Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Friday, 2 November 2012

Jim Dine: Utopia (2011)


.
File:Sedimentary-clay-mountain.jpg

Sedimentary clay mountain, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by puroticorico, 2008



work work work work work work work
work work work work or
just wait for this
to end.
Don't buy anything
anymore
What's the point of decorating what?
so...
work work work work work work work work
work work work work
until --
there's nothing
more and no one
left to love or
feel bad about
or dream



File:Clay-ss-2005.jpg

Quaternary clay in Estonia (400,000 years old): photo by Siim Sepp, 2005

8 comments:

TC said...

The great Jim Dine. What is there to say? Work work work work. Better and better and better and better.

Jim Dine: Fresh and a warning

Jim Dine: the downfall / of your eyes

Jim Dine: The Flowering Sheets

Jim Dine: We lived once in an ideal kingdom

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

Yes, what else is there but
"work work work work work work work
work work work work or
just wait for this
to end."

11.2

light coming into sky above still black
ridge, planet below moon next to branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

flesh out likeness to place,
pen-and-ink for which

setting concealed, thinking
that can be, as place

white circle of sun in fog above ridge,
circular green pine on tip of sandspit


TC said...

Steve, I do believe you and JD may be cut from the same clay.

(A little buttery-white cloud has just now wandered o'er yon hill to start the day.)

Hazen said...

A teacher of t’ai chi of my acquaintance described the work ethic in modern day Japan in a similar way, though it seems to me like a world-wide affliction:

work work work work work work. die.

Susan Kay Anderson said...

Hamlet's mom, Gertrude,
Queen of Denmark could be
the answer to part of a riddle.
It was a mystery I did not figure.
Detection takes practice. To be.
Johnson, another part. A plain,
unassuming name. Northern.
Something I do not get.
Like teaching. Witnessing
torture of the teachers. The kids
have no problem to say shut up.

Susan Kay Anderson said...

Jim Dine's titles: otherworldly.

Mose23 said...

Work as excavation or work as gravedigging (as is every good Bourgeois' business).

I love how the poem drives down to that vacated dream.

TC said...

Jim's Giant Swedish Pinocchio may be the world's largest Wooden Boy.

“The Pinocchio is a metaphor for art.” That seems about right.

And, contests...

Gertrude Johnson. Bingo!