FALL/WINTER 2025
Five Prose Poems on Art
Cole Swensen
Traveling
Emily Dickinson never went anywhere. Sitting at the window,
turning over in her head the names of various places—Delhi,
Santiago, Stockholm—as if the names now lay strewn across the
field that filled most of her view, as if the stiller she stayed, the
farther she became.
René Magritte
painted 27 versions of The Empire of Light from 1939 to 1967. In
every one, there’s a lighted window, but often more prominent is
a streetlamp, radiant, the light of it whiter than that in the window,
which is warmer—and above the nocturnal scene, a bright blue
sky, as if night could still be full of sun. Magritte rarely worked in
series, but often had the sense, when out walking, that he was
being followed by a streetlamp that was casting a light over his
shoulder. He’d turn around, and it wouldn’t be there, though
sometimes the light still was.
Early Moments in Abstract Expressionism
It was early in the 1940s, and a painter exploring new avenues in
abstraction was experimenting with working right up close to the
canvas, her nose only a couple of inches away. Completely
absorbed in her work, she applied daubs and streaks of color
intuitively, impulsively, randomly. At the end of several hours,
utterly exhausted, and with the canvas now completely covered,
she dropped her brushes into turpentine and left the studio
without looking back and seeing that, though utterly abstract, the
work exactly replicated Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel.
Mirabilia Minutiae
Rogier van der Weyden’s Braque Family Triptych (1452) in the
Louvre is only partly in the Louvre—much of it actually occurs in
some other country accessible only through acute detail—and
that’s why the detail is there. As you lean in more and more
closely—which you have to do in order to see it at all—your
peripheral vision gets blocked out, isolating you, cutting you off
from your herd, as it were, which allows the painting, like any
predatory being, to take hold of you and gently, inexorably, pull
you in. It’s such a lovely world, in which a white horse walks off
down a curving path through green fields with a figure walking
along behind—and as you lean in even more closely to see who
it is, you suddenly realize that it’s you.
The Majesty Oak, Kent, England
Trees with proper names—it’s a ghastly anthropomorphic
intrusion, but it does make them easier to find on a map. Which,
in turn, makes you recognize the map—any map—as another
anthropomorphic intrusion, and one that, while having no effect
upon the relentless fluidity of the world, does greatly impede our
ability to perceive it.