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A Clasp of Some Sort
by Marjorie Welish
1
“The Silver Swan”—that’s funny
I thought swans white, unlike
Yet who slides out the extra
guttural death written
in silver which is white
in heraldry. By a lake.
2
Once upon a time: a swan
dead like the quatrain still
athwart the nature morte
as the camera came to reveal it
in pulling back from the
heaped things in slow
motion incremental reveal; the set
says motion-picture studio floor
and attests to the artifice.
Non-lyric, non-dramatic, non-epic.
3
Downgraded from blue chip
after failing its estimate
at auction, the metropolis fell apart at the seams of pathos.
Single-proprietor businesses are extinct,
yet burst from its Saved Pictures
a swan strains to reach muck as gray as gray print
in the glare of monographic memoirs.
The editor is caput, athwart the memoir.
Missing private equity, the raptor is commercial
amid twinges and the cry [and we quote],
“I shall be standing when the last one of you is out of business.”
We kept a copy of the sting.
Wringing the arcade’s neck.
Marjorie Welish is the author of several books of poetry, limited-edition constructed artist’s books, and a book of art criticism. Isle of the Signatories (2008) came about thanks to a Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship of Cambridge University, 2004-5; other recent books of poetry are In the Futurity Lounge/Asylum for Indeterminacy (2012), So What So That (2016), and A Complex Sentence (2021)--all from Coffee House Press. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art Since 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); she is also a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998), and has written art criticism for popular magazines such as Art in America and Art Monthly (U.K.) as well as for scholarly journals, such as Partisan Review, Salmagundi and Textual Practice (U.K.). Fellowships include: Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2014-15; St. Edmonds’ College, Cambridge University, Visiting Fellow—granted for 2014-15; others: Fulbright Senior Specialist Roster, 2006-11--Spring 2010 (Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland); grantee, and Spring 2007 (University of Frankfurt, Germany). Her creative arts and criticism were the subjects of a day-long conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, resulting in a 300-page conference book, Of the Sign, The Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, New York (2023-24), and Grating, Gradient, and Then Some, Jesus College in the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK (2024), Panel April 24: with Jean Khalfa, Rod Mengham and Drew Milne. In February 2024, Artforum published a ten-page portfolio of her art.