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| "It’s nice to celebrate the taggers because they are sweet individual people..." |
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Room xVx DO I
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the last word shall want a word
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i like you wanted to be god / ashes / the last word / the thorn / make up / we dance / forever we dance / the
light / forever / "speak"/ Jolly Jingles / funnily enough / Rubinstein / wanted but shall want a word / Scorched Earth / the last word of light shall want a word / a letter / Veronica Forrest-Thomson / the thick sack / Anne Frank / Our Little Chair / do i know you / Nick Owens / a letter / back to the Bible /
the scarlet / ? / terrible but beautiful / Glad Wrap / you are / poetic artifice / Rubinstein / don't understand / The Art of Rebellion / who are you / will want / but couldn't don't / corroboration / (beyond all pity winter plate) / trees / wonderfully made / Dust in the Giant's Eye / don't understand / in the forever / Grandpa / don't say yes when you know you want no / de Jesus / light / shall (not) lack / (a failed error)/ Work / lost / Vietnam! Vietnam! / 'Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.' / handle N.Z. with prayer / (Hannah Wiener could be here Hannah Weiner could be here) / Who are you? / Patterns for Canvas Embroidery /
i stutter / in a room different / Tracy Black / we are family / wonderfully made / we dance forever in the light / Work / what was that thing / Symphonic Poem / Liz Maw /
scarce to throb / Mathematics / Shorter Oxford / Argonauts of the Western Pacific / man i think without qualities thus I man therefore am / Pensees / Carolina / wanted / know / man i /
'Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.'/do i know you /(many others find) / don't understand / corroboration /
scarce to throb / Mathematics / Shorter Oxford / Argonauts of the Western Pacific / man i think without qualities thus I man therefore am / Pensees / Carolina / wanted / know / man i /
'Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.'/do i know you /(many others find) / don't understand / corroboration /
i couldn't understand the light / what was that thing / the last word shall want a word
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24 comments:
Wow Richard. What a post. I came here in part today because you made a comment on my blog. It arrived in my email box but somehow did not appear on the blog.
That's not a problem but I wanted to thank you for your witty comment about the experience of being written about as Frankenstein, and here I find an amazing series of portraits, self portraits? that hark bark to a gorgeous Frankenstein who slowly over the course of several contexts disappears, torn up into the waste paper bin of life.
It's fantastic. What an artist. What a life lived.
Thanks.
Elisabeth. It is not meant to Frankenstein but it could be. You are meant to have a good laugh also by the way...!! One portrait from a cover of a book (I have) called 'The Scarlett Letter' by Hawthorne!! (Which I have read in fact...great book.) I read it because Kathy Acker who influenced Jack Ross) writes about it (ironically I think) in "Blood and Guts in High School"
Marti Friedlander did a book of NZ scenes from the 70s etc and I (aged about 22) am in one photograph...Mark Sinclair (son of Keith Sinclair the historian) is on the front cover. I played chess with him about 1961 or so as his father (who my father knew) watched...also I knew Mark a bit about 1970...he was in the Winnie the Pooh Bear Club at Auckland University!!
But there are a lot of other connections.
I did the series of the "portrait" in one day (pinned him to the washing line! (but I see Christine Hellyar (quoted in M Dunn's book on NZ Sculpture) might have beaten me in using a clothes line in her art); but I then added some of my own pictures and my fathers and so on.
The post itself took ages as I manipulated and arranged many images and so on...
Interesting progression as you noticed. I am intending to make my whole Blog into a single Art-Work Blog (I applied for funding) but first of all a book.
Titus books are provisionally interested.
Thanks or your comment. I also was interested in your reaction to being written about!
I write about myself...more to the point I write between myself ("All the Richard Taylors" (a post on here - conversation /interview wih myeslf!) was actually published in Brief...)
Ya gotta laaff!!
I think this is one of the best things I have done on here, so thank you again Elisabeth. It is great to get support.
In the background to one picture is book of collage art. It is called: 'Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.' (African-American artist) I came across it by chance.
I endorse her work (she was (is still I think she is still alive)?) very talented and creative); and I underpin my "work" (my images and arrangements etc) somewhat with it, as EYELIGHT is perhaps also a "Symphonic Poem".
Link to the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Symphonic-Poem-Aminah-Brenda-Robinson/dp/0810945053
For some reason your work reminds me of a sort of 'masculine' version of Tracey Emin’s exhibit, the unmade bed, with its soiled sheets, unwashed underwear, empty tampon packets and condoms, as signs of the life of an adolescent girl, testifying to her experience.
I've read an interesting paper about this by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson where they liken the practice of autobiography today to Emin's rumpled bed.
