Lee Krasner: Hans Hoffmann’s “best pupil”/ poem by Sarah Wyman

Lee Krasner:  Hans Hoffmann’s “best pupil”

Floor fodder of the shredded prints
became a papier collé enhanced
by black squirts she raged
at her impotent man who sulked 
in the corner.  

Betty made her take home
rejected works from an unforgiving gallery.
So, she over-painted what wouldn’t sell:
canvases now heavy with imagery
abstracted to the cuts and colors
that crack their frames today.

But those paper shards, 
fluttering to floor!  

Returning to studio
she read their sense,
gathered up the tantrum residues, 
maintained juxtapositions as they lay
and (Jackson’s justification of wifely
duty aside), dusted them into position
on flatbed floorboards of her own, 
downstairs chats overheard
where the eagle reared his regal head
and watched her work through tears of red.

Haiku

Who owns the black drip
that from Pollock’s paintbrush spits?
Lee used it like glue.

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Sarah Wyman’s volume of poems, Fried Goldfinch, is published by Codhill Press. She writes and teaches on verbal / visual intersections and lives in the Hudson Valley where climbing feet kick dust down to a river-sea.  Her work has appeared in Aaduna, Mudfish, Ekphrasis, San Pedro River Review, Potomac Review, Petrichor Review, Chronogram, Shawangunk Review, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Poets of the Hudson Valley (Codhill), and other venues. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Sighted Stones (2018).