The creamy sensuality of the toothbrush rack melts your heart. Talk about ennobling humble objects with tender attention. It’s an act of painterly love lavished on a trivial appurtenance. Both lyrical and somehow sad.
“There is something I lack as a painter that de Kooning and Alex Katz have,” he jotted in his diary in 1967. “I wish I had that. I’d tell you what it was except that I don’t know.”
(Joe Brainard)
… A reticent Oklahoman who died of AIDS in 1994, at the age of 52…, [Brainard] arrived in Manhattan in 1960, and fell in with what was probably the last group of artists and writers to flourish in the city without any money… [He] sought to take up as little space as possible… specialized in small-scale works… understood how cheapo things (comic books, cigarette packaging, gift tags, restaurant receipts, etc.) can be an expression of authentic emotion… The poet Ron Padgett… recalls a period of artistic crisis in which “he took an increasingly dim view of his work.” Overly conscious of his deficiencies, he signed up for classes at the New York Academy of Art. His remaining years were given over to reading novels.
(Deborah Solomon, “No Ordinary Joe,” New York Times, 11-16-22)
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Something Memorable in the Way of Verse
The Poets
There he sat among them
(his old friends) a walking ash
that knows how to smile.
And he still dreamed of a style
so clear it could wash a face
or make a dry mouth sing.
But they laughed, having found
themselves more astonishing.
They would drive their minds
prismatic, strange, each wrapped
in his own ecstatic wires,
over a cliff for language,
while he remained to raise
a few birds from a blank page.
Poem by Bert Meyers in Poetry, January 2023.
Bert Meyers is singled out for celebration in this issue of the magazine. The poem appears, ironically, in a journal that seems to be dominated by writers wrapped in their own ecstatic wires, to borrow Meyers’s phrase. As poems go, there’s relatively little to translate. “A walking ash”? The essay about him mentions that Meyers was a heavy smoker — indeed the habit is implicated in his relatively early death. “Drive their minds over a cliff for language” is so apt it explains itself — the perfect metaphor! — portraying a mode of recondite, self-referential versifying that the speaker dismisses in favor of unassuming eloquence. With its unemphatic rhyming and lucid phrasing the poem is graspable, coherent and concise, all of which makes it linger in the mind, and even on the tongue. I hear a flutter of wings!
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved