Only through time time is conquered (Books - Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden)

Deirdre Madden, an Irish fiction writer, is one of my favorite authors writing today.  Her work is elegantly structured, economical, her characters drawn with precision and warmth, and her stories often capture an ordinary person confronting the unordinary.  She subtly explores the discomfort that results and creates for the reader the impression that these surprises are what makes a life worth living.  In no book does that seem truer than in her latest: Time Present and Time Past (Europa Editions, 2014). 

What we go to art for (Books - Artful by Ali Smith)

I fell over a review of Ali Smith's Artful (The Penguin Press, 2012) by happenstance this past week, thought it sounded interesting, and then walked into my favorite bookshop the next day looking for something else, and I thought - there's that book I read about.  I can never resist browsing the books stacked on the big tables at Three Lives Booksellers.  I read a page and thought - oh, I really do have to read this: its art criticism but it's also a dialogue between a woman and her dead lover, and it was originally delivered as a series of lectures, which really means she has written a dramatic dialogue.  So anyway, I bought Artful as well as the novel I had come in for and even though I was really looking forward to reading the novel, something made me start Artful on the way home in the subway that evening and I was stunned, hooked instantly.  I did not want to stop reading it.

Beautiful little accidents of everyday experience (Books - You Do Not Need Another Self-Helf Book by Sarah Salway)

Sarah Salway, friend and author of the novels Tell Me Everything and Getting the Picture (among others), has just published her first volume of poetry! What better way to ring in March? It boasts the smile-inducing title You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book, and after reading it, you probably won't. The book features verse and prose poems, mostly contemporary subject matter, and a good deal of first-person voice (but not exclusively). They are sexy, reflective, funny, clever, even cheeky, but mostly these are intimate and generous poems. You can feel the poet reaching beyond her comfort to give you something of herself. I admire the way Sarah courts everyday experience, like shopping or little moments of regret, for accidents which reveal something fresh about being inside of our lives, and how she then uses her craft to create something of lasting worth and beauty from them.

I am delighted to participate in her virtual poetry reading by presenting Sarah's own reading of "Dad Plays St George."




You may purchase the book here: http://www.pindroppress.com/?page_id=440 or here.

For other stops on the virtual poetry reading tour, click here for the list of links.

Wislawa Szymborska, spirited Polish poet - Her poems make me say 'Yes, exactly.'

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature, died on Monday at 88 (hat tip: Bookslut)

I posted some of her irrepressible poems here in 2007, in addition to this excerpt from her Nobel address:

Bookish things...

As avid bookish folk, I thought you would like to know about the following:

Writer Sarah Salway author of the novel Tell Me Everything, a favorite of mine, will have a new book of poems published by Pindrop Press in March 2012. I don't know what it's called, but it is bound to be juicy. Check out her happily sensual Love and Stationary here.

Lucy Caldwell is an Irish novelist (Where They Were Missed, The Meeting Point) and playwright (Carnival, The Luthier, Guardians, Leaves, Notes to Future Self) whose work has been roundly praised in the English press but, I must admit, was unknown to me. Her The Meeting Point has won the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, a prestigious and generous award for young writers given out

Inflorescence - Swedish Poet Tomas Transtromer wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

Today's Nobel Prize winner in literature, Swedish Poet Tomas Transtromer, has long been a favorite of mine.

Dream Seminar
Four thousand million on earth.
They all sleep, they all dream.
Faces throng, and bodies, in each dream -
the dreamt-of people are more numerous
than us. But take no space...
You doze off at the theatre perhaps,
in mid-play your eyelids sink.
A fleeting double-exposure: the stage
before you out-manoeuvred by a dream.
Then no more stage, it's you.
The theatre in the honest depths!
The mystery of the overworked director!
Perpetual memorising of new plays...
A bedroom. Night.
The darkened sky is flowing through the room.
The book that someone fell asleep from lies still open
sprawling wounded at the edge of the bed.
The sleeper's eyes are moving,
they're following the text without letters
in another book -
illuminated, old-fashioned, swift.
A dizzying commedia inscribed
within the eyelids' monastery walls.
A unique copy. Here, this very moment.
In the morning, wiped out.
The mystery of the great waste!
Annihilation. As when suspicious men
in uniforms stop the tourist -
open his camera, unwind the film
and let the daylight kill the pictures:
thus dreams are blackened by the light of day.
Annihilated or just invisible?
There is a kind of out-of-sight dreaming
that never stops. Light for other eyes.
A zone where creeping thoughts learn to walk.
Faces and forms regrouped.
We're moving on a street, among people
in blazing sun.
But just as many - maybe more -
we don't see
are also there in dark buildings
high on both sides.
Sometimes one of them comes to the window
and glances down on us.


