Living as Form

In the words of its brochure, "Living as Form" presented "over 100 artists and projects, 25 curators, and 9 new commissions highlighting 20 years of socially engaged art." On Sunday GH and I wandered through the mostly empty Essex Street Market building in which the exhibition was held. The projects were not readily comprehensible, their explanations in densely written booklets, their images played on looped videos. Mitch Corber was there to show the interviews and books of Poetry Thin Air Cable Network, as was Cindy Hochman. Cindy was kind to press on me a copy of her new chapbook The Carcinogenic Bride, but I insisted on paying a poet for her work. The poetry is lively. I particularly like the last poem "Under Anesthesia," in which the disoriented patient addresses the doctor like a lover in a swirl of weird imagery and knowing humor:

Doctor, I am lying on your table with my compliant bones
Doctor, soon you will be under my anonymous skin
Doctor, you have reduced me to my lowest common denominator
Doctor, is that a scalpel in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

After dinner at Nonya, GH went home and I made my way to Bowery Poetry Club, where I was to read for the Carmine Street Metric series, hosted by Eric Norris. It was nice to see familiar faces there, in particular, Wendy Chin-Tanner, John Marcus Powell, Quincy Lehr, Rick Mullin and Robert Gibbons. Rose Bernal was there too. My fellow feature, George Witte, read poems that take on large issues--America's foreign wars, the healthcare system--but see them through their effects on individual lives. The poems are quietly intelligent, with an undercurrent of anger. I read from Seven Studies and was pleased to sell four books, one to a handsome young man with a beard, whose name is Max.

After the reading, a few of us had dinner at a nearby pub. We shot the air, throwing up Auden, Eliot, MacNiece and Nabokov for targets.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Thumboo's "Ulysses by the Merlion"

I've just revised a poem written years ago, a poem that delineates the different responses of four readers, of different generations, to the seminal nationalistic poem by Edwin Thumboo . Thumboo is reckoned to be the first major Singaporean poet writing in English. First, Thumboo's poem, then followed by mine. ULYSSES BY THE MERLION (for Maurice Baker) I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs; Passed Scylla and Charybdis To seven years with Calypso, Heaved in battle against the gods. Beneath it all I kept faith with Ithaca, travelled, Travelled and travelled, Suffering much, enjoying a little; Met strange people singing New myths; made myths myself. But this lion of the sea Salt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail, Touched with power, insistent On this brief promontory... Puzzles. Nothing, nothing in my days Foreshadowed this Half-beast, half-fish, This powerful creature of land and sea. Peoples settled here, Brought to th
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more