Poems: giovanni singleton

A few years ago, when her first book appeared, I shared two poems by giovanni singleton, a poet I've known and been a fan of for years. giovanni's collection ascension deservedly won the California Book Award and garnered a great deal of praise from fellow poets and critics, some of whom noted her ability to utilize silence to great affect, and the cumulative power of poems, which, once they set the book down, continued to fizz in their consciousnesses. I wholeheartedly agreed. To this day, I can remember the effect a very short, seemingly simple but powerfully erotic little poem entitled "the chair" had when I heard her read it years ago.

Another direction giovanni has taken, related to those earlier poems, was in exploring poetry's material and graphic qualities. In her most recent book, American Letters: works on paper (Canarium Books, 2018), she reproduces a number of poems that are as much works of art in a visual sense, which is to say, drawings in language, as they are poems made of language. This is not ekphrastic poetry in any of the ways I have presenting it. It is poetry as art, akin to concrete poetry and textual performance (think of the poems I shared by Doug Kearney).

In the case of the second poem-artwork below, it also seems related to asemic writing, though giovanni's calligraphic poem's words are real and do mean something, individually and together, even as they challenge our ability to read them, and bar any easy interpretation. American Letters' poems' sources include African American spirit writing, sacred sound, Tibetan meditation practice, giovanni's study of Japanese language and calligraphy, and the multiple traditions of visual poetry.

The first poem was featured during last year's National Poetry Month by Colorado State University, and as soon as I came across it online, I found myself studying it. One need not read the words to see what giovanni is up to, and yet it is necessary to read them--you can enlarge the image by clicking on it and pinching your trackpad or screen, depending upon what you're using, or even download it, to get a fuller sense of what the poem is doing. Note also how the title, with the marker "Untitled," is similar to many works of visual art.

Poems like "Untitled (Bird Cage)" and the second poem below, from American Letters: works on paper, raise the question of what kind of language is appropriate to discussing the poem, and how to read it. Or rather, it organizes our ways of reading it first, and we have to come to terms with it and how it resets our expectations. That is what poetry and art does, it seems these poems keep reminding us. We can't hear this enough, though.

and from American Letters: works on paper (II):

Source: Poetry (December 2016),

Poem: Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali,in 1967

I could have sworn I had posted the following poem, by Marianne Moore (1887-1972), a poet whose work I, like anyone educated even passably in the US before the last 25 years, was required to read at various intervals--in grade school, junior, high school, college, and graduate school--and which I have increasingly come to adore. She was, like William Carlos Williams, whose poetry I featured a few days ago, a leading figure in American Modernism, and, as many critics have noted, a superlative stylist and magician with language. Instead, it turns out I'd posted about Moore's poem "Poetry," which carries with a publication history worthy of a scholarly lecture. Moore also was, like T. S. Eliot, a poet I regularly heard about growing up because she was born and grew up in the near suburbs of St. Louis--in Kirkwood, Missouri, to be exact, the next town over from Webster Groves, where I spent a good portion of my youth.

In fact, I sometimes think that the deceptive simplicity and apparent naturalism of Moore's work leads readers, as it did for me, to assume they will "get" her work when in fact its complexity is right there before your eyes. But a little deeper reading usually opens the poem's meanings up, like paper flowers unfolding in water. Like Elizabeth Bishop (1917-1979), Moore's poems also avoid, at least on the surface, the personal and confessional, but her variable perspective on the world does eventually become clear, and that surface control seems at times to lie atop something burbling below, a rich vein of feeling. (As Dan Chiasson discussed in his thoughtful review, Linda Leavell's acclaimed 2013 biography of Moore, Holding on Upside Down (FSG), reveals how much personal tumult the seemingly placid Moore did live through, from childhood on.)

"No Swan So Fine" is one of Moore's briefest masterpieces, unsurpassed in its music, precision, wit, and irony.  I taught it most recently in "Foundations of Literary Studies," Rutgers-Newark's introductory course for potential undergraduate English majors and minors, and it left most of the students bemused, until we walked through it together and, as is so often with Moore's poems, it clicked. They started to get it and wanted to talk about it; some did with considerable exuberance. It was the direct result, critics have pointed out, of Moore's lifelong observation and careful notation. Scholar Patricia Willis writes that in March 1930, Moore saw in the Illustrated London News a pair of Louis XV candelabra, the "property of the late Lord Balfour," a friend of her friend, British critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933), to whom she had sent a condolence about Balfour earlier that year. She even sketched them (see below).

A year later Moore read a New York Times Magazine article (19 May 1913, pp. 8-9), by Percy Philip, about the Rockefellers' restoration of Versailles, and notated above a clipping of one of the featured images (cf. below) the line "There is no water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." I find it fascinating to consider how she fits that resonant aperçu into the poem, leaving it as a prose quotation but transforming it into poetry, not unlike the poem itself, which unfolds as an argument attempting to make sense of disparate and contrasting images, artifacts, ideas. The overtly rococo language not only evokes Louis XV but embodies that era--"with swart blind look askance / and ambidextrous legs, so fine / as the chintz china one with fawn - / brown eyes and toothed gold..." This tongue-twisting ornateness, which is nevertheless not superficial but full of depth and seriousness, continues in the second stanza, culminating in that falling final sentence, like a guillotine.

Lastly, the theme of the past and the evanescence of culture was in Moore's mind as well because, as Willis adds, she wrote the poem to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Poetry magazine, but with the thought that it would shutter that spring; it is, however, thankfully still with us, and Moore's poem appeared in that October 1932 issue, alongside poems by Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Witter Bynner, Eunice Tietjens, and others. Here, then is the poem:

Moore's poem, copyright ©
Poetry Magazine

And now, those images--the candelabra, Moore's sketch, and the clipping (all from the Marianne Moore Archive Online):

The actual swan candelabra
sold at Christie's

and

Moore's sketches of the candelabra

and

From the New York Times Magazine: "The Tapis Vert at
Versailles Where Melancholy Now Reigns as Queen"

Photos: Image Text Ithaca

I'm currently at Image Text Ithaca, an extraordinary weeklong immersion in art-text collaboration at Ithaca College (organized by Catherine Taylor and Nick Muellner), and have been going nonstop since I arrived, so I haven't had an opportunity to post any thoughts about the experience. But it has been energizing and freeing, in so many ways. I present on two of my projects--I have many more in mind--today. Below are some photos from the week so far. Enjoy!

"We are programmed by colors." - Matvei Yankelevich
"The book is a physical object." - Matvei Yankelevich

On the patio at the barn

Preparatory conversations

Photographers chatting

The barn

Downstairs

Lunchtime

Talking about projects

Conversations unfolding

Working together

Photographing prep

Designing books

Examining photographs

Work underway

Creating

Conversations between photographers

Creating away

One of my books

One Night Only: Ace Hotel Residency Show, January 2015

If you're in New York City, do drop by the Ace Hotel New York, where I think that at least one of the pieces I worked on during my residency there will be on display from January 8-31, 2015.

"Pensées" in Recours au Poème

UPDATE: Daily Telegraph art critic Alistair Sooke writes on the August 28, 2014 BBC.com site about Yves Klein's successful development of the ultramarine pigment that cemented his fame: "Yves Klein: The Man Who Invented a Color."

One of the chief reasons I translate writing by non-Anglophone writers is to make their work available to readers who would otherwise have no access to it. However imperfect and faulty my translations I always do hope they offer a glimpse into the work of the translated writers and the worlds from which they come. As a writer myself I always appreciate the opportunity to be translated; it has happened several times, and the most recent instance is one of the best, because the translator is one of the best, a poet in all senses of that word, with a philosophically inclined mind such that she is able to convey multiple layers in every text she carries across languages, including her own. I am speaking with tremendous gratitude about Nathanaël, whom I was incredibly fortunate to have translate one of my very recent poems, "Pensées (After Yves Klein)," a tribute in part to the great, problematic French conceptual artist whose work has haunted me since I first saw it years ago.

