Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets

"This is a wonderful anthology edited by J.D. McClatchy. It brings together roughly a century of Anglo-American poets writing about painting. It starts with Yeats and goes all the way up through Richard Howard and John Ashbery. It has a very quirky sensibility. McClatchy says that he wanted to bring together an Anglo-American tradition of poets writing about painting. It’s sort of hard to say what the tradition might be, and he lets the different pieces speak for themselves. He says they all have an interest in style and that’s definitely true. You can really feel the individual voices of the poets in the things they’ve chosen to talk about and in the way they’ve chosen to talk about them. “What there is to see in most images changes a lot over time” I love the book for its surprises, it’s like a little treasure chest. Every time I go back to it, I find some essay that I didn’t pay attention to before that’s somehow revelatory, or just gets my interest going, my attention sharply drawn in one direction or another. This is actually a book that a student of mine gave me, a lovely writer calling Corinne Manning and that’s also nice. I teach writing about the arts , but this wasn’t a book I knew, until this student gave it to me. One of my favourite pieces in it is a piece by Frank O’Hara about Jackson Pollock. That’s an essay I’ve quoted in my own work and returned to repeatedly. It really manages — through both its poet’s sensibility and the proximity of O’Hara to Pollock, he really knew Pollock, and really understood what Pollock’s project was — to bring out a lot of the different dimensions in Pollock’s work that are somewhat subsumed in his current, gigantic status. It’s easy just to be told he’s great painter and not really think about what his project was. For its specificity I really appreciate that essay and many of the essays in that collection. Yes. That’s something I’m interested in. I recently wrote a book about Bernard Berenson who was an art connoisseur and art critic. Part of what was extraordinary about him was his way of seeing. Working on that project is what got me really interested in this topic and trying to think about what different people’s ways of seeing are. Berenson had, in some ways, a quite poetic way of seeing. He carried this incredible wealth of art historical knowledge with him, but that wasn’t always what he talked about when he was trying to bring a painting across to a reader. I think there’s a lot to be said for just careful looking and careful language in rendering visual experience."