Reading

‘The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart’ by Jack Gilbert

Previous Story

Interview with Barry Nemett, Painter and Author o [...]

Next Story

LOS SOLOS Series opens on September 5


(Transfer Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg)

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.
By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,
power without consequence. The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon
and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication. We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed
with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise
because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

– Jack Gilbert

Related Stories
The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Centuries-Spanning Look at Race and Sculpture Opened Just After the Election, Provoking an Executive Order to Rewrite History

Curators Karen Lemmey, Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura spoke truth to power. Power threw a tantrum.

"The Return of American Pest" Confounds, Closes with a Reception on Saturday

American Pest feels intensely familiar and specific, yet it reflects nothing from my highly partisan social media feeds. It feels like entering into an America that exists... but I’m seeing it as if under water or on some other plane of reality that I have never visited before.

Baltimore art news updates from independent & regional media

This week's news includes: BMA acquires close to 150 new works, Carla Hayden hired by Mellon Foundation, Grandma Moses exhibition comes to SAAM,  Harriet Tubman exhibition curated by Larry Poncho Brown, a breakup at Glenstone, Motor House raises funds to rebuild, and more!

Do Women Still Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met Museum?

Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble is exactly the show we need right now.