Thursday, November 29, 2007

Poems and Painting

It's an ideal situation for poets to interpret a painter's world, especially those artists who are both figurative and have content which implies a relationship between the objects and people on the campus, a suggestion of narrative complexity.The basic problem to overcome, though, is finding the equivalent tone and language that relays a strong sense of the visual style , which suggests the narrative thread. I've written of few poems after artist's work, not that any of them have been successful in any terms I'd lay out, but these efforts have been a interesting practice of jumping over the tropes you might normally rely on and instead develop a new rhetoric. Staying with a style one knows when attempting to get inside another man's art can result in a poem that reads more like product, as I noticed in a poem I came across recently, "Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad" by Edward Hirsch.Normally I like Edward Hirsch a good deal, but this attempt to unearth the hidden essence of Edward Hopper's ideally isolated landscapes makes me think that it is a tad overwritten. The details seem entirely ready made:

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.


Artifacts from the prop department.This reads more like scene descriptions one finds in parenthesis in a film script's early draft. The camera lingers on the badly lettered sign, the camera pans the closed storefronts, the camera pulls back to a vista that reveals the town in bas relief against a mountain range, with houses
huddled in tight clusters that encircle the center of town. It is rather dramatic, visual, and effective , if one were watching a movie film made from our supposed script.

But we aren't, and Hirsch's descriptions more instructive than revealing. Hopper's advantage is that he could suggest relations between his human figures to one another and to their surroundings with his magnificently broad strokes and his blurred, subdued tones and yet maintain the essential isolation of each element on his canvas; his contexts are subverted by the existential singularity his streets, sunlight, his characters are all shown to be locked in. The effect is visceral, one gets his mood in a rush, and one garners more perception the more they study his best paintings.

The narrative, of course, is implied, and this is where Hirsch's poem becomes mannered, in the attempt to do what Hopper achieves by describing the elements, suggesting the rather obvious relations between them . and back peddling to conclude, finally, that the American malaise is totalizing estrangement.
It's a poem full of tricks and moves, and it makes one wish
for a more plain spoken, less qualified tone poem.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Poems and Comedy

The point, of course, being that everything that is entertaining or distracting from the morbid sameness of daily life cannot be said to be exclusively in the domain of the willfully dumb, conceived in a massive expression of bad faith: what is entertaining, from whatever niche in the culture you're inspecting, is that activity that holds you attention and engages you the degree that you respond to it fully. Tomas Morin has the new poem up on Slate titled "Twenty First CenturyExhibit", the storyline being that it takes place in a Natural History museum where visitors gawk at a recreation of an American business office of the previous century. It's a predictable run.The purpose was satiric, I suppose, but Tomas Morin's efforts to make light of museum patrons' rituals to confront works of art intended to confound them ,but this poem is so obvious that reading it through is re mindful of watching Saturday Night Live in the Seventies , sitting through one relentlessly loud and smugly mannered sketch after another simultaneously trying to convince myself that what was on the screen was cutting edge and good by default, and realizing under all the hip rationalization that the jerky doings of the cast were obvious and glaring. And not funny. The funniest thing about them was the idea that they thought they were amusing even accidentally.


The poem makes me less about the vanity of autodidacts who want to have an opinion on everything than it does a guy I knew who fancied himself a comedian. This fellow, not a friend and certainly a pest, would insinuate himself into conversations at social gatherings where we shared a number of acquaintances in common and would further level himself into any conversation he passed; he would , without variation, issue forth a formula sarcasm , a litany of similes and what-ifs delivered in an under-considered delivery that was rapid, flat, a tone that only emphasized the banality of his attempts at wit. He was the sort who often found himself alone in the middle of a party after his latest clutch of fellow party attendees simultaneously found reasons to walk away, talk to a bathroom, freshen drinks, go to the bathroom. The irony here is that Morin himself is another wind-pundit who essentially turns the role of poet into something the equivalent of being one of those anonymous comedians who make make strange, unattractive noises on VH1's Best Week Ever. This poem deals with stereotyping with stereotypes, and there is no clue that the poet is aware of the loop he got himself caught in. Not that it would have helped this poem. 

It's not that history is being rewritten, but that it is just another commodity that can be hacked, jerry rigged, corporateized and made the subject of uncomprehending punchlines ; it's not about learning, but about knowing the answer, which is to say that twenty first century man and woman wants the material available like an Ipod tune, and then disposed of just as easy. The pity is that the poet summarizes the situation is a way that repeats the absurdity he's criticizing.
The tragedy was that he isn't a figment of any one's imagination but rather a lurking mass of vapidity looking for another group to wrap it's tentacles around.Morin's poem wants to reveal the banter and jargon and conflicting forms of condescension that comes with a group of motor mouths who can't , for a moment, stand in front of an exhibit and consider it in situ, without a script. The poem , like a SNL sketch, is ninety percent set up, with punchlines dropped on you like 16 ton weights. This shtick that gives shtick a bad name.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Gone Baby Gone: terse Boston noir



Had a chance to see Gone Baby Gone during a break from all the turkey feasting, and it bodes well for the revival Ben Affleck film career . His comeback film, Hollywoodland, which had him starring as the late actor George Reeves who played Superman in the Fifties tv show, was merely okay, the sort of small film project other stars like Bruce Willis (Pulp Fiction) and Sylvester Stallone (Copland)have used to rebound.

The effort didn't hurt Affleck's reputation , perhaps enhancing his credibility as someone who is "about the work" and therefore reliable, but his performance in that unfocused bio-pic was , I thought, stiff as a cardboard suitcase. Blame the script, perhaps, but I couldn't get beyond Affleck's jawline, lantern and making his smiles seem like smug, tight little smirks. Which is too bad, since I understand from current press that Affleck is one decent guy.

Good for him that he latched onto a good script with his directorial debut Gone BabyGone, starring his brother Casey Affleck.Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote Mystic River), this is a straight forward, dark-skied mystery set in Boston where the junior Affleck's character, a private detective specializing in missing persons working out of his apartment, is hired to "augment" the police investigation in a child kidnapping case by talking to neighborhood characters who won't talk to the police. Straight ahead, moody, paced briskly considering the film's length and the number of complications, Gone Baby Gone is a sturdy and respectable effort, unpretentious and never false to Lehaine's cut-rate prose descriptions of older Boston enclaves and foreboding weather, and he allows characters to establish their rationalizations.

And it's a pleasant surprise to see a good actor like Morgan Freeman in a good movie for once. Casey Affleck, very fine as Robert Ford in the recent western The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford, where we see his character's fan boy adulation of the famed robber slowly evolve into a murdering paranoia, is equally adept here, conveying a detective still in the process of developing a personal ethics as he weighs the arguments from parents, hardened cops and a girl friend about what constitutes the right thing to do. Affleck's detective here is someone making his way through a pragmatic world where everyone argues that what they do is for the greater good, and he's a man who finds himself adhering to a moral code regardless of the consequences. This becomes a bit talky , you can imagine, but the verbal jousts between he and Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman are wonderful things to observe, that rare thing, actors with dialogue exchanging practical philosophies.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

It's better to give a resentment than to get one


Sometimes you run into a left hook that's intended for your chin that someone else thinks you deserve. The aggravating thing is being accused of things that were the furthest from your mind. I remember eight years ago

I was working at the customer service desk of a college bookstore,helping a customer, a woman of color who seemed to me to be from India. She presented an unsigned credit card to pay, and she became upset when I asked for a photo ID, basically declaring a racist with her remark "I bet you don't check their Driver's licenses" , referring to a white customer who'd been in line ahead of her. She grabbed her purchase and her receipt and stormed off before I could say anything. What I would have said to the offended woman had I the chance was this:

1.I'm required to ask for photo ID when presented with a credit card with no signature by both the credit company and store policy.
2.That I'd standing behind that counter for four hours prior to my helping her with her purchase, and that I'd already asked three white customers for photo ID when they gave me unsigned credit cards.

I never got my chance to explain store policy/tell her off, which is a good thing, as any additional words from me would come to no good for continued employment. So instead I stewed, dwelled on it, wallowed in my irritation, my thinking inching disturbingly close to redneckish. Ironically, since the cause was being accused of racism when there was no offense purposefully given. The offense was in the customer's mind, and all I could conclude was that she had an standing issue that was just awaiting the right time for what I took was its frequent expression.

Irony is one of those textures of life that never cease casting variations on a theme. In the post 9/11 age of digital commerce, over half the customers I help have credit cards that request that a cash handler ask of an ID. Further, it's not unusual for customers to become irritated when they aren't carded. One client had written in the signature space "DEMAND ID OR REFUSE THE SALE". That day I was an odd mood and took offense by given a demand from someone I didn't know. I processed the sale without asking for indentification, handed over the bagged merchandise and her receipt.

"You didn't ask for my ID" she said, "did you see what I wrote on the card."

"Yes" I said, " and it's unlikely a thief would try to get away using a card with such a demand on the back."
She took a deep breath, rolled her eyes and grabbed her small child's hand and left the store, not to be seen again all these months later.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Idra Novey and the art of the brief lyric



Longing, nostalgia and the long view are the themes Robert Pinsky has given us the last two weeks, with Frank Bidart’s two fine and artfully jump cut melancholy in his two offerings last time with “Candidate” and “Valentine”, and this week, with Idra Novey’s sweetly indirect case study in coincidence and memory, “Definition of Stranger”. The style differences are key; Bidart’s poems were a direct address of a narrator’s thinking in reflection, something of a slide show with a clipped narration barely hanging the images and instances together, yet uniting them with a consistent tone he could build on.


Novay’s poem comes to a related theme, the connection between dissimilar things and the at times the artificial barriers one might use to maintain a distance between themselves and others outside their sphere. Surely, it begins pedantically enough, with a clear and cold definition of what a stranger is, a reading from a dictionary :” Person not a member of a group.” But there is more, and the sort of examples a dictionary provides, usually faceless and inert, comes alive with images that seem the sort of things one gets a glimpse from peripheral vision and then turns for a full view.

A dry explanation of a word we all use and whose meaning we take for granted acquires her unexpected degrees of implied ambiguity, and it is this element of surprise that underscores Novey’s assumption that we’re not separate and fully autonomous .

It is a function of personality that there are some matters that cut deeper than others,nescitating a distancing device so a person can make their way through their daily affairs and obligations without being overwhelmed and immobilized. Novey's poem, as I read it, is in one of those moments when distinctions, differences and distances are for a moment dissolved as memory is stirred. As I read it, this is needed since equilibrium is something that personalities require ; all is not finally settled and in place and all is not resolved like a story one has finished writing, but the occasional island of calm and feeling connected to things outside one's immediate embrace is a strong undercurrent I pick up from Novey's writings. Even as real life accelerates and becomes more complicated, there is a respite. She gets a moment with a skeletal accuracy. It is the effect of reading something or flipping through old photographs and having the scenarios flash by you once again, along with the attending emotions.


We are linked, and our actions have an effect in the larger community. The poem does run the risk of being viewed solely as list, but Novey is a smart enough poet to know when to end the stream of examples. List making is a vice of the poet who cannot stop writing, a setting up of odd things set up against one another that aims for the kind of Brechtian Alienation Effect , where we have an intense observation of the things in one’s material surroundings become odd and perceptually malformed and from which one can realize the layers of false consciousness they’ve coated their lifeless objects with. The sheer accumulation of quizzically poised detritus is supposed to fire up the synapses and make us realize that there’s too much spent accumulating consumer goods solely on the advertised promise that one becomes a better and more fulfilled citizen. In smaller doses, it works, as in Ginsberg’s early work, or in the genius that is A.R.Ammons ‘ to write long and inclusive while maintaining a running theme in his lines. But those were poets who could develop ideas and have them change, evolve, and finish up with resolution you didn’t expect to come seeing, not an easy task at all. Too often list making is merely a trick of the trade that just overwhelms a premise or hides the fact that there wasn’t one to begin with. The goal seems to be to fill the page, to view writing poetry as mere process.


It’s not mere process to Novey, and her poem has the grace and dignity of a small , polished gem, a bright stone of a perception set in a casing that’s elegant for it’s simplicity. The things around the narrator—I assume it is one who reads the lifeless definition of stranger and then rolls off the tight string of associations—are closer and more related than not, from the casual brush on the shoulder in a crowded city, to the fact that someone else’s trash can become another person’s comfort, in the image of the discarded becoming a napping place for a destitute man. She is also delightfully aware of the sounds of words and the rolling, accelerated sensation they can give


Person not privy or party
to a decision, edict, et cetera,
but who's eaten
from the same fork
at the pizzeria
and kissed your wilder sister
on New Year's.


The dual alliterations, with the p’s popping and the e’s easing their way to the finish, gives us city sounds, the vivid feel of conversations occurring at once, radio stations tuned to different stations, thoughts colliding with one another and reviving a memory, an image, formerly lost, now recalled:


Person assigned
to feed the tiger at the zoo
where you slipped your hand
once
into the palm
of somebody else's father


These are wonderful connections, minor, banal on the surface, but all the same demonstrating our inter-relations through what we buy, discard, what we touch and eat. Novey’s poems is seamless in how it brings together the associations between pizzeria forks, a person feeding a tiger and the lone hand a small girl trustingly held onto.But it’s not about any of those things, in themselves; what the poet gives us is a concise and sweetly evoked demonstration of the human need to order their existence, past , present, future. We crave continuity even in the things that drive us crazy with their randomness; Novey’s poem is a graceful example of how one can make their world at least settle into place, to become coherent for a period before the next flurry.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Frank Bidart's "Candidate"


Frank Bidart’s “Candidate” seems constructed from the rubble of what used to be a man’s life; someone who thought they’d change the world, set it on fire, inspire legions to do the same. Bidart is at that age when a man’s interior life has segued from the future they are going to mold with their plans to forge a revolution in the consciousness of their time, or at least achieve a number of goals that will confirm them as men of action and into a continual review of what one has done, what corners have been shaved from the building blocks of an unsustainable integrity. The man, the one volunteering himself for a cause , or feeling himself selected for higher purpose, has his reminders of the assumptions he started with, a gathering of incidental and banal things.


on each desk mantel refrigerator door

an array of photographs
little temple of affections

you have ironically but patiently made

**********

Those promises that make us confront
our ambition, pathetic ambition:

confront it best when we see what it
promised die. Your dead ex-wife

you put back on the mantel
when your next wife left. With her iron

nasals, Piaf regrets NOTHING: crazed
by the past, the sweet desire to return to

zero.


Melancholy is the mood, the world is fragmented, made of shards and bits of things that used to be whole that are now in various stages of dis assembly; a double hardship, a deeper heartache of regret. One is stuck with the things that there is no use for, unable to throw them away lest more of what someone had been is gone. And the remains , the photographs, the key lines of old recordings, mock him. One of his wives is dead and there is only a mulling over of the last words they spoke to each other before she passed, a loop of words he interrogates and inspects and replays at varying imagined speeds to find a clue of what went wrong, what he should have done,picked up on. He hangs himself nightly with the snapshot.Piaf regrets nothing, of course, but this man regrets liking Piaf’s assertion because he once used it, doubtless, as a slogan for his perfectly formed future. But Edith Piaf was a singer performing someone else’s lyric, and her voice is a recording of a sentiment that will not, cannot change, fluctuate with time; it is the same strong, strident exclamations, the exact same nuances, pauses, rushes against a back beat, the same surface pops and scratches. The protagonist is in a life that had to change lest he cease to be meaningfully engaged with what matters for him. Lest he cease to be.


Undisenthralled you
regret what could not have been

otherwise and remain itself.
There, the hotel in whose bar you courted

both your wives is detonated, collapsing;
in its ballroom, you conceded the election.

There's your open mouth
conceding.

A good photograph tells you everything
that's really going on is invisible.

You are embarrassed by so many
dead flowers. They lie shriveled before you.


This is a man who has feels himself vanishing, the trail of each compromise and evolution he’s had in his game plan , and the places where these changes occurred and thus construct the complicated, rueful, meditative character in this poem are being torn down. Soon there will be nothing left of him in the landscape he once had memorized and could tell personal stories about. An actual election takes place, perhaps? Confidence and easy answers worn to the nub, an agenda adjusted, modified, shaved, finally abandoned by circumstances large and lethal to a soul’s vibrancy, we have a character locked in a backwards glare. This is a man who cannot see what still stands, but only that which is ruined and ragged with time.

"Valentine", a poem by Frank Bidart





An interesting poem, bearing the name “Valentine”, I suppose, because so much failure to keep solemn promises, lies, thefts and endless manner of behavior that wind up harming those close, beloved, trusted equally rationalized with the evocation of “love”. What we come to read is an emerging realization that the most intimate term of selflessness and dedication to other people is used to keep wives, husbands, children, and generations, latched to and lashed by psychologies that do them ill and rob them of what they can become. It begins in youth, a young man experiencing duplicities in the name of love, and in the righteousness of untested conviction makes a pledge, he says , my case will be different:


How those now dead used the word love bewildered
and disgusted the boy who resolved he

would not reassure the world he felt
love until he understood love


Conviction gets tested in intervening years and, finding that experience won’t conform to the dictates and conditions of theoretical idealness, the protagonist discovers the need to invent new definitions for old words, that meanings are subjective and change, colored by experience and coined from reflex; he uses love in situations he thought he’d never find himself in, he uses a term he had wanted to keep personally uncorrupted.


Resolve that too soon crumbled when he found
within his chest

something intolerable for which the word
because no other word was right

must be love
must be love


The hardest task in the world one lives in with others is explaining oneself, of getting across the nuances and finer points in the terms they use; meanings and context get larger, less focused, the ground rules one has set for themselves for authenticity are negotiated, compromised. How one thinks of love becomes private, internal, a condition
of being that’s rare and precious and finally incommunicable in terms that are not wholly false. “Love” becomes a short hand for any impulse one has, any obsession that forms and becomes malignant, harmful.


Love craved and despised and necessary
the Great American Songbook said explained our fate

my bereft grandmother bereft
father bereft mother their wild regret

How those now dead used love to explain
wild regret


Banged about, exhilarated, betrayed and betrayer , the protagonist shoulder’s his abused idealism, attempts to be stoic about the pragmatic choices he’s been forced to make with his idealism given a life that took it’s own course despite his plans to discover the meaning of “love” and so use the word unambiguously. But ambiguity is all there is here, and he becomes cynical, debasing and expanding and modifying his beloved term to the degree that words and actions are not coherent and congruent. It’s a sad sequence of snapshots Frank Bidart has given the reader, a compressed tale about the making of cynic who couldn’t sustain a passion for life beyond the disabusing of his optimism.

This is compression at its finest, and the sentences take odd turns and twists of implication without an overgenerous supply of biography; this is writing Don DeLillo, who writes the best sentences in American English, would enjoy. Like DeLillo, the history of a particular word is traced and its modulations are succinctly characterized. One may lack a name, one may not know anything in the way of biography, but what makes this poetic is the beauty of the revelations; it unfolds like a bright conversation you’re overhearing where you’ve pieced together the scenario although you lack the back-story. The effect is that you recognize something you’ve seen elsewhere. It is the shock of recognition.