Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Two Fridays ago, went gallery hopping with VM not in Chelsea, but on the Upper East Side. Saw a retrospective of David Hammons, the foremost African American conceptualist artist, at Mnuchin Gallery. The most striking work was his Basketball Chandeliers. Also saw portraits and landscapes by Jean-Michel Basquiat, including four paintings of cows and goats. We ended up at the Met, to look at Turner's whaling pictures, before having a drink at the gallery bar. * TLS April 8, 2016 from Pippa Goldschmidt's review of Jules Verne's The Self-Propelled Island , translated by Marie-Therese Noiset: By contrast, in The Self-Propelled Island, published much later, in 1895, this optimism is tempered with a greater sense of realism; now technology is primarily an enabler of hubris. The novel is set in an apparent utopia; a vast island inhabited only by millionaires which floats around the Pacific, hardly ever needing to dock in its home country of the United States. Only the very...

Read at Poets House for the launch of Tribes 13 yesterday. It was a day of record heat, but cool in the Battery Park home for poetry. The circular exhibition room showed some interesting first editions and letters, by Robert Duncan, Pound, Ginsberg, H.D., among others. No Asian American poets there. No Asian American poets too up on the wall in the quiet reading room. The narrative of American poetry, even in a liberal and progressive space, does not include them. For the first time I felt the enormity of the challenge of becoming a part of American poetry. Okka said hi in the exhibition room. She had heard of me from a Singaporean poet friend, and was visiting Poets House when she read my name on a flyer advertising the Tribes reading. An Indonesian, she has been writing since young, and will be taking up a writing residency at the Vermont Art Studio next month. We sat together for the reading. The turnout was very good. There must have been close to 100 people there. I read "T...