Hyperallergic Reviews Books by Lawrence Giffin and Lesle Lewis

At Hyperallergic, Mark Scroggins recommends Lawrence Giffin's Untitled, 2004 and Lesle Lewis's Rainy Days on the Farm to readers looking for poetry inspired by visual art of the painterly kind. On Giffin's Untitled, 2004, Scroggins writes, "[t]he poem, addressed to the poet’s infant daughter (also named Agnes), is about [Agnes] Martin’s painting, but it’s also about art in general and art’s relationship to life." Picking up from there: 

Giffin recalls his encounters with various artworks — camping with a philistine boomer couple near Walter de Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” a memorable drug-fueled experience of Maya Lin’s “Wavefield” at Storm King Art Center and Mark di Suervo’s “oversized / steel-beam sculptures, / phallic only if ‘phallic’ means / insecure” — and thinks hard about what it means to go to exhibitions:

It’s as if the entire purpose of museums

is to keep alive the supposition that

there really is something here to see,

which betrays an anxiety that

someone somewhere surely must

know what’s going on, not simply so

we should not feel abandoned to

ourselves alone (anything but that)

but so we might receive the seal

of their invincibility

to indulge in cruel ranking.

Giffin prefers to see his art in company, to view it out of the corner of his eye or over the shoulder of someone he loves:

Art is whatever you have to turn

away from, turning instead toward a bird

in space or to study a new love’s

unique forms of continuity in time.

Otherwise it’s just pictures of stuff.

As this genial, heartfelt, and at times deeply wise poem unfolds, we learn a great deal about Agnes Martin’s career; about the geometry of spirals; about the history of western landscape painting; even about Talmudic and Kabbalistic interpretations of the opening letters of Genesis. 

Learn more at Hyperallergic.