A Fetish for Good Poetry

Edited by Rose Kelleher, Issue 12 of the Shit Creek Review is kinky in the best way. It makes us think about the relationship between poetry and perversion. One might say poetry is a perversion of everyday language. Saying so not only sexualizes poetry, but also politicizes it. For who gets to say what is normal and what is perversion? Under whose regime are we still living, no matter how hard we try to liberate ourselves?

What does it mean for me to publish my poems about a father's belting, anal sex, underaged sex,  SM and fisting under the rubric of "perversions"? The line in the sand is always shifting: is anal sex still considered perverted or is it on its way to normalization? Normalized under what regime? There must always be lines, as there must always be regimes of control.

The Latin root of "pervert" means "to overturn" or "to subvert." The meanings overlap but they are not the same. Subversion is the diligent, secret work of sappers. Overturning is the work of revolutionaries. Perversion as a weapon has an analogy in deconstruction. Should it be seen as the endlessly differing and deferring sign? Or is it  the destruction of an old order to build a new one? I want perversion to be the second, but fear it is only the first.

Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917

He returned from Morocco in 1913, and before departing from Paris to Nice in 1917, painted some of his most challenging works. In the geometric construction of the paintings, you can see his response to Cubism, and in his use of blacks and grays his response to World War I. Instead of focusing on the aesthetic or political context of this body of work, the MoMA show throws a light on its physical production, how Matisse scratched and etched and repainted the canvases, or else left them "unfinished." The result is an exciting glimpse into Matisse at work in his studio.

Why the physical effort, and then to leave the evidence so clearly on the paintings? Matisse wanted to fight in the war but was rejected because of his influenza. poor eyesight and age. He spoke (or wrote?) about fighting the war in his own way, on his canvases, and so he did, I believe. But who was he fighting against? Not the Tradition, which he loved, but Himself. He fought to paint a different way from how he painted before. All that he upheld, prized, identified with, all that had to be thrown down. In overcoming himself, he became a force that cannot be dismissed.

The Window (1916)

Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997) at the Met

The title of the exhibition says it all: Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting. Unlike many Chinese artists, Xie Zhiliu, a native of Changzhou, kept the copies and sketches he made throughout his career, and these now provide an absorbing account of the development of a traditional Chinese painter working in the twentieth century.

Copying the masters and working from nature were the complementary disciplines of such an education. Not knowing the tradition in which he worked, I found it hard to distinguish between Xie's work and the work of his chosen masters, like the Ming painter Chen Hongshu (1599-1652) and other bird-and-flower painters. I could see that his lines, as a young painter in his twenties, were less sure than theirs, but I could not see how he departed from them deliberately. Even the drawings done from nature looked as if they had been traced.

I was most impressed by the work in the last gallery. (I could not find any images of the work on the Met website.) The years of imitation and study paid off in an original freedom. In 1994, Xie made a brightly colored album called Views of Yosemite National Park, California, after visiting the reserve with his wife. The mountains were rendered with Chinese feeling for both mass and etherealness. Xie remarked that the pine trees in the park made up half of the beauty of the place, a sentiment that is observable in so many Chinese landscape paintings. Leaves 8 and 10 of the album were particularly beautiful for their abstraction and color.

Even more interesting, to me, was the eight-leaf study of a lotus pond. In leaf after leaf, the lotus flower contended with the swirling wash of ink until it emerged from the darkness, in full bloom. Other lotus stalks, barely glimpsed earlier but now seen in the white space, reinforced the victory of the verticals.

