Last week I attended a New York City book party in celebration of the release of Stephen Cramer’s second book of poems. It took place in the quirky Telephone Bar & Grill on 2nd Avenue, just south of St. Mark’s. Those familiar film crew trailers were parked along the avenue and East Village dwellers simply went about their evening as the business of leisure & literature proceeded unencumbered. I mention this because in Cramer’s new book there are plenty of odes & homages to those New York moments that make of this city, among many other things, a center for inspiration & creativity.
The Painters at MoMA
We view their work the most,
though it never inspires
the dazzle of the camera flash
like the hyperbolic wheeling,
the furious burn & swirl
of that famously heaving
night sky. Their work is never
complete, & I’m not talking
rumors of unsatisfied masters
entering the galleries
with a crimson-lit brush
stashed beneath a coat
to secretly retouch a delirious
sunset purchased years ago.
No: I’m talking the weekly
after-hour revisions,
the men toting paint rollers
to touch up fingerprint & scuff
on the bare stretches of wall
between a sleeping gypsy
& Gauguin’s Tahiti. I’m talking
the only painters in these galleries
whose one ambition is pure
erasure, whose pinnacle of art
to blend in. Imagine the muscle
of their fluid push & pull,
the effort behind their continuous
mural to anonymity. Let us,
this once, praise Santos & David,
those names no one scrawls,
the brushstrokes no one copies
onto the blank of a sketchpad,
praise, this night, John & Andreas,
their pure heights spattered
with a series of minor frames.
When Cramer opened his reading with this poem I was caught off-guard by the uniqueness of the angle—tell it slant, indeed—and the subversion of the listener’s expectation after that title. This poem was not in honor of the master artists like Van Gogh & Gauguin, who attract millions to the museum each year, but in honor of the men who paint the walls on which those famous artists’ paintings are displayed.
The poem takes its time unfolding the private narrative that takes place in one of the most public of spaces in Manhattan. This song to the unheralded anonymous heroes of “the after-hour revisions” whose “ambition is pure erasure” is sung within the blank spaces between the picture frames of the celebrated artists with household names.
This juxtaposition picks up on the trope introduced in the book’s title, Tongue & Groove, which is “a type of construction consisting of two pieces, one with a convex tongue and another with a concave groove which, when joined, fit securely and durably, creating one continuous whole.”
The structure of the poem, too, echoes this image with its alternating sequence of two- & three-line stanzas. I didn’t catch that as a listener, but as a reader, it’s interesting to note how the momentum & rhythm—this other type of groove–are affected by the dovetailing of even- & odd-numbered stanzas.
(From Tongue & Groove published by the University of Illinois Press, 2007. Used with the permission of the author.)
Comments for this post are closed.