dc holt, poet

Life As Art.
poetsorg: A collage of photographs of the participants of the New York Women’s Literary Salons, 1975-1976. Photographs by Freda Leinwand.

poetsorg:

A collage of photographs of the participants of the New York Women’s Literary Salons, 1975-1976. Photographs by Freda Leinwand.

I Posed Nude Once

I posed nude once and while your

strokes were hard and deep they

revealed little beneath the solid color.

 

I was mere and silent while sitting baring

nothing, everything, a part of the drama.

 

Perhaps I reflected glimpses of a collective

conscious, likelier still an uninhibited spontaneity

you left long ago on the side of that well worn road.

 

Such a preoccupation you had with my hazel eyes

quick to roll during one of your rants.  I settled for

less and reveled  in old albums housing new dust.

 

But brush strokes lacked and failed to execute

my nerves of ecstasy.

 

Published in, In the Belly of Delights, 2013

Hurricane

Clouds swelled

gray ‘til so heavy

they wept for days

drenching a still, concrete

silence.

Solemn rains searching

for brown grass,

dried branches, parched

lips, poured through thin

corridors,

seeking work.

 

Published in, In the Belly of Delights, 2013

Diplomacy

Welcome to my vernacular.  It is a bit

North and a bit West.  The words enter

my sentence structure like block pieces

of an antiquated video game.  They fall

off my tongue in rhythmic waves, though

a jab from the mouth without its dam

stings like a closed fist without a lexicon.

Words are playful and malleable, to be

created and reformed, versed and reversed,

pronounced and announced,  covered in a

garb of diction and annunciation.  Yet, words

and intonation without forethought, or impaired

spontaneity can be a cocked thirty-eight

pointed with no compass.  But, what are words

without intent?   Possibly a leaky facet of

erroneous drivel or the extraneous round

of an aimless rifle.  Words are one part

deliberation and one part consideration boiled over

the blue flame of temper and moderation.  The speech

must have all of its parts.  Or else bullets fly, bombs

race for targets, empires fall and power is lost.  Words

plead and fight fierce, but without value are

strikes of apathy or tyranny.

 

Published in, In the Belly of Delights, 2013

Unfiltered

I tell of a story—-

working my hands deep

into rich dark life-giving

soil, kneading and sewing,

raising an inside greenery

of natural peace to calm

a non-stop mind, thoughts

without sign posts.  My filter

has rusted beyond a quick fix

allowing a steady breach in

a theoretical dam—-now

compromised—-abnormal.

Fearless honesty flows rampant,

unapologetic, revealing inconvenient,

unyielding truths—-infallible forces

created from the sudden impact

following a toddler’s simple wave.

Medications, inoculations become

sedations, frustrations—-awake, sovereign

in my moments, baring a smooth indentation

on the writing side of my crudest of fingers—-

small, dry hands, deceptively wrinkled, inking

what the mouth only once could say.

 

Published in, In the Belly of Delights, 2013.

newyorker: Nobody knows how old the Russian-born photographer Nina Leen was when she died, in 1995. Judging from her obituary, information about Leen is scarce. She lived in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to the U.S., where she became one of Life magazine’s first female photographers, in the nineteen-forties. She shot countless assignments for the magazine, including more than fifty cover stories, and produced fifteen photo books. Her most well-known subjects were animals (including her dog Lucky), American women and adolescents, and the Irascibles, a group of abstract artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Though many of Leen’s assignments were quite pedestrian—her photos have titles like “A Couple Looking for a House to Buy,” “Children Attending a Birthday Party,” and “American Women Playing Bridge”—her images are packed with as much violence, sexual tension, and mystery as any David Lynch film. Her photos wouldn’t look out of place next to Cindy Sherman’s on a gallery wall. But, unlike Lynch or Sherman, Leen found tension in the real world, and her subjects weren’t actors—they were just everyday people living out their lives. And while a quick search on the Internet will turn up photo captions, why bother? After all, sometimes knowing less is much more interesting. —James Pomerantz on the photography of Nina Leen. Click here to view additional photos: http://nyr.kr/NWEGWY  

newyorker:

Nobody knows how old the Russian-born photographer Nina Leen was when she died, in 1995. Judging from her obituary, information about Leen is scarce. She lived in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to the U.S., where she became one of Life magazine’s first female photographers, in the nineteen-forties. She shot countless assignments for the magazine, including more than fifty cover stories, and produced fifteen photo books. Her most well-known subjects were animals (including her dog Lucky), American women and adolescents, and the Irascibles, a group of abstract artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Though many of Leen’s assignments were quite pedestrian—her photos have titles like “A Couple Looking for a House to Buy,” “Children Attending a Birthday Party,” and “American Women Playing Bridge”—her images are packed with as much violence, sexual tension, and mystery as any David Lynch film. Her photos wouldn’t look out of place next to Cindy Sherman’s on a gallery wall. But, unlike Lynch or Sherman, Leen found tension in the real world, and her subjects weren’t actors—they were just everyday people living out their lives. And while a quick search on the Internet will turn up photo captions, why bother? After all, sometimes knowing less is much more interesting.

—James Pomerantz on the photography of Nina Leen. Click here to view additional photos: http://nyr.kr/NWEGWY

 

My latest book.

In the Belly of Delights is a collection of poems I’ve worked on for five years and includes some poems from my college days. 

Unsubscribe to Normal

With a smack I was off

the list—-unsubscribed—-

though never would I have

volunteered knowing the strict

parameters and thin margins

never would I have wanted

to be molded so neatly, packaged

so tight, right—-unable to voice

the mass without first voicing the self

—-mine didn’t belong to such curb appeal,

rather to shadows and deeps.  I am an

outlier with wrong speech, wrong walk,

but I get there just the same—-though

perhaps in a grander world of softer petals,

vivid hues, and purest of honesty without

daily filters and fashion lenses.