Amazing news—big congrats!

Art is weird. I made this painting in 2019 but it’s hard to imagine making this work now—a strange experience to encounter my six-years-ago mind framed and on paper and feel it was created by someone else who was (is?) me.

My commutes have significantly improved this week by coming back to this collection as an audio experience. All gratitude to @dseuss.bsky.social for the wonderful poems and improved headspace.

Good strength to you for the season, @aestallings.bsky.social.

I feel this. The very real problems are massive and many, but even so, the sheer volume of coverage and posts etc etc has a way of making the grounded, embodied, generative even, parts of my life seem smaller they are. Running and cooking have been an amazing help. And always coffee!

I love the obsessive, flow-state energy that comes when a manuscript starts to fit together, the try-to-keep-up confidence of the poems suddenly running far ahead, almost without me.

Hugely grateful to have a new poem in the beautiful new issue of @berlinlit.bsky.social, one of my favorite new magazines...

Here we go.

The way this piece moves…whew. Glad to have read it. Congrats on the publication!

I was just talking with a friend about the way he’s seen 1st-year art school students change in recent years, where for many hyper visibility online & brand collabs are now their main goal in making art—being “creators” ASAP. Who has time for the slow, generative evolutions of ateliers?

My hope for a work of art to be beautiful doesn’t erase or ignore the suffering it coincides with. Life is beautiful. Life is very hard. I make art, I write poems, as affirmation and critique, as supplication and testament and hope toward a better tomorrow.

It’s strange to write, to make art, to enjoy life—to paint with such bright colors!—when there’s so much to mourn. This painting holds all of it. Maybe every painting does.

My most recent painting “The Fullness.” How am I still astounded at the multiplicity & simultaneity of life? How one moment contains so much. Joy, grief, tenderness, outrage. The simple pleasure of coffee with friends; watching my son climb a tree, even as bombs fall & fires erase neighborhoods…

Gift of D. and J. de Menil

Chryssa, Five Variations on the Ampersand, 1966

https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1136540

COUPLET Reading Series: The 'Winter Edition' Event in New York, NY by Leah Umansky on Friday, February 28 2025

@coupletseries.bsky.social returns for the 'winter edition'
with Bruce Whitacre, Tina Cane, @jennmartelli.bsky.social, @elizabethscanlon.bsky.social @darrencdemaree.bsky.social and @sarahali.bsky.social on 2/28 at 5pm at Red Room/ KGB Bar in NYC
#coupletnyc
#Poetry

Mary Sisler Bequest

Auguste Rodin, The Three Shades, 1881-86

https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1136741

The kind of aspirational content I’m here for.

bb’s debut year is here! We Contain Landscapes, my first book of poems, comes out in March with @tinhouse.bsky.social 🌀 it would mean a lot to me if you preordered the book for yourself &/or someone you adore from your favorite bookstore, or requested it from your local library

Expressionist painting of warm interior: a man seated with a golden guitar, an open window to the dusky sky and trees.

After nearly five years of mostly painting, 2024 was a big year for poems—and finding a better balance between the two. I was especially glad to finish this piece, “Better Chords,” started in 2022. Here’s to hoping 2025 is full of all kinds of music, on the page and in the studio.

Thank you, W. S. Merwin.

Reading Peter Schjeldahl’s art writing has been such a pleasure lately—you can hear his proximity to the NY School poets coursing through (which always endears someone to me). At first I wondered what he might have written had he not given up on poetry to be a critic. Now I think he never did.