His Name Is Love

My poem "I Am My Names" appears in Zócalo Public Square, with an expressive black-and-white photo by Paolo Aquino. The poetry editor Colette Labouff asked me to submit after getting my name from Jonathan Farmer. With this pub, and the later appearance of "A Lover's Recourse" in At Length, only one out of the seven sequences in my next book remains unpublished. I guess a book should give something unavailable elsewhere, besides bringing together in an organized whole an entire conception.

*

Watched Puccini's Turandot last Saturday night. The seats in Lincoln Center Plaza were almost all gone an hour before the screening. Found a place in the third row, where the view was not bad at all. Simple story stretched out to operatic length. Princess Turandot requires her suitors to answer her three riddles or be beheaded. The young prince Calàf answers the riddles but gives her a chance by asking her to find out his name. She tortures his slave girl Liù to get his name, but the latter refuses to answer. Touched by the slave's love for her master, Turandot yields to Calàf's kiss and so experiences passion for the first time. Asked for his name the next morning, she replies it is Love, an answer that is both wrong and right, both defeat and victory.

Maria Guleghina as Turandot was a compelling singer, but did not have the looks that would make anyone believe that Calàf fell in love on catching a glimpse of her. Marcello Giordani was not young enough to be the prince. Marina Poplavskaya was too proud to be a slave girl. That was a lot of disbelief to suspend. The music, however, was glorious, Calàf's night aria, the Chinese folk song that heralded Turandot's appearances, the final chorus.

Of the five operas I watched during the Met's Summer in HD Festival, the one I enjoyed most was Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. I must sue to know Mr. Strauss better.

*

Had a great time with GH on Fire Island last Sunday and Monday. He slept over at my place, and we took the LIRR from Woodside Station. The beach was a little too windy on the first day, but the weather was perfect on the next. Cherry Grove was thick with lesbians over the Labor Day weekend. Next time, we are going to stay at the Pines.



Photo by GH

Comments

Anonymous said…
"I guess a book should give something unavailable elsewhere, besides bringing together in an organized whole an entire conception."

Absolutely.
1:13 PM
Jee Leong said…
Heard you. :-)
6:15 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more