September 26: Lane Falcon

My dear friend Lane Falcon is in her final year at Sarah Lawrence in poetry although she's managed to cover a fair amount of fiction as well. Her poem and observations follow.

Jackson Pollack’s  “Autumn Rhythm”
To him, to live
was to be entwined— to stand outside
that nest of rusted wire
was to die. 

Observations

As usual, lovely to see Caitlin, with whom I can talk in tongues about art and poems and people. Going to The Met made me want to get fired from my job and collect unemployment for a few months, like my sister. If only we were allowed to drink coffee in there, it would be the perfect place to hibernate. I almost ran over a couple of little old ladies but that’s nothing new and luckily no one cursed me. Caitlin seems very at home among the sculptures and canvases and, at the same time, tentative, respectful. I’ve never been so close to a Pollack painting, I don’t think. Just prior to us sitting down, I’d been telling Caitlin how I never really thought of Pollack paintings as visceral, despite something I read recently that compared his painting to the poems of Sharon Olds. His stuff always seemed so abstract to me in comparison to Sharon Olds’ version of urgency. Sitting there, though, I kept thinking how art is a metaphor for the artist’s perception of the world (duh!) and how immediate and seething his painting is. Not every emotion has a perfectly carved image to represent it. I think, in poetry, this sort of effect can be likened to the use of diction, music as opposed to image. Music is as immediate as image, right, as far as plucking at the soul strings (pun intended, but only after realizing it was there)?

September 25: Jessica Ankeny

Jessica Ankeny is a gifted poet in her second year at Sarah Lawrence. Her poem and observations from her writing time in the Musical Instruments section of the Met are below. 

The Reason Sound-Makers Go Behind Glass and We Look at Them, No, We Just Walk Past

It comes in bright

bright color sound, like curly, like desire for your body,

like my body, anybody

to play play play, smells like red, no, sounds like turquoise, don’t

know sound of horns on gourd, should thank

spiral, thank animal, thank reaching, horn? look ma! pulled

pipes from ‘neath the kitchen sink

please blow on it, I blow goat heads, I speak swollen, I envy

horny toad heart, I have

horny toad heart, I sing ragweed, I sound dragon,

I strung so tight my strings disintegrate, need to play need need

to sound like sound barrier, drum like whiskey, close your sing, no, close

your sing, no, sing metal, sing dust

removal, sing strung voice disintegration, smell no tune, no

tuning, how right note with no right tuning? push sound

with elbows, no, push the pep

pep mushing, no, open the carpet, pinch glass ‘till it screams—

there’s music inside, it’s there.

Observations

  It was a great pleasure to see Caitlin for the first time since she graduated. There is something about the MET, about looking at things meticulously maintained under glass, which encourages a formality and a referential nature in conversation. I like that. I also liked how our conversation changed while we were in the subway.

            We went first to the textiles hall or basement or dungeon or whatever, but even the doorbell won’t get you in on Saturdays.  I ended in the hall of Old World international instruments.  Caitlin was in the room of near-modern western instruments.  For a reason I can’t place there was one wicker chair in the middle of each hall. We respectively took the chairs. Caitlin’s room (I blame Ringo’s drum) was busier then mine. As I wrote I became more upset that these beautiful instruments, many of which were used in sacred rituals, were just sitting behind glass. What good is an instrument not played? Does a sacred object loose its sanctity if it’s not in use? If an object is not fulfilling the purpose of its creation is it really worth looking at? I don’t know. I am undecided if the information gleaned from viewing objects outside their context is even true. Sure, seeing a gourd with antelope horns coming out of it and strings wound tight between the horns is pretty cool. But saying something is cool without knowing what it sounds like, or what it was used for exactly, distorts any meaning it might have had. It lessens the sanctity of the object. Doesn’t it? I don’t know. Does it even matter? I think so, but even as I write this I make plans to go back and see those textiles.

September 21st: Aldina Vazao Kennedy

Aldina Vazao Kennedy, is a fellow Sarah Lawrence graduate, a non fiction writer who devoloped an  interest in and talent for poetry. Her poem follows.

Afterlife Accounting at the Met

My people are North Atlantic but my magnet
spins South. I taste oranges, almonds, pungent
olive oils, and cheese squeezed from goats.
Egypt is Mediterranean too. Before Romans cut
roads through my home, pharaohs stored pots,
faceted rocks, and godly symbols. They traveled heavy.
At the Met, all I see means death
and how to survive. Afghani lapis lazuli chains
enclose necks, fingers, and arms--fit for Kings’ men.
When guards look away, I touch something sacred.
Who carves himself
into temples? Dendur, Tikal. Theocharis 1899. Kheper 1936.
“Dung beetles push the sun into being.”
Afraid I’ll forget, I take pictures.
In Antigua, I heard campesinos and señoras
thank the Virgin and pay

promises, and hoard prayers and humiliations suffered.
Faith alone won’t save us.

