Mostly Abstract at Ashawagh

    Cynthia Sobel has organized “Mostly Abstract” at Ashawagh Hall in Springs this weekend. The show at the art space opens Saturday afternoon with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m. It will be up through Sunday afternoon.

    Included are paintings, drawings, and sculpture from Barbara Bilotta, Beth Barry, Phyllis Hammond, Jana Hayden, Stephanie Reit, Sheila Rotner, Ms. Sobel, and Mark Zimmerman.

More Women, New Show

    The Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton will present “The Women, Part II” beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Roisin Bateman, Marilyn Church, Asia Ingalls, Susan Lazarus-Reimen, Jane Martin, Kryn Olson, Nicole Parcher, Amy Pilkington, Barbara Press, Anne Seelbach, and Evan Zatti are some of the artists represented in a show devoted to the pursuit of abstraction.

    It will remain on view through March 3. The gallery’s winter hours are Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., or by appointment.

New Dates for Marfa

    The LongHouse Reserve’s spring trip to Marfa, Tex., will take place May 9 through May 13. Marfa is the home of the Judd Foundation, dedicated to the art of Donald Judd. The Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art museum, presents exhibitions and installations both permanent and temporary. The town is an artists’ mecca, with many working studios and other events of interest.

    Reservations and more information are available on the LongHouse Web site.

Celebrating Diversity

    On Sunday, the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will host an international cultural celebration to honor the talent and diversity of the East End from 1:30 to 4 p.m. The event will include traditional music and folk dances, art activities, and tours of the museum.

    Among the groups scheduled to perform are the Kildare Academy of Irish Dance, the Shinnecock Thunderbird Dancers, Showers of Blessings Choir, the Tewa Marimba Ensemble, and Danni Medina. The festival is free with museum admission.

Moves Like Pollock

    Musicians with an eye for the dynamic movement of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings can now have a guitar or bass decorated with an image taken from the floor of his studio at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs. Waterstone Musical Instruments, a Nashville firm, is making the guitars, which come with a hard-shell case and certificate of authenticity. The $1,500 price includes a donation to the Pollock-Krasner House.

Intimacy at Grenning

    Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor will exhibit “Intimate Works,” a show of interiors, still lifes, and self-portraits, beginning Saturday with a reception from 3 to 5 p.m. The show’s opening has been planned to coincide with HarborFrost and will have live music.

    The participating painters are Marc Dalessio, Ben Fenske, Hege Elizabeth Haugen, Ramiro, Melissa Franklin Sanchez, and Lynn Sanguedolce. The show will remain on view through March.

    As part of HarborFrost, the gallery will take part in the art walk on Saturday, joining Monika Olko Gallery, Christy’s Art Center, the Hooke Sculpture Gallery, Richard J. Demato Fine Arts, Tulla Booth Gallery, and Romany Kramoris Gallery. The walk will conclude at the newly christened Sag Harbor Fine Arts Center.

New/Old Tonic Artspace

    Winter has worked its magic once again and transformed the Kathryn Markel Gallery in Bridgehampton into the Tonic Artspace for a limited run on weekends through February. On view will be the exhibition “Virgil Is Still the Frog Boy,” beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The show is based on a 40-year-old line of graffiti near the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike and a local legend.

    According to the show’s organizers, the legend was that the original graffiti, “Virgil Is the Frog Boy,” was based on an East Hampton teenager, who was given the name by his friends, “but his identity and the circumstances under which he earned the nickname remain a secret.” Years later, the same trestle was painted again to say, “Virgil Is Still the Frog Boy.” Who wrote the two sets of graffiti remains a mystery.

    The group show includes work by the artists Carly Haffner, Christine Lidrbauch, Grant Haffner, Scott Bluedorn, and Scott Gibbons.

   While you don’t have to be a woman to enjoy “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” it certainly helps. The smattering of men in the audience at the Southampton Cultural Center on Thursday night seemed to be enjoying themselves at this frothy pink cocktail of a production, but it was the women who laughed the most and the longest.

