by Mark R. DeLong

A few years ago I shared a draft of a sonnet sequence with a poet from the Northwest I had followed for a while. I asked him if he’d give the piece a once-over and provide some critique, and his reading was perceptive and useful for me. One comment drew my attention in particular: “I fall flat on ‘beauty,’ ” he wrote. “This is the one place in the poems the image turns outward into metaphor that cannot be touched — ‘beauty’s hidden folds’ is a no-thing” he wrote, pointing out at the last line of the second sonnet.

I thought about it, wondering about beauty and no-thingness, and thinking that beauty must be something more than an empty word or a placeholder for some substantial thing that is a “better” thing. Then, I admitted and still do admit that I don’t really know what beauty is, aside from maybe being something in the “eye of the beholder,” perhaps an evaporated no-thing, really.

Nell Painter discusses her “lying twentieth-century eyes” and how “[t]hinking like a historian misled me as an artist” not too far into her memoir Old in Art School (2018), a book I picked up when I was thrashing through the first year or so of my retirement. For I had toyed with making a turn like Painter, who wrapped up an eventful career teaching and researching history at Princeton and leaped into undergraduate study of art at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and then an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design. She was finishing her sixties when she graduated with her MFA. Read more »