ON THE SEX LIVES OF THE GREAT ARTISTS

Dear Son,

Irreverence is fabulous for enlivening a library.  In that category lies this book, SEX LIVES OF THE GREAT ARTISTS by Nigel Cawthorne.  It not only is an elucidating read but really funny -- I hope you enjoy it someday.  The chapter on Pablo Picasso, for instance, which Cawthorne titled "Prickasso," contains the claim by Dada poet Tristan Tzara that Picasso "had his cherry popped" by a young girl who served drinks at a bar below his studio.  Because the girl was unlike "the buxom women most male virgins hanker after," Tzara said, Picasso presumably later said about the girl's thin body and red hair: the experience had been "like screwing my father."  A lot to unpack in that statement ....

... and other such statements which later made their way into one of my longer poems, "The Erotic Life of Art: A Seance with William Carlos Williams. This poem, which I wrote at MacDowell's Art ?Colony, would not be possible without Cawthorne's book -- whose title I credit by actually citing it in the middle of the poem. The poet-critic Thomas Fink calls that poem one of my greatest feminist poems.

And that poem is a centerpiece in one of your mom's poetry books, THE AWAKENING: A Long Poem Triptych & Poetics Fragment.  So if you ever read THE AWAKENING or this poem and want to check out the reference, it would be an interesting research.  But also incredibly funny and I hope you will enjoy that experience someday.

Love,

Mom