This presentation of eight poems written by Michael Heller for etchings of Jane Joseph dating from 1986-2002 are taken from his 2010 collection, Beckmann Variations & Other Poems.

Jane Joseph, Plot, 1986. Etching, 14.5 x 20.3 cm. Courtesy of the Artist

Please click image to access the presentation.

Jane Joseph, who was born in Surrey, England,  trained as a painter at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts 1961-65 and gained the Leverhulme Award for travel in Europe for the year 1965-66. In 1970 she set up a studio near Crickhowell in Breconshire where she worked part-time. Since 1980 she has lived and worked in West London, occupied with the urban landscape. It is this subject which propels her work. In 1989 she had the opportunity to work in the Graphic Workshop of Pécs, Hungary. Abbey Awards allowed study and travel in Italy in 1991 and again in 1995.

In 1999 The Folio Society commissioned her to make etchings to accompany “If This is a Man” by Primo Levi followed by “The Truce” in 2001. These prints contribute to a substantial body of work in small black and white etchings and large charcoal drawings. Subsequent publications include “A Little Flora of Common Plants” and “Seeds & Fruits”, both with text by Mel Gooding and “Kinderszenen” with poem by Anthony Rudolf. She has exhibited regularly since 1973. Public solo exhibitions include Worcester City Art Gallery in 2001, The Victoria Art Gallery, Bath in 2002 and The School of Art Gallery, Aberystwyth in 2004. Recent sets of prints have been shown at the Eagle Gallery, London. Collections include The National Art Library (V & A Museum), The British Library, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge  and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut. Jane Joseph taught at Wimbledon School of Art for many years and is currently teaching at Morley College, London.

Michael Heller has published twenty volumes of poetry, essays and memoir. His most recent books are Eschaton (2009), a book of poems, and Beckmann Variations & Other Poems, a work in prose and poetry (2010). His collection of essays on George Oppen, Speaking the Estranged, was published in 2008. Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics,appeared in 2006. Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2003. His memoir, Living Root, was published by the State University of New York Press in the Fall of 2000. Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study, a collection of fiction, was published in 2009. His libretto for the opera, “Constellations of Waking,” based on the life of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, has been set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Harpers, New Letters, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Jewish American Poetry, Pequod, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and many others. His critical study, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry, was published by Southern Illinois University Press. His many awards and honors include prizes from The New School for Social Research, Poetry in Public Places, the New York State CAPS Fellowship in Poetry, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fund for Poetry. He has given many poetry readings in America and Europe at such places as Yale, CUNY, SUNY Purchase and Buffalo, Temple, Rensselaer, NYU and the University of Wyoming, the Sorbonne, Cambridge, Warwick and Durham Universities. For many years, he was on the faculty of New York University and has taught at The Naropa University, The New School, San Francisco State, Notre Dame and other universities. His papers are collected in the Stanford University Libraries at: http:/ / searchworks.stanford.edu/ view/ 8550579.

Click the image of Emma to view the Bernstein/Bee collaboration and read Charles Bernstein’s poem in full

Emma Bee Bernstein, Self Portrait with Change Machine and Pearls, 2006. Courtesy of Janet Kurnatowski Gallery

Charles Bernstein is author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound. There will be a party for his new book Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (University of Chicago: 2011) on Saturday, June 11, 4-6 pm, at A.I.R. Gallery, 111 Front St., #228, Dumbo, Brooklyn. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist who lives in New York City. Her latest solo show, Recalculating: New Paintings, will be at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn from May 25th to June 19, 2011. Her work has been included in numerous group shows and has been reviewed in Art in America, Art News, The Forward, The New York Times, Art Papers, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her 13 artist’s books include collaborations with Susan Howe, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Regis Bonvicino, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee is the co-editor with Mira Schor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism (Duke University Press, 2000) and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. She has had fellowships and grants from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the NEA, and NYSCA. Bee teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism and Writing program. Her website is: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee

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Cry Stall Gaze, poetry by Anne Waldman and artwork by Pat Steir, will be published by The Judith K. and David J. Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The poem and artwork take the form of a scroll, or more properly, two scrolls. The poem is printed on translucent paper through which the image by Pat Steir registers as a palimpsest. The printed image, meanwhile, can also be viewed independently of the poem. Translating this project from this intended printed format (it is not yet published) to the web has presented the challenge of finding an equivalent to the intimacy of image and text in the coupled scrolls. Our solution has been to offer two views, in their entirety, of these scrolls: one in which the image is viewed alone, the other in which the obscured image and superimposed poem are viewed together. To read the poem, the viewer needs to click on the relevant segment of text, within the second scroll, to be taken to a blow-up of that segment in which the words are legible. From there the viewer can return to the scroll, or move on to the next segment of text.

Poet Anne Waldman is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, (Penguin, 1994), Marriage: A Sentence, (Penguin, 2000), Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin, 2004), and the poetic text: Outrider (La Alameda Press, 2006) which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson. Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009) is Waldman’s most recent book. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2011. She is editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. She has worked actively for social change, and has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats, Col. which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads. She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with Ammiel Alcalay. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and then director for a decade. She currently serves on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club and Issue Project Room in New York City. She has been an editor of several small press venues over the years, including Angel Hair Magazine and Books, Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge, Erudite Fangs and Thuggery & Grace.

Pat Steir is an artist internationally renowned for works that lyrically and dramatically exploit chance effects to evoke such natural phenomena as waterfalls, works that she views in the tradition of Zen painting.  Born in Newark, New Jersey and based in New York City, she has lived and worked in Italy, Holland, and California.  She studied at Pratt Institute, where she now holds an honorary doctorate, and at Boston University, and has taught at the California Institute of Arts, Parsons School of Design, Princeton University and Hunter College. Steir has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Los Angeles County Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, as well as museums in Dublin, Lyon, Geneva, Berlin, Rome, and Reykavik. She is represented by Cheim & Read, New York, and has also shown at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Harley Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.  Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London; Steir was a founding board member of Printed Matter bookshop and of Heresies magazine, and has served on the editorial board of Semiotext.  Steir achieved renown in the 1980s for her wall drawing installations, one of which was remade in November 2009 at the New York Studio School.

Granary Books
New York
2008

Francesco Clemente, 2008. Watercolor, From the book featured

POETRY FOR ART – Editorial Advisor: Bill Berkson – presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates to visual art. It can be poetry that responds, like criticism, to work on view at the time of posting. Or, as is the case here, it can represent a collaboration of between artist and poet. Alcuni Telefonini is a livre d’artiste published in an edition of 70 by Granary Books, New York, with words by Vincent Katz and images by Francesco Clemente. The poems were written in Italy, Germany, and France in 2002, while the author was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. The watercolors were made during the summer of 2006 in Italy. artcritical has extracted three poems from Alcuni Telefonini:, “Back,” “Breath,” and “Bricks,” arranged over four double-page spreads out of 28 pages. The book was printed in 2007 at Silicon Gallery Fine Art Prints, Philadelphia.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cabal of Zealots (1988, Hanuman Books), Understanding Objects (2000, Hard Press), and Rapid Departures (2005, Ateliê Editorial), and two volumes of translation from Sextus Propertius, Charm (Sun and Moon Press, 1995) and  The Complete Elegies (Princeton, 2004).  In addition to his work with Clemente, Katz has made other book collaborations with artists, including Rudy Burckhardt, Wayne Gonzales, and Alex Katz.  Vincent Katz writes frequently on contemporary art and has published essays on the work of Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Kiki Smith, Philip Taaffe, and Cy Twombly. He is the editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books.

Francesco Clemente, who was born in Naples, Italy, in 1952, moved to New York City in 1981, though he continues to spend time in Italy and India.  He has often engaged in collaborations, both in India with local craftsmen, and in New York with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, among others. He has published many works in conjunction with poets, including John Wieners, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Rene Ricard.  Clemente’s works on paper were the focus of a full retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990, which traveled within the United States and to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991).  The artist’s comprehensive oeuvre was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Clemente, mounted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999-2000), which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2000). Most recently, a survey of the artist’s work was organized by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (2002-2003).

