Upcoming free concert, Monday, 22 June 2026, at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with violinist Giancarlo Latta and pianist Robert Fleitz. (Registration required.)

Masks Mocking Death by James Ensor

J. M. W. Turner’s “A Boat and Red Buoy in a Rough Sea” (c. 1835-40). Out of _Impressions in Watercolour: Turner and his Contemporaries_ (The Holburne Museum, Bath, 2025). Barely a splash of red paint, buoy like an afterthought. I love the title: how it reduces the immediate world to its essence.

Anne Ryan / Untitled (#461), ca. 1952

Anne Ryan / Untitled (#36), ca. 1948

Reading, slowly, the seemingly discrete short chapters of Lisa Robertson’s _Riverwork_ (2026), a couple per day. Here she quotes Proust, whose secretary, Céleste Albaret, typed and stitched together the “proliferating fragments” of his narrative:

Dipping into the Dutch biologist and animal behaviorist Niko Tinbergen’s _Curious Naturalists_ (1958), a book I first read as a teenager. How Tinbergen’s praise for “long periods of relaxed, unspecified, uncommitted interest” and “seemingly aimless wanderings in the fields,”

Duane Michals

Duane Michals / It is No Accident You are Reading This, 1976

Upcoming free concert, Monday, 22 June 2026, at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with violinist Giancarlo Latta and pianist Robert Fleitz. (Registration required.)

The best now sail the bee’s ship, their course laid no more by stars, they themselves are the lights that fade, their company the constellation that drifts apart behind thick clouds. -Thomas Meyer

Susan Howe again. In “Personal Narrative,” out of _Souls of the Labadie Tract_ (2007), reveling in such wild conglomerate gleanings: “I believed in an American aesthetic of uncertainty that could represent beauty in syllables so scarce and rushed 1/2

Thinking of how Susan Howe (b. 10 June 1937) works largely by assembling correspondences—ideas that to some degree “don’t exist.” In _The Midnight_ (2003), after a lengthy list of quasi-misfits—

One of Alexander Graham Bell’s tetrahedral kites in flight, 1904

Tim Atkins, out of a 2021 interview, conducted by Jonathan Skinner and Daniel Kane: “I do see ‘beauty’ as being simply alive in the moment. Beauty means some kind of egoless experience of the present. That’s the ‘beauty’ I am after.”

Work in progress. #mixedmedia

Wondering again idly—possibly an autochthonic hazard of too much reading of the New York School—if James Schuyler noted, in the opening lines of “The Morning of the Poem,” the tiny ambient structural echoes of Frank O’Hara’s “St. Paul and All That”:

Come across whilst leafing through some old notes: Bolaño’s lovely & slightly enigmatic line out of the First Infrarealist Manifesto: “Tenderness is an exercise in speed.”

Reading: Natasha Wimmer’s translation (2026) of Álvaro Enrigue’s lively and wide-ranging novel (2018) of the wars of Apacheria, _Now I Surrender_ (title out of Geronimo’s clipped & defiant words: “Once I moved like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.”)

Paul Casteinau, A Group of Senegalese Soldiers in Saint-Ulrich during WW1, 1917. Autochrome

Immanuel Knayer (1896 - 1962) 'Arbeiter bei der Frühstückspause' oil on canvas 1925

Ben Nicholson / 1946 (Tibetan)

Ben Nicholson / August 64 (stone relief Valle Verzasca)

1825: Finishd planting my Ariculas - went a-Botanizing after Ferns & Orchises & caught a cold in the wet grass which has made me as bad as ever - got the tune of 'Highland Mary' from Wisdom Smith a gipsey & pricked another sweet tune without name as he fiddled it

Lightning converts nitrogen into compounds that enrich the soil and triggers wildfires that clear forests & grasslands to stimulate seed germination, and may have helped produce the organic molecules needed for life on Earth. ~ Lightning is the lord of everything. -Herakleitos (Guy Davenport)

Nandalal Bose / Untitled (Waves)

Walt Whitman (b. 31 May 1819), interviewed in 1888, to “young literateurs“: “Whack away at everything pertaining to literary life—mechanical part as well as the rest. Learn to set type, learn to work at the ‘case,’ learn to be a practical printer, and whatever you do learn condensation.“

Walked rather listlessly through the Marcel Duchamp exhibit at MoMA last week, thinking something like “what America would be like / If Duchamp had a wide circulation” no longer “Troubles my sleep . . .” Something inert and expected about it all.

