Off a room of Greek art of the fifth century B.C., beckoning like a glowing black abyss, is the Met’s Man Ray show. It’s oddly tucked away, but it’s not a small show, and there’s really no reason to complain about it, but as a museum-goer near me said to her friend, “Some of the rayographs can be pretty boring.”

Well, yeah, they can be—in some respects, we’re a long way from what was visually exciting in the 1920s—but we’re concerned here not with oneiric eggbeaters but with Man Ray’s poetry, assuming he has any. And he does! For example, I discover this little tidbit online.

This was published in a little magazine in 1915, and, like some of the rayographs, it may be less than thrilling. So Chat, why don’t you do a Man Ray poem? Chat is, of course, rarin’ to go, a veritable taureau in the chute.

Object Waiting for a Name 
The shadow arrives first. 
The object pretends not to notice. 

I measure the distance 
between intention and accident 
with a bent ruler. 

Nothing happens. 
This is sufficient. 

Well, that may not really be sufficient, but Chat insists it’s just dandy.

Why this fits Man Ray 

• Declarative, unemotional tone 

• Objects treated as sentient but indifferent 

• Action replaced by conceptual stillness 

• Ending that refuses resolution 

If you squint, the words disappear and what remains is tempo. It’s closer to a rayograph in language than a poem in the literary sense. 

Uh, yeah. But wait! Speaking of conceptual stillness, there’s a piece of Man Ray’s poetry—if you can call it that—online that seems to the contemporary (squinting) eye to be a completely redacted text, right out of the Epstein files the way the DOJ would do them if they could. Chat claims this “dash poem” is under copyright, hence not reproducible, but it isn’t. Let’s just view Chat as a dreaming object having a literary infringement nightmare. Here it is:

Now let’s put Chat to work on this. Yo, 5.2: Make a Man Ray poem with words that are configured similarly to these various dashes. Chat, ever the flatterer, calls this a “good, subtle request,” and after paranoiacally assuring me it’s not copying anything, produces this.

An original poem 
after Man Ray 
(words standing in for dashes) 
still 
 unexplained distance 
 pause 
 a horizontal refusal of motion 
 wait 
 remaining 
 
This isn’t anywhere near what I asked for, obviously—for starters, it’s way too short both in length of line and number of lines—but Chat, with the usual flurry of bullet points, goes to some lengths to show how this “maps the dash poem conceptually,” and I’m not in the mood to argue. Then Chat, unbidden, offers two more.

Optional variations (if you want to push it) 
Even colder / more object-like 
mark 
 extended interval 
 mark 
 extended extended interval 
 mark 
 mark 
 
Slightly more sensual (Man Ray via photography) 
edge 
elongated shadow 
exposure 
the surface holds its breath 
exposure 
edge 

All the Chat dash poems, by the way, are triple-spaced at birth. “This is not about what the words say, but how long they take to exist on the page,” Chat insists, but I’ve closed it all up, it’s too damn porous on the page. So now there are three Chat-created, allegedly dash-based texts. Let’s just run them together and filter them through BTR on a MANRAY conceit to see how they dream. So we have Marwari (spoken in parts of India, Pakistan and Nepal), Albanian, Niyanja (spoken in Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe), Rundi (spoken primarily in Burundi), Arabic (Egyptian), Yoruba (spoken primarily in South West Nigeria, Benin and parts of Togo), and back to English. It’s the usual Bingian block that will require volitional lineation, which in this case is easy: Bing Translate has littered the text with achy breaky commas.

Go forward,
start,
stop,
walk slowly,
stop,
residual power,
line in place,
energy and line in place,
energy,
finish,
long shape,
light,
group,
strong wind,
light,
end

Sounds uncannily like a Beckett monologue. I pull Man Ray’s Self Portrait off the shelf (did I ever read it or did I just look at the pictures?). Beckett is not in the index. The only thing to do is go to Gem—Chat can’t be trusted with this, it’s still in a copyright panic, it may’ve popped a few Blackwells. Gem, what’s the connection between Man Ray and Samuel Beckett? Answer sans bullets:

It is highly probable that Man Ray and Samuel Beckett knew each other, as they both lived and worked within the same tight-knit circle of artists and intellectuals in Montparnasse, Paris, during the mid-20th century. While they are rarely the primary focus of the same historical study, their lives overlapped in several notable ways: 
Common Circles in Paris 
The Montparnasse Scene: Both men were fixtures of the Parisian avant-garde. Man Ray was a central figure of the Surrealist movement, and Beckett was famously the assistant to James Joyce, who was a close friend of Man Ray. 
Shared Friends: Man Ray famously photographed James Joyce and many other figures in Beckett’s immediate orbit, such as Marcel Duchamp. 

The Cimetière du Montparnasse: In a poetic coincidence of history, both Man Ray and Samuel Beckett are buried in the same cemetery—the Cimetière du Montparnasse—which serves as the final resting place for many of the “intellectual heavyweights” of that era. 

BTR has worked its magic. Krapp’s Last Jape. Strong wind. Light. End.