Languages are invented for accounting. Linear scripts.
Grandmother notes 66 bible pages read.
Mother contracts salvation with tear-dropped coins.
They hang scapulars from their necks.
Forty years of hard spousal service earns
how many coupon-books for Heaven?

Father doesn’t talk sense.
Plaques tangle neural pathways.

He doesn’t remember tomorrows
and stores rocks to cobble our driveway.
He records with marble and white stone.
Ellis 56. The rest he lays with asphalt and tar.

September 17th: Guest Writer Jean Hartig

Jean Hartig is a gifted poet who graduated a few years before I did from Sarah Lawrence. Her poem and bio are below.

The American Wing

Primitive economy of these trees
resembling the knees of a man dropped
blushing beneath a girl--oh
but the light then shifted.

An insect shudders inside a wall.

The next decision would be migration.
Elevated tracks and the arch of the aqueduct
passing technologies. Our automobile
cleaved to a rail beside a river.

The story of the land's unsealing from its mothers
turns to mineral, our teeth caving, turns to stone.

He did not want to resemble the monument's
perforations, a steed crawling
flush before him. He did not want
to see his hand beginning another's name
in the water combing over the alloy.

The lie of that field more quick,
more keen. The roof is letting
something in that isn't light.

Unfaced.

A signal appeared on vees of glass, noting the number to call.

The man caught in it, panicked, and some of his fingers
uncorked their leaves.

We do not believe the other
in the scene. Only no mother conceiving
from her conjoined seas of concern,
the green-flied animal not falling from her skirts.

A fog-eyed train drew above us a catalog
of possible apogees. On its back, the reduced queen, her limestone eye
proving the canyon unmanning a purchase of steam.


Bio: Jean Hartig lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her chapbook is Ave, Materia (Poetry Society of America, 2009).

September 17th

My guest writer today was the lovely Jean Hartig, who had been for a run around the storm stricken Prospect Park before meeting me on the way to the subway. It was nice to have someone to share the commute with, due to the storm the commute was considerably longer today then it normally is. All the trains were running late.

Jean chose the American Wing and it was very nice to be back there. Even though there is something cold and formal about the room I enjoy writing there because of the light.





Edited to Remove Poem: An edited version of this poem has since been published.






Factors
Day of the Week: Friday
Occupancy of Museum: Empty
Arrived at: 9:45
Departed at: 11:00
Read on Commute: On the way there I talked and on the return trip I read a little more of Provenance by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo.

September 14th: Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick (Photo's)

Shannon's wonderful photographs from outside and inside the met are shown below.

September 14th: Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick is a friend, fellow writer and recent graduate. She writes long compelling poems. She also has a lovely blog called Ways We Are Lost where she wrote a little bit more about the impact this experience had on her http://wayswearelost.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/lost-in-the-met/. It is really a blog worth reading regularly. Her poems and thoughts are below.

In The Museum, A Schizophrenic Among Angel, Voice, Nail


Spiral, saints, painting of someone’s
Torturer—children ask, What does that
Mean? As though the way to heaven
Is through a flagged red heart of a burning goat.

*

Pull your hair out, said the widow of Seville.

All of it?

Yes. I need straw—
Gates from which to enter the world.

I want to eat your lamb,
I said, then your hands.

*

Pull it out.
Pull it out.
body, hair.

*

Noticed swans, their necks gripped
by women, thought of Seville, how one jumps
In fountains fully clothed, folds exposed—
This reminded me of the tortured man’s stomach,
so I stopped looking at the goat.

*

After leaving the museum, the widow of Seville followed me
Down the street, into shadow of leaves. Satellite woman—
She said, have a sandwich. I said, No, I must keep trim.

*

I came, come for the burning goat, his bones.
I came, come for the living-speak.
I come, came, pulling a strand from my head.
I came, come, hungry—side-split ache of dead for the living.

*

You can have my hair—
The world outside contains me.
The people walking by? My food.


Observations

It's interesting, a definite change of pace for me, to write from the museum. I felt bombarded by many different voices. The notebook I wrote it allowed me, or gave me permission, to write without thinking too much about line breaks or worry about erasing what I immediately thought was cliche, or bad writing--usually on a computer word document, I will quickly delete whole lines in seconds, but from my notebook in the museum, I just had to keep writing.

