Attributed to the Harrow Painter
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
Attributed to the Harrow Painter reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the speaker’s son’s remark on a painting by Julian Schnabel that it “looks like garbage.” What does it mean to be a minor artist, the poems wonder, like the Greek pot painter named in the book’s title, who is described by one critic as “indeed a minor talent, not withstanding the undeniable charm of some of his works”? What structures must be destroyed to clear the way for all the “minor” voices that litter the discourse of Western civilization? This is a mangled, tattered guide to transcendence through art in an age when such a thing seems nearly impossible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite exhibiting elements of the new sincerity movement's blurring of earnestness and irony, this sophomore volume from Twemlow (Palm Trees) slyly and miraculously escapes the looming trap of the movement's tendency towards triviality. He achieves this by situating a childlike wonder, an awe that borders on parody, within the context of a thought-provoking conversation about the problematic economies in which writing circulates: "I wrote,/ To paraphrase/ Myself, to interpret or/ Delay/ My words, to rework,/ Remix, mash up,/ Redefine, defile,/ Lift, smash, plagiarize,/ Borrow, beg, steal,/ Augment, as homage." Here Twemlow subtly instructs the reader about how the text was intended to be engaged with: as an ars poetica as well as a deconstruction of Twemlow's own awestruck meditations on fatherhood. As the collection unfolds, Twemlow nimbly explores the ethical problems of a system in which a deeply personal narrative inevitably becomes a commodity. He elaborates: "The word, I don't/ Want to repeat it/ Anymore, it has taken on/ Its own blemished lore." Subtly and provocatively, Twemlow questions the value practical, aesthetic, humanistic of the work of art outside of the discourse that prompts it. Filled with poems that reflect on and interrogate the politics of their own making, Twemlow's collection is a refreshingly self-aware variation on the innovations of contemporary poetry.
