“George Washington,” c. 1986, by James “Son Ford” Thomas at Steven S. Powers’ booth. Credit… Lila Barth for The New York Times.
… If you keep your eyes open, some unexpected moment of beauty will stop you in your tracks.
(Will Heinrich)
The 31st annual Outsider Art Fair… is New York’s largest clearinghouse of work by self-taught and marginalized artists…This is what stood out to me…
Heinrich surveys 10 booths from the fair, including that of Steven S. Powers, which has the Washington bust.
… Powers, a New York dealer, has an especially eclectic and winning mix. Start with James “Son Ford” Thomas (1926-1993), sharecropper, gravedigger, Delta bluesman and, since childhood, working ceramic sculptor with specialties in skulls and busts of George Washington. The Washington here, with dirty cotton hair and an expression of ominous blankness, is spattered with red — it makes him look Caucasian, bloody and syphilitic.
(Will Heinrich, “Portraits of Elvis and Dreamlike Visions at the 31st Outsider Art Fair,” New York Times, 3-3-23)
The byline for a good essay in The New York Times is “Abraham Josephine Riesman,” tagged as follows:
Mx. Riesman is a journalist and the author of a biography of Vince McMahon.
It’s my first encounter with “Mx.” in The Times, and I wondered how it likes to be said. A video I consulted sounded to my ear like “Mex.” Wikipedia transcribed it with the symbol for the sound of the ‘a’ in “about,” barely a sound at all.
In my dialect “Mr.” is “mister” and “Ms.” is “miz.” I’ve seen “Mrs.” in books as “Missus,” but I sound it as “Mizzes.” (Why was there never “Mrr.” for married men? Mirror and Mizzes Jones.) “Mix” seems inevitable for “Mx.” (Snap. Thomas Hezikiah Mix was an old-timey movie cowboy.)
Parenthetically, I assume “Mx.” can replace “Mr.”, as well, which totally gives id-entity its walking papers. In principle I could be Mx. “N” — and no one the wiser I’m Texan.
Back to the point. I read the essay careless of Abraham Josephine’s orientation. Imagine my surprise at the following:
Abraham Josephine Riesman (@abrahamjoseph) is a journalist and the author of “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” as well as “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.” She is on the board of directors of Jewish Currents. [my bolding]
(Abraham Josephine Riesman, “The Best Way to Explain the G.O.P. Is Found in the W.W.E.,” New York Times, 2-26-23)
“Women hold up half the sky” is a dictum of Mao Zedong cited by China’s current ruler, Xi Jinping, to endorse the equality of the sexes. Here’s his mission statement for the “equal” woman:
“The broad number of women must conscientiously shoulder the burden of caring for the elderly and nurturing the young, educating children, and playing a role in building family virtues.”
How about this dictum: Don’t be a man telling a woman she’s your equal. She can do better than that. (See note.)
(Chris Buckley, Joy Dong and Amy Chang Chien, “A Shrinking, Aging China May Have Backed Itself Into a Corner,” New York Times, 1-18-23)
Note This punchline belongs to a woman, but I forget who said it.
Jenny George powers the issue to a strong start with a poem whose title, unusually, helps read it. Here are the first 4 of its 11 lines:
A snake lies in the open, dormant in its sleeve of heat. A gilded orphan on the sun-warmed dirt, eye-slits ajar, waiting for the infinite to arrive. (“The Artist”)
Nam Le has 6 rambunctious verse-structures containing (among others) the words “mitotic,” “mitogenic,” “exophones,” “chrismed,” “lexithymia” (= “alexithymia”), “entelechy” and “yarrow.” Entelechy “makes actual what is otherwise merely potential,” according to the Internet. One Nam Le structure actualized laughter for me, which is a coveted trigger. Here’s its crescendo, referring to the Vietnamese language:
… Leaving, at last:
214.— The number of Kangxi/Nôm radicals. Upon which all articulations hinge. From which all possibilities spring. But is this all there is to it? At the end of number — mere/more language? (“[29. ARITHMETICAL]”)
I thought of the tedium of Numbers in the King James Bible. But it’s Pound whom Nam Le mentions elsewhere, reminding me of the tedium inflicted by the Cantos on the aspiring Romance linguist who years later writes these lines.
