Stefania Heim, Hannah Baker Saltmarsh, and Piotr Gwiazda at Kelly Writers House, April 2013.
In Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, James McCourt describes James Merrill as a poet who inhabited a universe of his own creation, situated outside the public realm and its urgent social agendas. Unlike James Schuyler, the other “Jim” in McCourt’s Queer Street chapter, Merrill was a poet of remarkable verbal fluency and visionary panache, for whom the attitude of otherworldly detachment served perhaps as the most effective shield against the pervasive homophobia of the postwar United States.
For Jessica Lowenthal and Chris Mustazza and in memory of Bob Lucid
Author’s note: This paper was delivered informally, mainly for the purposes of provoking a discussion. As such, this should read more or less as it was presented orally.
In an apartment studio performance from 1986, Russian conceptualist writer and artist Dmitri Prigov greets the prominent Moscow artists and writers in attendance: “Here we have gathered again. There’s Tarasov, and here I stand. Kabakov is somewhere there, and there’s Chuikov. […] And there are other people sitting and standing — they are my heroes! Heroes of Pushkin! Of Lermontov, of Tchaikovsky!”[1]
Brian Reed and Craig Dworkin at Kelly Writers House, April 2013.
Author’s note: The following was written as the preface to the Danish edition of Notes on Conceptualisms by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, which was published as Notater om konceptualismer by Editions After Hand (Århus, 2012). The chronology sketched out in the preface served as the basis for my talk at the Poetry Communities conference. — Craig Dworkin
