Just Because: 'Chaïm Soutine: The Errant Road, 1939'

'Windy Day, Auxerre,' by Chaïm Soutine ca. 1939                                         The Phillips Collection

"This poem is from a series based on a decades-long fascination with the landscapes of the early-twentieth-century painter Chaïm Soutine," writes poet Cole Swensen. "The critic Clarisse Nicoïdski claimed that Soutine was the painter 'who made the wind visible.' This series tries to capture and continue Soutine’s synesthetic grasp of the world." Soutine (1893-1943) was an Expressionist artist. Born in Belarus, he moved to Paris in 1913 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His paintings, focusing as they do on shape, texture, and feeling, are seen as a bridge between the more classical form of Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. from poem-a-day:

as if a road could be otherwise but geometry
defies the man who is lost on the road that
the trees want to reach and reach down
to his walking on
along a verticality that defies
the requirements of normative perspective
and so he will reach, and the trees against chalk—
the gesture of the arm extended is central
to all Soutine's work be it a branch or an ache
or a split of the face, going off. In this case
can you say that a man is lost just because
you cannot distinguish him from the background.