NYTimes WRITERS ON WRITING By DIANE ACKERMAN
Poems Foster Self-Discovery
This wasn't a planned book, but one that geysered up naturally over a year and a half, during which I wrote poems daily. I began writing them to corral the unruly emotions that arose during intense psychotherapy, a process I explain a little in this excerpt from "Omens of Winter":
Poems arrive as meteorites.
Collecting them, I try my best to impart
impulses, the Morse code of the heart,
but I do not understand the vernacular
of fear that jostles me until art occurs,
or why knowing you from afar
spurs hours of working myself into the stars.
Well, I do know, but I fight its common sense:
I try to stabilize us through eloquence.
It's an old story, better told than I tell,
how artists shape what hurts like hell
(usually love) into separate empires
of lust, tenderness, and lesser desires
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NYTimes Arts By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF
What Documenta Meant to Them
On Saturday, the huge international art exposition Documenta 11 opens in the small German city of Kassel and remains on view through Sept. 15. Begun in 1955 and now held every five years, Documenta is, in the words of the artist Joseph Kosuth, "This moment when the artists of America, Europe, Asia and Africa are fused together as a real global community."
NYTimes Arts By ALAN RIDING
The Art of the New, the Art of the Deal
In one sense, then, Documenta 11 is simply mirroring the existing globalization of contemporary art.
Thoughts, wrote Nietzsche, are shadows of our feelings: always darker, emptier, and simpler than these. And the written word, it strikes me, is but a shadow of our thoughts. 