I thought the poem below might get a rise out of my visual-artist friends and anyone else interested in art:

1400
by Albert Goldbarth (born 1948)

Saps, and the anal grease of an otter, and pig's blood,
and the crushed-up bulbous bodies of those insects
that they'd find so thickly gathered on barnyard excrement
it makes a pulsing rind, and oven soot, and the oil
that forms in a flask of urine and rotting horseflesh,
and the white of an egg, and charcoal, and the secret
watery substance in an egg, and spit-in-charcoal
in a sluggish runnel of gray they mixed
with the harvested scum of a bloated tomato,
and steamed plant marrows beaten to a paste,
and orange clay, and auburn clay, and clay bespangled
with the liquid pearl of fish scales stirred in milt,
and suet, and glue boiled out of a hoof,
and ash, and grape-like clusters of fat grabbed
out of a chicken carcass and dried in the sun
until it became inert and yet still pliable, and lime,
and the pulp of the cherry, and the pulp of the cherry
immersed in egg, and coral in a powder,
and silver flake, and fig, and pollen, and dust, and beeswax,
and an iridescence scraped with infinite care
from the wings of hundreds of tiny flying things,
and salted iridescence, and human milk, and ores,
and gall, and stains expressed from teas, and gobs of squeeze-off
from the nettings of cheese, and rouge, and kohl,
and luster, and oyster, and lees: and so from these
they made their paints: and then
their Gods and their saints.

One of the striking features of Albert Goldbarth’s poem is that it’s all one long sentence, broken into lines but not into stanzas. It’s one long list capped off with a rhyming couplet though, of course, the rhyme is somewhat hidden in that “saints” is at the end of its line while “paints” is not. And yet it’s true that rhyme is subtly threaded through the rest of the poem in the form of approximate end rhyme and more hidden exact rhyme (for instance, “teas,” “cheese” and “lees” in the fifth-to-last, fourth-to-last and third-to-last lines, respectively).

Another striking feature of “1400” is its impressive amassment of sensory details and its bravura word choice. Some examples:


… the crushed-up bulbous bodies of those insects
that they'd find so thickly gathered on barnyard excrement
it makes a pulsing rind

… spit-in-charcoal
in a sluggish runnel of gray they mixed
with the harvested scum of a bloated tomato

… clay bespangled
with the liquid pearl of fish scales stirred in milt,
and suet, and glue boiled out of a hoof,
and ash, and grape-like clusters of fat grabbed
out of a chicken carcass and dried in the sun

… gobs of squeeze-off
from the nettings of cheese


But the most striking feature of “1400” may be the contrast Goldbarth underscores — the contrast between the unglorious ways paint was made in the Renaissance and the glorious “personages” (Gods and saints) Renaissance artists created with that very same paint.

On the Playground, On the Block
by Dana Crum

This excerpt from my novel At the Cross was published in African Voices in 2001.

After Sidney and his mom moved to D.C., he passed the first few weeks pouting and sweating. Fans rattled in the windows but blew in only heat, which compounded the heat seeping in through the walls and rising from the floor. It was worse inside than out, making that first summer in D.C., even worse than those he'd experienced in Alabama. There he and his mom had lived in his grandmother's bungalow, where hot air couldn't rise and gather at the highest of several floors as it did now in the cramped, top-floor apartment that was his new home. To escape the heat, as well as the equally stifling boredom, he began going out on the block for more than an RC cola and a bag of corn chips.

On one such evening he sat alone on a parked rusting Pontiac and, scowling, recalled what he'd accidentally stepped on on his way downstairs a few minutes ago. He'd heard a snap! and then a crunch! and had lifted his shoe only to see the thick, white guts of a cockroach splattered over the floor and over both his sneakers. The glossy, black-and-brown shell was cracked and flattened. The wiry antennae and thorny legs fluttered for a moment, then stopped altogether. Nauseous, he feverishly scraped his shoes against the floor to clean them. And now, outside, he gazed at the redbrick tenements, broken sidewalks and slanted dirt yards besieging him and longed for the waving arms of trees, nodding heads of flowers and lush pools of grass around his grandmother's small but clean, white-and-green house. He wondered what the friends he'd left in Birmingham were doing at that moment. Probably, they were riding their bikes down the street, every now and then one of them popping a wheelie while the rest sat crouched over their handlebars in the position their mothers warned would ruin their posture. Sidney was staring at the foot of the hill, wondering what they would do later on when he noticed, less than a second away, a football zipping toward him in a tight spiral. "Catch the ball, man!" someone shouted, and Sidney threw up his hands, his usually reliable hands, but the ball bounced off them and spun in the air before clattering to the ground like a clumsy bird.