    Last Thursday’s presentation was singular for the appearance of Ilene Beckerman, the author of the book on which the play is based, as the character Gingy, the author’s nickname. She had never appeared as herself in any production of the play, which was written by Nora and Delia Ephron using two of Ms. Beckerman’s books and the Ephrons’ friends’ own experiences. But Michael Disher, who directed the play, worked his magic to transform another non-professional into a credible and charming performer in an evening of diverting monologues and group reflections on topics such as mothers, miniskirts, marriage, boots, sexuality, and even Madonna as a style muse, at least on Halloween.

    At 77, Ms. Beckerman was adorable as herself, vibrant and enchanting and full of the spunk and insight that emanated, too, from her writing as channeled by the Ephrons.

    She was joined on stage for this presentation by Barbara Jo Howard, Deborah Marshall, Catherine Maloney, and Bethany Dellapolla. The cast revolves to include at various times the four actresses who performed that night as well as Brooke Alexander, Katie Lee, Gretta Monahan, Susan Cincotta, Paula Brannon, Susan Wojcik, and Edna Perez Winston.

    The staging, which consists of the five women sitting on stage with scripts on music stands as in a reading, is comfortable on one hand and challenging on the other. How to keep the audience interested with such a static environment?

    The answer is smart and elegant: Incorporate Ms. Beckerman’s original drawings from the book as projections so the audience can see her depictions of herself as well as photographic illustrations and collages of some of the other items of clothing discussed in the play. The latter were conceived by Ms. Dellapolla and are exclusive to this production.

    Add in some movement and a few brief dance routines along with some acting between the readers in between the monologues, and what could have been a long slog becomes an engaging event. The comedy inherent in the material helps too, especially after discussing heavier topics such as mothers dying too young, early heartbreak, and divorce.

    The cast was dressed all in black, with only Ms. Beckerman’s sparkly head wrap standing out in the darkness. Although it could be viewed by some to be a cop out, the neutrality of the cast, in contrast with the clothes described, allowed for a more fluid audience experience. These are universal sartorial moments — prom dress, important date dress, wedding gown — so women are then free to imagine using their own choices and wardrobe as reference. It makes the experience more appealingly universal.

    The dialogue is snappy; the references all are accessible. Despite its original source, it definitely has the Ephron stamp — a kind of everywoman lowest common denominator approach, provided the audience is smart, stylish, college-educated, and not from a flyover state. I might even add “of a certain age,” since the stories included all seem to be from a time and place a few decades removed, whether from Ms. Beckerman or from the women the Ephrons recruited, except girls and women tend to be curious about the generations who preceded them and the collective experience of the feminine is rife with traditions and rites of passage that don’t change all that much from decade to decade. The horror of trying clothes on in a dressing room, getting a bra that fits, being dumped after sex for the first time, the joy of wearing the all-forgiving non-color black; these are all things to which any woman can easily relate.

    All of those performing last Thursday were well-rehearsed and certainly doing less reading of the text than acting it out. It is a perfect play for a minimal and shallow stage such as the one at the cultural center. Mr. Disher has said previously that he much prefers full productions over stripped-down readings, but this production really suited the space and his embellishments. The lighting and sound design by Daniel Schappert gave what could have been a stark and austere environment the kind of visual pop that made the actors and their production sparkle.

    “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” is being performed Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. through Jan. 27. Tickets are $22 and $15 for students under 21 with ID.

   “The Scottish Play” is the title many people substitute for “Macbeth” when inside the theater, not because they are interested in geography, but because, according to an ancient theatrical superstition, speaking the title aloud in a theater will bring calamity upon the speaker and the theater itself.

    But only good luck was in the air at the Friday night debut of William Shakespeare’s bloody masterpiece, produced by the Round Table Theatre Company and Academy at LTV Studios in Wainscott.

    How else to explain the rain, which poured down on the roof as the play began and continued throughout the evening? Rain is the perfect background sound for this eerie, mystical tragedy, set in Scotland 1,000 years ago.

