Hello? Who’s speaking please?
Richard Hamilton, A dedicated follower of fashion, 1980.
John Ashbery selects my manuscript for the 2013 Walt Whitman Award
Yesterday The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Miami Herald, Salon, NPR , The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (where Walt Whitman served as editor) and other outlets reported that John Ashbery selected my poetry manuscript, Put Your Hands In, for the Academy of American Poets 2013 Walt Whitman Award.
About Put Your Hands In, Ashbery writes: ‘Exactly a century ago, the Armory Show brought European avant-garde art to New York. We are still experiencing its consequences. Among the works on view was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, which a derisive critic wanted to rename, ‘Explosion in a Shingle Factory.’ Both titles come to mind as one reads Chris Hosea’s Put Your Hands In, which somehow subsumes derision and erotic energy and comes out on top. Maybe that’s because ‘poetry is the cruelest month,’ as he says, correcting T.S. Eliot. Transfixed in mid-paroxysm, the poems also remind us of Samuel Beckett’s line (in Watt): ‘The pain not yet pleasure, the pleasure not yet pain.’ One feels plunged in a wave of happening that is about to crest.’
Artist Kim Bennett has long collaborated with poets in works of printmaking, painting, and multi-media. Her work was featured in last summer’s ODE TO STREET HASSLE show at Bronx Art Space. These photographs show Kim’s work-in-progress that draws on my longer, as-yet-unpublished poem “Across the Boss’ Desk.”
