Untitled
I turned my back on the color fields. I turned my back
on the abstract, New York, the blue/red adjustments
and the inflamed men, the men inflated with trust
and acts of god and gorgeous manly man drag.
I turned my back on the furious magazines [I could
read], their reds and blues and frequencies I used
[I could use] to spin myself into an ecstasy, white
dervish, in custody of a story that begins troubled
with power, then the trouble is you as you spin,
a dance that ends with what kind of man I am.
Copyright © 2019 by Bruce Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I feel the same way that painter Philip Guston did when he said about his drawings of Nixon: ‘So when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world… going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue? I thought there must be some way I could do something about it.’”
—Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
Smith is the author of six poetry collections, including Devotions (University of Chicago Press, 2011), which was the recipient of the 2012 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.