“Let us see how specialness / survives past death,” begins a poem on the discovery of an Ice Age lemming. Keizer also provides Delaney with a champion beyond the everyday limitations of this world through an imaginative version of the Caribbean figure Papa Bois “queer-quixotic and multiloving”: “Papa Bois, old woodsman, come see/ how this golden son paints your domain- sycamore’s plainsong, pine’s keen sigh.” There is a line in Arlene Keizer’s richly-researched debut collection about “all the unsung flowers.” Part lyric biography, part celebratory contribution to the limited field of ekphrastic poetry books responding to African American artists, Keizer’s collection unfolds a myth-making presence for Tennessee-born painter Beauford Delaney and his “fractal language.” Moving between persona and observation, these poems track the artist from an awakening to gay desire in the garden of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum– “Is he playing with / my gaze or stalking desire?”– to Greenwich Village, where “you’re painting syncopation, the deep cadence of black life,” to his emigration to France where his “glory may sing” as a Black artist. Repetition, pointed tautologies, and other linguistic plays and ploys prevail, and succeed: Primitivo “went into the casket alive,/ crossed the border, / and came out something like alive.” Meanwhile, “The fence isn’t real, it’s extra real / because we get crossers to also swallow/ all of it, the whole simulator.” As Primitovo asks, “That’s a job? Defining borders?”Īrlene Keizer, Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black Poems for Beauford Delaney ” In interrogations of the border as simulacra, we follow a pair of siblings, Primitivo and Primitiva, in a sobering and imaginative deconstruction of a political concept that costs innumerable lives.
We witness “the crosser,” who “is a possession that someone wants but we’re not sure who. “You’re so close to being over the border, just get over it already,” quips the speaker in Texas poet Gabriel Dozal’s debut, El Simulador de Fronteras, which pairs his poems in English with Spanish translations by Natasha Tiniacos.
#Mind vacation life simulator simulator
Gabriel Dozal, The Border Simulator / El Simulador de Fronteras, trans. Praise who cast, from such delicate / bronze, an absence.” Are we living in a simulation? What does it mean to be part of the history of life on earth, linked to the lives of frozen creatures- wolf, bird, lemmings– of the Ice Age? As I pour over this small stack of August books, I return to David Keplinger’s “Sonnet”: “Praise the singing bowl after the song.
#Mind vacation life simulator free
Labor–the means or impediment to making creative work: we follow Beauford Delaney to France to paint in Arlene Keizer’s Fraternal Light, which has, as an epigraph, an excerpt from his application for funding, “I wish to be able to work one year free from immediate financial worries, in a quiet place, with the possibility of some travel in Europe.” At work, the mind of the poem wanders. In this month’s poetry roundup, we get to slip behind the information desk at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inhabit the vantage of a model pretending to pump gas, and observe a duet of two men fixing a frozen escalator. Who’s at work in American poems? I take note when I find anyone working a contemporary job in a contemporary poem.
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