Jean Arp used seashells and blood; Jean Dubuffet, butterfly wings and glue; Bruce Conner, nylon hosiery and nails.  Joseph Montgomery uses nonesuch provocative materials in his assemblages, part of the show Velveteen, now on view at Laurel Gitlen, the polished, new gallery on the Lower East Side.  Instead, he uses what one would find in the garage of the average do-it-yourselfer–canvas, clay, lacquer, oil, sheet metal, and plastic—weaving, painting and affixing them on panels averaging 12.5”x 10.5” x 3” deep. Less noteworthy than the use of found, masculine materials, is the skill with which the artist successfully unifies disparate textures using high value colors.  His work solicits a calm and restrained response uncharacteristic of a medium which has been disturbing audiences for a century since the advent of the first modern collage by Picasso in 1912 and “God”, the first modern assemblage by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg in 1918—a work which featured plumbing fittings.

Historically, assemblage has mixed substandard materials to yield a kind of anti-art which  pasted, pressed, glued, nailed, cut, stapled and painted “found”, previously intact, and everyday objects into new, expanded forms. Montgomery’s assemblages (called paintings by the gallery) have much in common with two-dimensional abstract paintings such as Robert Motherwell’s Western Air (1946) and Gertrude Greene’s Monumentality (1949), only re-imagined as three-dimensional relief sculptures.  The stronger precedent can be found in Jean Pougny’s (Ivan Puni) 1915 Suprematist Sculpture which might account for their “strange familiarity”.

Velveteen’s locus of inquiry in sculpture continues with minimalist sculptures made of shims, or tapered pieces of wood.  On one end of the continuum are Large Shim: 13 and Large Shim: 7,  two 10-foot tall wall-mounted, natural, red cedar shims in varying widths.  The strong wedge shapes, suggesting exclamation points minus the dots, share the enthusiasm of Hisayuki Mogami’s 1962 curvilinear pine sculpture Laugh, Laugh, Laugh.

The most muscular of the shim series is Image One Hundred Thirty, a protruding, black lacquer wall sculpture of cedar shims arranged as alternating wedges and suggesting charred wood.  Additionally, three similar wall sculptures use cedar or cardboard constructs mimicking shims with faux wood finishes or covered in white paint.

On the other end, two large marbles marked with the deep indentations of a marble saw rest on the floor.  The found objects pulled from a Vermont stream have much in common with the wall sculptures, although they predate them, temporarily filling in the gap where the “paintings” did not yet exist, the artist wondering if their “resemblance” to the paintings suggest that all images are “just waiting to be found”.

All images courtesy Laurel Gitlen

He delivers what one studio visitor described as a “luminous experience” by blending formalistic techniques which distort the subject “beyond recognition” and are indeterminable in advance with elements of a category of occult photography known as supernatural; the Oxford Companion to the Photograph describes supernatural images as those which “more or less show what an observer present during the exposure could have seen” and more important, do not show ‘the invisible’.

Subsequently, two of the images, Reading the email telling me Oscar had died and The sun setting on Riley’s birthday, with Hannah screaming in the background capture the emotionally charged moments selected, but they are not representational. The viewer must create the narrative, and in some ways, according to Farwell, the photograph. The image is beyond recognition even though the camera, minus lens, produced an “aide-mémoire”.

The installation ranks high in mischievousness, hiding what was once in plain sight and then coaxing the viewer to complete the final image.  With no two final results alike, Die Transfer Process will have succeeded in engaging audiences in a creative process using a space no larger than the one found on their cell phones.

Sisters© Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Single-handedly, Scopophilia, the 25-minute slideshow and centerpiece Nan Goldin’s show at the Matthew Marks Gallery show generates empathy for Goldin’s subjects, those demi-monde friends appearing in alternating states of intimacy and quiet dysfunction. For about half an hour, the transgressive vulgarisms associated with her work are forgotten. Instead, viewers experience a pastiche accompanied by a liberating soundtrack and the juxtaposition of images typical of her aesthetic with ethereal masterpieces depicting eternal devotion, love and tenderness.

