Sunday, December 20, 2009

Hans Arp sitting in a chair


"I was alone with a chair on a plain
 Which lost itself in an empty horizon"
                                 (Hans Arp, "The Plain")

Sounds alone

of a weasly disjointed memory. Hans is old,
  sinewy like the hand he prises
  day from, rising just there—
soul of chairs reified in his favor, but yelling

—& worth every bit the night it's dying of, itself—
  "Dark hole!" Char isn't old man's meat
  to make you rise, ice-lashed
enough & hand too stiff on the edge of ghosts

And what churns inside, like steeple o'er steeple, be
  the white inside him, ol' saint
  with mostly work on his breath
A chancy plain evening (& all that) for cold ol' boys 

3 comments:

Ed Baker said...

WELL now..
I moved my books around a-while ago and rediscovered my

Jean Arp Collected French Writings (Poems, Essays, Memories) Calder and Boyers (London) / Riverrun Press (Newe Jersey) 1974

check out his
Sacred Silence

The Table The Chair

Stone Formed by Human Hands

Concrete art

etc etc etc

for my 2wo sense surrealism (as stated on the back cover)

"(..)is now realized as one of the most important influences in expanded creativeness and use of imagination in spite of the dumbing down and philistinism which has invaded the culture of the turn of the new millennium."

then there is (also) Hans Arps
plastic work "we" got a genius here!

John Calder's press has saved for "those who 'dig it'" mucho DADA stuff!

Jean (Hans) (also) had a muse named Sophie... Sophie Taeuber-Arp

no "slouch" in her own right..

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Ed,

a poem and a picture were the sole inspiration: I haven't really examined his artwork in detail but it was tempting to use the contrasting 'white' (of the picture) and the reference to "dark" in Arp's poem, the dark opening up under his chair.

I hope it worked.

Anonymous said...

not sure haw to say this so...
the "poem" that you are after is some-where in side this line of yours just replied:

"the dark opening up under his chair."

not able to jump around among all of my "stuff" here to run-things-by-you

best advice? go fly a kite

so "a poem and a picture"
the sole inspiration?

that is at least tertiary to the "thing"

where "thing" is simultaneously
object and subject

coming and going
this way and that
kite-flying

lots of "stuff" recently in your poems that I want to
snatch and 'play' with...

too public a forum..

and

as you know my mantra #237 -

nothing much ever happens in a crowd never.


Kokie-san