A MONA Moment It was Emerson who commented, "The Poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as sign. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space was strewn with these flowers we call suns, and moon, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."
With some poets as our guides, then, let's contemplate some paintings. Here is English poet W. H. Auden, musing on Breughel's Icarus in the Musee Des Beaux Arts in Paris.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Our own Nebraska poet, Don Welch, contemplates the Lawton Parker painting, Teatime on the Verandah, in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art, speculating creatively on that woman on the veranda, surrounded by shimmering, impressionist dabs of blues, yellows and whites.
Notice how she looks west,
What does she remember?
Cartwheels on the lawn?
The woman's blue, Finally, a comment on artists by poet Charles Simic.
Theresa said he got the dumb idea So, friends, as we enter this summer on the plains, here's my advice. I will be back again in the fall with some new moments, in the interim we'll reprise a few. Until then, go ye and find candles, stick some in an old hat, come out here to Kearney and go down to the shores of the Platte, go at night, contemplate that meadow of space above you strewn with those flowers we call moons and stars, our museum without walls, our museum of wonders and delights.
The Poets
By Ron Roth
Director
Museum of Nebraska Art
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating,
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
And how in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.As the woman stands on the veranda,
notice the punctuation of the light,
its exclamations of white
as if the sun had settled into points.
the absence of her daughter,
grown and gone,
an infiltration of blue moments.
A small girl playing in the yard
in the youthful antics
only memory holds?
Her arms and legs
sparklers in the sun?
The saffron moments
of iridescent love? Now,
in late afternoon, light greens.
Such small shudderings
in the limbs beneath the leaves.
the afternoon is white,
memory's green: each
a brush-stroke in a single scenes.Do you remember the crazy guy
Who stuck candles in his hat
So he could paint the sea at night?
Alone on that empty Jersey beach,
He kept squinting into the dark,
And waving Ms brush wildly.
From a movie she saw once.
Still, there he was, bearded and hairy
Like the devil himself
Piling one murky color on top of another
while we stood around watching,
the candles on Ms head flickering
Then going out one by one.
