Progressive Wednesday

The big three, part iii.

Well, here we are: another Monday, dear readers. So, as we did the last two weeks, we’re going to offer up a triptych of art for your eyes and ears, brains and, hopefully, hearts.

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I really don’t want to write much about this video of…what I guess I’d call “performance art” at its most witty and whimsical. And I’ll say this: I’m glad there are people out there doing this kind of thing.

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Here’s a lovely and energized poem by Frank O’Hara simply called “Song.”

O’Hara, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from 1960-1966, wrote with an urgency on par with folks like Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman. Unlike the former, his poems tend to make a bit more logical sense. Unlike the latter, his poems tend toward something more intimate. In his poetics manifesto, O’Hara wrote:

I went back to work and wrote a poem for [a] person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so [my poetic philosophy] was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.

As a writer, I applaud and adopt this sensibility whenever possible. And there’s some odd correlation for me between his philosophy and his early death (he was 40) after a sand buggy accident on Fire Island.

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SONG

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Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?

I was thinking of you

having a Coke in the heat it was your face

I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian's

I was thinking of you

and down at the railroad tracks where the station

has mysteriously disappeared

I was thinking of you

as the bus pulled away in the twilight

I was thinking of you

and right now

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So, since it is Monday, why not close things off with a rock-till-you-freaking-drop tune called “Monday.” In case you’re new to the site or suffer from some sort of one-track-mind-ism (and you’re train is still boarding at the station), I dig on Wilco. That alt-country/avant-rock outfit is my Disney World. And here’s video of them kicking the aforementioned rocker from their sophomore effort, Being There. The footage, I should mention, comes to us from I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a documentary by Sam Jones of the band recording then touring on their post-modern masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.