The artist here, Ben Benn was a pioneering modernist. Born in 1884 in what is now known as Ukraine, he migrated to America with his family and settled in New York, where he first exhibited in the early 1900s with Dadaist and surrealist Man Ray, and cubist and futurist Max Weber. My poem is an homage to Benn’s still life, and to Weber’s cubist poetry. A link to the poems can be found below.
Found Poem for the Cubists
(After Max Weber’s “Haze”, “Weather Report”, and “The Eye Moment”, published in Cubist Poems (1914)
Warmed, heated, dried, burnt
We drank talked through nights
Breezes, breezes
Revolution through composition
Eyes, eyes on the prize
The prize is an art revolution
We pressed sweated by day
Bolder, bolder
We rode wrote painted talked
Contoured the tables with cubism
Cubism, futurism, the avant garde
Night and day we drank talked
Haze, haze
Apricots, apples, glass, bags, flags
The prize of the revolution: a still life
©elsp2025
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