To Pimp the Fine Young Cadence

A softening of Eroll Morris?

Julian Schnabel, film-maker.

"I think that the past or tradition is realized in the present, consciously or not, and that is the incredible pressure I feel in the work. Otherwise, it would be just a pastime or entertainment. By trying to establish a history of the lyric, what one is really addressing or voicing is lyric history. All real art makes us reconsider tradition—not as a fixed canonical body that exists behind us or bears us up, but as something we move toward. We find it reading back through those very works that were ahead of their own time—in the poems of Emily Dickinson or William Carlos Williams or Jack Spicer, for instance. If this model of discovery teaches us anything, it's that tradition is, in fact, always just ahead of us. Something we are always approaching. . . . " Read the entire interview with Peter Gizzi.

Lucien Freud: The Way to All Flesh.

CA Conrad Somatic Poetry Exercise No. 4: "Take a red magic marker and draw a 9 on your naked chest. Draw the 9 from the bottom up. Start the tip of its tail at your navel and sweep UP to have the round circle of its head in the middle of your breasts. Put on a shirt that conceals the 9 from other eyes. Go out to the corner and quickly choose a direction. At the next corner choose another direction. Don't think about where you are going, instead spend the time between corners looking carefully at the world. Finally come to a complete stop at the 9th corner. Look across the street and focus on four different objects. Draw a line to connect them, looking carefully at what's inside this square you've just made. What's outside? What's half-in? Imagine you string lights to make the square. Imagine its contents at night, dimly lit. Imagine this square a year from now. Ten years from now. Now go somewhere quickly and write, run, run to a place where you can write. Suddenly the city, your city, is a place where places to write come to mind, you must always know those places at all times."

Review of the new Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop.