Jack Whitten
                                1974
                                acrylic and string on canvas

1.

Ambition is the book. There are no spells. There’s no mastering anything. Revise toward gravity, where to fail is to rise.

2.

Whitten wrote: “For jazz musicians, ‘to go to the woodshed’ or to ‘woodshed’ means to practice in private, implying both the freedom to experiment in isolation and the relentless discipline of practice prior to taking ideas public.”

3. My Woodshed

A young black boy opens his mouth and instead of words or millefleur trailing out, he stuffs it with a peach. 

A black boy opens his mouth and instead of words or millefleur trailing out, he stuffs it with a peach. 

A Black boy stuffs his mouth with peaches. Each one entreats him to eat more. 

Stuffing his mouth with peaches, each one entreating him to eat more, a Black boy drifts on sweetness like a boat under a stream of paper lanterns. 

Stuffing his mouth with peaches, each one / entreating him to eat more, a Black boy drifts on //
sweetness like boats under a stream / of paper lanterns. 

Stuffing his mouth with peaches, each one / entreating him to eat more, a Black boy drifts on //
sweetness like boats under a stream / of paper lanterns. 

Stuffing his mouth with peaches (each one / entreats him to eat more), a Black boy drifts on // 
sweetness like boats under a stream / of paper lanterns. 

Stuffing his mouth with peaches, / each one entreats him to eat more, / a Black boy drifts on / 
sweetness like boats under a stream / of paper lanterns. 

Stuffing his mouth with peaches, / each one entreats him to eat more, / a Black boy drifts on 
sweetness like boats under a stream / of paper lanterns. 

4.

The string is a backslash, frozen now, but Whitten deliberately placed it on a slab of wet acrylic. Found colors he called those conjured shades, buckets of them poured in a specific order onto an enormous canvas and then worked over for it is work he would remind us with his body. He built the “developer,” a rake-like tool, and, in one gesture, dragged its forty pounds across a quarter-inch thick layer of paint. (This was, of course, after preparatory sketches.)  “Controlled chance” he called the process. The string inscribing the moment.

5. The String Section

The bit of twine in the back of meemaw’s kitchen drawer, the one with all the packets of sweet and sour sauce. The heart of a tin can telephone. What Fate allots and cuts. A sequence of characters on a computer screen. To emerge from the labyrinth changed, enter with string. Get free.

6.

                Stuffing his mouth with peaches, each one 
entreating him to eat more, a Black boy drifts on
                sweetness like boats under a stream 
of paper lanterns. Biting one 
                disrupts the brittle thinking. 
Biting one is pink as the narrow door to the river 
                pictured in the book he stains with treats.

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Last summer, I saw the Jack Whitten retrospective at MoMA. I’m embarrassed to admit I wasn’t acquainted with Whitten’s work. The twentieth century presents a gap in my art historical knowledge, particularly when abstraction expressionism and its inheritors, like Whitten, flourished. Faced with abstract paintings, I entered the exhibit with some trepidation. Despite moments of access when I notice patterns in shapes or colors, how they repeat and develop like a poem or music, more often than not I feel held at arms length by abstract art. It’s a harder kind of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure. But as I continued, passing decades of work from the 1960s to the 2010s, Whitten’s art growing in scale and complexity, I grew giddy with awe. To see a Black artist’s development over a career, innovating and transforming his practice, was inspiring to behold. What moved me most was the palpable sense of ambition in the best and truest sense. On display was a breathtaking studio log begun in the fall of 1992. On October 27, he wrote: “My use of image is a matter of faith.” On November 8, he wrote: “There must be some way to bypass the time zones: Past-Present-Future.” On December 23, he made a list called “To Avoid At All Costs.” This list contains things as varied as “Narrative,” “Male-Female Category,” “Black Bourgeois Aesthetic,” “Abstraction as Design,”“Art History,” and “Excess Emotional Baggage.” Whitten spent his entire life thinking, feeling, and working through his medium. Radical transformation and reimagining. Seeking no less than liberation and the divine. 

Last summer, some music got stuck in my head. I challenged myself to write a poem with this music using sonic rather than logical connections. The music was a word, a color, and a fruit: peach. For weeks, I was dissatisfied with my drafts. Then I thought: What if that music was the poem? The chord that needed to be played over and over? What if I riff? What if I let the seams show and make the work visible? I needed to live inside the music and what I found was Whitten’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The color gave me a way in through the pleasure of its peachy hues, an orchard of peaches, pale and dark, peaches at night and peaches in dirt, red and pink and orange and bruised brown-black. I was drawn to the paint’s textured quality: its dense, fluid impasto seemed like a model for the surface of a planet. I’m in an experimental, expansive mood when it comes to art writing. I’m interested in ekphrasis outside the bounds of the lyric poem. How does ekphrasis exist as a travelogue or a monologue or a zuihitsu, which incorporates prose and poetry? How does ekphrasis exist as a prose poem (or is it nonfiction)? What can be uncovered through research, observation, and imagination? This ode to Whitten’s artistry emerges out of this creative impulse.

//

(Note: Jack Whitten’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not in the public domain, which is why we’ve linked to it above.)