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| John Riddy Rome (Federico Fellini) 1999 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| Dan Holdsworth A Machine for Living: Untitled 1999 photograph on paper, mounted on aluminum Tate Gallery |
Prophecy
At the end of the year the stars go out
the air stops breathing and the Sibyl sings
first she sings of the darkness she can see
she sings on until she comes to the age
without time and the dark she cannot see
no one hears then as she goes on singing
of all the white days that were brought to us one
by one that turned to colors around us
a light coming from far out in the eye
where it begins before she can see it
burns through the words that no one has believed
– W.S. Merwin (1999)
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| Andreas Gursky The Rhine II 1999 chromogenic print Tate Gallery |
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| Hannah Starkey Untitled – March 1999 1999 chromogenic print, mounted on aluminum Tate Gallery |
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| Hannah Starkey Butterfly Catchers 1999 chromogenic print, mounted on aluminum Tate Gallery |
For the New Ark
Cockroaches, of course, the professionals,
As well as most varieties of lice,
And indeed insects of every description,
The crawlers, slitherers, drillers, hoppers, and fliers,
The gulpers, siphoners, champers, lappers, and munchers;
A quantity of rodents, and particularly rats,
Their red-rimmed, malevolent eyes glowing
From behind nibbled sacks of grain;
Deer, against odds, and many domesticated ungulates,
Their capacity to provide for others and absorb abuse
Come at this crux to their aid;
No frogs, no turtles, no elephants, and very few fish;
Dizzying numbers of microbes, the mutable;
Pigeons, scavengers par excellence,
And such birds as dispose of much carrion,
But no songbirds, and nothing of startling plumage;
No rhinoceroses, clearly, or pandas, and nothing like a whale;
Surprisingly few lizards;
No krill;
No marsupials except the opossum.
Yet raccoons, boars, and several bears;
Jellyfish;
Dogs, cats, worms, the more circumspect of arachnids . . .
These the companions fit and unfit for Man,
Who sets out today upon the ocean of hereafter,
Equipped with the vague notion of arrival
And his idea of deity, ark of quaint construction,
To bob upon the deep until
The inundation of hours shall drain away
As his heart's thought shall recede, leaving
The fugue of light, leaping and releaping off of water,
Leaving that general dank giving of the past,
Its bloated scatterings, its layered silt,
And also the cartilaginous invertebrates,
And those parasites salvaged within the vessel of their host.
– George Bradley (1999)
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| Erwin Wurm One Minute Sculptures 1997 C-print Tate Gallery |
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| Boris Mikhailov At Dusk 1993 gelatin silver print, tinted Tate Gallery |
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| Boris Mikhailov At Dusk 1993 gelatin silver print, tinted Tate Gallery |
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| Boris Mikhailov At Dusk 1993 gelatin silver print, tinted Tate Gallery |
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| Boris Mikhailov At Dusk 1993 gelatin silver print, tinted Tate Gallery |
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| Boris Mikhailov At Dusk 1993 gelatin silver print, tinted Tate Gallery |
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| Boris Mikhailov At Dusk 1993 gelatin silver print, tinted Tate Gallery |
Forgetting
It's the third act of Three Sisters; Masha's weeping
at the window; she's forgotten the Italian word
for "bird," they'll never leave that village, snow has turned
to rain and with each freeze and thaw she'll lose a few
more foreign words that once she'd hoped to use in Moscow,
flirting. I've forgotten all Ohio's counties,
and the last verse of "A Mighty Fortress," after
"let goods and kindred go"; I've lost the clever links
between Dickinson and Mick Jagger that I've used
to woo my classes. Is there, under my lame tongue,
a word that means the milk-sweet smell of my child's hair
from those first days when we thought we'd remember
everything? A word that brings the plunge of blood from head
to groin during that first kiss? Is it enough to know
that they existed, holding the empty word
like a vial whose perfume has dried up?
Anyway, it was Irina, not her sister,
weeping; it was the words for "ceiling" and for "window"
she'd forgotten, though in time she'd lose them all.
I'm trying to recall the story of the Baal
Shem Tov who forgot his life's accumulation –
tales, laws, history – all but the letter K.
Tending that small seed, he found the world again.
I sing myself to sleep with ABC and cling
to the useful letters that spell milk and kiss,
knowing they'll feed me when there is nothing else.
– Deborah Burnham (1993)
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| Thomas Struth Galleria dell'Accademia I, Venice, 1992 1992 photograph on paper, mounted on aluminum Tate Gallery |
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| Nan Goldin Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo! undressing, NYC 1991 cibachrome print Tate Gallery |
The Misconstrued
They're almost gone,
Whose most rebellious, high-flown
Thoughts obeyed punctuation
Beaten into them by the previous generation.
They got through
The Depression and the War (now World War II)
With direct object and subjective complement
Still chalked on their inner firmament,
Only to watch the peace
Uncross all t's
With the billboard-length infraction, the blurb
That decoupled subject and verb,
The boom in non-
Parallel construction, the one
Sentence paragraph, the layout framed in prose
That became, in Thurber's word, commatose,
Until police action and protective
Incursion were one with the split infinitive,
And gone was syntax you could syncopate
Because it kept a beat,
And longer gone that parsable country
Where wit and the leading narcotic were extra dry.
Coming to focus before
The whole world was, like, turned into metaphor.
They fade, dismissed, embittered, but
With grammar in the gut.
– Bruce Berger (1991)
Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)