May 2015 · fred sasaki sarah dodson lindsay garbutt holly amos christina pugh alexander knowlton...
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May 2015 FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccvi • number 2
Transcript of May 2015 · fred sasaki sarah dodson lindsay garbutt holly amos christina pugh alexander knowlton...
founded in 1912 by harriet monroe
May 2015
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE
volume ccvi • number 2
CONTENTS
May 2015
P O E M S
frank bidart 95 The Fourth Hour of the Night
thomas lux 129 The Horse Poisoner
peter ciccariello 130 In the Absence of Oulipo
karen solie 131 Bitumen
sylvia legris 136 Spleen (Hollyhock) Spleen (Blood Lily)
daisy fried 138 The Girl Grew and Grew, Her Mother Couldn’t Stop It
tomaž šalamun 139 Introduction Alone “Historical brutality” Ships The Window of Death Hard Core Three Flies Translated and introduced by Brian Henry
C O M M E N T
cathy park hong 151 Against Witness
donald revell 162 Scholium
mike chasar 185 Lullaby Logics
contributors 192
Editor
Art Director
Managing Editor
Assistant Editor
Editorial Assistant
Consulting Editor
Design
don share
fred sasaki
sarah dodson
lindsay garbutt
holly amos
christina pugh
alexander knowlton
cover art by jenny kendler“Species Traitor I,” 2013
POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG
a publication of the
POETRY FOUNDATIONprinted by cadmus professional communications, us
Poetry • May 2015 • Volume 206 • Number 2
Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2015 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Please visit poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/submissions for submission guidelines and to access the magazine’s online submission system. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at JSTOR.org. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Media Solutions, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the UK.
POEMS
95FRANK BIDART
frank bidart
The Fourth Hour of the Night
i
Out of scarcity,— ... being.
Because, when you were nine, your father
was murdered,betrayed.
Because the traveler was betrayed by those with
whom he had the right to seekrefuge, the Tatárs.
Because the universe then allowed a creature
stronger, taller, moreruthless than you
to fasten around your neck a thick wooden wheel
impossibleto throw off.
Because at nine your cunning was not equal
to iron-fastenedimmense wood.
Because, stripped of what was his from birth, the slave
at tenoutwitted
96 POETRY
the universe, tore the wheel from his neck: —
because your neckcarries it still, Scarcity is the mother of being.
•
Hour in which betrayal and slaveryare the great teachers.
Hour in which acquisition
looks like, and fora moment is, safety.
Hour in which the earth, looking into
a mirror, names what it seesby the history of weapons.
Hour from which I cannot wake.
ii
Ch’ang-ch’un was determined that he would notprostrate himself before
the conqueror of the world
though Alexander the Great, drunk, hadexecuted Aristotle’s nephew when he refused
to grovel before his uncle’s pupil.
97FRANK BIDART
•
Ch’ang-ch’un bowed his head with claspedhands. The Great Khan was gracious.
Though Ch’ang-ch’un, much younger,had refused invitations from the King of Gold
and even the emperor of Hang-chou, now,in his old age, he discovered he was
tired of waiting for apotheosis.
At last invited to court by the terrifyingconqueror of the world, he said Yes.
•
He traveled for a year and a halffollowing the route the Great Khan
himself had taken. He passed valley after valley
that, years later, still were filled withungathered, whitening bones.
•
He bowed his head with clasped hands.
The most powerful man on earththen asked him to teach him the secret
of the Taoist masters —
98 POETRY
the elixirthat allows men to cheat death.
Temujin was in pain. Temujin
for fifty years lived as if immortal —though surrounded, all his life, by death.
Now he had fallen from a horse. The injury
had not entirely, after muchtime, healed. He brooded about death, his
death. Now he must conquer the ancient
secretthat would bend
heaven to his need.
He asked Ch’ang-ch’un for the fabledelixir.
iii
The world. He was born at the great world’spoor far edge. In order to see the rich
debris that must lie at the bottom of the sea,
he sucked and sucked till he swallowedthe ocean.
•
99FRANK BIDART
Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Nestorians —he summoned
each. Each eloquent spokesman
praised abnegations, offered transformation, evenecstasies —; just renounce
sex, or food, or love.
•
Eating power, he fucked a new woman every night.Best, he said, was the wife or daughter or mother of
an enemy.
•
He watched his friend Bo’orchu hunteach day as if hunting were the purpose of life, work
sufficient for a man. As a boy he discovered his
work when he had a wooden wheel around his neck:to escape the wheel.
Every single thing tastes like, reeks with
the power that put it there. Weaponskeep in place
who gets rewarded how much for what. The world
•
100 POETRY
is good at telling itself this is a lie. The world.
iv
Each unit made up of
ten: ten soldierswhose leader reports to a unit of one
hundred soldiers, whose leader reports to a unit of onethousand soldiers, whose leader reports to a unit of
ten thousand.
With iron logic he had raised the great structure
from the flatinternecine earth
(— abyss where absolute, necessary
poweris fettered, bewildered by something working within us,
MUD IN THE VEINS, to paralyze
decision —; as well as by that necessarysweet daring
that leaps across the abyss to risk all, to correct and cripple
power, — ... but then finds, in despair, it must try to master it).
101FRANK BIDART
v
Though Temujin’s father, alive, waskhan
the remnant of his family was, at hispoisoning, driven from the circle of the wagons.
Temujinhad shining eyes, but at nine no force.
They survived by eating roots, berries, strayrodents, birds the boys’
cunning pulled from the air.
•
Temujin’s father out of his mother had two sons.His poisoned
father, out of his second wife, also had two sons.
•
One day, with a freshly sharpened juniperarrow, he brought down a lark, and his
half-brother, Bekter, nearly his age,reaching the bird first, refused to give it up.
Temujin ran to his mother, who told him he mustaccept this, that four boys with two
102 POETRY
women alone must cease fighting.With his bow and arrow, the next day Temujin
murdered his half-brother.
•
His half-brother at each moment relentlesslydisputed and clearly forever would
dispute everything Temujin possessed.
•
When he confessed to his mother she shriekedonly his shadow
ever again could bear to be with him.He didn’t believe her. She lived
blinded by panic. He lookedaround him. Human beings
live by killing other living beings.
•
His father’s rival, who told his father that Temujinhad shining eyes, when his fatherdied decided he now could make Temujin a slave.
Temujin rammedthe wheel down on the idiot guard’sskull.
103FRANK BIDART
Sorqan-shira and his sons found himdrowning amongreeds at the edge of the river.
Frenzied, risking theirlives, Sorqan-shira and his sonswork to cut away the wheel from his body.
•
The arrow flewas if of itself.
Temujin’s half-brother turned and saw
Temujin’s unerring aimaimed at
his chest.
Before the arrowwas released
his half-brother did not beg to live.
His half-brother’sgaze was filled with
everything that would happen would happen.
•
In the delirium of Temujin’s adultdreams, the knife he stoleescaping
104 POETRY
is uselessin unlockingthe wheel.
•
How each child finds that it must deal withthe intolerable
becomes its fate.
•
W O R L D
with this A R R O W
I thee wed.
vi
Even the conqueror of the worldis powerless against the dead.
The most intricate plan his friend Jamuqaever accomplished
was to make Temujin execute him.
•
They met as boys.
105FRANK BIDART
By the frozen waters of the Onon, Temujingave Jamuqa the knucklebone of a deer.
Jamuqa gave Temujin the knucklebone of a deer.
They could see their breaths. They mingledbreaths. They swore they were anda,
brothers. They sharpened arrows — juniper, cypress.
•
When they met again, many yearslater, Temujin’s
wife, Borte, had been seized by another tribe.
Jamuqa commanded a whole tribe. Hepledged his friend twenty thousand men.
Temujin also by this time was chief, but of
many fewer. The two friends and two armiesfound and freed Borte after nine months.
The anda celebrated by the waters of the Onon.
•
They were too drunk, too happy. Jamuqapulled a blanket over himself and Temujin.
They lay all night under the same blanket.
•
106 POETRY
For either to have expressed desire, to havereached, would have been to offer the object of desire
power. It could not be done.
•
Jamuqa forever wants them todo it to them
together, in tandem, two couples next toeach other —; so Temujin can and must
look over and see his insouciant
bravado as he dismounts, hear Jamuqa’sgirl cry out first, more jaggedly.
•
When the chiefs gather to choose, forthe first time in decades, a Great Khan,
to Jamuqa’s surprise
Temujin is chosen. Someone points outhis family is royal —; Jamuqa
is merely descended from a favorite concubine.
•
At feasts, Jamuqa thinks supplicantsshuffle him aside to reach Temujin.
107FRANK BIDART
As the world more and more defers to Temujin
Jamuqa becomes, in his own eyes, a ghost.He is the memory of Jamuqa.
•
In the new army under Temujin, aristocracy hasfew privileges. A friend who has fought under
Jamuqa for years must, to rise, compete
against peasants. Panache, the sweet disdain formere consequences, gain, victory, is lost.
•
Many, like the tribe that tried to enslave him, willnever accept Temujin.
Whenever a new group rebels, Temujin findsJamuqa is in their company.
•
Men don’t want to serve under Jamuqa —
because his friend would not fight againstthe Great Khan, he cut off the friend’s head, and hung it
from his horse’s tail.
•
108 POETRY
Jamuqa joined the Nayman army;Jamuqa deserted the Nayman army.
•
An outcast with five last remainingfollowers, Jamuqa
in the high snowy Tangu mountainsat the very limit of his native country
as he eats a wild ram he has killed and roasted
is taken prisoner by his companionsand delivered to Temujin.
vii
Your father seized your mother as a girljust after her
marriage to someone from her own tribe. This wascommon practice. Just after
your marriage, the same tribe
seized your wife, and gave her to the brother of the chief.All proceeded from desire — from
deferred justice, the chancre of unclosed
injury. This bredenmity through generation after generation, blood
109FRANK BIDART
feuds, tribe against tribe against tribe.
As the Great Khan, Temujin outlawed suchseizures. He did What was there to be done.
•
The axes of your work, work thatthroughout the illusory chaos of your life
absorbed your essential
mind, were there always — What wasthere to be done. You saw many men
refuse, or try to refuse
what needed to be done. Whether they could notfind it, or were, finding it, disgusted, they
without it wandered, like Jamuqa.
•
When Temujin entered the dark room the prisonerwas naked.
His genitals hung pendant, bulbous —
as if swollenfrom rubbing.
He still is a creature that is beautiful, but all dirty.
•
1 10 POETRY
Jamuqa said, What you must do is kill me.
I will never accede to your power.
Alive, I will rally your enemies.
Dead, I will, in their eyes, just be one more fool.
Temujin replied that hecould not. They had been, since boyhood,
anda. Without him, would he have recoveredBorte?
Jamuqa replied that he did not want his skin
broken duringexecution. He repeated, twice,
I will never accede to your power.
Temujin refused. Jamuqa wassick in the head. Healthy men don’t want to die.
•
Jamuqa escaped. Two men who Temujin valueddied bringing him back.
Then Jamuqa escaped again. When Jamuqa was
returned again, Temujinhesitated for months.
Then he granted his wish.
1 1 1FRANK BIDART
•
He insisted the skin not be broken.When he saw the body, the head was severed,as if someone for some reason had beenfurious.
•
Temujin was furious with him for lettingpride, some
sickness of the mind, poison
feeling,— ... they had been, since boyhood, anda.
•
Even the conqueror of the worldis powerless against the dead.
He saw, smelt
the carcass ofJamuqa,—
... who had known that Temujin was toosmart not to be, by his
death, forever tormented.
•
1 12 POETRY
He watched you take from him what he thought washis — the world of indolent chaos
inhabited by the beautiful
and lucky — fuck anything that walks, if that is whatever inside you
demands. In the end the something
that was broken in him was mute.He insisted that it did not exist.
viii
There was an immense silence between Temujin and Borte.
•
In the beginning, sweetness, because there had been no need to talk.
•
Temujin’s father had taken him at nine on a journey to find Temujin a bride.
•
She was ten, and beautiful.
•
His father and her father were old allies, and it was agreed.
1 13FRANK BIDART
•
On the way home the Tatárs poisoned his father.
•
Temujin was sixteen when they were at last married.
•
Within days, Borte was abducted.
•
Borte was abducted because, when their camp was attacked, there was only one free horse.
•
Temujin thrust the horse at his mother, not his wife.
•
This was as it should be.
•
Borte knew this, accepted this.
•
When she returned from those who had seized her, she returned about to give birth.
•
1 14 POETRY
Temujin did not ask what humiliations she had endured.
•
Whose child was it?
•
It could have been Temujin’s or the creature’s who took her.
•
Temujin declared the child, a son, his.
•
He needed to be perceived, among his own people, as someone of impeccable justice.
•
Someone whose rectitude is above vanity.
•
They had three more sons.
•
He needed legitimate sons.
•
Borte raised, as well, orphans that Temujin’s soldiers plucked from burning villages that they themselves had burned.
1 15FRANK BIDART
•
Those thus saved proved to be among the fiercest, the most loyal of his soldiers.
•
After Borte returned, the armies of Temujin and Jamuqa camped together for a year and a half.
•
Borte and Temujin’s mother found the closeness between the two men humiliating, an insult, an embarrassment.
•
Borte and Temujin’s mother told Temujin that as long as he was tied to this debauched, fickle friendship, the other chiefs never would choose Temujin as the Great Khan.
•
It was the first month of spring.
•
The two armies had to move off to fresh grazing.
•
Temujin, furious, listened to the two women as if he were a statue.
