ZOLAND IN CONVERSATION: Jeffrey Yang

7 Feb

Jeffrey Yang, our first featured poet of 2012 , is the author of the poetry books Vanishing-Line and An Aquarium. He is the translator of Su Shi’s East Slope and Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies; and is the editor of Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions and, with Natasha Wimmer, Two Lines: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. He works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books.

Yang took some time to talk with Zoland Poetry this January about his forthcoming books, his thoughts on translation and process of writing. We hope you enjoy the resulting conversation, the first of many interviews planned for 2012, and please visit our Featured Poet page for a sample of Jeffrey’s poetry and translations.

 

ZP: You have two new books out, Vanishing-Line, your second book of poetry, and The June Fourth Elegies, translations of recent Nobel laureate, Liu Xiaobo (to be released in April). Could you discuss any reverberations that might have happened in the writing and translation of these works, between Vanishing-Line, where the poet speaks as supra-witness, and in Liu Xiaobo’s case where the poet speaks as infra-witness, indivisible from the fabric of his immediate experience?

JY: As far as reverberations during the writing/translating of these two books, it could only go in the direction of the Elegies, as I had long finished writing Vanishing-Line before I started translating Liu Xiaobo. The first poem of V-L dates to around 2000, and it expanded and contracted over the years, off and on, until it felt done sometime in 2010. And they’re really such different books, thought the mode of both is primarily elegiac. I actually find it fun to translate something wildly different than anything I could possibly be able to write myself—on one level it forces me to suspend any prejudices I may have about certain styles, aesthetics, ideas and to listen more closely to the original. But I think as one translates, everything one has read or written before echoes in the brain, consciously or unconsciously.

As far as supra- versus infra-witness, I think I understand what you’re saying as Liu’s book of poems is so intricately connected to the June Fourth Movement and his involvement in it. And yet the poems in Vanishing-Line are also indivisible from the personal experiences that shaped them. In that sense we’re both writing about what we’re seeing and feeling in relation to what has happened in the past, even the distant past as its experienced through words and the present. But part of what drew me to Liu Xiaobo’s poems was certainly his terrifying need to turn to poetry during a time of personal/historical anguish…. that the poems in June Fourth Elegies are always pointing to the circumstances and reasons for their existence.

ZP: So much can be deduced about a poet from the work that they choose to translate. Could you tell us how the Liu Xiaobo project came about?

JY: Actually, it was by accident, fell from the sky into my lap. I owe this to David Haglund, the managing editor of PEN America, and Larry Siems, the director of the PEN America Center’s Freedom to Write Program. David had asked if I wanted to translate some of Liu Xiaobo’s poems for the magazine, and sent me some poems Liu had written to his wife, Liu Xia, while he was in prison. Then later Larry asked if I’d translate another poem to be read at the opening of the PEN International Fesitival in 2010. A few months later Larry visited Liu Xia in Beijing, who gave him a copy of June Fourth Elegies, which he then passed on to me. I sent a sample to Graywolf Press and to Liu Xiaobo’s current U.S. agent, Peter Bernstein, and on we plowed.

ZP: You have also published several volumes of Classical Chinese translation (Su Shi’s East Slope, and selections from the Qian Jia Shi, Rhythm 226). Could you speak about the experience of translating the work of poets long gone versus that of a living poet? How did your sense of responsibility differ?

JY: Actually, that was the whole of the Qian Jia Shi (a Song Dynasty anthology of classical poems) I translated, initially as an exercise, then ended up publishing myself in four little volumes/seasons, the first “summer” volume for my wedding where we gave out copies to our guests. Propaganda!

You have to be as careful translating a living poet as a dead poet, but the living poet can actually smack you in the face if you get something wrong. For me, the responsibility’s the same for both as you want to make the best poem in English out of the template before you, either way. Still, there is a deep tradition of translating long-dead Chinese poets beginning with Ezra Pound where one can chop up one poem and paste a stanza of it into another poem, or read phonetic radicals as pictographs for more polysemous renderings into English, etc.—all for good, specific, historic reasons of course, one of them being ignorance. But it’d be ridiculous to be such a close imitator of Pound in this way, unless the tradition and work you’re translating allows it. Try to be so interpretively loose and inspired with the work of living poets and they’ll probably end up finding your body afloat in the Hudson, or some other river.

