Such Whimsy!

A mid-week visit to the Seattle Art Museum has kept me giddy and upbeat/positive all week. I loved watching the old video footage of Calder happily conducting his wire-hanger miniature animal and people circus. Priceless. I also got a chance to examine one of Michelangelo's illustrated grocery lists:

"two rolls, a pitcher of wine, a herring; tortelli . . ."

Why, of course.

I took notes for what I hope will eventually be a couple ekphrasis (poems about art).

Buoyed all week by visual art and the spring-like weather.

And today a book I've been wanting to own since last August arrived in the mail: John Hollander's A Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. (It is out of print, very expensive, and very hard to find, but I finally tracked down a copy I could afford!) This is the book if you want to understand and write ekphrasis poetry. It's illustrated and contains a great many ekphrasis poems written over the last 500 years. I probably won't have time to read it till late March (between quarters), but I can skim it now, at least.

I picked up a pile of reserve books from the library, too -- can't wait to dip into Bernadette Mayer's Poetry State Forest! And I have out two books by Rae Armantrout, whom I feel drawn toward despite my inability to make any sense of most of her poems, though I appreciate their intelligence, unique voice, and beauty. I hope, with continued reading, a clearer path into her work will emerge.

So that's been my week . . . that and a lot of thinking/listening about Haiti.