"Love Song at New Moon"

“During a period as a teenager, when I was housing and food insecure, I discovered one day in the local library a book containing some of the works by the German artist Paul Klee. I had never before encountered an artist who so consistently explored, and so often seemed to erase, the intersections of biology and machinery, organic and inorganic, playful and grotesque, human and nonhuman.
     “Just before lockdown in 2020, I rediscovered another copy of that same book, Philippe Comte’s Paul Klee (1991). In the weeks after, poems inspired by Klee’s works arrived rapidly, as if they had been incubating all that time. Klee painted Liebeslied bei Neumond (‘Love Song at New Moon’) in 1939, when he was in the last stages of a rare and painful disease called scleroderma, which causes a hardening of connective tissues. Though he had been forced to flee the Nazis, who considered his art ‘degenerate,’ and found it increasingly difficult to move, in 1939 alone he created over 1200 paintings and drawings. WWII was just beginning. He would be dead within a year. In my poem, I hoped to at least give a sense of such a desperate state, such a desperate longing.”