It’s not fair to dribble snippets of Nam Le, but I like this sententious apothegm:
The Way that lets itself be said to be The Way Is not the Way…. (“[11. VIOLENCE: ANGLO-LINGUISTIC]”)
Dorothea Laskey’s “Framed Pictures” slides past me for 29 lines, then a poem breaks surface in this resonant conclusion:
The dead only speak through poetry So make the poems be the things That you give everything They must carry on
The nod for most radical enjambment goes to KB Brookins:
… The snake plant ’s grooves also remind me of your hips moving like water to Bad Bunny, bare-faced and singing translations in my ear. (“The Snake Plant”)
The foldout is devoted to “Jotxland Epic” by Rodolfo Avelar.
Writers who identify as poets assay discourse that repels paraphrase. I’m beginning to find this liberating. It seems a fool’s errand to restate verse in order to “reveal” what it intends to say, or to extrapolate an arc. (I imagine writers hate when readers do this.) The words are simply there, in ink, on paper (physically or virtually). They’re mine now. I don’t have to goose them into a figuration. I can just be a thrill seeker.
This bumptious slogan was adopted by TxDOT in 1986 for its anti-littering campaign. The worst offenders were young men aged 16 to 24. The slogan was thought to have “that Texas bravado” which would appeal to those scoundrels. It did. If you need to know more, see this article.
An old saying for something that’s drearily predictable is, “It’s as sure as dearth and Texas.”
Dearth is so prevalent, it’s easier to name things there’s not a dearth of: inequality and bad weather come to mind. Weather can be fixed, but inequality is an Act of God.
As for Texas, suffice it to say that Texas is sort of everywhere, and not in a good way. From Texarkana to Tallahassee, Austin to Martha’s Vineyard, Waco to Sturgis, Amarillo to Scottsdale, Dallas to San Jose, El Paso to Raleigh, everywhere you turn, there’s just more Texas out there messing with America.
The next time I explain old sayings to you, we’ll talk about “Monet is the root of all evil.”
There’s a biography of John Donne I’d like to read. As a preacher he was a crowd magnet in the pulpit of Saint Paul’s in London. He wrote love poems, some laced with misogyny, and later wished he hadn’t. He fell in love with and took to wife a teenager, Anne More, confined his affections to her, as he put it, and impregnated her 12 times in 16 years of marriage. Her 12th pregnancy was a stillbirth, and Anne died five days later.
Andrew Tate is jailed in Romania for possible crimes. The targets of his evangelism, juvenile males, take his glorification of brutality and Bugattis seriously. Tate’s lawyer retails the thesis that it’s merely a performance.
Donne was a rake for part of his life, but some of his rakishness was pose.
For Rundell [his biographer], Donne was “an exhausted oversexed lover in the imagination only, but he caught that voice of the libertine and exploded it, made it his own. … If you are looking for a master class in how to look and sound like a womanizer, he offers it.”
Donne did some great writing. Tate has nothing in common with him except as putative fantasist and creator of another hell for women. Counselors are exhorting schoolboys to ignore him. (That should work!) What about girls? It’s hoped they, too, will be helped to avoid being fodder for sexual terrorists and priapic preachers.
(James Shapiro, review of Katherine Rundell, “The Libertine’s Voice: The Life and Love Poems of John Donne,” New York Times, 9-16-22; Emma Bubola and Isabella Kwai, “‘Brainwashing a Generation’: British Schools Combat Andrew Tate’s Views,” New York Times, 2-19-23)
You’ve been punctuated! In my title, moving the pause (caesura) signaled by a comma turns Hamlet’s proposition into something different. Whatever “that” may be, being it or not being it is what’s now in play.
The New York Times publishes a poem by Magdalena Zurawski, “[Dog Is a Way of Thinking],” that features “intrepid use of caesura.” The phrase is Anne Boyer’s, who introduces the poem. “The poem’s frequent midline interruptions of otherwise overflowing (enjambed) lines creates a gentle resistance to the ordinary flow of thought,” Boyer writes. She makes delicious mention of “the dog’s keen-nosed present sense” (so close to “present tense”!), and states that “Dogs thrill at palpability.” Here’s the poem’s ending:
Your dog, if he could talk, my language tells me, would, every day, like a radio, catch an air wave and say, “Today. … ”
“Even a mere comma can be the conductor of time” is Boyer’s introductory parting shot. Uh-oh. “Even” or “mere,” but not both! This quibble over redundancy outs a dirty secret: I sweat the detail. I love strategic punctuation, parsable syntax, penetrable diction and rational typography. Clear structure enables complex speech. Verse fails when it conflates oddity and license with inspiration. Does this bias render me unfit to read Poetry magazine? I hope not.
