Sean
Singer
Van Gogh Legerdemain
Niet,
nooit, nimmer is the Dutch way of saying no, never, never, and
it is exactly what you don’t want to hear from your love as you
sleep on a straw mat in a straw hut, in Etten. It’s 1888: Vincent
says: I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place
where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime. He thinks
razors, yellow, crows. Oddly, Theo reports his brother’s last words
were: “La tristesse durera
toujours,” the sadness will last forever, and Vincent—saw
everything in yellow, and yellow absinthe, yellow corneas, yellow
envelopes, foxglove, and tinted narrow stalks, perhaps swallowed
paint hollowed with lead—was poisoned? Radiographical examinations
show he reused many canvases. He painted things
as they themselves feel
them to be. Hokusai’s “waves are claws and the ship is caught in
them, you feel it.” The women washing at the Langlois Bridge at
Arles shows a sickening preponderance of yellow, with its dynamite
corners and blonde asterisks. Once a blue Zouave asked Vincent what
the hell he was doing there and he twisted like a ginger-colored
whirlwind and said fuck, I paint them well.
Sean Singer
Sean
Singer’s first book
Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize,
selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from
the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark. He
lives in Harlem,
New York City.