•
1 16 POETRY
He heard Jamuqa say that camp pitched on the slopes of the mountain gave the herders of horses what they wanted, but camp pitched on the banks of the river was better for the herders of sheep.
•
The women said that when night fell and Jamuqa’s wagon stopped to pitch camp Temujin’s wagon should continue.
•
Temujin’s wagon as Jamuqa’s wagon stopped to pitch camp on a mountainside continued.
•
As the night passed the clans realized what was happening, and, frightened, debated to stop with Jamuqa or stop with Temujin.
•
Schisms within a tribe, even sometimes within a clan.
•
One shaman dreamt that a cow white as snow struck at Jamuqa’s wagon until it broke one of its horns, bellowing that Jamuqa had to give back its lost horn, striking the ground with its hoof.
•
The shaman dreamt that a white bull followed Temujin’s wagon bellowing that Heaven and Earth have decided the empire should be Temujin’s.
1 17FRANK BIDART
•
When Temujin heard this he promised the shaman thirty concubines.
•
As day broke and Temujin at last stopped, count could be taken of which clans followed Temujin and which stopped with Jamuqa.
•
Temujin camped near the sources of the Onon.
•
The clans who had chosen Temujin in the disorder and uncertainty of the night now were joined by others.
•
They had weighed the situation.
•
Temujin was famous for the care and probity of his decisions.
•
The princes of the royal blood joined Temujin.
•
Many days passed before Temujin looked directly at Borte when they spoke.
1 18 POETRY
•
She was the vehicle of necessity.
•
Of what had to be.
•
He would not forgive her.
•
In time, he lost interest in forgiving her.
•
When he returned from his last long campaign which lasted eight unbroken years, he was grateful she did not ask about each night’s new woman.
•
In time, near the sources of the Onon the princes of the royal blood elected Temujin Great Khan.
•
Fame clung to the story of how he saved the beautiful Borte.
•
The irony was not lost on Borte that as Mother of Orphans she was married to the force that made them orphans.
1 19FRANK BIDART
ix
Only at the age of thirty-nine Temujinat last was master of all Mongolia.
The emissaries of the Kings of Gold
had played tribe against tribeall his life, to castrate them.
To achieve unity, to achieve the empireessential to maintain unity
half the tribes had to be massacred.
•
The Tatárs killed his father, then aftersubduing them, followed by their unending
involuted betrayals and rebellions,
Temujin withoutsorrow exterminated them.
Every male standing higher than a wagon axle
was killed;the rest enslaved.
•
Exterminationis not a question of vengeance. It is a question of
120 POETRY
safety. Of not allowing what happened to happen.
•
Under Temujin, the Mongols crossed the Great Wallthat the Kingdom of Gold over centuries
built to contain them.
Before them, the lush, cultivated great plain
stretched five hundred miles,— ... from Beijing to Nanking.
•
Between the Mongols and the Kings of Goldlay a trench of
blood, inexpiable wrongs.
Fifty years earlier, betraying Tatárs handed offthe Mongol khan Ambaqay
to Beijing’sKing of Gold, —
... who impaled him on a wooden ass.
•
Temujin drummed into his troops past atrocities.
After they took Huai-lai, the ground for some ten milesaround was for years still strewn with human bones.
121FRANK BIDART
•
The full fury of the Mongols was reservedfor the great cities of Islam.
Their Sultan had twice murdered Temujin’s emissaries —
what rose in Temujin was the rage to annihilatenot just the civilization that
insulted him, but what made it possible ...
In the end, there was little left for his tax collectorsin the future to tax.
This was a world everywhere on the edge of desert —
the Mongols in fury dismantled the intricatenetworks that preserved and gathered and channeled
water. Without dams, without the multitudinous
screens of trees that were the handiwork of centuries,for Samarkand, for the cities of Scheherazade,
not just defeat, but dismemberment.
•
Nightmare from which not even the rich awoke.
•
......................... Stonework
122 POETRY
of hive-likeintrication, its hardface airy as lace,
indifferent hooves erased to sand.
x
Ch’ang-ch’un thought if he answered honestlyhe would be executed.
He asked Temujinto tell him Temujin’s story.
The Great Khan, to his own surprise, wasn’toffended. He liked the earnest old man.
Seized, suddenly absorbed, with relishhe began to tell the old man his
story, omitting nothing he imagined essential.
The Taoist master at last answered that there existsno elixir for eternal life.
He told him that the largest squarehas no corners.
He told him that they go east and west atthe will of the wind, so that in the end
they know not if the wind carries themor they the wind.
123FRANK BIDART
But as Temujin listened to his own voice tellhis story, the lineaments of his story, this
is what he heard: —
Because you could not master whateverenmeshed you
you became its slave —
You learned this bitterly, early.In order not to become its slave
you had to become its master.
You becameits master.
Even as master, of course, you remain its slave.
•
A S H. What yesterday was the locksteplogic of his every
position, purity in which he took justpride, cunning
solutions to what the universe thrust at him
appeared to him now ash, nothis, or, if
his, not his.
124 POETRY
•
Too often now he woke with his mouthgasping above water, the great wooden
wheel around his neck now
buoy, now tooheavy to lift.
Jamuqa’s face, mutilated —
Jamuqa, with whomhe lay under the same blanket.
The familiar universe began to assume its shape.
Inherentenmity of equals. Each master
not a master. A fraud. A master slave.
•
His own voice said it.
•
Old, he includedhimself in his scorn for those who
young want the opposite of this earth
then settlefor more of it.
125FRANK BIDART
•
The life he had notled, could not even now lead
was a burning-glass
between himselfand the sun.
•
Temujin saw that the Taoist masterwas terrified.
The old man, facingthe verge, had leapt into the sea —
he had given the conqueror of the worldsimply what he had already.
He liked the old man. After dallyingfor months discussing
the dead surrounding themhe allowed him to return to his own country.
•
Masterslave, you who have survived thus far
the lottery of who will live, and who will die — contemplate Genghis Khan, great,
126 POETRY
oceankhan, born Temujin, master slave.
xi
The death of his grandson Mutugenseemed to Temujin
harbinger of his own death. This boy
raised in a desert dust-stormwas innocent of dust.
He who made one imagine somethingundeformed could emerge from deformity
died by an arrow.
That he should die —.
That he should die assaulting a Muslim citadelmeant that Temujin himself, bareheaded,
took part in the final attack that destroyed it,
that every living thing therein, man and beast,the child slain in its mother’s womb,
must die —; that no loot, no booty
should be taken, but everything inexorablyerased; a place thereafter forever accursed.
•
127FRANK BIDART
When Temujin heard of his grandson’s death,he learned it before the boy’s own father.
He called all his sons to share a meal, and at it
announced that he was angryhis sons no longer obeyed him.
Jaghatay, Mutugen’s father, protested.
Then Temujin told Jaghatay that the boywas dead.
Gazing fixedly, Temujin with a choked
voice forbadeJaghatay GRIEF.
Forbade him not just the signs of grief, but GRIEF itself.
He kept them at table for hours. At the endJaghatay, when Temujin left the room, wept.
•
He now knew how he wanted to be buried.
He wanted the course of the Onon temporarilydiverted —; there, at its muddy center,
burial in a sealed chamber.
Then the riversent back over it.
128 POETRY
Any travelers encountering by chance
the funeral cortegewere to be executed.
xii
Imaginationclings toapotheosis,—
... those who inherit
the powerfuldead imaginethem and cling.
Hero to his people,—
... curse (except inimagination)to everyone else.
The dream I dreamed
was not denied me.It was not, inthe mind, denied me.
•
This is the end of the fourth hour of the night.
129THOMAS LUX
thomas lux
The Horse Poisoner
No one knew why horses were dying — two from two farms over,one in town, three at the poor farm (not in great shape,anyway, so noconcern at first), then the mayor’s son’s pony,then three stalls in a rowat the local sulky track. The vet sent blood to the State Police,who sent it to Boston for “further analysis.”Meanwhile, two more died.One so old it was no surprise,and another mistaken for a deer and shot.Some people wanted to make a connection,but the errant hunter was cousin to the sheriffand was known as too dim to pull offa string of horse poisonings.There were no more suspicious deathsin the county for two months. Then three, lying downnext to each other, seen first by my cousin Freddyat dawn in the town square.He delivered newspapers.Horses rarely lie down flatunless they’re sick, or dead.Test results came backfrom Boston and, Freddy said, also the Feds.Inconclusive, though each necropsyshowed that the poisonwas delivered with the aid of a carrotor a sugar cube in a carrot.
130 POETRY
peter ciccariello
In the Absence of Oulipo
131KAREN SOLIE
karen solie
Bitumen
One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic skyeast-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia.Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water,
evenbacklit by a devouring glare that whitened its edges,bent the bars. Waters apart from society by choice, their living room the aftermath of accident or crime. When the storm comes,we will see into it, there will be no near and no far. In sixty-five-foot
seasfor the Ocean Ranger, green turned to black then white as moleculeschanged places in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, the way wood passes intoflame, and communication errors into catastrophic failurefor the Piper Alpha offshore from Aberdeen.
It burned freely. If I don’t come home, is my house in order?Big fear travels in the Sikorsky. Twelve-hour shifts travel with them, the deluge system, aqueous foam. Machinery’s one notehammering the heart, identity compressed with intentions, drenched,the tired body performs delicately timed, brutal tasks no trainingadequately represents and which consume the perceivable world.In beds on the drilling platform in suspended disbelief,identified by the unlovely sea’s aggression, no sleep aids,should a directive come. Underwater welders deeply unconscious.Survival suits profane in lockers. By dreams of marine flaresand inflatables, buoyant smoke, percolating fret,one is weakened. Violence enters the imagination.
Clouds previously unrecorded. Unlocked, the gates of lightand technology of capture in bitumen oozing from fracturesin the earth or afloat like other fatty bodies, condensedby sun and internal salts, harassing snakes with its fumes.Light-sensitive bitumen of Judea upon which Joseph-Nicéphore
Niépcerecorded the view from his bedroom. It looked nice. A new kindof evidence developed from the camera obscura of experience
132 POETRY
and memory, love-object to dote on and ignore. Collectible photochrome postcards. Storm surge as weather segment,tornados on YouTube relieve us of our boredom. In the rain, drizzle, intermittent showers, unseasonable hurricane threatening our flight plans, against a sea heaving photogenically, straining at its chains like a monster in the flashbulbs, on wet stones astonishingly slick, we take selfies, post them, and can’t undo it.
Meaning takes place in time. By elevated circumstance of Burtynsky’s drone helicopters, revolutionary lenses pester Alberta’s tar sands, sulphur ponds’ rhapsodic upturned faces, photographs that happen in our name and in the name of composition. Foreground entered at distance, the eye surveils the McMurray Formation’s freestanding ruin mid-aspect to an infinity of abstraction. A physical symptom assails our vocabulary and things acquire a literal feeling from which one does not recover. Mineral dissolution, complete. Accommodation
space, low. Confinement, relatively broad, extremely complex stratigraphy, reservoirs stacked and composite. An area roughly the sizeof England stripped of boreal forest and muskeg, unburdened by hydraulic rope shovels of its overburden. Humiliated,blinded, walking in circles. Cycle of soak and dry and residue.
The will creates effects no will can overturn, and that seem, with the passage of time, necessary, as the past assumes a pattern. Thought approaches the future and the future, like a heavy unconventional oil, advances. Hello infrastructure, Dodge Ram 1500, no one else wants to get killed on Highway 63, the all-weather road by the Wandering River where earthmovers
remain unmoved by our schedules. White crosses in the ditches, white crosses in the glove box. The west stands for relocation, the east for lost causes. Would you conspire to serve tourists in a fish restaurant the rest of your life? I thought not. Drinks are on us bushpigs now,
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though this camp is no place for a tradesman. Devon’s Jackfish is five-star,
an obvious exception. But Mackenzie, Voyageur, Millennium, Borealis —
years ago we would have burned them to the ground. Suncor Firebag
has Wi-Fi, but will track usage. Guard towers and turnstiles at Wapasu —we’re guests, after all, not prisoners, right? Efficiently squalid, briskly producing raw sewage, black mold, botulism, fleas, remorse, madness, lethargy, mud, it’s not a spiritual home, this bleach taste in the waterglass, layered garments, fried food, bitter complaint in plywood drop-ceiling bedrooms
strung outon whatever and general offense and why doesn’t anyone smoke anymore. Dealers and prostitutes cultivate their terms organically, as demand matures. The Athabasca River’s color isn’t
good.Should we not encourage a healthy dread of the wild places?Consider the operator crushed by a slab of ice, our electrician mauled by a bear at the front lines of project expansioninto the inhumane forest. Fear not, we are worth more than many
sparrows.They pay for insignificance with their lives. It’s the structure.
