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Millennial and apocalyptic traditions in prophecy cross-fertilize the broader reformative tradition. The chapter examines end-time prophecies including forecasts of race greatness and a contrasting nonracial universalism; reconstructs and analyzes John Jasper’s famed “Sun” and less-known “Stone Cut Out of the Mountain” sermons; and discusses parallel uses by major reformative prophets.

This chapter discusses black biblical interpretation between 1865 and the Nadir. It analyzes the interpretive activity of two prominent figures: Frances E. W. Harper and John Jasper. In the wake of the Civil War's radical disruption of the South's slave economy, and amid the promise of Reconstruction, Harper's Moses: Story of the Nile, published in 1869, shows optimism about the possibilities for black life. In the epic poem she fashions a Moses with virtues of the politics of respectability and commends him to the black community as the key to racial uplift. Nine years later, after any hopes of the promise of Reconstruction had been eroded, John Jasper, the towering pastoral figure of Richmond, Virginia, takes Exodus 13:5 and preaches his renowned sermon, “The Sun Do Move.” Defiant rather than optimistic, Jasper's pillar of fire politics rejects the truth claims of the new scientific discourses from which African Americans have been barred access.

This chapter presents a reading of O'Hara alongside examples of work by his artist friends and collaborators Joe Brainard and Jasper Johns. It argues that O'Hara's sense of his poetry — and indeed his body — as a self-aware performance unpicks, as it were, the textual stitches in which authenticity and feelingness might be located. The chapter examines the work of O'Hara, Brainard and Johns work in terms of a poetics of collage and how such a poetics might be seen to open out questions of what — literally — to put in the picture. If, for Brainard, memory and feelingness are key elements to his art and writing, this is also true of the elegiac pieces made by Johns that reflect upon his friendship with O'Hara. What unites these works is their questioning of the efficacy of a poetics of elegy and of touch.

Rubbing and casting are in some respects like photography as they involve a moment of proximity, intimate contact with something, yet they are also techniques of replication. This double valence perhaps helps to explain the peculiar psychodynamics of these processes. The distinction between carving and modelling in terms of object relations as proposed by the Kleinian art critic, Adrian Stokes, is used to throw light on the art of direct casting. Artists considered in this context include Anna Barriball, Jasper Johns, Allan McCollum, Masao Okabe, and Rachel Whiteread.

Carnal knowledge contravenes body/mind dualism. The repetitive horizontal inlay presents an ancient binding format relying on compressed color as an invitation to sensory response. This essay argues that the variants of artisanal inlay {mosaics, intarsia, grids, even twitter snatches, and pointilliste memes} are chief among erotic types of compositional ordering. These initially hand-made, tightly interlocked, and obsessively repetitive patterns mime an accumulating, self-generating intensity of feelings. It’s notable that supposedly cooly abstract strains of Modern Art seductively explore this self-assembling, pavement-like combinatoric and the sensuousness of its varicolored tesselation. Consider Jasper Johns’ shadow-steeped crazy-work flagstone paths, David Hockney’s wet poolside terrazzo parquet, or Ellsworth Kelly’s ecstatic arrays of spectral light. Here, however, the central focus alights on a more sultry integration of perception, thought, and feeling into a single sensory-motor concept. Neither material symbol nor passionate artifact, but both, Cy Twombly’s sumptuous and worldly Peony Blossom Paintings (2007) presents the lateralized stages of an overwhelming physical relationship. This immersive, large-scale series configures the changing situation of desire from irresistable arousal, to entangled climax, to ebbing flicker, all exhibited by means of a chromatic format characterized by haiku containment.