Buggermania and Other Madnesses

TLS July 9 2010

from J.P.E. Harper-Scott's review of Roland John Wiley's Tchaikovsky, and Adam Zamoyski's Chopin: Prince of the Romantics:

Very touching are Tchaikovsky's letters to his brother Modest in 1876, which show him racked by his urge to perform sexual acts that he admits are contrary to his Christian belief. "Buggermania," he writes. "forms an impassable gulf between me and most people." Admitting to thoughts of joining a monastery, Piotr implores his brother, whose sexual interests were similar, to exercise control over himself. Some of the letters are more explicit than others. of Josef Kotek, fifteen years his junior, he writes, 

When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it . . . passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength . . . . Yet I am far from the desire for a physical bond. I feel that if this happened, I would cool towards him. It would be unpleasant for me if this marvellous youth debased himself to copulate with an ageing and fat-bellied man.

*

Wiley's musical commentary lays occasional critical emphasis on prelest', a concept veering from simple attractiveness to more dangerous seductiveness and corruption; he regards this as "a Russian element deeper than hackneyed determinants of nationality, enhancing it in pieces where no phrase of folk song ever sounds" . . . .

*

Recent musicology has out the body interestingly near the centre of its discourse about the production and meaning of music, but Zamoyski's drift here, by contrast, is that the body serves only as a conduit of the sempiternal, its shabby humanity burnt off by exposure to the fires of creativity.

***

from Paolo D'Iorio's review of Handschriften, Erstausgaben und Widmungsexemplare, edited by Julia Rosenthal, Peter Andre Bloch and David Marc Hoffman:

Nietzsche scholars will be delighted to find in this new book a reproduction of one of about ten known copies of the first edition of the fourth part of Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885). This copy contains a significant dedication: "To my revered, dear friend Franz Overbeck with the request to keep secret this ineditum--and many other requests", which reminds us, better than any philological explanation, of the different editorial and philosophical status of the fourth part of Thus Spake Zarathustra. While the first three parts are published works made available to the general public, the fourth part is a private printing, which Nietzsche wanted to keep secret.

*

Finally, a mention of the page that Nietzsche gave to the doctor of his madhouse as his "testament" on May 5, 1889. It contains staves, music, words, scribbles: some of them perfectly readable, though most are virtually indecipherable. This is the only document in the collection not to have been transcribed. Nietzsche has always been one of the strongest advocates of life, despite all its pain death and madness, and the presence of a speechless testament in the middle of these beautiful manuscripts and remarkable books is particularly appropriate, because it reminds us, better than any philosophical explanation, how difficult it is to be an advocate of life.

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TLS June 11 2010

from Lorna Hutson's review of David Hawkes's John Milton: A hero of our time:

Hawkes's insistence on the centrality of usury to understanding the development of Milton's thought illuminates the psychic tendency involved in the early poetry. One of Hawkes's arguments for Milton's immediate relevance to the present moment is the poet's claim that the truths he revealed were ahead of his own time, and would only be understood by succeeding ages. As young as twenty-two, Milton imagined for himself the life of study and contemplation that would make him a prophetic poet. This situating of a studious life in the context of the financial investments that paid for it makes the reader aware of the poet's stressful sense of psychic investment, of the strains of living one's life as a debt that risks going unpaid.

***

from Llewelyn Morgan's review of Ellen Oliensis's Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin poetry:

But if at times one can feel that the theory is flattered by the superlative talents of the critic, that nicely conveys the manifold merits of Freud's Rome: for me Oliensis's reading of Scylla's erotic pursuit of Minos in Metamorphoses 8 does not amount to a case for penis envy, but it is from any perspective a superbly illuminating account of the episode, stylish, perceptive and psychologically acute. With this of all topics I am bound to allow that the problem may be mine. Does the proliferation of feet in Catallus 63 play out a castration anxiety? Maybe not/ But it cannot be anything but therapeutic for classicists to be told that "synecdoche is the rhetorical counterpart of the fetish".

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TLS July 16 2010

from Guy Dammann's review of the 63rd Aldeburgh festival of Music and the Arts:

One can never be prepared for someone like [Pierre] Boulez. His identity seems entirely bound up with the paradox, implicit in the idea of artistic originality, of necessity as the flipside of novelty.