    Good luck, too, is the presence of Jeff Keogh in the title role. He has an excellent understanding of the language and the part, and plays Macbeth with a haunted, compulsive clarity.

    Further good luck was in evidence in the form of the able Morgan Vaughan playing Lady Macbeth, and, of course Josh Gladstone, who was, in turns, dramatic as Ross and hilarious as the Porter.

    In all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, a fool will emerge, who frequently seems to serve no purpose but to make the audience laugh.

    Usually, Shakespeare arms the fool with double entendre, always, at some point, focusing on sex. It is good to know that not much has changed in us humans in certain areas: Ribald Shakespeare made us laugh 400 years ago and makes us laugh now, as long as the material is in the hands of a talented performer like Mr. Gladstone, who is better known as the artistic director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall.

    Shakespeare is a sexual writer. There is a palpable passion in his characters. The passion, in Macbeth, is for bloodlust.

    The Macbeths are a happy, loving couple. He sends her missives when he is at work in the field, his work being that of a killer. Nominally, he kills for his king, Duncan, but in fact, it is his profession. He kills to live, and he lives to kill.

    Macbeth receives a prophecy from three witches at the beginning of the play that he is to become king. They do not tell him how, but his mind immediately jumps to the murder of Duncan.

    He is a simple man complicated by a vivid imagination. He writes his wife about his plan, then circles back in his mind, questioning it.

    There are no circles in Lady Macbeth’s mind. She sees a straight line through Duncan to the crown.

    The deed is done. Both their hands are covered in blood. “A little water clears us of this deed. How easy is it, then,” Lady Macbeth tells her husband.

    It is, of course, anything but easy. He is haunted, seeing ghosts at the dinner table, goading him into more and more bloodshed. She, in turn, descends into madness, and death. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” says Macbeth at the end.

    With that, Shakespeare leaves us with as bleak a vision of existence as in any of his tragedies.

    Playing Shakespeare provides a pair of unique challenges to contemporary actors. In modern theater, acting comes from what is not said as by what is said. The truth of the character is not in the words he speaks, it is beneath the words, hidden in the subtext.

    With Shakespeare, the opposite is true. The truth of the character is all in the words.

    Once an actor grasps that concept, which is not as easy as it sounds, he comes to the second challenge — the language itself.

    This is not contemporary, casual speech. Written mostly in iambic pentameter, an actor must give him or herself over to the flow of the words, the structure of the language. Diction is essential, as is vocal power, which should not be confused with volume.

    Trust the language Shakespeare has given us, and your performance will ring true.

    The performance levels in this production are uneven, which is to be expected from a fledgling company in which many of the actors are still learning, but over all, the company has accomplished its mission in its first fully-staged production, sending us out into the night, appreciating the glory that is Shakespeare.

    “Macbeth” can be seen tomorrow and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at LTV Studios. The cost at the door is $25, $15 for students and those over 65.

    Richard Barons, the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society, has been named executive director of the Thomas Moran Trust following a vote in December. Joining him at the trust are new board members and a new chairman who are also with the historical society.

    Arthur Graham, who is president of the East Hampton Historical Society is now also chairman of the trust. In addition, those named to the trust’s board from the historical society are Maureen Bluedorn as secretary, Barbara Borsack, Bill Fleming, and Bruce T. Siska. Other new board members are Curt Schade as vice president, Alan Mitchell as treasurer, and Frank Newbold.

    While each entity will continue with its own identity and revenue stream, the administrative consolidation made sense from an economic standpoint, Mr. Barons said on Friday at Clinton Academy. Saving money on staff will allow the trust to make the most of the money the prior board and director have raised toward restoration and repair of the several buildings that make up the property, he said. He declined to say whether the changes signaled a lack of confidence in the previous management of the trust.

    The house is badly in need of repair and its second phase of work to begin restoration and important structural buttressing is now underway. Mr. Barons said windows and door are being restored and re-glazed, tarps have been put on the roof, the yard has been cleaned up, and mildew is being addressed. Some of the heating elements installed in the 1950s have also been taken out and other 20th-century additions that have no significance to the family or property will be removed.

    The trust recently received a $477,000 grant from the state, which in turn made it eligible for a matching grant of $250,000 from the Sylvia and Joseph Slifka Foundation.

New Work at Vered

    Vered Gallery in East Hampton will have a show devoted to new work by Hunt Slonem tomorrow through March 11.

    The show will feature 20 paintings of colorful birds, butterflies, and bunnies in Mr. Slonem’s characteristically whimsical and Expressionistic approach.

    Also in the Gallery are works by Willem de Kooning, Arman, Milton Avery, Bert Stern, Man Ray, Perle Fine, Ray Caesar, Ron Agam, Adam Handler, Will Cotton, Steven Klein, Pablo Picasso, and many others. The gallery is open on weekends through the winter.

Chamberlain at Flavin

    This year, the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton is showing “John Chamberlain: It Ain’t Cheap.” The exhibition presents six of the artist’s metal paintings from 1965 and a sculpture titled “It Ain’t Cheap” from the same year. The works are from a series of 12-inch-square paintings in lacquer and metal flake on Formica that were first presented at Leo Castelli Gallery in January 1965.

    The show will be on view downstairs through Oct. 20 on the weekends. The permanent installation of Flavin’s nine fluorescent light works is on view on the second floor. Admission is free and the hours are noon to 6 p.m.

Artists Needed to Save the World

    Maureen Connor, an artist and co-founder of the Institute for Wishful Thinking, will deliver a talk  “The Institute for Wishful Thinking: Art, Activism, or Just Wishful Thinking?” on Saturday at 3 p.m., at the Parrish Art Museum.

    The lecture is part of Hope Sandrow’s three-month “Genius Loci” which celebrates the new museum and its sense of place, both in its new setting and among the community at large.

    The institute exists to foster participation of artists and designers in the effort to solve larger social problems and seeks proposals from artists, architects, and designers for residencies at government organizations and agencies at all levels. It was founded in 2008.

    Some pending “wishful” proposals include the design and installation of signs at 10 former underground nuclear test sites, the use of vacant New York City properties to house the homeless, the development of a federal sex education curriculum through a series of artist commissions and community collaborations, and the nationalization of the Federal Reserve Bank with state branches empowered to give interest-free loans to Americans with incomes under $200,000.

    Tickets are $10 and free for Parrish members.

Guild Hall Happenings

    On Saturday at 8 p.m., Guild Hall will present a screening of “The Magistrate” by Arthur Wing Pinero. The National Theatre Live presentation stars John Lithgow as the magistrate and Nancy Carroll as his wife, Agatha.

    The Victorian farce is centered on a deception. Agatha lied about her son’s age as well as her own when she married Posket, the magistrate. But her son’s precocious predilections for alcohol, women, gambling, and smoking threaten to expose the five years she has shaved off their ages.

    As the lies unravel, a series of comical indignities and outrageous mishaps ensue. The play is reminiscent of such comedies as “She Stoops to Conquer,” “London Assurance,” and “One Man, Two Guvnors,” also produced by the National Theatre in London,

    Tickets are $18, $16 for members, and are available online through Guild Hall’s Web site or at the box office beginning three hours prior to the screening.

    On Wednesday, students who participated in the Round Table Theatre Company’s “Speaking Shakespeare” class will give their final scene presentations at 7 p.m. and the public is welcome to attend. The event is free.

Fooling as Art Form

    Allan Zola Kronzek, a magician, will present a free slide-illustrated talk on “The Art of Fooling” at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

    Mr. Kronzek, who is from Sag Harbor, will discuss the history of magic from its early days in ancient Greece, through the Renaissance, when magicians were feared as conjurers and sorcerers and sometimes persecuted as such, to 18th-century England and modern times. He is the author of “A Book of Magic for Young Magicians: The Secrets of Alkazar” and “The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter.”

    The talk, which is suitable for adults and teens, features live performance, audience participation, paintings, photographs, and theatrical posters as part of the presentation.

Auditions for Singers

    The Choral Society of the Hamptons will hold auditions on Friday, Feb. 1, for its spring concert, to be held on April 7.

    Mark Mangini, the society’s music director, will hold the auditions at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. Those who attend should be prepared to sing a short piece, for which accompaniment will be provided. They also will be asked to demonstrate sight-reading ability.

    The spring concert will also be at the Presbyterian Church, with rehearsals on Fridays from 7:30 to 10 p.m. The first rehearsal is tomorrow, and those planning to audition are welcome to watch. Auditions can be scheduled and questions answered by the society’s executive director, Veronika Semsakova, at [email protected].

    Guild Hall has announced the recipients of its 28th Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards, to be presented on March 4 at a benefit dinner at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

    Those who will be honored are John Alexander for visual arts, Walter Isaacson for literary arts, Nathan Lane for performing arts, and Mickey Straus for leadership and philanthropy. Marshall Brickman will return as master of ceremonies and the presenters will include Ken Auletta, Alec Baldwin, and Jack O’Brien.

    The academy honors summer and year-round East End residents who have continuously excelled over the years in their chosen fields. Past recipients have included Laurie Anderson, John Robin Baitz, Steven Spielberg, Billy Joel, Elaine Stritch, Mel Brooks, and Alec Baldwin for performing arts; Julian Schnabel, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Weber, April Gornik, and Chuck Close for visual arts, and Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, Edward Albee, Joseph Heller, and Joe Pintauro for literary arts. Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Dina Merrill, and Peter Jennings are among honorees who have received special awards from the academy.

    Mr. Alexander, a native Texan who left the state in the 1970s for New York City, is known for his fantastical realistic paintings of nature and people. In addition to many gallery and museum shows throughout his career, he was given a retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2008. A part-time resident of Amagansett, he has been a volunteer firefighter there.

    Mr. Isaacson, formerly chairman and chief executive officer of CNN, editor of Time magazine, and the author of several books including a recent best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, is currently president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Institute, based in Washington, D.C.

    Mr. Lane is a Tony, Emmy, and Screen Actors Guild award-winning actor, who was most recently seen in “The Iceman Cometh” with Brian Dennehy in Chicago. He appears on television in a recurring role in “The Good Wife” on CBS. Probably his best known star turn was as Max Bialystock in “The Producers” on Broadway, which won the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Musical, as well as an Olivier Award in London when the play ran there.

    Melville (Mickey) Straus joined Guild Hall’s board in 1992 and was named its chairman in 1995. The founder and a chief programmer of the cultural center’s Hamptons Institute, he led Guild Hall’s $14 million capital campaign for the renovations of its building and grounds, completed in 2009. He has had a long career in the investment industry and since 1998 has been head of Straus Asset Management. Mr. Straus serves as a director of many arts-related institutions.

    Tickets to the 28th Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards can be purchased through Guild Hall’s special events department. Funds raised from the 6 to 10 p.m. event will benefit Guild Hall’s programming.

   Following the student art exhibition, which will run from Feb. 2 to March 3, the Parrish Art Museum has a full schedule of temporary exhibitions lined up for the next two years.

    “Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating” will be on view from April 21 to July 14. The Parrish will work with the Grey Art Gallery at New York University to offer this show of the preparatory work Ms. Aycock does to bring her ideas for her monumental installations and outdoor sculptures to life. The Grey Art Gallery will display works from 1971 to 1983. The Parrish show will cover 1983 to 2012.

    In July, the museum will present “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet,” which will remain on view through Oct. 27. This show will be presented in partnership with the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and will include some 50 paintings and works on paper, mostly from 1948 to 1952, which draw attention to the visual affinities among the three artists at pivotal moments in their careers. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated 140-page catalog, published by Yale University Press.

