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| Gösta von Hennigs Clown playing Violin 1915 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Justus Lundegård The Dining Room 1919 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Vilhelm Hammershøi Sunshine in the Drawing Room III before 1916 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
The Light of Interiors
The light of interiors
is the admixture
of who knows how many
doors ajar, windows
casually curtained,
unblinded or opened,
oculi set into ceilings,
wells, ports, shafts,
loose fits, leaks,
and other breaches
of surface. But, in
any case, the light,
once in, bounces
toward the interior,
glancing off glassy
enamels and polishes,
softened by the scuffed
and often-handled, muffled
in carpet and toweling,
buffeted down hallways,
baffled equally
by the scatter and order
of love and failure
to an ideal and now
sourceless texture which
when mixed with silence
makes of a simple
table with flowers
an island.
– Kay Ryan (2003)
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| Vilhelm Hammershøi Interior with Lady reading 1900 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Richard Bergh The Council of the Society of Artists 1903 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| John Sten Landscape 1906 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Eugène Jansson Sunrise over Rooftops, Stockholm 1903 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Nils Kreuger March Evening 1900 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Otto Hesselbom Over Forest and Lake 1908 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Carl Fredrik Hill The Last Human Beings before 1911 oil on cardboard Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
Simplicity
Once the simplicity of my songs was their meaninglessness
satisfied with what they found, a shred of greenery
that shrouded our house and a larger shred that shrouded
the khaki creek, dark placid with unease, sparkling
of leaf death and offal, a mirror clearer than fresh days,
deeper than a cloudless night its never breaking and
never speaking surface. What else then were my yips
but acceptable amid sparrow chatter and the invisibles chiming,
crickets and cicadas, and the stir, the snaps, the blunders
of big grasshoppers, poplar-leaf-netherside in hue:
sounds of their legs releasing a stalk, that wags now, wild
grass or wheat, and then their claws catching another,
or the flight of one who fell, click, after which we'd find him
impassive, on a stone let's say or bald patch of baked field,
staring wisely, as if the journey had gone just as long planned.
So it's possible to know too much: for instance, now, that dying
was that place I woke to as life. So my first, simplest
songs, a child's shouts, nothing but life, soaked,
buried and smothered in life, lost in life's thorax,
were wrong. So my tongue was molded by an already old
community of disease and the glories of my eyes were a late
remnant, lute remnant, the feminine lusciousness
and green ray were a greyed-over rind of what had been
before I was formed, a phlegm spit up of the true,
the dead splendor that no one now alive could ever grasp:
our splendor was its corpse
and I had to go forward into the almost birdless treeless
town we had built by cannibalizing the hardened blocks of aftermath,
there to fight to live, even live well, as some did,
and fight to take away their words, steal them, deform,
make them my own, stones made adequate
to crumble and tower the song of gratitude that is still enjoined.
– A.F. Moritz (2003)
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| Nils Dardel Portrait of writer Gustaf Hellström 1913 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Anders Zorn Portrait of painter Bruno Liljefors 1906 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Robert Thegerström Portrait of Vilhelm Stenhammar 1900 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Anna Munthe-Norstedt Wild Briar-Roses 1908 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
– poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)