Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Ralph Fiennes's "Coriolanus" (2011)

2012-02-01T06:39:00.001-05:00

I am not into modern updates of Shakespeare, especially those with a political axe to grind. Such updates seem to condescend to the audience, as if we cannot be trusted to draw our own conclusions from a straight production of the Elizabethan Shakespeare. In movies, the contemporary imagery also tends to overwhelm the Shakespearian language. Ralph Fiennes's modern adaptation of Coriolanus does not escape these pitfalls. The battle scenes, set in a war-torn city that could be Baghdad or Kabul, could have been lifted from any number of modern combat movies. The riot for bread played like an angry protest on TV. I was also struck by how inefficient film conventions are compared to those of the stage. When Coriolanus approached Aufidius to offer himself as an ally, the camera followed Coriolanus slowly through a dark tunnel to the enemy headquarters. On stage, he would have just appeared in Aufidius' presence.

But Fiennes managed to capture on the big screen the nuances of the complex relationships between Coriolanus (Fiennes) and his nemesis Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and between Coriolanus and his mother Volumnia, a powerful and poignant Vanessa Redgrave. Yes, the plot pivoted on Coriolanus' patrician contempt for the unwashed masses. The emotional crux, however, lay in his absolute allegiance to the truth of himself, early on encouraged by Volumnia. That such absoluteness is lonesome may explain Coriolanus' eagerness to find in Aufidius an opposite and a twin. When Volumnia pleaded with her son to betray himself by sparing Rome, she was in effect asking him to destroy himself. Aufidius was merely the convenient knife. The terrible nobility of such self-justification was the source of the sublime in this film version.

Everyman's Library: "Villanelles"

2012-01-31T06:35:00.003-05:00

Got my copy of Villanelles yesterday, edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali. Published as part of Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, the book has a lovely cover and handles well. More books of poetry should be published in this handy format. My poem "Novenary with Hens," written so long ago for PFFA's Apprentice Challenge, nestles between Carolyn Kizer's line from Valery and Steve Kowit's grammar lesson. Besides the (largest) section on contemporary villanelles, there are sections on the (brief) tradition, villanelles about villanelles, and variations on the villanelle. A little treasure chest.

Gypsy and Porgy and Bess

2012-01-30T21:43:00.000-05:00

Watched Gypsy in school last Thursday. A very engaging student production. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents. Mother Rose was hungry for stardom for her daughters. When the older one June eloped, the younger one Louise bore the brunt of maternal attention until she gained fame as a stripper and renamed herself Gypsy Rose Lee. The musical also bore witness to the fall of vaudeville and the rise of burlesque.

Then on Sunday, with TB I watched The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, directed by alumnus Diane Paulus, and adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre Murray from the original folk opera by George Gershwin, DuBose, Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin. Crippled Porgy took Bess in after her man Crown killed someone and had to flee. Crown returned to claim his woman, and Porgy killed him after a struggle. I have not watched the original, but was told by a colleague that the adaptation cut a few of Porgy's arias, and so shifted the attention to Bess, who was also given a more sympathetic treatment.

Audra McDonald sang Bess superbly, though her operatic singing did not quite gel, to my ears, with Norm Lewis' musical theater singing as Porgy. David Alan Grier was a slick Sporting Life, who succeeded finally in tempting Bess to escape Catfish Row for the bright lights of New York City. Phillip Boykin played Crown with real menace. He was the force of chaos in the tight fishing village. Of all the songs, "Summertime," "A Woman Is a Sometime Thing" and "My Man's Gone Now" were sung most memorably.

Mary di Michele's "The Flower of Youth"

2012-01-28T16:40:00.001-05:00

You read up on a great writer and director, what he wrote and what others wrote about him. You find affinities in thought and temperament, though you live in different times and places. You fly to Italy for an academic conference and make the pilgrimage to the writer's grave at Casarsa. There, sitting on a bench shaded by cypress, weeping for a man you have never met, you hear a voice whispering to you in Italian, which you don't know how to write, but find yourself transcribing. Translated into English, the voice said,

I leave the city and discover the sky,
The world is bigger than I realized,
Where there's nobody the stars are myriad.

That was what happened to Mary di Michele, according to her book's prologue, and what inspired her to write The Flower of Youth. The title is the same as that of the volume of verse Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in dialect about his coming of age in the countryside during World War II. The verse that di Michele heard at Pasolini's grave speaks of the affinities that she found in the Italian writer. The usual migration goes from the country to the city in the search of a bigger world. di Michelle and Pasolini, however, found their world enlarged by leaving the city for the country. In her case, that journey is also a return, a homecoming, from Canada to Italy. Born in Lanciano, Italy, in 1949, she moved with her family to Toronto when she was six.

The Flower of Youth is organized in four parts. The Prologue narrates in verse and prose di Michele's journey to Pasolini's grave. Part II "Impure Acts," the bulk of the book, speaks in the voice of Pasolini about the struggle between his sexuality and his faith. Instead of fighting in the war, he followed his mother into the countryside to set up a school for boys too young to be conscripted. di Michelle's poems take off from his own memoir about that period of sexual awakening. In Part III "After Pasolini," she translates the two very different versions of the poem that Pasolini wrote about his death, and she adds what she calls a permutation, a poem of her own about the reported circumstances of his death that deploys motifs from his poems. Part IV the epilogue explains the structure of di Michele's book.

The poems in Part II reproduce what di Michele discovered to her surprise when she read Pasolini's memoir. The World War is sidelined in favor of the internal battle. The bombs keep falling, but the real devastations are those of the heart and its desires. Most of the poems are written in quatrains with the last line of each quatrain shorter than the rest and indented. This stanzaic form proves to be admirably malleable and musical in di Michele's hands. The opening stanza of "Postscript(s)" introduces gently yet pointedly Pasolini's story in di Michelle's chosen form:

The fall of '47 I was 25 and still living
in Viluta. What made me stay so long?
What made me linger in that nothing place,
that hamlet of ten houses?

The enjambment after "living" subtly reminds us of the casualties of war. The repetition of "What made me" fills out the entire length of the third line and the next, which also contracts to round up the small hamlet. di Michelle is also fond of breaking a line between an adjective and its noun. That device works well in many instances to maintain narrative momentum, but may seem arbitrary in some places.

The sentiments traced in these poems are not extraordinary, but they are delicate. Sexual rendezvous takes place in discreet fields and secret woods, to which the reader's eyes are not privy, though enticed. In a few places, the plain language descends into conventionality, as when de Michele's Pasolini complains of a boy that "He erected invisible walls/ against me" ("Spring Far Behind"). The same poem, however, quickens in the end when Pasolini dreams of lying with him again in "a familiar bed," which for them is "some ditch fragrant with primrose." The invisible walls are unreal, a mere idea, but the ditch smelling of primrose brings the country and the sex to the nose.

In like manner the best poems of the book bring to life the physical environment in which the drama of love not only takes place but finds its embodiment. In "Hidden Corners/The Earth Moves," spring has returned and so has B. naked to the waist. He leads Pasolini into the woods, where

The dew had dried but the stones, gravel
from the river bank, still glistened; in the grove
where we lay together the Earth trembled
with the passing trains.

The trains unexpectedly and perfectly convey the temporary vibrations of the encounter. In "A Thousand Birds," it's summer and the boys go back to swimming naked at the pit, their playful cries harmonizing with birdsong. Sitting by the pit, distracted from his Tasso and Tommaseo, di Michele's Pasolini is keenly aware of his envy "for those meadows where B. stepped/ shoeless into the long grass." The mixture of the sacred ("shoeless") and the sensual ("the long grass") is captured vividly in a memorable image. With such images the book convinces us that the country is more bountiful than the city.

Sam Mendes's "Richard III"

2012-01-25T20:28:00.001-05:00

Last night, at the BAM Harvey theater, Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes, played to a full house. The production was the last to be mounted as part of The Bridge Project, a British-American collaboration. I enjoyed the Project's King Lear last year, the eponymous hero played by Derek Jacobi, and so looked forward to the play about the infamous, hunchbacked king.

Kevin Spacey, as Richard, was disappointing. His performance stayed on a single note, that of a growling menace, that did not have any shade or space in it. His seduction of Lady Anne was utterly unconvincing because there was no charisma or sex appeal in the portrayal. The humor when speaking lines that are not supposed to be humorous was broad, almost farcical. Richard was almost a cartoon character in Spacey's hands.

The other actors were not particularly memorable, except two. Chandler Williams played the Duke of Clarence with restrained dignity. The scene of his execution was poignant, the tragedy accented by the comedy of the bumbling murderers. I also enjoyed watching Haydn Gwynne play Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV. She was a survivor, hard and wily. In the end she outmaneuvered Richard by marrying her daughter to Richmond, future King Henry VII, first of the Tudor kings.

The attempt to make Shakespeare our contemporary was heavy-handed. In the scene when Buckingham and the Lord Mayor of London begged Richard to become king, Spacey appeared, in a weird self-reflexive move for the film actor, on the projection screen. While Buckingham, played by the black actor Chuk Iwuji, rallied the crowd in a tone resembling that of a black preacher, Spacey refused the crown with the transparent dishonesty that recalled present-day two-faced politicians. We got the message, and then wished that we had gotten the message from the play by ourselves.

Poem: "Emphasis"

2012-01-23T19:02:00.000-05:00

Poem written on January 13 and revised two days ago, after reading it at Cornelia Street Cafe.

Emphasis

The nightwhen the nuptial song inside the body had to be taken out by emphatic signlanguage

KimHyesoon, “Ghostmarriage”

Signlanguage had not meant to lay a hand on her

but songlooked only in the mirror when she sang.

Aftercrossing his heart seven times and still failing

to turn herface, he reached for her with his hands.

She lookedat him from eyes as placid as a cow’s

while hermouth squeezed the udder of her body.

The squirtsof sound tasted warm, and for a while

he did notknow to thank his hands or her singing.

He thankedher the only way he knew, shuddering

into thesoft places where his hands had pounded.

The songwrapping its tenderness around the sign,

when he spilled his seed he could almost speak.

Loved and Lost

2012-01-18T06:42:00.000-05:00

WL and I watched the French movie Domaine (2009) at the IFC last Monday. A story about a gay teenager (Isaïe Sultan) who loves and then leaves his glamorous aunt (Béatrice Dalle) when she descends into alcoholism. Trust the French to glamorize a woman by making her a Math whizz. There is insufficient substance in the plot to hold the attention, but the cinematography is beautiful. The script, written by the director Patric Chiha, is rather self-consciously literary, with stage-managed echoes and parallels.

"Steam: The Turkish Bath"

2012-01-14T17:25:00.001-05:00

Directed and co-written by Ferzan Ozpetek, this is a subtle and beautiful film about waking up from one's unhappiness. Francesco and Marta run a small design firm in Rome. Marta has been cheating on her husband. When Francesco's Aunt Anita dies in Istanbul, she left to him one of the few remaining hamam or Turkish baths in the city. Intending to sell the bath at first, Francesco is warmly welcomed into the family running the bath, attracted first to the daughter, then to the son. Seduced by Istanbul, he decides to stay and re-open the bath.

His affair with the son is discovered by his wife who breaks up with him. To help her understand his feelings, Francesco shows her the letters his aunt wrote to his mother about falling in love with Istanbul. After he was stabbed by a hired thug of a ruthless developer and died, Marta finds herself staying on to complete Francesco's project, the re-opening of the hamam. I like very much how the film shifts midway from Francesco's perspective to Marta's, the real successor to the indomitable Anita who never appears in the film but whose spirit presides over it.

Alessandro Gassman plays a very believable Francesco, whose happiness is so sadly short-lived. Francesca d'Aloja is a memorable Marta, very French in her self-possession. Mehmet Günsür plays the very attractive son, also called Mehmet. After watching the movie, GH and I talked about visiting Istanbul, so drawn we were to the muted, crumbling, sensual images in the film.

Poem: "A Town Called Road" (first draft complete)

2012-01-12T06:48:00.000-05:00

A Town Called Road

After thedeparture of the gods resembling desire

TadaChimako, “The Town of Sleep”

First Report

The townlooks open as the moon looks open.

It shines faintlyand faraway even on the inside.

A silver roadcuts through the heart, if a heart

can becalled a heart when it heaves like a ship.

In thenorth, the local woods are taciturn

unless theyare asked for a light,

and theywill unfold from their sleeves a light

and theirmouths will open.

It is easyto take a wrong turn.

The south,also called misleadingly the port side,

tilts towardsthe ships.

Second Report

The trade inhearts

is thrivinglike nowhere else. A full-grown heart

goes for a thousanddollars in broad daylight.

It isconsidered an act of deep friendship

to bring outfrom the kitchen and open

a freshheart. Feelings, however, must be put aside;

a gift is afavor to be returned.

On TV publicmen speak by turns

of thenourishing taste of a good heart.

Down by thedocks, on the far side,

I have seen ayoung woman’s face alight,

a moon-glowopenness,

when heartscome in on a tanker ship.

Third Report

A fullreport will leave by the next ship.

Fourth Report

Every threemonths, the town turns

invisiblefor a full day, unopened.

Like a bloodclot spreading through the heart,

a thick,black light

invades fromthe inside.

There are nomore outlines and outsiders,

only thewhisper of worship.

What is thechanging light

of theseasons, the trees’ attention-seeking turns,

compared tothe heart

when itcloses and opens.

Final Report

I shouldturn myself in for going over to the other side

but theships show a red light. To the quiet woods

I will bringthe moon lady and to her mouth open my heart.

Poem: "A Town Called Road: First and Second Reports"

2012-01-11T06:45:00.002-05:00

A Town Called Road

After thedeparture of the gods resembling desire

TadaChimako, “The Town of Sleep”

First Report

The townlooks open as the moon looks open.

It shines faintlyand faraway even on the inside.

A silver roadcuts through the heart, if a heart

can becalled a heart when it heaves like a ship.

In thenorth, the local woods are taciturn

unless theyare asked for a light,

and theywill unfold from their sleeves a light

and theirmouths will open.

It is easyto take a wrong turn.

The south,also called misleadingly the port side,

tilts towardsthe ships.

Second Report

The trade inhearts

is thrivinglike nowhere else. A full-grown heart

goes for a thousanddollars in broad daylight.

It isconsidered an act of deep friendship

to bring outfrom the kitchen and open

a freshheart. Feelings, however, must be put aside;

a gift is afavor to be returned.

On TV publicmen speak by turns

of thenourishing taste of a good heart.

Down by thedocks, on the far side,

I have seen ayoung woman’s face alight,

a moon-glowopenness,

when heartscome in on a tanker ship.

Poem: "A Town Called Road: First Report"

2012-01-10T06:50:00.003-05:00

A Town Called Road

After thedeparture of the gods resembling desire

TadaChimako, “The Town of Sleep”

First Report

The townlooks open as the moon looks open.

It shines faintlyand faraway even on the inside.

A silver roadcuts through the heart, if a heart

can becalled a heart when it heaves like a ship.

In thenorth, the local woods are taciturn

unless theyare asked for a light,

and theywill unfold from their sleeves a light

and theirmouths will open.

It is easyto take a wrong turn.

The south,also called misleadingly the port side,

tilts towardsthe ships.

Poem: "One More Dispatch from a Distant Land"

2012-01-09T18:11:00.000-05:00

One More Dispatch from a Distant Land

When I wasfifteen, becoming a woman frightened me. When I was eighteen, being a womanstruck me as loathsome. Now, how old am I? I have become too much of a woman. Ican no longer return to being human; that age is gone forever. My head is small,my neck long, and my hair terribly heavy.

TadaChimako, “From a Woman of a Distant Land”

It was themost exquisite form of torture yet invented. The schools trained us to berigorous scientists, subtle logicians, discriminating literary critics,scrupulous theologians. We were given every form of encouragement. Then we wereovertaken by our bodies. We bled heavily without a wound. We joined with men,hoping to be shattered, but only mild pleasure, if not disgust, happened. They,on the other hand, cried like babies or dogs and wanted the same for us. So we faked it and after a while couldnot tell the body’s rumor from the world’s reality.

I am one ofthe luckier ones. I stopped dating and threw myself into teaching. I have foundsome measure of satisfaction in seeing my charges flourish. This one will be anearthbound astronaut strapped to her seat of her skirt. This one will writepoems about “women’s issues,” which will be anthologized in volumes of women’swriting. This one, the most intelligent of her class, will devote herself toraising her kids. She and I will meet occasionally for coffee and debatepassionately the merits of marriage. She will succeed in making me doubt myluck.

Jorge Luis Borges's "Labyrinths"

2012-01-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

There are marvels in Borges's mazes, but there are no monsters, or more precisely, the monster is the maze. The thin line between fiction and fact, the multiplying paths of choice, the confusion of chance and fate, the interdependence of memory and forgetfulness, the regressions of infinity: these are the speculative themes embodied in his short stories, which are ostensibly about secret cabals, German spies, an endless library, ancient sacrifice, murder mystery, theological controversies, and the failure of a medieval Muslim intellectual to understand the Greek categories of comedy and tragedy. Borges takes a popular genre, such as crime thriller or science fiction, and, by exploring and subverting its conventions, exposes our assumptions about reality. My favorite stories in this collection are "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Library of Babel," "Funes the Memorious" and "Death and the Compass." In these the starting premise is developed to the fullest extent; the mazes are not only complex but shapely.

A few of the stories, such as "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "Three Versions of Judas," read like essays. I find them unsatisfying as stories, but wonderfully teasing otherwise. This collection does give a selection of Borges's essays written as essays. The two essays that shed the greatest light on his stories are "Avatars of the Tortoise," which is about Zeno's paradoxes, and "A New Refutation of Time" about his idealistic outlook. The essay "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal," which traces the evolution of the image of "a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere," reads like one of his stories.

In the essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," he argues that the Argentine writer should not limit himself to local or national subjects. Instead, the whole world lies at his feet. "For that reason I repeat that we should not be alarmed and that we should feel that our patrimony is the universe; we should essay all themes, and we cannot limit ourselves to purely Argentine subjects in order to be Argentine; for either being Argentine is an inescapable act of fate--and in that case we shall be so in all events--or being Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask." The sentiment here resonates with me. A writer "creates" his own predecessors, as his essay on Kafka argues, and the writings finally create a symbol of a man, like the infinitely sensitive Paul Valéry or the liberating George Bernard Shaw, who wrote in a letter, quoted admiringly by Borges, "I understand everything and everyone and I am nothing and no one."

Labyrinths: Buenos Aires

2012-01-06T06:15:00.000-05:00

Laid out in a grid, the streets of San Telmo should have been easy to navigate, but the perfectly symmetrical arrangement meant all intersections looked roughly the same. All corners were right-angled. Inside the maze, it was hard to remember what direction was North or West. The streets were named after countries in the Americas, and so we wandered all over the map, in Peru, Bolivia and Estados Unidos. In which state was the old-styled parilla we liked at which we had dinner one night? What was its name? On our last afternoon in Buenos Aires we stumbled on La Poesia Cafe.

*

Friday afternoon milonga at the Confiteria Ideal. The mazy footwork of tango crossed the palatial dance hall. After a set of songs, the dancing couples separated and returned to their own tables. The women sat along one wall like a gallery of yellowing portrait photographs. The men hardly touched their beer. A short elderly woman threaded her way through the small tables to ask me to dance. I shook my head and smiled hard so that she would not be offended by the rejection. She slunk back to her seat. I was terribly sorry to let her down. I could not look at her again.

*

We searched for the resting place of Eva Peron at La Recoleta. She was buried in the Duarte family vault.

*

Alejandro Xul Solar (Oscar Agustin Alejandro Schulz Solari, 1887-1963) is one of the most singular representatives of the vanguard in Latin America. In 1912 he went to Europe where he stayed until 1924, living in Italy and in Germany and making frequent trips to London and Paris.

