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Praise
for
Visions: Paintings Seen Through the Optic of Poetry,
by Marc Elihu Hofstadter
Visions:
Paintings by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Chang Dai-chien,
Georgia O'Keeffe and California Impressionists Seen Through
the Optic of Poetry.
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Marc
Hofstadter wields an optical instrument that captures the rays
that emanate from the interiors of things, rather than from their
outsides. This is what makes him a poet, an excellent one. I believe,
as he does, that the moment is the key to the eternal and color
the key to the invisible.
—Yves
Bonnefoy
Following
the Chinese dictum, "paintings are silent poems," Marc
Hofstadter bequeaths the canvas word. So before Pollock he utters:
"No room to breathe/in this cacophony of snow." And
before the late gloomy Rothko, he hears the cry under the paint:
"Death conquers all/yet there's movement/in the dark sea
below it." Like the great Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, he
watches Picasso's blue dancing in chains. And then chats luminously
from the canvas.
—Willis
Barnstone
To
read Marc Hofstadter's Visions is to feel you're walking
through an intimate museum. One or two paintings hang in each
hushed, whitewashed room. The light filters in. And then, magically,
each painting begins to speak. Zen-like, Hofstadter sets his spare
evocations against "reality, white,/which is unknown to us,"
so that we're left to contemplate again the mysteries of art and
artist, color and consciousness, and to remember that "sometimes
life's joys are small."
—Kim
Addonizio
The
big questions—love, death, life—evolve in the painter's
mind, flow out of the brush, and take shape and color as they
hit the canvas. Why didn't I realize this before? These poems
put me in that mind, as if, for a moment, I am the painter.
—Clive
Matson
Published by Scarlet Tanager Books.
ISBN
0-9670224-5-2, Paper, 72 pages, $14.00
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