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In 2012, Leila Philip and Garth Evans set out to challenge themselves as artists. Philip, an award-winning prose writer, wrote poems. Evans, an internationally renowned sculptor, made watercolors. Water Rising tells the story of this remarkable collaboration. Philip’s realist poems—about nature, beauty, love, and loss, set amongst Evans’ abstract, deeply hued, layered watercolors, create a book which is more than just a gorgeous read and a visual feast. What emerges in this book is a stunning and original collaboration, which, as Worcester Art Museum Director, Matthias Waschek, points out in his introduction, extends how we think about the relationship between painting and poetry.

As part of our Poetry for Art series, artcritical is honored to present three poems and watercolors from this collaboration. Water Rising is published by New Rivers Press, November 2015. For our sampling of this publication we have chosen the title poem, “Here” and “In the Drawing” with watercolors that appear in proximity to those poems on the printed page.

As Carter Ratcliff, the distinguished poet and art critic, writes of this collaboration:

Leila Philip’s poems are intricately accurate about the look and sound of natural things, the grand sweep of the seasons, and the elusively textured emotions that unite two people in a single enterprise. She is a particularly subtle kind of realist. Garth Evans, a non-figurative sculptor, is seen here as a watercolorist transposing the grand forms of his three-dimensional work to the flatness of paper. Her representations and his abstractions do not, at first glance, seem to have much to do with one another. With attentive reading and looking, however, we begin to perceive in his imagery intimations of specific things–qualities of light, shifting structures of space–and, in hers, openings onto vast, unnamable matters of hope and the flow of time. Each is as much an abstractionist or a realist as the other, and Water Rising joins their work in a magnificent unity.

Leila Philip, a regular contributor to artcritical, is the author of three previous books, including The Road Through Miyama (Random House 1989, Vintage 1991), for which she received the 1990/PEN Martha Albrand Special Citation for nonfiction, and the award-winning memoir A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (Viking 2001, Vintage 2002, SUNY 2009). Philip has received numerous awards for her writing, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Garth Evans is a British sculptor with an international reputation whose practice is central to the narrative of British sculpture. His work is included in major public collections, including: The Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Brooklyn Museum, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Tate Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, among many others. He is the head of sculpture at the New York Studio School.

Water Rising by Leila Philip and Garth Evans. New Rivers Press, $50.00 / Hardcover/60 pages. ISBN: 978-0-89823-336-0

To learn more about this collaboration and its environmental mission, please visit to www.water-rising.com

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Ron Padgett has collaborated wih Jim Dine, George Schneeman, Joe Brainard, Bertrand Dorny and Trevor Winkfield. With Dorny he has made 40 books. His How Long (Coffee House Press) was a 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry, and his Collected Poems (Coffee House Press) received the 2014 L.A. Times Best Book of Poetry prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America. 2015 will see the publication of Padgett’s new collection, Alone and Not Alone (Coffee House Press), and his translation of Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (New York Review Books).

Bertrand Dorny was born in Paris in 1931. His curiosity as a painter led him to printmaking, which laid the groundwork for his future work. He was particularly attracted to humble materials: driftwood, cardboard, discarded pieces of paper, etc., with which he created collages, folded paper works, and large wooden assemblages. Dorny has created a great many handmade books with contemporary writers and poets, copies of which can be found in special collections in Europe and the U.S., such as the Bibliothèque national de France and the Beinecke Library at Yale. His recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Bibliotheca Wittockiana in Brussels.

Working with Bertrand Dorny
by Ron Padgett

My collaborations with Bertrand Dorny began in 1988 when we were brought together by Gervais Jassaud, the director of an artist’s book series called Collectif Génération. I had never heard of Dorny, and I was hesitant to work with an artist I didn’t know. The process turned out not to be very collaborative: I supplied a poem (“Aristotle’s Coffee Shop”) and Bertrand created some color bands around the words. He liked the poem and I liked the color bands. Not long afterward, when he visisted New York, we arranged to meet for lunch at the acual Aristotle’s Coffee Shop, then on Park Avenue South. We hit it off immediately, and Bertrand proposed that we do more books together.

Since then we have done around 40 of them, all hand-made by Bertrand in limited editions (two to nine copies) in his atelier in Paris. In most cases he does the art part first—collage, string, glitter, spray paint, cutouts—leaving spaces for my writing. He mails one copy to me in New York or Vermont, where I ponder and ponder. Bertrand’s work is so attractive that I often hesitate to sully it with words. In our earlier works I would mail him a text, written on a temporary overlay to use as a guide for hand-setting the type, using a rubber stamp kit he calls his “petite imprimerie.” In more recent years he has asked me to add the words myself, by hand.

When I’m in Paris, the process is different. He and I go upstairs from his apartment to his atelier in the building’s attic. The whole place is redolent with history: Bertrand was born (in 1931) in the apartment he lives in, the poet Théodore de Banville (1823?1891) died in the building, the French Revolution was hatched around the corner at the Café Procope, and from one window in the atelier you can see the Eiffel Tower and from another the spires of Notre Dame. The atelier itself is compact but efficient. In it Bertrand stores his many prints—until not long ago it housed his engraving press as well—and the hand-made books he has made with a number of writers, among them some of the greatest living French poets, such as Michel Butor, Michel Deguy, and Bernard Noël, as well as a few anglophones such as Kenneth Koch and me. The focus of the atelier is Bertrand’s work table, across which are strewn cutout bits of colorful paper, strips of stick-ons, advertizing postcards, pens, pencils, erasers, a box cutter, string, thread, scissors, a hole cutter, a metal ruler, and, somewhere among them, a telephone. It is at this table that he cuts down a sheet of heavy paper (such as Arches or Rives BFK) and folds it into the accordion that forms the basis of the book we are about to make. He hands it to me and asks, “Ça va?” Then he cuts some additional ones and we’re off. He adds art to his copy, I add words to mine. Then we switch copies and keep working. Sometimes one of us will pause and ask, “Is it OK if I do this?” It almost always is. This back-and-forth continues until we feel we’ve finished. The process is highly spontaneous, for even if I begin with an idea I’ve come up with previously, it always swerves into something else, affected either by Bertrand’s art or by the open energy of working with him. Sometimes when he has glued down a particularly fortuitous piece of paper or added a fetching loop of string, I hear him say quietly to himself, “Ah, que c’est joli!” And when I pause to take a look at the atelier itself, with the light coming in from both sides, I think to myself, “Ah, que c’est joli!” There is no denying the charm of working with my friend, a real French artist in his garret atelier in the middle of Paris.

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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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Click the image of Emma to view the Bernstein/Bee collaboration and read Charles Bernstein’s poem in full

Charles Bernstein is author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound. There will be a party for his new book Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (University of Chicago: 2011) on Saturday, June 11, 4-6 pm, at A.I.R. Gallery, 111 Front St., #228, Dumbo, Brooklyn. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist who lives in New York City. Her latest solo show, Recalculating: New Paintings, will be at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn from May 25th to June 19, 2011. Her work has been included in numerous group shows and has been reviewed in Art in America, Art News, The Forward, The New York Times, Art Papers, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her 13 artist’s books include collaborations with Susan Howe, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Regis Bonvicino, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee is the co-editor with Mira Schor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism (Duke University Press, 2000) and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. She has had fellowships and grants from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the NEA, and NYSCA. Bee teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism and Writing program. Her website is: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee

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Cry Stall Gaze, poetry by Anne Waldman and artwork by Pat Steir, will be published by The Judith K. and David J. Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The poem and artwork take the form of a scroll, or more properly, two scrolls. The poem is printed on translucent paper through which the image by Pat Steir registers as a palimpsest. The printed image, meanwhile, can also be viewed independently of the poem. Translating this project from this intended printed format (it is not yet published) to the web has presented the challenge of finding an equivalent to the intimacy of image and text in the coupled scrolls. Our solution has been to offer two views, in their entirety, of these scrolls: one in which the image is viewed alone, the other in which the obscured image and superimposed poem are viewed together. To read the poem, the viewer needs to click on the relevant segment of text, within the second scroll, to be taken to a blow-up of that segment in which the words are legible. From there the viewer can return to the scroll, or move on to the next segment of text.

Poet Anne Waldman is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, (Penguin, 1994), Marriage: A Sentence, (Penguin, 2000), Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin, 2004), and the poetic text: Outrider (La Alameda Press, 2006) which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson. Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009) is Waldman’s most recent book. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2011. She is editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. She has worked actively for social change, and has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats, Col. which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads. She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with Ammiel Alcalay. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and then director for a decade. She currently serves on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club and Issue Project Room in New York City. She has been an editor of several small press venues over the years, including Angel Hair Magazine and Books, Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge, Erudite Fangs and Thuggery & Grace.

Pat Steir is an artist internationally renowned for works that lyrically and dramatically exploit chance effects to evoke such natural phenomena as waterfalls, works that she views in the tradition of Zen painting.  Born in Newark, New Jersey and based in New York City, she has lived and worked in Italy, Holland, and California.  She studied at Pratt Institute, where she now holds an honorary doctorate, and at Boston University, and has taught at the California Institute of Arts, Parsons School of Design, Princeton University and Hunter College. Steir has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Los Angeles County Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, as well as museums in Dublin, Lyon, Geneva, Berlin, Rome, and Reykavik. She is represented by Cheim & Read, New York, and has also shown at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Harley Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.  Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London; Steir was a founding board member of Printed Matter bookshop and of Heresies magazine, and has served on the editorial board of Semiotext.  Steir achieved renown in the 1980s for her wall drawing installations, one of which was remade in November 2009 at the New York Studio School.

The post Cry Stall Gaze: A Collaboration with Pat Steir appeared first on artcritical.

Granary Books
New York
2008

POETRY FOR ART – Editorial Advisor: Bill Berkson – presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates to visual art. It can be poetry that responds, like criticism, to work on view at the time of posting. Or, as is the case here, it can represent a collaboration of between artist and poet. Alcuni Telefonini is a livre d’artiste published in an edition of 70 by Granary Books, New York, with words by Vincent Katz and images by Francesco Clemente. The poems were written in Italy, Germany, and France in 2002, while the author was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. The watercolors were made during the summer of 2006 in Italy. artcritical has extracted three poems from Alcuni Telefonini:, “Back,” “Breath,” and “Bricks,” arranged over four double-page spreads out of 28 pages. The book was printed in 2007 at Silicon Gallery Fine Art Prints, Philadelphia.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cabal of Zealots (1988, Hanuman Books), Understanding Objects (2000, Hard Press), and Rapid Departures (2005, Ateliê Editorial), and two volumes of translation from Sextus Propertius, Charm (Sun and Moon Press, 1995) and  The Complete Elegies (Princeton, 2004).  In addition to his work with Clemente, Katz has made other book collaborations with artists, including Rudy Burckhardt, Wayne Gonzales, and Alex Katz.  Vincent Katz writes frequently on contemporary art and has published essays on the work of Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Kiki Smith, Philip Taaffe, and Cy Twombly. He is the editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books.

Francesco Clemente, who was born in Naples, Italy, in 1952, moved to New York City in 1981, though he continues to spend time in Italy and India.  He has often engaged in collaborations, both in India with local craftsmen, and in New York with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, among others. He has published many works in conjunction with poets, including John Wieners, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Rene Ricard.  Clemente’s works on paper were the focus of a full retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990, which traveled within the United States and to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991).  The artist’s comprehensive oeuvre was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Clemente, mounted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999-2000), which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2000). Most recently, a survey of the artist’s work was organized by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (2002-2003).

In the Poetry For Art series, artcritical present three poem from the book arranged on four double page spreads:

(click the thumbnails for full size reproductions of page spreads)

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March 6 to 24, 2009
24 Spring Street
New York City, 212 965 9995

POETRY FOR ART presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates, responds, or is dedicated to the work of a contemporary artist on display in New York or elsewhere at the time of posting. Bill Berkson – who is editorial advisor to the series – is a poet and critic who lives in San Francisco and New York. His recent books include Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006; Goods and Services; Bill, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; and Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems just out from Coffee House Press. He was awarded the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Oona Ratcliffe lives and works in Brooklyn. She has participated in various exhibitions across the U.S., including a solo show at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, and recent group shows at the Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York,;the Bolinas Museum, California; Roberts & Tilton, California; and Geoffrey Young Gallery, Massachusetts. Ratcliffe received a Janet Sloane Residency Award from Yaddo in 2005.

Paolo and Francesca

after Dante Alighieri, from Canto 5, second circle Inferno, “La Bufera” –
the whirlwind where souls reside whose reason was overwhelmed by desire.

Smitten, I began: “Poet, I would speak
with that pair who go so lightly there
together on the wind.”
And he said: “You will see
when they come a little closer, ask
by the love that brings them on, they will come.”
So, when the wind swept them near us,
I raised my voice: “O breathless spirits! come,
talk with us, unless another forbids it!”
And as doves whom desire has called,
with wings poised and resolute, borne by their will,
come through the air to their sweet nest,
These left the company where Dido is
and approached us through that wretched air,
such was the power of my soulful cry.

“O kind and gracious being
who visits us in this perditious murk,
we who stained the world with blood,
If we could pray to the lord of the universe, we would,
to grant you peace, since you have pitied us
in our sad perversity.
Whatever you please to speak of or to hear
we will hear and speak of with you
while the wind, as here it is, is still.
The place where I was born sits
by the shore where the Po descends,
to be at rest with other lesser streams.
Love, that wakens quickly in the gentlest heart,
seized that one through this beautiful form
which then was torn from me – and manner still offends me.
Love, which excuses no one loved from loving,
fixed this man’s charms on me so firmly
that, as you see, they haven’t left me yet.
Love brought us together to this death:
Cold Hell waits for him who spent our life.”

These words carried from them to us.
And when I heard how doomed these spirits were,
I hung my head and kept it so long like that
until finally the Poet asked what I thought,
And when I could answer, I began: “Alas,
how many sweet thoughts, what great desire
brought them to this sorry place!”
Then I turned back to them and said:
“Francesca, your suffering makes me cry,
and I pity you terribly –
But tell me, in the days of those sweet sighs
how did love concede to let you know
your dubious desires?”
And she said: “Nothing is worse
than recalling the happiest of times
in utter misery; your teacher knows this well.
But if you really want to learn
our love’s first root, I will tell
although my misery in telling will be plain.
One day for pleasure we were reading
how Lancelot was struck by love.
We were alone and somewhat careless.
But as we read our eyebeams often met
and our faces lost their color.
One part alone was enough to undo us.
When we read how that lady’s lovely smile
was kissed by such a lover,
he, who is forever inseparable from me,
All trembling kissed me on the mouth.
That book and whoever wrote it was our Galeotto.
That day we read no further.”
As the one spirit spoke,
the other wept, so that, pitying them,
I fainted as if I were dying,
And I fell as a dead body falls.

1982/2009
for Oona Ratcliffe

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