for Mel Bochner, 1940-2025
“Doubt, thy name is certainty”
Mel’s a word that rimes with tell, and gel, and sell, and bell.
When it rings, I think Mel!
When I’m in the city, where he was wont to dwell,
Tribeca means Mel! And so on, for gel and sell.
And for smell, as well.Rime can be trusted every time
to obscure the crime. But Mel didn’t yell.
He lived in a domestic haven of art, not hell.
With attention focused on syllable and sense,
on gibberish and smarts, his endless lists
of idiomatic phrases, when brilliantly arrayed,
stuck like darts on the big target of American art.Just think how much the twenty-six letters of the alphabet
meant to him! And of the handful
of diacritical marks with which he fronted & fonted
his rogue meanings and vogue shapes.With so much talk to cull from and irreverence to mine,
being in a world of language was not unlike being surrounded
by music, albeit the music of goof & wonder, of fatuousness & blunder.Mel used more colors than anybody knew existed
to body forth verbal collisions in work after work.
Never less than exacting, still he courted accident.
He was as messy as the feeling of the moment demanded.
What Francis Picabia wrote of Guillaume Apollinaire a hundred years ago
pertains tonight, as we navigate Mel:“The memory of him that I preserve is one of a great freshness of heart,
of a great simplicity that only really blossomed in the intimacy
of friends, outside of any “gallery.” As for his work, I consider that it is
at once filled with invention, and of the most intelligent kind.
He’s a friend whose absence I regret profoundly.”
Geoffrey Young [photo credit: Dennis Kardon] was born in Los Angeles in 1944, and grew up in San Diego.
Before settling in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1982, Young spent student years in Santa Barbara (UCSB), and Albuquerque (UNM), then lived for two years in Paris (a Fulbright year followed by a six-month stint working for La Galerie Sonnabend). Married for many years to Laura Chester, they lived for seven of them in Berkeley (two sons born). Their small press, The Figures (1975-2005), published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction.
He has taught literature and art at San Francisco State, Columbia’s General Studies Program, Vassar, and the University at Albany, NY. From 1992-2018 he ran the Geoffrey Young Gallery, where he presented hundreds of contemporary art shows.
Nadia Szold’s 80 minute film, The Figures (2023), features Young in the context of art and writing friends.
Recent
chapbooks of poetry and drawings include LOOK WHO’S TALKING (2024); At
Stake (2024); Monk’s Mood (2023); Money (2022); & Habit
(2021).
