fig-1

fig-2

fig-3

fig-4

fig-5

header

fig-6

fig-7

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/elegy-ecstasy-rereading-motherwell/"></div>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/dean-rader">Dean Rader</a>
“a word is elegy to what it signifies” –Robert Hass 
The first poem of mine to be accepted for publication in a national magazine was about Robert Motherwell. It bears the dizzyingly innovative but not misleading title Motherwell. It was (and is) an homage to his spectacular series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, completed between 1957 and 1990. That Motherwell is the subject of a poem is not surprising since the main aesthetic concept for the Elegies finds its roots in poetry. Motherwell’s artistic guide was the French Symbolist poet Stephan Mallarmé, who urged artists “to paint, not the thing, but the effect it provides.” That advice is highly symbolic and highly evocative in that it foregrounds the poetic over the literal. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/elegy-ecstasy-rereading-motherwell/#more-3178" class="more-link">Read more</a>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/elegy-ecstasy-rereading-motherwell/"></div>

Elegy as Ecstasy: Rereading Motherwell

Brother Poem

Suddenly We

Victoria Chang is the author of OBIT, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her latest book is The Trees Witness Everything (2022). She is the incoming Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech.

Victoria Chang

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored eleven books, including Works &amp; Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes &amp; Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, is forthcoming in 2023 from Copper Canyon. His writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.

Dean Rader

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Will Harris’s “Brother Poem” and Evie Shockley’s “Suddenly We”

Two Roads: Poetry Reviews in Dialogue

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

The Rupture Tense

From From

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Jenny Xie’s “The Rupture Tense” and Monica Youn’s “From From”

Best Barbarian

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Roger Reeves’s “Best Barbarian”

The Trees Witness Everything

Jennifer Chang&nbsp;is the author of&nbsp;The History of Anonymity&nbsp;and&nbsp;Some Say the Lark, winner of the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in&nbsp;The New Yorker, A Public Space, Poetry, Georgia Review, The Believer, The New York Times,&nbsp;and&nbsp;Yale Review, and she has published essays on poetry and culture in&nbsp;New Literary History, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, The Volta, Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, New England Review, and&nbsp;Los Angeles Review of Books. She serves as the poetry editor of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nereview.com/">New England Review</a>&nbsp;and since 2003 has been on the staff of&nbsp;<a href="http://secure-web.cisco.com/1BYp8v90rGBor2AwpzWwPF7HV8e7hPhWwsjM8kvOYxX8mleGBkj0kE7dCcbpwUn8K6WqOJeOsYtN2zYPKozlQvT-tEFV4Dq6kiTByD7YTjhROl7CxyJvrIDQhixAOa9bjsic6Pa7ERPvK4wuURViOUdrEFZYKsfWgYYnswz7YSfjBjRC7PenMIjzlWQ-WL5hNVRWHftfaM5Fmw7Zo78FoXhxBwGHm9bPVyFt00zt210wrLez7mnKvMr4EMMCNxaSCc5TlqBGupkbUQlliCEcFhN8SvVbySwfn_3CeExKMQlfxo1cdbkXVbMJ9xplUnQe_RPRRw87__tGLF7tkJfvTscFep_htpiWPpYor7RsjoXxIVfob5APFHsolkUCJIdjljgciERDckOsvzd-Xw9QmRBLk5PDi8GX-PxYzH2jFfMVDbYXiL3sHIEtn7i3HmKLruN9oYdJ0Ylg2pcXeqtpNELx0FeCOtheahG62psSSxRmaPgzii4RdcERU7bxjorabCxjrRsL0g2qeoRSiEnGQkUMnFEc9NTJkYL7Z5KB3LfMdI_Px6w8ezID9E1yiHo5v_jtVxoKOZdmAYv3fDMb0Hg/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kundiman.org%2F">Kundiman.</a>

Jennifer Chang

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Victoria Chang’s “The Trees Witness Everything”

Requeening

All the Flowers Kneeling

Philomath

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of First Books: Amanda Moore’s “Requeening,” Paul Tran’s “All the Flowers Kneeling,” and Devon Walker-Figueroa’s “Philomath”

Dark Traffic

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s “Dark Traffic”

Such Color: New and Selected Poems

The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Tracy K. Smith’s “Such Color: New and Selected Poems” and Arthur Sze’s “The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems”

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Douglas Kearney’s “Sho”

The Renunciations

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of Donika Kelly’s “The Renunciations”

The Earliest Witnesses

Two Roads: A Review-in-Dialogue of G. C. Waldrep’s “The Earliest Witnesses”

How to Carry Water

“More than Me”: On “How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton”

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through

America Starts Here: On “When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry”

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored eleven books, including Works &amp; Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes &amp; Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, is forthcoming in 2023 from Copper Canyon. His writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.