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“TIM SCOTT” // 1980 ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE [gelatin silver print | 13 9/10 × 14″]

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Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989)

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mitski - class of 2013

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Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, New York, 1967, from photographer Lloyd Ziff.

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Sound of Metal (2020) dir. Darius Marder

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A Sentiment Of Love

13x10 cm. oil on paper

Nickie Zimov

Instagram

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In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

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“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014.

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Claude Cahun,  vers1939

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Helmut Lang S/S 1997 Robert Mapplethorpe

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“The Back Room at Max’s” Original artwork by Richard Bernstein Photo: Candy Darling Facebook page

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i watch this video of holly woodlawn once a day

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Patti Smith at the Boarding House in SF, 1975. When photographer Michael Zagaris mentioned a portrait, she replied, “How about this for a portrait?”

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Barthel Bruyn the Elder, Detail of Portrait of a Noblewoman, 1530-35

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Alia Shawkat for The Cut by Olivia Bee

Styled by Susan Winget 

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Alia Shawkat photographed by Carlotta Guerrero for Nylon Magazine, December/January 2017.