ZP: In my experience translation has always been an exercise in awareness, not just of the original work and the other but most importantly (most beneficially) of the familiar, the home language, and on an intimate level my own work; it gives an objectivity to the poetic decisions I make, the voice with which I speak. How does your work as a translator affect your poetry and your perception of yourself as a poet?

JY: I totally agree with you about translation as an exercise in awareness. I think translating a poem reminds me that a poem I’m writing myself is just as provisional, subject to change and transformation, even after the “final” draft. I mean, the work says “let go” at some point, but after a book’s published I still find lines I could change. I think of poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz who were so open to the poem’s continuous transformation, the circulations of the song. At the same time, translation also slows me down as a poet, forces me to be more mindful of word choices and lines in my own work. Life would be easier and more comforting without both, but it’d also be lifeless.

ZP: Could you discuss the evolution between your first book, An Aquarium and your second, Vanishing-Line? What was the journey from the interiority of An Aquarium and its enclosed microscopic examinings to the exteriority of Vanishing-Line and the outward spill of its perpetually retreating horizon?

JY: Well, I actually started writing Vanishing-Line long before An Aquarium was ever conceived. The title of V-L was there from the beginning but the structure changed drastically over time, lots of it was cut at one point, then rewritten. Then I got stuck, so I put it down and the idea for An Aquarium popped into my head so I started working on that until I finished it. Then I returned to Vanishing-Line and the whole finally made sense. I seem to work on a couple things at once, then one thing eventually needs to be put down which allows me to finish the second thing. Each specimen or poem of the aquarium embodied a measure of distance already so it was easier to approach, and fun in a scientific experiment kind of way to write, though by “Zooxanthellae” I was an ecstatic wreck.

At times writing Vanishing-Line was more like squeezing water from a stone—it’s filled with the dead who were close to me, and it took much longer for me to get right in my mind. That said, there’s a stanza about a hermit crab in V-L that could be in An Aquarium, while the latter contains its share of vanishing: themes do overlap in the two books, but structurally and emotionally they’re quite different.

ZP: Finally, would you be so kind as to share with us a small personal truth that has allowed you to persevere in this profession?

JY: A profession in the sense of a principal (or even principle) calling. And I still believe Ruben Darío: La poesia existirá mientras exista el problema de la vida y de la muerte. [“Poetry will exist as long as the problem of life and death exists.”]

 

Anne Porter (1911-2011)

6 Dec

Continuing with my selection of poems from the Zoland annuals I turn to Zoland Poetry #2 for a poem by Anne Porter. Anne died recently at the age of 100. We will miss her, but her poems live on.

 
Like Birds in Summer
by Anne Porter

Anna you stayed
In your huge frozen country
When it was filled with prisons
Your only child
Was held in one of them
 
You lived as close to suffering
As eagles to the sun
And out of this
You made your poetry
 
Reading your poetry
I felt ashamed of mine
Till I remembered
There is a way in which
All poetry is one poetry
All poets one
 
There’s Christopher
Consigned to Bedlam
For praying in the street
 
There’s the executive
Behind his office desk
Secretly writing, writing
Stretching his words until they touched
The edge of madness
 
And there’s the the doctor
Who spent the night
Delivering an infant
 
He left the Housing Project
Just as night was fading
The street-lamps all went out
And in the paling sky
Above the city
He saw the morning star
 
We have his greeting
To the morning star
 
And there’s young Helena
In the Gestapo prison
Scratching her prayer to Mary
On the wall of her cell
 
Forty years later
Her words were found there
Shining, immortal
 
Whether we’re whispering, chanting
Or shouting, cursing, screaming
We are opposing the numbness that’s
Our mortal enemy
 
Though there are times
When we will sing for joy
 
And it’s as if
Our poetry were gathered up
And given to the earth
So that the earth may cry
And sing with human voices
 
It is as if
We were a choir
A carillon, a chorus
 
Like birds in summer
When the sun comes up.
 

The State of Poetry

25 Oct

The sad state of affairs is that an increasing portion of the print devoted to reviewing literature is delegated to fiction and non-fiction with only a dwindling and meager slice left for poetry, if that. The fact that national venues for the review of poetry are so few does not mean that the review of poetry books is not necessary, or irrelevant, (how can it be given the growing swarm of newly released poetry books and new poetry presses?) only that the competition for mention has become that much more severe. The fact is, if the number of poetry books published every year is greater than it ever has been, the role of the reviewer in highlighting the interesting, the promising, the worthy in this avalanche is more vital than ever. At the most a poetry review can help a book sell and draw attention and support to the poet, at the least it can extend the dialogue and focus on a work and prevent it from being swallowed by the sheer numbers of its counterparts.

