Brodsky and Auden are two of my favorite poets - very different artists, but quite fond of one another in real life  - and they both wrote some phenomenal rhapsodies about what the New Year means to the human soul. Or spirit. Or consciousness. Scroll past the pics for something from each of them.

Joseph Brodsky, excerpt from Watermark - his brilliant prose love poem to Venice, published in 1992)
“I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is. Perhaps this idea was even of my own manufacture, but now I don’t remember. In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles, and ripples, and – as I am a Northerner – for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it. I am not looking for a naked maiden riding on a shell; I am looking for either a cloud or the crest of a wave hitting the shore at midnight. That, to me, is time coming out of water, and I stare at the lace-like pattern it puts on the shore, not with a gypsy-like knowing, but with tenderness and with gratitude.”

A New Year Greeting
by W.H. Auden

After an article by Mary J. Marples
in Scientific American, January, 1969

On this day tradition allots
to taking stock of our lives,
my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,
Bacteria, Viruses,
Aerobics and Anaerobics:
A Very Happy New Year
to all for whom my ectoderm
is as Middle-Earth to me.

For creatures your size I offer
a free choice of habitat,
so settle yourselves in the zone
that suits you best, in the pools
of my pores or the tropical
forests of arm-pit and crotch,
in the deserts of my fore-arms,
or the cool woods of my scalp.

Build colonies: I will supply
adequate warmth and moisture,
the sebum and lipids you need,
on condition you never
do me annoy with your presence,
but behave as good guests should,
not rioting into acne
or athlete’s-foot or a boil.

Does my inner weather affect
the surfaces where you live?
Do unpredictable changes
record my rocketing plunge
from fairs when the mind is in tift
and relevant thoughts occur
to fouls when nothing will happen
and no one calls and it rains.

I should like to think that I make
a not impossible world,
but an Eden it cannot be:
my games, my purposive acts,
may turn to catastrophes there.
If you were religious folk,
how would your dramas justify
unmerited suffering?

By what myths would your priests account
for the hurricanes that come
twice every twenty-four hours,
each time I dress or undress,
when, clinging to keratin rafts,
whole cities are swept away
to perish in space, or the Flood
that scalds to death when I bathe?

Then, sooner or later, will dawn
a Day of Apocalypse,
when my mantle suddenly turns
too cold, too rancid, for you,
appetising to predators
of a fiercer sort, and I
am stripped of excuse and nimbus,
a Past, subject to Judgement.

1969

Sixteen years old, somehow possessing a driver’s license, I drove up and down these roads every time I wanted to get anywhere. Rural life is unimaginable without a car or truck - how do you get to your crummy fast-food job? How do you get to the supermarket? Buy cigarettes? Visit friends? Back home we drive these roads because we have to. Driving along County Route 23 and 66 and 9H and 9G, I felt truly independent for the first time, and truly alone, and very flimsy. I saw how easy it would be to die out there, and I saw how meaningless my fear was.

This landscape shaped me. Black bare tree branches against a bright twilight sky. Boris Pasternak spoke of “the pure essence of poetry - it is disturbing, like the ominous turning of a dozen windmills at the edge of a bare field in the black year of famine.” Riding these roads I think I know what he was talking about. Great art shows us how our suffering means so little to the universe. How these things we build will outlive us. How hunger and loneliness and loss and aesthetic ecstasy are all symptoms of our own threadbare mortality.

Last month, home for Thanksgiving, Amber drove me and Juancy to Chatham in search of yarn. I took these photographs through the window.

“So yes, that’s the wonderful thing about writing (because it isn’t the money), that you achieve moments of insight and you realize things that are important, that you might not have known were important to you and who you are.”

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=9652

Stephen Elliott wheatpasting posters for his book, The Adderall Diaries...

Laika is an icon for me for a lot of reasons.

The cell phone/interconnectedness/worldwide-information-superhighway addict in me celebrates her and Sputnik-2 as important steps on the road to where we are today. The Soviet history scholar in me loves her as one more link in the long chain of lives destroyed in the course of the Soviet experiment, a chain that includes so many of my artistic heroes (Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Tsvetaeva). The vegetarian in me mourns her as another victim of our hubristic belief that we can kill animals for the sake of advancing human knowledge.

Here’s a lovely poem about her, by Zbigniew Herbert.

First the Dog
to Laika

by Zbigniew Herbert

So first the faithful dog will go
and after it a pig or ass
through the black grass will beat a track
along it will the first man steal
who with iron hand will smother
on his glass brow a drop of fear

so first the dog honest mongrel
which has never abandoned us
dreaming of earthly lamps and bones
will fall asleep in its whirling kennel
its warm blood boiling drying away

but we behind the dog and second
dog which guides us on a leash
we with the astronauts’ white cane
awkwardly we bump into stars
we see nothing we hear nothing
we beat with our fists on the dark ether
on all the wavelengths is a whining

everything we can carry on board
through the cinders of dark worlds
name of man scent of apple
acorn of sound quarter of colour
should all be saved for our return
so we can find the route in an instant
when the blind dog leading us
barks at the earth as at the moon

WEDNESDAY/ NOVEMBER 4th, 2009/ 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos
450 Grand Concourse at 149th Street
Bronx, NY 10451
718-518-6728

http://bronxarts.org/bwc_events.asp

Hope to see you there! And here’s a picture of my 2009 Halloween costume, as Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica…