A Poet Recalls Alfonso Ossorio

Lately, I've been thinking about the late artist Alfonso Ossorio, whose "Congregations" exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum is so extraordinarily beautiful. I knew Ossorio, and was fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate with him on a work for a Guild Hall exhibition some 15 years ago.

In 1980 the painter Jimmy Ernst suggested to Guild Hall's director, Enez Whipple, that the museum present a show of collaborations between poets and artists. Mr. Ernst felt that poets were underacknowledged on the arts scene out here, as true today as it was then, since poems have no financial value and poets don't make any money at what they do, while artists sometimes do.

Collaborations

Over the next couple of years Lillian Braude, along with several others, took on the project, inviting three dozen poets and three dozen artists to work on projects together, one-on-one.

The show that resulted included collaborations between Willem de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, James Schuyler and Darragh Park, Robert Dash and Doug Crase, and many more, including a kind of wooden phone booth made by Hans Hokanson; when you stepped inside the booth, you could hear Ron Padgett recite a poem.

The committee in charge of the exhibit asked me to pick an artist with whom I would like to be paired. I asked for Ossorio, and, to my surprise, he agreed. Although I'd published some by then - I'd had a couple of chapbooks and a good string of magazine publications, including The New Yorker - I wasn't exactly a household name nor was I cozily connected to the artsy Hamptons community. Mainly, I knew a lot of other poets, none of us particularly glamorous. I guess I was 25.

Like Disneyland

I'd first heard of Alfonso Ossorio through my friend the painter Josh Dayton. Josh and I had gone to high school together, and, as kids who wanted to be artists, we did what such kids do - told each other what to read, what paintings to look at, what music to listen to.

Josh had a connection with Ossorio through his family's business, and he took me over to the Creeks - this was some years later, I guess when we were about 20, in the early 1970s - to meet the man. It was like going to Disneyland. The collection was spectacular, the house was unbelievable, the studio was breathtaking, and Alfonso himself was enormously gracious and kind.

He was very supportive of young artists, and he liked the idea of artists working together - the last time I saw him, in fact, he was encouraging me to collaborate with Josh on some new works, and he also had asked me to give him some poems so that he could try to do something with them; I only wish there had been more time, and that something had come of that project.

Alfonso took Josh and me on the grand tour. Believe me when I say that experiencing the Creeks for the first time was something you simply don't forget. For years I'd seen the big crazy pile of what looked like space junk but which was, of course, a sculpture, painted in the characteristic red, white, blue, and black of many of Ossorio's outdoor works, on Montauk Highway, at the east gate to the Creeks.

But actually driving beyond it and down the driveway into the acres of carefully planted trees and shrubs, to end up at the main house, was marvelous. It was like entering a parallel universe.

But what really devastated me was the pair of Clyfford Still pictures - and they were big, very good Clyfford Stills - that hung in the entry hall, so that as one entered the house there was a Still on your left and a Still on your right. These were pictures that could have had their own room at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Collection

The collection was eclectic and wonderful - the big Pollock was gone by the time I first saw the place ("Lavender Mist," now at the National Gallery in Washington), but there were other Pollocks, and de Koonings, and Dubuffets, and works by dozens of other artists, many of whom were not familiar to me. I remember that in one upstairs area, there was a group of works by British Pop artists, some well-known and some relatively obscure.

But beyond the collection of works by these artists were Ossorio's own works. The most spectacular, on a first visit, was "INIXIT," a piece mounted flush with a wall of the house, which had a door built into it.

I can't remember if Alfonso kept the door of that piece open, or if he opened it to show us what was inside (great slabs of mirror and various iconographic objects), but I thought, and still do, that it was pure magic. Everywhere there were surprising objects.

Picking The Poem

But back to the 1980s. I'd visited the Creeks to bring Alfonso a chapbook of my poems, and he called a week or so later to say that he liked a couple of poems, one called "Puer Viatur," whose title seemed to fit with his fondness for Latin, and which is a pun on homo viatur, or "man on the road," the literary term for the genre of writing that extends from "The Odyssey" to Kerouac's "On the Road" and beyond. "Puer Viatur" means "boy on the road."

The other, which is a much better poem, is just called "Poem," and it's a dark piece of writing, with death in it, and Alfonso found all kinds of images that extended on the theme of the poem by the time he'd finished the congregation: This is the magic of the piece.

Stupefied

I played only a small role in the making of the work. My job was to write out my poem in ink on a sheet of watercolor paper. Alfonso had decided he liked my handwriting, and he instructed me to get some permanent black ink and go to it, so I wrote out the poem a few times, picked the one that looked the best, and drove it over to the Creeks. Subsequently, he mounted the text on a wooden disk and placed it near the center of the congregation.

I should mention here that I was so stupefied by the place that just about every time I went to visit - and he encouraged me to visit as often as I liked, to check on the progress of the piece - I brought a friend, because Alfonso and the Creeks were simply too much for one person; I needed to share the whole experience with someone else.

Once I brought a writing student of mine who also made outdoor sculptural pieces, and Alfonso spent time poring over photos of his pieces, and praised his work and encouraged him to continue.

The Tortoise

I believe that this may have been the afternoon when, as the three of us were sitting in a small room filled with an assortment of extremely interesting objects, I suddenly be came aware that there was something large and unusual at my feet; looking down, I saw that there was an enormous sea tortoise placed on the bottom part of the table before which I was sitting.

