Prompted was I, by Glenn Dixon’s essay on the Hirshhorn’s “Regarding Beauty” (“It’s All Too Beautiful,” 1/14), to exhume a losing entry (my six other efforts also lost) from the Washington Post’s alphabet poem contest decades ago:
Kafka Dafka
“Asinine!” Boor cries.
“Dammit,
Each framed glop here
Is junk.
Kafka loved
Meaninglessness.
Nevertheless,
One prefers
Quality.
Rare, searching, taut,
Ulyssean visions.
Whitish Xs yawn,
‘ZERO!’”
I don’t invoke “Kafka Dafka” to inveigh against “Regarding Beauty,” which I haven’t seen yet. I was thinking especially of White on White—a white square (?) on a white canvas—which I viewed at the Museum of Modern Art in the middle of the last century. I used to say that there should be a sequel, a picture frame with nothing inside, called White off White.
Rockville, Md.