Forever 30, Forever Nass.

Always a little better than he pretends
And a little worse than he wishes, my friend,
Saying words that should be written down,
Displaying a smile that is often a frown.

As soon as the words strolled
Across the doctor’s lips,
She realized the cold waste -

When Nelson dies,
All two hundred and six
Of my broken bones
Will ache for you.

Bright Star starring John Keats
John Keats rests his head as angular
as two racially white blades of hay.

Life Story starring Jeff Goldblum
The mystery has a name, Jeff Goldblum.

y November you already thought of returning,
rubbing Vaseline into your palms and the crevices
of your cracked heels. No napalm rained down in a foreign land,
no birth dates streamed across the screen to push our brothers into war.

There’s a house
a half an hour south
of town,
built of stones
my father hauled
from down the road
in his old Ford
Fairlane. He built it for
my mother when she asked.

The grass is trimmed like my father obsesses over. It’s green as Heineken bottles, as my mother’s eyes when shining with tears, and the white lines that frame it up and down stand out like Claire’s porcelain skin at Ricky’s son’s baptism.

Rob Madole is composing a creative thesis for the Creative Writing Certificate. This is an excerpt from a larger work.

This semester the Visual Arts Department Seminar, “Issues in Contemporary Art” sought out to not just learn about the tides of new art, but also to take hold of it as curators, theorists, and writers. For the next few weeks, an exhibition of the works of established contemporary artists like Nikhil Chopra and Joshua Kirsch will be displayed in 185 Nassau and the new Butler gallery as a curatorial project of the visual arts department. Open to the school, these projects bring a bit of the contemporary art scene to Princeton, NJ and allow us to understand and explore questions of self-representation, technology and the consciousness of space through the medium of art.
--Saba McCoy for Visual Arts 392