Above is painter Sean McElroy’s “So Just Be It.” I have known Sean a long time, and I admire both his art and intellect. I was reminded of his work yesterday as I settled down with Ben Lerner’s new book of poems, Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)—a book I’ve been excited to read since, well, Lerner’s last book of poems. If I tried to say too much about these paintings and poems, I’m sure my reach would exceed my grasp, so to oversimplify I’m trying to tell you that Lerner’s new poems and McElroy’s paintings are interesting because of their appropriations of geopolitics, war, pop culture, the lexica and imagery we take for granted—I’m trying to say they get me really worked up in my thinking about our world.
Below is a Lerner stanza that reminds me of a McElroy painting:
All these flowers look the same to me
Night-vision green. There is nothing to do
In the desert but read Penthouse and lift weights
My blood is negative. That’s all you need to know
Sophisticated weaponry marries the traditional
Pleasures of perspective to the new materiality
Of point-and-click. I’m writing this one
As a woman comfortable with leading
A prisoner on a leash
To offer just a stanza doesn’t do Mean Free Path justice, of course. This is a mere snippet of a sequence of intellectually rigorous, often strange and surprisingly beautiful fragments in a composite formation. But the idea behind the piece reminds me of McElroy’s art. In a world of militarized language and images, how do we say or present our experience in a way that doesn’t slip into a Daily Show-esque mode of ironizing? Or a mode of superirony? Or something else? See McElroy’s “Looking for Fun, Outgoing, Spontaneous” for something else:
What I’m trying to say is that these two artists make a great pair, and their work is great individually as well. See this from Lerner (I’m trying to mention his new book favorably, to be clear, and suggest that there’s much more to be gained by experiencing the sequence):
Birds were these little ships that flew and sang
There were some cool pics online. Funny
Strange, not ha-ha funny, how the black
Canvas grows realistic, a bird’s-eye-view
Of their disappearance. Wave after wave
Of déjà lu. After the storm, the sky turns
Night-vision green. The color of murder
I can hear the soldiers marching in my
Pillow. Even in Canada
Even when Lerner is hard to swallow, sometimes even off-putting, he’s at least interesting. See McElroy’s “A Brick is Drawn out of the Great Tomb for Thee” for such masterfully composed disturbance:
So what do you think? I’ll try to more coherently explain myself next week, when I attempt to more carefully review Lerner’s new book. In the meantime, I want to know if anyone else has paired a particular contemporary poet and visual artist (apart from Bianca Stone, who is enviably both in one), and I want to know what you’re excited to be reading.
You can see more of Sean McElroy’s work at: http://www.goldensplinter.com/SEAN_MCELROY
