Vulnerability Study
* Mary Camille Beckman *
To me, Solmaz Sharif’s poem “Vulnerability Study” is perfect.
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Midnight Reads
* Mary Camille Beckman *
How do I soothe myself when I react, as if allergic, to my own need for sleep? Just calm down, I plead. My insomnia strides forward, unchecked.
A Form of Loss: On Writing an Obituary
* Mary Camille Beckman *
The obituary form is form par excellence. It’s formula—a formula that prefigures its content. Like air inside a balloon, the content of my grandmother’s life—names, dates, places, accomplishments—took the shape of its container.
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On Being Bad
* Mary Camille Beckman *
Sometimes—too often—I forget what it feels like to be thrilled by poetry. So, every day I press the cold body of the guitar against my chest and stomach and feel again what potential feels like—how well I might come to know this body and neck in my arms.
No Man’s Land: Robert Altman’s 3 Women
* Mary Camille Beckman *
What value does the culture place on this “girl-woman transition” that it won’t name the people going through it? Robert Altman’s film 3 Women (1977) doesn’t quite answer this question. It does, however, dramatize its premise: the problem of inhabiting an unnamed space. And it does so by launching two of its three title characters—Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek)—into that girl-woman no man’s land. The dramatic tension that arises propels 3 Women forward.
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Dora García’s Instant Narrative
* Mary Camille Beckman *
Before Dora García’s Instant Narrative was installed there, the apse of the local university art museum was the kind of space I’d cut through on my way somewhere else. The bathroom, the contemporary galleries upstairs, the auditorium in the basement. Nineteenth century American landscape paintings line the walls, visible between marble columns. The mood: quiet, cold. The mood: formal, save the rumpled students slouching through on their way, like me, elsewhere. Before Instant Narrative, I moved through the apse largely unnoticed and unnoticing.
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Query and Response: “The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison answers Antoni’s implied imperative: use yourself, your emotions and your responses, as an analytical and critical tool. Antoni’s ideas illuminate Jamison’s primary techniques—Antoni and Jamison, perhaps, share a working definition of empathy: empathy as an effort of imagination, effort of intellect; empathy as a door through which to enter art, for reader, viewer, and maker; empathy as inquiry; empathy as the site of analysis; empathy as resistance to tradition or traditional tropes; empathy as choice.
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Song in My Heart: On Poetry and BFFs
* Mary Camille Beckman *
The poetry I love most, I love the way I did my girlhood best friend. And for the same reasons: disobedient wit, cool smarts, a throaty voice, candor. I love it for its intensity, for its invitation to intimacy.
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Effort and Effortlessness in Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy
* Mary Camille Beckman *
I had already loved Robert Motherwell’s painting Reconciliation Elegy (1978)—had already claimed it as my favorite painting—for years before I tried to account for that love, to support that claim. On a recent trip to Washington D.C., I brought my partner to the modern wing of the National Gallery, where the painting hangs, and as he looked at the vast canvas high on a far marble wall, he asked me, as if—of course, no problem—I’d know the answer to his question, “What do you like about it?”
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On Rereading and Rewriting Sestets by Charles Wright
* Mary Camille Beckman *
I read Sestets, reread it, reread it again. And when rereading wasn’t enough, I disassembled every sestet in the book so that I might put them back together again: I translated each poem into its opposite, one by one, line by line.
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