Commentaries - June 2014

Calling a Koons a Koons

Little Mermaid Koons {poetics lab simulation]

 Allegorical micturition has swept
the guest halls of the art galleries
and the undermasses
wail in the background to iambic
beat. Sludge is proclaimed sludge,
hairdos hors d’oeuvres, as the soiled
face of inverted cardioerasty—a.k.a.
genital fetish—rears its mushy brow.
––from “Ambliopia” in The Sophist (1987)

 The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art is to big art shows what The Little Mermaid is to big Broadway musicals: bright, breezy, and tuneless. Koons's art is a product of the Disnification of Warhol (and decidedly not the other way around). The show is worthwhile seeing as a monument to the most commercially successful aspects of the New York art market. As with the proverbial  restaurant, with food shot up with MSG, you leave the show aesthetically hungry.

The infinity in language

Plant (1960) by Remedios Varo
Plant (1960) by Remedios Varo

“Poiesis, in the deepest sense, is cosmology.” —Adam Cornford

In addition to poets using science as a source for metaphor, claiming science as a type of poetry, and conducting science as poetry, there are poets who are making science a determining element of their worldview. One such poet, Adam Cornford, whose poetry and critical works intersect with evolutionary biology, physics, cosmology, and more, and who Andrew Joron has called a “cosmo-surrealist,” has said in our recent conversations that his aim is to discursively imagine science as a way to “(re)imagine that which we know, especially that which we know indirectly, that is, by way of instrumentalities and mathematical schemata.”

Marthe Reed: Three poems from 'Nights Reading'

[Scheduled for publication September 1 by Lavender Ink in New Orleans: a major coming forth]

 

GAZING AT PLUMS

 

Though the reasonable man does not have doubts, the condition of woman is
perhaps less certain. A question of where

 

A box of pens, a wooden bowl, desk littered in open books: the uncertain truth of
propositions

 

Light penetrates the shadow of night jade. A hawk rending the black-flecked back
of a bear. Can we rely on our senses?

'Black W/Holes: A History of Brief Time,' part 2 of 2

Cover of FUSE Magazine, 1998, courtesy of fusemagazine.org
Cover of FUSE Magazine, 1998, courtesy of fusemagazine.org

What follows is Part 2 of 2 of M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay, “Black W/Holes: A History Of Brief Time,” which combines definitions from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time with an urgent discussion about race relations in Canada and beyond in the late 1990s. This essay was originally published in Toronto’s FUSE Magazine in 1998. After sending Philip my commentary, “Physics of the Impossible,” which speculatively discusses her book-length poem Zong! (Wesleyan University Press, 2008) in relation to Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, she sent me this essay. Since it only appears in the back issue of FUSE, I am presenting it here with her permission.