Benjamin Harnett
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benjaminharnett.com
Benjamin Harnett
@benjaminharnett.com
3.4K followers 680 following 5.6K posts
Sometime poet, historian, software engineer, novelist, union man. https://www.benjaminharnett.com https://thehappyvalleynovel.com
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It’s time for Friday’s Ice Art and Poetry, my ongoing collaboration with artist Mark Mastroianni. Here we have a dialogue about beauty and place. Wherever you go, there you are, but where is your heart?
The sun is shining through a block of ice with various color forms embedded, they seem like a half-remembered idea or a fractured landscape of hill and field and there are other shapes like hearts and people, and fine lines in the ice that could be vessels or roots; the sky is yellow and palest purple, the yellow is repeated in the wind blown crusted snow. The hills are dark but waking or heading to sleep. My poem draft, the beautiful place: THE BEAUTIFUL PLACE It is a truism bordering on the cliché: No matter where you plant yourself there will always be a place out there, where the sun hits just such a way as it's setting so that your heart yearns for it-the beautiful place. Is it a meadow atop a hill? Sometimes mists will rise up, earthly to heavenly cloud. Equally paradigmatic: That place, when you find it at last, will be something ordinary. Sad single-wide trailer, some rusting farm implements half-plowed into dirt, a flat rock that, standing upon, someone can stare down into the valley and imagine what a beautiful place it is that you have come from. Somewhere else always begins the rainbow, where morning-light makes a pool, a green almost Edenic, a place of peace. So the lesson as old as any fairy tale is not that the beauty is always an unreachable other, nor that it vanishes at the merest touch, but that beauty is everywhere, and cliche allowed.
January 9, 2026 at 3:46 PM
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Obsessed with the sky
The sky is the gentlest gradient from pink to yellow in the very lowest left above the hills to a sort of mineral blue in the top right. The tree in the center is an elm and it is starting to get quite tall, considering I planted it as a sapling many years ago. The snow in the field is also mineral blue and it’s deepest in the footprints that make a path up to the tree.
January 9, 2026 at 1:33 PM
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Contrappasto
A tree trunk with many limbs this way and that silhouetted darkly against the pale winter sky, a little yellow mostly light grey and the faintest blue. The tree looks human despite its many and different limbs.
January 9, 2026 at 1:28 PM
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We come in peace
Two weird snow creatures with beckoning limbs and dark querying eyes. The one on the left is taller, the one on the right has a more helmet-like head. They are obviously alien. The sky is hazy and the low hills are sleeping.
January 9, 2026 at 1:24 PM
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Leaning
A snowy clearing in the forest reveals a hidden stream; some young fir trees pop up beside their elders, while in the front ragged birch trunks, the small one leaning on the other are seen.
January 4, 2026 at 2:15 PM
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Maybe if we keep the Christmas display up a bit longer, something good will happen.
A squat, pink vase with hexagonal pattern, with gold branches coming out bedecked with Christmas bulbs dangling, a pair of fake pomegranates, and in front a smaller vase made of pentagons and to the right a tree swallow in ceramic brightly painted dives, A glass Christmas tree bathes everything in a pensive, moody light.
January 4, 2026 at 1:51 PM
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Christmas books continue to pile up
A close up shot of a pile of tiny books on top of a Christmas red linen table runner. There is a miniature fake plant askew in the top-right. These books are part of a model kit, and I assembled them, gaining new appreciation for book as physical object.
January 3, 2026 at 10:37 PM
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Friday’s Ice Art and Poetry: In ice with the help of light you can make a garden live in winter’s heart; the Etruscans left gardens for their dead, in bright frescoes and painted reliefs. Today’s collaboration (by us, Mark Mastroianni and Benjamin Harnett) makes a garden for your screen:
A large square of ice with paint, paper, twigs, leaves, and other objects embedded. It’s settled in some snow in a field with a hill and trees behind. The light is glowing through it mildly, as it’s a cloudy day. It’s inspired by the poem that follows. My poem draft, it reads: THE ETRUSCAN GARDEN Like the Etruscans it remains only in their tombs, in frescoes, and as reliefs. Trees: the cypress, and the laurel of lanceolate leaf; myrtle with death-black fruit, the date palm; also grapevines, flowering ivy, and poppies conspicuous by distinctive seed-heads. Painted figures, too, chapleted in flowers, garlands draped over the neck: blue and red blossoms, red and deeper red, yellow with a fringe of black lines. And on the backs of bronze mirrors, in one scene, a man, proffering, to his consort, divine, a plant sprouting from bulb in open hand, perhaps a lily, fragrant-of what significance, sadly, ancient sources do not say. But in no place sepulchral are arrayed those ill-omened stems Tagus, the Etruscans' homuncular sage, warned against: the fern, the wild pear, the black fig, red dogwood, and the briar rose. And if these or their like should grow in my potager plot, today? Who can say.
January 2, 2026 at 8:04 PM
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Last book of 2025:
A photo of the book “how to talk about books you haven’t read” by Pierre bayard.
December 31, 2025 at 1:00 AM
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A second installment of my collaboration with artist Mark Mastroianni. #FridayIceArtAndPoetry Here in the days after the longest night we wonder in ice and in poetry what we will find as the light returns. “What’s out there?”