In the Poetry For Art series, artcritical present three poem from the book arranged on four double page spreads:

(click the thumbnails for full size reproductions of page spreads)

March 6 to 24, 2009
24 Spring Street
New York City, 212 965 9995

POETRY FOR ART presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates, responds, or is dedicated to the work of a contemporary artist on display in New York or elsewhere at the time of posting. Bill Berkson – who is editorial advisor to the series – is a poet and critic who lives in San Francisco and New York. His recent books include Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006; Goods and Services; Bill, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; and Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems just out from Coffee House Press. He was awarded the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Oona Ratcliffe lives and works in Brooklyn. She has participated in various exhibitions across the U.S., including a solo show at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, and recent group shows at the Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York,;the Bolinas Museum, California; Roberts & Tilton, California; and Geoffrey Young Gallery, Massachusetts. Ratcliffe received a Janet Sloane Residency Award from Yaddo in 2005.

Oona Ratcliffe, Heartspring the wreckage (diptych), 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 168 Inches. Courtesy of the artist

Paolo and Francesca

after Dante Alighieri, from Canto 5, second circle Inferno, “La Bufera” –
the whirlwind where souls reside whose reason was overwhelmed by desire.

Smitten, I began: “Poet, I would speak
with that pair who go so lightly there
together on the wind.”
And he said: “You will see
when they come a little closer, ask
by the love that brings them on, they will come.”
So, when the wind swept them near us,
I raised my voice: “O breathless spirits! come,
talk with us, unless another forbids it!”
And as doves whom desire has called,
with wings poised and resolute, borne by their will,
come through the air to their sweet nest,
These left the company where Dido is
and approached us through that wretched air,
such was the power of my soulful cry.

Oona Ratcliffe, Hippies in the dust, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist

“O kind and gracious being
who visits us in this perditious murk,
we who stained the world with blood,
If we could pray to the lord of the universe, we would,
to grant you peace, since you have pitied us
in our sad perversity.
Whatever you please to speak of or to hear
we will hear and speak of with you
while the wind, as here it is, is still.
The place where I was born sits
by the shore where the Po descends,
to be at rest with other lesser streams.
Love, that wakens quickly in the gentlest heart,
seized that one through this beautiful form
which then was torn from me – and manner still offends me.
Love, which excuses no one loved from loving,
fixed this man’s charms on me so firmly
that, as you see, they haven’t left me yet.
Love brought us together to this death:
Cold Hell waits for him who spent our life.”

Oona Ratcliffe, Voracious, 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 inches. Courtesy of the artist

These words carried from them to us.
And when I heard how doomed these spirits were,
I hung my head and kept it so long like that
until finally the Poet asked what I thought,
And when I could answer, I began: “Alas,
how many sweet thoughts, what great desire
brought them to this sorry place!”
Then I turned back to them and said:
“Francesca, your suffering makes me cry,
and I pity you terribly –
But tell me, in the days of those sweet sighs
how did love concede to let you know
your dubious desires?”
And she said: “Nothing is worse
than recalling the happiest of times
in utter misery; your teacher knows this well.
But if you really want to learn
our love’s first root, I will tell
although my misery in telling will be plain.
One day for pleasure we were reading
how Lancelot was struck by love.
We were alone and somewhat careless.
But as we read our eyebeams often met
and our faces lost their color.
One part alone was enough to undo us.
When we read how that lady’s lovely smile
was kissed by such a lover,
he, who is forever inseparable from me,
All trembling kissed me on the mouth.
That book and whoever wrote it was our Galeotto.
That day we read no further.”
As the one spirit spoke,
the other wept, so that, pitying them,
I fainted as if I were dying,
And I fell as a dead body falls.

1982/2009
for Oona Ratcliffe