To Die Next To You - Softcover
TO DIE NEXT TO YOU, poems by Rodger Kamenetz/ drawings by Michael Hafftka is a unique event in the literary and artistic world.
Two brother artists, both nurtured by the dream world and its imaginal colors and sacred words, have joined to produce a single work of rare quality. More that a collaboration this work is a journey into the power of the unconscious depth of word and image, in which master painter and poet present verbal and visual displays of agony and joy, destruction and falling, love and dying. This project has taken ten years to produce, from the first poems that emerged from Rodger Kamenetz' encounter with dreamwork to three years of gestation as Michael Hafftka internalized the poems and reconstituted them in images that serve as imaginative midrash, annotation, anticipation and anti-illustration. The drawings offer brilliant first readings of the poems without limiting their scope, and it is equally possible to read the poems as reflections and interpretations of the drawings. The brilliant design of Andrew Shurtz allows the reader to move between worlds of poetry and painting, without losing trace of either one. Advanced praise for this new work has been overwhelming. Poet and art critic David Shapirohails Kamenetz as "one of the secret best poets in America" and finds in his work "the fire in the heart of the great transcendental Romantics." Turning his eye to Hafftka's"fabulous anti-illustrations" he compares the artist to Soutine and Bacon and finds him "a humanist in the line of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Meyer Shapiro." John Yau, another greatly accomplished poet and art critic, says that Kamenetz has sent us poems that "are mysterious and open- both parable and their opposite, anti-parable", while Hafftka "with pen and ink" "registers the turmoil of being afflicting the inhabitants of the strange world called Now. " Together, Yau writes, poet and artist have "achieved the miraculous."
Two brother artists, both nurtured by the dream world and its imaginal colors and sacred words, have joined to produce a single work of rare quality. More that a collaboration this work is a journey into the power of the unconscious depth of word and image, in which master painter and poet present verbal and visual displays of agony and joy, destruction and falling, love and dying. This project has taken ten years to produce, from the first poems that emerged from Rodger Kamenetz' encounter with dreamwork to three years of gestation as Michael Hafftka internalized the poems and reconstituted them in images that serve as imaginative midrash, annotation, anticipation and anti-illustration. The drawings offer brilliant first readings of the poems without limiting their scope, and it is equally possible to read the poems as reflections and interpretations of the drawings. The brilliant design of Andrew Shurtz allows the reader to move between worlds of poetry and painting, without losing trace of either one. Advanced praise for this new work has been overwhelming. Poet and art critic David Shapirohails Kamenetz as "one of the secret best poets in America" and finds in his work "the fire in the heart of the great transcendental Romantics." Turning his eye to Hafftka's"fabulous anti-illustrations" he compares the artist to Soutine and Bacon and finds him "a humanist in the line of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Meyer Shapiro." John Yau, another greatly accomplished poet and art critic, says that Kamenetz has sent us poems that "are mysterious and open- both parable and their opposite, anti-parable", while Hafftka "with pen and ink" "registers the turmoil of being afflicting the inhabitants of the strange world called Now. " Together, Yau writes, poet and artist have "achieved the miraculous."
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap:
JOINT STATEMENT: TO DIE NEXT TO YOU
Poetry and drawing are brothers that emerge from the dark of sleep holding hands-- bringing fresh images out of the vividness of dreams, giving birth to strange monsters who may be saviors, and charging words and paint with electricity which streams from the place in the soul where love and pain are one word.
About Michael Hafftka
Michael Hafftka, has a way with paint, and he can pace his sometimes very large paintings in such a way that we want to see what will happen next. ---John Russell, The New York Times
New York has scarcely seen figure paintings of such unrelenting solemnity and exasperation, or with so original an authority, since Francis Bacon brought his first exhibition to the city. Like him, Hafftka can be characterized as both an eccentric visionary and an increasingly dazzling technician whose virtuoso painterly expressivity and skills invite comparison with the masters.
--Sam Hunter, Princeton University,author of The Museum of Modern Art New York, Abrams Books
Hafftka's explorations are so profound and his presentation of them is so strong that they take on the character of myth. ... Perhaps it is enough to say that his work is powerful, original, and superbly painted.