I'm interested in the many differnt ways in which we can represent ourselves visually, whether through words and/or photographs and/or anything else that might come to hand. It's such fun.
And I understand why you consider this work one of your best within the blogosphere. It's stunning, and for me now even more so when you identify some of the links.
Gosh we must be communicating together in time at this moment. My comment seems to have overlapped with yours. Thanks for this link. I'll check it out.
There possibly is a "link" I have seen that work in a book of British art recently. I wouldn't do what she did (quite) but I am interested in all that kind of stuff. I am interested in just about all art. I fact I am almost interested in everything! I go to my local library most days and I keep getting more and more books out on all kinds of subjects!
But the book I saw had some really strange stuff in it!
You can also see a book called "Seen this Century" and from that I took an idea of an (NZ) artist called Tracy Black who crumpled up here paper and then drew on it etc & I think she put things in her purse ultimately wore and were scratched (process). Also I have an image of Nik Owens's abstract...he was a poet / photographer I knew...the mask was done by my daughter Tamasin some years ago. (I put some colur on it.) There is a self portrait of my father and near it Parmigianino's and the word 'Ashes..' (a book by Nik) can be seen...which links to John Ashbery's "Self Portrait in a... Convex Mirror". Veronica Forrest-Thompson (her book I also found quite by chance one day) sadly committed suicide when only about 25 or so and her book of poetics called Poetic Artifice is there - she knew J H Prynne etc...Anne Frank thus also makes and appearance and Rubinstein (also Jewish) was perhaps the greatest chess player who ever lived...the Vietnam war reappears (I used images from that book in previous posts)...
Spelling errors - hence my deletion. if I drank alcohol (which I don't these days) - I would think I was drunk!
But every time I run through these images I cant stop laughing at the funny mad man who is perhaps me! Or a persona... But he he appears everywhere...looks (lustfully or just madly?) over the shoulder of the Brazilian woman who spent years in terrible poverty then got out and wrote her diary...and a book of Goethe's (part of what I think is complete set of Carlysle's books) is beside them...I've never read that. But I did read 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' which is very good and quite distressing to read.
I've been watching a DVD before bed but revisit now to find your additional thoughts.
It's a wonderful journey you're on.
Your typos threw me for a minute, but not for long.
It's too late for me to offer anything further coherent now but I'll be back in the fullness of time. Thanks, Richard.
I mentioned your blog in my post today, Richard.
I hope you don't mind, exposing a little more of your confused identity, but given you're already blogging about it here, I suspect you won't mind at all.
There's nothing like an acknowledgment of our multiple and confused identities. It keeps us all on our toes.
No that's great. All writers are egotists I think! I wanted sometime ago to write in some kind of completely "objective" way but I was inspired by say Zukofsky of '80 Flowers' [and his 'A'] in the way he planted flowers and watched them grow then wrote poems about them...[ad his inclusion say of Marxist ideas and alter his own family etc] and via say M. Legoott and say Mark Scroggins* an other things I acme to see the idea of mixing various approaches from the personal to the more objective in one work.
So while it could be "about" me it is about everything... (at least in theory). I also want (eventually) to get other people to be a a part of the making process (in so far as that is practical).
*I've read more things about LZ then I have read of him although I did read his 80 Flowers and some of 'A'.
Other influences, an essay (and poetry) by Charles Bernstein in 'In the American Tree' by Andrews and Silliman), some reading of Beuys and reading about say Charles Ives.
But art (and science ideas) are also important...(as is some politics and so on.)
Also such as (inter alia) John Ashbery, G. Stein, Hannah Weiner and Alan Sondheim
Charles Bernstein on Hannah Weiner
fom the journal "Jacket
"Charles Bernstein
Hannah Weiner
(first published in the Poetry Project Newsletter in 1997;
reprinted with permission.)
HANNAH WEINER has been so much a part of my life as a writer that I find that her death hasn’t ended my relation to her but moved it into another dimension. I don’t mean anything supernatural about that — I always played the resolute skeptic to Hannah’s more heterodox beliefs; but I never doubted that she was a visionary poet, and I found her insistence on her clairvoyance to be a welcome relief from the heavy-handed rhetoric of poet as prophet that she so utterly rejected.
While Hannah befriended, and was admired by, many poets of my own generation, her poetry begins to make a different sense when considered in the context of some of the poets of her own generation. Like many of these poets, she was deeply influenced by Eastern thought and in search of a poetry of everyday life. In this, her project resonates with Ashbery, Mac Low, Guest, Ginsberg, Eigner, Creeley, Wieners, and Schuyler. Like Jack Spicer, she understood that if the heart of poetry were a radical foregrounding of the medium of writing, then this would also mean that the writing, and possibly the writer, became a medium. But a medium of what, for what? One of Hannah’s most enduring achievements as a writer was her unflinching, indeed often hilarious, inclusion of what, from a literary point of view, is often denigrated as trivial, awkward, embarrassing, silly, and, indeed, too minutely personal, even for the advocates of the personal in writing.