    “Michelle Stuart: Drawn From Nature” will be on view at the same time. Ms. Stuart, a resident of Amagansett, works in drawing, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and site-specific earthworks to engage in a dialogue with the natural world. The work included will span 1968 to 2010. The exhibition has been organized by the Djanogly Art Gallery’s Lakeside Arts Center at the University of Nottingham, England.

    In November, the Parrish will bring back its always-anticipated “Artists Choose Artists” exhibition, for which local artists choose from multiple submissions to serve as mentors and partners in displaying their works. The show will be on view from Nov. 3 to Jan. 12, 2014.

    Coming up next year will be a major survey of work by Jennifer Bartlett and a retrospective exhibit of work by William Glackens.

“The Best American

Poetry 2012”

Edited by Mark Doty

Scribner Poetry, $16

   “Rain falls on the Western world, / the coldest spring in living memory everywhere,” begins Frederick Seidel’s “Rain,” one of 75 poems chosen by Mark Doty for the 25th volume of “The Best American Poetry 2012.” Mr. Seidel’s words could serve as an epigraph to this twilit anthology whose poems tend to exhibit an intense interest in death and the paranormal, casting shadows over the warm weather of poetic play with (in W.H. Auden’s words) the “problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly.” And although much of the stormy weather in “The Best American Poetry 2012” is leavened by humor, the poets rarely flash the kind of conciliatory smile we expect from our local weatherman.

     No consolation, for example, is found in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s disturbingly funny “The Afterlife,” in which the speaker dreams of encountering her mother in heaven only to be rebuffed. “There are no mothers here,” says her dream-mother, “just separate souls.”

    And in Paisley Rekdal’s long poem that braids the French Revolution, cancer, and waxworks, Ms. Rekdal, commenting on the wax figures in Madame Tussauds, notes: “there is a death / even for the deathless, objects / that depend on reputation to survive . . .”

    Even Billy Collins, the country’s best-known comic bard, is here represented by “Delivery,” a short poem in which he imagines the news of his death being borne by “a little wooden truck / or a child’s drawing of a truck . . . and of course puffs of white smoke.”

    To be fair, Mr. Doty, a resident of Springs and an award-winning poet himself, has done an admirable job of assembling poems that employ a variety of forms (ghazals, sonnets, prose poems) and registers (from the irate to the tender). Like previous guest editors of the series, he includes well-known poets (Mary Oliver, Mark Strand) and emerging poets (Eduardo C. Corral, Jenny Johnson). And there are plenty of poems in the book that deviate from dirge, glimmers of pure fun, such as the riotous opening of Jennifer Chang’s “Dorothy Wordsworth”: “The daffodils can go fuck themselves . . . I, too, have a big messy head.” Or Mary Ruefle’s “Middle School,” in which the students of a school named after the famously solitary Italian poet Cesare Pavese “all became janitors, / sitting in basements next to boilers / reading cheap books of Italian poetry, / and never sweep a thing. / Yet the world runs fine.”

    Other poets in “The Best American Poetry 2012” appear less comfortable tending the boiler and reciting Auden’s maxim “poetry makes nothing happen.” The Bay Area poet Brenda Hillman’s prose poem, “Moaning Action at the Gas Pump,” is more manifesto than poem, exhorting readers to “start a behavior of moaning outdoors when pumping gas.” Ms. Hillman’s outrage may not make for the “best” poetry in the classical sense (i.e., it doesn’t sing and leaves little to the imagination), but our gas-guzzling culture, it suggests, neither deserves nor needs that kind of music. To survive, she writes, we must “shred the song.”

    For those seeking chords of rapture, there is the hypnotic anaphora of Terrance Hayes’s “The Rose Has Teeth”:

I was trying to play the twelve-bar blues with two bars.

I was trying to fill the room with a shocked and awkward color,

I was trying to limber your shuffle, the muscle wired to muscle.