By pairing harmony with pathos and the impalpable with the palpable, we are given reasons to care about the fates of all of Goldin’s men and women, both past and present.   More significantly, the corporeality in Goldin’s work suggests a departure from a static, myopic world into one where connectedness is sought, relationships are healthy and touch is of a soft variety.   Goldin, the woman, seems to have embraced humanity, an uplifting prospect for those familiar with her work.

the Nap© Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Scopophilia continues across three galleries, as nearly fifty mounted thematic photographs, including  Hair, Water, Crazy Scary, Odalisque and Veiled, shown as “mosaics.”  It’s impossible not to ask what was awakened in the artist to have selected the works she paired with her autobiographical subjects beyond scopophilia, the pleasure of looking.  Curatorially, the show would have benefited from the introduction of a narrative–think e-readers with anecdotes illuminating the new perspective of the artist.

Diptychs like The Horse Races, Egypt; Sisters; The Nap; Swan-like Embrace; Pygmalion and Galatea were more studied, and validate her self-described desire to understand people as opposed to being a voyeur or narcissist.  Sisters is the finest among them with its asymmetrical composition and ethereal light highlighting the angelic qualities of the modern girls, their slight Roman noses mirroring those of their classical sisters.

Hair © Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

A portrait in the round gallery paired Louvre paintings with Goldin subjects, one atop the others such as Diana the Huntress (1550/60) with Valerie, London (2003).   Indeed, the story about why these images are paired (one of the images is part of her personal mythology) meets the challenge posed by Patrice Chéreau.  Yet by accepting his invitation to participate in “Faces and Bodies” the cross-disciplinary program which ran through January 2011 at the Louvre, Scopophilia becomes evidence that Ms. Goldin achieved a detectable amount of transcendence from an earlier body of work.

Light moves slowly between the galaxies according to physicist Paul Davies. Scopophilia gives us the sense that Goldin has been exposed to a light more poetic than scientific,  and,  more important, more hopeful.

Installation View

At the heart of the interdisciplinary, experimental approach to art making documented in “Black Mountain College and Its Legacy” at the Loretta Howard Gallery, is a human ethology that emphasizes cooperation and interdependence.  What happened at Black Mountain College is as nostalgic as it is antithetical to western society’s preoccupation with the importance of the individual over the group, most recently highlighted with the passing of Apple’s visionary icon earlier this month.

Ray Johnson

In an early 20^th century America, the maverick North Carolina-based institution fostered a breadth of inter-media (multimedia) projects achieved through assemblage, a style of working Steve Jobs would never have subscribed to.  Therein is this show’s value and significance.  It is a celebration of creativity achieved through mutual dependence versus the aggression and competitiveness our society often celebrates in our (now post-Jobsian) world.

Picture a college campus populated by some of the greatest artists and thinkers of the 20^th century, including Buckminster Fuller, Ben Shahn, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Harry Callahan, Dorothea Rockburne, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, many of whom have their work on display here.  Yet, Black Mountain College was not an arts school, although there are over 100 works by 35 artists in the show.  It was a liberal arts college (it closed in 1957) that experimented with art.

. . it really became kind of recognized [at BMC] that art could be anything, and could be made out of anything, and that it didn’t necessarily cross boundaries — they thought – between theatre, the visual arts, dance, music, etc., that you could mix all this up and make a multi-media – or . . . environmental art.

Kenneth Noland, Student 1946-48, 1950 Summer Session

Robert S. Mattison, who co-curated the show with Ms. Howard and wrote the catalog, offers several insights about the visiting artists’ program which differentiated the college.   “BM stands out for freedom of inquiry.  Artists were invited without institutional restrictions, and the interactions with the students were determined almost wholly by the artists themselves…[it’s] heritage is defined by the linkages between individuals.”