In another professional capacity, like many poets I wear many hats, I was working on the coordination of the Massachusetts Poetry festival. In preparation for the event, meetings around the state were conducted to speak with publishers and poets and publisher-poets about their perception of the state of poetry in Massachusetts. One of the most telling comments I heard in this process was from a small press publisher. After a few hours of discussing program ideas, cross-promotion possibilities and suggestions on how to bring aspiring writers into the poetry community, this publisher respectfully pointed out that what she needed was not more poetry writers, what she needed was more poetry readers and what as a festival celebrating poetry were we going to do to address that. It is probably the most important question we were asked, and it is one that we are still working to address.

The poet and the poetry reader have become so conflated recently as to become one, as most who read also write. Whatever the implications of this phenomena, the bottom line is there should be a balance between production and digestion, a balance between the plethora of new presses and new books and venues to discuss and digest their wares. At Zoland, as a staff of poets in the publishing business, we are dedicated to supporting both sides of the coin. Since beginning the annual in 2005, we have run this series of online reviews with the intention of profiling work that we found compelling and supporting the efforts of small presses and poets. Now that the annual has come to a close with our fifth and final volume, we are looking at ways to keep the Zoland spirit alive through our website and other endeavors.

You may have noticed two new features on our website in the past few months. The first is a small press review which will be included in each series and which will spotlight a range of recent publications from a different small press each round. Our inaugural review was of Boston-based press, Pressed Wafer and this round we are happy to showcase a few new titles from Counterpath Press. The second is a featured poet page, a space where we give poets a platform to share a sizeable sampling of their forthcoming work. This feature will expand to include interviews as well in the near future.

Enjoy and stay tuned…

Zoland Reunited

13 Oct

Our very own Translation Editor, Christopher Mattison, will be stateside again this week and in Massachusetts no less. This Friday October 14th at 3pm he will be will be discussing his new multimedia project, Mapping Hong Kong, at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room as part of the Omniglot Translation Seminars. Roland Pease editor of Zoland Poetry will introduce. Please come join us in celebrating his return.

More information can be found here: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/events/index.cfm

Poems from the First Annual

22 Sep

In rereading Zoland Poetry #1, I came across a few poems I want to spotlight. Obviously I like all of the poems in the book or I wouldn’t have published them in the first place, but from time to time I would like to bring back some of the poems from the five volumes for new readers to enjoy. If you like these poems please search out more of the poets’ work, in ZP #1 or elsewhere.
 
 

Sixteen Shades of Gray
by John Maloney

The angle opens, the horizon
vanishes. Still, for the ten-
thousandth time I work
separations onto a surface.

If there were some resolution,
I could understand, but nothing
shows, nothing moves from head
to heart to hand, but blood.

I stop, and watch intensity
diminish on the glass. Nothing
is detected, the screen oblique,
deflection of an artificial edge.
 
 

The War on Terror
by Rachel Loden

Satellite beaming
on the rose-
twined cottage:

no chains required
when slavegirl’s
in the mood.

Only your birthright
for a mess
o’pottage,

and a barrelful
of sweet,
light crude.
 
 

Calm is the tree standing straight or twisted
by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by
Daniela Hurezanu & Stephen Kessler

Calm is the tree standing straight or twisted
Calm too is the bush in its mediocrity
Calm is the proud horse untouched by froth
Calm is the mushroom and its wife the moss
Calm is the little spring calm the torrent too
Calm is the set course removing me from Time
Calm is the dying flower Calm the growing grass

Sustaining Translation

3 Aug

We need a more sustainable form of publishing to forward the cause of literature in translation, though as margins in book publishing continue to be cinched more tightly, such “sustainability” is a difficult venture for independent presses.

As most readers are well aware, a majority of literature in translation first hits shelves through independent presses or smaller arms of the large houses. In the case of independent presses, this only can happen because of funding from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, various state cultural organizations (which are funded by the NEA), and private foundations such as Witter Bynner and Lannan.