*

Now months shy of his 102nd birthday, [Elliot] Carter is in as good a position as any to compose a work with the title What Are Years?, a setting of five poems by Marianne Moore. Scored for chamber orchestra, with an array of pitched and unpitched percussion, the limpid instrumental writing provides a sleek bedding for beautifully measured vocal lines which support the wittily skewed angles of Moore's verse. In both the poems and the music, detail surrenders itself imperceptibly to confrontation with mystery.

In the final, title song, a bird is observed "growing taller" in the act of singing, It sits captive between fear and desire but voices the infinite reach of human longing: "satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy". The line is carried through a steep crescendo into a resounding chord, amid the decay of which the soprano intones "This is mortality. This is eternity". 

*

Scored for a folksy, almost comic ensemble which includes basset horns a contrabass clarinet and parts for mandolin and banjo, [George Benjamin's] Into the Little Hill is less an opera than a piece of ritualized musical storytelling. At its heart is the dramatic contrast between the compromised reality in which we accept, as the minister puts it," all faiths because we believe in nothing", and the realm of unbridled presence accessible only to the innocent children (and rats), who blissfully follow the piper's Pythagorean strains to the light that blazes under the hill.

In one sense, Into the Little Hill can be understood as a kind of negative Gesamkunstwerk--a total work that has renounced all totalizing claims. With the aid of John Fuljames's minimal staging, the work affords a limitless space and time for the imagination through the bewildering beauty of its gestures. Though the audience are left no less bereft than the townsfolk in the story, the work engenders a strong and emboldening perception of one's own freedom to pull together each phrase, image or utterance. At the same time, it suggests an easier, more honest relation to history than that which dominates the gloomy horizons of Boulez and Berio. The illusions of the past cannot be brought back, or its horrific losses made good, but the structure of our relation to ideas of infinity and perfection remains the same, brought to being neither through enchantment nor disenchantment, but through the effort to create and comprehend beauty [italics mine].

***


from Stephen Gaukroger's review of Edward Skidelsky's Ernst Cassirer: The last philosopher of culture:

In his Essay on Man, [Cassirer] writes that

language, myth religion, art, science, history are the constituents, the various sectors of [the circle of humanity]. A "philosophy of man" would therefore be a philosophy which would give us insights into each of these human activities and which, at the same time, would enable us to understand them as an organic whole.

Such insight is to be achieved, on Cassirer's view, through an appreciation of the symbol-making nature of human beings. While other animals are immersed in the immediacy of worlds of their own, human beings go beyond these limits, and must construct symbolic forms of understanding--myth, religion, language, art. science--to find their way in a way which is not their own, even if it remains of their own making.

***

from Siriol Troup's review of Gunter Eich's Angina Days: Selected poems, translated by Michael Hofmann:

"All poems are too long", [Eich] said in 1965. "I'm graphic, black-and-white, I'm in favour of omission, abbreviation, shorthand . . . . I ask questions, I don't give answers". . . . His writing becomes a decision to see the world as language, an attempt to translate from a language in which word and thing coincide. We translate, he says, without having the original text.

Pedro Almodovar's "Law of Desire" (1987)

I think I may have gone off Almodovar. I could not watch to the end his tale of obsessive love (of Antonio Banderas's crazy rich young man for Eusebio Poncela's narcissistic filmmaker). There was little that was new in the film's exploration of obsession and narcissism, and so I was left with two unpleasant characters for whom it was hard even to feel repulsion. The acting was fine (titillating to see Banderas buggered by Poncela), but the plot was thin. The one bright spot was the portrait of the filmmaker's transsexual sibling. Carmen Maura was by turns terrified and tender, and gave the film what heart it had.

