Solo R&B Vocal Underground

The editors of Poetry magazine have paired the following prose quotation from City Dog: Essays by W.S. Di Piero with this poem:

I was sitting in the Upper West Side studio of the painter Paul Resika. We’ve known each other nearly twenty years. I’ve seen a great many of his paintings and he has read my books. He’d been wanting to paint me, but since I didn’t have days to give up for an oil portrait, we spent a long afternoon talking, smoking cigarillos, and drinking sherry—very Philippe de Montebello—while he drew. An hour or so along I was confiding secrets (which is not my habit) and relating long-ago events that hadn’t before snagged in my consciousness. I monologued (also not my habit), I couldn’t shut up, I was being a real chiacchierone, as my family would say, wagging their hands as if flicking water from their fingertips. Roy Eldridge boiled from the cd player while I related an anecdote from my childhood, about a time when I briefly and uselessly took music lessons. “You should write about that,” Resika said. And a year later, I do, but in the writing the originating anecdote turns into an essay on how in my youth music became inseparable from physical pain. It’s pure self-portraiture. (But what is its truth?) Meanwhile, it’s three hours later and Paolo has finished two drawings, one a suave, light-handed, rather fair likeness. “Not bad, this one,” he says. “But I think I got something here.” What he got was a portrait that snapped and roared at me—an angular, anxious head that looked not so much drawn as struck. He had found, or reimagined, animal quickenings in my inner life which only I (I thought) was aware of; the image also coined a sensation very familiar to me, a crude blending of idiotic irrational joy and fevered fear of living in a world of harm.