A large rectangle of ice encasing many various moon shapes with the light of the sun just barely coming over the hill flooding it. The moons eclipse each other and a large central moon has a green cast. The ice is standing in a snowy field and casts a shadow on the viewer. My poem draft: WHAT'S OUT THERE? What was that bump? Why did the light go on? Is that something bright gliding through the trees? Is that sound a truck idling? How long will it last? What is behind the fog? Why do we care? We share a glance through the window, as we linger on the stairs. What's out there? In the yard? In the clouded dimness? An hour before dawn? Crouched big, dark as a bear? Our dog bristles up, is growling, attuned to the slightest impingement on our little sphere. Oh only a contractor bag, shifted from its pile by the wind. He calms quickly. Meanwhile, how do we fare? Clouds part. The sky is winter clear. We see a falling star. The far is near. A vast twinkling. And us, still rattled. The same big question remains, general, unaddressable, vain: What's out there?
December 26, 2025 at 8:33 PM
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A lot of chaos basically
A photo of a man playing accordion with a horse head mask in front of an elegant brick building; childhood photos in a frame; a small print an artist made inspired by some of my poems; a 4-day work week pin from union organizing, a monster pothos growing into the wall.
December 23, 2025 at 10:12 PM
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Toni on an adventure
A woman standing in a rock in a field with rays of sunlight shooting down around her from a dramatic looking cloudy sky. The field is patchy with snow. The hills behind are low and gentle. She is looking to the east and is wearing a wool hat and dark sunglasses. Her hands are in her pockets.
December 22, 2025 at 1:00 PM
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I’m doing a collaboration with artist Mark Mastroianni—a side project of his are these beautiful, ephemeral ice sculptures. He’s taken some of my poems as inspiration and here’s the first, which he started in November but thanks to the extreme weather got delayed (and now is already gone).
A rectangular block of ice with various objects embedded in it and colors and textures, string, leaves, green and purple, the setting sun, with snow and hills behind. The work of artist Mark Mastroianni. My unpublished draft poem reading as follows: NOVEMBER The earlier I wake up the less time I have. Life leaks from the bucket as fast as it can be filled. We must cover half the distance, then half again. How does it feel for you, already there, in the future-pretty good I guess; or pretty bad. I have always imagined a string connecting us, eye to word to hand to eye. Send me a message on that string. Let me know: Are better things possible? Once we've begun to slide down the leafy bank of our understanding, is there purchase to be found? Do we climb to the light of the ridge, or fall away forever? There's no final answer except that there must always be another November, expecting you, each one farther than the last: that's thermodynamics and an expanding universe, and the messages you've sent are only my echo.
December 19, 2025 at 5:32 PM
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So recently got this little cat soap as a gift. Our young doofus male cat crept up to it and his ears curled back and he cocked his head and then slowly, gently touched it with his paw a few times, and then got up real close and sniffed the neck of the soap a few times. “Brother are you ok?”
A small cat-shaped soap in a dish on a marble counter.
December 19, 2025 at 3:21 PM
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Pepe Silvia string-wall meme with crazy eyed Charlie Day.
December 18, 2025 at 12:57 PM
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Scenes from the frozen wasteland
Looking at a snowy field through a blackberry thicket, some canes have ice dripping off and the sun is a glowing yellow ball in a frozen sky. The hills are low and dark, more blue than green.
December 17, 2025 at 12:04 PM
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It’s cold
5 degrees Fahrenheit this morning in Cherry Valley
December 15, 2025 at 12:23 PM
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A head of the Buddha buried in powdery snow up to his gently closed eyes, snow piled above like a crown.
December 13, 2025 at 9:35 PM
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They say never read the reviews but it’s nice to get a good one. This reviewer wrote log lines for each of the stories in the collection and they’re kind of amazing. www.goodreads.com/review/show/... (picture is a sample of the log lines including two of my favorite)
Delivery - Through his job as a pizza delivery driver, a high schooler meets two college students who promise to teach him how the world works. Tom Doolie - An unnamed townsperson describes the universally despised Doolie family and the eventual collapse of both the family and their business. This little Piggie - A green glow-in-the-dark pig tries to make sense of his life within the science lab. The Stick Man - A recent widow compares her present situation to that of a man from her hometown who was obsessed with collecting sticks. Nuts! - A group of survivors listen as one recounts how he tried to warn the president of the coming squirrel apocalypse.
December 12, 2025 at 1:10 PM
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Forget it, Jake—it’s Busy Town.
A Christmas ornament of the worm driving an apple car from Richard Scarry’s Busy Town.
December 8, 2025 at 7:53 PM
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Some intersecting hills, one low and far, the other near. Varying mists and clouds, a snowy field with tall dead reeds and canes, bare trees, pines. The clouds are smoky or clotted or smeared fogs, a haze of light opens at the center. Snow is coming.
December 8, 2025 at 12:22 PM
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It’s a winter wonderland out there
Three tall scotch pines draped with snow, towering above a small black shed, the sky is pale morning, a fence runs along, also snow topped, patio chairs and a cafe table snow covered, and generally snow everywhere. Good morning!
December 3, 2025 at 12:23 PM
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Meanwhile…
The other side of the sunset, a pale moon watching. There are a few ragged pink clouds, the moon is a frosty eye to one, while languid stretches of grey wisps are laid upon the steely blue chill, and a bit of hillside below is dark and toothed with firs.
December 1, 2025 at 12:41 PM
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About last night
A particularly impressive sunset; a lake of fire rippling with clouds above the hill, the sleeping field, with a sharp rip of light blue shining neon in one corner and a few piercing yellow eyes, and the line of puffy clotted clouds above are grey and blue and behind violet and purple.
December 1, 2025 at 12:33 PM
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Trump’s MRI results
Still life with food and fruit photo by Peter Lippmann. It’s a bunch of rotten fruit in a Dutch still life style.
December 1, 2025 at 12:28 PM