When I got home and transferred what I wrote in my notebook onto a word document, it was like I was coming at the writing on a whole new level, an extra step in the writing process that I don't usually have. I was recalling the place and sensations, paintings and images, again in my mind whole trying to take the first draft to a second and third on the computer. In my mind, I was back in the place where the inspiration happened. I was back in the museum. However, the words I wrote in the museum, once transferred onto the computer, seemed like new words and images. Something long divorced from my experience and yet remembered, but from a different perspective.

September 12th: Patrick Brawley

Patrick Brawley is a gifted poet, recent graduate from Sarah Lawrence, and current publishing intern. I really appreciated how his poem integrated what surrounded us in the museum without being overwhelmed by it. His poem and thoughts are below.

Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru

Darlin’ caught a murder rap
in dry desert heat, running
round dunes slowly shifting

in the wind. Vehicular evil sliding
down her throat navigating glass component
fragile valley clearing. Can’t grow

no corn in sand boy your soil is to dry.
It goes much deeper
than what she said,
her humid voice dusting off them old tools;

hadn’t used them in ages. Forgot how
to turn up earth, irrigate the limited
moments of each secret trickling under

her feet filed in tributaries of disappointment. Tool
spoon handle with no basin, I walk the ridge
hoping for the valley that if I stay there long enough

I’ll become antiquities, an ashtray that old pot, buried
heavy enough to avoid the shattered
parapet swept into dustpan of the horizon’s

deviated septum. Each gravitational leak
pulling her deeper into the oasis
a grain of sand looking for love;

a astrolabe guiding light to the shaman driving
blind toward another sunrise stacked
on the sarcophagus painted around his head.

In the dry heave’ staring at the girl I wanted,
did you play hard to get? Do you love me
God? I’ll eat this rotten harvest; afraid of famine

worms burrowed their way to pavement. That dry
spell ate the sun hollering fire in public space. Drawbridge
dumped its cargo of pills into my industrial mouth

enlightening my bankruptcy, a river boat man
took me across swallowing lotus lilies to float away,
balloon strung to a message for the lord.

Observations: Patrick Brawley

It was great to see Cait for the first time since our graduation. The Met is a great place to see friends one hasn’t seen in awhile. Its art spanning the timeline of the human journey tying knots to form a latter of universal consciousness that we all climb, get off, and rejoin through out our lives. It was fantastic to catch up and see exactly were Cait was in the adventure. Talking about everything from cell phones to personal identity we strolled through a city dug up and placed inside a museum, which seems appropriate, building monuments to the triumph of human spirit. We began writing in the Islamic section of the museum. I have somehow seemed to always walk right passed it, and thought this a great opportunity to immerse myself in something new since we all seem to be striving to make our own voice in a new season of our lives. We then switched to Asian sculpture and the immense Buddha of Medicine stared at me. We all search for our medicine through different paths, and we each find serenity in our heart. The struggle to find our path however personal is a universal passage that is what truly makes us all human. It was great to catch up with Cait, and I wish her well in all her future endeavors.

September 12th:Geneviève Bourgeois

Genevieve Bourgeois is the first artist to draw at the Met with me, which was rather exciting. Below is her work and thoughts.



Genevieve's Observations

On Sunday September 12th, 2010. I joined Caitlin at the Met, we chatted while waltzing through exhibits. Although we were involved in deep conversation, I couldn’t help but notice minuet details. Whether we were discovering Egyptian tombs, admiring American furniture, noting height measurements of Frank Lloyd Writes’ chair legs, to holes in a hippopotamus’ tooth. When we finally decided to work we found ourselves surrounded by Islamic art. Had a hard time focusing the tip of my pencil. I ended up taking a five-minute adventure and stumbled upon a spacious room “Buddha of Medicine” and tall shapely figures. This room is where I rejected my pencil choose a pen and focused on the shapes that filled the room.
This was a wonderful experience and I would be more than willing to do it again. It is always a pleasure to be with great company surrounded by a cornucopia of masterpieces.

September 11th, Jacob Jans

Jacob Jans wrote the following, hopefully the first step of a much larger project, in the Cloisters this past Saturday.


