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04 Nov 2009 11:07
November 04, 2009
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Evolution of a Painter
November 5, 2009 - December 19, 2009
George Krevsky Gallery_______________________ Petit TestamentErn Malley In the twenty-fifth year of my age I find myself to be a dromedary That has run short of water between One oasis and the next mirage And having despaired of ever Making my obsessions intelligible I am content at last to be The sole clerk of my metamorphoses. Begin here: In the year 1943 I resigned to the living all collateral images Reserving to myself a man’s Inalienable right to be sad At his own funeral. (Here the peacock blinks the eyes of his multipennate tail.) In the same year I said to my love (who is living) Dear we shall never be that verb Perched on the sole Arabian Tree Not having learnt in our green age to forget The sins that flow between the hands and feet (Here the Tree weeps gum tears Which are also real: I tell you These things are real) So I forced a parting Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness. ...(more)
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..................................................... The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax — Introduction
David Lehman
jacketTHE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943.(....)
The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor MalleyIn a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.(....)
Ern Malley has always had an honored place among the poets of the New York School. Kenneth Koch printed two Malley poems, ‘Boult to Marina’ and ‘Sybilline,’ in the ‘collaborations’ issue of Locus Solus, the avant-garde literary magazine, in 1961. At Columbia University in 1968, Koch introduced his writing students to Malley’s poetry, suggesting that the hoaxer’s antics were well worth imitating not for purposes of polemic but for legitimate poetic ends. In 1976 John Ashbery asked his MFA students at Brooklyn College to compare Malley’s ‘Sweet William’ to one of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns. Which did they think was the genuine article? (The students were divided.) Ashbery’s point — and it seems to be Malley’s point — is that intentions may be irrelevant to results, that genuineness in literature may not depend on authorial sincerity, and that our ideas about good and bad, real and fake, are, or ought to be, in flux....(more)
Christine Wertheim
cabinet_______________________ 
Claude Levi-Strauss
1908 - 2009It's nice, anyway, and hard not to read as an act of will, that the dean of structuralism should have waited until after the so-called post-structuralists were all dead before taking leave himself. I hope his work will enjoy a lot of critical re-examination in the coming years.
- Justin Erik Halldór SmithJust as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; man may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists --Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations!-- in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
- Tristes Tropiques of 1955_______________________ 
Albert Pinkham Ryder
1847 – 1917_______________________
Preface: For HildaThe Ships Move On Hilda Morley (1919 - 1998) Freckles on my thighs, my legs— I never had them before (someone called my skin once the color of apricots) the grey in my hair greyer, grey to white even, my face changing, becoming a bit like my mother’s face & I rarely could see her as handsome (though Eugene Morley saw it) Faces of my women friends who were beautiful when I met them, so beautiful, such promises of bliss I could hardly believe they were real or my face when M. said “How do you feel carrying around a face like that?” Time has hollowed, lined, dulled the brilliance of eyes, the perfect matching of curves, of mouth to forehead, cheek to eyebrow, the proportions shaken in all our faces Those shapes which seemed to exist only to please, to pleasure the soul, to make the observer stare, wrenched now a little, twisted, obscured by sags & puckers, hidden by pressure of years: a parchment where everything leaves a trace I had thought those contours on my friend’s face hard & clear enough for a profile on a ship’s prow Life has written on us The ships move on relentlessly They carry us with them, caged in whatever time has written on us indelibly, that amazing handwriting (now only half-familiar) on the skin of our years
Robert CreeleyLet Us Name the Most Unjustly and Bizarrely Forgotten U.S. Poet of the 20th Century
Kent Johnson
digital emunction_______________________ 
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