For My Visual-Artist Friends (and for Anyone Else Interested in Art)

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.

'The Transfiguration' by Raphael

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.

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