Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
MoMA Mia: A video conversation with Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri asked me to meet him at New York's Museum of Modern Art on September 22, 2022, to talk about the museum's way of framing modern art, bouncing off a conversation we had at the museum a few years earlier. A starting point for the conversation is my essay "Disfiguring Abstraction" in Pitch of Poetry. Chaudhuri deepens and enriches my attempts to get outside the "Western Box" (as Olson called it ) when looking at some of my favorite works of art. This is the first in what will be a series of video conversations for Chauhuri's web site Literary Activism, where this video was first posted. Note: ambient sound from IPhone (vertical image).