What is Poetry? Part 2

By Jeffrey Thomson

The light
that points
the way

in the fog.
The light
in the fog

that thickens
and reveals
the fog’s

cold breath.
The fog
as well.

​

This group of paintings uses blue-as-subject -poetry explored through abstraction; an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air (John Ashbery on Joan Mitchell) and the pulling my own stoop-shouldered kind of blues across paper (Carl Phillips in his poem blue).  I'm looking to Joan Mitchell's painting vocabulary as inspiration, particularly her cool end of the spectrum paintings married with all the poets I've ever loved and their blue words.