Writing about the poet writing about art to be a party to Dead Fred’s guided tours. As we go pre-and-post-ing through history’s revisional -isms, he documents Documenta bric-a-brac, photo-painterly foliage, quaint antique knowledges. Be you a red-cheeked knight riding the bypasses of medieval Europe or O’Hara’s avatar on a chance nature walk in the 20th century’s countryside. Sometimes you pick an apple and put it in your pocket. Sometimes you kick it back into the branches like a football. Sometimes it falls, hits you square on the Newton, practically decapitates you. I start roller skating fast and carrying, in one hand, an umbrella (like Magritte’s that balances a glass of water), in the other, a camera (that can point only at my own overgrown face). See me seeing the plastic littered everywhere in this pie-on-the-sill pastoral and trying manically to shove it all into a suitcase. Hear my interiority microphone saying: “This was a good book even if it don’t matter.” Action in the Orchards by Fred Schmalz (Nightboat Books, 2019).
