Rosanna Albertini, collage, January 7 2025

Were I standing under the crown of a tree, time and stories would be embedded in the trunk and the branches, weather and animals would tell poems made with wind, chirping and lightenings, what words can do? They come after. 

The poet says

The poem refreshes life so that we share,

For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies 

Belief in an immaculate beginning 

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, 

To an immaculate end. We move between these two points:

From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration

Of what we feel from what we think, of thought

Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.

The poem, through candor, brings back a power again 

That gives a candid kind to everything.

WALLACE STEVENS,  “NOTES TOWARDS A SUPREME FICTION” (all the fragments between images are from the same poem by Wallace Stevens)

Adam in Eden was the father of Descartes

And Eve made air the mirror of herself / of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves / in heaven as in a glass; a second earth;

And in the earth itself they found a green– / The inhabitants of a very varnished green.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed. / There was a myth before the myth began, / Venerable and articulate and complete. /From this the poem springs: that we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves / And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. /

A wait within that certainty, a rest / in the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.

The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind, / Hidden from other thoughts, She that reposes / On a breast forever precious for that touch, / For whom the good of April falls tenderly,

He is and may be but oh! he is, he is, / This foundling of the infected past, so bright, / So moving in the manner of his hand.

He is the artist as an old man. RA

A THOUSAND THANKS to

WALLACE STEVENS hoping his spirit can see this post

SHOSHANA WAYNE Gallery LA

LEHMANN MAUPIN NY

HAUSER & WIRTH LA

MARK STRAUS NY

PRAZ DELAVALLADE LA

AND to Diego Cassisa and Peter Kirby (disguised as Adam and Descartes)

Young artists Eva Granos (a populated air, she was 10 ) and Isaac Granos (humans & or monsters he was 7)

My shield, my hero, my friend despite the fact we are family: artist Alberto Albertini (green apples – still life – photograph)

Thanks to all the artists whose work becomes “of a candid kind” in the light of poetry:

Jeanne Silverthorne, Louise Bourgeois, Cole Sternberg, Chantal Joffe, Ed Clark