At his return he participated actively in the esthetic renovation proposed by the editorial group of the Martin Fierro journal (1924-1927).

Fried of Jorge Luis Borges, he illustrated several of his books and collaborated in various of his editorial enterprises such as the Revista Multicolor de los Sábados y Destiempo.

With a vast culture, his interests took him to the study of Astrology, Kabbalah, I Ching Philosophy, religions and beliefs of the Ancient East, of India, and the Pre-Columbian world, besides Theosophy, Anthroposophy, among many other branches of knowledge.

He remained busy as well with the creation of two artificial languages, the "neocriolle" and the "panlengua", and the "pan-chess"' he proposed a modification of the musical notation and the piano keyboard, and conceived the idea of a puppet theatre for grown ups, among many other things.

*

So many Caucasian-looking porteños. Blond hair, skin. Where are the Indians?

Back in New York City, I made the observation to a school colleague who asked about my vacation. My colleague, who teaches history, explained that the European immigrants killed the Indians off to clear the pampas for cattle-rearing. Charles Darwin wrote about a Spanish governor putting out the eyes of an Indian with his thumbs.

*

The Rochester Concept Hotel, where we stayed, did not have a gym. To get to the gym, you have to go around the block to the Rochester Classic Hotel. To change hotel rooms, you have to pay US$30.00 more for each night. The leg of our bed flew out one night. We changed hotels. The new room was bigger, it has a bath, but we lost our private balcony. Gym, bath and balcony, which of these would you refuse to give up?

A hotel is a labyrinth with a room key.

*

We were used to seeing old Chinese women rummage the trash for recyclable bottles and cans on the streets of New York City. In Buenos Aires boys did the same, looking for paper, sitting on the sidewalks amidst the spilling garbage.

Downtown Buenos Aires celebrated New Year's Eve by throwing confetti, made from shredded office documents, down the streets. A holiday from work created work for others. Somebody had to pick the bits of paper up. Send in the boys, now grown into ashy men hanging off the municipal dump trucks.

*

In the painting Manifestación by Antonio Berni, the demonstrators pushing towards you look in every direction. You are relieved to find a pair of eyes looking at you, as if to say this is the way out.

*

They walked through the train cars and left whatever they were selling on the thighs of the seated commuters: lottery ticket, pocket guide book, page of stickers. Then they re-treaded their steps and retrieved their wares. It was a kind of contact, closer than a pious plea or a strumming guitar.

Our longest train journey was our trip to Tigre, a town built on the Paraná Delta. The way to explore the web of rivers and streams is by boat. But the vintage mahogany commuter launches will not ferry you up and down every waterway; they ply a route. They have found a gold thread and they hold to it. They have rendered the labyrinth navigable.

"Tigre" means jaguars, which used to roam the area. Perhaps they still do.

2011 Highlights

2012-01-01T18:31:00.000-05:00

I have always thought of this blog as my electronic memory, but I don't often call up earlier posts, unless I am searching for something specific. Coming back today from Buenos Aires, where the new, and not a review, was uppermost on the mind, I do not want to let the first day of this new year go by without summarizing 2011, the first year of the second decade of the old-new century. So I trawled the blog-posts of this past year, to remind myself of last year's highlights.

The most momentous event in my personal life was moving into a new apartment with GH at the end of February. I re-discovered how little patience I have for home decoration. Fortunately, GH had all the talent and passion necessary for doing up the UWS apartment on 86th Street. We threw two parties and everyone was full of praise for his taste. He knew when to leave well alone. On living together, we complement each other when we are not fighting. I am very thin-skinned. At school, I received a very appreciative evaluation as a "senior" faculty, having taught for fifteen years altogether in Singapore and New York. The school's sponsorship of my green card has passed the Department of Labor and now waits for the approval of the State Department.

Re-reading Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats during the summer to prepare for my new Romantic Poetry elective, I found myself transferring my preference for Keats to Wordsworth. I was somewhat repelled by the adolescent gorgeousness of Keats's language. I now like Wordsworth's plainness better. He also has more to say about human and familial relationships. Another poet with whom I spent much time was Anna Wickham. She is not a first-rate poet, but her feelings are indomitable and true. She is an original, like Stevie Smith, though they strike very different tones. In the pages of PN Review, I found Raymond Queneau's wonderful poems about Paris. In prose, I continued to read and admire John Updike. I read Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and then In the Beauty of the Lilies. He is tremendously life-affirming. The other prose discovery was Simone de Beauvoir's enlightening The Second Sex.

The de Kooning retrospective at MoMA was tremendously powerful. It bore out Peter Schjeldahl's assessment of him as the greatest American painter. I also enjoyed very much the Cone sister's collection of modern art at the Jewish Museum, and the complementary show of the Steins' collections at the San Francisco MoMA. Matisse is still my favorite Master.

In music, the All-Sibelius program by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, was memorable. Nikolaj Znaider played the Violin Concerto in D minor beautifully. Most thrilling, however, was the Miro Quartet's performance of Beethoven's late String Quartet in A minor. I lost my feelings for Eliot's "The Four Quartets" but made an incomparable gain. Listening to the late string quartets while walking to school in November and December remains enfolded in my memory. I did not care for the adaptation of Bach in the White Light concert Passio-Compassio, but the whirling dervishes were special. After the excitement of Strauss's Rosenkavalier last summer, I swore I would watch more Strauss. I did not do so in 2011. I must this year.

I watched a lot of bad films this year. Judging the Lambda Awards this year, I read Paolo Pier Pasolini's poetry. It led me to his challenging films: political, allegorical, provocative. I enjoyed Joseph Marston's Maria Full of Grace about drug mules, and Azazel Jacobs' Terri about an overweight boy. Rustin Bayard was rescued from relative obscurity by the documentary Brother Outsider, shown at the People of Color Conference in November. Katori Hall's play "The Mountaintop" focused on the face of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., but Angela Bassett, as the chambermaid and angel, stole the show from Samuel L. Jackson. The best theater I watched this year was courtesy of SW: The Classic Stage Company's production of Anton Chekov's Three Sisters. Has mildew been sadder?

Last year was not outstanding for travel, partly because of the cost of renting and furnishing a much bigger apartment. During the summer, we went to SF, and had a wonderful few days driving around Napa Valley. VM and JF drove us to Storm King on a beautiful sunny fall day. The weekend trips to Woodstock and Kingston were always a welcomed change of air. This last week was spent in Buenos Aires, which I will say more about soon.

I did go back to Singapore this year, after a two-year absence. It was good to catch up with family and friends, harder now with my sister and her family since they are living in New Delhi. I was very happy to read at Books Actually from my new book of poems Seven Studies for a Self Portrait, published in January 2011, and launched in two book parties in the homes of HS and VM. Last year I read at bigger venues out-of-town than in previous years, at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum, at the Asian American Studies Conference in New Orleans, and at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston. The readings saw a deepening association with Asian American poetry, a connection strengthened by reading Tim Yu's book of criticism Race and the Avant-Garde. My poetry was anthologized in Carcanet Press's New Poetries V. I did not achieve my goal of publication in a major American journal. Perhaps this year.

Discovering Raymond Queneau

2011-12-22T08:59:00.002-05:00

PN Review 202 is filled with interesting translations, of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen by Marilyn Hacker, Hester Knibbe by Jacquelyn Pope, Pier Paolo Pasolini by N.S. Thompson. I like most the poetry of Raymond Queneau, translated by Rachel Galvin. The fourteen short lyrics from his book Hitting the Streets describe his walks about Paris with a keen eye and a sharp ear, and an imagination that is lively and sympathetic. "The Concierges" observes an "old verdigrisy grey-beard/ sobbing in his doorway." "Rue Paul Verlaine," with its amulet of a street name, begins with a vision of a street that the street hardly understands:

Sometimes I have a strange, penetrating vision
Of a street made of off-white and maternal tin
on either side the walkway beats like a wing
while the road bears all the weight of its being

The ghosts of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, besides that of Verlaine, haunt these poems as well as these streets. "Rue Paul Verlaine" is written in the sonnet form. "Elsewhere" is in flowing free verse that imitates casual wandering, and discovers in the middle of the stroll, in the middle of the poem, an unexpected view of a sea port, before going on its way.

The sense of loss, however, is not far away from the sense of discovery or rediscovery. In "The Flies," the speaker almost whimsically bemoans that "The flies of today/ are no longer the flies of yore." In his childhood, the flies of yore killed themselves joyfully, by gluing themselves to flypaper, by shutting themselves in bottles, "by the hundreds, maybe the thousands." In contrast, the flies of today "watch their step."

These are transitory, delicate, sympathetic poems. I was surprised to learn from Galvin's introductory note that Queneau founded Oulipo in 1960.

"Enlightenment" Music

2011-12-21T22:31:00.000-05:00

This was a while ago: GH and I heard the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on December 11 Sunday, at Alice Tully. The program was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Romantic Sinfonia in C major for Strings and Continuo (1773); Heinrich von Biber's Mystery Sonata No. 10 in G minor for Violin and Continuo, "The Crucifixion" (c. 1674); Georg Philipp Telemann's unusual Concerto in D major for Four Violins (c.1720) and his Suite in G major for Strings and Continuo, "Don Quixote" (c. 1726-30), very picturesque; Antonio Vivaldi's Concerto in G major for Cello, Strings, and Continuo (after 1720) and Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto in E major for Violin, Strings, and Continuo (before 1730), played the least satisfying of all the pieces in the program.

I particularly enjoyed the playing of Amy Lee, who seemed to secure a rich tone from her violin consistently. Ida Kavafian, who played in most of the pieces, took a mercurial delight in fiendish technique. The young Danish cellist Andreas Brantelid was spotlighted in the Vivaldi concerto, and came off very well. His playing had a refreshing matter-of-factness about it. He carried his boyish good looks with similar nonchalance.

If Baroque, a term borrowed from art history, means bizarre, mannered or excessive, the concert program opined, then it is a term better applied to the period of Monteverdi (c. 1600s) extending as late as Biber (1670s). "The era of Bach, Vivaldi and Telemann," it suggested, "might better be called Enlightenment...." Alas, the popular term "Baroque" has stuck for this period, and so will continue to confuse new listeners.

Nancy Milford's Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

2011-12-20T11:11:00.000-05:00

Savage Beauty does not dispel the impression that Edna St. Vincent Millay was a major life but a minor poet. This well-written biography quotes many poems in full, including "Renascence," which early won Millay warm admiration from poets and editors, and financial support for an education at Vassar. The biography occasionally grades the poems it quotes, saying of one "extraordinarily lovely" and of another "masterful." It is, however, more interested in identifying the addressee of the poems, and other details from Millay's life. A discussion of the style of "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" begins insightfully but ends too quickly by linking the harp with a woman's head to the lap loom on which Clara Millay, Vincent's mother, wove hair for a living. Interesting identification, but it is surely not the last word on the poem.

Matters are not helped when emphasis is placed on the astonishing attraction of Millay's low reading voice. In returning to this over and over, Nancy Milford is but tracing the strong reactions of Millay's listeners. But this obsession with her voice has the unfortunate effect of marking Millay as a performer. Not only did she reach thousands through her reading tours, she also read on radio, reaching many other thousands. Her celebrity played a part, surely, in her decision to write propagandistic poetry against Fascism and American isolationism in the run-up to War World II. She was sincere in her political beliefs, but sincerity does not by itself create poetry. In a letter from that period, she talked about the need of a lyric poet to engage the world if she is not to say the same things again and again. Her political engagement, to my mind, is insufficiently self-doubtful. Her longtime friend and a poet Arthur Ficke expressed his reservations about her war effort "The Murder of Lidice" in a way that resonates for me:

I cannot, I will not, believe that this war is an ultimate conflict between right and wrong: and though I do not doubt for a moment that we are less horrible than the philosophy and practice of Hitler, still I think we are very horrible: and I will not, I must not, accept or express the hysterical patriotic war-moods of these awful days.

Millay's poetic sympathies lie with the High and Late Victorians. Her influences, as she describes them, are Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and Housman. She seems to have little to say about Eliot, Pound and Auden, and nothing to say about her female contemporaries like Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein and H.D.. Milford refers to a satire in verse she wrote against T.S. Eliot that targeted "The Waste Land," but does not describe its contents, let alone delineate its poetics. Late in her career, Millay became the darling of the people and of collectors who lapped up the expensive special editions of her books. She seemed divorced from the poetry debates that raged around her, in Europe as well as her native America, and so the avant-garde, which she appeared to embody in the 1920s in the form of the New Woman, left her behind.

Still, belonging to no party or school, she found the freedom, and spared the time from her work, to recommend poets whom she believed in for the Guggenheim. What she said about the sanctity of a writer's work, apart from whatever politics he or she chooses to profess, is still generous and relevant:

Of the six writers I am recommending this year, three are definitely revolutionists, one is definitely a classicist, one is probably mad and the other is doubtless trying to recover from shell-shock. What are you doing to do about them? ... I have come loudly out into the open, and am running the risk of making an utter fool of myself. I think the Guggenheim Foundation cannot properly be administered on any other terms; we may not foster the conservative at the expense of the experimental; the solid at the expense of the slippery; we must take chances; we must incur danger. Otherwise we shall eventually become an organization which gives prizes for acclaimed accomplishment, not fellowships for obscure talent, tangible promise, probable development, and possible achievement.

Was she thinking of her own history when she wrote the last sentence? She emerged from the abysmal poverty of a small-town Maine childhood, after her mother sent her good-for-nothing father packing and undertook to bring up the three daughters, Vincent, Norma and Katherine, by herself. Clara Buzzell Millay took up the job of a home-nurse and had to be away from her family most of the time. Besides suffering the absence of a beloved mother, Vincent at a young age was responsible for the two younger sisters. Milford is very good at conveying the power of this family romance for all the women involved, and scrupulous in detecting the darker undertones of abandonment, jealousy and anger.

Also detailed and interesting is her depiction of Millay's unusual marriage with Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch American importer. He believed completely in her poetic gift and strove to provide an environment for its flourishing. Unwilling to play the part of the possessive husband, he gave Vincent the freedom to pursue her romantic obsessions, in particular, her love affair with the younger George Dillon, the future editor of Poetry magazine. It is true, however, that the balance of power in the marriage shifted when Millay's writing began to bring home the bacon. Boissevain became the manager of the household at Steepletop, the estate they bought, releasing his wife to focus entirely on writing. I am reminded here to Leonard Woolf, who spared Virginia of the many distractions against writing too. Leonard, however, had Hogarth Press. Eugen had nothing, but the protection of Vincent, whom he guarded with perhaps overbearing vigilance. Like many partnered writers, Millay could dedicate herself to writing because she could bank on others' dedication to her.

"The Tillman Story"

2011-12-19T09:58:00.001-05:00

I found this documentary film while flicking through Netflix. The film is directed by Amir Bar-Lev and narrated by Josh Brolin. The story, when it broke in 2007, passed me by completely. One more bullet into the corpse of belief in the integrity of governments. Pat Tillman, an American football player, enlisted in the army after the September 11 attacks. When he was killed in Afghanistan, the military lied to his family that he died from a firefight with the Taliban. Apparently they did not want to make an unpopular war even more unpopular by reporting the death by friendly fire of an All-American athletic icon.

The family, in particular, the mother Mary 'Dannie' Tillman, pursued the truth of what had happened, and found the cover-up extending all the way up into the Bush White House. It was infuriating to watch in the film Donald Rumsfeld and military top brass claim forgetfulness regarding a confidential memo sent to them about the friendly fire. Led by Democrats, the Congressional Oversight Committee questioning them did not do its job. In his turn President Obama promoted the General who covered up the truth.

After watching the film, GH raged against the family for being stupid enough to enlist, and then to complain when the military deceived them. They should have known better than to support the war and believe their government. I was surprised that he was more upset by the family than by the government. When I told him so, he said that he assumes the government will fuck you over.

Poem: "Do You Think I'd Let You Go?

2011-12-15T05:41:00.002-05:00

Do You Think I’d Let You Go?

In thewinter he had the reddest cheeks

of theLincoln College crowd who included me and you.

He was not popularlike Darren, looked puny beside Anthony,

but in thewinter he had the reddest cheeks.

He walkedout on you and the kids, you wrote, in the New Year.

The olderboy is difficult, the younger came down with swine flu

in thewinter. He had the reddest cheeks

of theLincoln College crowd who included me and you.

for Sara

Poem: "I Do, I Do"

2011-12-13T06:50:00.000-05:00

I Do, I Do

In me (theworm) clearly

is norighteousness, but this—

persistence

H.D.,“The Walls Do Not Fall”

I’m eatingmy way through the books

of deadwomen poets—

AemiliaLanyer’s garden

where Eve isblameless

the robin-eye

in ElizabethBishop

PhillisWheatley’s bird-

of-paradise

the swartswan

song byMarianne Moore

AnnaWickham’s strangled cry

the tunes ofLi Qingzhao

Annie Finch,not the American anthologist,

the Countessof Winchilsea

the living

are eatentoo

ElisabethBletsoe’s Sherborne Woodcock,

PiedWagtail, Starling

MollyPeacock

Rita Dove

And one bornin Ghana

whose name is

a birdcall

Ata AmaAidoo

Poem: "Gingko Leaves"

2011-12-12T06:45:00.002-05:00

Gingko Leaves

I go to thethings I love

with nothought of duty or pity

H.D.,“The Flowering of the Rod”

When I putdown my book and step out of the dream

into the pokykitchen, the counter stained with sauce,

to chopcelery, bell peppers, mushrooms into cubes

and stirthem into sliced chicken for Monday’s dinner,

I am notgoing to love, my love, I am going to duty.

When yourage against the computer for being slow

or not doingtoday what it did so quietly yesterday

or eating upyour files or not saying what is wrong,

and I cometo you to put my hands on your shoulders,

I am notgoing to love, my love, I am going to pity.

I go to ariver, its waters secretly continuous, out of love,

to wetgingko leaves that renders the earth their ground,

to a glassof wine, loud dance music and men in trance.

These thingsI go to with no thought of duty or pity,

as when youturn in bed and wave me on with a kiss.

Thomas Bradshaw's play "Burning"

2011-12-11T13:41:00.001-05:00

In a Slate interview about the New Group production of his play Burnings at Theater Row, directed by Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw explains that his characters are so different from mainstream theater's because they say what is on their mind and they do what they want, without hypocrisy or self-deception. "Where my work departs from traditional drama," he says, "is the fact that my characters pretty much have no self-awareness and are almost acting on pure id. There is never any subtext in my plays." It is a bold artistic aim that is mostly but unevenly achieved in Burnings.

Two partnered white men adopt a 14-year-old white boy for help around the house and for their sexual satisfaction. A successful black painter commits adultery against his white wife by visiting a black prostitute. A white brother-and-sister pair swear to uphold their deceased parents' neo-Nazist beliefs. All of them say what they want, and pretty much do what they want in the next scene. But confusing the stated artistic goal is a half-hearted, unconvincing attempt to humanize a few of the characters, to give them egos and superegos, in addition to their ids. And so the neo-Nazi brother Michael (Drew Hildebrand) is shown to look after his disabled sister Katrin (Reyna de Courcy) with exemplary brotherly care, going so far as to masturbate her when she asks for sexual release while he is bathing her. The scene is extraordinarily tender and moving but, despite its incestuous overtones, is not the work of pure id.

Neither is the relationship between Chris the 14-year-old (Evan Johnson) and his playwriting boyfriend Donald (Adam Trese). Donald gives up the production of his play by taking Chris away from the household of the aging theater gods Jack (Andrew Garman) and Simon (Danny Mastrogiorgio). Chris, who reads Marquis de Sade on following one's natural desires, stays instead with Donald when the latter dies of AIDs. Also unlike id-ish behavior is the understanding forged between the grown-up Chris (Hunter Foster) and the black adolescent Franklin (a terrific Vladimir Versailles) who bond over the fact that both their mothers died of a drug overdose.

By injecting a shot of psychological realism into some of his characters, but not others, Bradshaw confuses his avowed method and goal, and raises questions about his objectivity. By objectivity, I mean a writer's ability to view every part of his work with equal distance, like in Pinter. Instead of describing formally the workings of id, the play chooses sides in bad faith. All playwrights choose sides, but what makes it vexing in this case is Bradshaw's disingenuous claim to present action without judgment. Any arrangement of action must involve judgment, if only to decide on priority. All texts involve subtexts. In claiming that "there is never any subtext in my plays," Bradshaw is being insufficiently postmodernist.

One such subtext comes at the very end of the 2-hour-45-minute play. After Peter the successful black painter (Stephen Tyrone Williams) had sex with a Sudanese prostitute Gretchen (Barrett Doss), he had an epiphany that he was still deeply in love with his dead cousin Lucy, whom he glimpsed at the age of 9 having sex with her boyfriend. After he was killed by the skinheads, his wife Josephine (Larisa Polonsky) mixes his ashes with Lucy's ashes so that they can be together in death, if not in life. Apart from the fact that it is hard to imagine a betrayed wife doing that (and the forgiveness that Josephine dispenses to everyone automatically does not help matters), it is also striking that no one thinks to ask whether Lucy would want her ashes mixed with Peter's. She may be his one true love, but there is no clear indication in the play that he is hers. The fantasy here is clearly masculinist. The absent dead, as happens often in a literary work, becomes the text's unconscious.

Poem: "Cold Blue Eyes"

2011-12-11T11:11:00.001-05:00

Cold Blue Eyes

My Brother,if we are not careful, we would burn out our brawn and brains trying to provewhat you describe as “our worth” and we won’t get a flicker of recognition fromthose cold blue eyes.

AmaAta Aidoo, “A Love Letter”

Trying to provemy worth, I am burning out my brawn and brains.

Burning toprove my brawn, I am trying out my brains and worth.

To prove mybrains, I am trying out burning my worth and brawn.

To prove mytrying, I am burning out my worth, brawn and brains.

To Brains,prove I am trying my brawn and burning out my worth.

To Brawn andWorth, prove I am trying out my, my, burning brains.

My brainsand my brawn trying to prove I am burning to worth?

I amburning, my worth, brains and brawn prove to my trying out.

Trying andburning brains, out to prove my worth, I am my brawn.

Out, burningbrawn, trying to prove my worth, I am my brains and.

My tryingworth, burning out to prove my brains and brawn, I am.

Trying toprove my worth, my brawn and brains, I am burning out.

Burning outmy worth, brawn and brains, I am trying to prove my…

Poem: "I Understand and I Wish to Continue"

2011-12-10T11:55:00.001-05:00

Mark Burnhope suggested I write a poem taking off from the title, after he visited this blog and read the warning page. Thanks, Mark!

I Understand and I Wish to Continue

Before hecomes home, tired and faintly greasy

from officedisappointments and crowded train,

I flick openmy laptop to get off the head of steam

accumulatedfrom an hour of workout at the gym.

The two men,one darkhaired and toned, a regular,

the otherfaircolored and fresh from his “first time,”

the website-speakfor a solo jerkoff shoot, greet

each other’sbody with no surprise but with speed

suggestingdesire. They know the routine, as do I,

first one,then the other, sucking the other’s dick,

the tongue,through circles that it draws, darting,

thethrilling amble like an elephant’s into the ring.

The shouts mountin well-timed urgency, released

like flyinghandle bars and caught again on return.

The headfalls backwards before the camera locks

on his dickwhen he can’t help what his body does.

Poem: "Abstract Shapes"

2011-12-09T06:31:00.001-05:00

Abstract Shapes

those abstract shapes of who I was

which shefound so much easier to love

JuliaAlvarez, “Folding My Clothes”

The armyuniform that I hated

my mother spaevery Saturday,

and rested ona bamboo pole

to dry withher flesh-colored bra.

Thesupporter of my oppressor

is myoppressor too. My mother

is anoppressor who does things

for me, likeyour mother for you.

Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex"

2011-12-08T20:31:00.001-05:00

Finally finished reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex last Monday. "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman," so translate Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier that resounding challenge. So many terrific things in de Beauvoir's analysis of how one becomes woman. Nietzsche is transmuted into the existentialist project of self-transcendence. Part One rejects the idea of female destiny, as promoted by biological, psychoanalytical or historical materialist views. Part Two recounts the history of women from the hunters-gatherers to the twentieth century, highlighting the theme of patriarchy and its need for woman to be the Other. Part Three tackles the sexist myths about women, elaborated by Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel and Breton, before looking at how Stendhal romances real women. All that in Volume I.

In Volume II Parts One and Two, de Beauvoir describes the lived experience of contemporary Western woman, from her childhood, through sexual initiation and marriage, to old age. The description cites psychiatric studies, literature, gossip and history, and integrates these citations in the heat of imagination. Every man should read at least the three central chapters: "The Married Woman," "The Mother" and "Social Life" to try to grasp the world from women's eyes. de Beauvoir contends that if women can be said to own a Character, that Character is entirely shaped by her historical subordination to men. Part Three examines three justifications that woman has employed to deny her powerlessness. She has been the Narcissist, the Woman in Love and the Mystic. In Part Four, the last part of the volume and book, de Beauvoir reflects on the growing economic independence of women in the twentieth century. She finds that encouraging but insufficient for true independence. The old myths, the old models for womanhood, and the old system have tenacious roots, and will not be removed easily. Contemporary women find themselves trying to be both independent (as defined by herself) and feminine (as defined by men). de Beauvoir's analysis still challenges, I think, women who think that they can be both, and men who think that they can have everything.

Some favorite passages:

Of D. H. Lawrence's belief in monogamous marriage: "There is only a quest for variety if one is interested in the uniqueness of beings: but phallic marriage is founded on generality."

Of Stendhal's love of women: "...while he is walking around Rome, a woman emerges at every turn of the page, by the regrets, desires, sadnesses, and joys women awakened in him, he came to know the nature of his own heart..."

Of the lack of a penis: "It is sure that the absence of a penis will play an important role in the little girl's destiny, even if she does not really envy those who possess one. The great privilege that the boy gets from it is that as he is bestowed with an organ that can be seen and held, he can at least partially alienate himself in it. He projects the mystery of his body and its dangers outside himself, which permits him to keep them at a distance: of course, he feels endangered through his penis, he fears castration, but this fear is easier to dominate than the pervasive overall fear the girl feels concerning her "insides," a fear that will often be perpetuated throughout her whole life as a woman. She has a deep concern about everything happening inside her, from the start, she is far more opaque to herself and more profoundly inhabited by the worrying mystery of life than the male. Because he recognizes himself in an alter ego, the little boy can boldly assume his subjectivity, the very object in which he alienates himself becomes a symbol of autonomy, transcendence, and power: he measures the size of his penis; he compares his urinary stream with that of his friends; later, erection and ejaculation will be sources of satisfaction and challenge. But a little girl cannot incarnate herself in any part of her own body....

Of the need for action: "Violence is the authentic test of every person's attachment to himself, his passions, and his own will; to radically reject it is to reject all objective truth, it is to isolate one's self in an abstract subjectivity; an anger or a revolt that does not exert itself in muscles remains imaginary."

Of the attitude of straights to gays: "The homosexual man inspires hostility from male and female heterosexuals as they both demand that man be a dominating subject; by contrast, both sexes spontaneously view lesbians with indulgence."

Of marriage: "But the principle of marriage is obscene because it transforms an exchange that should be founded on a spontaneous impulse into rights and duties; it gives bodies an instrumental, thus degrading, side by dooming them to grasp themselves in their generality; the husband is often frozen by the idea that he is accomplishing a duty, and the wife is ashamed to feel delivered to someone who exercises a right over her." and "Eroticism is a movement toward the Other, and this is its essential character; but within the couple, spouses become, for each other, the Same; no exchange is possible between them anymore, no giving, no conquest. If they remain lovers, it is often in embarrassment: they fee; the sexual act is no longer an intersubjective experience where each one goes beyond himself, but rather a kind of mutual masturbation."

Of the link between marriage and colonialism: "Marriage incites man to a capricious imperialism: the temptation to dominate is the most universal and the most irresistible there is; to turn over a child to his mother or to turn over a wife to her husband is to cultivate tyranny in the world; it is often not enough for the husband to be supported and admired, to give counsel and guidance; he gives orders, he plays the sovereign; all the resentments accumulated in his childhood, throughout his life, accumulated daily among other men whose existence vexes and wounds him, he unloads at home by unleashing his authority over his wife..."

Of the lack of genius: "How could women even have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius--or just a work--was refused them? Old Europe formerly heaped its contempt on barbarian Americans for possessing neither artists nor writers. "Let us live before asking us to justify our existence," Jefferson wrote, in essence. Blacks give the same answers to racists who reproach them for not having produced a Whitman or Melville. Neither can the French proletariat invoke a name like Racine or Mallarme. The free woman is just being born; when she conquers herself, she will perhaps justify Rimbaud's prophecy: "Poets will be. When woman's infinite servitude is broken, when she lives for herself and by herself, man--abominable until now--giving her her freedom, she too will be a poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her worlds of ideas differ from ours? She will find strange, unfathomable, repugnant, delicious things, we will take them, we will understand them."

Harmonic Intervals

2011-12-06T22:29:00.001-05:00

TLS November 25 2011

from Julian Bell's review of "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan" show at the National Gallery:

Perhaps variety is what this exhibition, this collection of the outstanding remains of a one-man civilization, is best fitted to offer. If you seek the coherence to all these phenomena you might need to turn to the scientific vision behind them, as Martin Kemp did in his illuminating book Leonardo da Vinci: The marvellous works of nature and man (1981). There you are led to consider the concept of the movements of the mind as a special case of a comprehensive investigation into movement. Whether through cogs and pulleys or through their fleshly equivalents (a parallel sometimes made explicit in the show's anatomical drawings), whether through patterns of plant growth and rock formation or through the workings of water and light, all that appears before our eyes must be governed by movement, a universal process organized around harmonic intervals.

Brother Outsider

2011-12-04T16:27:00.001-05:00

I was in Philadelphia, from Wednesday to Saturday, attending my second People of Color Conference. My first experience of the conference took place in Denver, and I wrote about my impressions of that conference on this blog. Learning from that experience, I decided to be very selective about the talks and workshops I would attend, and so had a much more pleasant time than before. It was also fun to be with KH and A.

The highlight of the conference, for me, was the screening of the documentary feature film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, directed by Nancy D. Kates and Bennett Singer. A Communist briefly in his youth, a lifelong pacifist, and an openly gay man, Rustin has been erased from traditional accounts of the civil rights movement in the States. He mentored, however, the younger Martin Luther King, Jr. and organized the 1963 March on Washington. After the screening, during the Q&A, a black female teacher from Alabama swore that she would fight to right the records when she returns to her state. A black male teacher, who teaches History, affirmed that his own research had led him to the same conclusion as the film's, that Rustin was a crucial figure in the struggle for civil rights. I was happy to hear the two teachers speak in support of the film and the figure.

The other film screening was also interesting. Why Us? Left Behind and Dying, another documentary feature film, followed a small group of inner-city African American high school students from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who explored why HIV infection rates are disproportionately high in black communities. Guided by documentary-maker Claudia Pryor Malis, the students interviewed research scientists and public health experts from both the USA and Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS activists and people in their own neighborhoods. Many causes were examined, including genetic, gender, social and psychological factors. The film was a frank and thoughtful look at a tough topic.

My interest in the conference turned out to be very much related to LGBT matters. I attended the workshop given by Rye Country Day School on the introduction of a Gay-Straight Alliance student club in the Middle School. The club caters to seventh and eighth graders. The students interviewed for the short video were mostly articulate about why it is important to support friends who may be LGBT. After the workshop, I was persuaded that more diversity work should take place in the Middle School at my school. Those years are crucial for the formation of identity and perceptions of others. The students grow more closed, more cynical, more brittle, when they go into the Upper School.

Before attending the workshop on the African American Iconic Images Collection, I had not realized that Philadelphia was a city of murals. Originating from the Anti-Graffiti Network in the 80s, the non-profit group has since been incorporated into the city government as the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Their murals encompass more than African American subjects and more than traditional mural techniques. The program evolves with changes in the city's neighborhoods. It is now looking to curate a collection of Latino images as well. It is also open to new artistic methods, such as the use of LED lights.

I took an afternoon off to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The twenty-five-minute trek from Marriott Downtown was worth it. The Rodin Museum, passed on the way, was unfortunately closed, but there was plenty to see at the PMA. It had a large collection of Impressionist art. I was particularly drawn to the landscapes of Camille Pissaro, which showed a great sensitivity to movement in the picture plane. In one painting, a road disappeared into a vanishing point while a train sped towards the viewer. The painting of a walled garden was divided by strong horizontals.

I was also very pleased to see Marcel Duchamp's early paintings (like his wonderful The Chess Game) and later readymades, including the bicycle wheel and the fountain. His cubist Nude Descending a Staircase (Number 2) was also on show. The Mexican Modernists had their own gallery here. David Alfaro Siqueiros's War and The Giants were sculptural images. I cannot remember the name of the artist of my favorite image of the afternoon. A man was shown pulling his shirt over his head. The bent muscular torso was rendered enigmatic by the hidden head.

I ended my walkabout in the Museum's reconstruction of an Indian temple. It was a dark and silent space, in which to rest one's feet and recover one's breath. A temple to art now, it was a refuge from the city's unquiet life. I was sitting out, for a while. Bayard Rustin drew inspiration from Gandhi's belief in non-violence, and put his body on the line for causes that he fought for. That was a form of self-transcendence that is beyond me.

The next afternoon, I walked around the historic district in the direction of Penn's Landing at the waterfront. In Washington Square I saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which commemorates the war dead in the American Revolution. The entire square used to be a burial ground. The diagonal path took me through Independence Square, and then to the Carpenters' House, where the Continental Congress first met to discuss action against Great Britain. From Penn's Landing, I walked to the Korean War Memorial, put up by George W. Bush, and then to the Vietnam War Memorial. Pine Street, lined with beautiful houses on both sides, led me back to the downtown area. I stumbled upon Giovanni's Room, an LGBT bookstore, with a white-haired man behind the counter, before walking up Queer Street, 12th Street, back to the hotel. I had the illusion of taking quite a chunk of American history in my stride.

Umbrella's Fifth Anniversary Edition

2011-12-03T08:51:00.001-05:00

Umbrella, a journal of poetry and related prose, celebrates its fifth anniversary with a special showcase of Carmine Street Metrics poetry. I have a poem in it. Congrats, Kate Bernadette Benedict, on five good years. Thanks, Patricia Carragon, for first publishing the poem "The Children and the Swans" in the Brownstone Poets Anthology. Thanks, Eric, for asking me to read for Carmine Street.

Steve Fellner reviews "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait"

2011-11-28T05:33:00.001-05:00

Steve Fellner recommends my book to readers and critics. Hear him, you all!

One of the most ambitious and overlooked book of this year is Jee Leong Koh’s Seven Studies for a Self Portrait. Even though presumably autobiographical, don’t expect any mushy confessions here. As good as anything I’ve read this year, Koh’s poems are curiously distant... but in an enticing and exciting way.... [more]

Returned, Filled

2011-11-27T08:03:00.001-05:00

We stayed with D & T near Woodstock from Wednesday to Saturday. For Thanksgiving, T cooked and fed a company of nine people. I met Jan Harrison, a painter and sculptor, and her architect husband Allan. Carol-Ann, a feminist performance artist, came with her new boyfriend, an Australian documentary filmmaker called George, who covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now covering Occupy Wall Street. Burroughs also made documentaries, but of jazz musicians. GH was the other architect, and I was the representative poet. As for our hosts, D worked with videos and T had worked for MoMA. So much art present at the table, but reality, in the form of George's wars, dominated the talk.

The day after, we drove two hours to the town of North Adams to visit MASS MoCA. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is housed in former factory buildings with beautiful hand-cut stone, covered bridges and exposed brick walls. The buildings were put up in the late 1800's, by Arnold Print Works, a textile company. When it moved out in 1942, it was replaced by Sprague Electric, which moved out, in its turn, in 1985. Walking in the factory yard, along the canal that ran between the buildings, I could smell the nose-wrinkling smell of paint, a pungent mixture of old and new. The white on the peeling birches seemed painted on.

I did not care much for the art on display. In the main gallery, the size of a football field, Katharina Grosse's installation of spray-painted gravel, sand and styrofoam, One Floor Up More Highly, looked arbitrary, inert and cheap. The retrospective on Sol LeWitt's wall drawings was mind-numbing in its iterations. I liked the wall drawings very much more at Dia Beacon where they formed a chapel-like space. Here, the walls stood in rows on their own in the middle of the galleries. The geometrical exhibition walls were much less interesting than the exposed brick of the building, interrupted at precise yet human intervals of windows.

The most intriguing work on display was Nari Ward's Sub Mirage Lignum. The last word refers to Lignum Vitae (the wood of life), a tree whose bloom is the national flower of Jamaica, where Ward was born and left as a teenager to live in the USA. The monumental centerpiece of this multi-room installation borrowed its form from a small conical basket-woven fish trap used by Jamaican fishermen. In Ward's Nu Colossus, broken bits of weathered furniture seemed both caught in the trap and woven in as part of the trap. Facing this gigantic basket of memories was a 30-foot long wooden boat held up by three large sheets of glass. The boat seemed to float in the air. It also reminded me of tourist souvenirs, of which ships in a bottle are only one variation. Ward's boat, however, leaned alarmingly on one side, creating a palpable sense of distress. The other parts of the work were less compelling. The sound and sculptural installation called Stall was too easy. Mango Tourists was as quickly exhausted as a double entendre. The two films Sweater and Jaunt were unoriginal.

We were all tired after the drive back home. T had the great idea of watching the film of Andy Goldworthy, the British land art sculptor. He practices, to my mind, an art of recuperation. Subtitled "Working with Time," the film showed the artist doing just that, creating temporary forms that appear and disappear with time. Having seen the spider-web made of twigs and thorns at the Hesse Collection, and the Storm King Wall, I was happy to follow their making in the film. Most astonishing was the urn-shaped structure made from balancing stones. It was built as an offering to the sea, which the sea accepted by washing over it, and when the tide receded, the sea returned the urn offering, only this time filled, not empty.

An Encounter like a Flash

2011-11-22T16:26:00.001-05:00

TLS November 18 2011

from Patrick McCaughey's review of the De Kooning retrospective at the MoMA:

The most telling example of de Kooning's progress through renunciation comes in the breakthrough years of critical acclaim 1948-53. He held his first one-man show in 1948 at the Charles Egan Gallery, a small and relatively obscure venue in New York, where he showed black-and-white paintings of the past two years. Most of them were just above easel scale, but they radiated an intensity of feeling, lightening white movements rent the unsteady black grounds. They rivalled the masterly, contemporaneous drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. Although they are abstract paintings with only the most fleeting reference to identifiable images--a roof, the letters spelling Orestes--they are burdened with an ominous foreboding. De Kooning prowled Manhattan by night and the black-and-white paintings hint at a city illuminated by erratic flashes of light, felt rather than observed. A famous remark made by him years later that "content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash" applies perfectly to these early masterpieces of Abstract Expressionism....

