Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel

Mark Nepo's "Fire Without Witness" is an epic poem that centers on Michelangelo as he paints The Sistine Ceiling. While painting the different panels, he reveals stories of his time, his life, and through his dreams, the future. As the panels are painted, the prophets and sibyls and objects of Creation come alive, unknown to Michelangelo, and tell their stories. The poem presents two skewed realities, and while at times the Biblical and mythic voices see Michelangelo, they never reach his awareness. 

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo.

About his work, Nepo says "It took me ten years to write the poem, which seems now a painting itself. It seems a vision of that rim between the human and the infinite, where our body of sense almost leaves us, than settles and hardens into what we are. And when dealing with the infinite, all comes down to one encompassing, unnamable source, one fire without witness. As Michelangelo himself put it, “What is in the very center is always free.”

From Part III: Michelangelo stalls on the scaffold to recall how he first saw the Pieta, complete, in the unquarried marble at Carrara.

"Someday, I'll carve a Venus, bunching
the warm breasts high, the silk legs closed,
the most perfect virgin, with everything
to give, and no desire.

O what if Heaven is as cold.
The things I love most wait hunched
in the white Carrara grove, never
where the workmen mutter. Like fish,
the statues scatter from the lines.
I hunt alone, away from the crews,
and the statues pull back, deep
in the thick of the mountain.
They hold still as the stone,
and some arch themselves
along the inner faults,
dreaming slowly
not to be found.

Painter Joan Mitchell and Poet James Schuyler Go Right on Shining

Two Poems by James Schuyler

Daylight

And when I thought,
“Our love might end”
the sun
went right on shining

Sunday

The mint bed is in

bloom: lavender haze
day. The grass is
more than green and
throws up sharp and
cutting lights to
slice through the
plane tree leaves. And
on the cloudless blue

I scribble your name.

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

Despite this fierce photo, Schuyler's readings of his poems is incredibly gentle. He, Ashbery, O'Hara and Koch were part of a New York group of poets, who retreated to the Hamptons in summer and collaborated with painters Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Jane Freulicher, Nell Blaine, and Grace Hartigan.

Hecht and Bellini "At the Frick"

Giovanni Bellini, "St. Francis in Ecstasy," 1480

Poet Anthony Hecht 
1923-2004

At the Frick

by Anthony Hecht

Before a grotto of blue-tinted rock

Master Bellini has set down St. Francis.

A light split through the Apennines to lock,

Counter, and splice man’s painful doubleness.

Else he could weakly couple at the belt

His kite-mind to his cloven nether parts

That seek to dance their independent dances.

The sudden light descending came to bless

His hands and feet with blisters, and to melt

With loving that most malleable of hearts.

Birds in the trees his chronicles recite:

How that God made of him a living net

To catch all graces, yet to let through light.

Fisher of birds and lepers, lost in thought,

Darkly emblazoned, where the oblivious mule

Champs at the grasses and the sunset rusts

The hilltop fortress, where the painter set

Heron and rabbit, it was here he caught

Holiness that came swimming like a school

Of silver fishes to outlast his lusts.

Now I have seen those mountains, and have seen

The fawn go frozen on the road with fear

Of the careening autobus, the sheen

Of its dilated eyes flash in its head

Like glass reflectors, and have seen the trees

As green as ever where their braches thresh

The warm Italian winds of one more year

Since that great instant. The painter’s dead

Who brought the Doge and nobles to the knees

Of the wind’s Brother Francis in the flesh.

Poet Mueller and Painter Delvaux, "The Village of the Mermaids"

Lisel Mueller

Paul Delvaux: The Village 
of the Mermaids

Oil on canvas, 1942

Who is that man in black,

walking 
away from us into the distance? 


The painter, they say, took a long time


finding his vision of the world. 

The mermaids, if that is what they are 


under their full-length skirts, 


sit facing each other


all down the street, more of an alley, 


in front of their gray row houses. 


They all look the same, like a fair-haired 


order of nuns, or like prostitutes 


with chaste, identical faces. 


How calm they are, with their vacant eyes,


their hands in laps that betray nothing. 


Only one has scales on her dusky dress. 

It is 1942; it is Europe,


and nothing fits. The one familiar figure


is the man in black approaching the sea,

and he is small and walking away from us. 

"American Gothic" by Poet John Stone

Our favorite couple...taking a photo op.

American Gothic, 1930 by Grant Wood

American Gothic

John Stone (1998)

Just outside the frame 


there has to be a dog 


chickens, cows and hay 

and a smokehouse


where a ham in hickory


is also being preserved 

Here for all time


the borders of the Gothic window 


anticipate the ribs 

of the house 


the tines of the pitchfork


repeat the triumph 

of his overalls

and front and center


the long faces, the sober lips 

above the upright spines


of this couple 


arrested in the name of art 

These two 


by now


the sun this high

ought to be 


in mortal time 


about their businesses 

Instead they linger

here 
within the patient fabric 


of the lives they wove 

he asking the artist silently 


how much longer


and worrying about the crops 

she no less concerned about the crops


but more to the point just now 


whether she remembered 

to turn off the stove.