Marjorie Welish

Marjorie Welish Poems

Marjorie Welish Biography

Marjorie Welish (born June 2, 1944) is an American poet, artist, and art critic. Welish is a graduate of Columbia University and received her M.F.A. degree from Vermont College and Norwich University. She is also a painter and is represented by Baumgartner Gallery (New York) and Aaron Galleries (Chicago). She lives in New York City and teaches art and literary criticism and art history at Pratt Institute; she has also frequently taught poetry at Brown University. Welish was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University in 2005. Welish's The Annotated 'Here' and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing on art has appeared in Art in America, Art International, Art News, BOMB (magazine), Partisan Review, and Salmagundi. A collection of her art criticism came out in 1999 entitled, Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960. In April 2001, a conference at the University of Pennsylvania was held to compile Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Cambridge University Press), a retrospective collection of papers and presentations given on her work, as well as a selection of Welish's writing and painting. She has received grants and fellowships from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Fifth Floor Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the International Studio Program, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.)

The Best Poem Of Marjorie Welish

Weeping Branch

Mist in modern discourse:
protesting decor, Lavender Mist.
Dismissive of mist's specifications
and spacing on canvas, you now have

know-how - decorative, unless it is
axiomatic lyricism; the lyric,
not too decorative, unless it is
complacent. Prejudicial against lyric

when he said too decorative,
and so-so. Begetting
a folio.
No synonymy here.

You and your crazy appetite
for pink, embracing the entire antipathy
and craze. Pink and black automotive
rhetoric, half camp / half criticism, fuchsia

usage arousing fear with precisely arborescent
irony toward consensus which does undo, leaps out at the reader.
Decor if and only if complacent pastel.
The world made up of brains in vats.

The world is a boat.
The world is dated half-truth:
1200; the author says 1950: which
something: epical, lyrical, epical-lyrical,

dramatic - which omitted category
is it?: 1968; yes, but which 1968?: 1789 or 1815;
1855 or 1890 or 1913 or 1948?
Now we are of the belief

there is an epistemology for all occasions,
systemic black and silver, silver and error.
Satyric pink and black proclaimed again
face to face, and on the mouth.

2
An answer obscuring lyricism, the lyric
the lyre
in radio waves. Prejudicial against
the lyric, he bruised it

then he took it from a confusion
of lyricism and lyric
and the calligram. Dissent and enterprising
letters so begetting a folio: the lyric.

You and your crazy cocktails, pink and black,
lyric silvered
and Four Saints, revealing her period
lyricism.

Marjorie Welish Comments