FrancieBobShawPlayingPerelmanBodies

Francie Shaw says of the paintings: “… each poses a question: is this play or struggle or both at once? What is the difference between terror and excitement, pleasure and pain? Who is carrying whom, who is in control?”

I say: Is this love-making or are these scenes of rape, foreplay or endgame, play or battle? Are these bodies separate, existing outside the other? In all of these paintings – and many of the poems – it’s impossible to tell. Ambiguity is androgynous.

Bob says of the paintings: “…the three figures [two bendable people and a dinosaur] are posed into an alphabet of primal postures. Spelling what? Eroticism pushing outward and intensifying or just little toy pictures? Subjectivity frames reason in these paintings. At the same time they stage flexible tragicomedies of the unnamable mixes of drive and reaction that course through our moments.”

Bob says of the words: “To try to meet this in words has been as exhilarating as those dreams where you can fly and as sobering as waking up.”

I say: FrancieBobShawPlayingPerelmanBodies, poems playing with the paintings while not being played by them. The paintings lead, the paintings travel passed the eye, away from the poems, connecting with other images, other amorphous dreams (fuss of amour), yet the poems can go places the paintings can’t, the naming wrapped around other namings:

48

I can have packed,
parked, gone through
inspection, flown and met
that day’s local infinity

I can have touched
those I love and spoken
phrases to those
I’ll never see again

Everyone knows how boring dreams are
And yes, the fulcrum only works when you’re awake
But the guy in the blue denim baseball cap
was he right when he said, “Killing me
is a war crime”?

Playing Bodies. Granary Books, 2004. www.granarybooks.com