A note of thanks, frontchannel, to those who wrote me backchannel with
their comments on the new Tate. A consensus emerges that both the
building and the curating are brilliant.
It strikes me that both in the US and UK lines of friendly
communication between graphic arts and poetry are tenuous. Friendships
between poets and artists seem less prominent a feature than was the
case years ago. A generation or two earlier the opening of something
like Tate Bankside (that is, if something like Bankside could have
happened earlier in the UK) might have occasioned bursts of
commentary from poets, even some verse. Today's poets seem
almost inarticulate about nonliterary arts of their own time, less
engaged by contemporary painting, sculpture, the graphic arts.
I'm fairly certain counterevidence can be cited, though, as many of us
have friends who experiment with video, play in bands, even paint and
sculpt. Some poets in New York take on these arts themselves,
perfoming in rock and experimental music, dabbling in multimedia, etc.
So in this instance crossfertilization between nonliterary arts and
poetry is more dynamic, perhaps. Yet what appear to be missing are the
intensities of a nonexclusive social nexus evolving out of shared
interests in the 'other,' the insouciant buzz and friendships between
the craftspeople of the eye and the word. Are graduates of literature
and writing programs, on one hand, and from art schools, on the other,
so professionalized as to be mutually independent?
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