Faculty Writing: David Wojnarowicz’s Art and “Senhal’s Complaint”
In The New York Times Magazine, Christine Smallwood discusses the “Rage and Tenderness of David Wojnarowicz‘s Art.” Smallwood writes: “Cultural journalists like to speak about artists ‘having a moment,’ and if this is Wojnarowicz’s moment, it has come at a good time for us.” Wojnarowicz, the itinerant artist, street urchin and AIDS victim, made art that mixed “text and image, autobiography and political action, tenderness and rage” in an unceasing effort “to bring lives and desires that were discarded or deemed less-than into public view.”
In the September issue of Poetry is Rebecca Ariel Porte’s poem “Senhal’s Complaint.” It begins:
Soul, don’t complain, says Senhal,
who means by ‘soul’ a thing like “future,”
possesses without knowing it
not soul, but future…