Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim ...

Agnes Martin was self-sacrificial, destroying her early work because it wasn't 'there' yet (my quotes). A hearer of things unheard, she was maybe one miracle short of being a saint. Yet she was enormously competent. And always succeeded: at teaching and education and most of her art. The few sculptures I found gauche and annoying, however, something for sale in a driveway on a Saturday. Nothing like the deliberation and control of the paintings. Her survival, line after line. Bounded alleys tamped down. Very glad I saw the show but I began to long for Rembrandt, deep and warm, O'Keeffe, surpassing seduction. The Guggenheim show upped my appreciation of Rothko, never far down. Guess I need to be moved.

Ching-In Chen's "Gruel, Tea: a riddle" {a fierce poem}

 

 

Agnes Martin's hand

Very happy to post Ching-In Chen's "Gruel, Tea: a riddle." I met her a few months ago. Was so impressed. Yet I'm messing up her poem. The 2 stanzas should be parallel or do I mean opposite each other.  I tried.  This is part of a larger piece.

Gruel, Tea: a riddle

A room full of fathers birth
maggots which boil
into a sticky bag of
soup. Some sons
learned to suckle
too tightly, their
incandescent greed
dropping into the pot.
Others memorized
the recipe of how to
survive without

Will follow you for 1000
miles without breaking sweat,
desires neither to be fed or
clothed, fears neither guns nor
soldiers, can kiss the bruising
sun or coax a lullaby from the
dying mother.

Wars have been lit in its name.

by Chin-In Chen, from The Heart's Traffic. Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press.

Info on image of Agnes Martin's hand here.

Susan Firer's "On the Island of the Elder Poets" {a witty poem}

by Agnes Martin

On the Island of the Elder Poets

In Memory of Kenneth Koch

"Why live in the provinces
when you could be in the capital?"

"Don't tell people you like Sexton—
it makes you look bad!"

"No atmosphere, please."

"If you don't sleep with me,
I will kill myself."

"Kiss me after my reading."

"Will you do my wash?"

by Susan Firer, author of the collections, My Life With the Czar and Other Poems, The Laugh We Make When We Fall, The Lives Of The Saints And Everything, Underground Communion Rail.

art by Agnes Martin. 1965 drawing. 

Be my diva, sweetheart: 65 and counting

When I was young I wanted to be a gay icon. Maybe it was a plausible fantasy for a yet-to-be-tested bi-sexual. Maybe my heterosexual selfhood believed that offered the likeliest male attention I'd get. Maybe it was something I should have followed through on. The fellow I lived with for five years in my twenties scored (scored, not bought) front-row Bette Midler tickets, knowing I worshipped her. I often felt I should have been born gay and male, a thought that strikes me as silly now that I accept the mutable slinkiness of sexuality and gender.

My parents were not homophobic so I didn't have excessive attitudes about gay men, although my sisters' taunts about being a lesbian terrified me. Judee Sill, later one of the shining lights of music and a lesbian, was one of my sister's friends, someone I knew when I was nine-years-old, so even there, contact had been made. When things got beyond ugly at home (the divorce) (I was about eighteen), I was shipped up to San Francisco, where I had a sort of Margaret Cho experience.

Unlike Cho, whose parents managed a bookstore in S.F.'s Tenderloin, and who lived among the loving (or not), brave (or not) and sometimes self-hating flamboyance of gay San Francisco in the seventies, my dear friends were, um, cultured.

I stayed with Alois, who still owns a house in the Haight. He was German (Catholic), had been a gay boy in Hitler's Germany. I'm still not sure of the details, but he was escaped from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp in Yugoslavia when he was thirteen; he wasn't there because he was gay. Boys were being shot as he escaped. After the war, his uncle told him to get out of Germany, and he ended up in San Francisco where he opened a coffee house of the real food, real conversation sort only possible in the late fifites and early sixties.

It was the Coffee Cantata, named after Bach's cheery musical number. Alois gave me a bed in his apartment (he rented out the first floor of the house), fed me incredible and very European whole foods, and resounding music (my father's classical tropes didn't include the great church music).

Alois had sold the Coffee Cantata by the time I lived there - its new crass owners moved it to Union, made it the coffee house equivalent of a fern bar - but Alois was Alois. Cultured, brilliant with languages, European for crissakes - and gay. One of the household's many running jokes was "he invented it." "Leonard Bernstein? Sarah, he's so gay he invented it." And so on.

If Michale Montlack, editor of the newly released My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, were to ask Alois who his diva was, Alois might consider Elly Ameling, a pure soprano who interpreted leider purely though not exclusively. Or, hey, he might choose Suzy Ormand, the financial dyke wizard. (Who knows.) My intention is to suggest my sense of diva as a gay term, yes, and also as an accessible example of female power and vulnerability.

Who would I choose? Are Emily Dickinson or Helen Keller - two heroes - divable (diva-able?)? Laura Nyro is. Agnes Martin? Emily Carr? Dorothy Day (pictured)? Certainly Judee Sill. Unfortunate though her statements about Palestineans were, Golda Meir is a woman I find stunning. Among the divas in the My Diva anthology are Helen Reddy, Joan of Arc, Julia Child, Princess Leia, Liza, Grace Paley.

It's a nice, okay, poignant feeling, to sit here and think about women I admire, to consider who is a heroine, who is an icon (a word my friend, poet Patricia Spears Jones, wants retired), and who is a straight-ahead "diva." It's heart-expanding to think about women men admire. I want more women admired. I want more.

My Diva: http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4584.htm