The Poetry of Sight

Behrens, Dreams of Fields (2025)

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

end of performative writing / writing for voice

Above Exhibition flyer for works by Mary Snyder Behrens (2005).

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William H. Gass, interviewed in Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 158—

I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It's destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed...By the mouth for the ear: that's the way I'd like to write. I can still admire the other—the way I admire surgeons, broncobusters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.

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how do you like your blue-eyed bird, mr. death?

Roy R. Behrens, © digital montage
Above One of my early digital montages (its title and date I can't recall). At the time I was interested in Arts and Crafts designer William Morris (that's Jane Morris leaning leftward), and Buffalo Bill (behind and above the target). One day we discovered that a bird (a starling) had been trapped in our wood stove, where it died and remained somewhat preserved. The feather colors were astonishing, and I decided I should place its body on a flat bed scanner, then use the result in a montage. Perhaps I also had in mind that wonderful e.e. cummings poem about the demise of Buffalo Bill: "How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death."

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Wilhelm Reich, Passion of Youth: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988, p. 10—

Once I was playing by the fence and a peasant boy my age [whom he was forbidden to play with] was watching me from a few meters away. Suddenly he grabbed a stone, I presume as a joke, and threw it at me. It hit my forehead and I bled a little. He certainly had not intended to be mean. My mother washed my forehead and told my father [who was the boss of the other boy's father] what had happened. Father became enraged. He summoned the child and the child's father. After referring briefly to the incident, he gave the father a dreadful beating. The peasant endured it quietly, without defending himself. As he walked off with his child, I could see him beating him the whole way home. The boy screamed frightfully. I was very upset, but said nothing and crept away to hide. I was about eight years old.

Sunday, January 18, 2026

to catch a green lizard without its tail falling off

Above Roy R. Behrens, book cover design for Joseph Langland, The Sacrifice Poems. Cedar Falls IA: North American Review, 1975.

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Lawrence Durrell, quoted in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer's Chapbook (NY: Viking Press, 1989), pp. 107-108—

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off. In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off.

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Saturday, January 17, 2026

Rainbow / machine-stitched appliqué and thread

Mary Snyder Behrens © 1986
Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Rainbow Sleeves (1986). Machine-stitched appliqué and thread on found fabric. 19"h x 29"w. Collection of the Racine Art Museum, Racine WI.

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H.H. Green, Simple Life of a Commoner, 1911—

But of all the things I saw that day, there was one that so deeply interested me that I have never forgotten its exact appearance. It was a wonder to a boy of my age and would be of considerable interest even now. It was just a common ordinary pocket knife with a bone handle and blades of steel, but it contained 1,851 [because it was made to be shown for the first time at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the first World's Fair, in 1851] of those steel blades, from one to two feet long and proportionally wide and thick, on down of all sorts and sizes till the smallest could not have been more than a quarter of an inch long. They were all open from the handle and stood out in all directions like the quills on a porcupine's back when he is on a war footing. Up to that time that was the greatest sight I had even seen. I have often thought since, if that knife had been lost for a thousand years and then found by some antiquarian, what a time the wiseacres might have had ever the monstrous size of a man, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century carried a pocket knife like that.

Thursday, January 15, 2026

proof / the curse of whiskey undercuts longevity

Roy R. Behrens © 2011, digital montage (detail)
Robert Kosmicki, quoted in Steven J. Zeitlin, et al., A Celebration of American Family Folklore (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 57—

Well, my grandfather came from Poland, and he just died here about a year ago, at the age of ninety-five. I remember one thing he said. He was a very wise man, but he was kind of a boozer all his life... On his birthday or something like that I'd take him a bottle of bourbon. And he told me one day when I brought him a bottle of bourbon for his birthday—! think he was ninety-two at the time—he said that he had given up alcohol, that alcohol had killed two of his brothers and so he thought that it was time for him to quit, because he wasn't old enough to die yet. So I asked him about the brothers it had killed. And he told me it had killed his brothers Colin and Stanley. I checked up on it and found that Colin was ninety-two when he died and Stanley was eighty-nine.

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

art is rare, sacred and hard work / no short cuts

Mary Snyder Behrens, Drawn Conclusions No. 14, Cleave 2005
Anthony Burgess, But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwertyuiop and Other Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986)—

Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. You can't create unless you're willing to subordinate the creative impulse to the construction of a form. But the learning of a craft takes time, and we all think we're entitled to short cuts…Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

slow art / deep-running skill and doggedness

Roy R. Behrens (©2011), Barbarian Seville. Digital book montage.
Robert Hughes in "A Bastion Against Cultural Obscenity" [a speech delivered at Burlington House, London] in The Guardian, June 3, 2004—

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in ten seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks into something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

See also "Art, Design and Brain Research: Non-Scientific Thoughts about Neuroesthetics" in Gestalt Theory (Vienna), 2013.

