I’m guessing you think there’s a typo in my heading. I know! The use of repetition in “The Renaissance,” a poem by Trey Moody (Poetry, May 2024), was a hook for me. The thirteen-line poem starts here:
I said hello. Then you said you said
hello. In this way, we were touching touching
clouds. […]
The doing of an act turns into a report of its doing or having been done — sort of. Actions are limned through an after-thoughtful lens — sort of. (I call this the “sort of” technique for understanding a poem.) A self-referential quality in the saying of saying partakes of mannerism in a winning way.
“Touching clouds” touches me. The thing I most wanted to paint as a kid on the hot flat Gulf of Mexi-Coast was clouds. The shrimp boats were picturesque, the curvaceous dunes aroused me, but the clouds drew me — so suffused with ineffable light I despaired of brushing them.
Rhetorically, note the canny enjambment of the repetitions in the poem. It lends the device both latency — postponing the complement — and the call-to-attention that comes with end of line. The maneuver is carried through to the very end:
[…] Usual, you map the passing time
in the shape of a cumulonimbus. I say how quiet quiet
can be when your face is this close to the painting.
“I say how quiet quiet can be” prepares a delicious reveal: The speaker and spoken-to are in intercourse with painting! That adjective “Usual” is inscrutable to me. What does it modify?
Perversely, I’ve quoted the beginning and the end of the poem. There’s enough going on in the middle to make your head spin. The poem makes enigmatic statements that are striking, abrupt and sort of intelligible, as poetry does.
[…clouds.] Such mannerisms endured throughout
the sixteenth century, when bread was scarce, words
for clouds scarcer. Of course we were younger
then, when all the lakes we wanted belonged
to the aristocracy, so we swam in nothing
but our suffering. As they do, centuries passed.
We kept thinking there were only so many ways
to light a fire. Now, it’s just as likely you’ll call
after a Sunday dip. [Usual …]
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
‘Just About Everyone Needed Therapy’
Hospital staff members, children and patients during a day trip near the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital, circa 1950. Credit… Baldran Collection, Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole. [New York Times caption and illustration]
This article highlights an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan that will end on August 18, 2024:
Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut.
The Catalan doctor Francesc Tosquelles was “a psychiatrist who spent decades dismantling the hard bars between illness and health, pathology and normalcy, artists and everyone else. He drew on Freud and Marx, and also on his experience as a refugee, in exile from Franco’s fascist Spain.”
Auguste Forestier’s sculpture “Untitled (Boat),” 1935-1949, opens the exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum. Credit… CNAC/MNAM, via RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Against the historical trauma of fascism, war and displacement, Tosquelles built radical psychiatric practices around non-hierarchical relations between patients, doctors and their neighbors… He also encouraged his patients’ creativity, which put him at the confluence of Modernist avant-gardes and Art Brut. All these ideas converged at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban, a small village in southern France, where Tosquelles worked from 1940 to 1962.
Marguerite Sirvins, “Landscape With Boats, Hunters, and Animals,” circa 1944-1955, rayon thread embroidered on fabric. Credit… Musée LaM. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Tosquelles also instructed his colleagues in psychoanalytic concepts and trained local people in basic psychiatry. With fascists on the march and decades of unthinkably brutal war, it seemed clear to Tosquelles that just about everyone needed therapy. If the affliction is social, he reasoned, the treatment must be too. [My emphasis — JMN]
”Untitled (Known as ‘Myrllen’s Coat’),” circa 1948-1955, a cloak covered in pale blue curls, heart-shaped groups of figures and illegible letters, made by a woman named Myrllen. Credit… Tennessee State Museum, Nashville. [New York Times caption and illustration]
The story behind “Myrllen’s Coat” is poignant:
Its maker, a woman named Myrllen, reportedly experienced symptoms of schizophrenia, and was one of the first Americans prescribed Thorazine. Her harrowing hallucinations subsided, but so did her desire to sew.
(Travis Diehl, “The Avant-Garde Psychiatrist Who Built an Artistic Refuge,” New York Times, 7-22-24)
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved