A Table of Contents - Dorthea Tanning

Current favorites  from Dorthea Tanning's first book of poems, A Table of Contents, published in 2004. 


GRADUATION

He told us, with the years, you will come
To love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
And comforted them.

FORTUNE COOKIES

Blackwidow and bluedaughter will precede a bronze fortune. Wait ninety-one dawns.

Try aulic apples and eco-similies when up a tree. On the next moon's round you will hear a new note.

A fixed star burns the edges of frayed identity. Look underground for knockout denouement.

Swarming doubt surrounds your final forfeit. Your aura is now in orbit. Wear its disguise.

Learn the Erynnian language of thorns. Make a pact with chaos. From then on you won't care.

The faces in the mirror have learned to talk. If you listen they will slash your past ignite your future.

In ten days your eyes will see a glaive. Take it as a sign of promise. Your beauty will explode.

Mix wine with semen and ectoplasm. Throw it out. You shall be richly rewarded.

Wild rapture spins over your personal landscape.  Do not hold your breath in the fire. This sign is bliss.

Entrance to Hell demands grit. After nine days in the ashes you will be walking on air.

Go mad and and you will not become truly insane. Tomorrow you will be chosen.

INSOMNIA, MY COUSIN,


you ride the night machine
witlessly in bedlam,
breathing on my scree,
my panting outdoor movie,
its paid admission being
my square root,
my flashbulb
socket-pinned and joyless.


Insomnia, my cousin,
you have sired nightly
indecent vertigo.
I lie haggard as you drag
your insane engine past 
across the floor,
slamming doors
on all my four dimensions,


leaving me high day
to shred the clotted dream.
Cousin, I repeatedly
betray you with its debris.

Those Who Understand the Myth, Dorthea Tanning August 25, 1910 – January 31, 2012

...There was a muddy center before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

 After holiday gifting her second anthology of poems, Coming to That (Graywolf Press, 2011), we are sad that Dorothea Tanning died at her home in New York City on January 31, 2012.  She was 101 years old. Aunt Anna Cordelia was the same age and studied at the SAIC as well. Did their paths ever cross?  Well, at least in my life's history.

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois and attended Knox College before studying painting in Chicago. In 1941, now in New York, she met the art dealer, Julien Levy, and his surrealist friends, refugees from Nazi occupied France. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. They would have 34 years together, at first in Sedona, Arizona.

Birthday, 1947 

Here she would continue to paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out. By 1956 Max and Dorothea moved to France. Though Paris was headquarters, they preferred the country quiet lure in Touraine and Provence. These years included an intense five‐year adventure in soft sculpture.

Reclining Nude, l969-70

Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976. “Go home,” said the paint tubes, the canvases, the brushes. Returning to the United States in the late 1970s, she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write as well as paint. Her poems have since appeared in a number of literary reviews and magazines, such as The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, The Southwest Review, Parnassus, and in Best Poems of 2002 and 2005. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm.