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Seth Feman

@sethfeman

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While there is still some light
on the page, I am writing now
a history of snow, of everything
that has been and will be thought.
When a blind poet says I need you
to be my eyes, they are asking to see
through your mouth.

—
Burton Callicott’s Bookshelf and Sunbeams | Alison C. Rollins’ The Library of Babel by @sethfeman

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4 days ago

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

—
from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Blue Ribbon Series (X, I, and IV) | from Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (X, I, IV, and V) by @sethfeman

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7 days ago

What is “traditional Jewish music”? Idk but we’re gonna find out! 😜

I’m thrilled to be part of the opening of Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from the Jewish Museum, New York (@thejewishmuseum ) at the Frist Art Museum. @fristartmuseum

This extraordinary exhibition brings together more than 130 Jewish ceremonial objects from across centuries and around the world: objects that live at the intersection of beauty, history, culture, and sacred practice.

I’ll open the evening with traditional Jewish music in the Frist’s Grand Lobby, setting the musical stage for the exhibition and the conversation that follows. Feat. @christosmalls on keys and some special guest vocalists!

Thursday, October 29
🎶 5:15–6:15 p.m. — Cantor Josh Goldberg and friends | Music in the Grand Lobby
🎨 6:30–7:30 p.m. — Opening Conversation: Beauty and Ritual

The conversation features Abigail Rapoport of the Jewish Museum, Trinita Kennedy of the Frist Art Museum, and Frist executive director and CEO Seth Feman. @sethfeman @abigail_rapoport @trinitakennedy

There is something powerful about bringing these objects out of the museum case and into conversation with the music, traditions, and communities that have given them life. I’m honored to help give sound to that story.

Frist Art Museum | Nashville
Free for members | $20 for not-yet members
Register at Fristartmuseum.org

Chag sameach!! 🍋🌳
#BeautyAndRitual #FristArtMuseum #JewishArt #jewishmusic #art by @sethfeman

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14 days ago

The bridal daisies and the goldenrod Wreathe in that meadow where rare afternoons
Came flowering from our richest summer sod. Our wills were watered there with rilling tunes Of birdsong, and with tilling touches we
Prepared the grounds of all we later thought.
Then our joined land made greater seigniory
Than the world’s manor we had separate sought. And starflowers so confused themselves with grass It was as though the constellations whirled About our dreaming heads, the old impasse
Dissolved and heaven mingled with the world.
Levitated meadow, bowing stars,
Have sunk and risen since you went away.
The earth and sky are back behind their bars;
Our flesh of grass is burning into hay.

—
Louis B. Sloan’s Self-Portrait in Landscape | Gray Burr’s Meadow Remembered by @sethfeman

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20 days ago

You light the lights
and great fires
of extended brilliance
without end.

You lift amid hazy smoke
flickering torches,
from eyes and heart you scatter
what you own.

It’s always just an attempt,
a path groping forward,
always just your picture,
that you carry from the light.

—
Marc Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Palette | Ingeborg Bachmann‘s Barriers by @sethfeman

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21 days ago

I hustle
upstream.
I grasp.
I grind.
I control & panic. Poke
balloons in my chest,
always popping there,
always my thoughts thump,
thump. I snooze — wake & go
boom. All day, like this I short
my breath. I scroll & scroll.
I see what you wrote — I like.
I heart. My thumb, so tired.
My head bent down, but not
in prayer, heavy from the looking.
I see your face, your phone-lit
faces. I tap your food, two times
for more hearts. I retweet.
I email: yes & yes & yes.
Then I cry & need to say: no-no-no.
Why does it take so long to reply?
I FOMO & shout. I read. I never
enough. New book. New post.
New ping. A new tab, then another.
Papers on the floor, scattered & stacked.
So many journals, unbroken white spines,
waiting. Did you hear that new new?
I start to text back. Ellipsis, then I forget.
I balk. I lazy the bed. I wallow when I write.
I truth when I lie. I throw a book
when a poem undoes me. I underline
Clifton: today we are possible. I start
from image. I begin with Phillis Wheatley.
I begin with Phillis Wheatley. I begin
with Phillis Wheatley reaching for coal.
I start with a napkin, receipt, or my hand.
I muscle memory. I stutter the page. I fail.
Hit delete — scratch out one more line. I sonnet,
then break form. I make tea, use two bags.
Rooibos again. I bathe now. Epsom salt.
No books or phone. Just water & the sound
of water filling, glory — be my buoyant body,
bowl of me. Yes, lavender, more bubbles
& bath bomb, of course some candles too.
All alone with Coltrane. My favorite, “Naima,”
for his wife, now for me, inside my own womb.
Again, I child back. I float. I sing. I simple
& humble. Eyes close. I low my voice,
was it a psalm? Don’t know. But I stopped.

—
from Taryn Simon’s Father Country I Do Love You | Tiana Clark’s My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work by @sethfeman

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22 days ago

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

—
Ian Edward White’s Untitled, Murfreesboro, Tennessee | H.D.’s Heat by @sethfeman

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a month ago

This year, the Frist Art Museum is celebrating 25 years in Nashville. Host @racheliacovone is joined by executive director and CEO Dr. Seth Feman to look back at the city’s changing art scene, the museum’s early years, and how the Frist has worked to make art more accessible to Nashvillians of all ages.

Plus, Seth shares what he’s most excited about in the Frist’s newly announced 2027 schedule of exhibitions and what the next 25 years could hold.

Listen to this episode “How The Frist Changed Nashville’s Art Scene” everywhere you get podcasts!

#nashville #thefrist #fristartmuseum taken in Nashville, Tennessee by @sethfeman

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a month ago

In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the still river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight

—
Eileen Agar’s Photographs of rocks in Ploumanach | Wendell Berry’s September 2 by @sethfeman

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a month ago

With webs of cool
Chain mail and his stout heart, is not the gander
Mocked, and ignorantly designated yet,
To play the fool?
“Egyptian vultures clean as cherubim,
All ivory and jet,” are they most foul?
And nature’s child,
That most precocious water bird, the loon—why
Is he foremost in the madman’s alphabet;
Why is he styled
In folly’s catalogue, distressful lunatic?

—
Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden and Tadao Ando’s Valley Gallery | Marianne Moore‘s A Fool, A Foul Thing, A Distressful Lunatic by @sethfeman

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a month ago

The whiskey stink of rot has settled
in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises
when I touch the dying tomato plants.

Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms
flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots
and toss them in the compost.

It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.

My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village
as they pulled the flax. Songs so old
and so tied to the season that the very sound
seemed to turn the weather.

—
Winslow Homer’s Rab and the Girls | Karina Borowicz‘s September Tomatoes by @sethfeman

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2 months ago

I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.

—
Benjy Russell’s A Body Full of Wounds | Jane Kenyon‘s What Came to Me by @sethfeman

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2 months ago