Jackpine Mine photographs beautifully on the shoulders of the day,in the minutes before sunset it’s still legal to hunt. One might,like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, at a certain removefrom principal events, cut a sensitive figure in the presenceof the sublime. Except you can smell it down here. Corrosivevapors unexpectedly distributed, caustic particulate infiltratesyour mood. As does the tar sands beetle whose bite scars, from whomgrown men run. Attracted by the same sorrowful chemical compoundemitted by damaged trees on which it feeds, its aural signatureapproximates the rasp of causatum rubbing its parts together.The only other living thing in situ, in the open pit where swims
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the bitumen, extra brilliant, dense, massive, in the Greek asphaltos,“to make stable,” “to secure.” Pharmacist’s earth that resists decay,resolves and attenuates, cleanses wounds. Once used to burnthe houses of our enemies, upgraded now to refinery-ready feedstock,raw crude flowing through channels of production and distribution. Combustion is our style. It steers all things from the black graveof Athabasca-Wabiskaw. Cold Lake. Rail lines of
Lac-Mégantic. The optics are bad. We’re all downstream now.Action resembles waiting for a decision madeon our behalf, then despair after the fact. Despair which,like bitumen itself, applied to render darker tones or an emphatictenebrism, imparts a velvety lustrous disposition,but eventually discolors to a black treacle that degradesany pigment it contacts. Details in sections of Raft of the Medusacan no longer be discerned. In 1816, the Medusa’s captain,in a spasm of flamboyant incompetence, ran agroundon the African coast, and fearing the ire of his constituents,refused to sacrifice the cannons. They turned on each other,147 low souls herded onto a makeshift raft cut loose from lifeboatsof the wealthy and well-connected. The signs were there,
risk/reward coefficient alive in the wind, the locomotive,small tragic towns left for work, where the only thing manufactured is the need for work. Foreshortening and a receding horizoninclude the viewer in the scene, should the viewer wishto be included in the scene. One can’t be sure if the brig, Argus,is racing to the rescue or departing. It hesitates in the distance,in its nimbus of fairer weather, the courage and compassionof a new age onboard. Géricault’s pyramidical composition —dead and dying in the foreground from which the strong succeed
upwardtoward an emotional peak —an influence for Turner’s Disaster at Sea, the vortex structure ofThe Slave Ship: all those abandoned, where is thy market now?
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It’s difficult to imagine everyone saved, it’s unaffordable. Wavesdisproportionate, organized in depth, panic modulatingthe speaking voice. The situation so harshly primary and not beautifulwhen you don’t go to visit the seaside, but the seaside visits you,rudely, breaks in through the basement, ascends stairsto your bedroom, you can’t think of it generally then. The
constitutionof things is accustomed to hiding. Rearrangement will not suit us.Certain low-lying river deltas. Island states, coastal regions —floodwaters receding in measures like all we haven’t seen the last ofreveal in stagnancies and bloat what’s altered, as avernal exhalationsof mines and flares are altered but don’t disappear. Still,iceberg season is spectacular this year, worth the tripto photograph in evening ourselves before the abundance when,
aflamein light that dissolves what it illuminates, water climbs its own red walls, vermilion in the furnaces.
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sylvia legris
Spleen (Hollyhock)
Unblacken the holy mallow,the incorrupt, the foregutinconclusion. St. Cuthbert’s cole,a stalky stand-up, the deadpanpeevish. Splenetic, the maroonedfascicles, the testy watchman-hockleaf-clock. Ad hoc the anti-antibodies, the ripped-openopen-pollinating poultice,the self-sowing aggrievement.
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Spleen (Blood Lily)
Complex amaryllis — two-faced,multiflorus, wrath-spathed ball ofire — grows flagrantly unfragrant.Pulp-fiery the take-no-prisonersHaemanthus. Bully! Bully!Bully the bloodflower! (Blood-thirsty suffice it to suffuse.)Transfuse the lily-livered,the raging un-aromatic, thearrogant blood-rivering spleen.
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daisy fried
The Girl Grew and Grew, Her Mother Couldn’t Stop It
The girl grew and grew, her mother couldn’t stop it; it terrorized. What would the finger-dance do? Kindergarten art a buffet of
markers,gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer’s pools drying clear. A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubesfor kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper into paper-bag dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too
smalland trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers. And
silver rain. And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape,
coloredin reverse rainbow. Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles. A bird. Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing
mane,and knowledge: that the sky’s full of black-struck Ms and Ws, drifting clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn’t reachdown to meet the earth; mother shrinks to the size of a penis.
139TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN
tomaž šalamun
Introduction
From the beginning, Tomaž Šalamun seemed somehow uncom-fortable as a Slovenian poet. Whether or not he consciously set out to become a world poet translated into over twenty languages, he remained simultaneously local and international, focused on his surroundings while looking outward. From his first book, Poker, in which he claims, “I got tired of the image of my tribe / and moved out,” Tomaž demonstrated a dissatisfaction with the usual allegiances that most poets carry around with them. So while he claimed the great Slovenian poet Dane Zajc as a major early influence, Tomaž was also influenced by visionaries like William Blake, mystics like Rumi and Giordano Bruno, and modernists like Pound, Eliot, and Williams. He discovered French and Russian poetry early on, and when he encountered John Ashbery’s Three Poems in the seventies, the book shifted Tomaž’s thinking about poetry and its possibili-ties. By then, Tomaž had recognized his poetry’s dependence on travel — the physical aspect of it as well as the exposure to new cit-ies, landscapes, cultures, and poets. And for the next four decades, Tomaž never sat still for long, participating in poetry festivals around the world, teaching in Amherst, Tuscaloosa, Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Austin, even working for the Slovenian Consulate in New York City as cultural attaché. He seemed positively indefatigable, until cancer took him on December 27, 2014.
Tomaž admired many American poets and followed American poetry as closely as he followed Slovenian poetry. Although several generations of American poets felt affinities with Tomaž, he remained beyond categorization and poetic schools. Opening one of his books at random, a reader might find Whitmanesque self-mythology, a list poem, an aphorism, a crystalline lyric, a dramatic monologue, a one-liner, a visionary narrative, a disembodied dialogue, an apostrophe, a disjunctive lyric, a series of imperatives, a personal narrative ... And Tomaž’s body of work is vast: his nine-hundred-page volume of se-lected poems, When, published in Slovenia in 2011, culls material from thirty-six individual volumes. Six more books followed, most recently Orgies, published three weeks after his death. Although he wrote in free verse, he frequently composed in quatrains, tercets, and
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stanzaless fourteen-liners, which occupy the same amount of time and space as a sonnet but short-circuit the sonnet’s formal logic. Despite his erudition and worldliness, most of his poems contain questions (there are more than ninety questions in the sixty-six po-ems in Woods and Chalices), as if implying that the poet’s role is that of the child attempting to grasp the unfamiliar, not of the didactic elder delivering wisdom.
Tomaž has always been capable of writing “anthology” poems — poems like “Eclipse,” “History,” “Folk Song,” and “Jonah.” But the longer he wrote, the more poetry overtook him. By the nineties, Tomaž had become so prolific, so consumed by poetry, that poems would wake him in the night and he would start “scribbling.” One might wonder if such a practice left his poems open to the workings of the unconscious (in part because his poetry was often described as surrealist), but there’s little difference between these poems and poems he wrote at other times. They all use language in new ways — nouns become verbs, adjectives become nouns, intransitive verbs take direct objects, antecedents move in and out of focus — and veer so forcefully that their central subjects are often impossible to pin down. In an email, he explained his penchant for the off-kilter:
“I like awkwardness, awkwardness is the crucial thing in my writing. Things should not be clear. If clear they’re too domesticated. I de-domesticate, invade the language, delogify.”
Tomaž had arrived at a kind of compositional freedom and fluidity that came after writing thousands of poems, achieving the ability to skim the surface of the mind (impressions, images) while plumbing the depths (of memory, history, myth, folklore). His poems range across world history, literature, and geography as well as his own per-sonal past, employing rapid shifts of location, thought, image, and tone from line to line, sometimes within lines. While translating Woods and Chalices, I asked Tomaž about his tendency to end lines on words like “and” or “have” (or even on the “se” in a reflexive verb), and he explained that the beginnings of lines were much more important to him than their endings. Tomaž also included multiple languages in his poems — especially English, Italian, French, Spanish, Croatian, German — because, as a polyglot, words and phrases in other languages came to him while writing. People’s names similarly appear throughout his poems — not just friends, but also historical, artistic, and cultural figures, some renowned, many obscure or of local renown — without distinctions or hierarchies. A poem might
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mention Nietzsche, then “Steve and Ken” (“In the Tent among Grapes”), without bothering to identify anyone.
Translating over one hundred of his poems, I realized that every poem by Tomaž deserved multiple readings, if only for the sheer force of imagination and the constant threat or promise of the shock of utterance. Some poems, after being brought from Slovenian into English, would make me wander away from my desk repeating a phrase that I knew had never occurred before in a poem in English (“Bob Perelman is the pigeon,” “Don’t sneak me onto mountains, chicken”). Without the mediator of another translator, I discovered just how unpredictable Tomaž’s poems are. Because there is often no way to get a handle on a primary mode or thread or theme in a poem by Tomaž, a translator stops looking for them and starts looking at sounds, images, places, and objects. In a way, Tomaž, an advocate for literal translation, compels a translator to break down a poem to its simplest elements. I once wrote to him with some questions about a poem I was translating, and Tomaž responded, “Things are com-pletely simple. I only describe what they do or they do what I order them to do. And they like to do what was not done before.”
— Brian Henry
Note: The poems in this selection span three decades. The earliest appeared in 1973,
the most recent in 2004.
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Alone
One finger is the tundra,one finger is the Bodhisattva,one finger is mother Slovenia.Two fingers still remain, beckoningand with awful force feeding me seventeen hands with this arrangement.Alone,I’m alone on the roof of the world and drawingso stars are created.I’m spurting through the nose so the Milky Way is createdand I’m eating so shit is created, and falling on youand it is music.I am God.I am God and I’m dancing.This table is a gift, this house is a gift,this garden is a gift, these squirrels are a gift.These human legs are murmuring mantras.Alone,alone.Glug glug glug I drink gulps of lightand I brush.So I shower and put myself back, alone.I alone am the center of the world’s light, the Lord’s lamb.I alone am all animals: a tiger, an ant, a deer,a rabbit, a porcupine (a hedgehog), a butterfly, an insect,a piranha, a baby rabbit, a daddy rabbit, the god of ferrets, the straw hat of a sketched puppy and his paws.I alone am all plants: strawberries, birch, hazel,pumpkin, fern, dandelion, juves ( juves is a plantwith thin roots, resembling the rootsof parsley, but it has a nose and head like a porcini cap and one birch’s hand,sitting all day in a race car like a liana),
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maple, oak, corn, alone.I alone am all the people named in this bookand all the others: Joe, Janet, Agatha, Veronika, Boris, Ivan, Italo, Pierre, alone.I alone am the air, smoothly, the lining, two parallel tracks,pot (to sweat), pot (the road), the cause, the forceps, Lope de Vega, the streak,the dot on the forehead, the dot in the air, alone.Alone,I alone am the air and the golden butter,linden bark, the king, the sickle and hammer,the Dalmatian, the saw, Armenia, the key,alone.
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“Historical brutality”
Historical brutality,you are a poppy.With a black scepter, silkwings.I see everything: the fieldof dew and castles’wedding parties.Enchant me then, rabble,the leaves are opening.Drink me like wine,say moooo.
145TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN
Ships
I’m religious.As religious as the wind or scissors.It’s an ant, she’s religious, the flowers are red.I don’t want to die. I don’t care if I die now.I’m more religious than the dust in the desert.The mouth of a child is round. My eyes are syrup, dripping cold.Sometimes I think I baked nettles, but I didn’t. Sometimes I think I’m miserable, butI’m not. I’m religious.I will throw a barrel into the river.If bees rushed into my face, I’d scratch at them with my hand and would seeagain.I don’t get upset.The soul presses like the crowds at the door.When I die, oxen will graze the grass just like this.Houses will glimmer just like this.
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The Window of Death
To stop the blood of flowers and to reverse harmony.To die in the river, to die in the river.To hear the heart of a rat. There is no differencebetween the silver of the moon and the silver of my tribe.
To clear the field and to run to the edge of the earth.To bear a crystal in the chest: the word. Soap evaporates at the door, fire illuminates the day.To look back, to look back one more time.
And to remove the robe. The poppy has bitten the sky.To walk empty roads and drink shadows.To feel the oak at the mouth of the well.
To stop the blood of flowers, to stop the blood of flowers.Altars watch each other face to face.To lie down on a blue cabbage.
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Hard Core
Yeah. It’s only a matterof environment if I’m a genius.
A genius iskohlrabi in a turnip inkale in
cellophanein the freezer.In
files they descend onthe white skin andconverge in the corner’s
follicles. The ants are illuminated.Basta.
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Three Flies
Three flies, woken by the sunon a white, illuminated wall,leap like the hands of a florist wrapping bouquets. They remind me of a knife thrower, who performs with five in the air.Is the quantity restricted?Catch and don’t think. Weigh me.I’ll run away from you like water and press youlike ice if you sizzle too much.Look at them on the white wall.Three trees from the new shoots of a cedar. From the corner of a cube.And, if you look closely, from a gully.
Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry
COMMENT
Installation views, Doris Salcedo, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
February 21–May 24, 2015. Artworks are by Doris Salcedo. Photographs are by
Nathan Keay, © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
151CATHY PARK HONG
cathy park hong
Against Witness
It’s a fact that more artists and writers tailor their works with the Internet viewer in mind. There are artists who make trendy abstract paintings in bold, unmodulated colors so nothing is gained or lost when one sees them on Instagram or in the gallery; these paintings are as easy to apprehend online as a color swatch for a sofa, which is ideal for the collector who doesn’t have time to experience the prod-uct in person. Similarly, there are more writers who write with trans-parent compression, knowing that their phrases could be atomized into tweets, chiseled into self-sufficient, endlessly linkable fragments.
