Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss by Philip Nel

Author:Philip Nel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2012-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

22

PROVOCATEUR AND PHILOSOPHER

What a fine day for

an act and a show

a cold and a snow

—RUTH KRAUSS, What a Fine Day For … (1967)

Now back in touch with Ad Reinhardt, Crockett Johnson was taking an interest in his old friend’s career. In April 1963, noting that Reinhardt’s paintings were on display “around the world,” Johnson asked, “Have you thought of Rowayton?” Kidding Reinhardt, who was then being canonized as a major American painter, Johnson added, “We have a nice little Art Association here and I think if I played my cards right I could wangle you into a group show. Oils priced over thirty dollars don’t sell very well of course, and it will cost you fifteen dollars to join, but the prestige is enormous.” Reinhardt should come up to take a look: “Pack a pile of your representative (I mean representative of your work; don’t go and paint a lot of representational pictures through any misunderstanding) canvases and your family in the car and take off.”1

If Reinhardt could not make it up to Rowayton, Johnson said he would visit on 1 May, when he and Ruth would be in Brooklyn Heights for a party hosted by Willard Maas and Marie Menken. Their parties were a who’s who of the culturally influential. Andy Warhol called Maas and Menken “the last of the great Bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank (their friends called them ‘scholarly drunks’) and were involved with all the modern poets.”2

In 1963, Ruth Krauss published one of her most important poems, “This Breast,” in the Wagner Literary Magazine. Begun in Kenneth Koch’s class the previous year, the poem’s inspiration may be Koch’s “Thank You” (1962), which gives thanks for a series of items unlikely to generate feelings of gratitude: “Thank you for the chance to run a small hotel / In an elephant stopover in Zambezi, / But I do not know how to take care of guests, certainly they would all leave soon.” Generating her own absurdist repetitions, Krauss’s recurring “This breast” takes the place of Koch’s recurring “Thank you.” Krauss’s sense of epic repetition likely also derived from her readings of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.3

The most striking difference between Krauss’s poem and Koch’s is tone. Where Koch sustains irony throughout, Krauss goes directly for surrealist pastiche. One stanza begins,

This breast as the Irish Statesman so shrewdly remarked most unabashed explorer of the crypts of the soul

This breast—but we have nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks

This breast a dove

This breast the flower of Gum Swamp

This breast a little confused by this possibility

Juxtaposing this breast with a wide array of unrelated items creates a series of associations, ranging from comic to serious, banal to baffling. Koch’s poem renders thank you ironic, but Krauss’s poem completely changes the meaning of this breast. Alignment with such disparate phrases as Mexican poetry and Chinese history and I seen it in the papers empties out the word’s meaning, transforming breast into a universal signifier. It can be an Irish Statesman, “composed entirely of scraps of historic fact,” or a “Dostoevskian masterpiece.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.