From Poetry (2005)

PARTS OF A STORY

Or, it could go like this, since
you want to know names,
places, people, particulars:

it was the particular paradise
of ninety acres of orchard grass
and a few scattered woods;
barbed wire, Holsteins,
and the plush of spring
as you feel it, wet beneath you,
when you sit down in a field in May—

or in the pasture’s folds where the creek ran:
there were ores of a grey clay
she could sit and mine all morning;
rotting trees, whose meat flaked off
like the flesh of fish;
or in the barn where the straw-dust
harried and swirled.

It was in an inheritance,
since it was given as all earth is given,
as ready to receive the pledge
of a young girl as the cow-flops
and the dull thud of horses’ hooves.

We may start here in this field,
with her kneeling, with the colors wet and black
suddenly pouring up—
but eventually we will have to confront the father,
then the ravishment by air,
then, still later—
the ravishment by imagination.

© Mary Walker Graham 2005

Leonard Cohen (Montreal, Quebec): from Beautiful Losers

Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! Look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on… 

© Leonard Cohen 1967

Chris McCabe (London, UK): "Premeet"

Eight minutes to a meeting I don’t want to be at
            lingering at stool in the white room
my dad would have written his dream England XI
                        I want to make a poke at a poem
      —one likeable Larkin take: to write what
you would want to read—
      but there’s always games on mobile phones
             DETAILS next to DELETE
                                      thumbs like fitting seals
       CLOSING APPLICATION
                            two minutes to go—
        was it Parkinson or Aspel
                      who shadowboxed pre-guests?

Cicatrix of papercuts makes this need to confess

© Chris McCabe 2006

Chris McCabe (London, UK): from Progress Poems

# 800: ivor cutler

see you next time he said I said not
if I'm like this (turned my back) he
said then I'll be like this (turned his
back) & there might be mirrors in front of us

he said there might be mirrors in front of us
I said not if I'm like this (turned my
back) he said then I'll be like this
(turned his back) see you next time I said


# 659: cleaning habits

& for some— to wash & clean up— is to
piss their own shit-stains from the toilet pan

© Chris McCabe 2005

P.F.S.: Nine Paintings 2

Though the formal aspect of Abby Heller-Burnham’s work is indebted to French Neo-Classicists Ingres and David, the thematic narratives embedded in her paintings, which hinge on usages of humor, irony, and rhetorical incisiveness, owe a surprising debt to post-modernity, and the conceptual post-modern art which has dominated NYC’s Chelsea galleries for several decades. Specifically, Abby’s narratives of the body, of femininity, and of queerness do the post-modern trick of moving past form to reach unadulterated thematic goals. Why the formal components which complicate Heller-Burnham’s paintings also add several more narratives (of aesthetic form itself, of aesthetic histories, and of America establishing a new, form-driven discourse with historical Europe), completing a well-rounded package which has in it the insignia balance and major high art consonance of the Philly Free School, is that we all, in Aughts Philly, argued that narratives of form itself are as interesting and as rich as thematic narratives, and created accordingly, against the American sanctioned and normative. Yet, the chiasmus which presents itself here between New York and Philadelphia has its own level of richness, and its own narrative— specifically, about form and formal rigor, and why, at a certain point, early in the new century, a group of American artists decided to investigate past what was indigenously in our blood, towards an embrace of the historical.

Abby’s Meeting Halfway takes us right into the heart and the heat of the New York-Philly chiasmus and conflict— a painting which grants equal time and attention to concept and form, establishing an essential multi-tiered narrative in the process. About queerness, what Meeting Halfway establishes is a sense of nuanced, practical particulars— Abby and her twin/muse only partly face each other as they emerge from their respective pupas, into— what? Respective adulthood? Sexual awareness? Consonance with a queer vision of life? As Abby and her muse “meet halfway,” their matching postures are ambiguous— they are bare-breasted, but covering their breasts. How I take the essential thematic narrative of the painting is that it defines a sense of isolation, alienation, and “half-sisterhood” among gay women. Here, the formal narrative is rather raw for Heller-Burnham— yet the graceful sense of added ornaments softens the construct, and the expert drawing and coloration fills it out into balanced major high art consonance. Yet, I can’t not notice that Robert Mapplethorpe is in Heller-Burnham's blood somewhere here— the awareness that queerness in art necessitates confrontation, and that queer alienation and intimacy are so oddly entwined as to be (or become) interchangeable. The boldness and bluntness of Meeting Halfway is very New York— it amounts to a declaration, both of queer independence and queer complexity. Mapplethorpe does similar tricks, with even more phallic boldness and bluntness— but his formal narrative is a minor one compared to Abby’s, and creates a sense of impoverishment around his work. Indeed, Mapplethorpe’s impoverishment is New York’s— incomplete or inadequate narratives of form, and a totalized reliance on theme and thematic (conceptual) narratives, without explanation of why form needs to auto-destruct.