But Doris Salcedo is not that kind of artist. She makes installations that resolutely resist this age of digital reproduction. Installation art is an immersive somatic experience, engaging all our perceptual planes — the spatial, the aural — and not just the optical. You have to be there in person to truly apprehend the art. Installations can be a ritualized quasi-religious experience, shimmering with Walter Benjamin’s famous notion of aura. If there is monumental labor involved, there can be something unseemly and decadent about installation art because of its temporality. It is wasteful because it cannot be kept.
Salcedo’s sculptures are anti-monumental. She works with humble domestic objects like wooden wardrobes, chairs, and tables that are sparely arranged in an exhibition space. Inspired by Paul Celan, she repeatedly refers to his poetry in her titles, like Unland: audible in the mouth, Shibboleth, and Unland: the orphan’s tunic. The objects are all used, rubbed down and softened by the bodies that have handled, lain, and sat on them for years. Chairs are dismembered, embedded into long, narrow doors; dining tables are ripped from their context, denuded of accompanying chairs, and can resemble morgue tables. These furnitures are ruins, sepulchral. A chair encased in poured concrete looks as sunken as if it were on the bottom of an ocean floor. A frail upended crib looks volcanized or rescued from the ashes of
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a fire. But the surfaces have been manipulated by the artist’s hand: table surfaces have been distressed, scratched, and threaded with hu-man hair like cryptic inscriptions from the dead.
Salcedo’s installations are said to be intimate and uncanny, both qualities in an artwork that must be intuited in person because both qualities require proximity. You must inhabit a space to feel unin-habited by the uncanny. In German, uncanny is unheimlich, or its lit-eral translation, unhomely. To feel the uncanny is not unlike déjà vu, where you are in a new environment and are jolted by a flash of the familiar, or inversely, when you’re in your own home and you sud-denly feel a terrible unease that this is not your beautiful house. Freud said that flash of the familiar is a return of our repressed past. It is the opposite of Kant’s notion of the sublime: while one elicits a rush of elevated pleasure, the uncanny provokes anxiety, a discomfort in one’s own skin. The uncanny, according to Freud, is not unlike the feeling of being buried alive. The uncanny, according to Freud, is also to feel “robbed of one’s eyes.”
Salcedo has called herself a “secondary witness.” She has made sculp-ture responding to the 1988 massacre of La Negra and La Honduras banana plantations, where workers were dragged out of their beds and shot in front of their families. She has made sculpture responding to a story of a six-year-old orphan who, after witnessing the killing of her mother, wore the dress that her mother sewed for her day after day. Salcedo combs the countryside of her native Colombia, searching and listening to victims whose family members have “dis-appeared” because of the ongoing violence between drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary groups.
To make art representing another victim’s pain can be ethically thorny. Susan Sontag wrote, “The appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.” Images of suffering can arouse our horror, simulating an illusive identification between us and the victim or “a fantasy of witness” before we are conveniently deposited back into our lives so that someone else’s trauma becomes our personalized catharsis.
Untitled, 1998, wooden cabinet, concrete, steel, and clothing, 72¼ × 39 × 13 in.
Collection of Lisa and John Miller, fractional and promised gift to the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.
Untitled (detail), 1998; Plegaria Muda (detail), 2008–10, wood, concrete, earth,
and grass, one hundred and sixty-six parts, each 64⅝ × 84½ × 24 in., overall
dimensions variable. Inhotim collection, Brazil.
Plegaria Muda (detail), 2008–10.
Installation view, Doris Salcedo, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
157CATHY PARK HONG
But Salcedo refuses our appetite for the sanguinary, refuses any at-tempt at verisimilitude because what is absent in her work is the body in pain. Tragedy has not been transmuted into a consumable narra-tive or embedded into an instant, catch-all image. There is a somber restraint to her artwork, a silence; these stories she’s gathered cannot be represented. Said Salcedo: “I have constructed the work as invis-ibility, because I regard the non-visual as representing a lack of power. To see is to have power; it’s a way of possessing.”
•
Like Salcedo’s art, Celan’s poetry is often characterized as “bearing witness,” a description that has become a genre unto itself. All poems bear witness, even if it’s to the dailiness of one’s life — like going to the movies or stealing plums from the icebox — but a poem valorized as such is a poem that is testimony to an exceptionally dark period, embalming a moment where there has been visible, collective trauma. Oftentimes, the poet has witnessed catastrophic conditions that have happened elsewhere in a geographically remote place (quite a few poets categorized as witness poets happen to be Eastern European) or conditions that have already been bookended in the past. It’s rare that these conditions are chronic systemic problems like income disparity. The critical reception surrounding the poem that bears witness is rife with moral earnestness: the poem is about survival; the poem fights against oblivion; the poem calls for hope; and ultimately, the poem remembers.
But is it enough that a poem “remembers” when we are now entrenched in an era of total recall? Andreas Huyssen wrote,
“Everything is stored in the cloud. There is endless memory. From the point of the view of the archive, forgetting is the ultimate trans-gression.” According to Huyssen, we suffer from a hypertrophy of memory. Like Beyoncé, who records every minute of her life, we have amassed archives so thorough that real time is cannibalizing present time. So why valorize poetry for being a living archive when memory has become our most booming industry? In an era when eyewitness testimonies, photos, and videos are tweeted seconds after a catastrophe, poetry’s power to bear witness now feels outdated and inherently passive.
Installation view, Doris Salcedo, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago;
Unland: the orphan’s tunic, 1997, wooden tables, silk, human hair, and thread,
31½ × 96½ × 38½ in. “La Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection.
159CATHY PARK HONG
But perhaps I feel this way since I’m writing this when the witness seems more powerless than ever. There were sixty-four witnesses when the grand jury reviewed the murder of Michael Brown, yet still the grand jury failed to indict police officer Darren Wilson. With the case of Eric Garner, there was a cell phone recording of the fa-tal chokehold. “The grand jury kept interviewing witnesses, but you didn’t need witnesses,” Garner’s widow said of the video to the New York Daily News. “You can be a witness for yourself.” We were all witnesses. We all saw. Yet witness accounts matter little when pros-ecutors can mishandle evidence and mislead the jury, when evidence is up against the Law that makes impossible the criminal conviction of police officers who act with impunity. When the verdict was an-nounced, one felt robbed of one’s eyes.
•
During Celan’s lifetime, critics lauded his “Death Fugue” as being an irrefutable poem that bore witness to the Holocaust. Out of all his poems, “Death Fugue” was the most anthologized and the most quoted for its haunting, incantatory power and its clear references to the concentration camps. As his poetry became more idiosyncratic — his syntax more gnarled, his images more gnomic and mineralogical, his syllables more neologistic — Celan grew to loathe “Death Fugue.” It dogged him, overshadowing his other works, and fearing he was becoming a mouthpiece for Jewish Holocaust poetry, Celan later refused to let “Death Fugue” be further anthologized. Meanwhile,
“Death Fugue” became a German obsession, a fixture at commemora-tive events. The scholar Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi wrote,
At some subliminal level the Germans have come to know the poem ... at such an early age and on ceremonial occasions that it has become an incantational procedure rather than an intended text.
Rather than an act of rememberance, the recitation of “Death Fugue” turned into a mantra to ward off difficult engagement with the past. But this is how it is when a poem becomes commemorative. It becomes all pious gesture and drained of meaning. When a poem becomes commemorative, it dies.
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Whatever word you speak — you owe to destruction.
Celan was not just a poet who bore witness. Celan was a visionary poet — and also a vengeful poet. Pierre Joris, who translated the im-pressive Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, writes how Celan’s poetry creates “in and through the poems a new, viable world.” Joris also cautions that we not limit Celan’s poetry to a “re-venge play,” but I don’t consider it a limitation. Like the artwork of witness, the artwork of vengeance could be its own genre (see Kim Hyesoon, see Kara Walker, see Dodie Bellamy). Celan was full of what Nietzsche called ressentiment — which is a slave’s sensibility of grievance, paranoia, and defiance — and turned it into a fecund creative force. This is the kind of literature that is lifeblood against the sanctimonious, sanctioned poetry that the establishment uses to exonerate themselves. It is not enough for a poem to be witness, to preserve a dated moment and give voice to puppets from the past. It’s not enough that a poem extol the virtues of survival and overcoming. What if the poet never overcomes? What if the poet hears the same bitter verdict when testimony after testimony has been given? What if that poet — and this is the ultimate emotional transgression that repels the reader who takes comfort in literature as forgiveness — still feels a shadow of hate and it is that hate that disfigures song into something broken? But see, the only way to get at that inalienable grief is to disfigure song. Celan was a sadist with the German lan-guage, shredding it down to find the kernel, and from those shreds, he created a third language:
Blackas memory’s woundthe eyes root for youin this plot bittenbright by the heart-teeth.
He wrote from negation, from an “eternalized Nowhere,” from an identity of “no name,” countering with the impossibility of testimony since testimony could be easily manipulated and excerpted into sound-bites. His language is irreducible. It is stone and ash. It is the sound-less howl that tears at the enemy’s syllables until they are spent shells.
161CATHY PARK HONG
This essay was commissioned on the occasion of Doris Salcedo, curated by Madeleine
Grynsztejn and Julie Rodrigues Widholm, at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago. It is the first retrospective of the work of sculptor Doris Salcedo.
No one bears witness for the witness.
To give form to memory, one must also forget. Like Celan’s poetry, Salcedo’s sculptures ignite silence. Her installations slow down per-ception. They require that I be there in person and that I see with my body, a mode of perception that grows obsolescent as the cul-ture industry razes down time and space into the cloud. The actual presence of I, the viewer, is required to truly apprehend the absence of you, the Other. These domestic ruins have been rafted from nowhere, from no one. I cannot sit in your chair, eat at your table. I cannot open your dresser and touch your shirts that will trigger eidetic memories of a dance or late night walk. The proximity be-tween you and me is infinite. (And what kind of proximity do I need to write as witness? Should I have experienced the event myself? If I watched the video, can I write about it? Do I have to be related to the victim? And what do you mean by relation?) I can never me-tabolize what you went through yet I cannot escape your disquieting sadness, the burden of your solitude. How it unfolds even when I leave this space. What has become of you? What could have gone through your mind?
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donald revell
Scholium
Allegory is a pageant of metaphor and simile. Trailing clouds of glory all its own, figurative language comes upon the scenes of our imagining there. No poet writing in English writes pageantry so in-close as does Robert Herrick. Here, in its entirety, is “The Coming of Good Luck”:
So Good-luck came, and on my roof did light,Like noiseless snow; or as the dew of night:Not all at once, but gently, as the treesAre, by the sunbeams, tickled by degrees.
Given substance, shape, and agency, Good-luck enters upon the ad-vent of itself. Notice how it remains itself — not embodied by snow, not portrayed by snow, but given over to a like behavior, a noiseless-ness. In pageant, then, there are two: Good-luck and snow. Then there are three. “The dew of night” adds to noiseless Space (the snowy rooftop) the quiet Time of night. Given space and time, then, Good-luck is wholly born.
Once born, Good-luck possesses not only similitude, but absolute Being. The enjambment between lines three and four is climacteric.
“As the trees” leads us to expect another simile; but suddenly, capital-ized and alone, stands the one word “Are.” Snow and night and trees all blend into plural singularity, into the apotheosis of Good-luck. Apt to apotheosis, there is radiance; Herrick provides “sunbeams.” Here, “Are” is the instance of Amor, after which the upturn bends,
“tickled by degrees” toward home. After the radiance, we are returned to homely simile: “as the trees are tickled by degrees.” But with this difference: an apotheosis added, embedded. Herrick’s figures of speech alone could not have anticipated such a birth.
Out of Allegory they emerge, the words and phrases, into pageants great and small. They return home afterward, completing a world in which allegory and fact, allegory and actual experience, are one flesh.
Ek gret effect men write in place lite;Th’entente is al, and nat the lettres space.
— From Troilus and Criseyde, by Geoffrey Chaucer
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The storm of flung flowers rises and falls, and in that cloud of beauty ‘donna m’ apparve — a lady appeared to me’ ... it is even permissible to let ‘the flash of a smile’ pass at that phrase, so of-ten noted.... She wore some kind of dress ‘di fiamma viva — of living flame,’ and over it a green mantle; white-veiled, olive-crowned, she paused there, and Dante — The great pageant has been so, and more than so. We may not be able to stay its pace, but Dante could. He has heaped up ref-erences and allusions; he has involved doctrine and history and myth, and the central dogma of the twy-natured Christ itself. He has concentrated meanings, and now the living figure for whom all the structure was meant is here.
— From The Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams
Reverie is at an end. Purgatory might well have been a pilgrim fantasy, and Inferno a gothic nightmare. Dream visions sort very well with vengeance and remorse; they are the pretty conscience of child’s play. But Paradise, upon whose brink the breathing heralds of Allegory welcome Beatrice, is real. Beatrice speaks a name: “Dante.” And Dante writes it down. Allegory is splendid entertainment, but it en-tertains neither mask nor alias. Dante crosses over. Heir of allusion and son of reference, he crosses over into pageant and Paradise under his given name. He’s wide awake — voi vigilate ne l’eterno die. The story is true. William Blake has painted so many eyes into the picture. There are witnesses.