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Indian eyes / the role of ocular culture in high art

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Ginu Kamani, “Code Switching” in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, ed., Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 99—

Indian lore is full of the magical power of the eyes—justified, in my view, as Indian eyes are truly incomparable. The cultural emphasis on implicit rather than explicit communication, on keeping emotions in check, on placing others before self, and observing duty-bound restrictions on words and action, transforms ocular communication into a high art. In the Vedas, the visual gaze is considered as potent as the transmission of semen between bodies. Westerners are often entranced by the eyes of Indian gurus and holy men, whose gaze casts an enticing spell. Many have felt hypnotized, submitting to a power they cannot fathom.

Sunday, January 11, 2026

not funny adults / do you know what happened

Above Roy R. Behrens, acrylic painting [title and whereabouts unknown], 1968.

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Deborah Andersen, Dialogue: An Art Journal {March/April 1987), p. 50—

In 1948 when I was six years old, I was selected to appear on Art Linkletter's radio program People Are Funny. The night before the show, my mother worked feverishly getting me ready. On the show I was the first child to be announced. Art Linkletter asked me "Debby, do you know what happened last night?" In my cutest little voice, I responded, "No, what?" There was hysterical laughter. Without saying another word to me, Art Linkletter turned to the next child and asked him the same question. He answered, "President Truman was elected." I have spent the rest of my life trying to figure out what happened.

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bush whacked / rhymes with porky, no offense

Above Roy R. Behrens, painting titled Homage to Arshile Gorky. © 1967. As an undergraduate art student, I had become greatly interested in Abstract Expressionism, and had written a paper about Gorky's famous painting, The Liver is the Cock's Comb. At the time, I hadn't yet discovered that Gorky had taught a camouflage course for civilians during WWII at the Grand Central School of Art in NYC.

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During the 1984 presidential campaign, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were running against Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, Bush's wife (Barbara Bush) said in response to the question of how she would characterize candidate Ferraro: "I can't say it but it rhymes with 'rich.'" Later, having realized the offensiveness of her quip, Barbara Bush called to apologize, as Ferraro later recalled in her autobiography, Ferraro: My Story. New York: Bantam 1985—

"I just want to apologize to you for what I said," she [Barbara Bush] told me over the phone while I was in the middle of another debate rehearsal. "I certainly didn't mean anything by it."

"Don't worry about it," I said to her. "We all say things at times we don't mean. It's all right."

"Oh," she said breathlessly, "You're such a lady."

All I could think when I hung up was: Thank God for my convent school training.

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Saturday, January 10, 2026

an anagram overkill / What's for repas, Eclat?

Nature Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2019
W.V. Quine, The Time of My Life: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. xii—

At Oxford we had an au pair girl named Tecla, and I could not get over the feeling that the name was a garble. I kept trying anagrams. I would say, "Set the table, Tacle." "Bring the treacle, Tecal." "Bring the meat, Cleat." "Take my plate, Clate." "What's for repas, Eclat?" "All set, Alcet?" My wife was afraid Tecla might leave.

the endangered practice of designing posters

Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2019
Above Roy R. Behrens © 2019, Poster (a collection of twenty-five bird posters). There are few things I enjoy as much as designing posters. I've created scores of them, especially in the past decade. Most often I've designed them (without charge, pro bono) for nonprofit organizations whose causes I want to help to support. But the opportunities have all but disappeared these days. Printed posters seem almost to have come to be an endangered species. Where would we display them? And for what purpose, since it is far easier to post and share the image and notification on various social media sites. Yet (to my mind) there are few things quite as beautiful as an exquisite poster on a wall. Above is what one might regard as a "metaposter," since it is a single poster made up of an arrangement of multiple posters for a local wildlife preservation site (Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Waterloo / Cedar Falls, Iowa). Too bad this practice is now passé.

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Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), pp. 37-38—

There were no septic tanks and no sewers in our village. Each home had a backhouse that had to be cleaned out once a year. For three years, when I was between ten and thirteen, I did this chore for [a woman neighbor named] Fronie. Each time she gave me five dollars, and five dollars to me then was far more than five hundred would be to me now. In those days no lime was thrown over the dung to make the task easier for the shoveler. Each time I became deathly sick, but I needed the five dollars so desperately that I saw the job through. I have no words to express the horror of those two or three hours each year. I would lie on my stomach and throw up when there was little or nothing to yield. After the job was over, I would go to the Mill Cove for a swim and to Patten Point to smell the fragrance of fir trees and bayberry bushes.

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