Years ago through my job at NYU's Faculty Resource Network I met an artist-scientist, Dr. Adrienne Klein, also a fan of Yves Klein's, and our shared moments of Kleinophilia led in part to the poem "Klein Bottle," which references yet another Klein, the German mathematician Christian Felix Klein (1849-1925), whose non-orientable surface, a staple of topology, the poem invokes. That was an oblique reference to Klein (Yves)--and of course Adrienne and Felix Klein, and mathematics and science--but "Pensées (After Yves Klein)" is more direct. Klein also was one of the intellectual spurs behind one of the most enjoyable classes I ever taught, "Topics in Creative Writing: Conceptual Writing/Art," in 2010. (I fantasize about teaching an updated version of that course at Rutgers-Newark!) I want to say that until that same year, as a result of a mini-exhibit of Klein's work at the Art Institute of Chicago I had never seen any of his paintings or sculptures in person, but this is not correct; a little retrospection reminds me that I certainly did see Klein's work in other museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, which owns several of his works, and MoMA. Encountering Klein's "Blue Sponge Relief" (pictured above) and other images at the Art Institute back in 2010 laid a deep anchor, though, and recently, as I was writing poems about artists and artworks, the "Pensées" emerged.

Since they were about a French artist I sent them to Recours au poème's founding editor, poet and critic Matthieu Baumier, with whom I'd exchanged some emails around the time the online site first began publishing, and did not hear anything back, so it was a surprise and pleasure to learn that Nathanaël would be the translator (she had previously translated some of the poems from Seismosis and succeeded in bringing into French the English rhythms yet also creating a similar, novel music in French), and that she also was preparing a short introductory essay, "Arraisonner le vide" (roughly "Investigating the Void") which manages to encapsulate in a paragraph much of the conceptual richness I was seeking to convey. She also discusses some challenges in translating between the two languages that English in particular produces. I had not thought about it when writing these "Pensées," which are haiku-like in their brevity, but Nathanaël astutely identifies in so many words English's parallel vocabularies, which I drew on. "White" (from English's Germanic roots) and "blank" (from its Norman-Latin ones) are the same word in French, blanc; the same is true with "emptiness" (from Old English) and "void" (from Norman and Latin), which translates as vide. In addition, Nathanaël finds not just an equivalent, but a convincing French music for the English, even as she stays very close to the English syntax. That is quite an accomplishment.

You can find the essay and the entire poem in translation at the Recours au poème site, which if you read French is a bonanza of contemporary Francophone poetry, and I highly recommend it. My former colleague Reginald Gibbons has a series of poems, also beautifully translated by Nathanaël, on the site. Below is a snippet of my poem. Now I just need to find a place to publish the English original!

***

From "Pensées (After Yves Klein)"

Monochrome:
une couleur,
infinité.

*

Monotone:
un accord, puis silence:
une symphonie.

*


Je signe le ciel
J’assigne au ciel
un sens nouveau.

Copyright © John Keene, translation by Nathanaël, 2014. All rights reserved.

ETERNiDAY @ Queens Museum of Art

The Unisphere

Yesterday the Queens Museum, which I had not visited in over a decade, hosted ETERNiDAY: Queens Poet Lore Festival of the Language Arts, from noon until 8 pm. This multifarious event was much more than a poetry festival, however; it represented a successful collaboration between the visual, performing, musical, and literary arts, with readings, performances, dancing, and a book fair occurring throughout the Museum's newly remodeled exhibition spaces. From the atrium to the café to galleries to work spaces, a wide array of events took place such that it was sometimes hard to keep up, the sounds often bled into each other, and by the end of the day I felt as though I had attended 20 readings as opposed to six or seven. But the conjunction of so many words, so much music, and so much visual art and performance, shared by such a wide and diverse range of people, from professionals to members of the Queens and broader New York metropolitan area communities, had an invigorating effect, and I found myself wishing that this museum and others explored such possibilities more often. (Note to self: suggest something of this sort to the Newark Museum.)

