A Beautiful Day: Seventeen Poems

Jim Dine's poems are the voices between his paintings, the questions between his drawings, the whispers and shouts between his sculptures: an unceasing, probing flow that augments and energizes his visual work. Dine writes through a process of collage, arranging and re-arranging fragments as they come to him, noting them on scraps of paper, on the studio wall, even (a favorite medium) on the sick bags of airplanes.

A Beautiful Day presents 17 poems; some are recent pieces written during the intensity of corona quarantine, others are older creations he has now rediscovered and re-shaped, as a sculptor returns to a work after many years with a fresh eye and hand. As always, Dine's poetry is densely autobiographical and grapples with the polarities of experience: with delight and melancholy, with criticism and celebration, with nostalgia ("Childhood mood / The soul / complete and elegant / Constructed of wishes / And clouds"), rage ("I ran into him at the airport, / 'I hope you die a miserable death / You fat fascist fuck'"), and, inevitably, the passing of time: "The magic falls, / Years go by, / Hitting the window / They get used up."