So Many Artists, So Little Time

The New Museum block party, at Sara Roosevelt Park on Saturday, was a small neighborhood affair, consisting of about 8 small tents and mineral water sponsored by Whole Foods. Good enough, I suppose, for fitting in, but not for reaching out. The museum however was crowded. GH and I watched Patrick Pleutin's animation short Bamiyan (2008), shown as part of the REDCAT International Children's Film Festival. The 14-minute film narrated, in French and Chinese, with English subtitles, the visit of Chinese monk Xuanzang to Bamiyan, Afghanistan, where he saw the giant statues of Buddha. The statues were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, and children living in the valley told the legends of that destruction. The colors of the film were as gorgeous as stained glass, but they moved and changed.

Both GH and I liked the work of Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, but we liked different parts of it.  GH liked At a Certain Distance (Ex-Voto Paintings) (2010) for their architectural rendering of space, and matched muted colors. He also liked the film The Tenant (2010) which featured a soap bubble wandering through a deserted house. I enjoyed Rain Rains (2002), "an environment of leaking buckets." It used just a few basic elements to create a sensuous and meditative experience. "After the Storm" (2010), made with New York county maps exposed to the weather during Brazil's rainy season, resonated with implied narratives. The painting over the torn maps suggested the working of imagination, after the weather had taken its toll.

On the second floor was Brion Gysin, painter, performer, and poet. In 1959 he invented the Cut-Up Method and together with William S. Burroughs created The Third Mind, a Cut-Up collage manifesto. He also invented Combination Poetry (computer rearrangement of the words "the poet does not own the words," for instance) as well as the Dream Machine, a rotating light sculpture that used the flickering effect to create visions. The methods were interesting; they shared a common wish to circumvent the mind. But could they say anything more than that?

I enjoyed the art on this visit to the New Museum much more than on previous two visits. The artists on show this time were much more substantial and creative. After resting at GH's place for a while, we went to the neighborhood garden where his friends R and L and their daughter S were working. They became members not so long ago, and were planting some flowers in their allotted bed. The garden was wet and loamy and hot.

Leaving them, we passed by a much bigger neighborhood garden (at the intersection of B and 6) and went in to take a look. A fish pond bubbled near the entrance. A pavilion stage stood at the back. We were back at the gate again when a young man ran up to us and invited us to return for a film screening. Later, at the Q&A, we realized that he was the director of the film. The Evangelist,  directed by Nathaniel Chapman, explored the relationship between a gay man (played by Theodore Bouloukos) and a boy he adopted (Lucas Fox Philips) who turned out to possess a religious bent.

Set in Provincetown, the film deliberately, and quite originally, flipped the usual scenario by making gay the status quo and religion the marginalized. What followed was almost a parable about the murderous instinct at work in religion, but a parable inflected by absurdity and familial love (from a gay man!). The supporting characters could have been fleshed out more, but the central drama was captivating. Despite working from what must be a tight budget, the black-and-white cinematography was very artful.

We were soaked in perspiration by the time the film was over. The night was very humid. But we wouldn't have wanted to miss watching the film. One of the incidental pleasures of a Saturday night in New York.

Lucian Freud at the Centre Georges Pompidou

TLS June 11 2010

from Mark Hutchinson's review of "Lucian Freud: L'Atelier" at the Centre Georges Pompidou:

Where, then, does the heart of Lucian Freud's originality lie? Over and above his unquestionable technical virtuosity, there are two areas of his work in which Freud can be said to have opened up new ground. One is the series of portraits he made of his mother, who posed for him in his studio more than a thousand times between 1972 and her death in 1989 . . . not only are they among his most powerful paintings but, as Jean Clair, the man who first championed his work in France, observed some years ago, the theme of the son watching over the dying mother is a visual counterpart (and an unusual one) to one of the most haunting images in Western art, that of the mater dolorosa.

The second area, of course, is his nudes, in which the model's genitals are, often as not, positioned at or near the centre of the composition; and, by extension, at the very heart of the act of creation. So familiar have these "naked portraits", as he prefers to call them, become that it is easy to forget how fearless this self-styled "biologist" has been in his demythologizing of the nude. To remind yourself ot his, you have only to stand before one of his more insistent male portraits, sprawling with his legs apart like the Barberini faun, but without the civilizing reference to Antiquity--"Nude with Leg Up (Leigh Bowery)", say. Try as you might, you do not know where to look, particularly when the model is male. . . .