Over the last few years there also has been an infusion of support (in terms of finances and publicity) from fantastically important organizations such as the Polish Cultural Institute, Romanian Cultural Institute, Korean Literature Translation Institute, and the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation. What this has meant practically in the U.S. is that prose and poetry in translation from these various literatures are popping up in the list of a number of independent and university presses. In theory this should be a good thing, though I’m not yet convinced that the support is always used properly by the beneficiaries, because, in reality, what it has meant is that one Taiwanese poet appears in a catalogue next to ten regional Midwestern neo-confessional poets. And more times than not, there is no continuity between the translated poet’s work and the remainder of the Press’ list. A few hundred copies are sold, and then the Taiwanese work disappears deep in some back list as the subvention received from the cultural organization was just enough to cover the cost of the printing and (possibly) a small translator advance. The Press can’t or won’t afford any additional time or resources, and the title dies. Related to this, there are any number of presses that have initiated a contemporary series of literature in translation, but generally there is only external funding for 3-4 titles, and as soon as the subsidy dries up, no more energy is put into the series. The model should be sustainable funding and not required subvention.
 

Selection

In terms of my current location within the world (Hong Kong), I am particularly interested in the “fate” of Chinese literature in translation (specifically from the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan). There’s, of course, the global question of why certain works are chosen over others for translation – is it primarily an issue of choosing titles that “work” with a particular English-speaking audience? A literary ouija board?

The best editors act as curators, considering both the gallery space of their pre-existing lines and the shifting interests of readers/viewers. However, I also know that a certain percentage of editors are directed by finances rather than aesthetics, and that in the case of Chinese literature, since at least the late 1980s, the error has been in focusing on “dissidence” rather than “dissonance”. Instead of judging a work based on literary merit and doing something new, editorial focus groups are run to ascertain which work will sell best, based on the current political climate. This is not something specific to Chinese literature, though with China often at the forefront of world news, it will more than likely continue to be a reality for years to come. Similar trending followed the rise and fall of Russian literature in translation throughout the Cold War and into the birth pangs of Glasnost, and there was a lot of very bad Russian literature translated because of certain authors’ socio-political importance.

As a practical example of what’s now, in looking at a selection of titles being published in an upcoming season by 100 independent presses based in the US and UK, with 25 of these being presses that regularly (or at least occasionally) include translation in their lines, fewer than 15 out of more than 500 books are works in translation. In terms of Chinese literature — only one of these books is by a contemporary author and the other three Chinese titles are retranslations of Tang classics and Confucian standards. If an independent literary press can sell through 1,000 copies of an unknown contemporary author in translation over a couple-year period of time, the press has done relatively/very well with that title. In most cases, the combination of university libraries and top independent accounts will account for 300-400 copies. In a best-case scenario, the press then hopes to double that amount when adding in individual bookstore and online buyers and events.
 

Who

So, end on an up note and bring it all together. Let’s have three who are doing good for Hong Kong?

MCCM Creations
Since entering the world of book publishing in 2001, MCCM’s aspirations have remained consistent – to bring readers original and inspiring books from authors and designers who share a passion for books as objects, as well as a strong desire for exploring hybrid concepts. Cross-disciplinary realities are at the core of MCCM – fusing illustration, the visual arts, design, architecture, photography, sociocultural criticism and literature.

Dung Kai-Cheung
A longtime literary light of Hong Kong, Dung Kai-Cheung’s novel The Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City will be hitting the world in English translation through Columbia University Press in 2012. Translated by Bonnie McDougall, Anders Hansson, and the author, reserve your copy[ies] now.

“Dung Kai-cheung (1967- ) was born and raised in Hong Kong. He first achieved literary fame in 1994 by winning first prize in Taiwan’s Unitas Eighth New Writer’s Award with his novella Androgyny: Evolution of a Non-Existent Species (Anzhuozhenni: yige bu cunzai de wuzhong de jinhuashi). Since then, almost all of Dung’s works were published in Taiwan. Dung Kai-cheung is a theory-minded writer. The Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City is a perfect example of how Dung utilizes his academic training in creative writing. The novel combines various Western sources: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Umberto Eco’s On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1, and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. The word “archaeology” in the subtitle naturally brings to mind Michele Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. In terms of defying conventional genres and confusing the boundary between the factual and the fictional, Dung also has Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths in mind. The Atlas is a hybridized text not only because of its diverse sources but also because it ruptures generic boundaries.” [Revised slightly from Chen, Lingchei Letty, Writing Chinese: Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).]