P.F.S.: Nine Paintings

In the continuum of visual art, an oeuvre of nine paintings is not particularly significant unless the nine paintings happen to be masterpieces. With American painter Abby Heller-Burnham, this appears to be the case. The limited oeuvre here on display encompasses a dazzling array of formal and thematic material— precise attention to painterly nuance and detail balanced with an idiosyncratic (intermittently “queer”) vision of urban life in early twenty-first century America. A painting like The Skaters embodies this vision— the moody chiaroscuro of the scene, its ambience of desolation, which is a specifically urban (in this case, Philadelphian) ambience; balanced with meticulous formal execution which is nonetheless skewered against conventional painterly representation; create a complex construct which is too formal to be aligned with post-modernism, but also both too dark and too strange to be aligned with middle-of-the-road pictorial art.

To be short; The Skaters, and Heller-Burnham’s other masterpieces, are something new under the sun. All are illuminated by the painter’s keen and quirky sense of multiple meanings, of representations whose import multiplies when observed closely and carefully. The Walls Have Ears presents a maze of possible meanings and levels of interpretation— the most obvious level concerns sexualized love between women; but the picture finds many ways of being queer, as the games it plays with identities and perspectives are blisteringly intense and complex. It’s a complexity which doesn’t disavow absurdist humor and irony. Compared with what is typically seen in New York galleries, it is a narrative feast. Many of these paintings are narrative feasts— The Lost Twins could be taken as an art-related allegory, or a critique of allegories; a humorous indictment of the process of artistic canonization, or a humorous portrayal of the artist’s vulnerability in the face of time and canonization; a self-portrait, or a parody of self-portraits; or all of these things at once. Closure is defiantly rejected.

This is what Heller-Burnham’s paintings have which has frequently been missing from New York art; a sense of absolute formal and thematic richness, and of boundlessness in richness, resultant from the exercise of intense (newly, American) imagination. On the Other Hand is a narrative feast in another direction— the social mores of American “indie” culture meeting the transcendental religiosity of Renaissance painting. The juxtaposition is bizarre, and uncanny— it collapses many centuries together in a novel way, to lampoon hipster culture; but this lampoon is executed with the absolute technical authority and mastery of the Renaissance masters themselves, and so winds up transcending its status as a lampoon. Not since Picasso has a visual artist fulfilled this many imperatives at once— that the painter is female, and queer, is a triumph both for American art and American feminism. Yet, Heller-Burnham’s scope as an artist is too broad to be tied wholesale either to formalism, the American (in its novel Philadelphian form) or queer politics— as with all superior artists, there is a universality to her creations broad enough to align her with the most durable humanism. If the oeuvre of her masterworks is small, it is a smallness which the paintings themselves belie— each painting represents an incision into the aesthetic consciousness of the West in 2025. Like Picasso, Heller-Burnham has her way of enacting phallocentrism— and her uncompromising originality is as brutish in its sharpness. Heller-Burnham not only enacts, but is, an American artistic revolution. And she must be here to stay.

Mary Walker Graham (Boston/Virginia, USA): "On the Banks of the River in Winter"

So many Marys grieving by the river
that I have to cover my ears
to shut out the sobbing and hear,

as if for the first time, 
the long low sound of the water
and the train just beginning

to round the bend and blow
its way through the dark tunnel.
How many times I've sat

in summer: considered the chicory,
drawn the blue bridge flung
from bank to bank, or wondered

the names of the red flowers,
their throats like trumpets.
How many times I've not

given in to the weeping:
I can almost see her— the one
who lifts the Potomac mud

to her face and smears,
as if it were a balm and not
the original problem,

or the one with the bucket of fish:
she should return them but that would mean
letting them slip, silver and whole,

finally cast out. I'd rather
let them wander in the maples,
cold and insistent and crying.

I should swim somehow— wait
for spring; I've been waving
to that other a long time,

the one who wears the red
and not the blue scarf.

© Mary Walker Graham 2008

William Allegrezza (Indiana, USA): "distances"

for lori

across   darkened expanses   where dolphins reign
counters cry the numbers to sleep
across   specious words   lined along arches that
bloom   water itself   is new
across space that expands    with images of tubers
in growth is light falling from eyes forming circles
across two moments of here in place and
stumbling forward   you   subtle   beautiful   alive

© William Allegrezza 2007

originally published in The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel anthology