*

Freud's rendering of flesh is almost a byword for clinical detachment; this, it seems to be saying, is what the human body comes down to when scrutinized under a 200-watt bulb and stripped of its airs and graces. A portrait, however, will often tell us as much about its maker as it does about the model, and for all the talk we hear of the complicity and intimacy involved in posing for Freud, it is the painter, I suspect, who is the real object of his excoriating gaze; ultimately, the impression you get from so many of his nudes is of a man bent on mortifying his own fascination with, and dependency on, the flesh.

*

The most arresting image of all, however, is the full-length "Painter Working, Reflection" (1993), a portrait of the artist naked at seventy, one hand brandishing a palette-knife, the other with the thumb hooked like a second phallus (a conceit Freud uses more than once in his male nudes) around his palette. It is an extraordinary image, a mixture of melancholy, gravitas and clownish pathos in which the artist stands before us, half-doubting, half-defiant, his heavy legs bruised with blood, and with nothing to support him but the unlaced boots he might almost have borrowed from Van Gogh.

*

As for the monumental portrait of Leigh Bowery, what can one say about this eight-foot-tall figure standing with his ankles crossed like a ballerina, who seems to have stepped straight out of Greek mythology, part man, part bull, except to note that, whatever it is Freud has been looking for all these years in the human flesh, he has clearly found it. Candid, factual, admiring and unembarrassed, for once it is openly and unreservedly an act of re-enchantment, and one that makes our conventional categorization of human sexuality look hopelessly threadbare. "I found him perfectly beautiful", says Freud with disarming simplicity.

Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon"

I was some way into the novel before I realized that it is, basically, a Bildungsroman. It charts the growth into maturity of Macon Dead, Jr., nicknamed Milkman. Born into middle-class affluence, and suffering from its ennui, Milkman is torn between a dominating landlord father and a loveless, hopeless mother. He wishes to escape from home, from the heavy hand of the past, but he does not know what he wishes to escape to. In search of the gold his Aunt Pilates had supposedly taken from a white man she and her brother killed, Milkman journeys to the South (Virginia) where he experiences black communal life--connected to Nature, free of the North's materialistic individualism--and so recovers his lost family history.

If this sounds like romanticizing the black South, it is. Sure, Morrison depicts the South as proud and violent (Milkman gets into a fight in the store), as racist and greedy (Macon Dead Sr.'s father was shot dead by the whites who wanted his farm). But the Southern blacks, in this novel, are essentially kind and hospitable. They do not take vengeance for injustices like the seven Northern blacks who call themselves the Days, and kill a white person for every black person killed by a white, in order to preserve the racial ratio. No, they do not live for the Days, but  keep the race memories for forgetful Northern blacks.

What is this family history kept for Milkman? That his great grandfather Solomon was a big man in that part of the country, who had many many children (like Father Abraham), but decided to fly off (literally) and leave his wife and children. This is not history, but allegory, of a magical kind. The trope of the flying man opens the novel and recurs throughout. Allegory simplifies history and character in the hope of achieving archetypes. I am not sure that is achieved here. Guitar plays the Cain to Macon Jr.'s Abel, but that archetypal relationship is constantly troubled by a lack of convincing reason for the attempted murder. Too much plot credibility is sacrificed at the altar of symbolism.

Not only does allegory oversimplify history (some would want to praise it as "mythologizing"), it also does not completely cohere in Morrison's hands. Solomon's flight is supposed to be transcendental, in contrast with others who fly and fall to their death. However, Morrison editorializes in an aside that, unlike men, women could fly while staying on the ground. But if women are superior to men in this manner, where does that leave poor Solomon? In mid-air, I guess.

