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THE TANG, THE VIKINGS, AND MR. WRIGHT
“Form is a conveyance for the spirit.”—Tang statement in the Shanghai Art Museum
The Tang could see the horseness of the horse.
Look at that canter flowing out of itself
into a field we recognize as our own love
of what we make if we make it well enough.
It was as if they could inject themselves
into their paintings, where they would be at rest.
So it was themselves they re-created
while looking at a landscape through a glass
darkly, their own self-portrait tucked into
the hills as a bluff with wind-gnarled boughs sheltering
a tiny fisherman in a wee small boat.
They became chiaroscuro on rice paper scrolls,
and the ink itself did breathe and bleed.
By the latter Ming, the Tang had devolved
into decorative scruples of imitation
as in a photograph without a mind.
At the same time, Vikings were hollering, “Skoal”
meaning “skull” when they’d scraped those bony cups clean.
And Frank Lloyd Wright said, sometime before darkness slept him
to the dead, “Design is the thing that is the thing.”
His students were sitting around, eating his food.
As architects, they liked the sound of what he said.
It seemed important; the man had style.
In other words, he was being himself,
the only but lonely entrance to the formal world
that is a lot more real than this one
by several orders of magnitude.
Andrew H. Oerke recently returned to poetry, his first love, after many years in development
work with the Peace Corps and other voluntary organizations.
Poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry,,
and in numerous other magazines. In 2006 two new books of his poetry, African
Stiltdancer and San Miguel de Allende, were published jointly by Swan Books and
the UN Society for Writers and Artists. They received the United Nations Literature Award.
Email: Andrew H. Oerke
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