I wanted to mention earlier and I forgot to
that I'm so delighted that my friend Brenda Hillman will
be following me on this podium.
Brenda and I were both in Miss Jean Christensen's
creative writing class at Rincon,
and so you get to evaluate the fruits of Miss Christensen's
labors here.
Wonderful.
Well, when I am not out there in Amagansett,
I live in New York City, and New York
is a kind of continual pressure.
Something impinges on you every second of every day,
and you either love it or you don't.
It wakes you up.
It pushes at you in interesting ways.
You can't live there and not be affected by New York City.
I did not for years get the paintings of Jackson Pollock.
I admired him, but I didn't get it until a young friend of mine
got a job working at the Museum of Modern Art, which
meant that I could get in on Tuesdays when the museum was
closed, and I could be in a room full of Jackson
Pollocks by myself, which turns out to be a life changing
experience.
It's not anybody else talking, just the incredible silence
of those paintings.
Pollock did some of his best work
out near where I live in the country
next to a salt marsh called Accabonac Harbor.
That's mentioned in here, and I think
that's all I need to tell you.
"To Jackson Pollock."
Last night somebody murdered a young tree on 7th Avenue
between 18th and 19th.
Only two in that block, and just days
ago we'd taken refreshment in the crisp and particular shade
of that young gingko's tight leaves,
its beauty and optimism, though I didn't think of that word
until the snapped trunk this morning,
a broken broomstick discarded.
And tell me what pleasure could you take from that.
Maybe I understand it, the sudden surge of rage
and the requirement of a gesture,
but this hour, I placed myself firmly on the side of thirst,
the sapling's ambition to draw from the secret
streams beneath this city to lift up
our subterranean waters, power in a pointless scrawl
now on the pavement.
Pollock, when he swung his wild arcs in the barn air
by Accabonac, stripped away incident and detail
till all that was left was swing and fall and return,
austere rhythm, deep down things,
beautiful, because he subtracted the specific stub
and pith, this wreck on the too hot pavement where scavengers
spread their second hand books in the scalding sunlight.
Or maybe he didn't.
Erase it, I mean.
Look into the fierce ellipse of his preserved gesture,
and hasn't he swept up every bit, all the busted
and incomplete, half finished and lost?
Alone in the grand rooms of last century's heroic painters,
granted entrance on an off day to a museum with nobody,
thank you, this once nobody talking, for the first time,
I understood his huge canvases were prayers.
No matter to what.
And silent as hell, he wrote the huge engine of his attention
towards silence and silence emanated from them
and they would not take no for an answer
though there is no other.
Forget supplication.
Beseechment, praise, look down into it,
the smash up swirl, oil and pigment
and tree shatter, tumult in equilibrium.