For Hannah Weiner, nothing was too minute to merit recording, but she decisively rejected all the extant literary models for recording personal thoughts or feelings — from the single-voice lyric to the narrative-driven diary. The motivation for Hannah’s charting of her personal space was not primarily self-expression — any more than the motivation for Descartes’s meditations were primarily self-expression. Rather, she used her self as the most ready-to-hand site for her experiments on the relation of language to consciousness. Hannah’s work is an unrelenting synthesis of radical formal innovation and intensely personal content. Her best-known work remains The Clairvoyant Journal (Angel Hair, 1978), where she used a three-voice structure to record not only her own diaristic impressions and notations but also — scored in italics — a voice commenting on what she had written and — in capital letters — giving commands to her. This highly original fugal structure — an explicit alternative to the more conventional monologic forms — found vivid realization in the three-person performances that she gave in the 1970s and 1980s.
....."
Jack Spicer, Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Wieners and Schuyler are big with me...all the men are "gay" but I am not!
But I don't think this is significant.
richard, don't mean to be a late-comer to this post, as i've clicked here several times since it was published, but just wanted to second your last comment here. it seems all the poets that have been signficant in my life, thom gunn, weiners, very esp. schuyler, were all gay, and i am not. i don't think that has any special resonances in the plain fact of defining one's own sexuality. the same being floored by women poets but i do think an early exposure and love of the writings of other sexualities had a salubrious effect on my writing and my life view. difficult to quantify at the moment but i think falling in love with say rimbaud at an early age [his life and his work] then thom gunn [who is so explicit in both his writings and his living] and schuyler, where all these writers are so open and frank and accepting allowed me to be the same. in their writings they were so comfortable and accepting of their sexuality allowed me to be likewise comfortable and accepting of the creature i developed in to. and the fellow creatures that make up our human being. if that makes sense.
wonderful self-portrait, by the way. please email me your home address as i'd like to send you, if i hand't already, a couple of my chapbooks.
Richard - thanks for coming here ! There is so much going on in cyberland...I looked at one of your posts and was a bit overwhelmed...
But re Ashbery, Schuyler and O'Hara et al (and Jack Spicer, and Wieners))...when I first "got back" into literature one of the first books I saw was by John Ashbery (Houseboat Days) I saw he had won the Pulitzer so I started reading him and got pretty obsessed with his way of writing.
It wasn't for some time that it ocurred to me he was gay. For me it (a person's sexuality or whatever) didn't seem relevant. I'm not saying I'm hugely enlightened but what matters to me are the ideas etc
But art and literature (For me I believe in a kind of total art I call ART which comes via Wagner and others...in fact I think there is a German word for total art, but for me it does or I try to get it to encompass everything (of course this can only be theoretical)...in a way Alan Sondheim did i that for me, he had (has) some strange stuff (and some great writing also), but I see his work as a kind of parallel towhat I am doing although he was very deep...do you know what he is doing these days?)
In any case ART...tend to be fields where people of varied sexuality etc are involved....
Is it less "manly" to love beauty etc? In NZ as boy we called people either "scaredy cats" or "pansies" ... in fact I took aline for a part of my "from The Infinite Poem" at random from Pound's Cantos "Disney against the metaphysicals" and Ted Jenner ( a friend and an interesting writer and Classics scholar who was the local agent fro Paideuma explained what it meant (I thought he meant Disney was somehow against the Mataphysical poets!) but in the 50s I recall those films such as "The Living Desert" and in those we saw scorpions fighting so on but when flowers bloomed wonderfully and magically all the boys went "Eugghhh!" In disgust as as if that is how you have to be (of course there is a way that men and women "take sides" on this...and boys of a certain age etc, it is necessary and maybe inevitable to some degree))...that is how working class Kiwi attitude or it used to be (Rugby, racing and beer and men worked and fought while women did the house work and so on (not that some differentiation isn't required I believe it is, and more women read "sensitive " novels than men))...hmmm all very complex...Not that the "atmosphere is that intimidating here as such...after all prostitution is no longer illegal in NZ, and while women still don't get = pay etc we have made some gains...John Kirwan the big tough rugby fellow (ex All Black) comes on TV and talks of his deep depression and so on...
(My grandson gave Xmas presents to everyone in his class one year!)
Politics has to rear its ugly head...I was reading some Tom Gunn last year...
