Poetry
To Micah Ballard in San Francisco
I give away all that I am
frame moments that remain
rolled straight from brown eyes
I know charms turn the crowd to action
another silent chill says
alone is a way-station to form
how underrated we are
as a skull makes the oasis of a smile
cry out obsessive familiars
true love formulates hours of light
behold a blank regality
watching the day unfold
I am more myself today
when the body falls away
we are eaten by the fugue state
anything goes by saying yes
chronic dreams revisit the past
proper pleasures seed the head
if your love be not free
the depths look like shallows
there's a demand for the genius
of broken overtones
we must march to the beat
the one about self-exception
our ferocious dissidence and blazing
topicality, spectral cathedrals
using us for incense
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Holly Coulis: Eyes and Yous
By Alfred Mac AdamFEB 2022 | ArtSeen
Holly Coulis’s brilliant, punning title perfectly captures the intellectual conceit that drives her equally brilliant show. Her work, picking up on the eyes in the title, has always been a matter of focus. How, in her earlier paintings, to perceive a still life: should the size of objects in a painting be determined by reality or should size have nothing to do with representational verisimilitude?
Jamel Shabazz: Eyes on the Street
By Michael ShorrisMAY 2022 | ArtSeen
Jamel Shabazz likes to say that his photographs capture people “at their best.” His language is deliberate, and his words sit in their own shadow, leaving implicit and unsaid the dark question of the converse. His lively portraits are stalked by their own context, so many artifacts of a period in which, he admits, “people were witnessing a lot of suffering.’ It’s in spite of this, or perhaps because of this, that Shabazz’s images are incandescent with joy.
The Hare with Amber Eyes
By Jason RosenfeldFEB 2022 | ArtSeen
The Jewish Museum’s present show is a spinoff of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, the best-selling book from 2010 by the British ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal, an elegant, erudite, auto-biographical, and equal parts devastating and elevating family memoir. Designed by Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and curated by Stephen Brown and Shira Backer in collaboration with the book’s author, the exhibition documents through 450 objects the rise, fall, and perseverance of the Odessan grain-merchants-turned-bankers Ephrussi family over a century and across three continents, and the odysseys of their prized possessions.
For Your Eyes OnlyFans: Playwright Gage Tarlton on Sex, Confessions, and the Digital Age
By Kyle TurnerOCT 2021 | Theater
Brooklyn-based playwright Gage Tarlton is compelled by the ways in which OnlyFans seems to occupy the eye of the storm, both as theatrical space and tool, for younger people negotiating their lives and identities on the internet.