It’s no accident that upon the verge of Heaven itself, Dante hesi-tates for eight full cantos. He is all eyes. He is the pageant while the pageant lasts. In Purgatorio, earthly paradise is Eden still, regained through material witness. In states of perfection, all things are excul-patory evidence of themselves. I want to cross over under my own names, all of them, alongside pageantry. Yet it’s not by accident that I hesitate. I like my allegories allegorical. “Better ... to stay cowering / Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning / Is a delu-sion,” as John Ashbery writes (“Soonest Mended”) so early and so well. Allegory is safekeeping. It is shield and buckler in the mock-siege of spring 1970, Fort Tryon Park, New York. Boys hurl themselves toward the battlements. Girls, laughing in midair in false miniver, urge them on. Simply to remember them, as one amongst them, is to know that Happiness exists: Allegory the shield; Allegory the buckler; Allegory the actual Name, walking away into The Romance
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of the Rose. Together in eternity now, the authors appear, historically, in ideal sequence. First, Guillaume de Lorris, poet of the opening four thousand lines. His story is true. Happiness is the image of itself. How do I find it?
By keeping steadily before you both the literal and allegorical sense and not treating the one as a mere means to the other but as its imaginative interpretation; by testing for yourself how far the concept really informs the image and how far the image re-ally lends poetic life to the concept.
— From The Allegory of Love, by C.S. Lewis
Fort Tryon Park was Eden still. I was a boy. I was there, part and parcel of the tatty materials, and I bear witness to it still. It’s there to be learned forever in the first four thousand lines or so.
Few poets have struck better than Guillaume de Lorris that note which is the peculiar charm of medieval love poetry — that boy-like blending (or so it seems) of innocence and sensuous-ness which could make us believe for a moment that paradise had never been lost.
— From The Allegory of Love
Moments have a way of yielding to the next moment — “some climbing / before the take-off,” as Pound said, speaking also of battle-ments and Paradise and of voluptuaries turning upward out of pag-eant, continuing the pageantry. Guillaume de Lorris, poet of courtly love, yields to Jean de Meun, poet, scholar, sceptic, and tireless ex-egete. Adding eighteen thousand lines of his own, completing The Romance, de Meun takes the Rose by storm, by sheer force of numbers.
It was the misfortune of Jean de Meun to have read and remem-bered everything: and nothing that he remembered could be kept out of his poem.
— From The Allegory of Love
I think that we all, one way or another, become the Jean de Meuns of ourselves. We annotate the finest days again and again. We exhaust our happiness, meaning only to complete the dream. We lay broad waking. The only cure for love, Guillaume, is to love more. As for
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de Meun, as for ourselves in the long afterglow of the great poems, we must read more. We must travel the allegory the right way round.
Committed to the safekeeping of every name, commodius vicus brings a traveler the right way round. Back from the brink leads back to the brink and also to questions of conduct. What is a fallen man to do in Eden when Eden never fell? Love more. Read more. William Blake painted many eyes into the picture. A man could use them. As a through passenger —
My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concen-trated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.
— From Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
As a tourist —
You would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw — You would make fewer traveller’s mistakes.
— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, June 12, 1851
As prodigal son —
Life is not long enough for one success.— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, July 19, 1851
Return excels itself by virtue of a simple turn. Sing the Shaker hymn. Sing it with Henry.
Here or nowhere is our heaven.— From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by Henry David Thoreau
Is Grasmere just across the verge of Paradise? Does a man, on the far side of pageant, forgive the fathering child he was? Is Paumanok Eden? Is the absconded she-bird forgiven, either by her fathering mate or by the out-setting bard? Loving more, reading more, the painted eyes begin to number the heavens. Is England a green and pleasant one? Is America?
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Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinityBe still the same as when you walked the beach Near Paumanok —
— From Cape Hatteras, by Hart Crane
Brink and verge and selvage: crossing over, up, and into the pageant, close-reading is close-loving. “My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman —/ so — .” My head is hands and feet: all eyes.
So very close is first a cloud of emblems, images, words. So very close — loving reading, reading loving — the qualities of joy are indis-tinguishable from objects each possesses. My cloud was on the cover of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, in color. Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car by William Blake shows an awakening cloud, envi-sioned as colors blazoned forth with eyes in plumage, eyes in flowers, pageant-wise.
Così dentro una nuvola di fiori che dalle mani angeliche saliva e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fuori,Sovra candido vel cinta d’oliva donna m’apparve.
— From Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri
All the loves at once, donna m’apparve, a lady appeared to me — says Dante, says I, says anyone whose name is spoken aloud on the skirt of Heaven. It’s written down. In the spring of 1972, in Professor G’s “Introduction to Literary Analysis,” and on a narrow bridge through flowers and farther, into the mounted policemen surround-ing the Pentagon, all the loves at once appeared, una nuvola di fiori, already written down. I fell in love a dozen times. Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car was a cloud I carried everywhere it carried me. Numbering heavens, 1972 was such a number, each numeral pos-sessed by joy.
How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joysHoly, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love.
— From Visions of the Daughters of Albion, by William Blake
The daughters of 1972 appeared to me as gaze in plumage, gaze in flowers, asymptotes of actually beautiful human being touching the
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curve of my eye. Said curve continues pageant now, for joy. And Blake was right of course. One joy cannot absorb another. Eyes do not absorb the light. They rise to it, pageant-wise. I’m saying nothing about symbols. This is allegory. My college, Harpur College, was then, as now, incorporate with Binghamton University. The school itself, however, was not in the city of Binghamton. More heavily wooded then than now, campus lay to the west, in the town of Vestal. I lived very near, on Vestal Avenue, number 123, upstairs. It was a four-room apartment, to begin with. Sometime in March, one of the rooms came away and fell into the street. The monthly rent remained the same. My weekly writing assignments for Professor G likewise remained the same: five hundred words on “Among School Children.” Yeats’s pages in my Norton were the heavily annotated skirt of the cloud I carried everywhere, and a long schoolroom, too. I am sixty this year, smiling. As I was smiling in 1972 when Professor G invited me to dinner and I saw, for the one and only time, her remarkable daughter. I’ve forgotten her name. She wore a cream-colored dress with intricate bodice. Her only jewelry was a crucifix, silver, set with five red stones. All the air and all the light of that evening belonged to her. She spoke very little. She smiled often. I have never forgotten. There was pretty plumage once. This is the chase! (From among the heaped-up references and allusions, it is proper to choose from The Winter’s Tale; in the fall of ’72 I would take Professor G’s Shakespeare class, and there would come a morning when, staring out a window into the small, first snow, listening to her sing to us a song of Autolycus’s, I was born. There was a mischievous breath between small snow and William Shakespeare I had never breathed before. My life ever since depends upon it.) The daughter’s smile and unaf-fected elegance, the color of her cheek and hair, made her a daughter of the swan to my close-reading eye. In “Among School Children,” Yeats names no woman’s name, but she goes without saying. “Ledaean” suffices. In pursuit of atonement, not of possession, close-reading is chaste. In the spring of 1972, I loved them all and was lover to none. Atonement is magical chastity: “a living child”; “yolk and white of the one shell.” Sylvia, an Arcadian by name, was the friend of some friends of mine. One afternoon I saw her fall and tear the seat of her dungarees. The gesture, the nonchalance (to use Whitman’s word) with which she folded the rough tear together and went on speaking to her friends, was unspeakably lovely. I’m saying nothing about symbols. This is allegory. I fell in love, and never spoke to her until
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an accident of the anti-war movement made a change. In Vietnam, the Easter Offensive — which dragged on well into the autumn — was horrifically underway. Protests and escalations kept steady pace with atrocity on all sides, in all dialects and distortions. Not a single branch or trellis flowered that April and May, in Vestal, in echt Binghamton, in Syracuse (where a strange girl kissed me the softest kiss of my life as a policeman took away my whistle and my flag), in Washington, DC (where I saw Sesame Street for the very first time with two small girls who called me “Mr. Demonstrator” because I was a guest in their parents’ home), and across the river in Northern Virginia (where many ran a gauntlet of bowing branches and rearing horses, I with those same two children under my arms, to escape the tear gas), but that branch or that trellis seemed outraged or afraid. It’s hard to smile when all that smile are terrified, even the flowers and small girls. No one is comfortable, and no one lives to grow old beneath a gauntlet. I had my Norton with me everywhere. I continued writing my weekly assignments “Among School Children” literally, young and old, at play in peril. In the midst of all, “bent / Above a sinking fire” one late night on vigil on a courthouse lawn, I spoke with Sylvia and got to know her, if only a little. Our purpose was solemn pres-ence, round the clock, every day, in quiet protest of the arraignments and convictions of schoolmates subsequent to their arrest at other, more clamorous demonstrations around town. The midnight was damp and chilly; we were a drab contingent huddled around the fire I’d built in a trash barrel. (The police didn’t mind. This was Binghamton, New York, a gentle place. In the morning, they’d bring us buns and coffee.) Drab, except for Sylvia. After forty hours of vigil, we’d looked to be the sullen, bewildered children we mostly were. For once, the heckler’s daylight shout of “dirty hippies” would ring true. But not of Sylvia. Hers was a Ledaean body sure enough, and a face always tilted slightly across the shadow-line where, if you looked closely, a smile began. When she stepped into the circle of firelight, I stood up straight and tried my best to look like a Moses in fatigues, prophetic behind my skimpy beard. She was so nice, so easy in her zeal. She hated the War. She hated the draft. Everyone did, and so we might as well stay close to the fire and talk about music and school and summer plans. There was a long night still ahead. And so we talked, leaning into the warmth together, sometimes laughing. One by one, our companions drifted off to doze on benches, strum guitars, read beneath streetlamps. For a while, Sylvia and I were
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alone. Then, out of the shadows came a voice, and a man, not much older than ourselves, dressed in a business suit, stood beside us. He asked about the vigil. In the long small talk, he got around to asking if a little break — a hot shower, forty winks in a clean, warm bed — sounded good to us. I must admit that I’d already thought of such things; but a room had only lately fallen away from my apart-ment on Vestal, and it would offer no refreshment to beautiful Sylvia. The stranger, in town on business, said he’d been given a suite by mistake at the Ramada, and we were welcome to the extra bed and bath if we liked. We liked, bewildered children as we mostly were. Suffice it to say that, back at the Ramada, we found our stranger’s nature to be “but a spume that plays.” Sylvia and I showered (sepa-rately, of course). It felt good. And then we were indeed welcome to use the big, clean bed ... provided that our host could, well, watch. Watch what? Sylvia and I ran back to the courthouse lawn, hand in hand. When the sun came up, policemen brought hot coffee and sticky buns. The morning had a festal air, a sunshine purpose with no war in sight. I never saw Sylvia again after that morning. Over the summer, she must have transferred to another school. In my weekly essay, I wondered about that man in the business suit, and what his mother “would think her son, did she but see that shape” squatting beside an empty, unruffled motel bed. All loves at once can some-times come to naught. But I was among the blessed schoolchildren, studying pageant from the inside, according to the curriculum of pageant — “reading and writing and flaming arithmetic” ( John Ashbery, “And You Know”). I could number the heavens, one by one. Donna m’apparve. I counted by William Blake’s four cardinal numbers for Visions of the Daughters of Albion: one; holy; eternal; infinite. Una nuvola di fiori was everywhere in the spring of 1972, and out of every cloud of those days a Lady appeared to me. Reina was with me, on all roads, and I with her. My eyes in the yearbook photograph look toward Reina, behind the camera. She was in my kitchen making tea when a bedroom fell away into the Vestal Avenue traffic. She wasn’t frightened. She still came round to visit me nearly every day or night. She typed my papers for Professor G’s
“Introduction to Literary Analysis.” She steadied the horses at the Pentagon and made chaplets for herself and for two small girls from broken branches. She was not my lover, though my friends assumed she was, and I was proud to let them. She had an air so absolutely unique to herself, so acceptable — by which I mean to say that her
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mere presence made all things welcome, calm, accepting, unfailingly candid. Wherever she stood in her cloud of flowers, she was the flowers, even drifting into mind or midair. This is not symbolism. This is allegory. Goodness appears as herself, in the role of Goodness, and afterward as a great deal more, though I know nothing about it. The “self-born mockers of man’s enterprise” move too fast. I write poems, etc. The Easter Offensive gorged itself all summer and ended before Christmas. Soon it was somebody else’s war. By then, Reina had found a lover. Once, I saw her dancing with him at a concert in the Student Union, February 1973. There is such a thing as Hell.
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Only by dancing. Donna m’apparve just to say that Youth and Beauty are one and the same, a Heaven secured by pageant evermore, if only. “Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice.”
Hesitation and delay must never be mistaken for rest. “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” — Stonewall Jackson’s dying words. Rest is the efflorescence of right action: i.e. the Pageant itself. The brink, the near shore, the selvages, these are places of clamor. Rooms fall away. Branches fall away. No one after-ward remembers anything amiss. The spring of 1972 was one heaven to cross, in the direction of Heaven. (Asymptote hardly knows itself until — Guardaci ben!) 1973 was bound to come and bound to go be-neath the chariot wheels of Youth and Beauty. “Ben son, ben son Beatrice.” Yeats, in the closing lines of “Among School Children,” resigns himself to a frantic question. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” But simultaneities are not identities. If they were, symbols would suffice. Allegory leads us quite a dance, but the danc-ing is real. The role of Love is danced by Love, and “each joy is a Love.” The symbolist eventually runs short of numbers. Allegory goes on. Even Wordsworth, who knew better, having voiced a per-fect summa of pageant early in his Intimations Ode — “The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting” — runs short of breath and numbers by the end, resigning himself, like Yeats, to a conundrum: “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” Hell is deep. Heaven is wide. The true measure, the true account of any motion is the motion itself.
Does his eye behold the beam that bringsExpansion to the eye of pity? Or will he bind himselfBeside the ox to thy hard furrow?
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........................................................................Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!