--John Caldwell, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Hafftka is a marvelously resourceful Neo-Expressionist in command of technique, subject matter and, most important, vision. He's also one of the best young painters to have come along in a decade, without posturing or pretense or super evident jockeying for art-world position. Hafftka is too hideously virtuous for the latter; and, if virtue is its own reward, it is also, in this case, proof of an astonishing integrity of style.
Gerrit Henry, Art In America
About Rodger Kamenetz
Rodger Kamenetz's very exciting and original poems are a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew.--- Yehudah Amichai
Rodger Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names."--Louise Erdrich
The Jew in the Lotus is a book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying them. -- Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times
What's so exciting about The History of Last Night's Dream is that it talks about how there's a whole other life that we are living when we sleep and that our dreams are there as offerings and gifts to us if we only recognize what the dreams are there to teach us.--- Oprah Winfrey
Terra Infirma is a haunting memoir, deeply felt, poignant, tragic-- funny-- powerful, and memorable for the poetic precision of its language.--- Walker Percy
From the Back Cover:
Poetry and drawing are brothers that emerge from the dark of sleep holding hands-- bringing fresh images out of the vividness of dreams, giving birth to strange monsters who may be saviors, and charging words and paint with electricity which streams from the place in the soul where love and pain are one word.
About Michael Hafftka
Michael Hafftka, has a way with paint, and he can pace his sometimes very large paintings in such a way that we want to see what will happen next. ---John Russell, The New York Times
New York has scarcely seen figure paintings of such unrelenting solemnity and exasperation, or with so original an authority, since Francis Bacon brought his first exhibition to the city. Like him, Hafftka can be characterized as both an eccentric visionary and an increasingly dazzling technician whose virtuoso painterly expressivity and skills invite comparison with the masters.
--Sam Hunter, Princeton University,author of The Museum of Modern Art New York, Abrams Books
Hafftka's explorations are so profound and his presentation of them is so strong that they take on the character of myth. ... Perhaps it is enough to say that his work is powerful, original, and superbly painted.
--John Caldwell, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Hafftka is a marvelously resourceful Neo-Expressionist in command of technique, subject matter and, most important, vision. He's also one of the best young painters to have come along in a decade, without posturing or pretense or super evident jockeying for art-world position. Hafftka is too hideously virtuous for the latter; and, if virtue is its own reward, it is also, in this case, proof of an astonishing integrity of style.
Gerrit Henry, Art In America
About Rodger Kamenetz
Rodger Kamenetz's very exciting and original poems are a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew.--- Yehudah Amichai
Rodger Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names."--Louise Erdrich
The Jew in the Lotus is a book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying them. -- Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times
What's so exciting about The History of Last Night's Dream is that it talks about how there's a whole other life that we are living when we sleep and that our dreams are there as offerings and gifts to us if we only recognize what the dreams are there to teach us.--- Oprah Winfrey
Terra Infirma is a haunting memoir, deeply felt, poignant, tragic-- funny-- powerful, and memorable for the poetic precision of its language.--- Walker Percy
Praise for TO DIE NEXT TO YOU
I was stunned by the collaboration between Rodger Kamenetz and Michael Hafftka. It is a retrospective and duet.
Rodger Kamenetz is one of the secret best poets in America. He has created poems that are part of a dreaming community, and little do we know, says Shelley, how beautiful fire may be. In Rodger Kamenetz's work I feel the fire in the heart of the great transcendental Romantics. What I hear dominantly is the unwillingness to ameliorate. He never whines nor does he abandon "the task." Like the fabulous anti-illustrations throughout the book, he is part of the intransigent realism that makes The House of the Dead into the House of the Living.
Rodger Kamenetz is a leader and a prophet, a visionary with a vision, when most of us "are testing out wings, our straining struts." May this marvelous lyric tenderness continue.
Hafftka is a humanist in the line of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Meyer Shapiro --his are wild notations that amplify the poems in an inescapable flesh and fire. Hafftka is always capable of self-destroying machines, there is in him Soutine and Bacon, a space opened for the scream of creatures. He is not afraid of pathos and the nightmares of Goya.
