Three Poems by Stephen Bett

Inflection Point: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)

That famous and infamous painting — look it up, nuff said


1913 Armory Show            the first significant event
I learned in school              — an inflection point
kicked in             60 years off the frock of the clock
such hopeless succès de scandale, el reverso

Twenty odd lines, planes, dots through space…
A trip down stairs               from sterile veneration
to sheer malice

This skeletal babe’s post-cubist (not Futurist)
could never be proto-fascista, Senore
No cinematic effects pls, said Marcel

Reduce, reduce, reduce was my thought
(non Il Duce… eh turista porco?)

Marionettes clatter, decompose before our very lies
Slab-like forms cut across canvas
Severe wood colors (hah) make for brown-out

Duchamp had peeled away the nude’s beauty,
                                       its carnality, and even its sex
Just a slip of a thing              na’kid fling
down this flight of stairs
(Shout-out to 21st century trans wars… whoopsie)

Nude the First (No. 1) stuffed away somewhere? maybe
descendent No. 3 fell off Marcel’s train to Munich?

Definitive version:       Explosion in a Shingle Factory
suits just fine, what could be
better?

Rack ’em up: Hat Rack (1917)

Assisted readymade: wooden hat rack suspended from the ceiling. Original lost. Dimensions not recorded. No inscription. [Replica, by Schwarz, 1964, under Duchamp’s direct supervision.]

Rack ’em up some more, sport

Splash ’n flush fountain, hat & coat hangers
a 1917 hat-trick for you

Assisted, not scored
(nothing between the lines)

Total neutral zone, absolute indifference
(b/c who could possibly care?)

Indifference, eh?          Endlessly deferring — to you, Marcel

His living space “bristles with readymades”
This five-curly-prong piece…
                             not the painterly moment
that’s for sure

A retinal poke (& joke)
no eye candy

Watch out, pupils
Marcel must’ve been heard saying

Eye on the Prize: To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918)

Oil, silver leaf, lead wire, and magnifying lens on glass (cracked), mounted between panes of glass in standing metal frame, on painted wood base


Hard to explain, would take an hour of almost

Lot going on beside image (look for yourself, friend)

All of a hardness                   metal to the
wood         — magnifiers on fire —             between
panes, crossed wires, cracked glass
(sounds like a book of glosa!)

Picabia (old rave) reports the Duch in Buenos Aires
organizing hygienic urinal service

So there’s that too…

It’s one more geometry lesson        oculism &
                                          the “retinal paradigm”

Defo an eye test

Is the prize candy?



Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 23 books and 6 chapbooks in print from Blazevox Books, Chax Press, Ekstasis Editions, Spuyten Duyvil, Thistledown Press, and several others. His work has also appeared as an Ebook (Argotist, UK) and in well over 200 literary journals in Canada, the U.S., England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Croatia, Finland, and Turkey, as well as in eight anthologies, on radio, and on YouTube. His personal papers are archived for scholarly use at Simon Fraser University Library’s “Contemporary Literature Collection.” His website is StephenBett.com