James Brown, Planet (Pink and Grey) VI, 2006, oil and pencil on linen.

Frederick Seidel has received some unusual tributes in recent years. Writing in n+1, Philip Connors credited Seidel’s poetry with giving him the courage to quit his job. Wyatt Mason made a passionate case for Seidel’s Poems 1959–2009 in The New York Times Magazine—not a publication known for its attention to verse. There’s been a poem dedicated to Seidel in The New Yorker. The London Review of Books has likened him to a YouTube person in a bunny suit, while fellow Paris Review staffer Dan Chiasson compared Seidel’s effusions to a garden hose. In a nice way.

Now the artist James Brown has published a collection of works on paper, canvas, cardboard, and linen inspired by Seidel’s poem “Into the Emptiness.” The volume has come to our attention just in time to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday, tomorrow, of our most youthful editor.

James Brown, Into the emptiness I, 2009, mixed media on cardboard.

James Brown, Into the emptiness II, 2009, mixed media on cardboard.

James Brown, Into the emptiness V, 2009, mixed media on cardboard.

James Brown, Into the emptiness XVIII, 2009, mixed media on cardboard.

James Brown’s Into the Emptiness: A Descriptive Catalogue was recently published by SOAVE Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Italy.