The Cloisters is a conjoining of the very old and the very new, quite literally, with pillars of old churches supporting newly constructed ceilings, ancient stained glass windows set in new walls, bright museum lighting perched above ancient altars, and beside a verdant gardened courtyard, a Pontaut House with crumbled walls, cracked pillars, a smooth ceiling and floor, and long wooden benches where Caitlin and I began our writing session by reading from The Rule of Benedict as was once a daily ritual at abbeys around the world.

I believe there is a certain joy to be had in setting aside a portion of each day to contemplate how we participate in the world. The chapter we read from The Rule of Benedict described the proper behavior of an Abbess.

This got me to thinking about the daily pressures our society throws our way in an attempt to define proper behavior for us, and how I often find myself struggling to have a solid sense of this, much less have the time to think about it intentionally.

Which gave me the idea of writing my own personal imitation of The Rule of Benedict. My initial attempt, composed at the Cloisters, is below.


The Rule of Doubt


Press shut your mouth, and hold, my friend
these thoughts, if you will,
in the silence of attention,
and notice the sounds which are not sounds,
and how your body moves
in accordance with their rising,
so that with this silence
you can again be aware of thought.

To you,
whoever you may be
who are renouncing noise
to create sound
under the reverence of doubt
these words are addressed.

And first of all,
as motion begins to flow toward your tongue,
the way water flows through the branches of a tree,
building tension to the very tip of a leaf,
allow awareness of your hidden motions to rise
so that you may choose them.

********

As I wrote this, I realized much of my life has been informed by the tradition of poetry. I am considering continuing this project using quotes from favorite poems and poets, the way The Rule of Benedict quotes Psalm and and verse from the Bible.

September 7th and 9th: Marion and John Franklin

Marion Franklin a retired schoolteacher and cook extraordinaire, and John Franklin my former theology professor and the head of Imago: a Christian Art Organization came with me for two wonderful writing sessions. Their work is below, as well as an Introduction By John. The photo credit goes to Marion.


John's Introduction
It was a great pleasure for Marion and me to spend some time with our friend Caitlin while in New York. We are enthusiastic about her writing project “A Month at the Met”. On the two days that we were together with Caitlin at the Met – our inclination was to look to the images there for inspiration. We offer here some thoughts written and remembered from those special moments at the Met.


However you look at it, the back has an extraordinary psychological power, a power that can be wonderful or disquieting or some combination of the two.

Jed Pearl - Antoine's Alphabet - pg. 21

Marion Franklin -



Tuesday, September 7th


Visiting the Met is for me like a voyage through time –from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China of distant past to Medieval Europe, seventeenth century Holland and nineteenth century France. The artefacts provide a glimpse into life in these times past. Wealthy and poor, royalty and worker, aristocracy and bourgeoisie – we are able to discover a little and enter a time not our own. The works I see at the Met inspire within me admiration for the craftsmanship and artistry of the masons, potters, sculptors and painters through millennia. Choose any room and you can (if you will) be transported for a moment or an hour to another place and another time – each in its own way enriching you experience and understanding of the human condition.



Thursday, September 9th



After visiting the Met on Tuesday we were browsing in Barnes and Noble (in the art section) and happened on a book titled Antoine’s Alphabet. Had it been left to me I would never have seen it – but John who is somewhat taller than me saw it on a top shelf. It is a slim volume of short essays (26 + of them) all on the work of Watteau. Watteau has been a favourite artist since I saw a reproduction of his work in the first art history book I owned. When I go to the Met I always visit Mezzetin – it is like visiting an old friend. The surface beauty of the painting is in sharp contrast to the intense longing on the clown’s face. I have never been able to figure out why I am drawn to this painting. I am hoping to find some new insight from this book by Jed Pearl. Perhaps he will say what I can’t express myself. Here is an example:



“The mysterious young man, painted by Jean –Antoine Watteau, ...is a splendidly absurd mechanism dedicated to the idea of human feeling. The touch of Watteau’s brush, the power of his conception, here .... a mingling of velvetiness and steeliness that constitutes one of the miracles of art. I cannot get enough of the easy and yet persuasive power of this work... “ (Jed Pearl, Antoine’s Alphabet, p 4)





John Franklin



On our Tuesday visit to the Met I suggested some time be spent with the work of seventeenth century Dutch art. The works of this period were among the first to generate my interest in visual art. Though my interest is now very diverse – I never tire of returning to these gentle inspiring paintings. I didn’t know what to expect when participating with Caitlin on this creative project – and my responses I could not have predicted.