*

The ferocity and grotesqueness of the Women of 1950-53 brought its own criticism of the artist. The pictures were seen as a misogynistic attack on women--a complaint that has not entirely died out. The Women retained their transgressive nature. The slashing brushstrokes and the physically violent attack on the surface rendered the image of women as raw, primitive and defiant and it shocked the 1950s. "Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It's more joyous."The shock remains even as they continue the grand line of Cezanne's "Bathers" to Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and Matisse's "Dance."

From Passion to Compassion

2011-11-20T09:12:00.001-05:00

In last night's Passio-Compassio, the Bach rearrangements by Music Director Vladimir Ivanoff sounded unconvincing to my ears. The string quartet, saxophones, bass clarinet, Arabic nay and qanun, Turkish ney, kanun and kemence, harpsichord, organ and frame drums, playing excerpts from Bach's Passions, sounded like a garage jam session. Bach's music was too strict, too self-contained, to admit foreign influences easily. When the music turned more improvisatory, more open-ended, as in the Syrian Orthodox chants and traditional Turkish songs, the different musical traditions melded into a sparkling stream. The experience taught me the usefulness of open forms in accommodating vastly different worlds: jazz improvisations, Arabic musical ornamentation, mystical refrains.

The Lebanese contralto Fadia el-Hage sang beautifully in the first half of the program. The Syrian chants were intricately embroidered by her warm yet brilliant voice. Particularly memorable was her rendition of Kefnet kmo zavnyn ("My nature took revenge on me"). In the second half Turkish singer Mustafa Dogan Dikmen stole the stage with his expressive performance of what I think was Ya llahi ("Oh Lord") in Ottoman Turkish.

Ali Ufki, the composer of Ya llahi, had a fascinating history. The concert program: "Born in 1610 to a Protestant Polish family (probably in what is now Lviv, Ukraine), this musician and scholar, whose original name was Wojciech Bobowski, had an improbably life. He was taken prisoner at an unknown date by Crimean Tartars and sold to the Ottoman court of Sultan Murad IV on the strength of his musicianship. He later converted to Islam and served as an interpreter of some 16 languages--and as Ali Ufki, he became one of the most prominent composers within the Ottoman empire before his death around 1675."

The Mevlevi dervishes appeared in both parts of the program, in imitation of their four "welcomings" (selamlar): four times, the dervishes greeted each other and the leader (sheik) of the group and started whirling. Their whirling was slow; their union with God was not ecstatic but contemplative. Their tall hats represented the tombstone and their white skirts symbolized the burial shroud for the ego. Casting off their black cloaks represented being reborn into the truth. According to the program, the dervishes are neither dances nor monks. They are real estate agents and merchants in daily life. Some have families. "They meet weekly to practice their ritual. Their concerns are togetherness and good deeds." It was strangely beautiful to gaze on grown men twirling about in long white skirts.

Throughout the performance, verses by Rumi were dimly projected to the back of the stage. I remember best his wish for the Beloved to put his lips on him, so that the mystic could, like a flute, sound out a blast of music.

Timothy Yu's "Race and the Avant-Garde"

2011-11-19T10:57:00.001-05:00

In this work of criticism, Tim Yu brings together two groups of poets not usually considered together, the Language poets and the Asian American poets. The first is usually thought of along aesthetics lines whereas the second is usually described as a social category. By thinking of the avant-garde as life praxis, Yu illuminates the common origins of both Language and Asian American poetries in the New Left politics of the 1970s.

Faced with the splintering of the Left into what they saw as identity politics, the Language poets, mostly straight white men, had to confront the ethnicization of their own subject positions. Their Beat precursor Allen Ginsberg in writing his auto poesy provides a clear example of how not to be mix poetry and politics in the 1970s, as Chapter One discusses. Chapter Two examines Ron Silliman's attempt, both in his correspondence with other Language poets and in his book Ketjak, to acknowledge his ethnicized position and still maintain his centrality.

Discussed in Chapter Three, the project to create an Asian American identity was supported by a great deal of poetry writing appearing in new Asian American publications such as Gidra, Aion and Bridge. Poets such as Janice Mirikitani, Lawson Fusao Inada and Naohiko Oka were forging a poetry that would distinguish itself from being Asian and being White American. They borrowed inspiration and poetic strategies from the Black Arts movement, but were also embarrassed by their borrowings.

Chapter Four looks at the two opposite ways of reading Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book Dictée, published in 1982, and canonized in Asian American studies by the mid-1990s. One way reads Dictée as an experimental poetry of form, a reading that has sometimes emphasized Cha's foreignness. Another way is to read the book as an "ethnic" writing of pure content. Yu argues that Dictée shows both ways of reading to be inadequate: it stages, instead, the clash between these strategies of interpretation.

John Yau is held up in Chapter Five as a poet who is both experimental and Asian American. In de-essentializing the Asian American identity through formal innovations, Yau continues the tradition of experimental Asian American writing started in the 1960s and 70s. The tradition has been obscured by the rise of introspective lyrical poetry written by poets such David Mura and Li-Young Lee in the 1980s. One of the achievements of Yu's book, then, is the restoration of the link between early and contemporary experimental Asian American poetry. Yu writes, "Like those early avant-gardists, Yau takes Asian American identity not as a given but as a product of the poem's own formal strategies--an identity that is thus provisional, shifting from poem to poem and even from line to line."

This description of Yau's project strikes a chord with me. I have said elsewhere that I don't consider myself Asian American, having neither the history nor the papers. After reading Yu's book, however, I now see that my own ontological project bears great similarity to that of Asian American poetry. If not (yet) a signed-up member of the Asian American community, I am certainly an ally. Yu's book is an absorbing read. The analysis of individual poems is deft. The prose is clear and jargon-free.

Carol Chan's Review of "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait"

2011-11-17T05:06:00.001-05:00

I take my reviewers seriously. I take them seriously because I really like to know how my poetry impinges on an informed and acute sensibility. I take them seriously because I want to know the faults and limitations of my writing, and so learn how to write better. A negative review is more useful to me than a fulsome, ignorant one. What follows is my attempt to read a review carefully in order to understand its reservations and learn from it. It is also, of course, a piece of self-justification, but I hope it is not merely that.

Carol Chan does not like Seven Studies for a Self Portrait. For her the book "unfolds like a series of scientific experiments that don't quite take off." By "experiments" she means to indict me for being overly intellectual: "He frequently makes the wrong bet, falling in love with the idea of a poem, the idea of art." To support her contention, she quotes in full "Bulb" from the sequence "What We Call Vegetables." After criticizing the poem for its "weak" imagery and "clumsy" execution (though she acknowledges the poem's apt mimetic music), she judges that "The reason 'Bulb' exists is that it accompanies an idea, is part of an experiment...." That is true of the process of writing the sequence. I would not have written "Bulb" if I were not writing "Bud," "Leaf," "Stem," "Tuber," and "Fruit." Her description connotes, however, that the poem is merely an intellectual exercise, i.e. an experiment.

She continues, "But I'm not quite convinced that there is any substance here...." She then defines substance by referring to A.C. Bradley's 1901 lecture "Poetry for Poetry's Sake." She interprets Bradley as saying that "the poetic is that which satisfies the reader's contemplative imagination." The obvious implication is that "Bulb" does not satisfy her contemplative imagination. But why not? She does not explain of this poem. Is it because of the "weak" imagery? But what is weak about the poem's deployment of the onion image? No explanation. Is it because of the "clumsy" execution? But Chan herself commends how the poem's sound patterning "recreates aurally the acts of 'slipping', 'unbuttoning'."

A clue to her dissatisfaction may lie in the next part of her paraphrase of Bradley--"A poem convinces the reader of a particular world or moment it inhabits." A particular world or moment. I gloss that formulation by looking at the poems that do satisfy Chan's contemplative imagination. After praising the title sequence "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait" for its precision in words and imagery, Chan highlights the first three lines of "Study #3, After Vincent van Gogh":

God sank a mineshaft into me for a reason
I could not see in the coalmining district.
Coal dust ate the baby potatoes and beer.

She comments, "Not a word is out of place--the gravity and bleakness of much of van Gogh's work immediately translates onto the page with the apt word ("sank") and vague, ubiquitous detail ("coal dust")." Gravity and bleakness do characterize the "particular world" that the poem depicts. It is a "world" recognizably human, what with its mineshafts, coal dust, baby potatoes, beer and God.

Not so much a "world," but a particular "moment" is another extract that Chan quotes with approval, this one from "The Cave" in the sequence "Bull Eclogues" about a speaker very much like Ted Haggard, the ex-Evangelical pastor exposed for paying for gay sex.

At home it makes a smaller sound, the grief.
The click of a light switch. No mercy
in the darkness or the light the house repeats,

but hiding for a time, however brief,
in me, as in my den, I hear the plea
of an unfired bullet in the drawer firing.

Chan reads this sensitively. She comments, "Koh's specific shade of grief is "the click of a light switch", startling, acute, blinding, immediately omnipresent," and then states flatly, "this is poetry--an experience composed of but cannot be reduced to that puree of sound, image, rhythm, substance." To my ears, "this is poetry" sounds dogmatic and absolute although it intends to praise. Sure, the lines are one form of poetry, but poetry comes in many forms. Contra Bradley, it is not limited to depicting a realistic world or a psychological moment. It may not be grounded in a recognizable lyric subjectivity. In fact, Seven Studies, as its name suggests (and not Seven Portraits, the shorthand that the review uses for the book), explores the different ways of looking at the self. The sequence "What We Call Vegetables" looks at the self as the communal "we," as still-life paintings that come to life, as a form of conceit linking human and vegetables. Here is "Onion," which Chan holds up as Exhibit A of my "inclination towards the cerebral, literary":

When we unbutton
our skin, our whole
body slips through,

and leaves behind
more fleshy skin
for unbuttoning,

and skinnier body
for slipping through
the shrinking hole.

The rounded life.
An onion. A mouth.

The poem does not depict a world or a moment. That is not what it sets out to do. It enacts, instead, an idea of a form of life. Call the life self-devouring. Chan is right to call attention to the poem's ideation, but why can't such thoroughly enacted ideation provide something for a reader's "contemplative imagination"? The speaker is not van Gogh nor Ted Haggard, a lyric subjectivity; it is, instead, an onion, a mouth. The poem does not resemble Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" or protest poetry, but neither poetries would have fallen into the ambit of Bradley's definition either. When I wrote the sequence, I underestimated its challenge to a predominant, if fusty, view of poetry. Now I think that this sequence, and others to which Chan objects, gives the book whatever traction it has in questioning our sense of self.

Chan also feels the disjuncture between subject and form in the sequences "I Am My Names" and "A Lover's Recourse." "I think," she writes, "I could imagine the rationale behind his choice of the ghazal in his meditations of unrequited/lost love, and the riddle to explore responsibilities and definitions of the self--but I only understand these decisions intellectually." It is a pity that she does not expand on what she thinks is the rationale behind the choice of the forms. It is a curious feature of the review that it does not engage with any of the work's stated intellectual influences, not with the Nietzsche epigraph nor with the Roland Barthes of the ghazal sequence. Instead, Chan quotes Bradley and American critic Stephen Burt for an essentializing view of poetry--"this is poetry"--in order to find my book wanting.

When Chan comments on the riddle form, her critique puzzles me. "Visually, and read aloud, the riddle only almost works--the declarative answer at the end of each poem ... hints at pretension in the poet's claim to universality...." I don't understand how the answer to a riddle claims universality. An answer to a riddle is ... an answer to a riddle, somewhat gleeful if the answerer gets it wrong, somewhat deflated if the answerer gets it right. To give an answer like "My name is Anon. I am a father" seems more personal than universal. Personal too, the evasion of the poet's own name throughout the sequence.

Of the final ghazal sequence of the book, Chan writes, "Here, as in elsewhere, one gets the sense that Koh is writing for the sake of writing, because he has to fill up the pages...." As is typical of Chan's critical method throughout the review, she cites examples from the poetry without explaining why the quotations are "throwaway lines," "cliches," or "awkward imagery." Why is "Time is a river. That is if you are a fish./ If you are a sunflower, time is a fire" a throwaway line? Why are caves, windows, train stations necessarily cliches? She gives "door as apple's skin" as an instance of awkward imagery, but she gets the comparison wrong. I wrote "The apple wears its skin so well--I mean, so tight--/ I cannot find the catch to open the door."

And yet she can read the ghazal form sensitively. Of the bell ghazal, she writes, "In each couplet, the bell is variously a metaphor for the poet's ego, conscience, sexual desire, poetic voice and critic. The bell is presented via a different voice--a command, a musing, an irritation, an action, an effect. These voices and situations work with the central image to develop the complex tensions in desire, thought and action, rendering the abstract "bell" in the final couplet all the more meaningful and powerful in the light of the lines before...."

So alert to tones, Chan puzzles me when she fails to consider that apparently throwaway lines are intended to sound casual or flat. "I see I am the last man drinking in the bar" works only because of its starkness. Or that what Chan cites as "clumsy lines" have good reason to be awkward. In a road accident, the result is not always smooth-flowing but is often grotesque, as Frida Kahlo discovers: "a bus handrail is sticking in my uterus like a huge thumbtack." The sound must seem an echo to the sense, as Pope says. The sound of a line cannot be judged apart from its sense.

Chan has in mind a particular sound, just as she has in mind a particular conception of poetry. We all do, but it's worth asking ourselves whether our conception limits what we read and write or opens us to different senses and sounds. At one point in the review, Chan accuses me of intellectual "hubris." It is a severe charge, of impiety to the poetry gods. What then should I make of her conclusion on my book that "In his risk and search for the 'bigger picture' (meta-narrative and intellectual coherence of the collection), it seems that Koh has not quite come to terms with the value of poetry ... --what poetry is for, why we write." I am a proud man, but I don't assume that I know what poetry is for, and certainly don't think that everyone should agree on the same reason for writing. The presumption in "we" quite takes my breath away.

Contra Eliot

2011-11-14T05:11:00.001-05:00

After hearing Stephen Dillane read "The Four Quartets" at the Clark Studio Theater last Friday, my longstanding love affair with the poem may be over. The still small voice of the poem that I had always heard in my head was suddenly and merely expressive in the mouth of the actor, expressive of a conservative religion, a contempt for other people and an authoritarian disposition that I knew were there, but had ignored as in the flush of love. I still admire the questing spirit in the poem--"Old men should be explorers"--and still respect the scrupulous scrutiny with which Eliot examines his life. Like Wagner's return to Christian symbolism in Parsifal, which caused Nietzsche to break with him, Eliot enters in "The Four Quartets" a dead end that no one else can follow, except his co-religionists.

The contrast with Beethoven's late String Quartet in A minor, which supposedly inspired Eliot, could not have been vaster. Played feelingly by the Miro Quartet, the music was achingly human. Even in its most divine aspect, the slow middle movement of the five, the divine is the expansion and elevation of the human spirit, and not a denial of it. The music makes me proud to be human, to belong to the same species as the man who composed it. The music is, ultimately, life-affirming.

Yesterday afternoon, GH and I listened to the Vienna Symphony Orchestra play at Avery Fisher, under the baton of Fabio Luisi. The program was completely Romantic: Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto in C minor and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major. Lise de la Salle, the twenty-three-year-old wunderkind from France, was mesmerizing at the keyboard. I did not think she reached the depths in the first movement of the concerto, but she was delicate in the second movement, and dazzling in the third. She disappeared under the orchestral sound at some point in the first movement, but was strong and commanding otherwise. I was surprised by how slow the work was played.

The same slow pace governed the Beethoven symphony, and destroyed it for me. Masterful precision in tempo and volume civilized the carnivalesque spirit of the work. The painful inarticulacy of the second movement sounded to my fanciful ears like operatic declamations. I would like to hear the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under a different baton, for the strings sounded wonderful, blended and warm. This performance of Beethoven, however, was Bacchus in coat-tails.

Correction

2011-11-13T07:55:00.001-05:00

Correction

until a name/and all its connotation are the same.

Elizabeth Bishop, “Conversation”

When he asksme for my name, I give him Jee.

No, your realname, he insists. Don’t patronize me because I am American.

I tell himmy name is Jee Leong, but in America I go by Jee.

Jee Leong,he elongates, now that is a beautiful name.

He is right Ididn’t think he could remember Jee Leong

but he iswrong to think I made Jee up for him.

Mascara Call for Asian American Poetry

2011-11-12T11:38:00.001-05:00

Mascara LiteraryReview will publish a special issue of Asian American poetry in July 2012. I am guest-editing it. The issue aims to present the vitality of poetrywritten by Asian American poets now. Essays and reviews are also welcomed, butplease query me first with a writing proposal.

A bi-annual literary journal founded in 2007, Mascara isparticularly interested in the work of contemporary Asian, Australian andIndigenous writers. The journal is supported by the Australian Council for theArts and the National Library of Australia. It now receives 5000-7000 visitsper month from 70 countries.

Submissions to Mascara Literary Review are by e-mail. Onlypreviously unpublished work will be considered. Simultaneous submissions are acceptableas long as you notify the journal immediately of an acceptance elsewhere.

Send 3-5 poems and a short bio in a single Microsoft Word doc as an attachment, labeled with yourname. Write “Asian American poetry” in the subject title of your e-mail. The response time is 3-6 months. Please do not query before 3 months. Send yourwork to submissions[at]mascarareview[dot]com. The deadline for submissions isMarch 31, 2012.

Poem: "Tearjerker"

2011-11-09T06:28:00.000-05:00

Tearjerker

My mum wouldinsist on watching

the latestrelease with Dad and me, some action flick

like Iron Man or The Fast and the Furious.

Clanks andclashes notwithstanding, she would fall slack, snoring.

The plot,said Dad, is too complicated for your mum.

But shecould tell you everything you want to know

about some 100-episodeCantonese tearjerker,

who issleeping with whom and not his wife,

why he sellsout his partner, how she takes her revenge,

what is therelationship between real life and TV.

Poem: "Tracing Death"

2011-11-08T18:23:00.001-05:00

Tracing Death

We trace thepow’r of Death from tomb to tomb

PhillisWheatley, “To a Lady on the Death of Three Relations”

The lifethat sailed from sight, the life to come,

the lifethat scribbles softly in between—

we trace thepow’r of Death from tomb to tomb.

A woman fellbackwards, stunned in her womb.

Extractedfrom her dry eyes by the men

the lifethat sailed from sight, the life to come.

Elsewhere abride is waiting for her groom,

around hermouth sweat gathers to a sheen.

We trace thepow’r of Death from tomb to tomb.

StudyingVirgil in the children’s room,

the slavehears from the Carthaginian queen

the lifethat sailed from sight, the life to come.

The writingstarts, and stops, and then resumes.

In gracefulelegies out of her pen,

we trace thepow’r of Death from tomb to tomb.

Pray for us,Lady of our certain doom,

that we may bringhome safe by line nineteen

the lifethat sailed from sight, the life to come.

We trace thepow’r of Death from tomb to tomb.

2011-11-07T21:48:00.000-05:00

"Eve's Fault" has been published in tongues of the ocean, a journal of Bahamian, Caribbean and related poetry, edited by Nicolette Bethel.

I wrote the poem during one of PFFA's 7/7s, and then workshopped it on the poetry board. Nico liked it so much that I had to give it to her.

Katori Hall's "The Mountaintop"

2011-11-04T05:54:00.000-04:00

As a friend commented, Angela Bassett tore up the play at Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre last night. She was phenomenal, the heat and the heart of the action. She played the hotel maid who turned out to be an angel who had come to tell Martin Luther King Jr. (Samuel Jackson) that it was time for him to die. I was somewhat dismayed at first by the revelation that she was angelic because she was so full-blooded and interesting an earthly being, but the turn of events led to some well-judged comedy, in particular, a funny phone conversation that King had with Grandmother God, which ultimately underlined the pathos of a man coming to terms with his untimely end.