Poetry, February 2023, celebrates William J. Harris (still living). Reading the issue’s portfolio of Harris’s poems gave me some laugh-out-loud moments. Here are two (in full):
On Wearing Ears As long as people continue to wear ears there won’t be much peace and quiet in this world.
How We Met Barbara said, “I got to take a shit. Why don’t you two Get to know each other?”
I was stunned at the refreshing paucity of hocus-posery in Harris’s statement of purpose:
Since I am a comic poet… I am always on the lookout for funny, deeply funny, humanly funny poems… My poems are as straightforward as I can make them… I want my poems to make the reader feel, understand and laugh — it is nice when a poem does all three. (Quoted from Howard Ramsby II’s introductory essay.)
Here, in full, is another of Harris’s pieces from Poetry’s portfolio:
For Bill Hawkins, a Black Militant Night, I know you are powerful and artistic in your misspellings. How distinctively I sense your brooding, feel your warm breath against my face, hear your laughter — not cruel only amused and arrogant: young — insisting on my guilt. Night, let me be part of you but in my own dark way.
The story of what befell the work of Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand at Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota) is as disheartening as what transpired several weeks ago at Hamline University only a short distance away. (It’s telling that The Times includes no images of Talepasand’s offending art.)
Goldberg’s art-not-deferring summation is attractive and aspirational, but it’s pie in the sky, I’m afraid. Full-throated art always tangles with something — often it’s with religiosity (faith’s evil twin). Henry Louis Gates Jr. elsewhere calls the urge to censor art “a symbolic form of vigilante policing.” There’s a lot of it about.
Cy Gavin, “Untitled (Grass growing on a weir),” 2022… Credit…via Gagosian; Photo by Rob McKeever.
“He’s showing us in the natural world our own inner landscape,” said [collector Bernard] Lumpkin, who owns four Gavin canvases. “When you’re inhabiting a painting by Cy, you’re inhabiting a world which is simultaneously strange and familiar; real and surreal; local and foreign.”
(Robin Pogrebin, “A Modern Take on the Hudson River School Tradition,” New York Times, 2-1-23)
Cy Gavin, “Untitled (Moon),” 2022. Credit…via Gagosian; Photo by Rob McKeever.
The manscape I inhabit’s belly button is simultaneously inward and outward.
EthicalDative 
Gender Reveal Vagary
The byline for a good essay in The New York Times is “Abraham Josephine Riesman,” tagged as follows:
Mx. Riesman is a journalist and the author of a biography of Vince McMahon.
It’s my first encounter with “Mx.” in The Times, and I wondered how it likes to be said. A video I consulted sounded to my ear like “Mex.” Wikipedia transcribed it with the symbol for the sound of the ‘a’ in “about,” barely a sound at all.
In my dialect “Mr.” is “mister” and “Ms.” is “miz.” I’ve seen “Mrs.” in books as “Missus,” but I sound it as “Mizzes.” (Why was there never “Mrr.” for married men? Mirror and Mizzes Jones.) “Mix” seems inevitable for “Mx.” (Snap. Thomas Hezikiah Mix was an old-timey movie cowboy.)
Parenthetically, I assume “Mx.” can replace “Mr.”, as well, which totally gives id-entity its walking papers. In principle I could be Mx. “N” — and no one the wiser I’m Texan.
Back to the point. I read the essay careless of Abraham Josephine’s orientation. Imagine my surprise at the following:
Abraham Josephine Riesman (@abrahamjoseph) is a journalist and the author of “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America,” as well as “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.” She is on the board of directors of Jewish Currents. [my bolding]
(Abraham Josephine Riesman, “The Best Way to Explain the G.O.P. Is Found in the W.W.E.,” New York Times, 2-26-23)
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