“Black Mountain College and Its Legacy” challenges viewers to consider what resulted when the talents of so many innovative artists from such a variety of disciplines were harnessed in a remote valley setting just outside of Asheville between 1933-1947.  The show gets an aural jump-start with John Cage’s debut into electronic music, Williams Mix, 1952-53, which is analogous to techno-rock today. The sound piece is followed by a photograph of David Tudor’s performance of Cages’ “4’33”. To learn that Cage credits Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings as the inspiration for the piece is to begin to understand how the dots connect within the context of the expansive two-storey show.  Around the corner is Merce Cunningham’s film Antic Meet, four short filmed “studies” of the roots of modern dance, tedious because our awareness of the dance that would follow it is now mature.

Dates on many of the works place the artist’s career on a continuum between those influenced by the “legacy period” and those made more recently.  Willem de Kooning’s Standing Figure, c. 1948-50, for example is shown next to Two Women, 1963.  Kenneth Noland’s 1949 V. V. is next to the 1963 Soft Touch.   Ray Johnson’s hypnotic collages include Untitled (Dear Suzi) 1958 next to 3B (Back of Cupid Head with Snake) 1992 with Untitled (Merce Cunningham) 1982-88 wedged in between.  In the later work, Johnson sums up why Black Mountain matters; embedded in the piece is written:  after 40 years of avant-garde choreography, the grand old man of experimental dance is still treasured by the young and finally winning mainstream recognition.

Buckminster Fuller

Dorothea Rockburne, inspirational in making the show happen in Chelsea, contributed Gradient and Field, 1971. The piece further exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach and employs set theory, introduced to her by mathematician Max Dehn who spoke to her about “mathematics for artists”.

The story of Buckminster Fuller’s mobilization of the BC community to participate in building an unsuccessful prototype of what would later become the Geodesic Dome illustrates his  inspirational mantra, “everything is connected”. This is demonstrated in a photograph of students raising the failed Supine Dome above their heads, by Beaumont Newhall.  Newhall would later become curator of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House from 1948-1958. A schematic print of Geodesic Dome accompanies the group shot, again, connecting the dots, or in this case, the venetian-blind material used to construct the Supine Dome.  Closest Packing of Spheres, 1980 proves to be a more concrete time capsule than the ephemera on the wall, but not less thought-provoking.

Where Jobs practiced control, Black Mountain eased it, erasing boundaries between who teaches and who is taught as well as the differences between dance, geometry, sound and the line—a legacy worth knowing about.

Andrew Moore, House on Walden Street, East Side, 2008, Digital chromogenic print scanned from film negative

Andrew Moore’s must see photographs in Detroit Disassembled at the Queens Museum of Art capture the ruinous state of Detroit after the collapse of the automotive industry.  The colors are lush, the light, ecclesiastical; and Moore captures the intensity prescribed by Frederick H. Evans who urged photographers to “wait till the building make you feel intensely”.

The demise of Detroit is so devastating as to remind one of Chernobyl’s aftermath vis-à- vis Michael Forster Rothbart’s photographs commemorating the 25^th anniversary.  In 1950 America, Detroit was the center of the universe in the production of 10 million motor vehicles, 70% of which were on the road in the U.S. at a time when the United States represented only 7% of the world’s population.  Now, the U.S. Census report (two years ahead of Moore’s three month visit to Detroit in 2008-9) shows it has lost 25% of its population in the last ten years.

Did Moore intend to educate the viewer about the demise of an industry that unleashed a social revolution of unprecedented personal freedom to travel unchecked and the lessons therein for voters and policymakers? It’s hard to say given his visual syntax, which is tainted with a commercialism most often associated with magazine assignments.  The tendency is increasingly apparent when reviewing his treatment of hotspots like Bosnia and Vietnam, and controversial projects like Robert Moses’ New York.

The days when photographers needed to be of two minds—working for the magazines “by day” and on their own projects “at night”—are long gone.  Yet the boundaries are blurred with Detroit Disassembled.  Whose story does Moore tell?

Philip Evergood, list of contacts, ca. 1947.

It is hard to believe that the 1913 New York Armory Show took place less than 100 years ago.  The seminal show drew laughs for its paintings and denunciations for their degeneracy, while the  medium of photography, facilitated by Alfred Stieglitz, was inaugurated as a new art form, acceptable only as measured by proximity to the extreme paintings and sculptures on exhibit.

It is Picasso’s list of suggested artists for inclusion in the show, dated 1912, that makes a case for the subtleties that make this Morgan sleeper,  “To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art”, a must-see for anyone interested in art history or contemporary art or both.  Through curatorial acumen, its 80 lists simultaneously remind us how different yet familiar at the same time the world is today from the one reflected in the exhibit.

With tweet-like efficiency, Picasso’s list of recommendation includes the names of Gris, Leger, Duchamp, Delaunay, and Metzinger for inclusion in the show at the behest of organizer Walt Kuhn.  It is as prescient and powerful as a manifesto and staggering in its significance, considering the impact these names would have in ushering in the era of abstract art in America.  Moreover, the art market in New York City, which currently boasts hundreds of galleries, was virtually non-existent.  Considering the paucity of galleries in New York City at the time, whose numbers would rise to only forty by the time WWII began some 25 years later, the impact of abstraction, to this day, remains unequaled.

Pablo Picasso, “recommendations for the Armory Show for Walt Kuhn, 1912

Consider Joan Snyder’s response to the question “What is Feminist Art?”, written in 1976 as part of an art project.  It starts “Feminist sensibility is…” followed by a three page list of nouns.  Included are anatomical terms, art supplies, constituents of the art world, and short rants against dominions of the art world interspersed with action words in a brew-ha-ha befitting the challenges and frustrations of women artists contending with “piece of the pie-ism.”

Or Grant Wood’s list, written in 1931, of 14 “business” depressions between the years 1819 and 1931 with the closing comment after 1931 (and 1932) that “all came to an end except this one.  Mebbe this will….”  Maybe readers will find this too painful to contemplate outside the context of art reviews.

If R. David Lankes, Director of the Library and Information Science Program at Syracuse University is correct about knowledge being a process, this show illustrates why the digital environment is merely a tool for acquiring knowledge and not a repository of knowledge itself; that knowledge “is what we do and why we do it, not something that can be boxed up, transferred, or archived.”  Reviewing Joseph Cornell’s list of purchases at the Madison Square Garden antiques fair in 1957 are found “a set of cards (picked from broken lot) of characters in various amusing scenes, miniature toy wagon, horse and driver, German ca 1900, and misc marbles (marked as sold).”  Readers familiar with the artist’s work will invariably find themselves imagining the resulting assemblages with each tick.  These lists are so much more than keywords on a screen.

Yancey Richardson Gallery signaled appreciation for the naturalist John Burroughs by naming the summer group show Beautiful Vagabonds, the writer’s poetic keywords for birds.   Few works exemplified a naturalist’s approach to photography, however, demonstrating fitting curatorial restraint for a subject-based show intent on catholicity. Among them Sustenance #114 by Neeta Madahar, Policeman by Jitka Hanzlová, American Goldfinches by Paula McCartney, and Terry Evans’ Field Museum, Drawer of Eastern Meadowlarks, works corresponding to what one would see in a natural history museum.

These are not the birds of our youth mentioned in Burroughs’ Birds and Poets either, the ones that “remain forever the same”.  Some are disturbing birds.  Richard Barnes, Murmur #1, an ominously tornado-like swarm of birds, Alex Prager’s video still Eve, capturing the socialite character in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” fending off pigeons in this case, not seagulls; or Bertien van Manen’s St. Petersberg (Birds in Room), in which dilapidated state housing meets Columbidae, and Kahn & Selesnick’s King of the Bird, a Magritte’s Man in the Bowler Hat scare-crow with two dozen very large birds.

Masao Yamamoto, Untitled # 1601 from the series Kawa=Flow

Others have messages. Birdcalls, on loan from the Sol LeWitt Foundation, signaled an appreciation of the mischievous bird.  Birdcalls is an audio work of Louise Lawler’s catcalls of 28 male artist names as irreverent and shrill as it is hilarious.  Also, Barbara Bosworth’s portrait Indigo Bunting which updates medieval depictions of birds as messengers—the woman’s manicured nails notwithstanding humanizing the interaction.

Many were birds with less to say.  Esko Männikkö’s images, reminiscence of Roni Horn’s taxidermic Bird series, are the heads of birds shot from behind, as mute as pink flamingo lawn ornaments.  Sanna Kannisto’s birds were contextually mute, and far more interesting in her book Fieldwork which documents her photographic experiences in the rainforest.

But it was Masao Yamamoto’s bird, silent but spirited, in a pair of gelatin prints that were the most successful pieces in the show. By engaging the viewer in the anticipation of flight, our strongest association by far with our avian friends, it helped Beautiful Vagabonds achieve an objective of sorts.  Burroughs said it best:  “The true poet knows more about Nature than the naturalist because he carries her open secrets in his heart”.

LANY, pronounced L. A. New York, is the high functioning group show at Peter Blum Gallery in Chelsea where seven artists from both cities have ample space to show their work.  The non-thematic (beyond bi-coastal geography) show, organized by Mario Diacono includes work by New York-based Daniel Rich, Andy Cross and Benjamin Degen and Los Angeles-based Kara Tanaka, James Melinat and Kevin Appel.  There is also a show within a show by New York-based Luisa Rabbia.

In the front gallery, Tanaka’s cowhide maps, Whisper from Meru (the Every-Mountain, the Axis Mundi) and An Earth with Many Navels (Distribution of HolyHermitages) are paired with one of James Melinat’s paper sculptures A Portrait of a Black Hole (Shadows Cast in Total Darkness).  Here the names of mountain systems like Putucusi, Machu Picchu and Huyanu Pichhu of the Peruvian mountains are carved into hide. They interact with Melinat’s large scale origami influenced sculpture, capturing the notion of shadows.

Two more works from Melinat’s, Obsidian Eye of the Abyss and Dark Heart of the Cosmos are cootie-catcher contemplations about the future.  Benjamin Degen’s 2011 Actor, Diver, and Palustric, three oils on linen, are reminiscent of Richard Bosman’s Man Overboard, DrowninMan, and Waterfall. Kevin Appel’s work riffs on architectural themes against a backdrop of nature.  Daniel Rich’s luxuriously precise Saddam Grand Mosque, and Andy Cross’ The Future in Un-Painted: Three Hikers and Walking Liberty, all recall national icons Johnny Appleseed and Lady Liberty.

In the “side gallery”, is the show’s centerpiece by Luisa Rabbia. The floor sculpture Crowd dramatically represents a clutch of humans.  A massive crowd of heads is supported by elongated torsos that extend to form roots covering the floor. The viewer is drawn inwards as one would be to outstretched arms or the sudden presence of a choir about to sing.

Rabbia’s humanistic focus on the immigration issues challenging the west, Italy in particular, turns Crowd into an androgynous messenger whose faces and recycled clothes speak to our collective identity. The piece reinforces the notion that there is but one race, the human one. Potentially, “we are all immigrants”, says the artist.  This piece accompanies two particularly strong works on paper. From the Within Out situates a heap of people and pillows on untethered wheels, making itinerant that which is most closely associated with domestic safety. People depicts a strip of cranial masses rising from a dark block of roots so tightly packed they eliminate white space

LANY is less an exploration than an exploration of our unified, mythopoeic identities driven by the many ways these hard-working artists tell stories of understanding and explanation.

Spring in New York is a brief and uncertain period according to the Green Michelin Guide, but the weather held for the preview of “Anthony Caro on the Roof” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 25. The five, large-scale steel sculptures are typical of his work, with characteristic use of ground plane and prefabricated steel sections.  The English sculptor, 87, spoke to press, friends and admirers, in the midst of his playfully arranged works.  “I am very thrilled”, he said, no doubt referring to how supremely suited they were to the expansive Cantor Roof Garden, framed, no less, by blossoming trees in Central Park.

The more recent Odalisque (1984) and End Up (2010) use found objects to “eliminate references and make truly abstract sculpture, composing the parts of the pieces like notes in music”, Caro once noted. Buoys, dock bollards, and shipping chains, are examples of the unwieldy scrap he used in his transmuted sculptures. The affable sculptor worked as an assistant to Henry Moore in the 1960’s and acknowledges the influence of Americans like sculptor David Smith and painter Kenneth Noland.  In 1961, he wrote that America was the catalyst that changed his work.  Sir Caro (he was knighted in 1987) works everyday, doesn’t look back and wants to keep “sculpture moving”.

It must be true, having gleefully reported that he is working on a three city block sculpture which will be installed on Park Avenue in March 2012, described as frieze-like by the Evening Standard of London.

Having followed the poetry scene on both sides of the Hudson for years, it was inevitable that I would come to know the poets paired for this interview.  In 2010, I met George Wallace at the Bowery Poetry Club where he was host for that Sunday afternoon’s reading.  I immediately appreciated the excitement he generated and the encouragement he offered to the features and those, like me, who would participate in open mic.  I met Romanian-born poet Claudia Serea at the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey in 2010.  There, I was surrounded by poets who would eventually offer to publish her work and mine in the same Red Wheelbarrow anthology that year.  When I learned that the two poets knew each other too, they became perfect candidates for the artist-to-artist interview series.  Claudia would ask George to decode poetryland and George would oblige, revealing a mindfulness about poetry that straddles high and low culture, emphasizing the roles of plurality, craftsmanship and discovery.

George Wallace is the 2011 Writer-in-Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.  He is currently on tour promoting Walt Whitman and Beyond—Fanfares for the Common Man both stateside and overseas.  He is the author of 19 chapbooks of poetry, professor at Pace University in New York, a well-known and highly regarded poetry promoter.  Here, he is interviewed by Romanian-born poet Claudia Serea whose work and translations have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish and 5 a.m. and is the author of two poetry collections.

Claudia Serea: What makes the American poetry American? Is it the geography, the social message, the aesthetic? Is there an American aesthetic?

George Wallace: There are a lot of different kinds of American poetry. Language poetry is different from spoken word and neo-formalism, for example. There are also a lot of diverse voices and approaches. This is a country made of different people and their cultural voices come from Japan, Korea, Africa, Eastern Europe. So, we should use the plural: American poetries. There are multiple voices. It’s less geographical than cultural. Diversity also comes from the plurality of interests in America. A Beat poet doesn’t have the same interest as an academic scholar. The answer is plurality.

CS:  On your blog “Whitman and Beyond: Fanfares for the Common Man,” you talk about Walt Whitman’s “brawny anti-intellectualism” and his praise of the American “Barbaric Yawp.” Williams Carlos Williams also strove to write “in the language of Polish housewives.” Today’s poetry has a more sophisticated approach to language, and is often experimental. How do you bridge tradition with contemporary trends? Are today’s poets still writing for the common man?

GW: Many of them are, just not the well-known ones. Language poets are not particularly concerned with the common man. But there are many places where one can find poetry written for the common man: at the Nyuorican Café, or at cowboy poetry conventions. But you can’t have the ying without the yang. There is an anti-intellectualism trend and also an intellectualism trend, an academic trend. At the Bowery’s “Page Meets Stage,” for example, they pair a writer known for his written work with a writer known for his performance poetry. It’s a dialogue between the two trends, an uneasy one, similar to the one between a parent and his child. One has to write for both. Failure to meet both standards would result into having stand-up comedians and ranters on one hand, or falling into obscure snobbism on the other, such as the intellectual arrogance of Pound and Elliot.

