Featured Poet: Richard Deming

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the American poet Richard Deming this week (pictured) as the featured poet. Deming is a poet, art critic, and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature and visual culture. His poems have appeared in such places as Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and The Nation, as well as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. He regularly writes for The Boston Review and Artforum.

The Picture of JB in a Prospect of Ladyboys

(after John Ashbery after Andrew Marvell, for Joshua Brown)

A hand holding a soda trembles

as some latent wish casts its lots.

The generous arch of a penciled brow

brings the gaze up close. Where else do

names choose their changeable places?

And the one girl with an impossibly

slim waist faces the camera and smiles,

while uneven skirts sway above the knees.

In this picture there’s no nearby garden

and everyone’s eyes are wide open.

II.

Did you? For how much? and how must

the imagination quicken

a reality that is and is more

necessary than the one in

hand, the one we’ll squint and blur

into focus. Curiosity is a kind of daily

translucence and their hair’s so long,

it invents its own virtue.

Leave things be for now. Forgive me,

standing beside you, they are so lovely.

III.

There may be a future of doctors,

hormones, a shiny scalpel meant

to slit and fold because truth’s

a hard thing when it’s wrong.

The animal light of being

wanted is more than comfort and

persistence—the body directs

itself, everyone, all of us, along

for the ride. There’s a word for

these swelling hips. Reform its

error into certain reply.

Battered by luck and the fast intent

of the dream of otherwise,

give us a kiss for the hope that bears

all it’s given. Just put your lips together.

poem by Richard Deming; published at Eyewear with permission of the author.

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

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"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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