Fire Jottings
Throughout the dismal months my life sparkled alive only when I made love with you.
As the firefly ignites and fades out, ignites and fades out, - in glimpses we can trace its flight
in the dark among the olive trees.

Throughout the dismal months the soul lay shrunken, lifeless,
but the body went straight to you.
The night sky bellowed.
Stealthily we milked the cosmos and survived.


Romanesque Arches
Inside the huge romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
Vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle-flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
'Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that's how it's mean to be.'
Blind with tears.
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr and Mrs Jones, Mr Tanaka and Signora Sabatini
and inside them all vault opened behind vault endlessly.


A Page of the Night-Book
I stepped ashore one May night
in the cool moonshine
where grass and flowers were grey
but the scent green.

I glided up the slope
in the colour-blind night
while white stones
signalled to the moon.

A period of time
a few minutes long
fifty-eight years wide.

And behind me
beyond the lead-shimmering waters
was the other shore
and those who ruled.

People with a future
instead of a face.


More of Tomas Transtromer's poems are linked via my side bar under the heading Inflorescence and then his name.

Poem for a child from his father (An Inflorescence - Where's The Moon, There's The Moon - poems by Dan Chiasson)

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

My once weekly series of poetry and poets has become a whole lot less frequent. But having read Dan Chiasson's new volume of poems published this year: Where's the Moon, There's the Moon I couldn't resist. The volume's centerpiece is the 27-stanza title work - full of paradox - at times playful, at times very dark. That work's title suggests a story one might read to a child, but it is not childish or child like. Its events, such as they are, include a child reading an animal book, but its gist is more brooding, existential. Chiasson the father talking to his son about being both a father and son himself. A book for his son, and in that way a children's book. It appears to come from a feeling of having become unmoored.

If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there,
if I call out to myself come here
and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things
a boat, and watch myself over the waters come rowing,
but, crossing the midpoint between shores,
out in the middle of the colorless lake,
no longer approaching, no longer coming closer,
disappear, where am I now, has my boat capsized?

Its lines, in their length and in their song-like declaration of 'I,' have a Whitmanesque feel. Each stanza is a single long sentence. Like many of Chiasson's poems, he seems to be talking to the reader right off the page.

bear with me while I try to convey what I want to convey:
my father's distance and yet the tendency of distant things
to become central...

Rare vocabulary and obtuse symbols are not his modus operandi however, these poems flirt, perhaps purposefully or perhaps as a result of where they come from in the poet, with more contradiction, he quotes Yeats, offers passages that are resistant, at first, to any direct explicative translation, they are more enigmatic, more after capturing feeling, more obscure than his previous ones. They require the reader to peer around corners, meaning is not packaged and ready for consumption right off the page. I don't feel comparisons to other writers are always fair, but the title poem had very much the feeling of something by Pablo Neruda, which surprised me given the previous work of Chiasson I have read, but I offer that comparison most appreciatively. I feel like I am continuing to mine new things from these poems as I read them over.

I am not going to offer the title work in its entirety, as I often have with poems in the past, just that excerpt above. I encourage you instead to buy the book, because I doubt the market for contemporary works of poetry is all that swift. I'll offer instead one of the volumes other works, Thread. Laid out simply on the page, it is a work of straightforward, declarative diction on the one hand, but complex rhythms bury themselves within larger structures, as in his play with the second, third and fourth lines. The second line, for example, could offers either his denial or his declaration of himself as an anchor and yet, if you obey the line-break, then he is frayed, and then he exemplifies this by breaking his line of thought with the parenthetical phrase "and this I feel perpetually," ending with the notion that he ought to make himself clear. Yet somehow, he has. This is a self-reflective poem, but a funny one too, I think. In addition, here is a good recent interview with Chiasson from moreintelligentlife.com. and here is my other post on some of his earlier poems.

Thread

I lack the rigor of a lightning bolt,
the weight of an anchor. I am
Frayed where it would be highly useful -
and this I feel perpetually-to make a point.

I think if I can concentrate I might turn sharp.
Only, I don't know how to concentrate -
I know the look of someone concentrating,
indistinguishable from nearsightedness.

It is hard for the others to be near me,
my silly intensity shuffling
a zillion insignia of interiority.
Being near me never made anyone a needle.

