As Vincent Katz’s illuminating forward makes clear, poetry has always been an important element of Jim Dine’s art. Dine himself has related his poetry to the performance dimension of his output, and has commented on them as integral aspects of his artworks. Katz tracks the history of Dine’s complicated ventures into poetry, the earliest stemming from the time of his involvement with the visual arts. Indeed, in Katz’s words, Dine’s “oeuvre as a visual artist can justifiably be described as poetry.” Poetry here, according to Katz, is “taking one thing and making it into something else,” a refining of the modern poet’s “defamiliarization” that aligns the Pop rebus or collage of the painter with a poet’s decontextualization or deformation of language. What we get in Poems to Work On, Cuneiform’s beautifully produced book, then, is essentially a gestural act of refocusing, not so much the integrating of diverse pictorial and written elements that Dine is famous for but on a separating out of the linguistic element that enables us to sense and appreciate its qualities as poems qua poems on the page.

Dine’s poetry, like all of his art, draws on multiple twentieth century traditions. He plays with everything, surrealism, Lettrism, Pop Art, New York School (he’s especially beholden to its poets such as O’Hara, Koch and Ashbery) to name a very obvious few. What these movements and practitioners all have in common, as with Dine and his poems, is that they see history, especially the history of art and tradition as a cornucopia rather than as isolate and/or oppositional lesson plans for civilization and culture. The tone of the poems is generosity, and Dine’s relationship to the past is one of lighthearted opportunism, magpie tolerance for otherness, and a comic shoring of fragments as he flails along. Take these few excerpts from “Travel Dust”:

Two eggs follow me to

the Food Derby

I set my sight on toast

and loads of tea and pumpkin seeds,

mixed with four or five grapes

(in my mouth)

so I have energy

to breathe.

. . . .

Going real slow

by foot down river

fumes belching

out of Moscow.

Heavy guards around

your smokestacks.

. . .

All the greasy

machines get down on their knees

to spray hearts clear plastic.

Dine’s world is a topiary: here, seemingly beyond contradiction and critique, the crazy clutter of American city life and its “Food Derby” is set side-by-side with Moscow’s belching river and the machine and plastic littered mindscape of contemporary life. There’s an air of something off-target in Dine’s riffs and concretions as they run from insouciance to pathos, finally to settle into semi-comic professions of indifference, as in his Wolfman (Wall) where “the big action takes place next door. ALWAYS DID,” that often leads that insouciance into a sense of wonderment, as in “Oceans:”

INNOCENCE

THAT’S WHAT i LIKE!

LOOKing down THIS

VALLEY

LOOK—

UP IN THE SKY,

THERE’S

BLUE ON YOUR LIPS/

As with his Mobius-strip geography that is capable of touching a half-dozen points at once, Dine’s typographic moves ironize the passage above, the lower case letters undercutting its unabashed Gee Whiz boyishness in the same moment as its seeming artlessness grabs it back. In this sense, Dine’s work is both pose and poise; this naïf knows just what he is doing.

Which can be not only sophisticated entertainment, a sort of ramble through hi-jinks and mood swings, but also an anchorage for depth of thought. Katz calls Dine’s “The Untersberg Gift” a “limnal poem.” The poem, as Katz notes, constitutes a return to poetry after many years of not writing. At once manifesto and demonstration, the poem sits by itself, mid-book, showing Dine, after some twenty years of poetic silence, reaching down into himself for what impels his art, where having “spoken/to ‘the emperor’ many times,” he’s found in Untersberg the transformative moment of “the body/waiting to be opened to reveal itself (hopefully).” Is this “’emperor’” a self-imposed censorious governor inhibiting Dine’s free-wheeling emotions or are we watching some reconfiguration of an emperor’s “new clothes” moment of revelation that releases Dine from his self-conscious awareness:

‘Are you courageous?’ asked the Emperor.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am dazzled by beauty.’

Nature gives me the courage to persist,

in my quest for the fabulous treasure inside.

Barbarossa asks me to sing for him.

And Dine does sing again for us, with an often graceful observant humor that strikes me as endlessly quotable. This new mode seems too casual to call a method, but it’s built on juxtaposition and sudden unexpectedness, as in “Nite Letter:”

My, my they’ve taken to watering the red orange juice. Next

they will probably want me to drink umbrella handle wine.

A boyfriend and his girlfriend (two really swell looking kids)

are about to do something stupid in front of a telegram

and some stenciled palm trees.

At once urbane and “raw,” as an anthropologist might have it, Dine’s poems are full of verbal pleasures and comic tonalities, like that “umbrella handle wine” above with all of its top of the palate lollings or the “stenciled palm” that propels the imagination into some gallery of the new where an exhibiton of Dine’s work is being held. In these gestures, Dine replicates the complex feelings that his paintings give to viewers, who marvel at the precision of his draftsmanship as they are carried along through blurring and cascading traditions of art. The eye and ear rarely rest as they move down through the lines of a Dine poem, even as they often amount to self-knowing teasers. The poems are charmers, even as they raise questions of where a word is traveling or how expectations are transformed by syntax and diction. Despite the disjunctions, there’s a seamless controlling ear presiding over Dine’s poems that gives them weight and authenticity. And every now and then, all the lyric power comes over unapologetically, that is, without the interference of art-world and poetry-world zippy-zaps and defensiveness. What happens then is as magical as anything being written today:

Resting comfortably

….my eyes watch the downfall

of your eyes.

the downfall of the Leonardo highway

uncomfortably sitting

with mouth open and face white

phoning the world

to find

new anxieties in free verse

imagine—

one man in the cosmos

the saint of vanishing dreams

blue limbs, gold draperies

the child of the Baptist

rushing the ending

Poems To Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine. Foreword by Vincent Katz. (Victoria, Tx: Cuneiform Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0986004032, 300 pp. $50

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Click the image above to view Dda

Publication of Dda marks the occasion of Michael Heller’s acceptance of the role of Poetry Editor at artcritical. Mike — who succeeds Bill Berkson in this position — is no stranger to these pages: In 2011 we posted Within the Open Landscapes: Words for the Etchings of Jane Joseph, a segment of his 2010 collection, Beckmann Variations & Other Poems with images by Joseph.