The 90-minute play, directed by Kenny Leon, humanized the monument that is the civil rights leader. It opened with King shouting to his friend to buy him Pall Mall. The smoke, which generated high sexual tension between a flirtatious King and Bassett's comely Camae, was also a sign of their shared humanity. King entered his motel room, coughing badly, and when he relieved himself in the bathroom we heard the icon passing water. His shoes were a particularly potent symbol. In their stink, they reminded the audience obliquely of the civil rights marches--the blacks' sacrifice and the whites' violence. Later, Camae put on King's coat to tell him what she would say if she were him, but she refused to wear his stinking shoes. In that refusal, Hall the playwright was also subtly pointing out that no one else could have walked in the man's shoes.

Instead of trying to be King, his successors should "carry on the baton" dropped by his death. That quotation became a rousing refrain when Camae the angel showed King the future before he died. Accompanied by original music by Branford Marsalis, the motel room gave way to a slide projection that highlighted the major events, as seen from an African American perspective, from King's assassination to Obama's inauguration. The last speech made by Samuel Jackson as King was very moving. He was no longer a reverberating voice, as heard at the start, but a man pleading quietly with other men and women.

Helaine L. Smith's "Homer and the Homeric Hymns"

2011-10-30T11:27:00.000-04:00

My dear friend and colleague Helaine has just published a wonderful textbook for teaching Homer or studying him on one's own. Homer and the Homeric Hymns provides substantial selections, freshly translated, from The Iliad, The Odyssey and eight Homeric Hymns. These passages, focusing in turns on the different gods, are accompanied by thoughtful commentary on Homer's art, with detailed footnotes on background, literary terms and vocabulary. Each chapter ends with questions for discussion, and suggestions for analytic and creative writing exercises. There are even sample essays to aid training in composition. Indices of mythological and literary terms enable easy cross-referencing.

Helaine is a master teacher. She has taught English for over thirty-five years, and this book is really a treasury of those years of experience. As a colleague, she is always generous in sharing ideas and resources. When I taught sixth-grade English for the first time, her guidance meant the world to me. In the mythology unit, I used with great success the passages and exercises from what would become her book. Particularly affecting and memorable to the students was our discussion of Hephaistos. When Zeus and Hera quarrel at a feast in The Iliad, Hephaistos not only tries to persuade, with proper deference, his mother to reconcile with Zeus, but he also moves around to serve the other gods wine, knowing that his limp will draw their laughter and so defuse the tense atmosphere. Helaine's discussion of the incident alerts the reader (or teacher) to Homer's psychological subtlety as well as his imaginative power.

If the material in the book is not beyond a class of bright sixth-graders, it is certainly suitable for high school and college composition classes. The advantage of using this book is that the student becomes familiar with some of the foundational stories of Western literature and culture, besides developing reading and writing skills. Homer and the Homeric Hymns does not assume any prior knowledge of the epic poet. The introduction places Homer usefully in his historical context. This book encourages, instead, an informed appreciation of Homer's vitality to the Western imagination.

"3 Idiots" Feels Good

2011-10-29T11:01:00.000-04:00

Recommended by friends, 3 Idiots is an extremely well done, extremely entertaining comic caper, with a big heart and boundless energy. After watching it last night, I wanted to watch it all over again, all 170 minutes of it. It had such life in it.

Netflix plot summary: "While attending one of India's premier colleges, miserable engineering students and best friends Rancho (Aamir Khan), Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) struggle to beat their school's draconian system, which, in their eyes, unfairly values grades over creativity. Loosely based on Chetan Bhagat's best-selling novel Five Point Someone, this entertaining Bollywood comedy also stars Kareena Kapoor (Rancho's love interest) and Boman Irani (the tyrannical dean of the Imperial College of Engineering)."

The film narrative takes the form of a search for Rancho by his two former friends, the college scenes played as flashbacks, and so ends with finding Rancho, and the fulfillment of his free-thinking and optimistic philosophy of "Aal Izz Well." The plot is unrealistic and inconsistent at many points but only a pedant would dwell on these points and miss the magical conception of the whole. Tropes established at the beginning recur with gaiety in different guises throughout the movie.

The most eye-catching of them is the pulling down of one's pants. It is first introduced when Farhan forgets to pull on his pants in his hurry to join Raju in his search for Rancho. It returns in the hazing of the college freshmen, to which Rancho refuses to submit. When a senior tries to punish him by pissing outside his dorm room, he is electrocuted by Rancho's impromptu engineering. The scene reminds me of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, when Saleem as the Budhha is electrocuted in the same manner. The pants motif concludes triumphantly when the three friends display their victory over their conformist ex-classmate by showing him their butts.

The movie is held together miraculously by Rancho, the engaging college-man and presiding spirit of play. Aamir Khan is a revelation to me. He was 44 when he made this film but he is thoroughly convincing as a student engineer in his mannerisms, gait and boyish smile. The portrayal is even more striking when he appears so different in his previous movie, Ghajini, where he plays a bulked-up revengeful recluse. I have just put a number of his movies on my Netflix queue.

The cinematography of 3 Idiots, by C.K. Muraleedharan, is highly intelligent, as is the art direction by Rajnish Hedao. The colors are not beautiful in a conventional sense, but they elicit a strong emotional connection to the scenes. When the two friends finally find Rancho in his village school, the ethereal colors are buoyant, expansive, paradisal and fantastical. The happy ending in which spiritual freedom and worldly success come together may be a piece of daydreaming, but, boy, does Rajkumar Hirani the director make it feel good.

de Kooning Retrospective at the MoMA

2011-10-25T06:44:00.000-04:00

de Kooning's paintings make sense for me when they are seen as a part of the whole, a restless, always-moving whole. They are experimental in spirit, and so they change in method, materials and manner, although the themes of women and landscape recur in the oeuvre. The women appear in early abstracted interiors, then appear in later abstracted landscapes, and they become landscapes in the third Woman series. He is Matisse painting outdoors. His textiles and fabrics are the patchworks of light. He abstracts his figures more radically than Matisse ever did, reducing them to floating fragments and suggestions, but the love of women holds him, as it did Matisse, to figuration. His art is essentially erotic.

The breakthrough black-and-whites, painted in 1945, I find fascinating, even moving. They make beautiful, entangled shapes. Again and again, as if fighting against a strong innate feeling for shapeliness, de Kooning breaks his compositions apart. He does to achieve intensity. He puts pressure on his forms. He is wary of mere graphic prettiness, of commercial art. He wants to be taken seriously. He takes his perceptions with utmost seriousness. This, yes, heroic effort renders the ethereal last paintings utterly poignant. The slick white surface, the ribbons of blue and red, splashes of yellow, are almost too pretty. They come close to hotel lobby art. But they are suffused by a spiritual light. They have the glow of tremendous force applied and then withdrawn. They are an outcome. They show what a late-style can feel like.

War Requiem

2011-10-23T20:59:00.003-04:00

This afternoon, LW and I heard Britten's War Requiem (1961-62) performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Slovenian Sabina Cvilak sang soprano, Ian Bostridge tenor and Simon Keenlyside baritone. I was especially taken by Cvilak's singing. The London Symphony Chorus, directed by Joseph Cullen, and the American Boychoir, directed by Fernando Malvar-Ruiz, completed the roster of performers.

The Requiem has six movements: Requiem aeternam, Dies irae, Offertorium, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Libera Me. In counterpoint to and ironic commentary on the Latin text are poems by Wilfred Owen. The bell-ridden first movement, for instance, is countered by "Anthem for Doomed Youth" ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?"). The effect is intended to be jarring, or at least dissonant, but I found myself wishing that Britten had not tried to combine prayer and protest. As a protest, the work came off as hectoring. As a prayer, well, it wasn't one.

"Strange Meeting," the longest poem by Owen in the Requiem, received the most beautiful and poignant musical setting. Bostridge and Keenlyside sang their parts with lyrical sensitivity.

Joy Sonata

2011-10-23T09:58:00.001-04:00

Last Wednesday, GH and I heard the London Symphony Orchestra, led by Sir Colin Davis, performed an all-Sibelius program at Carnegie Hall. Nikolaj Znaider soloed in the Violin Concerto in D minor, and he was terrific, warm and delicate in the quiet passages. I have his performance of Elgar's Violin Concerto on my iPad, and listen to it over and over again. For some reason I did not care so much for Symphony No. 2 performed after the intermission.

It was a rather more unconventional program last night at Alice Tully. A part of White Light Festival, "A Homage to J. S. Bach" looked at how Russian composers have been influenced by Bach's musical forms while using a modern tonal idiom. The program was headlined by Gidon Kremer, who played with beautiful intonation a chaconne from one of Bach's partitas. I also enjoyed very much Shostakovich's Piano Trio 2, which Kremer played with cellist Giedre Dirvanauskaite and pianist Andrius Zlabys, both from Lithuania. Kremer, an American, was originally from Riga, Latvia. The three musicians melded their sounds together into a whole while retaining their distinctive parts.

Two other Russian composers were also heard on the program. Both worked unknown during Soviet rule but now are being heard more and more in the West. "Dedication to J.S. Bach for violin and piano (quasi echo)" by Valentyn Sylvestrov was performed with solo violin that night. Sofia Gubaidulina's Chaconne for piano called for fiendish technique, very capably met by Zlabys. Her Sonata for violin and cello (“Rejoice!”) unusually juxtaposed the string instruments' normal tones with harmonics. She explained that this leap from one realm to one higher above is, for her, the definition of joy.

New Poetries V

2011-10-22T08:34:00.000-04:00

Received my copy of New Poetries V yesterday. It's a beauty. It has a nice thick feel to it. The cover image, by Isabel Schmidt, is full of overlapping gentle things in soft colors.

Beyond advocating for his poets, Michael Schmidt's preface says a number of useful things on the principles that should guide an editor or anthologist:

Editors who are not promoting a movement or a group, when they tear open an envelope or click an email attachment, hope to be surprised by the shape on the page, by syntax, by the unexpected sounds a poem makes, sometimes with old, proven instruments used in new ways. They might hope to find evidence of intelligence. And they respect creative disobedience. Where there are schools they look for the truants; where there is a consensus with its levelling decorums, they edit against it. They are not looking for unschooled talent but for poetry as discovery in form and language. And the question of relevant subject-matter need arise only if it does arise. Nothing is prescribed.

Useful things to bear in mind as I consider whether to guest-edit an issue of Mascara.

Interview with Lantern

2011-10-20T05:57:00.001-04:00

The significance of the number seven, the fragmented self, the gay transnational Asian poet, the Singapore poetry scene, self-publication and critical legitimacy, literary awards, and poetry free-for-all...

...in my interview in Lantern Review. The beautiful Wendy Chin-Tanner puts the move on me.

The Weekend and After

2011-10-18T22:04:00.003-04:00

Too tired to post anything substantial, but do want to record a couple of things before they fly out of my head. Yes, this is a mishmash. Watched, or was it heard, Wynton Marsalis at 50 on PBS last night, while unfriending more than a hundred people on Facebook whom I have never talked to and who never talked to me. I liked the more complex, more "classical" compositions than the more populist ones. But what do I know about jazz? Zilch. I heard jazz at Iridium once, a long time ago, and did not enjoy the music, though the company was delightful. In New Orleans earlier this year, I heard an old-style jazz band, and imagined that this was the kind of music that Larkin loved and hated Charlie Parker for destroying.

GH and I watched Weekend last Saturday night. There are at least four different movies that go by that name on imdb, not including movies titled The Weekend. You would have thought that directors or studios would try harder to come up with something original. The Weekend that we watched is directed by Andrew Haigh. Russell (played by a very good-looking Tom Cullen) picks up Glen (Chris New) at a club, and their relationship develops over the course of a, you guess it, weekend into something deeper. Both guys are convincing at different stages of their relationship, Russell a lifeguard, shy orphan, looking for a committed relationship, Glen an artist, who came out as a teen to a supportive mother, who just has his heart broken and has sworn off boyfriends. The script is realistically meandering, full of hesitations and half-heard mutterings. The sex scenes are unembarrassed but not glamorized. I don't think the film is great, but it is certainly superior to most gay relationship movies that I have seen.

I bought and read H.D.'s Trilogy at one sitting on Sunday. More about that later. I have been going back to Mina Loy, and wondering what I really think of her. She can be so good, and then she can be so bad. I can see why Thom Gunn was so drawn to her poetry: it has verve. Yesterday and this morning I revised "domed/doomed/deem'd." I have clarified what Lady Mary Wroth means by "A knowing part of joy is called the hart."

Storm King

2011-10-15T11:37:00.001-04:00

Last Saturday, VM and JF drove GH and I to Storm King. We first took a long hike on the mountain, and then made our way to the Art Center. The grounds of the sculpture center were beautifully landscaped. The museum building overlooked the meadows to the North-west and the North woods. To the south was the leisurely undulating South Fields where gentle knolls raised monumental works like Mark Di Suvero's Pyramidian (1987/88) against a background of sky, and a mirror-clear serpentine pond provided the perfect playground for Roy Lichtenstein's Mermaid (1994). Yellow-brown grasses that came up to the knee were sculptured for contrast to the green fields.

At the very end of the South Fields was the highlight of the walk for me: Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield (2007-08). The artist who designed the darkly shiny Vietnam War Memorial worked here with mounds of earth. The grassy mounds did not look very special when we walked past them, though they were taller than we were and quite massive. Viewed from the necessary vantage point, however, the work was a moving miniature of the hills behind it, without being literal in its imitation. It helped me grasp, perhaps for the first time, the power of a truly site-specific work.

Close by was another striking site-specific work, Andy Goldsworthy's Storm King Wall (1998-98). The dry wall ran down to the pond, as if disappearing into it, and re-emerged on the other side before looping round and round a row of trees. It was an excellent example of the playful artistic use of a practical building technique. Like Maya Lin's Wavefield, Wall spoke of long tradition but also of individual talent.

Of the current show "5+5: New Perspectives" the piece that spoke most to me was Darrell Petit's Kiss (2008). Two big blocks of stone, curving in different ways, were leaned together, touching at one high point only. The other works were often witty but could not hold their own against the natural landscape. Storm King could be very cruel to less ambitious art.

I saw it from a distance but would have missed truly seeing it, if VM did not remark on Alexander Calder's Five Swords (1976). The martial abstract sulpture, in screaming red, thrust forward its bristling blades from a steady waist. Familiar only with Calder's mobiles, I was very pleased to see one of his stabiles. Because the center was closing, we had to find another place for our picnic. The spot we found after driving around a bit was stony and a little trashy but a river splashed in front of us while a meadow stretched behind us, into the growing darkness. The pleasures of the day sat around with us like friends.

Faith in Things Not Yet Spoken

2011-10-14T06:48:00.000-04:00

Last night GH and I attended the opening night of a new season of music by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The highlight of the evening for me was Haydn's Symphony No. 73 in D Major (The Hunt), played with thrilling color and dancing rhythm. The disappointment was Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major, with Gil Shaham. The first two movements were too slow, and lost the drama of the work. Shaham was clear and delicate in the quieter passages but did not bring out the architecture of the concerto.

The evening began with Mendelssohn's Fair Melusina Overture. The program note explains:

In medieval folklore, Melusina was a beautiful girl cursed to take the form of a mermaid one day each week. She married the knight Reymund, and forbade him from ever seeing her on Saturdays. He betrayed her one fateful day, spying on her in the bath, and she disappeared forever from sight of humans, although the sound of her wailing remained.

The music went from a rolling "water" theme in F major to a surging "galloping" theme in F minor, suggestive of Reymund's intrusion. It was quite poetic, if a little too pretty.

Cynthia Wong's Memorium, written in honor of her father who died of cancer, was given its world premiere. Commissioned by Orpheus as part of Project 440, the eight-minute work began somewhat obscurely, to me, but moved into improvised passages of great intensity and lyricism. In her note, the 29-year-old New York-based composer quoted Rilke as inspiration. She added these lines from the German poet to the score after each composing session:

"Even his downfall was for him only a pretext for achieving his final birth."

"It has inner light, even from a distance, and charges us, even if we do not reach it."

"I have great faith in all things not yet spoken."

"In you is a presence that will be when all the stars are dead."

Poem: "I'll be there right away"

2011-10-13T06:28:00.000-04:00

I’ll be there right away—
says the rocking horse.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWait a minute—
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxsays the clock.

Not so loud—
says the tin whistle.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThis way—
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxsays the mirror.

In here—
says the keyhole.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe bed, busy with blankets,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxsays nothing.

Poem: "Laugh all you want"

2011-10-12T06:46:00.000-04:00

Laugh all you want—

he is taking the scaffolding down,
this young man in a yellow hard hat

xxxxxhe is taking the scaffolding down
xxxxxwith the other deliberate fellows

xxxxxxxxxxhe is unscrewing the steel brackets
xxxxxxxxxxhe is dismantling all the right angles

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxhe is switching eyes with me—
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe kind fellow—as I hammer past

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxhe is taking the scaffolding down,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxunlocking the entrance to the bank.

Poem: "Listen. I will say this only once"

2011-10-11T19:55:00.000-04:00

Listen. I will say this only once— in your language—

tonight’s special is a spring quartet with pinto beans,

capers, bell peppers, wild onions and a lemon source.

You can have either a tambourine or a side of basilisk

but not both. I advise the basilisk. For drinking I have

a medium-bodied Hungarian tune from lost-and-found.

I also have a delicious Sangiovese but it is not for you.

There are three desserts tonight. Yes, quite a spread.

An American confection, heavy, sweet and empty,

nine hundred and eighty calories minus the Yiddish,

a fruit tart in a major chord called The Less Deceived

and a slow crumble with Chinese characteristics.

You need a minute? Take an hour. Take the whole night

if you wish. Just don’t you dare to ask me to repeat.

Poem: "Quiet, please"

2011-10-10T09:02:00.000-04:00

Quiet, please—

the beach is turning over to sleep, drawing up

to its shoulders the slipping blanket of the sea.

The old Ferris wheel is slowing to a final stop,

its wooden cars empty. The stands are closing.

On the pier, extended like a promise, the lines

are reeled back to their hollow round casings.

The patrol boat is circling an invisible crater

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxas if a man is drowning.

Not Afraid of Seeming Ridiculous

2011-10-09T11:50:00.000-04:00

TLS September 16 2011

from Seamus Perry's review of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali (translated by William Radice); The Essential Tagore (edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty); Boyhood Days (translated by Radha Chakravarty); and Farewell Song (translated by Radha Chakravarty):

Tagore's familiarity with the nineteenth-century poets was evidently very deep, and in his critical pronouncements, he can sound the clear high note of Romantic idealism which Yeats would have recognized. "The world becomes another world in our mind.... This act of the mind enables us to individualize external reality"; and an even more strikingly Yeatsian turn, "How to express the world the mind creates within itself? It has to be expressed in such a manner that it leads to a mood".

*

Many of Tagore's best writings are animated by a similar sense, sympathetic but accepting, of the unshapely desultoriness of the lives that they narrate, as though exploring the flip-side of the acquiescent universalism that animates many of the Gitanjali poems. It is the keen awareness of what he calls, in his essay "The Problem of the Self", "the surprise of endless variations, the advent of the unaccountable, the ceaseless procession of individuals".

*

... he is quite as good as Yeats on the way that the imagination can entrap the soul before ever managing to liberate it; and he would agree with Yeats that nationalist enthusiasm can be one kind of such poisonous fantasy. "The idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented", Tagore told his American lecture audience.

***

TLS September 30 2011

from Zachary Leader's review of Alfred Kazin's Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook:

Throughout his packed career, Kazin kept a personal journal which he failed to see published in its original form in his lifetime, and expected to have published after his death. "I am not afraid to release it, to publish it all; of seeming ridiculous."

*

When low, Kazin calls his journal "a disorderly pile of shavings". Sometimes it seems to consist only of "passive suffering, complaint, and yearning", though its "task" or function, he insists, is "to use our suffering and to use it so well that we can use it up."

*

Journal-writing encourages stylistic spontaneity, feeding an "inborn disposition to put things in brief". This disposition is mostly liberating, although it can also, he admits, be limiting: "The journal is too plastic to our hand, does not force us to go further than we intend to go, does not leads us to some inherent quality of its own, to vital discovery, and does not fight us, insists on its own needs".

*

In writing, Kazin feels, "you have paid back something of your debt to the Creation, to look at things more sharply, attentively, and above all more lovingly, with the senses and coordinates aroused by the act of writing".

Poem: "I won't lie"

2011-10-09T07:41:00.000-04:00

xxxxxI won’t lie—

the cats bothered me. There were four of them—

xxxxxthree shaggy black ones and a ginger—

but they seemed more. They nosed around the yard

xxxxxlike a party of scouts. They measured

the top of the fence in steps in both directions.

xxxxxThey mewed and were answered.

I watched and watched for the others until night

xxxxxmade it impossible to count for sure.

Day brought back the cats and their number. One

xxxxxshort of the fingers on a hand. Two short

of ten if the number of the creatures were doubled.

xxxxxEight short of twenty if they were tripled.

If they were multiplied by five, there would be twenty

xxxxxbut where were the other sixteen hiding?

I caught the ginger staring at me through the window

xxxxxthe morning before the cats disappeared.

I watched and watched but they did not come back.

xxxxxI lost four cats but they had seemed more.

for Rachael Briggs

Poem: "My mouth is dry as I speak"

2011-10-08T11:40:00.000-04:00

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxMy mouth is dry as I speak—

the arm thrown round me was encircled

xxxxxwith two bracelets,

one, two leather thongs were tied together at their ends

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxby tiny coils of wire

pulled towards each other and closed by an S-shaped clasp;

xxxxxthe other, a thin ring of nickel

with a running groove that made the single round

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxlook like two.

Inside the circlets, the arm

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwas withering,

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxhair bristling,

but the leather preserved its O

xxxxxxxxxxand the nickel resisted oxygen and shone.

Poem: "To be brief"

2011-10-07T23:13:00.000-04:00

To be brief—

when I entered the grotto
to find the Buddha
   carved from the living wall of the cave,

I wasn’t expecting the bats
   hundreds of furry pulses
agitating the air
   with more than blood.

   In the fearful disorder,
   image, wing, shadow,

I stumbled out,
   my face
   flittering still with near misses.

   They did not fly
into each other
   either.

Brahms' "Eroica"

2011-10-06T20:46:00.000-04:00

Last night, the New York Philharmonic performance of Brahms' Symphony No. 3 sounded wonderfully fresh. The first movement was particularly dynamic. I did not care for the thick orchestral textures of movements two and three, but the last was again eloquent. The sun rose majestically, and the effect just fell short of the sublime, because the last part was played a little too softly. I was sleepy throughout the Berg violin concerto, but electrified by the Brahms after the intermission. It reminded me why I attend actual concerts instead of listening to a CD at home.

The program began with Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Frank Peter Zimmermann and Alan Gilbert made a well-matched pair of soloists. TB was thrilled to hear the piece because she has been working on it with her music teacher, L, whom GH and I met that evening. L applauded the Bach enthusiastically and seemed to like the Brahm too. After the concert, he recited to me the opening of The Canterbury Tales. Fortunately I was able to recognize and so vindicated my life as an English teacher.

Living as Form

2011-10-04T06:41:00.000-04:00

In the words of its brochure, "Living as Form" presented "over 100 artists and projects, 25 curators, and 9 new commissions highlighting 20 years of socially engaged art." On Sunday GH and I wandered through the mostly empty Essex Street Market building in which the exhibition was held. The projects were not readily comprehensible, their explanations in densely written booklets, their images played on looped videos. Mitch Corber was there to show the interviews and books of Poetry Thin Air Cable Network, as was Cindy Hochman. Cindy was kind to press on me a copy of her new chapbook The Carcinogenic Bride, but I insisted on paying a poet for her work. The poetry is lively. I particularly like the last poem "Under Anesthesia," in which the disoriented patient addresses the doctor like a lover in a swirl of weird imagery and knowing humor:

Doctor, I am lying on your table with my compliant bones
Doctor, soon you will be under my anonymous skin
Doctor, you have reduced me to my lowest common denominator
Doctor, is that a scalpel in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

After dinner at Nonya, GH went home and I made my way to Bowery Poetry Club, where I was to read for the Carmine Street Metric series, hosted by Eric Norris. It was nice to see familiar faces there, in particular, Wendy Chin-Tanner, John Marcus Powell, Quincy Lehr, Rick Mullin and Robert Gibbons. Rose Bernal was there too. My fellow feature, George Witte, read poems that take on large issues--America's foreign wars, the healthcare system--but see them through their effects on individual lives. The poems are quietly intelligent, with an undercurrent of anger. I read from Seven Studies and was pleased to sell four books, one to a handsome young man with a beard, whose name is Max.

After the reading, a few of us had dinner at a nearby pub. We shot the air, throwing up Auden, Eliot, MacNiece and Nabokov for targets.

Junction/Cycle

2011-10-02T10:14:00.000-04:00

GH and I wanted to see Richard Serra's new works at the Gagosian Gallery, and so took in other galleries on a pleasant, if drizzly, Saturday afternoon. At the Magnanmetz Gallery, Colombian artist Miler Lagos built an igloo out of books from a defunct US Navy base library. The old index cards papered a nearby corner. On the other end of the gallery, his video Water House (2011) showed a water tank floating on water. It keeps water out instead of water in, and so becomes a kind of ark.

At George Billis, American artist Adam Normandin showed photorealistic paintings of freight trains. I like the idea of reproducing spray-painted graffiti on uneven metal sidings with oil paint on a flat canvas. Affirmation was particularly compelling an image. Another artist, British Paul Winstanley, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, painted from photographs, mostly his own. Showing people alone in public spaces, the soft-focused works seemed to meditate on people meditating in a moment snatched from the rush of life. Interesting to me how contemporary painting appears to be grappling still with photography. The question of their relationship, which is also a question of the status of painting, is still unsettled.

Cultural displacement was expressed with unexpected violence in Do Ho Suh's show at Lehmann Maupin. In Fallen Star 1/5, the artist created a replica of his childhood home in Korea and crashed it like a tornado into the side of a replica of his adopted home in Providence, Rhode Island. The meticulous care with which he made the replicas, down to the tiny color pencils in the basement artist studio, spoke of his feeling for both places. The feeling for the material environment increased the violation of the crash.

There were too many people at Gagosian to enjoy Richard Serra's Junction and Cycle peacefully. The gallery ceiling with its florescent lighting and skylights also sat awkwardly atop of the gigantic steel sculptures. It rejected the sculptural ambition to shape, carve, space. Cycle reminded me of earlier works visited at MoMa. Junction felt new, less directing, more questioning, a labyrinth simplified to its most basic element. It was odd, but stimulating, to go from these serenely accomplished works to Matthew Barney's "DJED" show at Gladstone Gallery.

The three large sculptures from his "Ancient Evenings" project were made from traditional sculptural and industrial metals too--iron, bronze, lead and copper--but they were ironized by unusual accents. On top of a cast iron sculpture of a Chrysler Imperial undercarriage perched a pickaxe made of gold. In another work, a big tablet of wax changed irregularly into a thick metal sheet, accompanied on the side by the same transformation of a rope. Such ironic juxtapositions might strike a viewer as cheap visual shots, but they could also niggle at the Olympian grandeur of work like Serra's. Barney is agitated, self-contradicting and incomplete. The decay of things is not attractive, but it can be fascinating.

Poem: "Another America"

2011-10-01T06:43:00.000-04:00

Another America

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

Mina Loy, “Lunar Baedeker”

Port people
with sea for eyes
and river mouths

set up campfires,
courses of dirt,
and chandelier palaces

The other Paris
who picked Hera,
objectively most beautiful,
for the apple from the Hesperides

received the city,
the arrangement of avenues, handkerchief parks,
noon showers that flirt with bicyclists
but keep their promise to the asphalt,

midnight inheritance of the stars,
cemeteries on land

Sailors on saddles
sing
of the jacaranda district

ride, singing,
to the silver altar
in the silver Basilica

The tango schools
once taught
men only

to drop
like a purple petal
from the mouth of the gaucho

Susan Howe's "That This"

2011-09-29T11:19:00.001-04:00

That This, about the death of Howe's husband, the philosopher Peter Hare, is an odd and sometimes beautiful book. The three parts that make up the book are very different, one might even say, at odds. Or so they seem.

The first part titled "The Disappearance Approach" is a rather conventional arrangement of diary-like prose entries. Beginning with the discovery of Hare dead in his bed, it proceeds by weaving fragments of memories with reflections on Jonathan Edwards and his family, Milton, W.H. Auden, Nicolas Poussin, and Ovid. The literary and artistic references give a sense of the couple's shared life, the Edwards reinforcing the New England connection, but they are also a rather familiar device to raise the tone and deepen the significance of one's loss.

Nothing particularly memorable is said about the writers. After quoting from a letter by Sara Edwards telling her daughter of Jonathan's death, Howe comments, "I love to read her husband's analogies, metaphors, and similes." In another fragment, she informs us that she's been reading Auden's The Sea and the Mirror. What does she get from it? "One beautiful sentence about the way we all reach and reach but never touch." Good enough for one's private journal but for a book of poetry? As if to make up for the threadbare observation, Howe continues, "A skinny covering overspreads our bones and our arms are thin wings." This writing is malnourished.

In the next part "Frolic Architecture," Howe has made type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries, with scissors, Scotch Tape and a Canon copier. The collages are startlingly beautiful on the page, clean and mutilated, in contrast with the six blurry and evocative photograms by James Welling that accompany the collages. Whereas the photograms bleed to the edges of their page, Howe's type-collages are sharply framed by their own cut edges in the middle of the page. In one collage, the words "ing body my body slipping" are sliced horizontally into two. They are followed by another line of words "d down full toward its own." After a bigger line spacing, the bottom half of the collage consists of three sightly misaligned columns of words:

secret sermon rough

a myst sermon of grac

a and i sermon sent to

The collages, like the one I just tried to describe, disrupt the conventions of type-setting and reading. The rupture echoes visually Wetmore's spiritual struggle and, by extension, Howe's tussle with grief. But the use of scissors, Scotch Tape and copier to produce this rupture feels like a form of play. It savors of art-and-craft. That this playfulness is intended can be seen in the title "Frolic Architecture." The first part of the book informed us that Peter Hare's father was "a modernist architect," and Hare's house in Buffalo, New York, into which Howe moved after their marriage, was filled with relics of family history. "Frolic Architecture" can be read, I suggest, as a playful subversion of the kind of grief memoir exemplified by the first part of the book. Its centered pieces also prepare readers for the reconstructed lyric of mourning in the third and final part of the book, also called "That This."

The first lyric, squarish in shape like all the others, continues in its diction the previous part of the book:

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put

on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed

The words are given heft because they are few in number. After reading "Frolic Architecture," however, the lyrics that follow also feel shreddable, contingent. Someone else may come along with her scissors and Scotch Tape. And in this way type is made to speak of anti-type, the visible to speak of "That thing not shadowed," form to speak of non-form. The present, re-written, reworked, is made to speak of the past:

That a solitary person bears
witness to law in the ark to

an altar of snow and every
age or century for a day is

For Howe, poetic form is inherited through refurbishment. I wish poetic language in this book is richer, less reliant on traditional tropes, but the book's formal innovation is stimulating.

Reading hosted by Boog City Newspaper

2011-09-27T21:36:00.000-04:00

Boog City Newspaper, edited by David A. Kirschenbaum, hosted Poets Wear Prada at ACA Galleries in Chelsea tonight. I read with Austin Alexis, Joel Allegretti, Richard Marx Weinraub, Dorinda Wegener, Karen Neuberg, Maria Lisella and Carol Wiezerbicki. It was lovely chatting with Cindy Hochman for a bit, and to learn of her proofreading work. A reunion of sorts took place with Dorothy Friedman August, whom I met at Kate and Ron's writing circle some years ago. Her work struck me then as imaginative and idiosyncratic. Neither Cindy nor Dorothy was there to read, but were there to support their friends. Call our meetings serendipitous.

Poem: "Copy"

2011-09-26T06:42:00.000-04:00

According to Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, by Georges Jean, when medieval scribes overlooked a line of writing, they would write it in the margin or at the bottom of the manuscript, and draw an arrow from it to the place where it should have appeared. The artist would even decorate the arrow with drawings of plants and animals climbing up the line of reparation.

This wonderful detail coalesced with my reading of Susan Howe's That This, a book of poems about her husband's death. The book is made up of three parts. The third part, also the title sequence, "delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal" (back cover). Most of the poems there consist of two couplets separated by stanza break.

I follow that pattern in my poem "Copy" and include a missing line at the bottom of the poem, a line which should be re-inserted into the stanza break, where it belongs, with an arrow. The epigraph is from the first part of Howe's book.

Copy

God is an epigraph

Susan Howe, “The Disappearance Approach”

Scribe and inscribed
with parched minium

gothic black gold tape
a lumina manuscript

the woman writes in

Poems in "Scythe"

2011-09-25T09:23:00.002-04:00

Scythe, a journal edited by Chenelle and Joe Milford, grows out of their poetry radio show. Joe interviewed me way back in 2009, when my book Equal to the Earth was published. Chenelle wrote me a few months ago for some poems. Three of them, after Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, appear in the fall issue. The Milfords' dedication to poetry is heartening.

Spinning Bees

2011-09-24T16:48:00.000-04:00

TLS September 23 2011

from Tim Blanning's review of Craig Koslofsky's Evening's Empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe:

No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky called "nocturnalisation", defined as "the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night", a development to which he awards the status of "a revolution in early modern Europe."

*

The most effective instrument was street-lighting, introduced to Paris in 1667, Lille also in 1667, Amsterdam in 1669, Hamburg in 1673, Turin in 1675, Berlin in 1682, Copenhagen in 1683, and London, where private companies were contracted to provide the service, between 1684 and 1694.

*

It has always been the educated who had demonized folk beliefs, while the common people had made no automatic association between the night and evil or temptation. Particularly resistant, for example, in many parts of northern Europe was the "spinning bee", a nocturnal gathering of women to exchange gossip, stories, refreshment and--crucially--light and heat, as they spun wool or flax. It could also be the site of courtship, as young men could be admitted to add spice to these gatherings. Indeed, an illustration from Nuremberg depicts a regular orgy under way, including a priest "taking care of the cook".

Tagore the Artist at Asia Society

2011-09-22T20:38:00.001-04:00

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) began drawing and painting at the age of sixty-three. He grew up among artists but had no formal training himself. I found his drawings of animals and biomorphic forms and his portraits, on show at Asia Society, beautiful and mesmerizing. He did not title his works because he did not want words to come between the viewer and the artwork, but his lifelong work with words surely influenced his art, and gave him its central conception, that of rhythm. A happy coincidence that I was teaching just then Coleridge's "The Aeolian Harp," in which he describes "the one life within us and abroad" as "rhythm in all thought."

"Seated Woman: forward bend" (c. 1930-31), done with colored ink and watercolors on paper, is a dark enameled egg. The early ink-on-paper work "Striding Bird" (1928) is calligraphy in motion. I did not care so much for Tagore's landscapes, which struck me as rather sentimental and unoriginal. Figures and faces seemed to call forth his imaginative powers.

There were also a beautiful head of Vishnu and a gracious Cambodian (?) vase in the lobby of the Asia Society. The art was worth the visit, even though Leo Bar, the monthly gay happy hour at the Society, was rather stuffy. I have never seen so many suits at a gay party. David, one of the organizers, was nice enough to talk to me while I was waiting in a corner for WL and GH to arrive. But it's unlikely I will go back there for a drink.

Brooklyn Book Festival 2011

2011-09-18T20:56:00.002-04:00

Roxanne was kind enough to invite me to share the table with her press, Poets Wear Prada. Somewhat to my surprise, I managed to sell seven books.

1. A woman quite soon after the start of the festival at 10 AM bought a copy of Seven Studies for her son, an English teacher who loves poetry.

2. Not too long after, another woman dipped into both of my books and bought Equal to the Earth on my recommendation that she get to know my work from the beginning. This sale is especially meaningful to me, for she liked enough what she read to pay for the risk of reading more of a stranger's work.

3. I sold another copy of Equal to a high-school junior who wants to write, and who loves T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg and Cavafy.

4. A woman was thrilled to find Frida Kahlo and Egon Schiele in Seven Studies and bought a copy.

5. A colleague from school bought a copy of Equal.

6. An older gentleman liked what he read of Bob Hart's Lightly in the Good of Day, and bought a copy.

7. A music composer read Equal for a long while, went off, and then wandered back to buy a copy.

Besides my colleague, Sunu and Naomi dropped by too, the latter visiting for the weekend. Perry Brass, who organizes the Rainbow Book Fair, and Jerry Kajpust, who works for the Leslie / Lohman Gay Art Foundation, chatted with us. The day was a little chilly under the tent, but the sun brought the crowds out.

I did not go around the fair but did hear Kenneth Goldsmith speak as a part of a panel on the main stage. He was suited out in pink to play the provocateur, and gartered in pink-and-white-striped socks. After his reading, which I did not stay to hear, he walked past our table with flamboyant nonchalance.

Wild Reeds and Drug Mules

2011-09-17T11:02:00.001-04:00

Last night GH and I watched Wild Reeds (1994), directed by André Téchiné. As an imdb reviewer observes, the film’s slight looseness does not matter in what is essentially, and beautifully, an insightful depiction of French coming-of-age in the time of the Algerian war. The title comes from the La Fontaine fable about the oak and the reed.

François Forestier (Gaël Morel), the model student who discovers he is gay, is the reed. He bends in the wind between the oaks: his Communist girlfriend Maïté Alvarez (Élodie Bouchez), his crush Henri Mariani (Frédéric Gorny), a pied-noir, an Algerian-born Frenchman, and his seducer Serge Bartolo (Stéphane Rideau) who lost his older brother to the war.

Politically uncommitted, sexually undecided, emotionally yearning, François is instrumental in bringing together his friends in the last extended scene of the movie. Swimming in the river or making love on its bank, the teenagers put down for an afternoon their burdens of loss and commitment, and relate to each other as bending reeds.

Maria Full of Grace (2004) was another movie on my Netflix queue for a while. I finally watched it last Friday. First-time director Joseph Marston made the movie after hearing her story from a neighbor in Brooklyn. Shot in documentary style, the film made astonishing use of its low budget. Sharp script (also written by Marston), convincing acting, unfussy cinematography.

Headstrong María Álvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), fired from her job of stripping roses of thorns, made pregnant by a boyfriend that she does not love and refuses to marry, decides to work as a drug mule, entering the USA with sixty-two pellets of cocaine in her stomach. After escaping the dealers, María wanders in a Queens neighborhood that I recognize. I think of Jackson Heights as a place for great Indian food. Gripping stories like María’s walk around in it too.

Poem: "Sex with Big Hands"

2011-09-13T16:29:00.000-04:00

Sex with Big Hands

Desire, sight, Eyes, lips, seeke, see, prove, and find

Lady Mary Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”

I want to hold up a boy’s big hands
and kiss him on his lips, gently first,
feeling the slight shock of contact
pass into a warming, then fitting
like a screw-top on a jar of jam,
when lips become mouths, mobile,
deep, and moist, tongues touching.

You know that moment when
a body that is holding itself in,
looking out, curious, cautious,
from behind a gauzy curtain,
relents and follows itself out
to greet your eager hips gladly,
that moment’s a proof, finding.

