Form Poems 080922-081003

Form Poems 080909-080921

Torture and Abstraction

"[Camus concluded] that the 'primitive' impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities."
-Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, 8.28.2006

John Brown's Face

Listen, I’ve framed a wall of two by fours
sixteen inches on center, I’ve closed

something in and walled something out.
This, simple perspective—how idea frees
or enslaves. Not the looking but the seeing
makes a window of a wall.

excerpt from John Brown's Face, by Kevin Stein

The referential quality of art

"I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them. The ideas that give rise to a work can be quite diffuse, so I would describe my usual working process as a kind of distillation – trying to make coherence out of things that can seem contradictory. But coherence is not the same as resolution. The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality, where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence."
-Martin Puryear, 2007