— From Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Albion is sick. There’s no resigning. Light itself is motion touching human eyes. Position, heal thyself. “Position is where you / put it,” says Robert Creeley (“The Window”). Beatrice says, “Guardaci ben!” and suddenly Heaven is wider still. Blake at the very brink, where the brink is Heaven underway. One pageant is one success. Is there a life of mine in there, an America? I’m asking.
In the words of an old Blues standard, “Can I get to you now, Lord, or must I hesitate?” Perhaps it is Dante’s delay and not his devotion I emulate. Am I afraid to cross over the river without my Virgil — my allusions, my heralds and cross-references? I must read more. Am I afraid to die? I must love more. L’antica fiamma, my old flame, is not old. In Heaven, Yeats, excess of love is not bewildered. On Heaven’s brink, more is better. I must read more lovingly, until reading crosses over to rest beneath the shade of words.
Stonewall Jackson must have known which river to cross and exactly where, exactly when. Upon the brink of Heaven, so close, precision as to moment, precision as to place, is critical.
So, while the light failsOn a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapelHistory is now and England.
— From Little Gidding, by T.S. Eliot
Only an American, most especially a Missourian, could have written those lines as pageant and not palaver. At the brink of Heaven, if you get it wrong, angelic hands cast no flowers — una nuvola di fiori / che dalle mani angeliche saliva. Mermaids do not sing. There is an in-stance of upturn not to be missed. Our lives are loves, surely. But comes a time we must love rightly. Else we risk the oblivion of love, disappearing back to Limbo. Surely our loves appear in perfect order, in poetry, in pageant. Comes a time we must read rightly. Else we risk the oblivion of metaphor, disappearing back into the anthologies.
Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane,Honey of roses, whither wilt thou fly?
— From The Forerunners, by George Herbert
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In the crisis of mortality, Herbert urges his poetry to turn away from metaphor toward perfection. He urges Allegory. He commends the perfection of death-in-love reading the pageant of his own conver-sion, voluptuaries notwithstanding. Conversion is that instance of upturn in love, in Amor, inside of which loving and reading play a single part. For an instant (it ought to last forever) Pageant knows itself. Small wonder then, at the end of his writing life, Shakespeare should write The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, tragedies of misread-ing that, via pageantry on islands, become comedies of redemption from oblivion and metaphor, of love restored to perfections more perfect than before.
In The Winter’s Tale, place and time escape the action of the play until returned by spectacle. Leontes, king of Sicilia, the true island home of pastoral poetry, of Theocritus and Bion, vexes his kingdom to nightmare with jealous, murderous misreading. Courteous words are misread as adulteries. Reading fails. Love fails. Innocents die in prison. Unreality rules. A spotless newborn, Perdita, is abandoned on the nonexistent shore of Shakespeare’s imaginary Bohemia. Only when Time itself, embodied pageant-wise in Chorus, speaks sixteen years of hallucinatory discord, does the healing festival begin. Florizel, a prince disguised as a shepherd, recognizes nobility in the now-grown foundling shepherdess Perdita. Pastoral turns toward home in tender Pastoral transaction. (Love perfects Courtesy; Courtesy perfects Love.) In pageant, to pageant, Pastoral returns to real Sicilia. There, the statue of the falsely convicted Queen Hermione comes to life, escaping oblivion, escaping metaphor, and all may read the truth of sweet reunion. Because of Love, reunion accomplishes more than the sum of its parts. Paradise is more than Paradise Regained. In pag-eant and allegory, the role of Love is always and only played by Love itself. Perfection shows ever more perfectly in the twinned originals.
In The Tempest, the pageant of Amor rescues not only the ship-wrecked, but rescue itself. Come to its appointed moment, Prospero’s magic makes a difference but, for all its mischief and music, no real change. His book must drown before he can read aright. The lov-ers must tear “the baseless fabric” of his enchantments; only then do they love face to face. We may smile when Miranda, first seeing Ferdinand, declares, “I might call him / A thing divine,” and smile once again when later, in her final speech, she exclaims “How beau-teous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” But she’s not wrong. Nor is Prospero right in his bitter rejoinder,
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“’Tis new to thee.” Love is divine in its beatific origins and volup-tuous destination, and love makes all things new. There are several pageants within The Tempest; Ariel sees to that. But the play, in its valedictory entirety, is one great Pageant. Prospero misreads until he reads a book greater than his own. That book is sweet reunion. Miranda misreads until she no longer portrays an imago. Only then is she born, into the allegory of real life. Unmistaken love is fitted to fly. As Prospero avows:
There, sir, stop.Let us not burden our remembrances withA heaviness that’s gone.
In love, countless perfections are exchanged, lover to lover. They pass between us. This is the story, and the story is true. Just before she died, my sister took down a picture I’d cut from a magazine and kept on my bedroom wall. She had it beautifully, expensively framed, and hung it back on its crooked nail, without a word. It’s a picture of Heaven — something medieval, a patch of garden in which the Blessed Souls exchange small tokens hand to hand, under the approv-ing gaze of two angels and two deer. Perfections are equal in essence, but there is a hierarchy, too. Cockermouth (“Much favour’d in my birthplace,” says The Prelude), Paumanok, Eden, these are heavens of the original sort: beatific. Trailing clouds of glory, to each an as-ymptote of his own, we go the transit of loves. We play the pageant. Sometimes Shepherd #2 becomes a King. Kids are equal in essence, but somewhere in the lovely transactions of Amor, actually inside the transactions, happens an upturn and hierarchy. After the shep-herd’s festival, Perdita is not simply restored to Sicilia; she will be Queen there, and Queen of Bohemia, too. After enchanted island exile, Miranda is not only restored to the duchy of Milan; she will be Queen of Naples, by and by. There are footsteps upon a Florentine bridge to consider also: donna m’apparve. Clouds are exchanged for crowns; heavens of the eventual sort (the event is Love) are Paradise, unjacketed and voluptuous.
In our real lives, actual events are inseparable, one from another. Each is a passage from a single text: the pageant in which, eventu-ally, we play all parts but one. To read more closely is to love more closely. And if, as near to the Beloved as we can say, words seem to fail, they have not failed. All structuralists are charlatans. “He’s here!
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He’s over here!” Donna m’apparve. Sometimes, we live and have our being entirely inside the words. Loving so closely, our eyes read into the stars inside of eyes.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by man-kind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.
— From Walden
Which is simply to say that poems and stars exist. Greatness consists in the originals. Oothoon, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, knows how to read. She can never be defiled or distracted, and her perfec-tion (which is astronomical) improves with every word.
How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joysHoly, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love.
It is very tender to know that Oothoon will travel, like Perdita, like Miranda, all the way from cloud to crown.
There is a grain of sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot findNor can his Watch-Fiends find it; ’tis translucent & has many
angles.But he who finds it will find Oothoon’s palace, for withinOpening into Beulah, every angle is a lovely heaven.
— From Jerusalem by William Blake
Loves remain distinct in their numberless heavens, each one in place, which is One place, never afterward amiss. Which is to say that po-ems and stars exist and, further, to say “the stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray.” That was Hart Crane speaking, his last completed poem, “The Broken Tower,” speaking the most intense of Amor’s deep transactions, inside of which perfection turns for home along a ray of sunlight. Staring straight ahead into a black bell tower streak-ing past, the eyebeam touches the curve of the human eye, descrying Paradise. “Slater, let me come home.” That was Robert Creeley speaking, in the role of Hart Crane in the singular pageant. And home they went.
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•
On my table here I have a compact paperback (1966 Anchor Books) of Hart Crane’s poems and selected prose. It’s my favorite, the last one published while New Critics ruled the earth and poems were safe to find friends of their own, and to keep them close for as long as friendship lasted. The book is built for intimacy. Here are poems that Frank O’Hara cherished at the very same hour in a very differ-ent Manhattan from that in which Robert Lowell likewise cherished them. These are poems Robert Creeley, in the most beautiful letters he ever wrote, taught Charles Olson how to love, while Allen Tate, a drinking buddy to Crane and to Slater Brown, was yet alive and writ-ing well in his entirely different America. (There’s a letter to Tate in this little book ... “We’re all unconscious evolutionists, I suppose.”)
This is not my original copy; it is a recent gift from a thoughtful graduate student. Thank you, Joseph, for, in your own words, “filling a gap.” My original was left behind on an airplane circa 1989 en route to the MLA convention in Washington, DC. It was already a broke-back and yellowing item; I’d carried it with me on every sort of trip for a dozen years and more. Why? All for the sake of one stanza.
And so it was I entered the broken worldTo trace the visionary company of love, its voiceAn instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
— From The Broken Tower
Here, in one lyric instant, are all the transactions of Amor perfectly, unguardedly compacted. The newborn seeks and finds a company, a pageantry. The way of affirmation, the visual, touches the via negativa upon auditory, imageless rhymes. Freedom of choice is a foundling awaiting the next instant, which must somehow, anyhow reveal im-age and voice imparadised.
Certainly, over the years there’d been a sense of increment. For a long time, it was only the phrases “broken world” and “visionary company” I loved and, imperfectly, grasped. Mishap and happiness, crisis and rescue — more than enough transit and transport for me. Still, over time it was the calm, the stateliness behind the (in)famous ecstasies of the poem that mattered more and more. The ups and downs, the gatherings and dispatch, the shattering diapasons, are not
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chaos. There is no delirium. Rather, Crane compacts a turbulence of transactions, all of them loving, into a single instance: “the stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray.” Follow that ray to its source. There is no regression. Asymptote touches bell curve on the rise. Intimations all prove accurate. Origin is newly destined:
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone(Not stone can jacket heaven) — but slipOf pebbles, — visible wings of silence sownIn azure circles, widening as they dip.
— From The Broken Tower
Uplift, “visible wings of silence,” fits the affirmation of images like wings onto the auditory imagination. A compact is sealed into pag-eantry: “The commodious, tall decorum of that sky / Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.”
•
As one of the epigraphs to Four Quartets, his crowning pageant of instances, T.S. Eliot chose this passage from Heraclitus: “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” As the instantaneous epi-taph to a life’s work, “The Broken Tower” ends in a shower of lights raining up through clamor ringing down. No gaps.
I must pass beyond memory to find you, my true Good, my sure Sweetness. But where will the search lead me? Where am I to find you? If I find you beyond my memory, it means that I have no memory of you. How, then, am I to find you, if I have no memory of you?
— From Confessions, by Saint Augustine
From cloud to crown, what becomes of memory is what comes of it. A secluded chapel for Eliot, a palace for Oothoon, azures for Crane, a brave new world for Prospero’s Miranda, each of these is a voluptuary instance of voices and imagery imparadised, just as they’d been from the beginning, only now aware. It happens often, which is to say all the time When. The pageant cannot remember itself, and then it does. Saint Augustine’s pilgrim anxiety finds a passage from resolution (“I must pass beyond”) to something far beyond
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independence. Still, resolution drifts. It drifts a very long way, into “blank misgivings” as Wordsworth called them, into Dante’s selva oscura where allegory ravens after messes of shadow meat. Sometimes it drifts all the way, as in Whitman, and eventually “the low and deli-cious word” becomes the death-in-life of “me.” Allegory grows cold this side of Paradise. Vision that misses the upturn, the fording place, the skirt of Heaven, una nuvola di fiori, never prophesies. Grace is a more-than-marvelous gift, but so is grit.
Out of all this beauty something must come.— From Canto LXXXIV, by Ezra Pound
Pound’s insistence acts on faith, and faith acts — radiance without let-up all through “Rock-Drill.” By grace or grit, perfection finds the turn for home inside of love, close-reading deep transactions writ-ten there. Close-reading prophesies. Prophecy is what becomes of memory, precise as to moment and to place.
Augustine pleads a further concern, as it is the very substance of memory — its essential Goodness and essential Sweetness — he cannot bear to relinquish. There’s nothing to fear. In becoming prophetic, memory relinquishes nothing at all. The voluptuary instance changes everything, forsaking not one thing, not even the shadow or petal or skirt of one. Inside of Love, memory no longer passes, however tenderly, between subject and object. Passages are reunion. Reading is closer than grammar comprehends. Augustine will know the con-jugations of his memory forever changed. Conjugal infinitives, as it were, cross over from Eden to Paradise, bringing the entire Garden home. It isn’t a pageant for nothing. Confessions commemorates a God more sweet and good than even His saint remembered. Likewise, toward the end of Purgatorio, Virgil, hitherto Dante’s unperfected memory of the Vision, disappears. He is not gone. He has become the dimensionless point exactly where Beatrice lowers her eyes, lift-ing the Commedia into Prophecy.
Nothing matters but the qualityof the affection — in the end — that had carved the trace in the minddove sta memoria.
— From Canto LXXVI, by Ezra Pound
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Dove sta memoria ... where memory liveth. Having taken the upturn, having forded the river, having joined with metaphor in pageant where metaphor is purely itself, memory is a mere agency no lon-ger. It is entity. The God whom Augustine so loved can neither be forgotten nor remembered. God lives, which is to say that all the Goodness and Sweetness dear to the saint freely live and freely act, dove sta memoria. As entity, memory fulfills the now prophetic pag-eant. Prophetic all along, it had merely been confused with grammars. Entity is transit, not transitive. In Confessions, Augustine’s love of God is perfected, revealed to have been in fact, and from before the beginning, God. In the Commedia, Dante’s love for Beatrice transits an identical dimensionlessness, the eighth day of June 1290 notwith-standing. Reproof, and then a smile distinguish the Beloved in poetry, where memory liveth. That is why “Dante” appears just once in all the hundred cantos; his spoken name is a summons to prophecy, to actual entity. Only then is it written down.
The visionary writes no poetry, only regressions and reprise. Reproof (say that of Beatrice) and a name (say “Dante” written into Purgatorio) are tenderly required. I could mention a voice call-ing “Child” at the end of George Herbert’s “The Collar.” Or Robert Creeley en route to his own real name in “Heroes” — “That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking. / This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil.” And then the asymptote curves into a smile, which is also the curve of a human eye, descrying Paradise. You can’t make these things up out of thin air, or out of abandoned nests, or out of blown roses. No one believes you.
That she is living,Were it but told you, should be hooted atLike an old tale; but it appears she lives,Though yet she speak not. Mark a little while.[To Perdita] Please you to interpose, fair madam. KneelAnd pray your mother’s blessing. [To Hermione] Turn, good lady.Our Perdita is found.
— From The Winter’s Tale, by William Shakespeare
Hermione alive is the mother Perdita never knew and therefore never had occasion to remember. To Hermione, Perdita is no found-ling, but a daughter born full-grown in perfect love. Where memory liveth, memory is an altogether new adventure, an entity among other
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entities, where neither subject nor object appertains. Imparadised, what Pound calls “the quality / of the affection” is a quality no more, not subordinate to humors and nuance. It lives free. Saint Augustine had nothing to fear. His memory lay always just ahead of him, where Goodness is entity and Sweetness is entity. The pageant of Amor an-swers to each part with all speed.
Lead us from hence, where we may leisurelyEach one demand, and answer to his partPerformed in this wide gap of time since firstWe were dissevered. Hastily, lead away. [Exeunt]
— From The Winter’s Tale
What becomes of memory is what comes of it. The very first photograph taken of my sister Roberta in Heaven dates from 1948. The cast of the St. Peter’s Church annual Christmas pageant gathers in full costume — a pastorale underneath balloons and mistletoe in the parish hall. The pageant has ended. You can almost hear a late train grinding through the midnight air outside and above. My sis-ter, innkeeper’s wife that year, is the eight-year-old with bangs cut straight across her forehead. She kneels in the first row. She holds a lantern up above her hair. I was born in 1954, and my sister, my dear one, died in 1995. I’d never seen this photograph, now on my desk, before 2001. It appears in a mustard-yellow book, The Beautiful Bronx: 1920–1950, by Lloyd Ultan, cofounder of The Bronx County Historical Society Journal. And I would never have seen the book, I’m certain, save for the fact that my friend John Ashbery sent it to me out of the blue. The pageant cannot remember itself, and then it does. John could not have known that, hidden way in the tall pages, would be a Roberta I’d never seen, exactly as I’d never seen her, really, time out of mind. The affirmation of images has a mind of its own. And you can almost hear the late trains passing by. Transit, not transitive, memory goes ahead of itself and us. Recollection antedates the image whose image is prophetic: in Amor, in Pageant. I never sought to tell my love. Love told Me.
Dove sta memoria ... where memory lives and has its being, its Entity. Paradise in transit, including the Interborough Rapid Transit threading lights through the Christmas midnight air of the beautiful Bronx. Perdita’s memory antedates her birth and her youth as a shep-herdess in Bohemia. Hermione proves it. Coming to life, stepping
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down from the cold pedestal and into pageant again, she embod-ies memory in every direction, moving once more. The way up and the way down from the pedestal: one and the same. A fantastic Bohemia and the actual Sicily: one and the same kingdom, in good time. Beatrice arises from a cloud of flowers, una nuvola di fiori. She simply lowers her eyes and sets the date June 8 of the year 1290 into motion forever. Dante’s memory, addressed to and by Eternity (Guardaci ben!) antedates his Vision and toil. Where the downward gaze of Beatrice finds him alone and raises him into his proper name, proving the truth of his book, in that exact, dimensionless point, all directions unite. Memory is entity, never anguish anymore. Reunion follows reunion. Finding my sister as innkeeper’s wife in a sudden book, exactly as I’d never seen her, six years before I was born and six years after she had died, my pageant remembers itself. The Bronx is beautiful. Long before I was ever a shepherd or a Balthazar, and long afterward, memory lives there.
Our neighborhood was an ethnic jumble and, given the turbulence of the sixties, calm. I’m tempted to say “pastoral,” but you wouldn’t believe me. Still, with the meadows of Pelham Bay Park north-ward, the waters of Long Island Sound to the south, and a blur of City Island east in the sunrise, it was pastoral to many and to me. By 1965, I’d been a shepherd in St. Peter’s annual pageant two or three times already, with a golden crown in sight. My new school, Henry J. Bruckner Junior High, mirrored the neighborhood perfectly in every way; yet with the teachers counted in, numbers began to favor our Italian-American friends. I knew nothing, walking through the gates on the first school day, of Virgil, Firenze, and the Papacy, but that was soon to change. I hope you’ll believe me. In English class, toward the end of the forty-five-minute hour, we met a visitor. Miss Petrusa was a small woman with closely cropped coppery-colored hair. She seemed, during the teacher’s introduction, literally to vibrate with excitement, although she stood stock-still. We learned that our class had been uniquely honored. Beginning Friday, and continuing every Friday for the next three years we would study, instead of ordinary English, Dante with Miss Petrusa in the school’s small, sunny library: seventh grade, Inferno; eighth grade, Purgatorio; Paradiso in our se-nior year.
Knowing nothing of Dante, we saw nothing extraordinary or bi-zarre in the Commedia’s displacing Treasure Island, Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition, and business-letter-writing one day out
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of every five. We liked the looks of the library; it had tall windows, clean tables, and smelled like Christmas cellophane. Miss Petrusa was always delighted to see us. Never once in our three years, precisely one hundred Fridays, did she become angry or severe. We quickly cherished her. To some of us, she was a doting auntie; to some, myself among them, she was an orphaned gaudy bird. What seemed familiar, we loved. What seemed strange, we intended to protect at all costs from all outsiders.
The ungainly pageant of our damnation, purgation, and bliss went very well. The ceremonies of innocence never drowned, not even among simonists and suicides. The worst that ever happened was that, occasionally, early arrivals would crowd around the illustrated dictionary, parsing genitalia. Miss Petrusa gave no homework. All she asked was that, should an image from the given week’s canto catch fire in our minds, we try to capture it with crayons and colored pencils. “Images, images, images!” she would exclaim. It was from Miss Petrusa, surely, that I learned to honor the Affirmative Way. To this day, I can draw nothing better than stick-figures in red fires or big roses. But heart and mind, I’ve entrusted my salvation to Imagery. I’ve never met an allegory I didn’t like. Even in times of imageless darkness and confusion, the sounds of words lead on to kindly light.
Per te poeta fui, per te Cristiano.— From Purgatorio
Given one hundred Fridays and a happy teacher, I’ve been familiar with eternity quite some time.
In May of 1967, New Critics ruled the earth, and our class was nearing the end of Purgatorio. Accustomed week by week to very close reading and to the vast interiors of our poet’s images (Dante was our poet by then, and the city of Florence a Bronx with funny little bridges), we’d come to the cantos of Earthly Paradise, to the rivers Lethe and Eunoe, and to new trees at Heaven’s brink. It was time for a field trip. On Friday, May 19 we boarded a bus and crossed the river to Manhattan and Fort Tryon Park. Miss Petrusa was taking us to The Cloisters, John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s anthology of medieval stone and gardens staring down the Palisades. I’d never been to the place; none of us had, though crossing the George Washington Bridge en route to the discount houses of New Jersey, we might have seen it — a blind church on a rocky outcrop. In the years ahead, I’d often spend
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my birthdays there. In June 1970, in the cloister called Trie, I wrote my earliest poems. But I’m thinking of the very first visit now. More than the altarpieces, tombs, and tapestries, more than the unicorns and the fruit trees trained to look like candles, what caught my eye was a single wooden bead.
Netherlandish, scarcely two inches wide, opened to the viewer on a hinge, it is not so much carved out of boxwood as into it. Look ever so closely, and there’s far to go. The eye finds, north and south, two concave hemispheres. To the north is every detail of Christ’s nativity — birth and adoration and the flight into Egypt in depth, in intricate relief. The north is Alpha. The south is all Calvary — un-imaginable death agony cut in, and cut farther in. Interiors multiply without a vanishing point. The south is Omega. The whole span of Christ’s mortality lies open to view. Then the mind remembers what the eye has seen. Here is a single bead. Close it shut upon its hinge; the Alpha and Omega reunite. Mortality floats in an ocean of limit-less space and time, a bubble of boxwood, a bead, just one of many of a scattered strand.
Having taught us to read closely on Dante’s epic scale, Miss Petrusa, on the 19th day of May 1967 taught us to read an image alter idem, inward, and then farther in. It would be impossible to carve or to pray an entire rosary of such beads. Each is a lifetime self-contained. Alpha prior to Alpha, and Omega after the end merely describe a round surface of boxwood. It is a bubble for bursting, like the sun, never seen to burst. The bead snaps shut. Invisible now to one an-other, creator and creature are one, and one Love. Subject and object, one and the same. Lover and beloved, one and the same. The entire strand must be the span of lifetimes, dimensionless and without end. A pageant cannot read itself, and then it nearly does. It reunites with all the pageants ongoing. Identity trumps awareness. Beatrice looks down from the visionary car and says to Dante, “Fratre,” which is to say, “Brother.” I find my sister gone ahead of me, backward into a book. I see where she has gone, whenever I wish, in the days remain-ing. Memory is entity. There is a grain of sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find.
Our time with Miss Petrusa ended one year later. The last of our Fridays was devoted to Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, the finale and pe-riphrasis in Empyrean, a hymn beginning:
Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio.
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The phrase itself is a bead of boxwood. The Virgin Mother, daughter of her only son, perfects in detail, in every mortal and divine specific, Alpha prior to Alpha and Omega without end. Our mothers and fa-thers, along with school administrators from all around the Bronx, were invited to join us for this last meeting. Miss Petrusa planned something special. We’d be dressed in white as best we could: white shirts and blouses, white chinos and pleated skirts, white sneakers. Gathered choir-fashion, facing our guests, and with our backs to the sunny windows, we’d recite the entire canto, from memory. Then we’d exit, in pageant, past the statuette of Dante by the door.
It went well. No one afterward remembered anything amiss. As for myself, I remember only whiteness, and then walking off. In adult life, reading that final canto again — many, many times — I come to line 64:
Così la neve al sol si disigilla.
Like an eternity opened upon its hinge, revealing infinite distances, white snow unsealed (disigilla) in the sunlight shows a whiteness without end, the chromatic Union directly before and directly after Dante’s prismatic word. Here is a credible forecast of Hart Crane’s final sky. Here, a “tall decorum” unseals earth, showing no gaps. And still it shows every prophecy and soul between my Florentine and my Bedlamite. Man and boy, I have seen it. Passing by the statuette at the door, I must have seen.
Well, I graduated, so you’ll have to.— From Gorboduc, by John Asbhery
Schooled by overwhelming words and loves — figlia del tuo figlio, my older sister younger than myself in ageless pageant, boxwood, box-wood — I read as closely as I can. Reading should be heroic (Thoreau). Where the point of reading loses dimension, I love. We love. Because of the conjugations, it’s nothing personal (Eliot). It’s prophecy and every soul in between. Every word has a hinge and every footstep a horizon. For Heaven’s sake, these are spiritual entities not structural doodads. Structuralists do not exist. Trailing clouds of glory, exis-tence streams the illustrious transactions. Beatrice, smiling for the last time into mortal eyes, your eyes belong to God, where Dante finds them: e quella ... sorrise e riguardommi. Open a word, Oothoon,
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and exactly there does knowledge remember itself virginal, unhurt. Hearing footsteps, Perdita, hear the eternal happy shouts of reunion. Little boy in Paumanok, the outsetting bard should outset in. Every word is a ceremony, and every footstep redoubles the horizon of its home. In the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the inscrip-tion reads gnōthi seauton, “know thyself.” Inscribed upon a forecourt, it means “go in.” At this point, alphabets bend. Hemispheres close, one upon another, death agony upon Christmas adoration, and the rounded universe is a single bead and the numberless Heaven. If this is boxwood, it is driving me wild ( Jack Spicer).
Poems are wild for prophecy, for the quick parlay of vision into reality. Begun ahead of time, visions move more ways than one, yet each way is the pattern of itself and cannot change. If not for the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf, Dante might have taken the shortcut. Happily, Virgil takes him in hand, and together they go the right way round. In visionary transit, knowledge may hope to find its path to self-knowledge, but only when its vision is unsealed. How so? In “Years of Indiscretion,” John Ashbery offers a beautiful phrase, sotto voce, but in earnest: “vision in the form of a task.” What is the task? To read closely into our loves, remembering each its place in the pageant. Memory unseals a poet’s vision of these, placing the poet in right relation, and then the pageant moves. The movement is Prophecy. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Christ’s imperative, while spoken quietly, tenderly to friends, is epical. They have had their Vision: multifoliate nature has affirmed the images of their in-ward minds, one and by one. Which is to say that they know and that they love. Now, Christ calls them to a task. Knowledge must go beyond the pagan forecourts, into self-knowledge: I love, and I have a name which the Vision speaks to me, to be written down only then and only by me. Love itself must also move; l’antica fiamma must be lifted and carried high, in visible pageant, along the arc of its homing. Again and again, my poets redouble the use of memory. It is pure the-ater, with the emphasis on “pure,” as Perdita, Oothoon, and all the voluptuary star-turns of poetry sing. The pageant remembers itself a shepherd and a king.
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mike chasar
Lullaby Logics
My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch, by Daniel Tiffany. Johns Hopkins University Press. $29.95.