Muse Magazine
At first, one of the finest print mags in Hong Kong on the art, culture and literary scenes, and now migrating primarily online, with the possibility of books and other non-digital objects in the future. Check back often to see where things are headed.

Bookstock Festival – July 29-31

8 Jul

From July 29-31 the third annual Bookstock Festival will take place in Woodstock Vermont (www.bookstockvt.org). It will begin on Friday by having an opening at the ArtisTree Gallery with an exhibit of creations by artists that challenge the concept of “The Book.” This was a juried contest. I have  to tout the work of one of the artists, my wife Lori—www.loripease.com, who has two ceramic books included.

On Saturday, poets and writers such as Thomas Powers ( The Killing of Crazy Horse), David Budbill, Sharon Olds, Weslie McNair and Cleopatra Mathis will read from their works. This book fair is not to be missed if you are in the area.

Jean Garrigue

8 Jul

Jean Garrigue (1912-1972) was the first poet of note I met and got to know. She was my friend Lisa’s godmother, and lived on Harvard Street just outside of Harvard Square in the late 1960s. I was in my early 20s, living on Dana Street a few streets over, and would see her from time to time. I was—and still am—impressed by her poems ( I highly recommend looking up her work). I knew next to nothing about poetry at that time, so I’m sure I didn’t talk to her about her poems, but I remember we once shared a train ride from Hartford to NYC and we both smoked like chimneys. People did back then. We discussed politics and the Vietnam war. I knew I was in the company of an important person. A poet. Someone I admired.

 

 

Zoland Poetry Number 5

24 Jun

The fifth and (for now) final issue of Zoland Poetry hits the shelves this summer. More information to come!

A Review of Albert York

1 Jan

albert york

Albert York 
by William Corbett

$17.50 | 94 pages | paper | ISBN 9780982410059
Pressed Wafer Press

Review by Sebastian Smee
 

Albert York, a painter born in Detroit, died last year at the age of 80. Described by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker back in 1995 as “the most highly admired unknown artist in America,” his paintings have been intermittently championed by critics such as Fairfield Porter and John Russell, and owned by the likes of Jacqueline Onassis (she had five of them).

And yet, embarrassingly, until recently, I’d never heard of him. William Corbett tells a perturbing story midway through his leisurely but riveting essay on York in a slim new monograph published by Pressed Wafer. Preparing to write on York for “Modern Painters” in the late 1990s, he had tracked down one of his characteristically small, obdurately mysterious paintings, “Landscape with Two Indians,” to the basement of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The employee who showed it to me, herself about to leave the museum because of a shake-up brought on by the new director, told me that the York would never hang in the museum again. She gave no reason but spoke in a flat, authoritative way, and to this day the York has remained in the basement.

The two Yorks in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York have also, according to Corbett, never been displayed.

Who, then, was York? What are we to make of him?

It’s hard to imagine finding, now or in the future, a better introduction to him than Corbett’s essay. Lucid, sensitive, amusing, passionate, frankly personal and yet free from the intrusiveness of the ego, it’s the best piece of writing on art I’ve read for several years.

It reads like part of a conversation – the kind of leisurely, limber, but never indulgent conversation you have with someone who has the whole  afternoon free – who has time, in other words, for unanticipated insights, and has the grace not just to accept but to cherish what cannot be known, understood, explained.

The conversational tone is natural to Corbett. It is also, perhaps, a tribute – not so much to York (with whom he never got to speak) as to the painter’s long time dealers, Roy Davis and Cecily Langdale. Corbett recounts in his essay that he first saw York’s work at Davis & Langdale while gallery-going on Madison Avenue.

There stood Davis in his uniform of corduroy pants and sweater, long cigar in hand. In answer to my questions – he must have known at a glance that I was not a collector – he talked at length, emphasizing in clear terms what he saw in York’s art. I don’t remember exactly what he said but the delight he communicated, the pleasure he relished in looking at and talking about York’s paintings, has stayed with me ever since.

Like James Schuyler’s poems, writes Corbett, York’s paintings “say so clearly what they mean to say that interpretation seems beside the point.” And yet his essay goes on to do two things. It tells about what we want to know about York, and it talks, with wonderful sensitivity, about the paintings.

We learn early on that York’s unmarried parents separated soon after his birth; that he grew up believing that his mother was dead (they were reunited after his father’s death); that he lived in a nursery and boarding school for the first seven years of his life; that he went to live with his aunt in Ontario at the age of 14, and that his father encouraged him to draw and paint, giving him a paint box that nonetheless contained “the wrong sort of brushes. They had hardly any bristles.”

