Stephen Rodefer paintings

STEPHEN RODEFER

BORN:            Ohio, November 1940
DIED:              Paris, August 2015

EDUCATION:

1959-63            Amherst College, Amherst Massachusetts, Art History & Literature
1963-67            Graduate Studies in Poetry and Literature, SUNY Buffalo, NY

One of the founders of the Language Poetry Movement. First American writer to be sought out and hired by the University of Cambridge in England.  A literary genius who took up painting in his 60's as a way to incorporate the visual and color into his literary art. Rodefer died in his Paris atelier in 2015 where he had been quietly painting on found materials, including cardboard, canvas, paper and wood, for his last years. His papers are on view at Stanford's Green Library.

                                     
                                 To  Any  Reader

                whose mind’s uterus is awash with Nietzsche’s semen

 Lasso sots-- sieze mistakers, peach sniffers, lazy boys
and hijack penthouse esprit de corpsers who travail
and noose our groceries with their amiable remedies
ejaculating mendicants nourished on vermin.

Our peaches are tits, our repentence laughter
Oui-Oui fashions on fat payments and our vows
we return Queer upon the bourbon train
crayoning vile eye leak to lather up our spots

On fever’s orielle lies MarilynManson tripled up
as he longs for Bercy meat for his enchanted tribe
and the mettle of Richet our volunteer, our son, eva
porates the entire fucking chimerical savannah with a match

Celestiel tarnation rips up our filament
O objects of repulsive things we treasure like repasts
upchuck the verse which denvers us to kindred oompas
across horrid sands to traverse the putrid fen

As a craven debauch will kiss and gorge on
any maryred tits of our best cathouse
so we volunteer Delphine on some clandestine alley cat
and press upon her forte mignon our best yokono grapefruit

Sir! raise the swarming ants like googled helmet worms
easing into our brains, our robot hippo camp, our vermouth
pur plink the people of Demuth when we blow bad breath their way
l’amour converts la mort-- kindred fluvia invisible, plaintive, absurd

If the vials, the mayhem, the rapiers and arsons of the General Rape
have not again embroidered replete our graphic work to come
the banal canvas of our piteous distinies can smack the monkey then
so our violin necks the mispelt difference stoned on Helen Jackie’s ma  regrets

Hardy people, feed the jackals parmassan, the lyceè is a panther
those apes, those scorpions, the vultures and those slime
all the galloping monsters who hurl their grog our way—rampant
hrough menageries inflammed with DeNiro pecadillo girls

It’s a lot like getting laid a bit mechanical but fucking plus
if you shake and shudder then heave and cry out loud to the globe
the feret cunts still volunteer their dirt to breeze you to it
and dance your ball joints mounted on their most available fiction

Well it’s a long us and the eye charges steep for each tear on her
you dream along while sexy UFO’s smoke your dearest hooka
and you thought you knew it all, been to lectures, earsucking the normal soup
of hypodermic critics, readers, ungainly in your reflection—Twins brother!   

24 02 05 SR Paris