I do remember that piece, Stephen. You always have interesting things
to see & then say.
The film on John Newlove, which was shown here recently, seemed to
sow thaqt poet moving toward a kind of silence that spoke even before
his heart attack, which did silence him for a few years before he
died. Unlike many of us, he wrote brilliant poems from the beginning,
then slowed down, with fewer & fewer until a kind of silence....
As to how well we'll handle growing old, ugh, I'm just not sure,
coddled more than any other generation as we've been here in the rich
West.... but we can ry, given such mentors....
Doug
On 7-Feb-08, at 10:25 AM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Thanks, Doug. Ann Hamilton's Tower is fantastic. She is also a great
> reader and her works radiate other than purely material dimensions
> of interpretation. Several years she did a piece in the Venice
> Biennale which made use of lines from a Charles Reznikoff poem. Not
> unexpectedly, hardly anyone in the art world had ever heard of
> Reznikoff, but that lack of art world literacy about poetry does not
> interfere with what she 'imagines' into her work. In fact, a
> number of her close friends are poets (Susan Stewart, Ann
> Lautrebach) who are often, on some level or other, in conversation
> with the making of her installations.
> (Maybe or maybe not you might have read my blog piece, "Becoming An
> Eraser" about my involvement in erasing words in a book during the
> installation of "Indigo Blue" at the San Francisco Museum of Art
> last summer?)
>
> Ah,yes, my almost 92 year old mom still - in one way or other
> continues to let her words cut through veils of her darkness! For
> most of her life she was a very active civic politician - serving in
> various organisations and City Commissions. (She founded the local
> chapter of The League of Women Voters, for example.) A while back,
> my brother took her to the annual meeting of "Save the Plunge", a
> group long dedicated to preserving the local and ancient Natatorium
> - where she and my dad used to swim a mile a day up into their early
> 80's. During the introductions around a circle - most of the people
> still knew her - my brother said a few words on her behalf,
> assuming she would not speak. In the silence that followed, she
> looked up and said to the gathered, "He does not think I have
> anything to say. Well, I do." No words followed. In the silence,
> everyone clapped in applause.
> On some very real level, inside she has not and will not shut up or
> be shut up!
> Ah, aging, what we poets have to look forward to!
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
& luckily people don't love us
for our virtue or
we'd be in a bad way.
Graham Greene
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