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From Mathias Svalina, book reviewer, University of Nebraska
Have I mentioned my absolute love of Joshua Poteat’s poetry? You should check out his book Ornithologies, that hit the stands last month. I started to get interested in poetry as more than just a personal expression by hearing and reading Larry Levis and Levis is still one of my guiding lights for what a certain kind of poetry can do. I think he shredded and reformed the personal meditative narrative. Levis, however, is a terrible guy to emulate. I had this conversation with Martin Arnold some years ago, that anyone writing like Levis ends up with the most schmaltzy crap. Joshua Poteat is the only poet I’ve read who has picked up the kind of meditative riffing and personal introspection that made Levis great and has transformed it into his own aesthetic.
From Mathias Svalina, again
As I was putting together a packet of poems for my poetry students, I was struck yet again by how damn good Josh's The Angel Continues Turning the Universe Despite Their Ugly Souls. He understands the lyricism of meditation, the inherent melancholy of transition. To be reminded of another thing is not metaphor, it's the failure of experience to remain distinct. It's a poem that effectively grows desperate through its own thought process. It absolutely slays me, as it did the first time I read it in Gulf Coast. If it is late in the evening I will proclaim to you & anyone else that I think Joshua Poteat & Jake Adam York are the only two poets really progressing the work of Southern narrative right now.
From Jake Adam York, Professor, University of Colorado at Denver
I would also say to you that, through the generosity of several wonderful persons in Lincoln, Nebraska, I have discovered a book I don't want to finish because I don't want it to end, Ornithologies, by Joshua Poteat. This is one of the best books I have ever read, and though I don't want it to end, I will come to its end, and I will begin it again. I wish I'd written much of what's in it and want to know the poetry there.
From Style Weekly article by Jason Coates—Passing the Torch: Similarities prevail in three generations of abstract artists.
Abstract art is a culmination of human experience, and of all human experiences, perhaps none is as valuable as that of teaching. “Pivot Points,” on exhibit at Anderson Gallery, explores the work of three generations of mentors and students while examining what painting and poetry as abstract art forms have in common. The traveling exhibition, curated by two faculty members of Virginia Commonwealth University’s painting and printmaking department, is staged on both levels of the gallery and comprises several intimate paintings on paper, intermingled with large framed printouts of individual poems. The highly regimented aspect of the show makes it easy for the viewer to witness the procession of the generations. The work of each of the six poets and painters is organized according to generation, from mentor to student. Despite the pass-the-torch implications of the exhibition, all of the artists — with one exception — are active, and most of the works are contemporary.
Though the similarities between the artists are obvious, each individual brings into his or her work a signature that is unique. “Third generation” painter Valerie Bogdan takes much from the agitated, slashing paint application of the post-World War II New York School, though she also shares a depth and slick graphic quality with her contemporary, Beth Weisgerber.
“Third generation” poet Joshua Poteat, in defining what it means to be influenced by “first generation” Larry Levis, says simply, “Larry is the poet I wish I could be.” Poteat comes close to meeting Levis’ majesty in the comic clarity of “People Who’d Kill Me (Spain, 1939).”
In Levis’ poem “Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex,” he captures the thrust of the exhibition. The poem makes reference to a Caravaggio painting in which the artist depicts his own face in both the youthful visage of David and the severed head of Goliath. The message is one of a continuum — of a blotting out of the individual. Though generations may pass, the same art and ideas will recur through the ages. |
