I recently watched the documentary, Black White & Gray , about Sam Wagstaff, the New York curator, collector, and photographer who was Robert Mapplethorpe’s partner in a variety of ways. It’s a really compelling study of a complex human being. It's insightful, vivid and smart, and really honors Wagstaff's life and legacy without oversimplifying it. It streams on Netflix. In addition to all the ways that I really enjoyed the film and respect it as an excellent documentary profile, I was delighted and surprised to learn that Wagstaff had represented Michael Heizer during the (short?) phase of his life when he worked and made a splash on the east coast (later, Heizer would say, “I’d been to the east, and didn’t like what I saw. It looked like it was degenerating.”). Wagstaff put Heizer’s works in his shows, and set up a famous earthwork exhibition at the Detroit Art Institute, where Heizer was to drag a heavy mass across the lawn, causing the mass to s
My books include the National Poetry Series selection, Nervous Systems and Absentia, both published by Penguin Books, and the limited edition chapbook of desert fragments, Artifact Eleven, which engages the monumental land-based art of Michael Heizer. In 2019, my latest collection, You Are Still Alive, debuts from 42 Miles Press out of the University of Indiana. It includes poems that have been published in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, and many other top journals. Like all of my work, it explores a wide tonal range. One poem, “A Moment for Authentic Shine” won the editors’ prize from Spoon River Poetry Review—a competitive prize with over a thousand poems considered. The final judge blew my mind by calling it a “postmodern corollary to Wordsworth’s Prelude,” which is pretty lofty praise. But the collection also includes “Sorry I Can’t Design Your Futuristic Bug Creature,” which is a poem about a giant beetle (based on the eastern-eye click beetle, but just way bigger and out to destroy humanity), which also won an award: the annual prize of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. To me, they’re like equally loveable siblings—one’s a little bookish and the other is up all night watching Doctor Who.
