Number 45

 

I like sitting at the foot of an old tree, above its

teeming roots.

Number 44

 

Gary, who is fond of the poetry of the late George Oppen (1908-1984), brought me this--from a notice by critic High Kenner, written the year Oppen died.

"The things he sees," wrote Carl Rakosi [a poet-friend of Oppen's]

"feels like the gnarled bark of an oak tree.  The tree is there, too. You can put your weight against it.  It won't give,"

Number 43

 

In an essay in The Crowning Privilege (1955), poet Robert Graves  spends some time in praise of American modernist poet, e.e.cummings--an unlikely enthusiasm for Graves, the arch classicist and poetic mythologist.  Amusingly, Graves praises cummings for being unabashed "to write, endite and publicly recite so intrinsically corny a sonnet as the one beginning":

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue dream of sky  and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Number 42

 

In 1965, American art critic James Lord published a small book called A Giacometti Portrait.  It was an account of his agreeing to sit for a portrait by Alberto Giacometti,  a portrait the artist assured him  would take only a couple of hours to complete.  In fact, the work took weeks and weeks and was never really finished.

In 2018, actor/director Stanley Tucci made an intimate and exquisite film of Lord's book.

He cast Geoffrey Rush as Giacometti (the actor looks astonishingly like the artist) and  Armie Hammer as James Lord.

In the course of one of their many walks--this time through a Paris cemetery--Giacometti,  gazing at the trees overhead, asks Lord an important question: 

Giacometti:  Have you ever wanted to be a tree?

Lord:  No.