Today’s ensemble + weekend style report + poetic motivation

Weekend style report:

The best look I saw all this weekend was “shirtless with bunny” as you can see here.

The grass at Korean Arts Village wore us. Dig Rob’s fedora! And Kim’s 60s daisy dress with Ray-Bans and preppie Minnetonkas! Gary’s in purple (my influence).

I converse with one of the village elders, who wears a simulacrum of homespun.

Here, Coco (who is thinking to change her last name to either Duchamp or Ono) is wearing a faux-batik print jersey dress in robin-egg blue, perfect for a summer romp in the country. I am also in jersey, in gaudy solids. We played Beatles trivia on the car ride back to the city; we are just about tied, I think. I couldn’t name the number of McCartney’s children (including the adoptees), and she didn’t instantly come up with “Apple Scruffs.”

Rob and I discussed poetic motivation at length. I’m not sure whether we agreed to disagree or whether we decided we were describing different sides of the same coin.

I insisted that since our society gives back so little to poets, that I cling to certain appealing (to me) aspects of the poet myth: the milieu, the conversations, the sensitive antennae, the embroilments. I maintained that we are “special people” who really are more observant, who perceive more intensely, than the average member of the hoi polloi. Rob felt that was not necessarily so, and opined that it is our main task to make work that is relevant to the contemporary situation using the materials of the culture around us. I agreed that form is primary, but that it is our particular challenge to make forms that are adequate to the intensities of our motivation, which starts for me as a kind of rhythmic itch that I suppose I could call emotional, the spontaneous overflow of powerful…you know the rest. That’s why I insisted on describing myself as a lyric poet. A lyre is a musical instrument. The strings vibrate. There’s something to that, and also to the sense of being able to enter a state of sonic excitation (I dragged the old “radio” metaphor out of the closet here)… that drugginess, to me, is what it’s all about. If it is intellective, or if there is critique in what comes out, for me that is more or less of a by-product.

No one in the car (although Coco didn’t mention her stance on this) quite agreed that this was how it worked for them. How about you guys?

I am only posting the outfit from Saturday as Rob and Kim had issues with their water tank and no one had a shower on Sunday morning. It’s the right thing to do, I think, even though I am wondering about what the constraints of this project should be. Is it like birth control pills, that if I skip a day I expose myself (or my project) to some sort of compromise?

Today, back to the 50s thing: Taffeta plaid with pink and gray undertones, coral lace bolero. Rain is forecast on and off all week, and it occurs to me that taffeta is the perfect fabric for the rain, even though I will sweat a little. Dress bought in Manhattan Chinatown for I think $30, on East Broadway. I have entirely forgotten the provenance of the bolero, but I think I’ve kept it around for a couple of decades.