Personally, my goal is to write for both standards: common accessibility with the complexity of thought and craftsmanship of the academic standard. I believe it’s possible to do both—and necessary.

CS:  You have done an important and extensive work as a poetry organizer. What is the poet’s role in the community?

GW: I think the poet’s primary responsibility is to be a poet. They have to concentrate on the magic of craftsmanship. I wouldn’t prescribe that they should be community-oriented. It’s certainly advantageous for poets to be communal, to support each other, to create selflessly, and maybe anonymously, and to broaden the ecology of poetry. I happen to be trained in that respect. But the best leader is the one who doesn’t stand at the top and gets the glory.  The best leader is the one who turns over the power of success to the people.

A lot of Americans think they can adopt the Eastern philosophy, but you have to be ego-less. That’s very hard for poets, as they have to value their own opinion. This is the magic trick, to be an effective community-based poet. It’s a wire act.

CS:  You are well known for your performance poems. Do you write for the ear? Do you read the poems aloud when you write them? How do you integrate poetry and performance?

GW: I don’t read them aloud, but I hear them. And I let the music of the language, as it emerges, to guide the direction of the poem. Performance is built-in. I build the elements of successful performance into the poem: cadence, rhythm, repetition, internal rhythm, and persona.

CS:  Is poetry music? If your poetry were a musical instrument, what would it be?

GW: One of the things that poetry is—is music. It’s not the only thing. A poem wouldn’t be a drum. It has to be an instrument that growls or purrs like an animal. At the same time as people are listening, they hear the music combined with ideas and images. This happens quickly. In a performance piece, you don’t develop a single idea, but a bombardment of ideas. And music makes it impressionistic.

The poem needs to be an orchestra, or at least a string quartet. Like cubism, the poem represents a thing in fleeting pieces. The same surprise of discovery has to happen in the experience of hearing a poem. I want the audience to experience the excitement of discovery, not to give explanations.

CS:  What is your advice for the young poets? Something they should or shouldn’t do?

GW: My advice for the young poet: allow yourself to be young. Explore the energy and excitement of being young, but pay attention to experience in the world.

To the young genius: give me the answers, because I don’t have them yet.

CS:  Can you predict the future of poetry? Will printed books disappear? How will the internet shape the writing and disseminating of poetry?

GW: Big question. I don’t think that books will disappear. Eyesight will disappear before books. Books are a good technology, but not the best one for communicating stories. The best one is a campfire—but you can’ have a campfire in bed, or in the bathtub. I think you have to look at what’s gained and what’s lost.

You experience a book with multiple senses, something the internet can’t offer. I love the internet, though. It has the advantage of redundancy, of multiple places and platforms to store information. But it’s not the definition of the future. If anyone pulls the plug, it’s gone. The reason why books were successful was Thomas Jefferson who sold his books that became the Library of Congress. He placed books in every library—which brings me to “Lots of copies keeps stuff safe,” the LOCKSS system that Stanford University built to archive electronic copies of published journals, social and cultural studies, including poetry magazines (Poetry Bay, too.) Every library that subscribes has access to it.

CS:  In 1989, the Romanian Revolution was carried on with a song and poem that emerged as an anthem after being banned for 47 years. Recent events in Egypt and elsewhere showed people using rhyming verse and songs to deliver their messages. Does poetry have real power? Can it change the world?

GW: Poetry has power as real as the people who wield it. It can be used for all the different human enterprises, including liberation. What kind of power? Power that people turn to when they seek power, and look for necessary words. This happened after 9/11, when poems were sent to the site; they were posted on the walls and fences. It happens when a fireman retires after 50 years of service, and, at the retirement dinner, he reads a poem because he was moved to do so. People turn to heightened forms of expression when they have needs to express. If they don’t, they say “I’m at a loss for words.” Poetry makes it possible for us to never have to say that.

Artist Websites:

whitmanandbeyond.wordpress.com

Poetry Bay