The editorial comment seems to promote feminism, but I find the depiction of women, and their relationships with men, in this novel troubling. Women like Ruth Foster (Macon Jr.'s mother) and Hagar (his lover) give up everything, including their selves, for romantic love, the first with her father, the second with her cousin. If the women are not crazy for love, they are just crazy, like the bootlegger and witch Pilates (she who does not have a navel), her slow-witted daughter Reba, and Circe who took care of Macon Sr. and Pilates when they fled from the whites who killed their father. The crazies, living by themselves at the margins of society, are cut off from the community Morrison valorizes elsewhere.

The stories of all these women, lovers or otherwise, are subordinated to the stories of men. Milkman's sisters Magdalena called Lena and First Corinthians take center-stage for a while, but they always give way to Milkman. It is his redemption (easy enough, since all he has to do is to bury the woman he "killed" by rejecting her heartlessly), his assumption of patriarchal authority (he tells Pilates what is actually in her bag, and so serves as the envoy of her father's ghost) and his fraternal struggle with his best friend Guitar that the novel ends with. Love for the Patriarch is ultimately symbolized by the discovery that the bones Pilates carries and keeps with her do not belong to the murdered white man, but to her father. Where does that leave Morrison's feminism?

The moment the novel revealed that the father's body, washed up from its shallow grave, was threw into the same cave where Macon Sr. and Pilates murdered the white man, I guessed the secret of the bones. I doubt I am unusual in doing this. The problem lies in the storytelling. It is just not deft enough. Too labored also is the recovery of the family history, bit by bit, from different people. The novel begins ploddingly, with a long set piece about the birth of Milkman, quickens with interest in the chapters about Pilates's strange household and Corinthian's awkward love affair, and then drags out the meanderings of Milkman in the South. The women in the novel are more intriguing than the men but they don't have enough air time. This is, after all, not the Song of Sheba.

"A Disappearing Number" and "Perfect European Man"

Two plays in two days in two very different settings, the first attended yesterday with LW and friend S, the second today with TH.

Appearing as part of Lincoln Center Festival was Theatre Complicite's A Disappearing Number in its New York premiere. High-tech set, including video and direct projection, fluid stage transformation, polished acting, cross-cultural interactions spanning UK, India and the USA. The production, conceived and directed by Simon McBurney, moved like a film. It spliced the life of mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (Chetna Pandya) with a contemporary romance between a math professor Ruth Minnen (Saskia Reeves) and a futures trader Al Cooper (Firdous Bamji). It meditated on the different kinds of mathematical infinity, and sought consolation for death in the idea of infinite series, or Things Are Connected When They Happen One After Another. It was also about the idea of beauty. The Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy (David Annen), who worked with Ramanujan, wrote in his A Mathematician's Apology, "Mathematicians are only makers of patterns, like poets or painters."

The other play was also concerned with beauty, though of a much more physical kind. Written and directed by DJ Salisbury, Perfect European Man looked at the life of Sandow the Magnificent, who was to be preserved for posterity by a British Museum body casting. Xander Chauncey was a little opaque as Eugen Sandow though he bared almost everything throughout the show. Thom Christopher Warren was the vulnerable, and thus believable, caster Desmond Frates. The play quoted Keats's Endymion. The small Cherry Lane Studio Theatre was almost full for this part of Fresh Fruit: the 8th Annual International Festival of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Arts and Culture.

It's not about patter, it's all about verbal patterning.

Andrew Howdle's review of "Equal to the Earth"

Andrew Howdle has been a keen reader of my poetry for a number of years. His review of my book Equal to the Earth is informed by his intimate knowledge of my work as well as by our regular correspondence. If I suggest that his review is so far the best reading of my book, I do so not because he is highly complimentary, but because he reads it with high intelligence and broad sympathy. He is sensitive to the various ways technique contributes to emotion, and so neither is discussed in isolation or, worse, as if they are contradictory. Instead, he explains both the vision and the viscera of the work.