[New-Poetry] Re: Visible Silence: Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet

[Barry Alpert]

Thanks for calling attention to Michael Maglaras' second film on Marsden
Hartley, the first of which, "Cleophus and his Own", I witnessed at the
National Gallery of Art in 2005.  Maglaras and his producer were there to
present it, and I remember being intrigued when they cited as the germ of
their undertaking the discovery in an used book store of the unexpected
first printing of Hartley's long poem "Cleophus and his Own" in an art
catalogue focused on MH and Nova Scotia.
I look forward to viewing how they enact Hartley's relationship to Dada.
 Here's how I once extrapolated from that subject:


THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING “DADA”


 [via Marsden Hartley]


Be to not and pastime entertaining and

learn shall we game, sportsmanlike.

Glibly so who esthete “middleman” or go-between dreadful.

Shine will stars the that and tightrope

among vaudevillian satisfactory.


Dada-ist perfect, own your be.  Will you?  Your self

was art if

ordinary an or

greater any given or canvas or paper.



Barry Alpert



This morning's impulsive homolinguistic translation from Marsden Hartley's
Adventures In The Arts (NY: Boni & Liveright, 1921). Its title derives from
Hartley's afterword to that book.  I edited my way diastically through MH's
prose text from end to beginning, until I had spelled out "Being Dada" on a
slant. Then I worked over the results, without rereading Marsden Hartley's
considerable body of work in poetry but having viewed relatively recently a
rather full retrospect of his visual work at the Phillips Collection. Thanks
to the Pope for invisibly guiding me through heavy competition at a Catholic
school book sale where I recently scouted my first copy in 35 years of
Marsden Hartley's rare first book.
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