There is in Hafftka and in Kamenetz grand refusals to live by charm. Oh, they are both charming, but they are also horrifying and embodied. Hafftka rhymed with Kafka, of course.
--David Shapiro author of After A Lost Original, Lateness (poetry), and Mondrian's Flowers , Jasper Johns (art criticism)
The poet Rodger Kamenetz has traveled to a far-off land where "Rodger Kamenetz is a homeless name,/ A name of feathers." The poems he sends us from that place are mysterious and open - both parable and their opposite, anti-parable. It is poetry of paradox and lament, love and memory, eros and grief: "I live in the past which I invented." No matter what depths or heights Kamenetz reaches - gravity is inescapable, after all - he does not lose his sense of concentration and wonderment. The artist Michael Hafftka accompanied Kamenetz on this journey, and, as one might expect, they traveled by their separate ways. With pen and ink, Hafftka registered the turmoil of being afflicting the inhabitants of this strange world called Now. To Die Next To You is where "History waits for me in the powder of the stars-- the dust." This is the now we live in. Anyone who can make something of it has achieved the miraculous. In To Die Next To You, Kamenetz and Hafftka have done exactly that. Go on their journey with them, and carry this book with you on yours.
--John Yau author of A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, and Further Adventures in Monochrome
I was stunned by the collaboration between Rodger Kamenetz and Michael Hafftka. It is a retrospective and duet.
Rodger Kamenetz is one of the secret best poets in America. He has created poems that are part of a dreaming community, and little do we know, says Shelley, how beautiful fire may be. In Rodger Kamenetz's work I feel the fire in the heart of the great transcendental Romantics. What I hear dominantly is the unwillingness to ameliorate. He never whines nor does he abandon "the task." Like the fabulous anti-illustrations throughout the book, he is part of the intransigent realism that makes The House of the Dead into the House of the Living.
Rodger Kamenetz is a leader and a prophet, a visionary with a vision, when most of us "are testing out wings, our straining struts." May this marvelous lyric tenderness continue.
Hafftka is a humanist in the line of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Meyer Shapiro --his are wild notations that amplify the poems in an inescapable flesh and fire. Hafftka is always capable of self-destroying machines, there is in him Soutine and Bacon, a space opened for the scream of creatures. He is not afraid of pathos and the nightmares of Goya.
There is in Hafftka and in Kamenetz grand refusals to live by charm. Oh, they are both charming, but they are also horrifying and embodied. Hafftka rhymed with Kafka, of course.
--David Shapiro author of After A Lost Original, Lateness (poetry), and Mondrian's Flowers , Jasper Johns (art criticism)
The poet Rodger Kamenetz has traveled to a far-off land where "Rodger Kamenetz is a homeless name,/ A name of feathers." The poems he sends us from that place are mysterious and open - both parable and their opposite, anti-parable. It is poetry of paradox and lament, love and memory, eros and grief: "I live in the past which I invented." No matter what depths or heights Kamenetz reaches - gravity is inescapable, after all - he does not lose his sense of concentration and wonderment. The artist Michael Hafftka accompanied Kamenetz on this journey, and, as one might expect, they traveled by their separate ways. With pen and ink, Hafftka registered the turmoil of being afflicting the inhabitants of this strange world called Now. To Die Next To You is where "History waits for me in the powder of the stars-- the dust." This is the now we live in. Anyone who can make something of it has achieved the miraculous. In To Die Next To You, Kamenetz and Hafftka have done exactly that. Go on their journey with them, and carry this book with you on yours.
--John Yau author of A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, and Further Adventures in Monochrome
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherSix Gallery Press
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1926616502
- ISBN 13 9781926616506
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages112
- IllustratorHafftka Michael
- Rating
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To Die Next To You
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Six Gallery Press
(2013)
ISBN 10: 1926616502
ISBN 13: 9781926616506
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. Hafftka, Michael (illustrator). 112 pages. 9.90x8.00x0.40 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # 1926616502
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