Poem: "domed/doomed/deem'd

2011-09-12T16:16:00.000-04:00

domed/doomed/deem'd

This reading light on the poems of Lady Mary Wroth
is like my spot of consciousness. It decodes the marks,
grievous and oddly spelled, as in domed for doomed,
straightens out the urgent inversions, reconstructs
the labyrinth of sense into a familiar sonnet form,
and bathes (and I mean bathes) in the aura borealis.

Just beyond is darkness. Unseen, in the next room,
you finalize your drawings of the church renovation.
You said before, you love knowing that I am near,
hearing the couch sighing, or smelling my coffee,
whereas, submerged in my books, I am oblivious
to your existence, and so you feel outside of love.

Dear, you may be outside the circle of my thought,
but not the influence of love. As Lady Mary Wroth
writes, The knowing part of joye is deem'd the hart.
Know, if you must, a greater part lies in unknowing.
I am more than the heart, more than a reading light,
this coffee, this sighing, this darkness, is love too.

Poem: "Flinch"

2011-09-11T11:57:00.002-04:00

Flinch

Now, ten years later, when someone mentions 9/11,
you have learned not to flinch in your face or freeze,
or to flinch less visibly or to freeze less permanently.

for TS

Poem: "The Cliché"

2011-09-10T11:42:00.000-04:00

The Cliché

My mother will die with a cliché on her mouth—
I’m going to God or Love each other and live—
she will embarrass me even in her last moment,
common as the Kleenex she blows her nose into.

Unlike Rita Dove’s Beulah, she will not think,
with horrified longing, There is no China.
She will not ask what she knows of Africa,
or the equivalent of a land of origin.

As far as she is concerned, China is Africa,
and Africa may as well be China as anything.
She is going to God. She has loved and lived.
My mother will die contented, non-tragic.

Poem: "Paragraph"

2011-09-09T06:35:00.002-04:00

Paragraph

I tell my VI graders my favorite word is freedom.
It is a house with many rooms on a lazy afternoon,
and outside the house an overgrown path runs
to the woods, where a speckled stream gargles.
I tell them freedom is made up of two syllables.
The first sounds like the neighing of a runaway
horse, unbridled muscles in his voice. The second
echoes like a blow on the taut skin of a tom-tom.
And freedom, as all musicians and writers know,
is impossible without the discipline of the drum.
My students are impressed by my improvisation.
They turn to writing their paragraph with a will.
I look out the window of this old school building
and there’s the river, sun-lit, rippling green silk,
heading towards the sea. I don’t tell them the sea.
Or what becomes of a cart-horse with no master.
Or an abandoned house. I gently strike the drum.

Poem: "My Mother's Hips"

2011-09-08T06:19:00.000-04:00

My Mother’s Hips

these hips are big hips

Lucille Clifton, “homage to my hips”

They have a bicycle in them,
my mother’s hips. They move.
They have a washtub in them.
They do. Smell of soap suds.
They have a gas station too.
They don’t have a university
in them, they don’t, no, sir,
they don’t have a battlefield,
but they have training grounds
in Australia, they have India,
and the greatest city on earth,
New York, New York, where
I praise my mother’s hips.

Collective Brightness

2011-09-07T21:14:00.000-04:00

Subtitled LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, the anthology is edited by Kevin Simmonds, published by Sibling Rivalry Press. The first part of my "Bull Eclogues" is reprinted; it looks helpless without the rest of the sequence. I think I may have made a poor decision to publish one part on its own. Many countries are represented in the anthology. I am amused to see Singapore listed immediately after the United States on the back cover. There are three of us in the anthology: Irfan Kasban, Cyril Wong and me. Gay. Singaporean. Poets. No women. It's a shame.

The anthology is very lightly edited. The poems are organized by the poets' names in alphabetical order. The introduction claims a number of firsts, but says little about queer poets' take on spirituality, beyond the general affirmation that through this book queer poetry has taken its place at religion's table. It has nothing to say about the historical relationship between queer poetry and religious faith. No mention even of Whitman and Dickinson, the obvious American precedents. The gap is perhaps just as well since the anthology's ambition is very modest. It aims to provide the general reader with an assortment of poems written by queer poets on matters religious. The poems, without any kind of contextualization, are left to fend for themselves. One that does it well is Benjamin Grossberg's "Beetle Orgy," which gives the anthology its name.

Poem: "Love and Lawlessness"

2011-09-07T08:23:00.000-04:00

Love and Lawlessness

But love is lawlesse, every wight doth know

Isabella Whitney, “The lamentation of a Gentilwoman upon the death of her late deceased friend William Gruffith Gent”

We know it, but we know it suddenly
as a tree knows itself in a lightning-storm.
We know it fearfully, so most of the time
we’d rather not know it but fill in the form,
bring our own bags for bagging the grocery,
tear up the number, find an easy rhyme.

We know it, but we know it secretly
as a vineyard knows itself in the dark.
We know it nightly, so most of the day
we don’t remember it but hear the dog bark
with a deep blue sound, fumble with the key,
novelize a western township in decay.

We know it, but we know it privately
as a tulip knows itself in a tulip bed.
We know it flashily, so most of the thaw
we open to the sun our hearts and heads.
We know it and we know it defiantly,
but two is the beginning of the law.

Poem: "Indian Verandah"

2011-09-02T13:07:00.001-04:00

Indian Verandah

Sister, you live in a very private place

Meena Alexander, “Red Parapet”

I will visit you in New Delhi
in March, when school is out.

I will see your strange house,
verandah closing it around,

more like an old Malay palace
in Singapore than any rented

apartment in New York. I will
ask Raymond when he’s home

about managing a country’s oil
market, but say little about life

with Guy. I will run with Liesel
and read to Hannah the books

that she is fast out-growing. I
will be driven by your driver

through the old city, which will
remind me of the four long days

I was stuck in Calcutta when
my plane had engine trouble.

I will think that an itinerary
is always also an interruption.

In the relative coolness of
morning, I will sit with you

on the verandah, sipping tea
poured by your housekeeper,

both of us brightly polite
to her, neither of us used

to being served in our house,
if not by our young mother,

the tea strong, hot and sweet,
loose leaves from Dunagiri,

the air alive with insect
chirping and whirring,

which I cannot identify
and neither can you,

but you recall mornings,
before the girls were up,

when you came out into
the light and felt it wet,

and I listening to you speak
will close the time difference.

Lawson Fusao Inada's "Drawing the Line"

2011-09-01T09:45:00.001-04:00

Inada's book of poems pays his respect to his elders, those in his family and beyond. It opens with a prose meditation on a photograph of Inada as a young boy and his paternal grandmother. There are poems to his grandparents and a long prose-poem to a larger-than-life uncle who made all kinds of horticultural life thrive in his "personal atmosphere." There are also love poems to his big Latina sisters and his fellow Latina brothers, with whom he grew up in their neighborhood in Fresno, California. A poem in 20 sections pays tribute to hardworking Hiroshi from Hiroshima, who migrated from Japan to work in Inada's grandfather's fish-store. There is a hint in the poem that Hiroshi is his grandfather's son from another family he had in Japan. These family portraits are drawn with so much love and admiration that it seems callous to ask for a more critical perspective. However, when in the poem "Picture," Inada invites the reader, and everyone, to join his family portrait, I think he empties the trope of family too much in order to extend his hospitality.

The language of the poems is very plain, enlivened by Californian colloquialism and Japanese expressions. The pace is very relaxed. At many points, plainness lapses into explicitness, which robs the poetry of the power of suggestion. Relaxation can also lapse into laxness. There is an attractive mischievousness running through the book, but the wit sometimes devolves into an irritating love of puns and homonyms. Inada loves to play with opposites, most variously in the poems "This One, That One" and "Over Here, Over There," most poignantly in the poem about Hiroshi, whose two expressions mezu-rah-shi (his way of saying "how special!") and moht-tai-nai (a combination of "what a shame" and "what a waste") describe first the fish-store, then the city dump, and finally the world.

The last poem of the book, also the title poem, remembers a different kind of ancestor. Yosh Kuromiya was one of the young men who resisted the draft after the government had interned him and his community in concentration camps during World War Two. Inada's plain language becomes eloquent in meditating on what it means for the young man to "draw the line." In the process the line changes from a line of resistance to the silhouette of Heart Mountain, which overlooked the camp. The simple line drawing becomes three-dimensional.

Tragedy in London, Nixon in China

2011-08-31T23:27:00.000-04:00

Bluebird, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, and written by Simon Stephens, at Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2 this afternoon. Strong performance by Simon Russell Beale as a London cab driver whose reticence elicits life-stories from his fares. He reveals at the end that he has a harrowing story of his own. LW and I ran into the actor at the Grey Dog Cafe after the show. He was very pleasant when LW told him how fantastic he was in the play.

Then I watched John Adams's opera Nixon in China on HD screen at Lincoln Center Plaza tonight. Act 3, in which the Americans get roped into the story of the Communist Revolution is engagingly dramatic. The other acts are a little weird for my taste. The libretto seemed to be a patchwork of pseudo-philosophical statements and banal facts. The music with its minimalist repetitions is slightly more interesting. The opera has a kind of crude boldness that is more American than Chinese.

Gluck's "Iphigénie en Tauride"

2011-08-30T10:45:00.000-04:00

Last night, with LW and AG, watched Iphigénie en Tauride by Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck. On the big screen, as it was, a part of the Met Opera’s annual HD Summer Festival. The plot reworks a play by Euripides, in which Iphigénie is not sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, but is rescued by Diana. Held captive by the Scythians, she (a passionate Susan Graham) is forced to conduct their human sacrifices as a high priestess.

The drama really begins when the Scythians capture her brother Orestes (Plácido Domingo), still fleeing from the Furies unleashed by his killing of his mother in revenge for her murder of his father and her husband. A terribly ironic cycle would be complete if Iphigénie kills her brother as a Scythian sacrifice to the gods. The seemingly inevitable tragic ending is complicated and delayed by Pylades (marvelous Paul Groves), Orestes’ companion in his flight, who loves Orestes enough to die for him. He is the only guiltless one, unlike the House of Atreus.

At the end, the circle of family killings is saved from completion when Orestes and Iphigénie finally realize who the other is, or, in Orestes’ words, “where I am.” Diana is lowered down to stop the fighting between the Scythians and the Greeks, as if to say that though we cannot be pure in the world, we can be purified through suffering.

The production, by Stephen Wadsworth, was quite beautiful. The stage was divided by a very thick wall between the temple glowering in red and the outside freezing in blue. Inside or out. Guilty or innocent. Life or death. The wall separates but also joins.

Four British Films in Two Weeks

2011-08-29T16:23:00.000-04:00

Put them on record before I forget. Two triumphs over adversity, though the triumphs are very different, as are the adversities. In The King's Speech, directed by Tom Hooper, King George VI (Colin Firth) overcomes his stutter with the help of his speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) to speak to his people at the outbreak of World War II. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1 watched on my laptop and Part 2 in the theater), directed by David Yates, the schoolboy wizard (Daniel Radcliffe) manages to destroy the horcruxes and so put an end to the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes).

There are similarities between the films, however. King George VI's speech impediment is pinned by the film on his feelings of inadequacy, in particular, in failing to live up to his father's expectations. Potter too has big shoes to fill, those of his father who was the golden boy of Hogwarts, and who died fighting against Voldemort. He is also the spiritual son of headmaster Dumbledore. Both sons prove themselves true heirs by the end, one inspiring the British Empire to fight against the Axis powers, the other inspiring the British Boarding School to fight against the forces of darkness. Lineage is the sub-text of these two British films.

The other two films also center on sons, but these sons are estranged from their family to become artists. In Brideshead Revisited, the film directed by Julian Jarrold, Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is drawn to Brideshead because it is so completely opposite of his home and father. Love Is the Devil, subtitled Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, directed by John Maybury, does not show anything about the painter's Anglo-Irish background, but its black-out only makes visible the missing family in Bacon's circle of friends and lovers. So here is another myth: that one must disavow one's family to re-invent oneself. It helps, in the re-invention, if one falls in love with someone of the same sex, as Ryder did for Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), and Bacon (Derek Jacobi) did for George Dyer (Daniel Craig). It helps to break the rules.

Ruth Pitter's "Collected Poems"

2011-08-28T11:21:00.002-04:00

Ruth Pitter lived in the twentieth century (1897-1992), but her poetry lives in an earlier time. It refuses to acknowledge Matthew Arnold's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of faith, but struggles in isolation with religious doubt and meaning. As such, it is, on occasion, a powerfully individual poetry, but it is also radically cut off from the most significant movements of her time. The refusal to engage with Modernism and its aftermath stunts the poetry. The slightly archaic diction and windy abstractions persist into the late poems. The use of traditional verse forms (including the heroic couplet) evinces individual skill but makes no larger argument, unlike the work of Eliot, Auden and Larkin. A few late poems grapple with modern science, but the main thematic development in the Collected Poems is from the observation of nature to the description of dreams-visions, a movement backwards in time, from Romanticism to medievalism.

The nature poems, from the start, are keenly observant. What makes a few of them memorable is the addition of black humor. "Maternal Love Triumphant," which opens the Collected Poems so promisingly, speaks in the voice of a "Virtuous Female Spider," who eats her mate to keep her strength up for her unborn babies. After their birth, she feeds them by killing two bluebottle-lovers and a host of silly butterflies. Convinced that a mother's love "bears no blame," she looks forward to her heavenly reward when she dies. The complacent self-justification is developed through ten ballad octaves rhyming ababcaca, the first a and the last a using the same word. The poem is virtuosic in a very attractive manner.

Another memorable method is the complete and convincing transmutation of nature to meaning. In "Stormcock in Elder," the cock perching on the broken roof of the speaker's hermitage is described with gorgeous detail:

The large eye, ringed with many a ray
Of minion feathers, finely laid,
The feet that grasped the elder-spray:
How strongly used, how subtly made
The scale, the sinew, and the claw,
Plain through the broken roof I saw;

The flight-feathers in tail and wing,
The shorter coverts, and the white
Merged into russet, marrying
The bright breast to the pinions bright,
Gold sequins, spots of chestnut, shower
Of silver, like a brindled flower.

The language owes a great deal to Hopkins (minion, bright breast, brindled) but is made over into the speaker's own acute observation of her bird. The splendor described here earns Pitter the right to compare the brightness of the stormcock to the glory of the angel Gabriel at the end of the poem.

The felicitous use of the technical terms "flight-feathers" and "coverts" indicates how possible it was for Pitter to go the way of Marianne Moore. But she did not, perhaps because she was finally seeking not a way to live on earth, but a way to transcend nature. Moore's favorite critter is land-based and armored--the pangolin is functional, adaptable, paradoxical. Pitter's favorite creature is ornithological--nightingale, bird of paradise, phoenix, sparrow, stockdove, lark, swan, cygnet, sandmartin, cuckoo, crow, robin, chaffinch, owl, goose, swift--figures for song, flight and transcendence.

One of her best poems, an allegorical lyric, "The Bird in the Tree," says it best. Looking at "that tree" and its "haunting bird," the loves of her heart, the speaker asks, "where is the word, the word,/ O where is the art?" Desirous and unsatisfied, the poem prays:

O give me before I die
   The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
   The Bird and the Tree.

The song in the living green,
   The Tree and the Bird--
O have they ever been seen,
   Ever been heard?

The poem has the jewel-like clarity of a medieval illuminated manuscript.

The "living green" is evoked in many poems about plants and trees, another of Pitter's favorite subjects. The best of these green poems is "Morning Glory," which achieves the Blakean aim of seeing the universe in a grain of sand. But more interesting to me is the path not chosen, the moving post-war poem "Funeral Wreaths," in which plant life is already dead. It begins with uncharacteristic directness:

In the black bitter drizzle, in rain and dirt,
The wreaths are stacked in the factory entrance-yard.
People gather about them. Nobody's hurt
At the rank allusion to death. Down on the hard
Cobblestones go the painted girls on their knees
To read what the foot-ball club has put on the card.
There is interest, and delight, and a sense of ease.

The matter-of-fact tone is all the moving for being so matter-of-fact. The wreaths are "stacked." We are not at a shepherd's hut or autumnal grove, but at the entrance-yard of a factory. The wry speaker of "Nobody's hurt" sees the ironies in the all-too-human behavior of the "painted girls." The music of the verse is so subtle and personal that we may not notice the end-rhymes at first. These opening lines strike a "modern" note not heard elsewhere in Riiter's work. But the poem continues with one of her favorite devices, the asking of rhetorical questions:

Is it only that flowers smell sweet, and are pretty and right,
Or because of the senseless waste of so many pounds,
Or because in that dreadful place the unwonted sight
Of a heap of blossom is balm to unconscious wounds--
The mortal wounds that benumb, not the sharp raw pains
Of the daily misery, but the fatal bleeding inside?

These questions upset the balance in the earlier lines between observation and attitude. They are undigested ideas. They reveal other faults in Pitter's style too: the archaism of "unwonted," "balm" and "benumb"; the cliches of "senseless waste," "mortal wounds" and "daily misery"; the over-modification. Then, after a transitional thought, also untransformed--"Here is the supernatural to be bought with the gains/ Of the spectral torment," Pitter hits upon the surprising image of the hearse as a luxury sedan. And she is off, combining description and allegory in her inimitable manner:

The soul can go for a ride with the rich young dead.
It makes you feel like a wedding. The Gates Ajar,
The Broken Column, the Pillow with "Rest in Peace,"
The sham Harp with its tinsel string allusively bust,
The three-quid Cross made of flaring anemones,
The gibbetted carnations with steel wires thrust
Right through their ranking midriffs, the skewered roses,
Tulips turned inside-out for a bolder show,
Arum lilies stuck upright in tortured poses
Like little lavatory-basins.

It is a fantastic imagining of gain and loss, of life and death. Overwhelmed by its own vision, it vomits into those "little lavatory-basins." Alas, the poet feels the need to control the power of these lines by instructing the reader: "This is the efflorescence of godless toil," and by resorting to another favorite device, that of ventriloquism ("We are the lost, betrayed ones. We are the Crowd./ Think for you must do something to let us in."). Despite of its unevenness, or perhaps because of it, this poem shows how Pitter could have "modernized" herself while retaining her former strengths. The later dream poems have a certain eerie beauty, but nothing of the "intolerable wrestle with words and meaning" (T. S. Eliot) evinced in the strongest parts of this poem.

The Vital Gay Universe

2011-08-26T09:55:00.001-04:00

Eshuneutics' seven-part review of Seven Studies for a Self Portrait gives itself away: it examines the poetry with generous attention, and reveals the reviewer's own disposition. Here is a man who is highly critical of any weak versions of what it means to be a gay poet, just as he is of any limited interpretation of the context and influences of a work of poetry. He calls for forceful expression and broad sympathy in writing and reviewing. Sincerity, that supposedly discredited Romantic criterion, is bolstered by knowledge and judgment, and so becomes hard-earned authority.

Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven.

Hermione Lee's "Virginia Woolf"

2011-08-24T21:16:00.004-04:00

Hermione Lee's Woolf is a major Modernist who in conscious reaction against Victorian society and in artistic competition with other modern writers (Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, among others) set herself formal problems and solved them in her novels. Revealing is her process of writing. The intensity of writing a complete first draft gripped her but the coldness of revision was repugnant. She revised with great reluctance and labor, for re-reading what she wrote often shook her confidence in the writing. She was to the end of her life terrified of being laughed at. Despite her concern with form, when she tried to define to herself the essence of literature, she settled on "emotion."