But the Disney thing by Pound was about those documentaries, the reality of the docus I think he saw as a counter to say the metaphysical ideas of well - the Idealists, Plato etc but Pound (great as he was in many ways) was pretty crazy...he really believed in the reality of say the Eleusinian mysteries and some of for him the Greek gods were real I think, and yet he had that practical side, but not enough science to save him from fascism and anti-Semitism of the worst kind (can there be a worst kind?)...Hard to work out what he was saying and he felt he had failed in the end...
I don't know if I would continue if here were there not some feedback...how to continue in a human vacuum?
This last post started almost by chance with a drawing I did and then I used other art I had done last year...using books on "how to draw" and paint etc
But there are many images some by my father and others.
I want to move in various modes. So while, yes, it is "about" me...the "Do I know you?" is also for the "reader" so (Do I know myself, do I know you? Do YOU know yourself and so on...(who is you?) and the ordinary almost aggressive meaning or import of: "Do I know you and "Who are ya?" and so on...
("And so on..." courtesy of Vonnegut of his "Breakfast of Champions" I think it was I got the habit...)
So Lowell, Plath, Hughes Berryman...meet the language poets! But I like to work in the whole range...Auster is a friend of Charles Bernstein (whose daughter committed suicide, and that is in one of Auster's more recent books) and so on...
Jack Ross is "obsessed" with Celan (and Ovid and The Arabian Nights!) and so on and Scott Hamilton was on a de Lillo jag... (as well as his Kendrick Smithyman jag, and his NZ Wars and E P Thompson jags...("jag" ... a term I read Auden using once of Horace "I'm on a Horace jag at the moment." in an interview with some students in NY)); I read a lot of Thomas Wolfe and John Updike last year (I just finished his "In the Beauty of the Lilies")...but I am also reading NZ writers!! (Alan Curnow, Michael Morrissey to name only two of many and al those in Titus Books and in Brief...I want to get Martin Edmond's book re the artist Colin McCahon...I recall the day he disappeared (1984 or so?)...it was front page news..front page news of an artist!!
Richard my gentle thoughtful friend in the US so far away, my kindest regards. From the other Richard!!
Beckett of "Watt" (!!), "Endgame" or "Happy days" (say) for me can be very funny but of his works to me are very beautiful also...
I hope people see the very comic side of the images on here!! The face keeps re-appearing like a naughty ogre!
"... one's own sexuality. the same being floored by women poets but i do think an early exposure and love of the writings of other sexualities had a salubrious effect on my writing and my life view. difficult to quantify at the moment but i think falling in love with say rimbaud at an early age [his life and his work] then thom gunn [who is so explicit in both his writings and his living] and schuyler, where all these writers are so open and frank and accepting allowed me to be the same. in their writings they were so comfortable and accepting of their sexuality allowed me to be likewise comfortable and accepting of the creature i developed in to. and the fellow creatures that make up our human being. if that makes sense. ..."
This is good. Thanks. I can see. It does help.
I keep going back to the graffiti though (first image) - it was done on fence less than 100s yards from my own house in an alleyway...the young guy (young woman? Probably not...he would be Polynesian) has done something almost as good as a Jackson Pollock (or Colin McCahon?).
Gilbert and George are also very funny when they are interviewed...amusing ways of answering but not quite answering questions in oblique ways! They are gay also!!
Like an "artistic" version of the "non gay" Morecombe and Wise...
This series is brilliant Richard. I really love it.
Exciting!
with love
Amanda
Amanda! It is great to see your comment. How is your book going?
On here I was just thinking how many many images the mind misses and wondering how much we actually take in - some more than others I suppose. I see more and more connections on here that I am not sure I consciously "chose" or not...
Anne Frank is there (as is the woman who suffered great poverty in Brazil (that isn't her picture though)), but why Tarzan! Also I see a connection to a book by Maklnowksi but I haven't read it...and to politics as well as philosophy via my "Vietnam!" bopk (and an image of me in my days of protesting (US Imperialism) a protest that continues against the proto-Fascism of the US that is getting worse everyday)) taken (by chance and I found it by chance and it is as though I am supporting a pro- Christian "bring back morals" march, and Jesus Christ etc, well I was, but we were carrying an anti-War banner and they were quite hostile (thinking we were dangerous "commies" or "hippies" which we weren't (or not the latter, and not dangerous)), but our point was that war is immoral and so on) by the Jewish-NZ (award winning) photographer Marti Friedlander (female Jewish, links to Anna Frank?) ...and all without words per se or without commentary...and there so many ways one can "read it" ... read the images...
And language, what is graffiti and much else...(Cy Twombly...proto-Language...
Thanks again.
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