V. Putin's english lessons

I told Putin that some ideas look better handwritten, and some ideas look better as a picture or as pictures. To the writer it often seems that there's always the right picture to meet the word, but not always the right word to meet the picture; to the visual artist the word is a picture. In either case, there's always at least one other way of saying something.

Listening to and watching the British painter Gary Hume's studio-talk yesterday about the problem-solving nature of his art practice--that he looks at every painting and every sculpture he makes as a "problem to be solved"--I began to like Hume's art less than I had, and I had been a big fan of his big, shiny painterly conceptions, until I heard him say near the very end of his talk that all he really wanted to do was to make, "beautiful paintings."

Applying Hume's thinking to my own as a writer, I thought: the more I look at a problem the larger it becomes, until the problem becomes so immense it contains no culmination. Hume's compositional dilemma--where do the circles go, the stripes, how close can I come to making a conceptual painting appear to be almost representational--casts more of a shadow than it shines a light on the dilemma of the writer: the kind of language I'm interested would never claim to solve a problem; the kind of language I'm interested in either creates more problems or creates an environment is which there are none.

To this end I am toying with the idea of placing the titles of the poems I am currently writing at the bottom of the poem instead of at the top.

 

Consider the optics and the relationship of words to pictures and pictures to words in this clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle, January, 2017: Name, face, 5 bottles of water, supporters, caption, text. Question? Is all that water necessary? Photo by author.