The essay is full of these kinds of priceless details. York’s paintings are not only small, they’re awkward – the sort of awkwardness you find in early Cezanne, though without the histrionics: painted with “the wrong sort of brushes.”

He was shy. He studied art in Ontario and then back in Detroit, before being drafted into the Army at the beginning of 1951. He spent some of the following two years on active duty in South Korea. When he was discharged, he moved to New York City. After a number of years taking classes, painting, and working menial jobs, he took a job as a gilder with the great framer Robert Kulicke. Kulicke remembers nothing he said.

In 1959 York met Virginia Mann Caldwell, and moved in with her and her two children. (She supposedly did not know that York was an artist until six weeks after their marriage the following year.) They went to France. They came back.

As a painter, York was not impervious to influence. On the contrary, he loved the Ashcan School painters, Manet, Cezanne, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. But his sensibility was somehow circumscribed from the beginning. He didn’t really “develop” as an artist, at least not in the conventional ways that critics and art historians like to trace. He worked on small “panels” all his life – “always off-square and odd in dimension,” as Corbett puts it, no side longer than 16 inches – and favored still lifes, landscapes, and figures, none of which contain more than the merest hint of anything resembling contemporary life. (At one point Corbett, one of Boston’s leading poets, compiles an amusing list of the things York did not paint. Almost as arbitrary in its way as the things he did paint, it reads as a sly poem:

To my knowledge he has not painted a freestanding house or a row of houses.
He has not painted a country road.
Telephone pole.
Farm implement other than a wheelbarrow.
Hammer, pliers, or screwdriver.
Fruits or vegetables.

Bottle.
Book…

And so on.

Altogether, York painted fewer than 350 paintings – an average of between 12 and 15 a year during the years he was exhibiting new work. He stopped painting in 1992.

Corbett has the intelligence to perceive that York’s ostensible modesty, his lack of interest in promoting himself in the art world, and his consistent negativity about his own work (“It’s pretty lousy – pardon the word – work,” York told Tomkins about one of his shows. “It has no relation to good painting”) probably had a flipside: a kind of arrogance and imperviousness to criticism that allowed him to keep doing just as he pleased.

York was not, Corbett writes, “a sentimentalist.” His “rare assurance” is “not suave but guileless.” His paintings are “without forethought.” They have an “even-tempered off-handedness” and are “powerfully all of a piece.”

Elsewhere Corbett describes York’s trees as having “a standing still quality, not on guard but watchful, somehow alert but modest in their stateliness.” Yet another image is described as “cranky, stubborn,” the sort of thing “you wouldn’t be surprised to find in a secondhand shop.”

Corbett is brilliant on York’s paint handling, which at one point he describes as “fluid, tender, discreet but unfussy and quick, so that it expresses York’s discovery of his design while communicating a love of seeing for its own sake.” Later on, he anchors this attitude to paint in a given time and place, tempering York’s assertion that “the modern world just passes me by… I missed the train” with the brilliant point that “his paint handling is that of a painter who came of age in New York in the 1950s. His paintings surge with the lavish, consciously beautiful lick of that moment in American art…”

Writing about art doesn’t get much better than this. But in the next paragraph, it does in fact get better – or at the very least funnier, as Corbett describes walking from a show of York’s work to the Museum of Modern Art. There, he wandered into the 20th Century American collection “and the familiar rooms where Clyfford Still’s paintings hang. I have never liked Still’s work. His crags and peaks are not the Rockies, they’re only made of clay… I don’t see grandeur but American afflatus, the great ego and ambition of so much American painting after World War II. The train York missed was powered by big gusts of hot air.”

Again and again Corbett insists on the mysteriousness in York’s pictures, and “the wonder we experience when lost in looking.” His paintings offer us “moments apart to think about and feel what is in the word independent of the human urge to command and control.”

Corbett’s words, here and throughout the essay, reminded me of Rilke’s resounding admonition: “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

Corbett wrote his essay before seeing the MFA’s new Art of the Americas Wing, which opened in November of 2010. The wing has vastly increased the space available for the display of American art at the museum. And yet all that extra space has made no difference to the fate of York’s “Landscape with Two Indians.” It is still in storage; the MFA staffer’s bleak prophecy still holds.
 

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