Rhythm on the brain (An Inflorecence - Poet Rachel Wetzsteon)

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

Since I appear to have rhythm on the brain these days (see below), it would be remiss of me not to include a little poetry in ushering in our new year. Sadly, my acquaintance with New York poet Rachel Wetzsteon has been occasioned by her death. I thank fellow blogger and excellent poet Mark Doty for the introduction nonetheless. I admire local artists - those who pursue deep knowledge of a subject, a place, a color - through their medium as the magnificent playwright Horton Foote did for his corner of Southern Texas, or as Agnes Martin's deep investigation of feeling through her minimalist expressionist paintings in fields of gentle color. That is what Rachel Wetzsteon seemed to be doing in her intense, wry, urban compositions largely set in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York. I want to read more.

As both Mark and the New York Times offered her poem "Sakura Park" I thought I would post these two - the first an unseasonal invocation to autumn, the second a playfully intelligent evocation on longing:

Commands for the End of Summer

i.

Deepen,
leaves, not with what
has made us sorry but
with what was profound about that
sorrow.

ii.

Make me
spontaneous,
gathering winds, but don’t
blow so giddily I teeter
too much.

iii.

Songs I
listened to all
summer long, accept my
thanks: to regress is not to move
backward.

iv.

Splash of
patchouli on
my wrist, remind me that
in this cauldron there is a world
elsewhere.

v.

Smile! Those
days of humid
agony have earned you
the right to a hundred purple
sunsets.

vi.

Come, fall,
I can feel you
stirring, I can hardly
wait for the things that will happen
come fall.

Five-Finger Exercise

When things get hot and heavy this weekend or one August
twenty years from now, and I start tapping hexameters
up and down the shoulder-blades of my beloved (insert
auspicious, trustworthy-sounding, stolid but fun name here
for I can conjure none), I hope I do it right,
never losing sight of the skin whose golden toughness
allows the counting, never moving my fingers so briskly
that I can't hear his breathing, and never forgetting, even
in the lonely heights of sublimest inspiration—
What is your substance?... O rose ... and grey and full of sleep—
to flip the warm flesh over and whisper, It had to be you.

William Carlos Williams poem of a Saturday afternoon...

I've posted some of William Carlos Williams's poems before but not this one and, having just heard it read by Bill Irwin, I have to share it. It's lovely. Williams was a physician as well as a poet, I can only imagine he must have had a humorous bedside manner.

The Thinker

My wife’s new pink slippers
have gay pompons.
There is not a spot or a stain
on their satin toes or their sides.
All night they lie together
under her bed’s edge.
Shivering I catch sight of them
and smile, in the morning.
Later I watch them
descending the stair,
hurrying through the doors
and round the table,
moving stiffly
with a shake of their gay pompons!
And I talk to them
in my secret mind
out of pure happiness.

That was just what the doctor ordered.

Meditations in an Emergency (Poem by Frank O'Hara picture by me)

The day's musings are by Frank O'Hara, not me. His warped angle was necessary to counteract all the rain and all the talk. This poem has the best opening line.



Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away," yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

"Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds."—Mrs. Thrale.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns

Red rooms, red poems, read books....

A fabulous New York night yesterday with my fabumanic old friend Shiela. After four hours of neurosicence, I headed down to the East Village to bar KGB, Soviet themed, as it sounds. Old Russian posters on the red, red walls, Baltika beer served in large bottles, and what looked suspiciously like a painting of my favorite film director - Nikita Mikhailkov - (if you haven't seen Anna or Burnt by the Sun, put them on your list!). Anyhoo, we were there for not for the fabulous red wine, nor for the fabulous red atmosphere, but for a reading by Red Hen Press authors which included Ernest Hilbert reading from his accessible and thoughtful Sixty Sonnets, and Timothy Green reading, among other things, his breathless American Fractal, which I loved. There was also a short story from Greg Sanders's Motel Girl about a woman and a bear she rescues from a Moscow circus (appropriately enough) that was touching and memorable. Tapas,more wine, and much conversation followed - a great evening. Thanks Sheila! (You can see pictures over at her place).

This week has also brought some new reads. From the library come Kissing Doorknobs and Total Constant Order, both YA novels about obsessive compulsive disorder, on which I'm doing a presentation for school. I also received The Lunar Men in the mail. It is by Jenny Uglow and concerns the Lunar Society, a group of experimenters and creative thinkers who met regularly in late 18th Century England. It included James Watt - the inventor of the steam engine, Erasmus Darwin - poet and inventor, and Joseph Priestley - scientist and political and religious radical who I just learned about in Steven Johnson's book The Invention of Air. In fact, it is from that book that I learned about this one, which will probably end up on the summer reading list given what I have to do before the semester is over.