In Brian Selznick’s 2007 Caldecott-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the orphaned main character, Hugo, spends his time try-ing to repair a broken automaton in the hope that, restored to working order, it will transcribe a message from his dead father. “I’m sure that if it were working,” Hugo’s father once explained, “you could wind it up, put a piece of paper on the desk, and all those little parts would engage and cause the arm to move in such a way that it would write out some kind of note. Maybe it would write a poem or a riddle. But it’s too broken and rusty to do much of anything now.”
Hugo’s father was right — sort of. As Selznick explains in his ac-knowledgments, Hugo’s broken automaton was inspired by an actual automaton constructed around 1805 by the Swiss mechanician Henri Maillardet (1745–1830) and now contained in the collection of The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Capable of drawing four different pictures, Maillardet’s device also writes three decorated poems (two in French and one in English) including the following:
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When the automaton in Selznick’s novel is restored, however, it does not write a riddle or a poem, let alone a poem like the one with the cultivated archaic diction, trinket-like preciousness, formulaic nature, and failed seriousness — that is, with the kitschiness — that Maillardet’s automaton produces. Instead, it draws a picture, one that eventually leads Hugo and his friend Isabelle to discover that Isabelle’s godfather (who owns a toy shop from which Hugo has sto-len bits and pieces to use in repairing the automaton) is really the early filmmaker Georges Méliès.
Although there is no mention of either Maillardet or Selznick in Daniel Tiffany’s magnificent book, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch, Selznick’s erasure of poetry from the automa-ton’s history provides a nicely condensed version of the long “secret history” of kitsch’s origins in poetry that My Silver Planet uncovers — a history that reaches back to Maillardet’s eighteenth century and that, Tiffany claims, has been obscured but nevertheless embedded in and informing poetry ever since. Even though we now associate kitsch almost exclusively with the visual arts and material culture (velvet paintings, anyone?), My Silver Planet reveals how kitsch and people’s ideas about kitsch were in fact first developed and articulat-ed in relation to poetry. How and why kitsch’s connections to poetry were obscured, what the (far-reaching and significant) implications are for restoring those connections to British and American literary traditions and critical practices, including modern and contemporary poetry, and what unexpected social and literary values get expressed or embodied in poetic kitsch — what Tiffany describes at one point as “poetry in drag” — are thus the primary questions driving My Silver Planet.
Like Maillardet’s automaton, My Silver Planet is so full of fas-cinating and elegant moving parts (from counterfeit ballads to commonplace books, Mother Goose, pet epitaphs, Gothic sensi-bilities, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Charles Baudelaire, Ezra Pound, and Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory) that it’s impossible to de-scribe them all here; you’ve got to see it in action to appreciate it fully and, even then, it’s hard to believe it works. But a short (perhaps kitschen table) version of the history that Tiffany tells might go as follows. In the mid-1700s, about a quarter-century before Maillardet would relocate to London, and in response to the emerging category of polite, bourgeois “literature,” certain British writers (notably, but not only, coteries of queer aristocratic men pursuing personal and
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artistic relationships on secluded estates) started collecting, counter-feiting, sampling, and imitating old British folk ballads. Importing language that might have been fresh at an earlier point in history but that was so familiar by the 1700s that it appeared to be artistically primitive, unoriginal, cliche, and thus eminently reproducible — all characteristics that we now associate with kitsch — those writers tapped for the first time into the vernacular past as a way of “resisting the purified diction of ‘polite letters.’” In doing so, Tiffany argues, they discovered a range of new “poetic effects” acting “not as mode of representation but as an insular and ambient medium of expres-sion” that we now know as kitsch.
Kitsch, for Tiffany, is not a quality inherent in a poem or piece of art, but a mode of relating to a poem or a piece of art and thus an index of social relations and part of the history of taste (what you call kitsch, I may call art). In fact, one of the things that makes kitsch poetry kitsch, as the previous paragraph suggests, is how it traffics in the outdated (particularly outdated diction), unselfconsciously
“convert[ing] the exalted phrases of the poetic tradition into the ab-ject substance of automation and monotony” — a process that reaches a magical or perhaps terrifying epitome in the figure of Maillardet’s automaton, which is mechanically fated to pen the same three poems over and over, the novelty of its verses becoming more and more cliche and thus more and more automatic and monotonous each time they appear. Kitschy poems thus unknowingly cultivate what Tiffany calls “archaic or markedly ‘poetic’” attributes of language including
“poetic cliches and tableaux.” Kitsch links to the figure of the poet-aster, the production of poeticisms, and the activity of “poefying.” It frequently elevates the humble, simple, or small. Consider, for example, some of the elements of kitsch in the first line of the autom-aton’s poem alone: its inverted and thus “poetic” syntax, the poetic word “unerring,” the cliche of referring to one’s hand while writ-ing, the attention to smallness, and the archaic spelling of “smalle” itself that the decoration makes possible with a precious flourish. Whatever power this writing has (what Tiffany calls its “authority”) comes not from language’s representational capabilities but from ex-pressive — i.e., poetic — qualities of the language itself.
Kitsch’s effect, Tiffany argues, is one of “arresting poetry and its drive towards particularity and originality.” Kitsch doesn’t make po-etic language new. Rather, kitsch makes it “increasingly insular and arcane,” part of “an artificial, common language ... available to a mass
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audience” as cliche. And here — in the loss of poetic originality — is precisely its power. “In essence,” Tiffany writes,
what kitsch expresses lies beyond personal experience.... The loss of originality would allow poetry to become — via the traits of its reproducibility — the impersonal and allegorical expres-sion of millions of souls.
These claims for the aesthetic power of kitsch are thus what make Tiffany’s chapters on Ezra Pound, the New York School, and con-temporary innovative writing so striking. The modernist tradition in the US, at least in My Silver Planet, does not always “make it new” as Pound entreated poets to do; in fact, it makes it old more frequently than we think, in the process harnessing the effects of kitsch’s po-eticisms and poetic cliches for expressive, political, or innovative ends and thus unsettling the divide between “high” and “low” art. Following My Silver Planet, one might be moved to wonder, for example, how much more or less kitschy is the “unerring hand” of the automaton’s poem from 1805 compared to the “unerring hand” of Time in the last four lines of Claude McKay’s canonical 1921, Harlem Renaissance-era poem “America”:
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,And see her might and granite wonders there,Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
What makes the automaton’s poem kitsch and McKay’s poem art? Are they, in fact, both art? And how and why does the kitschiness of this moment in “America” — a moment where, as Tiffany describes it elsewhere, “time freezes” and poetry’s drive toward originality is arrested — affect how we understand the functioning of the language in McKay’s poem?
A further elaboration on poetic kitsch — including its additional verbal properties and effects; how it links in a variety of compel-ling ways to queer history and queer theory; how it produced (and therefore how poetry produced) the “inaugural artifact” of popular culture; how it and its “lullaby logics” and childish pleasures helped to create modes of reading and of relating to objects that anticipate
“the methods of enchantment and indoctrination essential to modern
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consumerism”; how kitsch may help reveal that we are at “the end of popular culture as a viable concept”; and how kitsch might imagine a progressive social totality — awaits you in the pages of My Silver Planet, dear reader. Sadly there is neither time nor space to elabo-rate on all of those suggestions here except to say that, in aggregate, they thrillingly, audaciously, and convincingly identify poetry as a primary motivational force in the history of popular culture, thereby also situating poetry studies as crucial to the study of popular culture and vice versa.
As compelling as this material is, of more sustained concern for Tiffany is, as I’ve suggested, the relationship between the vernacular and the avant-garde — also an agenda in his previous book, the excel-lent Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance, which sought to show, in part, how poetic or lyric difficulty is connected to the obscurity of slang used by beggars, criminals, and revolutionaries. My Silver Planet argues that kitsch (with its roots in the vernacular) shares an unexpected number of traits with the historical avant-garde including an adversarial stance vis-à-vis the bourgeois category of “literature”; a relationship to language as everyday practice; a deep suspicion of originality; and a cultivation of collective rather than personal forms of expression. The avant-garde and the vernacular are not the op-posites they’ve often been made out to be, Tiffany claims, but, rather, are in a dialectical relationship with each other, with kitsch serving as a “medium, a bridge” between them. Nearly half of My Silver Planet is given over to “kitsching” elite twentieth-century poetry (Pound, the New York School, and contemporary innovative writing), no doubt to display how kitsch works as a new analytic for poetry studies, but also to reveal how elite and vernacular histories exist in relation to each other and in mutual opposition to polite letters.
My Silver Planet offers a thrilling new way to read poetry from the past two hundred years. (Graduate students, you can now kitsch your way to a dissertation!) My only reservation about My Silver Planet stems from the fact that, while it acknowledges and examines early forms of kitsch poetry in the sphere of popular culture (Mother Goose, epitaphs for pets, etc.), it doesn’t examine kitsch poetry in modern or contemporary popular contexts, choosing, instead, to lavish its attention on kitsch in avant-garde contexts. While quick to name examples of kitsch poetry within the more recent popular sphere — newspaper verse by Edgar Guest, advertising jingles, song lyrics, and so on — My Silver Planet refrains from engaging any of
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them at length, giving the impression that while kitsch is “an evolv-ing aesthetic” in elite echelons, it is a static, monolithic, and eas-ily ascertained category of writing in popular ones, in the process effectively reinforcing the divide between the avant-garde and the vernacular that Tiffany claims kitsch helps to bridge. One comes away feeling that, insofar as modern and contemporary writing goes, the vernacular is important to understand not because it is complex or merits analysis in its own right, but because it can help shed light on elite poetries.
I suspect that, if turned as an analytic toward the popular, kitsch can help us better understand the work — if not an odd or unexpect-ed literariness — of once-famous poets like Guest (who wrote a poem a day for the Detroit Free Press for forty years); greeting cards and po-etic wall-hangings; popular song lyrics (rooted in the ballad tradition that Tiffany makes so central to kitsch); poetry scrapbooks (an exten-sion of the commonplace book that figures into My Silver Planet’s history); and poems appearing on or in any number of consumer items ranging from pillows to candy boxes to beer coasters. It might also help us to understand the citations of poems in movies or TV shows from the past fifty or sixty years that sometimes sample — and perhaps thus kitsch, or perhaps begin to make cliche — verbal arti-facts from literary culture in a way that parallels the incorporation of the vernacular by elite poetry and demonstrates how the “bridge” of kitsch between them does in fact run in two directions. (Think, for example, of what Dead Poets Society has done for — or to — Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!”) Perhaps the secret his-tory of poetry and kitsch that doesn’t make it into My Silver Planet’s secret history is that, just as it was with Mother Goose in 1765, kitsch in the poetry of popular culture has been an ongoing and evolving aesthetic as well.
It is interesting to note in conclusion, for example, that while The Invention of Hugo Cabret erases the kitsch poetry of Maillardet’s au-tomaton from its narrative, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning 2011 film version Hugo brings it back, although in displaced form. In a scene where Hugo and Isabelle are interrogated by Inspector Gustave in the Gare Montparnasse in Paris, Isabelle interrupts Gustave’s ver-bal assault and puts him on the defensive by quoting the majority of a ballad stanza excerpted from Christina Rossetti’s “A Birthday”:
191MIKE CHASAR
My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water’d chute;My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thickset ...
Inspector Gustave stops Isabella before she can finish the stanza, but in this context (the context of our present day viewing as well as the movie’s setting in thirties Paris), the verse is kitschy enough — trivial, mediocre, sentimental, derivative, commonplace, cliche, formu-laic, childish — that we can all finish the final line ourselves. It’s a scene that puts the fraudulence of kitsch’s history into play (Hugo and Isabella lie about where they’re headed, and Hugo pretends he’s not an orphan). It’s a scene in which the verbal cliche and the verbal effects of kitsch stand in opposition to the policeman of the train station’s bourgeois, polite culture. And it’s a scene in which the “lul-laby logics” of popular kitsch poetry get turned against the Inspector, distracting him and diffusing his aggression to the point where he eventually lets Isabella and Hugo go on their way. Kitsch “arrests” him, one might say, rather than the other way around, suggesting that while the history of kitsch and poetry has not been told and analyzed until now, the effects of that history are nevertheless, as Tiffany ar-gues, still with us — in the poetry we write and read, and in the train stations of our dreams.
The poem written by Maillardet’s automaton is from the Historical and Interpretive
Collections of The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
192 POETRY
contributors
frank bidart won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his latest book, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
mike chasar is the author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (Columbia University Press, 2012).
peter ciccariello’s art focuses on hybrid assemblages of real and simulated objects and the tensions between word and image.
daisy fried’s most recent book of poems is Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
brian henry * is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Brother No One (Salt Publishing, 2013).
cathy park hong’s latest book, Engine Empire, was published by W.W. Norton in 2012.
jenny kendler* is an interdisciplinary artist, environmental activ-ist, naturalist, wild forager, and social entrepreneur.
sylvia legris’s most recent book is Pneumatic Antiphonal (New Directions, 2013).
thomas lux’s To the Left of Time is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He teaches at Georgia Institute of Technology.
donald revell is the author of twelve collections of poetry. Essay: A Critical Memoir was published this year by Omnidawn.
tomaž šalamun (1941–2014) published more than forty books of poetry in his native Slovenian.
doris salcedo* was born in 1958 in Bogotá, where she continues to live and work. She is one of the leading artists of her generation.
karen solie* lives in Toronto. “Bitumen” is excerpted from The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out by Karen Solie, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Karen Solie.
* First appearance in Poetry.
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