Song of a Reformed Headhunter

At MoMA today, the revelation was Bodys Isek Kingelez's sculptural models of buildings and cities. Fanciful, colorful, utopian. "Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can't make models is a nation that doesn't understand things, a nation that doesn't live": Kingelez (1948-2015), based in then-Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also saw the retrospective of Adrian Piper but was not as taken with it. The exception was a triptych of Madonnas and children, white in the central and biggest panel, flanked by black and Asian. The misery in the side panels comments ironically on the happiness in the center. Among the many gifts of patron Agnes Gund to the museum was a startling beautiful "Soundsuit" by Nick Cave. Perched on a mannequin was an elaborate construction of metal, beads, and ceramic birds and flowers of the kind commonly founded in antique or secondhand stores. * Two Singaporean debut novels. Enjoyed Rachel Heng...

Read for the New York Writers Workshop at the Red Room with Sudeep Sen, Ravi Shankar, and Claudia Serea last Thursday. Good turnout, thanks to the strong promotional efforts by the organizer Tim Tomlinson. Claudia Serea's poems, from Nothing Important Happened Today , were very appealing in their lyrical directness and imaginative shifts. Born in Romania, she fled the country after the only violent revolution in Communist Europe. At a poetry reading— ice melting in a steel basin * Sweet sweet sweet rises from the swamp into a yellow warbler Composing haiku relieves the hemorrhoids a happy waste of time

Mark your NYC calendar. I'm reading with Ravi Shankar and Claudia Serea at Red Room (above KGB Bar), 85 East 4th Street, Thursday, April 21, 7:00 PM. The event is organized by the New York Writers Workshop. Its indefatigable leader Tim Tomlinson has put our poems on these beautiful images. Enjoy, and then come and enjoy more with us.