Arthur Leipzig, "Stickball," 1950

Bernadette Mayer

Lawrence Schwartzwald took this photograph of Bernadette Mayer at a reading last night at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church.

January at the Writers House

Click here to listen to a summary of January 2011 events at the Writers House - including the several-day "North of Invention" program, a gallery exhibit of photographs by Linh Dinh, our annual "Mind of Winter" event, and the 5th birthday celebration of our Common Press. The photograph here, taken by John Carroll at the 2008 Mind of Winter program, gives you a sense of the fabulous soup we make on that wintry evening - or at least of the pleasure taken from said soup by Michelle Taransky.

last night at KGB Bar

Alan Gilbert, at left, and Rosemarie Waldrop, at right, at KGB Bar last night. The occasion was Rosemarie's reading--with Monica Youn. Photograph by Lawrence Schwartzwald (for more about Lawrence, click the tag below).

Zoe Strauss

Zoe Strauss: 1, 2.

natural abstraction

My former student Ed Fuhr is a photographer. The shot above is one of his natural abstractions (a garden hose in a swimming pool, I believe). I taught Ed at Virginia in the--when was it, Ed? late 1970s or 1980--and we've been in touch, on and off, in recent years. So here's a shout-out to Ed!

the second-floor terrace of well-being

Erica Baum's new project is called Dog Ear. Photographs of consecutive pages of what seem to be old books. Dog-ear one page to create an origami-perfect right angle and the result is a kind of cut-up, only the text of the back side of the first page runs up-to-down rather than right-to-left, so the right-to-left lines of the previous page now revealed run to a corner and then turn 90 degrees. So we get, for instance: "made her feel as if of objects shaped." Can't wait to see the real project. Meantime, see you on the "second-floor terrace of well-being."

Ubu has already added Dog Ear to its terrific Erica Baum page, so I urge all readers of this blog to go there and find the link.

See a few earlier blog posts about Erica Baum's work.

Ashbery last night

Last night John Ashbery hosted the Tenth Muse at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd St. Y, where he introduced Marcella Durand, Robert Elstein and John Gallaher, who read from their works. Photography by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Vendlerian caffeination

Spotted at Dunkin Donuts last evening in New York: Helen Vendler. She was on her way to speak about Whitman at the 92nd Street Y, when my favorite literary photographer, Lawrence Schwartzwald, noticed her caffeinating herself in prep for a bout with the great bard's energy. I'm in Banff, Alberta, at the moment, and it's nice to know that the camera's eye is keeping track of things back east. (Click on either photo for a larger view.)

chronicler of guerilla goodwill

I'm pleased to have reconnected with my former student (from the mid-80s) Rob Rosenheck who is a fine photographer. He is author of The Love Book, described by the Times as "not only witty but downright courageous" and by Entertainment Weekly as "an amazing chronicle of guerilla goodwill." He's the creative director of Capobianco & Associates, based in L.A.

Fitterman redux

The other day I mentioned Rob Fitterman's new conceptual poetics project, and got a lot of positive response to it. My favorite literary photographer (as regular readers of this blog already know), Lawrence Schwartzwald, found this wonderful photo of Rob standing in front of the Ear Inn. We think the date was January of 1992.

sucked a sad poem

After looking at the photographs to be published in The Americans, Jack Kerouac said of Robert Frank that he had "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." At right is one of the 83 photographs published in the book. Kerouac wrote the preface.

Olde City after the storm

beware the doctor with the pencil mustache

One of my favorite archives is the New Deal photo library of the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA). Thousands of photographs are organized in categories: Art, Civil Works Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Conservation, Disaster Relief, Education, Farm Security Administration, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Film, Health Care, Historical Projects, Housing, Issues and Events, Music, etc. Under "health care" there are hundreds of posters, including anti-quack warnings such as the one I've reproduced here. It is dated August 30, 1938. I'm glad to see that the good doctor was one who did not "demand advance payment." And don't you love the evil dark image of the monocled medico shown toward the right side of the poster? We should beware the pencil mustache too, I suppose.

The final tell-tale sign of the quack cancer doctor? That he advertises.

closed for good

Once you've closed down, what more is there? If you're coming back, does that mean you're unclosed, that closed has been cancelled? Unlikely. More like: closing gives way to closed for good. This is no longer about putting on a sale.

Linh Dinh is quickly becoming my favorite political photographer. I'm pretty sure Linh would brush aside auteur-centered praise, since--at any rate this seems to be so--he's doing precisely no more than just looking closely at what's around him. He gets to affirm his positions just by pointing his camera this way and then that, sensitive to both easy and hard ironies especially in the visualities of language along the rotted cityscape. His blogs are State of the Union and Detainees and there I'm always feeling detained, indeed. I'm reminded of Cid Corman's minimalist meta-text: I make my art in order to detain you, here.

schticky Poetry?

Robin Williams reads Poetry magazine. Was he getting any good material from its pages? [Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald.]

mad about folded cut-ups

The new issue of Private Circulation features Erica Baum's Dog Ear. The piece reproduced here is the one called "Mad." Baum's work, as always, is photography and it's also conceptual poetry. Private Circulation is a monthly PDF available only by email subscription.

Dominick Dunne

Friends and family today buried Dominick Dunne, and of course Joan Didion was there. Stephen Sondheim was a pallbearer. Dunne died on August 26. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald/Splashnews.

reading Emily not quite blithely

Readers of this blog will recall that Lawerence Schwartzwald often takes photographs of well-known people in the act of leading their literary lives. Dustin Hoffman reading Ginsberg. Patti Smith reading a book of criticism on Wallace Stevens. Here Blythe Danner, who was the voice of Elizabeth Bishop's poems in the Bishop Voices and Visions documentary, is seen yesterday in the Meat Packing District (just north of the West Village) reading Emily Dickinson and her Culture. By the way, Lawrence is (by avocation mostly, I think) what might be called a "literary photographer." Is this a unique category?

Credit: (c) Lawrence Schwartzwald 2009.

cheap images seen between bars

Readers of this blog will know that I am a fan of Erica Baum's photography. Well, good news: we can see her new work at Dispatch, 127 Henry Street (NYC), until March 22. Below at left is one of the new photographs, and here's a short review from Artforum by Robin O'Neill-Butler:

The red-, blue-, and green-stippled book edges in Erica Baum’s new photographs bring to mind the paperbacks that encumber used-book stores, thrift shops, and family libraries: faded film adaptations, celebrity biographies, and the occasional art monograph. In this exhibition, she walks a fine line between documentation and concealment, presenting pictures of eight such books fanning out and close-up, open but not completely exposed. Fragments of text and cheaply reproduced images––Goldie Hawn in a scene from Shampoo (1975), Art Garfunkel, Richard and Pat Nixon––are evident between the bars. Although these images appear to mine a specific American decade, the 1970s, Baum shirks nostalgia for abstraction. Previously her work (in black-and-white) examined card catalogs, from which she derived a form of clinical and concrete poetry (SEX DIFFERENCES—SHIRTS, reads one). Here, the pulsating hues create geometric patterns, which appear painterly from a distance and recall a colorful version of Gerhard Richter’s “Vorhang” (Curtain) series from the mid-’60s. The fine red vertical lines in Art, 2008, for example, neatly frame the seated, youthful musician and echo the saturated crimson blocks in Nixon and Pat, 2009, which seem to split the image in half. Without entirely displacing the subjects of these photographs, Baum shrewdly extracts image and text from source, pushing language, both visual and verbal, to unstable, higher ground.

See this earlier entry.