So I'm back at the gallery in Lebanon, looking at Henrieke I. Strecker's tiny rendering of "a wave" last night (two weeks prior to bringing my poetry class)--also taking in Michaela D'Angelo's almost overpowering canvases (and the allure & affinity of her titles: "and they continued", "the sheltering", "and they all went to heaven in a little row boat", "everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die" [a counter balance to a kind of broadside I've kept from the 80s by John Giorno], a bundle of flowers ["detritus"] slathered into a glob of concrete pigment of itself resting inside the blue paint on top of the canvas); . . . in the gallery, also, are my friend Rachel's radiant and--in the overlap of slap-on-shape & dayglo peeking--defiant new prints. I'm there and starting to post on Twitter (twitter.com/poetpetermoney) affinities from Strecker's artist's statement--and this morning I realize the //s 'tween it and what Winterson wrote in Art [Objects]. And now I'm planning my evening course, in World Lit., and I crack open Tillie Olsen's Silences and arrive, basically, exactly where Winterson had me, cloth in hand, pen a beat away: p.159-- quoting from Woolf's diary, "slowly ideas began trickling in. . . the Moths, which I think I will write very quickly. . . . the play-poem idea; the idea of some continuous stream, not of solely human thought, but of the ship, the night etc. all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths"; later: "I shape a page or two; and make myself stop"--where there is the "ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall; and "I write nonsense. . . variations. . . possibilities; . . . Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading. . . I press to my centre" and "I begin to see what I had in my mind. . . One wave after another."
Survive, you, survive, text, sur vive, be done--and do these more,
