Related Articles • The Pollock, Another New Poetic Form • Dante & the Response Poem • Mathemetrics

I’m married to a painter but I wasn’t always. As a matter of fact, except for Van Gogh, whose paintings move, I never got painting. They seemed so stuck on the wall. Poems, you know, you could haul right off the page and set into motion, Wendy sewing Peter’s shadow onto his shoe tips.

That all changed when Alice Notley assigned her St. Mark’s Poetry Project workshop to visit a Willem DeKooning show at a small gallery uptown and to stand in front of the paintings until we were inspired to write poetry. It took me hours, but I made it through the painting into the poem, and I’ve been able to read paintings ever since.

Mark Rothko’s one of those painters who, if you don’t stop, stop, stop, look, look and listen, can sail right by. The luminous lift-off only occurs via relaxed eyes and nonbeingness float. When I visited the incredible retrospective at the National Gallery in DC -- currently at the Whitney, 75th and Madison, New York City -- I was struck by the linear nature of his color bombs: it was like they were all (mainly) three lines, call ‘em haikus. Naw, call ‘em Rothkos, I thought, and make ‘em rectangles like the paintings. And get those colors in there while you’re at it, like a tic-tac-toe, and now you gotta ROTHKO!

How to Write a Rothko

1. A Rothko (poem) can only be written while standing in front of a Rothko (painting).
2. A Rothko is three lines, three words per line.
3. Three of these nine words must be colors, and their position in the poem must be a tic-tac-toe.
4. Like all rules of poetry, break at your own risk.

Bob Holman

Compare prices  to buy the books • Mysteries of Small Houses • The Descent of Allette

Alice Notley’s most recent book, Mysteries of Small Houses, is as luminous a float as any Rothko: autobiographical, narrative, and with a spine of language so real you relearn to walk as you read. Her previous book, The Descent of Allette was our Book of the Year in 1996.

The Poetry Project workshop was a seminal wordshop, 1974-5. In the mix: Barb Barg, Charles Bernstein, Ed Friedman, Danny Krakauer, Bob Holman, Gary Lenhart, Steve Levine, Rose Lesniak, Greg Masters, Eileen Myles, Bob Rosenthal, Simon Schuchat, James Sherry, Susie Timmons, Didi Susan W, Jeff Wright.

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Rothkos by Bob Holman

    Resolute Dark
Blue old leak
Seed green pop
Earth hold brown

        Shatter Love
Magenta     fire      breath
Calm        black     wish
Remember    pre       orange

            Bone
Quest       yellow     tease
Test        yellow     breeze
Anchor      blue       still

    More Morning
Under spree green
Midst tooled tangerine
Over placid marine

 Where the Horizon Takes You
Excuse me you
The nondividing line
Gray white blue

    Vertalign
expansive monochrome
saturaluminous
invertorientation

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