“What do they think that is, that demands of them
and gets of them their love or their terror or both?
What do we poets do when we know it’s nothing?
Not for them or against them or about them.
Tom, I had to be here to ask that question.
I expect I’ll have to be gone before you answer.”
~Glyn Maxwell from #poem Coyotes by the Eliot House https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/coyotes-by-the-eliot-house-glyn-maxwell-poem
“Though Justice Sotomayor references a “commentary on consumerism,” that is not really what the invention of Pop art was most significantly about. What both Warhol and his contemporary Roy Lichtenstein were parodying in their work was the abstract and metaphysical ambitions of the Abstract Expressionist “action painting” that preceded them. By asserting the Whitman-esque thingness of the ordinary things that the Abstract Expressionists so strenuously rejected, Warhol and Lichtenstein were up to a kind of tense and subtle form of parody that, like all great parody, both mocks the source and flatters it by the attention paid.” ~Adam Gopnik
