Fuck ownership
Of things in general but especially of works of art
I’m sorry to initiate the proceedings with such an aggressive word
But poetry originates in the expression of feeling
Now obviously there’s more to it than that
I’m not saying that infants and toddlers cry in poetry
Or that fifteenth-century Henry spoke blank verse
But when we put into words our hunger discomfort or shakenness
And especially when we trouble deaf heaven with our song
Then we have crossed the line into poetry
And poetry is the best of all arts especially when we sing it
For then it becomes as infinitely replicable as video
Poetry is portable
Memorize it and take it away with you
Not so the masterpieces in the plastic arts
Now if you can get yourself into the National Gallery in London
Take a look at Bacchus and Ariadne
Certainly Titian’s technical achievement is a marvel
I can appreciate it but I’m not an expert
I stood there many long minutes trying to drink in the details
But the brain is not a camera though the eye is built like one
And the retina merely begins perception
The rest is interpretation and indeed creation
Others around me took photographs
But images abound far superior
To any that I can achieve with my Android
The work of art in the age of its digital reproduction
Yes we lose the facticity of oil and canvas
But we retain the profounder fact
Of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music
The encompassing of blind barbaric will
Within the decorum of art
The brandished haunch and the circle of stars
The pipes and timbrels and the abandoning ship
Though to be honest I see trumps and cymbals
And an anguished woman gesturing toward the receding craft
And full disclosure for about fifty years
To me the most important phrases in all of poetry have been
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of poesy
And now I knew what Keats apparently didn’t
That cheetahs goddamighty cheetahs pull the car
Perfect indisputable cheetahs with black tear line

And now I know since the image has entered
The digital that is to say infinitely replicable realm
That the pair of cats who turn toward each other saying what’s up
Display jinglebells on their Titian-red collars
I pretty much knew that Keats knew
Of the association of Bacchus and wild beasts
But that he should link chariot and pards plural
Strongly suggests that he knew this picture
Though I don’t suppose there was a National Gallery in 1819
I could look it up if I were a scholar
But what I love and I can see in the picture and the poem
Is that artworks are living things that reproduce like living things
And their offspring change and evolve and take on a life of their own
Thus Titian’s cheetahs become Keats’s pards
I doubt that many in England in 1819 knew from cheetahs
And the most bizarre aspects of Bacchus and Ariadne
The horns the fur the exposures the dismembered animal
The well-muscled giant enwrapped in serpents
Came not from a painter’s fevered brain
But from reading in Catullus and Ovid
Mere transcription in one sense
Titian perhaps invented the vessel engraved with Titian
And maybe the annoying little dog tormenting the adorable little faun
But then the artistry is as always
In the arrangement of the materials
It’s nonsense to claim
That Titian stole from Ovid and Keats stole from Titian
And that I steal from Keats here and elsewhere
Nobody owns a cheetah not rightly
Although the decadent Duke of Ferrara
Must have kept one or two in his menagerie

In the sixteenth century people were burnt alive
For possessing a copy of Tyndale
It’s pretty much the same if you search for and save
Minecraft or Across the Spider-Verse
But texts are replicable that’s what makes them texts
Nobody owns them or can be blamed for using them
Textuality infinitely reproducible
Manifest as medieval uncial or binary code
Deconstructs the flimsy unjust law of supply and demand
We can’t reproduce the molecules of paint or canvas
And so the unique impression of Titian’s hand is priceless
And must be conserved
But let’s let everybody access
Alex and Peter and Bacchus and his pards