![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/SuitorCVR300dpiRGBaerio_1024x1024.jpg\")
<\/a>Since his death in 2011, Edwin Parker \u2018Cy\u2019 Twombly, Jr. has emerged as a key figure of 20th-century art, even as many of his contemporaries and followers have fallen behind. Ironic confirmation of his importance comes from the many art enthusiasts who dismiss his paintings and sculptures, reminiscent of those who disliked such transformative inventors as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol long after their significance became unarguable. Among Twombly\u2019s admirers, meanwhile, is the poet Joshua Rivkin, whose close identification and deep research into the artist led him to publish a biography of Twombly titled Chalk<\/em> (Melville House, 2018).<\/h4>\nThis surprisingly controversial work thrust Rivkin deep into the troubled commerce of contemporary art.\u00a0Rivkin, who has a discerning appreciation for art and artists, got himself in trouble not by his choice of artist, for while Twombly may not appeal to everyone\u2019s taste, his work is at worst baffling, not offensive like some of his peers. Rather, Rivkin\u2019s biography got him into trouble precisely because of the kind of candor that only honest admiration can propel. Any field where there is as much money, power, and passion as art wields today will attract players who want to limit and control its discourse, and Chalk<\/em> threatens them. Now Rivkin has followed Chalk<\/em> with Suitor<\/em>, a “slim volume of poetry” in which he turns the same sharp eye and candid insight on himself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Suitor<\/em> I am a different kind of lover of truth now Since his death in 2011, Edwin Parker \u2018Cy\u2019 Twombly, Jr. has emerged as a key figure of 20th-century art, even as many of his contemporaries and followers have fallen behind. Ironic confirmation of his importance comes from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":54823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[3316],"class_list":["post-54822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-joshua-rivkin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/SuitorCVR300dpiRGBaerio_1024x1024.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 02:03:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54822"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70689,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54822\/revisions\/70689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Perhaps it shouldn\u2019t surprise readers that Suitor<\/em> and Chalk<\/em> illuminate each other in sophisticated ways. Embedded at the center of Suitor<\/em> is a ten-part prose meditation on two men, one the author\u2019s father and the other a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Fritz Haber (1868\u20131934). “The Haber Problem” begins:<\/h4>\n
More than a few parallels between my father and Fritz Haber: scientists, Jews, storytellers, obsessive, organized, thoughtful, ambitious, difficult, intelligent, stubborn, exiles, husbands, fathers, sons.<\/h4>\n
That said, the important parallel is that both were scientists. The senior Rivkin is a renowned oceanographer who studies the aquatic food web, while Haber invented an industrial-scale process for producing ammonia, which led to both high-grade fertilizers and explosives. He helped weaponize chlorine gas, arguably the most horrific weapon used in World War I, and did early work on what became Zyklon B, the principal poison used by the Nazis to gas Jews. Half the world\u2019s food production is made possible by ammonia fertilizer; the bomb that Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was made of the same agricultural material. So was the cargo that destroyed the harbor in Beirut, Lebanon, on August 4th. The Haber “problem” is not just his, nor Dr. Rivkin\u2019s: it is the dilemma of all science.<\/h4>\n
The hero and the villain are one: \u201cthe same science and the same person, doing both.\u201d Haber\u2019s wife killed herself in response. Rivkin\u2019s father\u2019s crimes are more mundane: a workaholic and an absentee father whose wife divorced him and whose son suffered his frequent absences \u2014 not all that different from so many fathers\u2019 misdeeds. Rivkin\u2019s father is gone three months, five months, away when Joshua\u2019s brother is born: \u201cI know him best by departures and arrivals.\u201d And when his eager family go to meet his return, \u201cHe stays at the dock to help organize the unloading of the samples. We drive home without him.\u201d<\/h4>\n
Eventually, the window into manhood that each father presents becomes a mirror in which the son glimpses himself. Now his interest in Twombly, in art and poetry, makes sense as a vocational alternative to the seeming moral vacuum of science. Art, after all, is all about values. And within Suitor<\/em>, the poems that bookend “The Haber Problem” question and explore how to live: how to be a son and a father and, in between, a man. It may not seem a timely concern, when so much social attention is focused on a welcome, indeed long-overdue reappraisal of women and a new, cultural acquaintance with their experience, but Rivkin shows that the same myopic society that overlooks women misrepresents men as well.<\/h4>\n
Poetry is Joshua Rivkin\u2019s art, but he approaches it with the keen observational powers of a scientist. Children learn to model themselves after their parents, but will often closely watch other adults where possible or necessary. In “The Suitors,” a series of fifteen poems, young Joshua, deprived for long stretches of his father\u2019s example, observes the men who court his divorced mother to see what she seeks in a man: their looks, their clothes, how they act.<\/h4>\n
He had a shock of red hair, boyish good looks.
\nHe made things with his hands: a copper sculpture for my sister.<\/h4>\nDrinking kept him young and talking and sad.
\nOn a dinner menu he drew my mother perfectly in purple crayon.<\/h4>\nOne night he slept on our lawn.
\nA man can remake anything about himself except his blood.<\/h4>\nYears later, she said, \u201cYou know, he was never all there.\u201d
\nOne night he slept on our roof.<\/h4>\nForgive us our absence. Forgive us desire.
\nI wanted him to stay.
\n(Suitors 3)<\/h4>\nIf “The Suitors” looks closely at the men who courted his mother, the sixteen titled poems are about grown-up dating, what the son learns from observing his mother. They underscore in verse form Gore Vidal\u2019s prosaic conviction that all sexuality is universal, that anatomy notwithstanding, when it comes to behavior, gender is a conviction, not a fact. And while they explore the outer orbit of desire, they keep in mind that the goal of pursuit may not always be capture, but there are genuine rewards for getting it right:<\/h4>\n
I say you and mean our life together
\nwill be a picturesque postcard<\/h4>\nfrom the Cape of Good Cheer,
\nthe Cape of Wonder.<\/h4>\nOther days it will be a typhoon,
\nwarm waters gathered into storm.<\/h4>\nI am divided
\nand unsure in so many things<\/h4>\nexcept this:
\nthe end of every suitor is rest.<\/h4>\nTo touch the hem of your dress
\nor the seam of your suit<\/h4>\nand leave it. The body waits.
\nWe have the serious business<\/h4>\nof living: unpack boxes
\nof books, unroll newspaper<\/h4>\nfrom glasses, fill cabinets
\nwith bowls and measuring cups.<\/h4>\nWe invite our friends.
\nJoin us. We\u2019ve made a place at our table<\/h4>\nThe table we bought at the flea market
\nand carried five blocks home.<\/h4>\nI set it with your plates
\nand my silverware.
\n(Suitor\u2019s Dream 1)<\/h4>\nNow that he has started a family of his own, settled in Utah, and published these poems written from his youthful experience, there can be no doubt that Joshua Rivkin will continue to write accurately and candidly about his ongoing discovery of how we live today, and to find what he has called “a poem below this one \/ where I know more.”<\/h4>\n
\nJoshua Rivkin
\nRed Hen Press
\n88 pp.
\n$16.95<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"