Isamu Noguchi / Grey Sun, 1967

Out of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s second novel—after _The Baudelaire Fractal_ (2020)—the lusciously epigraph-laden _Riverwork_ (2026):

At the Morgan Library: “Hujar:Contact,” being largely an exhibit of mounted contact sheets—some marked for cropping and/or printing—by photographer Peter Hujar (1934–1987). A wonderful portraitist—capable, too, of looking hard at decay, desuetude, death. Here’s “Dead Fish, Fire Island,” c. 1960-62.

Cy Twombly / Untitled (North African Sketchbook), 1953

Cy Twombly / North African Sketchbook, 1952-1953

Out of the Morgan Library exhibit “Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery’s Collection,” Trevor Winkfield’s 1994 “Study for ‘The Net’”—a splendidly bright, and necessarily doomed attempt to represent the ability of Ashbery’s poetry to—in Winkfield’s words—“capture everything.”

A 1955 Cy Twombly piece (“Wood, cloth, twine, and paint”) making shift in my provisional (and more-than-likely somewhat ignorant) constellatory artist-clumps. Thinking of some configuration that might include, too, Robert Rauschenberg, Antoni Tàpies, and Alberto Burri.

At MoMA briefly yesterday. This smallish untitled oil (c. 1965/1966) found hanging next to one by the somewhat unsung Forrest Bess.

Peter Hujar Canal Street Piers: David Wojnarowicz working on Krazy Kat Comic on Wall, 1983

Isamu Noguchi / Storm, 1959

What my bird brain took to examining closely at the near immobilizingly crowded Raphael exhibit at the Met. How I love the topsy-turvy abandon of sketch sheets and notebooks of random studies. Giovanni da Udine (Giovanni dei Ricamatori), “Studies of Parrots and Other Birds.” c. 1515-18

Thinking how “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows” vied with “The pump don’t work / ’Cause the vandals took the handles” in providing a name for the Weather Underground. The Weathermen versus The Vandals. (Bob Dylan, b. 24 May 1941)

He knows that every man who has some music in his soul can write poetry ten or twelve times in the natural course of his life, if the stars are propitious, but he does not propose to abuse that modest privilege. -Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald” (tr. Eliot Weinberger)

“Daily life is wonderfully full of things to see. Not only people’s movements, but the objects around them, the shape of the rooms they live in, the ornaments architects make around windows and doors, the peculiar ways buildings end in the air, the water tanks . . .” —Edwin Denby

Reviewing a twelve-volume epic poem about Francis Drake by Alfred Noyes, Edward Thomas pronounces it ‘utterly irresponsible foam upon the surface of the present moment.’

Out of Foolscap Poetry’s newest chapbook, Nathaniel Mackey’s Pill Hill—continuing the “long song” intertwining of both “mu” and Song of the Andoumboulou serial works. Of “the birds who were never / not there,” Mackey writes:

Thumbing around in Tim Atkins’s 2021 Crater Press book—the breezily titled “Nothing Conclusive Has Yet Taken Place in the World The Ultimate Word of the World and About the World Has Not Yet Been Spoken The World Is Open and Free Everything Is Still in the Future and Will Always Be”—newly received,

1777: Swallows begin to collect dirt from the road, & to carry it into chimneys for the business of nidification.

Pound, in “Dr Williams’ Position” (originally in a 1928 issue of “The Dial”), wherein, with a fine half-dismissive turn of phrase, he says of WCW’s _A Voyage to Pagany_: “it indubitably contains pages and passages that are worth any one’s while, and that provide mental cud for any ruminant tooth”:

If Emily were a geisha, BOTD in 1830. From the Women Poets Postcards series, lino and stencils on repurposed cardboard, 4x5