Crude Ash1
A painting of wordless paintings, a bedside of cannot
say more, milk in its simplicity, a motif for some time,
a childhood of wordplay, a fascination with shading,
an interest in waste, an apprehension of almost
beautiful, a flaw washing over, a change in the clouds,
a wheatfield of hearts falling, a landscape of decline,
a backdrop of anonymity, an I of “high” and “low,”
a puddle of noise and scream, a precise corrosion
of perhaps, a tongue in a skeletal car, a rhetoric
of randomly placed saliva, demands of fluidspeak,
a softening of focus, a ruination of old blue
eyes, a reality of no apparent scale, a sprawling
of no “here” here, an escape route that is
frozen forever, a phenomenon of sharing a bed,
a theme, an eagerness, a lack of humble jokes,
a however of things, a hope for gorgeous insults,
an arrival of sky-like hues, a renewal of everyday life,
an exhaustion of snow-capped summits, a neurotic
anxiety in flames, a coincidence of seemingly
on fire, a human talk in rare luck, a study group
about a satellite or minor god, a strategy of diffusion,
a fiction of nocturnal metaphors, a history of no
sleep, a remark of the twilight sky, an insect in split-
second descent, a profession of making signs
then abstracting them, an advanced study of one
carrot, a shape without having to force,
a county of lies, a church in the most literal sense,
a mouth of austere usual grace, a reference to
blandness, a murder with stroke-less fragments.



1 The title of the poem is an anagram of Ed Ruscha. The poem adapts language
from Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting (2009), Hayward Publishing, Southbank
Centre.
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As I was increasingly interested in the visual arts, I wanted to find another way to respond to artists and their oeuvre beyond merely depicting their work in the written language. I started reading curatorial essays, art criticism and interviews in artist books, and discovered that the language there had its own poetics that could be generative to my own writing process. "Crude Ash" (on Ed Ruscha) was the first cento coming out of this approach, which later extended to artists like Roni Horn and Rita Ackermann.

Nicholas Wong on "Crude Ash"
Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"Publishing is like joining a dinner party. Be a good guest—know what the conversations are like before you bust into the door. In other words: read magazines, read individual collections of poets you dig and poets that confuse you. Read anthologies grouped around a subject that interests you, etc. You want to contribute your own unique conversation—not just rehash what has already been said earlier that evening. The only way to do that is to find out what is going on. I’ll never understand people who want to publish who don’t want to read (and support) literary magazines. That’s like wanting to play a concert without wanting to listen to (and support) others’ music first."

via PALETTE POETRY
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What Sparks Poetry:
Nathan Spoon on Life in Public

"I hoped for this poem to expand beyond the realm of the scholarly, outward in a serious way relating to societal circumstances we are in together at present—and by societal I mean the global society of human beings sharing a planet, one tragically in a vortex of cascading concerns including war, surging debt and inflation, climate crisis, resource depletion and the crossing of planetary boundaries, growing inequality, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and the backsliding of democracy.” 
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