To argue for Woolf's significance, the biography also attends carefully to the political writing, primarily A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. In doing so, it shows convincingly how Woolf developed her feminism in response to her traditional upbringing, the women's suffrage movement, the male-dominated literary marketplace and the rise of Fascism. She was more than the delicate envelope of human consciousness, she was also an acute analyst of contemporary history. To marginalize her analysis because it focused on gender relations is itself a political act.

Lee does not attempt to excuse Virginia's personal faults, for instance, her snobbishness and petty cruelty. Instead, she shows from Virginia's diary and letters that the writer was well aware of her shortcomings, and experienced much internal self-contradiction. Virginia gave to others what she could spare from her bouts with madness and with writing. She shared the anti-semitism of her age but her marriage to Jewish Leonard gave both much happiness, and almost certainly enabled her to write. Her love for her sister Vanessa, fellow novelist Vita Sackville-West and composer Ethel Smythe caused much jealousy, anxiety and heartache, but she was never in doubt that her life lay with Leonard.

The command of detail in this biography is astonishing. So much was read, considered and synthesized in this 755-page tome. The portraits of the Bloomsbury group are lively. The writing is lucid and graceful, sympathetic yet exact. Lee has a particular feeling for describing Virginia's homes, in the country or in London, a sensitivity that goes well with the writer's life-long meditation on and in rooms. The description of World War II gives the narrative a natural climax, but the war did not cause Virginia to drown herself, Lee makes clear. The cause was the fear of the onset of another season of insanity. Having lived through at least two major bouts of madness, Virginia did not want to, could not, do it again.

Eshuneutics reviews "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait"

2011-08-22T20:30:00.000-04:00

Eshuneutics is writing a seven-part review of Seven Studies for a Self Portrait, and has posted Parts 1 to 3 so far. Part 1 examines the significance of the collection as a book of gay poetry. Its emphasis on my attempt to "give style" to disparate experiences is completely accurate. Part 2 is a more philosophical meditation on the spiritual ethos of the book. Part 3 reads the opening title sequence closely for its poetic strategy and music. The on-going review looks set to complement Nicholas Liu's QLRS review very nicely.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab

2011-08-21T21:22:00.002-04:00

Visited the BMW Guggenheim Lab at Houston and Second Avenue today. The disused lot, wedged between two apartment buildings, is now occupied by a mobile structure that hosts community discussions, lectures and film screenings. It is designed by Tokyo architecture film Atelier Bow-Wow as "a traveling toolbox."

On its website, the project is billed as

a mobile laboratory traveling to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Led by international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents in the areas of urbanism, architecture, art, design, science, technology, education, and sustainability, the Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. Its goal is the exploration of new ideas, experimentation, and ultimately the creation of forward-thinking solutions for city life.

On a bulletin board, titled "Legacy of the Lab," at the actual site, was a list of bullet points that seemed to be a summary of a round-table discussion on sustainability. The first point was "produce locally." The second was "don't buy from China." Good old-fashioned protectionism in the guise of forward-thinking solutions.

Reading Hermione Lee's "Virginia Woolf"

2011-08-20T12:39:00.002-04:00

It is a big book, 761 pages, and I am only at page 490 after working at it for two weeks. The mastery of detail is dazzling, the letters, the diaries, the writings, the biographies, the gossip, not just of Virginia, but also of her family and friends. Lee has a particular feeling for houses, just as Virginia had, and she describes them with much atmosphere. A tally of the houses:

Talland House, the Stephens' beloved childhood summer house at St. Ives; 22 Hyde Park Gate, the family's Victorian home in London; the convivial house shared by Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian, after their parents' death, at Gordon Square in Bloomsbury; the unhappy house shared with Adrian at Fitzroy Square after Thoby's death and Vanessa's marriage to Clive Bell; No. 38 Brunswick Square, where Virginia rented rooms to Maynard Keynes and his lover Duncan Grant, and, later, Leonard Woolf; Asheham, where Virginia and Leonard spent the first night of their marriage; Monk's House in the village of Rodmell, Sussex, above the Ouse valley. Houses, and the room they afford, are a vital motif in Virginia's writing. Besides the obvious Jacob's Room and A Room of One's Own, one think of the house from which Clarissa plunges into London, and to which she returns to host her party.

My own thoughts are full of home and rooms too. GH and I moved into this apartment on the Upper West Side at the end of February. We have lived here for six months, the months of early spring and summer, half of our one-year lease. It felt like a vacation home at the beginning, but after returning from hotels and friends' houses, it feels like home home. Two days ago, someone stuck a notice on the inner vestibule glass door: "An apartment was broken into. Please don't buzz anyone in you are not expecting." Just before reading the notice, on my way in after a run, I was jingling my keys, and thinking, the small key for the big door, the big key for the small.

John Updike's "In the Beauty of the Lilies" (1996)

2011-08-19T09:50:00.001-04:00

It is a tour-de-force, a novel that telescopes 80 years of American history through the lives of four characters. A Presbyterian minister who loses his faith. A young man who fears the world and so settles for the routine of mail delivery. A Hollywood star. A joiner of a religious cult. What connects them is family, for the cult follower is the son of the Hollywood star, who is the daughter of the mailman, who is the son of the minister. Through these four generational representatives, Updike traces the loss of religious faith in American society, and its attempted replacement by cinematic and fanatic illusions.

And yet the characters are no mere tools. I finish reading the novel, feeling that I have lived with Clarence, Teddy, Essie, and Clark, that they are people I could have known had I lived in their time and place. Their realism is borne out not only by the acute observations and evocative language of the novel, but also by the clear motive force in their psychology. The same intellectual idealism that drove Clarence in his theological studies leads to his spiritual crisis. The sharp descent in the family's status and wealth causes Teddy's insecurities. Petted and pampered by her parents, though for different reasons, Essie grows to believe that she is the center of the universe. Neglected by a celebrity mother, Clark turns to one who gives him a sense of destiny. These people are not hard to understand. The same continuities that tie them together as a family appear in their individual characters. They develop but they don't change. There is no radical break in family or character.

When all is clear, all is too clear. And here is my reservation about the novel: though it struggles with the dark topics of religious doubt and death, it betrays a certain optimism in its power to illuminate the struggle. On the plot level, the optimism reveals itself at the end in an act of heroism. Despite everything, Updike seems to say, there is hope. James Wood in London Review of Books (quoted in Wikipedia) expresses the criticism more trenchantly:

For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.

What Wood describes, stripped of its negative evaluation, is characteristic of Comedy. Updike may be usefully seen as a comedic writer. Wood's judgment, like mine, may, finally, say more about the spirit of our times than about the novel. The Tragic is, we think, a more suitable mode for representing our world. We want our literature to render us speechless.

Nicholas Liu reviews "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait"

2011-08-17T10:47:00.002-04:00

I think Nick has written an excellent review, not merely because he admires my book, and therefore shows good taste, but because he displays the informed and critical sympathy that a reviewer should have.

Koh Jee Leong's fine, if uneven, first book (Equal to the Earth, 2009) demonstrated at once his capacity for restraint and his willingness to sacrifice good taste in the service of a larger aesthetic aim. Sensibility and spirit have now crystallised into a mission, and Koh doesn't care who knows it. Or rather, he cares very much indeed. Not since kensai's ill-fated Maiden (2002) has a collection of Singapore poetry in English wanted to matter as much as does Seven Studies for a Self Portrait. Beginning with its summative, triply-alliterative title and its somewhat over-literal cover (seven photographs of the poet!), the book advertises its project loudly, erects its own museum placard. To top it off, Koh selects an opening quotation from Nietszche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident." A mighty epigraph, demanding a mighty book.

By my lights, it is exactly that.... More

Marjorie Perloff's "Unoriginal Genius"

2011-08-15T12:11:00.001-04:00

From the point of view of this skeptical non-reader of avant-garde poetry, Perloff's book is an excellent introduction to the New Poetics of the twenty-first century. The new poetry, according to Perloff, is the poetry of citation and appropriation, a poetry that confronts the present-day challenge of managing, presenting and reframing the information so readily and abundantly available through the new technologies such as the Internet. Older poetry cited and appropriated too, but, Perloff argues, the new poetry does so to such an extent that it becomes a different kind. The inspiration for it is not so much Eliot's "The Waste Land" as Pound's Cantos, where citation becomes structural.

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, which Perloff discusses in her first chapter, is also a source of inspiration. In its organization into folders, its juxtaposition of quotations, its non-linear index, and its use of symbols to link one quotation to another on a different page, it resembles the contemporary website.

Her second chapter examines the legacy of Brazilian concrete poetry. To defend it against the charge of the "iconic fallacy," or Cratylism--the belief that the sound and visual properties of a word have mimetic value--Perloff distinguishes between two types of concrete poetry. The father of concrete poetry, the Swiss Eugen Gomringer, strove to simplify a poem into a sign or an object that is easily comprehensible. The Brazilian concretists, who started out with Gomringer but soon diverged, and who called themselves Noigandres, were as concerned with the semantics of a word/poem as with its look and sound. The group, which includes the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, and Decio Pignatari, sees itself as recovering the discoveries of the earlier avant-garde (Pound and Mallarme), discoveries which never integrated into the mainstream due to the disruption of the world wars. It also discovers in the Internet the right medium for their concrete poetry.

In Chapter Three Perloff approaches Charles Bernstein's libretto Shadowtime through the lens of the Oulipo. Founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau, the Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle invents important poetic constraints for the generation of literature. Its exemplar is Georges Perec's novel La disparition, where the disappearance of the vowel e points to the elimination of eux (them) by the Nazis in World War II. Though Bernstein's Shadowtime is too eclectic to be considered strictly an Oulipo work, its eclecticism is rule-bound and so dramatizes the obsession of its protagonist, Walter Benjamin, with ordering a very disorderly life. It exemplifies the Oulipo axiom "A text written according to a constraint describes the constraint."

The next chapter, on Susan Howe's The Midnight, I find the least interesting. The juxtaposition of original poetry, documents, photos and pictures of objects in Howe's elegy for her mother already feels dated and conventional as a method. The method is too consumable, too pretty. Like Anne Carson's Nox. More resistant to market relations are the exophonic and multilingual writing discussed in the following chapter, but the works of Caroline Bergvall and Yoko Tawada analyzed here strike me as trite.

Most stimulating is Perloff's interpretation, in the last chapter, of Kenneth Goldsmith's book-length poem Traffic, the second part of his New York trilogy. The work is a result of the application of the ideas of Conceptual art to poetry. In his appropriation of Sol LeWitt, Goldsmith writes in his "Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing" that "the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an author uses a conceptual form of writing, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the text." Traffic comprises the twenty-four-hour WINS traffic reports that take place on a big holiday weekend. But what seems literal transcription Perloff shows to be carefully selected and shaped. It conforms to the Aristotelian unities; it moves from exposition to complication(s) to resolution. Its hyperreality becomes surreal: it becomes metaphoric. But would anyone, beside a literary critic, read it? Perloff quotes John Cage who quotes a Zen koan: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting."

In her Afterword, Perloff points out that, even in a poetry of appropriation, poetic choice is necessary, and so personal taste is involved. To my mind, that does not make genius unoriginal; it locates originality in a different place, in the idea, perhaps, instead of the execution. Some people will see this as unnecessarily limiting: why not be original in both idea and execution, instead of choosing one or the other? But such a limitation has produced a very different kind of poetry. The fact remains that every kind of poetry is produced by a certain set of limitations. Limits are necessary to art. The fun now appears to be exchanging one set of limitations for another. The difficulty is in choosing a set of limitations that resonate now and for a very long time.

SSSP Review in "Tidningen Kulturen"

2011-08-14T11:49:00.001-04:00

Freke Räihä reviews Seven Studies for a Self Portrait for Tidningen Kulturen, a Swedish magazine of culture. The review, in English, is strongly impressionistic. Some of its phrasing, as in "nakedness amplified," is as salty as it describes the poetry to be.

Neighborhoods in SF

2011-08-13T13:13:00.002-04:00

GH's birthday yesterday. We planned an easy day, lunch in a park overlooking the city, and dinner at Ideale, which he had tried unsuccessfully twice to get in. In the morning we shopped in Haight-Ashbury. The neighborhood has completed the process of gentrification that I saw starting two years ago. I bought two nice fitting shirts at the boutique Villains. We looked around the shop aptly called Creepy Crawly Things. We bought lunch at a deli and supermarket, and walked up Buena Vista Park. On top, four hippy-looking young people, two guys and two girls, had parked themselves at the best view. The two girls were doing yoga on the circular lawn. One said that they should form a sundial.

We walked down the hill to Castro, and enjoyed the relaxed Friday atmosphere. Then we went to the downtown architecture bookshop William Stout. I read in the store a book of photography about Louis Sullivan. The extracts from Kindergarten Chats combined uncompromising individualism and spiritual democracy. GH loves Peter Zumthor's writing, and so I bought his Thinking Architecture for him. I want to read it too.

Dinner at Ideale in North Beach was good but not outstanding. We went to the bar Rebel to meet his friend, who drove us to watch his friend fo a shower show at Truck, another gay bar. The two shower boys were ripped but the shower stood poorly lit in a negligible corner of the bar. The friend drove us to Club Dragon in SoMA, where GH and I had a good time dancing. It was not as crowded as I remembered it.

Collectors and Promoters: the Steins

2011-08-12T12:38:00.001-04:00

The Steins Collect at the SFMoMA is a big show. it reunites the collections of Gertrude, Leo, and Michael and Sarah Stein, dispersed after their deaths. Gertrude and Leo collected both Matisse and Picasso, among other artists, until they quarreled over Picasso's turn to Cubism. Leo rejected Picasso and became contented with looking at Matisse's new work in exhibition. Gertrude continued to champion Picasso, but not Matisse, for she saw an analogue in the Spanish master's experiments in forms to her own avant-gardism in writing. Michael and Sarah remained faithful to Matisse, who loved their son Allan and painted him many times. Portraits of Michael and Sarah by Matisse were hung in pride of place in their house.

There were so many Matisse works in the show that it was impossible to do them justice on one visit. I was enchanted by joyous colors of The Girl with Green Eyes, as well as a small delicate drawing of Madame Matisse in the olive grove. The Conversation, a painting of two women, was very beautiful. Matisse looked at women with so much tenderness. The force came from the desire to get the vision right.

Nearby the Jewish Contemporary Center mounted a complementary show, focusing on Gertrude Stein. The five stories, in the show title, organized her life into artists' images of Stein, Stein's domestic partnership with Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude's friendships with other artists, Gertrude's later celebrity, and her posthumous influence. The first story was most interesting of the five. In it, Gertrude changes in her pictures from a modern girl to a Buddha to a Caesar and to a matronly yet butch figure. She exploited the power of the image to enhance her power and prestige, a venture ably supported by Cecil Beaton, George Platt Lynn, and Carl van Vechten, among others.

The second story documented how well Alice ran the household while Gertrude conducted her literary and artistic affairs. Interesting here were the photos showing the two women using the conventions of spousal photography to suggest their committed union. I did wish that the show said more about others' reaction to the couple or the dynamics of the relationship. How did Alice see her role in the relationship? The images depict her as a wife, in the shadow of the dominating Gertrude. Was Alice happy with that subservient role?

The show was admirably frank about Gertrude's friendships with men, who had more power than women to promote her. Gay men, more likely than straight men to admire her unapologetic lesbianism, were also more inclined than straight men to surrender to her patronage or to collaborate in work. Gertrude wrote the words for Four Saints in Three Acts, while Virgil Thomson wrote the music for it. His lover provided the dramatic contexts that made sense of Stein's word experiments. The pigeons are in the grass alas. The opera debuted in America with an all-black cast. A great publicity stunt.

The last two stories were disappointing, the fourth chronicling Gertrude's triumphant tour of the USA, the last a paltry display of playbills, and less-than-inspired art cramped together in a corner. It is sad that Stein's influence on literature is not examined. The show was captivated by Gertrude's self-image.

The Hesse Collection

2011-08-11T11:54:00.028-04:00

We enjoyed our stay at Caymus Rancho so much that we were quite sad to leave it: the private balcony where GH sketched, I read, and we drank and read while watching the sun set; the tree outside the window in the morning, with leaves in gentle Pissarro colors; the old wooden floor; the split level which elevated the sleeping area, and so gave going to bed a sense of ceremony; and the movie loans for the end of a long, sunshine-saturated day.

The Hesse Collection was off the beaten track and on higher ground. The gardens were bursting with flowers and the lotus pond was a long stone rectangle. The art museum was subtly joined to the winery. I loved Robert Motherwell's Open No. 88 for its achieved sense of balance and proportion, while showing its process in the form of erased lines. It inspired me to think about incorporating process into my polish. I also liked Surface Tension, a netting made with twigs pinned together with hawthorn thorns only, no glue or nails. Made by a Scottish artist, Andy Goldsworthy, the netting focused attention through the intriguing device of a hole in the net. Then two big paintings, both named In the Beginning in German, by Anselm Kiefer, were monumental and strangely moving. They were anguished attempts to begin all over again.

The winery did not permit picnics on its beautiful grounds, but we found a lovely spot in Mont la Salle, a Christian Brothers conference and retreat center, next to the winery. Beside a group of tall redwoods, we ate our cheese and wine, chicken salad pasta and fruit. GH drove us back to SF, over the Golden Gate Bridge, its tops again covered with fog. We visited Baker's Beach and wondered how anyone could enjoy the beach in such cold. After driving through Golden Gate Park, we returned the Dodge, and checked into Kensington Park Hotel near Union Square. We had a very good dinner at Cafe Claude, a chic French restaurant in an alley off Sutter Street. We met a friend of GH for a drink at a bar near Church muni station, whose name has Owl in it.

Napa Valley

2011-08-10T14:15:00.001-04:00

A walk along shady Rutherford Crossroad while GH ran, and then continental breakfast at the hotel. A lazy morning reading papers and Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies. We visited Rubicon Estate owned by Francis Ford Coppola, and admired its manicured grounds and house. There was an interesting display of magic lanterns. Behind glass windows and doors dusty vintage wines slept on undisturbed shelves, wines bottled as early as 1946. Drove to Calistoga, walked up and down its Main Street shops, and had lunch at a diner that is more than 100 years old.

Clos Pegase was designed by American architect Michael Graves in an eclectic style that combines a Spanish courtyard, Greek pillars and geometric forms. GH was inspired by him to turn from designing teapots to designing buildings. Many sculptures stood around the grounds. I especially liked the mobile sculpture of George Rickey. Its two lancets rotated on their own center, and as they swung gently with the breeze they danced towards and away from each other in a mesmerizing manner. Inside the house were artworks by the likes of Matta and Jean Dubuffet. There was a painting of a gorilla skull on a green background by Francis Bacon. Huge antique French barrels stood on both sides of the beautifully proportioned wine storage room.

At Rombauer the pride of place was not given over to art but to nature. Standing on a hillside, it gave stunning views of the valley vineyards and opposite hills. The gardens were carefully cultivated, the wandering paths among them charming. GH and I liked the Rombauer merlot and chardonnay, and bought a bottle of each. GH took us on a long drive around Lake Hennessey. It was lovely to be up closer to the hill tops. The lake was dammed to pipe water to the valleys. On the way back to the hotel, we tried Caymus but the wine tasting was over. We walked over to Beaulieu too but did not fancy its crowded tasting room and commercial atmosphere. We liked very much St. Helena's Olive Oil Company, and tasted it's delicious olive oils, jams, honey infused with truffle, and smelled its soaps and lotions.

We had GH's birthday dinner at the Culinary Institute of America. His birthday is this Friday, but he wanted to eat at this special place. We had a drink on the outside patio and watched the darkening hills. We had dinner inside the restaurant where we could enjoy watching the chefs in training cook in the open kitchen. GH had a vegetable risotto while I had a crispy chicken confit. Both were well constructed and blended, simple but delicious. It was a lovely end to the day.