Tuesday September 7th



Entering another time, another place makes possible – a fresh look at the world around me. I am newly aware of this possibility through time spent before paintings, earnest in detail and deeply respectful of their subject matter. I have two Dutch friends from the 17th century whose creative gifts well exercised have brought me pleasure to the eye and food for the soul over many years – Rembrandt and Vermeer. On this visit to the Met I am once again able to enter their world and engage in silent dialogue with them.



Vermeer’s depiction of the tranquility of simple domestic figures alerts me to the cacophony of contemporary culture and generates a longing for the nurturing power of the silences. Rembrandt’s work seems laden with thoughtfulness – quiet reflection, perhaps too serious – and yet in a world where action seems to negate thought – or at least replace it, I am reminded of the noble gift of reflection, that ability to stand back and consider, the eagerness to know more deeply, a moment devoted to bringing a bit of order to one’s fragmented world.



I sit before a work by that most talented of painters – Rembrandt. It’s a painting of Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer. While writing I am distracted as I look down at the floor with footwear and feet of a seemly infinite variety passing by – I look up and am settled by this engaging work with its two figures – linking philosophical thought (Aristotle) with poetic imagination (Homer) – one guided more by logic – the other more by story, both walking a path in the interest of truth.

What draws me to these painters is their respect for what is human and for ordinary life – no idealization, no pretence but a heartfelt engagement with the world as they knew it.



Thursday September 9th



Strange how a still, voiceless object can communicate with such power and eloquence. Does the ubiquitous din of our contemporary society drown out the voices of silence? Statue and canvass – brush and chisel - have served to bridge time – bring past to present and present to past – a conversation that seems too rare.



Some moments with Watteau’s Mezzetin and I ask – Is the harlequin – that comic figure – bearing the weight of a loss or at least an absence? His trance – like expression finds some resolve in the passionate intensity of his hands, instruments active in creating sound on his lute – perhaps music of lament, perhaps of hope, perhaps of love.



Strange too how an artisan’s hand – two centuries gone has crafted an images that breathes life at this later time, generates interest, creates conversation and opens the way for a moment of joy, of sadness, of compassion or curiosity and nurtures the human spirit two centuries on.



Our current penchant for the immediate and the cavalier assumption that ‘now’ out values ‘then’ and ‘then’ merits not our time or interest is a falsehood all too common. Cultural memory now easily lost is not easily regained. Such loss breeds isolation and a directionless fog, identity masked and uncertain, homelessness.

September 8th, Jeanne DeMuth Alnot

Jeanne DeMuth Alnot, wrote a wonderful non fiction piece on two paintings in the gallery she chose. The work she did speaks for itself.

The Collection
in response to Giovanni Paolo Panini’s Modern Rome and Ancient Rome

by Jeanne DeMuth Alnot


I accumulate. Image and concept and connection. Together, they must, I’m sure of it, coalesce to form a coherent whole.

Panini corroborates and contradicts, defying me to generate meaning from the dispersed. In life. In art. Ancient Rome and Modern Rome mock the idea of convergence. Tableaus layered but not melded.

Ruins are times passed and overlapping. Cityscapes are places concurrent though discrete.

More than can be grasped together.

The limitation of perception and consciousness.

Time running backwards and forwards, forwards and back. The ancient gives way to the modern; the modern decays into the ancient.

And the deliberation of men, the urge to reconcile and apprehend, the need for information to condense into knowledge.

I accumulate. Like Panini, I hoard and layer, ideas stacking up in my brain. If I study the picture long enough, if I slave enough over the tablet and master plan, can I render my stash in massive, dusty tomes, complete records and narratives that describe everything at once? Panini’s tomes, my tomes, half the size of men, half the size of my body?

Panini’s men, in rapt deliberation. Amid the cluttered world.

Surrounded by statues. The transformation of flesh to stone.

The confirmation of isolation.

I accumulate. Yet what if the fragments will not all cooperate, will not distill, as Panini attests, into that hard-sought, unified whole? If I force fusion I must make reductive representation. It is only a handful here, a cluster there that consent to align.

My striving pen, my amassing trove.


The Experience: Museum writing is a habit of mine, so the milieu of the exercise was not new to me. The constraints, however, were entirely novel. As a nonfiction writer, I find the requirement to produce something essentially complete in a day or two unrealistic. It forced me to work off the cuff, creating a super-short that is essentially reactive in nature. By contrast, my proclivity is to write longer, deliberative essays. The Met project certainly pushed me outside my comfort zone.

Bio: Jeanne DeMuth Alnot earned her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Iowa, she has also lived in New Jersey, Paris, Thailand, and Brooklyn. She is a former staff member of the journal Lumina, and her work has appeared in Two Review.