Odilon Redon was an amazing artist. Few have captured the Symbolist moment as well. Few artists portray mystery, the ambiguous, or the debris of nightmare and daydream with as fine a touch as Redon. You can get a good sense of his oeuvre from this online exhibit from MoMa.

 

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I was digging through some of my old writings from the 1980s and found this poem. In a sense, it fits Redon, and it doesn’t:

 

Integration at Two

 

Horses in gallop-frenzy with poets in translation
Breach the walls of the money-men
Sink without a push from anyone extraordinary

. . . Climb back if you let them
You who cease for centuries and
Reappear like someone’s Prodigal
Like someone’s Nietzsche covered with dust
And choral-sounds

This echo this error is for you and yours
The troubles solved by fiction and bad fiction
The sounds recovered without any Master Tape

We who worship what you could be
Scream
Into its mic its depths
Tie urges and jokes to muscle and concrete . . . once

Walking around I am walking
Around a center that holds my eyes to the hard-wood
     Floor
And she speaks to me of real things of cars
          And office hours and red-tape flapping in the wind —

Brittle is a man who lies
About his motives
To her and for her because she
Has him and all answers break

 

 

— by Douglas Pinson