It took me aback, and to this day I can't remember what else may have been in the room; I think that the tortoise was the single greatest piece of interior design I've ever seen.

So I visited six or eight times over the course of many months - I can't recall exactly how long it took for him to complete the work, but it was not the only piece he was working on; I believe he liked to have a few projects going at once, and of course he also had his hands full with the Creeks' landscaping, an enormous work of art in its own right.

The Ironing Board

The studio was huge, with walls completely covered with, oh, let's say antlers, over here, neatly arranged in rows by size. There were boxes full of all manner of things - glass eyeballs, for example. There were lots of books, and work tables, and works-in-progress.

In the case of "Poem," Alfonso began with a panel, which he painted, and to which he gradually began affixing the many objects that make up the work. It's not quite as dense over all as many of the earlier congregations; although there are all sorts of objects in it, Ossorio used several larger shapes to structure the whole, the most obvious of which is a human skeleton.

He also used a large-shaded light, a big, black-faced clock from Hammacher-Schlemmer, a number of hat forms, a wooden wheel, and so on. And he descended to the Creeks' laundry room one night, stole an ironing board, stripped it, and mounted it toward the bottom of the piece, because he wanted a large diagonal form there. Whatever worked, he used.

Chained

The light was meant to remain on while the work was on view at Guild Hall. An alternate plan was to turn the light on at half-hour intervals. He also suggested that I might be chained to the congregation for a certain period of time each day - say, three hours - and would then have to read my poem aloud, while chained to this thing, every half-hour. He had all sorts of ideas.

In the end, "Poem" was just hung on a gallery wall; it spoke for itself. Keep in mind that the piece is 108 inches by 54 inches - that's 9 feet high and 4.5 feet wide. I didn't think to ask him why the clock was stopped at 11:30, so he volunteered the information - "That's the time when you either go to bed or you go out all night." He meant "you" in the general sense, although now that I think about it, that pretty much summed up my own style of living at the time.

So I continued to check on the work throughout the process of its creation, and when the show went up at Guild Hall, I visited it frequently.

Emotion In Objects

Others have commented on Alfonso's great erudition, and I can only echo what they've said - he was certainly brilliant, one of the most curious men I've ever known, interested in just about everything. He could quote Gerard Manley Hopkins by the yard and was rather disappointed that I couldn't.

There's a literary reference in the work that reflects on the imagery of the congregation and also extends the meaning of the poem - a series of letters mounted near the center of the piece spelled out, backwards (of course), lacrimae sunt rerum, a quote from Virgil that, literally translated, means "tears are things."

Commonly it's rendered as "tears are in things," but the direct metaphor is more powerful - that is to say, emotion is contained in objects. That is, the artist objectifies emotions, and certain physical objects can trigger specific feelings in us, just as when certain songs come on the car radio, you will be reminded of certain people, places, feelings.

The "Poets and Artists" show got a lot of publicity. A photo of Alfonso and me standing next to the work made the cover of Newsday's Sunday magazine - up in the corner - with a full-page photo inside. Documentary filmmakers made a good little movie about the show, interviewing a number of the participants, including Alfonso and me.

I saw Alfonso again some eight years later, in 1990, when I was writing a catalogue essay for the "III Generations" exhibit at the Arlene Bujese Gallery, when it was up on County Road 39 in Southampton.

Arlene had one or two other writers in mind for that catalogue, but Alfonso insisted that I write the essay - this of course was extremely flattering, but I mention it because it's just another instance of his interest in and support of younger artists and writers, from Jackson Pollock to Josh Dayton - he was the first major collector of Josh's work, seeing there, as he did in the case of Pollock, something that hardly anyone else had the eyes to see.

"Congestion Is Good!"

In the process of writing the catalogue, I interviewed all three artists - Alfonso, Elizabeth de Cuevas, and Dayton. I wish I'd taped my talk with Alfonso; I probably have my notes somewhere in my extremely disorganized archives. But that was the day he encouraged me to collaborate with other artists, and expressed interest in working with me again.

I saw him again on the day that the installation of the exhibition was almost complete. All three artists were there. I recall saying something to Alfonso about how crowded his part of the exhibit looked - putting it not that way, of course, but saying something like "There's so much stuff in here!" to which he immediately responded, "But you want congestion. Congestion is good!"

The Final Time

I saw him once more, on Main Street in East Hampton, before he entered the hospital for the final time, and he looked well although his voice had become somewhat raspy following surgery. His kindness and encouragement, and his manner of talking to you on your own level - I was about 25 or 26 when he made the congregation, and now that I'm 42 I realize how little I knew - meant a lot to me. I've always felt particularly gratified that I had the opportunity to see something of mine become part of one of his congregations, and I'm still astonished at the way he amplified and extended the meaning of that poem.

Poem

Someone you loved is dead,

So you go about things

As if you were dead, too. Definition:

Careful gardening,

Highly polished shoes,

Lots of smiles and nods

And affable conversation.

After a few years of this,

You notice one day a carton

Of mildewed espadrilles in the basement,

Black flowers in the yard, and,

Running out of a bush,

A small child, singing to himself,

With a broken truck in his hands.