Category: landscape

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Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

Emily Dickinson

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Wild nights – Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –

To a Heart in port –

Done with the Compass –

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden –

Ah – the Sea!

Might I but moor – tonight –

In thee!

Emily Dickinson

We must try to see one another in this way.
As suffering, limited beings—
Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

[…]

Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.

[…]

We had forgotten so much, of all else we had been and known.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

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… it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green – Whitman

His [Robert Smithson] break from painting would eventually lead him to construct—with the help of bulldozers and pilots and his wife and collaborator, the late Nancy Holt—“Spiral Jetty,” his best-known project, completed in 1970. It’sa fifteen-hundred-foot-long, fifteen-foot-wide spiral of stone that extends out into the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. According to the catalogue for an exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, entitled “Robert Smithson’s New Jersey,” it was Smithson’s visit to his pediatrician that helped steer him toward that new work, and began a new chapter for American landscape art. His pediatrician was William Carlos Williams.

[…]

When Smithson arrived at Williams’s home, the older poet had recently suffered several strokes but had just published the final volume of “Paterson,” his epic set in and around the Great Falls of the Passaic, the raging seventy-seven-foot-high cataract in Paterson. In an essay written by the exhibition’s guest curator, Phyllis Tuchman, we learn that Smithson looked at paintings by Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Ben Shahn in Williams’s home, and that, according to Smithson’s friends, the artist took to heart Williams’s axiom “No ideas, but in things.” In 1972, shortly before Smithson died, he would describe “The Monuments of Passaic” [an essay that ran in Artforum in December of 1967] in terms of “Paterson.” “In a way, this article that I wrote on Passaic could be conceived of as a kind of appendix to William Carlos William’s poem Paterson,” he said.

The Source of Robert Smithson’s Spiral
Robert Sullivan, The New Yorker, June 18, 2014

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Did we begin again?

Or to Begin Again, Ann Lauterbach (audio)

“went forth into that stygian dark” “pausing beneath trees to exchange strange confidences withheld during many years of seclusion.” — Saunders