I also picked up and started Will Lavender's Obedience, which is another college campus thriller in the vein of Donna Tartt's The Secret History or Barry McCrea's The First Verse. It concerns a logic class offered as a thought experiment in, well, obedience. Given the frequent mentions of Stanley Milgram, famous for social psychology experiments testing people's willingness to listen to authority, I have a feeling I know where this one is going. I would not describe the writing as long on subtlety, but I bought it for the plot, which does really keep things moving. I also bought a copy of Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers. I have only read the occasional short story of Ozick's in The New Yorker. I have never actually read a novel and thought it was high time. Mark Sarvas thinks she's the cats meow, so what more can you ask? And a lovely Persephone Classics edition of Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski also caught my eye. I had never heard of Laski or any of her novels, written in the 1950s. I have only sampled a couple of pages, but the story of a lost child in post-war France and the taut writing really have my interest piqued. And finally An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, a recommendation of Cornflower Books', and I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While by Taichi Yamada, which writer Junot Diaz talked about in a radio interview, are also on their way. An embarrassment of riches.

On continual intoxication (Books and other stuff - The First Verse by Barry McCrea, Slings & Arrows, and a little Baudelaire)

Barry McCrea's The First Verse delivers a suspense-filled punch. I read the final 200 pages in a single sitting. For my earlier posts on necessary plot details, go here and here. McCrea really drummed up not just a feeling of sympathy with Niall, his central character, but one of identification. I really cared about our young hero, despite the lies he tells and the people he hurts as he is drawn into a web of synchronicities. The strange world of texts into which he is subsumed starts as a search for identity as experienced by a young gay man after he first leaves home. But I didn't read this as a 'gay' novel per se. I saw it more as anyone's search for a whole to be a part of, as told from an experience of otherness. That sense of exile is by no means the soul purview of someone who is gay. Most people feel unmoured and alone at some point in their lives. Sometimes its in matters of identity - sexual or otherwise - but many people struggle to find a meaninful synthesis of the parts of themselves and it is on that point that I expect most readers will be able to identify with Niall.

This book reminded me a bit of another book I enjoyed this year - Thirteen by Sebastian Beaumont. In that novel, a man enters an altered state in which the number thirteen plays a prominent role. It has a really fun plot and functions as a parable about the role of engagement with others and control in a mentally healthy life. In The First Verse, similarly, a man is led into a maze of coincidences but this time through text rather than numbers. He lives then too in an altered but parallel universe:

As I looked at the fragile pair, Ciara and Patrick, a whole human life seemed to be passing me by Time still turned away on a reliably rotating axes, but I had jumped off, and I stood watching it revolve from a distance, distant and unreal and above all silent, just as when we were children, Ciara, Patrick and I used to see the big wheel at the centre of Funderland amusement park in Ballsbridge. Their timed world drifted across to me like faraway fairground music, indeed, heavy with nostalgia, but, compared to the life I now had, repulsive and banal.

It is as though, through playing with these texts, that Niall is able to unravel the narrative thread that is his life. Where once he had a sweater that held its shape and that could be useful to warm him, he now simply has a tangle of yarn. There is also a theme of mental wholeness here, but it is more subtly interwoven with the story than in Thirteen.

The First Verse made an interesting companion piece to Slings and Arrows the Canadian television series about theatre folk that The Ragazzo and I watched for the first time last night. We don't have television, so we only see programs that make it to DVD and come to the NY Public Library. I've been told by several friends how wonderful this program is and how much I will like it because it's about the theater, but my usual reaction to something like this (or Waiting for Guffman) is 'that's not funny; that's my life!' Through the first episode of Slings and Arrows I was constantly cringing with recognition. But the writing is so good and the conceit so clever that I found myself won over. The parallel between the novel and the program is about how we use narrative to give form and credence to our lives. In Slings and Arrows, there's a marvelous flashback scene to communicate backstory, in which three young artists - the actor playing Hamlet, his girlfriend and the actress playing Ophelia, and the director of a production so intense and marvelous that early during the run, the actor playing Hamlet goes completely crazy and never acts again. The scene is late that night, following the first night party. The three go drunkenly carousing through the streets of their small city feeling the spell of electrical power that can be cast by living the fullest moments of one's life through creating huge feeling and thought (one's own feeling and thought) but in the context of crafted text, music and effects specifically designed to drive an audience to catharsis and to do that in public. It is a weird and wonderful thing (let me tell you) sexy and alluring, on the one hand, but ultimately it can be destructive. It can be hard to feel that the rest of life lives up to those moments. The scene in the first episode captures that but exactly. But even though the actors feel seized by that power, and Niall feels seized by the power of the texts he plays with, the whole spell begins with an act of will. It's paradoxical, we cannot demand that the experience come, but we conspire (and can practice so as to do so skillfully) with the ingredients that finally produce it. Some people gain this skill and feel it is the only way to live - nothing else is worthwhile. The French poet Charles Baudelaire was certainly of that opinion:

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

But just as we can gain the power to create this atomic explosion of intensity, we can lose it. It is an unstable foundation on which to hang all one's existence - exciting, momentarily satisfying - but unsustainable. The First Verse and Slings and Arrows share this theme and involve the audience in a taste of that intoxication. Slings and Arrows does so with much more irony, I'm looking forward to continuing to watch it. The First Verse is more naive and more intimate - Niall is so young, which on the one hand makes him an unfortunate victim, but on the other gives the reader hope that he can escape and reconnect with the world around him. I won't tell you whether he does, but I found the journey McCrea sent him on both involving and rewarding.

Ladies and gentlemen...Hart Crane

- And Bees of Paradise

I had come all the way here from the sea,
Yet met the wave again between your arms
Where cliff and citadel - all verily
Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms -

Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes
I found.

    Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward.  We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,

By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.



Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Disturbing the universe (Opera - Dr. Atomic by John Adams & Peter Sellars)

American composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars have created an unlikely hybrid in Doctor Atomic - an abstract documentary opera on the creation of the atomic bomb. A documentary because it is based on actual occurrences and people. Abstract because while it focuses on the days approaching the testing of the bomb at Los Alamos, it is less a linear story than a collage. It uses projection and sculpture, going back and forth from the daily activities at Los Alamos to the interior monologues of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a leading physicist on the project, and his wife Kitty, and includes two poems - one a sonnet of John Donne's and the other Muriel Rukeyser's Easter Eve 1945. These varied components hang together on a score strongly consistent in temperament and sonority. Opening each of the two acts act is a recorded soundscape evoking the period and atmosphere of those days - bits of radio, sounds of machinery, jeeps driving around the dessert, the thunder storms that plagued the testing schedule. But this gives way to Adams orchestral music, which is brash, solid, evocative and intense. Modern textures mix with beautiful lyrical lines. You know what century you are in and you can feel the disturbance in the universe that is the theme of this work.

The Manhattan Project led to the development of a bomb that worked via the fission of the uranium atom, splitting it into small parts to cause the release of tremendous amounts of energy. Some also call it the birth of “Big Science.” The destructive force of the bomb was meant to be unparalleled, but once unleashed it would literally mean that humans could destroy everything. J. Robert Oppenheim, may have been a leader of the project, but he was also a voice of conscience. Quoting the Bhavagad Gita he wrote “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Once accomplished, this disturbance in the physical structure of the universe would leave the world a less stable place. While our increased knowledge would facilitate victory in war, it precipitated a world with political and humane problems never before contemplated. Dr. Atomic is a meditation on disturbance at these multiple levels and is beautiful in its sensitive expression of conscience and appropriately unsettling.

The production, directed intelligently by Penny Woolcock, is strong on story-telling. She is master for using people and things on stage to make our progress from event to event clear. There is none of the Met's typical sloppiness and nineteenth century stage clichés of people getting up on boxes to sing solo lines. Stage action was human and necessary. However Ms. Woolcock was less adept in her ability to develop the vertical line of the piece - the point in soliloquoy or aria when time’s literal progress stops and the inner workings of a person’s mind or soul unfolds before us. Here is where theatre engages in a little “quantum physics” of its own, defeating the typical laws and time and space, travelling in a way that memory and imagination allows. In these equally important moments of Dr. Atomic Ms. Woolcock seemed to have left the performers to their own devices. They became unrooted, and frozen in general attitude. It was a shame because the score and libretto in Kitty's Oppenheimer's scene in Act II were crazily inventive and an opportunity for complex internal conflict expressed with challenging music. An Act I scene meant to develop the Oppenheimers relationship, and the only time we see them together, was strangely disconnected and made unimaginative use of a silly choreographed dance rather than having these troubled human creatures connect to their love, or their pain in its absence, their feelings of inadequacy, or their feelings about anything at all. A more thoughtful development of the character of Pasqualita - the Oppenheimers’ housekeeper - might have helped sustain our interest in her long aria that opened Act II. The production seemed to want to use her as a spiritual symbol of the indiginous culture of New Mexico and perhaps stand for the parts of Los Alamos history that were more respectful of nature, but between desultory staging and textual references to vishnu and the trinity, I couldn't figure out what was intended.

Otherwise the production was strongly satisfying. Its physical elements were creative, functional, and a pleasure to look at. The Met chorus was used as an effective narrator and their performance was uncharacteristically precise and energetic. The role of J. Robert Oppenheimer is written with wide ranging emotional and musical tessitura. Gerald Finley's performance was human and involving, and his singing sumptuous. This was particularly apparent in the aria that closed Act I, a setting of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, chosen because it inspired Oppenheimer to name the bomb test site Trinity. It was the highlight of Dr. Atomic’s lyrical side. The writing of this opera was effective in not burying the story either in the development of technology, or in sentimentality for our lost innocence. The structure of the piece, building to the Trinity test, drummed up tension in the final ten minutes that really made my heart pound. As a whole the opera was thoughtful about human responsibility in the face of our ever increasing knowledge and movingly resonant, even topically so, but not preachy.

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,' and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet, dearely'I love you,' and would be loved faine,
but am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Living as variously as possible (An Inflorescence - Mark Doty & Frank O'Hara, poets)

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

This Friday sees an abbreviated version of my occasional poetry series An Inflorescence (see my side bar), today featuring contemporary New York poet Mark Doty whose own site I found in a round about way via Books, Inq. a new favorite place.

He has Frank O'Hara's gravestone, pictured on his website, which was reason enough for me to linger

"Grace to be born and live
as variously as possible"

Indeed. I am a rabid O'Hara fan, as you may know - 1, 2, 3, - I have read some of Doty's poems before, but only noticed today in Signal, which he posts in full on his site, how evocative he is of O'Hara. Not in form, Doty is more formal, as in 'adhering to form' as opposed to 'featuring repressed subject matter,' and I like that in a poem. Look at the orderly vertical column of paired lines in Signal.

LOST COCKATIEL, cried the sign, hand-lettered,
taped to the side of a building: last seen on 16th

between Fifth and Sixth, gray body, orange cheek patches,
yellow head. Name: Omar. Somebody's dear, I guess,

though how do you lose a cockatiel on 16th Street?
Flown from a ledge into the sky he's eyed

As with O'Hara, he takes modern colloquial trademarks and plays with them by formalizing them as poetry. Here the abbreviated language one would find in a sign becomes the quick, blunt rhythm of New York City. He "letters" the poem, with caps and italics, as the sign would be lettered - a sort-of meta poetry. His diction is colloquial as is O'Hara's, using phrases like "Not likely" or conjunctions like "everybody's." This poem has two other O'Hara-esque features - one is a sense of humor, though with its own Doty-ish character, being less breathless, more refined, than O'Hara. Here is an excerpt of O'Hara's Steps:

...where's Lana Turner
she's out eating
and Garbo's backstage at the Met
everyone's taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we're all winning
we're alive

A little crazy, it sounds like he just ran up a flight of stairs and he's bursting to tell you what he saw, and yet it is soooo good.

The other wonderfully O'Haran thing Doty does in a way totally his own is create accidentalish quality to the language that makes me feel as though he wrote it there on the street on a tiny scrap of paper so he wouldn't forget it. This casualness is belied by both the poem's form, as well as the thoughtful journey it takes (on the subway, actually) but it is one of the features that marks the poem of its time and place - my time, my city - in a way that I adore in O'Hara and and now in Mark Doty's work too. The poem is inherently readable and there is pleasure in appreciating its surface qualities. Yet, if you do a little work, it reveals more - complexities of structure, word play, urban images, artistic references... all sorts of fun. Dive in if you're game. Here's the whole poem.

Happy Friday. I'm off to an exam on neurotransmitters.

Celebrate National Poetry Day

I don't have time for a full post on Wallace Stevens today, but since Mark Thwaite recommended we carry him around today for Britain's National Poetry Day, I thought I would oblige my British readers (or anyone in the mood) with this so that you may carry it around in your head, if not in your pocket. It will certainly give you more return today than your investments


A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Tender Curmudgeon Laureate

I was sad to learn from Mark Sarvas that poet, critic (and tender curmudgeon laureate) Hayden Carruth died this week. Here is the Times obituary and here is my Inflorescence post, which includes a bio, a portrait of him done for the University of Chicago Magazine, and several of his poems including an excerpt from Dearest M, an elegy Carruth wrote for his daughter, and the marvelous Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, as a remembrance.

Book Reviews as News, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and an appreciation (Books, books, books)

I managed to catch up on three weeks of Times Book Reviews and still get a good deal of my school reading done, take a walk in the park, cook buckwheat pasta with tomatoes onions mushrooms and broth, and watch an episode of Rome - a productive Saturday for feeling so completely lacking in energy as I did. And we drank cups and cups and cups of tea. To no avail. I felt as floppy as Raggedy Andy.

The Books Reviews, read in sequence, are like a little snapshot of our zeitgeist. Just say Käse. Really they are more news than the news. Take the two weeks bookending September 11 - what was the theme? The new Paul Auster, the new Philip Roth, the new Francine Prose - they all deal with death. I'm a fan of Paul Auster so I'm likely to read his new Man in the Dark despite the lukewarm reception it has gotten everywhere including in this review by Tom LeClair. What did he expect writing about an unfulfilled book critic with terrible insomnia! I love to read about Philip Roth; I love hearing interviews with him about his writing, but I have yet to make it through a single of his books. Maybe it's a generational thing. I have heard those who do admire him say that his latest, Indignation, is not the book to start on. Maybe that means I'll like it. In his gushing encomium on the front page of this week's Book Review David Gates cannot stop himself from telling the book's secret. Although, the way he described the book, I had guessed it before he gave me a chance to debark. So if you are at all interested in reading this book, don't read this review until after you have read the book. Of her twelve novels and host of other books I have only read Blue Angel by Francine Prose. I thought it wicked and well crafted but haven't yet tried another. Any recommendations from fans of her work? Leah Hager Cohen's assessment of Goldengrove, Prose's latest, is unenthusiastic at best. As a writer, how do you like up to a name like Prose? It does make me want to read Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem Spring and Fall: To a Young Child though, which figures prominently in the novel:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Again, the theme seems to be aging and death - as with Auster and Roth - but this time addressed to a child who can not yet know of her loss consciously, but feels it just the same. The poems brilliance is, I think, that this rich juxtaposition of innocence and the perspective that comes with self awareness is packed into fifteen lines cloaked in the lilt of rhyming couplets. It gives the verse an almost wry smile, while the eyes of its 'I' are filled with tears. As if that 'I' could be speaking those words to the child and because of the lovely sounds made by the lines she would feel comforted, despite their content.

Speaking of the price of self awareness, today's Times has an appreciation of recently deceased author David Foster Wallace, by A. O. Scott that is really, well, appreciative, and quite beautiful.

Finally two other books that stood out in these weeks of reviews other than the three biggies were Dry Storeroom No. 1 by Richard Fortey, The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Fortey, who works for London's museum, catalogues the contents of its back rooms, pickling his description with anecdotes about its former employees and its store of ephemera. And the other book I was drawn to was The Time of Their Lives, Al Silverman's portrait of The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors. Bruce Jay Friedman writes an amusing and informative review that despite any criticisms still leaves me wanting to read 500 pages of anecdotal nostalgia about my favorite topic - books! There is a world of fresh print out there for us to covet (in the inimitable style of our trusty Dewey) so I am getting off my duff and reading some of it.

The breathless exhuberance that is Frank O'Hara (An Inflorescence but not on Friday)

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

Helen Vendler's recent review in The New Republic of Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems introduces me to some I had never read before.

The exuberance of this one is like the breathless laughter provoked by playing as a child.


Blocks

1
Yippee! she is shooting in the harbor! he is jumping
up to the maelstrom! she is leaning over the giant's
cart of tears which like a lava cone let fall to fly
from the cross-eyed tantrum-tousled ninth grader's
splayed fist is freezing on the cement! he is throwing
up his arms in heavenly desperation, spacious Y of his
tumultuous love-nerves flailing like a poinsettia in
its own nailish storm against the glass door of the
cumulus which is withholding her from these divine
pastures she has filled with the flesh of men as stones!
O fatal eagerness!

2
O boy, their childhood was like so many oatmeal cookies.
I need you, you need me, yum, yum. Anon it became suddenly

3
like someone always losing something and never knowing what.
Always so. They were so fond of eating bread and butter and
sugar, they were slobs, the mice used to lick the floorboards
after they went to bed, rolling their light tails against
the rattling marbles of granulations. Vivo! the dextrose
those children consumed, lavished, smoked, in their knobbly
candy bars. Such pimples! such hardons! such moody loves.
And thus they grew like giggling fir trees.




Even in his dark moments, O'Hara can't resist word play which, in this case, does double duty as philosophical play on the subject and object interplay between the lover and the loved.


Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

An Inflorescence, a flowering of poetry every Friday (Robert Hass - American contemplative)

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.

Robert Hass is an American poet born in 1941. He has published around five volumes of poetry and translated and edited many works as well by Czeslaw Milosz, Tomas Transtroemer, and some of the classical Japanese poets, whose work I feel Hass's resembles. It seems to move about in a little bit of everything until it lights on something that has the zing of the kind of insight you can get walking alone in nature or meditating. It find a kind of rhythm of the world like that you can come upon when engaged in simple tasks.

Here is a post about him which includes biographical information, and links to several more poems, and poets sharing their thoughts about their favorite poem of Robert Hass, including Dan Chiasson, whose poems I featured on An Inflorescence a few weeks back. And here's the poem he liked, one that feels to me like quintessential Hass.



Dragonflies Mating

1.

The people who lived here before us
also loved these high mountain meadows on summer mornings.
They made their way up here in easy stages
when heat began to dry the valleys out,
following the berry harvest probably and the pine buds:
climbing and making camp and gathering,
then breaking camp and climbing and making camp and gathering.
A few miles a day. They sent out the children
to dig up bulbs of the mariposa lilies that they liked to roast
at night by the fire where they sat talking about how this year
was different from last year. Told stories,
knew where they were on earth from the names,
owl moon, bear moon, gooseberry moon.


2.

Jaime de Angulo (1934) was talking to a Channel Island Indian
in a Santa Barbara bar. You tell me how your people said
the world was made. Well, the guy said, Coyote was on the mountain
and he had to pee. Wait a minute, Jaime said,
I was talking to a Pomo the other day and he said
Red Fox made the world. They say Red Fox, the guy shrugged,
we say Coyote. So, he had to pee
and he didn’t want to drown anybody, so he turned toward the place
where the ocean would be. Wait a minute, Jaime said,
if there were no people yet, how could he drown anybody?
The Channelleño got a funny look on his face. You know,
he said, when I was a kid, I wondered about that,
and I asked my father. We were living up toward Santa Ynez.
He was sitting on a bench in the yard shaving down fence posts
with an ax, and I said, how come Coyote was worried about people
when he had to pee and there were no people? The guy laughed.
And my old man looked up at me with this funny smile
and said, You know, when I was a kid, I wondered about that.


3.

Thinking about that story just now, early morning heat,
first day in the mountains, I remembered stories about sick Indians
and—in the same thought—standing on the free throw line.

St. Raphael’s parish, where the northern-most of the missions
had been, was founded as a hospital, was named for the angel
in the scriptures who healed the blind man with a fish

he laid across his eyes.—I wouldn’t mind being that age again,
hearing those stories, eyes turned upward toward the young nun
in her white, fresh-smelling, immaculately laundered robes.—

The Franciscan priests who brought their faith in God
across the Atlantic, brought with the baroque statues and metalwork crosses
and elaborately embroidered cloaks, influenza and syphilis and the coughing disease.

Which is why we settled an almost empty California.
There were drawings in the mission museum of the long, dark wards
full of small brown people, wasted, coughing into blankets,

the saintly Franciscan fathers moving patiently among them.
It would, Sister Marietta said, have broken your hearts to see it.
They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing

came here with their love. And I remembered how I hated it
after school—because I loved basketball practice more than anything
on earth—that I never knew if my mother was going to show up

well into one of those weeks of drinking she disappeared into,
and humiliate me in front of my classmates with her bright, confident eyes,
and slurred, though carefully pronounced words, and the appalling

impromptu sets of mismatched clothes she was given to
when she had the dim idea of making a good impression in that state.
Sometimes from the gym floor with its sweet, heady smell of varnish

I’d see her in the entryway looking for me, and I’d bounce
the ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were,
which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing

the power in my hands could summon. I’d bounce the ball
once more, feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot.
It was a perfect thing; it was almost like killing her.


4.

When we say “mother” in poems,
we usually mean some woman in her late twenties
or early thirties trying to raise a child.

We use this particular noun
to secure the pathos of the child’s point of view
and to hold her responsible.


5.

If you’re afraid now?
Fear is a teacher.
Sometimes you thought that
Nothing could reach her,
Nothing can reach you.
Wouldn’t you rather
Sit by the river, sit
On the dead bank,
Deader than winter,
Where all the roots gape?


6.

This morning in the early sun,
steam rising from the pond the color of smoky topaz,
a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine insects
are mating in the unopened crown of a Shasta daisy
just outside your door. The green flowerheads look like wombs
or the upright, supplicant bulbs of a vegetal pre-erection.
The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other
by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently.

I think (on what evidence?) that they are different from us.
That they mate and are done with mating.
They don’t carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood
and then go looking for it everywhere.
And so, I think, they can’t wound each other the way we do.
They don’t go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger,
kill with it, smear it on everything, though it is perhaps also true
that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us
when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond
and the pond’s green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a moment
in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope
it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing shimmers
from every color the morning has risen into.

My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together
in some bliss and minute pulse of after-longing
evolution worked out to suck the last juice of the world
into the receiver body. They can’t separate probably
until it is done.