Dda is a poetic sequence including eight graphic works by the artist couple alpert+kahn (Renée Alpert and Douglas Kahn) taken from their Dda series, the visual product of alpert+kahn’s intense study of Pablo Picasso’s seminal painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. The text (something of a dialogue/montage juxtaposing passages on the Picasso with those on the Dda series and other sources) and the integrated images take up themes of creativity, tradition and artistic transmission.

Renee Alpert and Douglas Kahn began their collaborative work as alpert+kahn in 1987 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Renee Alpert was encouraged and supported by Jacob Lawrence and Michael Spafford to pursue a career in art after receiving her undergraduate degree in philosophy. In 1984, she was awarded an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two Ford Foundation grants. An architecture graduate of Pratt Institute, Douglas Kahn worked for Marcel Breuer and Richard Meier before establishing his own firm. After leaving New York in 1980 he showed as a fine arts photographer as well as working as an architectural photographer, and he has appeared in such publications as Architectural Record, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Arbitare and Domus. alpert+kahn’s collaborative work has been shown and is in the collection at The Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, The Cinema Institute of Moscow, Fine Arts Center @ Cheekwood, Roswell Arts Center and other museums and galleries. In 1991 they were chosen by Van Deren Coke to be one of 20 New Mexican photographers to be shown at Vision Gallery in San Francisco. More recently in 2012 Charting the Sage and Uncharted, two gallery-size installations, were exhibited at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado. More information and examples of their work can be found at alpertandkahn.com.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Miami Beach, Michael Heller was educated as an engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His poems first appeared in the 1960s while he was living in a small village on Spain’s Andalusian coast. Since then, he has published over 20 volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction. Among his most recent works are This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010, Eschaton (2009), the mixed genre work, Beckmann Variations & other poems (2010) and Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (2008, expanded edition, 2012). His collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson include the multimedia works Constellations of Waking (2000), based on the life of the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, This Art Burning (2008) and Out of Pure Sound (2010), all of which premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Among his many awards are grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America and The Fund for Poetry. He is married to the poet and scholar Jane Augustine.

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This presentation of eight poems written by Michael Heller for etchings of Jane Joseph dating from 1986-2002 are taken from his 2010 collection, Beckmann Variations & Other Poems.

Please click image to access the presentation.

Jane Joseph, who was born in Surrey, England,  trained as a painter at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts 1961-65 and gained the Leverhulme Award for travel in Europe for the year 1965-66. In 1970 she set up a studio near Crickhowell in Breconshire where she worked part-time. Since 1980 she has lived and worked in West London, occupied with the urban landscape. It is this subject which propels her work. In 1989 she had the opportunity to work in the Graphic Workshop of Pécs, Hungary. Abbey Awards allowed study and travel in Italy in 1991 and again in 1995.

In 1999 The Folio Society commissioned her to make etchings to accompany “If This is a Man” by Primo Levi followed by “The Truce” in 2001. These prints contribute to a substantial body of work in small black and white etchings and large charcoal drawings. Subsequent publications include “A Little Flora of Common Plants” and “Seeds & Fruits”, both with text by Mel Gooding and “Kinderszenen” with poem by Anthony Rudolf. She has exhibited regularly since 1973. Public solo exhibitions include Worcester City Art Gallery in 2001, The Victoria Art Gallery, Bath in 2002 and The School of Art Gallery, Aberystwyth in 2004. Recent sets of prints have been shown at the Eagle Gallery, London. Collections include The National Art Library (V & A Museum), The British Library, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge  and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut. Jane Joseph taught at Wimbledon School of Art for many years and is currently teaching at Morley College, London.

Michael Heller has published twenty volumes of poetry, essays and memoir. His most recent books are Eschaton (2009), a book of poems, and Beckmann Variations & Other Poems, a work in prose and poetry (2010). His collection of essays on George Oppen, Speaking the Estranged, was published in 2008. Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics,appeared in 2006. Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2003. His memoir, Living Root, was published by the State University of New York Press in the Fall of 2000. Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study, a collection of fiction, was published in 2009. His libretto for the opera, “Constellations of Waking,” based on the life of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, has been set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Harpers, New Letters, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Jewish American Poetry, Pequod, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and many others. His critical study, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry, was published by Southern Illinois University Press. His many awards and honors include prizes from The New School for Social Research, Poetry in Public Places, the New York State CAPS Fellowship in Poetry, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fund for Poetry. He has given many poetry readings in America and Europe at such places as Yale, CUNY, SUNY Purchase and Buffalo, Temple, Rensselaer, NYU and the University of Wyoming, the Sorbonne, Cambridge, Warwick and Durham Universities. For many years, he was on the faculty of New York University and has taught at The Naropa University, The New School, San Francisco State, Notre Dame and other universities. His papers are collected in the Stanford University Libraries at: http:/ / searchworks.stanford.edu/ view/ 8550579.

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