Ephemera

This is my mother, Elisabeth Stuart Wardwell. I think she must have been in her late twenties or early thirties when this photo was taken.

The bookshelf I face in my study. Often I turn books out, and I like thinking about them in conversation with each other. At right is the famous image of Mina Loy on the cover of her novel, Insel. I wrote an essay on her artworks recently, so she has been present. The essay, titled “Mina Loy: Art of the Unbeautiful True,” will soon be published in Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable (Princeton University Press, 2023).

There is a long table on which there are objects. My house was a schoolhouse and a shelf runs along the walls, which evidently was once for chalk. It now holds some of my large collection of chapbooks. The framed piece is a facsimile of one of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems (published by Granary Books). At right is the John Ashbery poem the New Yorker published shortly after his death, and also Tom Phillips’s brilliant The Heart of a Humument. The small table has on it two pieces given to me by the artist Ann Hamilton, across which is an old beaded silver necklace.

I have numerous notebooks with these kinds of notations or scraps of language, words, murmurs in my mind or that I overhear. Sometimes I write quotations from books or possible lines for poems. I don’t recall where this note originated.

The mantelpiece has a sequence of postcards and objects arranged as a quasi-narrative, from a deep mystical forest through an underwater winter to an advent into spring. This image is toward the end of the sequence, with Giotto’s Return of Mary from Nuptial Rite and François Gérard’s Amor and Psyche. The drawing on the far right is Michelangelo’s The Dream of Human Life. There are also various creatures, insects, vessels, and a tiny ancient bell (for a sheep?) I bought at a flea market in Cadaqués, Spain. This final ensem- ble is connected by wings and music. The sculpture on the stool, which you can partially see, is called How to Fly and is by my friend Augusta Talbot. “The Thrum” is the earliest bit of writing I have of mine, I think we were asked to invent an instrument. The hanging violin is an antique handmade Christmas ornament (I played the violin once upon a time).

At the back of my house are eight windows, four of which face south. The sky is constantly shifting, and I spend a lot of time watching it and the altering play of light on the trees. The sky is another form of narration.