And Fady Joudah’s elliptical “Tenor,” where “each boy sits next / to his absence and holds him / in the space between two palms / pressed to his face — / this world this hospice.”

    Less conventional is the beauty Heather Christle resuscitates from the deadening lingo of computer programming. Ms. Christle, a young poet with a voice that’s difficult to shake, generates an eerily sad music through the repetitious language of the computer program BASIC:

This program is designed to make people cry

and step away when they are finished.

In one variation the line moves diagonally

up and in another diagonally down.

This makes people cry differently,

diagonally. A whole room of people . . .

    So many American poets are writing in so many styles nowadays that Mr. Doty’s task — and that of the series editor, David Lehman — seems highly fraught. In the past, “The Best American Poetry” series has been much maligned and contested for privileging certain kinds of poems and ignoring others. While Mr. Doty has succeeded in being a relatively democratic guest editor, one gets the feeling that this year the “Seventy-Five Poems Mark Likes” — as Mr. Doty modestly suggests renaming the volume — are unusually obsessed with mortality. Most poems, of course, are. These poems depart from traditional ruminations on the afterlife in their humble, often humorous tone and in their preoccupation not with individual mortality, but with the mortality of the species, a word that rhymes — in the ears of contemporary versifiers — with the word speech.

    Perhaps, then, it’s fitting to close on Steven Orlen’s gentle, plain-spoken “Where Do We Go After We Die.” Mr. Orlen, who taught at the University of Arizona for over 30 years, died before his poem appeared in print. In a note on the poem, Tony Hoagland, Mr. Orlen’s literary executor and former student, writes, “The poem is about stories as much as death: its final lines rather magically depict the end of all narratives, and the onset of speechlessness.” Here are those lines:

The bartender is drying the last of the glasses,

Stories slide under the chairs into the shadows,

Speech reverts to its ancient, parabolic self — Yea,

Though I walk through the valley —

And actions lose their agency — It came to pass —

The things of the world become scarce,

And what’s left spreads its wings

And flies around among them, like bats at dusk.

   Will Schutt, who lives in Wainscott, won the 2012 Yale Younger Poets Prize. His collection “Westerly” is due out in April from Yale University Press.

   Robert Richenburg’s paintings and works on paper from the 1950s and 1960s, during the height of Abstract Expressionism, are the subject of a new show on view in New York at the David Findlay Jr. Gallery on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition includes work that is gestural and full of color and linear movement.

    Richenburg, who died in 2006, was part of the New York School and a member of the Club, the group of artists who became known as Abstract Expressionists who met regularly on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s. He was also a student of Hans Hofmann. He eventually became a resident of Springs, where many of his fellow Club members summered or relocated on a permanent basis. He taught for many years at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

    In an essay for a 2006 retrospective exhibition catalog, The Star’s longtime art critic Robert Long said, “While some artists settle into signature styles and stop growing, whether out of financial worry, loss of heart, or lack of vision, Richenburg never forgot that to be an artist is to be an explorer. His relentless curiosity led him to try out completely different ways of painting, and to use many different mediums; he has consistently challenged our notions — and his own — of what constitutes art.”

    The artist himself noted that the work he made that seemed avant-garde at the time was already familiar to him so he kept pressing on and intensifying his images. “To stay with one way of painting for the rest of your life seems insane to me. Maybe it translates into success and you can put money in the bank, but you’re no longer an artist; you’re a merchant.”

    He was known during this period for his black-grounded works, which were built up with forms or gashes of white or colored paint with a brooding or explosive intensity. The dark ground made even his gestural mark-making seem ponderous, without the manic intensity and rhythm of some of Jackson Pollock’s drip works. But they are no less beautiful and in some ways easier to digest.

    By 1960, when he painted “The City,” one of the works in the current show, he was using a grid as an organizing principle, presaging the Minimalists’ fascination with hard lines and geometry that would eventually make Abstract Expressionism look fussy and self-involved in comparison.

    The exhibition will be on view through Jan. 26.