-My project for Visible Language, a rearranging of a
Philip Levine poem, was lost in the ether of the internet, but for the best: I ended up writing an even better one about Degas telling a student in the forties how to give lyrical handjobs, which I'm going to include in its entirety here.
“Milky Forty,” Done Right:
M. Degas, Twenty-One, Teaches Freddie Durfee that Intermediate Downward Art, Detroit, 1942
(Reimagining of Philip Levine’s “M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School, Detroit, 1942”)
M. Degas looked down & spoke:
“I remember, at worst, I believed
intellectual students who bucked forever,
except for Gertrude,
Gertrude Bimmler,
who added her help, as I knew it,
from that past at school--”
“You’ve done
what before?”
“I have.”
“Could I?”
“You’ve to ask a bold line, confidently,
looking to the possible: Way before
Gertrude, I did
Lucas Warshowsky, twenty--”
“Go on, M. Degas!” he shouted.
"--The room dark, this
precisely incorrect playground
of an isosceles science. I looked
back, diagonally, left,
begun with this--”
“Go on, M. Degas!” he repeated.
“I’d be bordering the pursed
minutes I created from store--”
“What minutes?”
“--On the one clock, in the study. It was
not exactly the most handmade
stroke you could have,
but it was to separate the roof
and the dark of the room,
for melted candy of maples,
and to represent walks begun, not
for you to have back…always a hand
of blackboard, the triangle cracked
from desks and his lips.
He quaked to the broken blackboard,
shivered,
and no one moved on.
The eleven April winds would
smile. Their trees stood back,
the early snow not swaggering,
all raised and repeated chalk,
for she knew a piece of what I done.
--But I have added another thought now.”
M. Degas mused particular until
the hypotenuse of the elms,
as though in complicity,
could have moved a barn.
