Near the Strange Bust of Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire’s Bust

The bust of Guillaume Apollinaire
greets those who walk
into this vest pocket parc that cuddles up
against Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Russian emigres chatter
on the bench next to mine.

The back of Apollinaire’s head looks like
a baked potato.
One does not make vodka from baked potatoes.

The Russians take another drink and
I can tell the subject has changed,
softened.


They toss bread to the birds and the man
who is doing most of the talking
turns to one woman and speaks in English:
"You are a tough old lady a tough old girl"

I look back at the potato head

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mummy's Curse and the Armani Suit

Image
    There’s a reason it’s called rag paper.   For centuries, ragpickers supplied the papermaking industry with cotton and linen. Discarded clothing scraps were the aluminum cans of the past. They provided a livelihood to the unskilled. At the dawn of the Industrial Age, everything changed. A rising bourgeoisie and the success of education lead to increasing demand for printed material. The impact upon paper and the rag   supply chain was unanticipated. Consumption of traditional cotton and linen scraps outstripped supply.   The price of rags rose. When demand for papermaking material exceeded supply, alternate sources were sought.    One long forgotten trove of very, very old rags was rediscovered in the 1800s: linen wrapped Egyptian mummies. A Maine papermill owner imported a boatload of them and removed the linen wrappings. The linen was then converted into pulp with the end product being butcher wrap.   Production of the brown   ...
Read more

Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter

Image
  Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter,   How They Happened, Where They are Located, Why They Went Unnoted for More than Fifty Years, and How They May be Understood and Put to Use By Sandy Kinnee and Lauren Kinnee, Ph.D. Once You See the Drips You will Always See them PART 2 Jackson Pollock’s Stray Drips (Over-Splatter): Their origins and implications   Abstract   This paper proposes a wholly new method for reconstructing the chronology of Jackson Pollock's oeuvre based on the presence of drips of stray pigment on otherwise cohesive canvases.  Pollock, after having finished a painting and let it dry, moved it to the side in his studio where it occasionally accumulated drips and other marks that were the byproduct of his working method.  These marks, here termed ‘over-splatter,’ are present on both recto and verso of many Pollocks in major museums.  Lavender Mist of 1950, for example, has a large and distinctive red splotch on the front, right s...
Read more

Isamu Noguchi and His Nisei Muse

Image
Noguchi Doing Time While it is true that at Poston Isamu Noguchi was neither fish nor fowl not fully Japanese and was in the internment camp voluntarily None of those who had reason to not want him around had the authority to release him He was a perpetual outsider Much like Pollock was portrayed as a cowboy but was anything but Except for Jackson's drinking Two artists doing time in ill-fitting Pigeonholes The book tells the story of Isamu Noguchi's girlfriend and muse during his time in the Poston Internment Camp, located in the Arazona desert where she inspired his famous lamps. CLICK HERE TO BE TAKEN TO THE FULL PREVIEW OF THE BOOK. The book is a limited edition of fifty copies.
Read more