Reggie Harris, reading
from Autogeography

I attended at the kind invitation of poet Paolo Javier, and had the pleasure of reading with Gracie Leavitt again for Nightboat Books as part of a reading by small presses that included futurepoem (Mina Pam Dick and Suyeun Juliette Lee) and creature press (Cassandra Gillig), but the space we were in, the Unisphere Gallery, also hosted mid-size and small press readings all afternoon by other local presses, as well as thematic readings focused on "Autogeographies," which included Reggie Harris, Jan Heller Levi and Aiko Roudette. Other readings and performances were held in the humid, astonishing (it has to be seen to be believed) "Panorama of the City of New York" Room, which replicates a mid-1970s (?) panoramic diorama of New York's five boroughs, with the twin World Trade Center towers intact.

Translator Susan Bernofsky,
talking about Robert Walser's
Microscripts

There were also readings in the Theater, from which I heard poet Julie Patton's melodious voice wafting out, which led me in; the immense, light-filled Atrium, where poets like Emanuel Xavier, Yuko Otomo, Nikhil Melnechuk, Michael Taylor, Amy King, and Bob Holman declaimed and sang with a power worthy of all listening; in a room featuring an exhibit on "Los Angeles Poverty," with prison beds, wherein poets Justin Petropolous, Celina Su and Latasha N. Nevada Diggs animated the space and created a conversation with the ideas in it; the Studio Artists Residency Space; and the Triangle Room in the Artist Studio Wing, where in an afternoon panel discussion on "Alternative Publishing and Literary Curating" that turned into much less formal, more welcoming conversation circle, Stephen Motika talked about his work with Nightboat, Sol Aramendi spoke about her efforts with Project(o) Luz, John Harkey detailed the DIY spirit of creature press, and Chris Stackhouse showed images of the transitory, multiform gallery and performance work This Red Door has enabled. There were so many more writers, performers and publishers, though, but

The melodious Julie Patton

One of the best aspects of the day was taking in the Museum's approach and exhibits, which are quite distinct from the ones you'll find at New York's other major borough (Bronx Museum) and international (Met Museum, MoMa, Brooklyn Museum, New Museum, etc.) museums; seeing so many fellow writers and artists in a truly community-based, non-academic environment; browsing the Book Fair; and just taking in the art and words. The Queens Museum sits in Flushing Meadow Corona Park, just off the 7, and entails a brisk walk from the station, though you get to walk away from the Mets' Citi Field toward USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, right up to and around the few remaining artifacts of the 1965 World's Fair, one of which is the Unisphere. Whether you visit the Museum, the tennis center or the baseball stadium, the trip is worth it, but do see the museum if you can.

Suyeun Juliette Lee,
reading one of her chapbooks

Mina Pam Dick, reading
work in conversation with Georg
and Grete Trakl

The exuberant Cassandra Gillig

Gracie Leavitt

The Book Fair 

At the Book Fair, with Flushing Meadows
Corona Park in the background 

More book tables

A reading in the atrium

Latasha N. Nevada Diggs and Paolo Javier

The Los Angeles Poverty exhibit's
State of Incarceration room

Peter Schumann's The Shatterer exhibit 

In Schumann's The Shatterer exhibit 

The New York watershed exhibit
(the Hudson & Jersey City in the foreground) 

Another of the exhibits, Pedro
Reyes' The People's United
Nations (PUn)

Justin Petropoulos reading
in the State of Incarceration
exhibit space

Emanuel Xavier reciting his poetry

The very humid, somewhat dark
New York Panorama room

The accordionist playing
in the Panorama Rooom 

Michael Clark, performing his
poetry in the Atrium 

At the "Alternative Publishing and
Literary Curating" workshop

Stephen Motika and John Harkey