Gagged on a clothesline

There is a bit of a buzz by  Tony Hoagland's commentary  in the September Poetry Magazine where he opines, in part,  that contemporary poetry is divided  into two types, the bong and the gong categories .The first  is the sort of poem that rings the bell, gonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggg!!!­, with a clarity of perception that is exacting, photographic. There is no mistaking what the writer is talking about, no ambiguity in the details, and one is surprised how a surprise ending arises from otherwise banal details .The latter being a diffuse, abstract, expressionist kind of ode that emphasizes the inexpressibility of the moment a poet might decide to write about, the escalating, entropy -bound speculation that comes after a deep bong hit or two. There are pleasures to be had in both approaches, of course, as those who are chronically clear and the others who prefer an obscurantist veil over their stanzas are actually are a varied lot, with their own ideas about how language needs to be subjugated to best reflect the author's quirky habit of mind. We the reader ought not be ashamed to have both Billy Collins and Louis Zukofsky on our shelves; what makes either of these poets, or the poets that come between them (assuming said shelf is alphabetized by author) interesting, intriguing, worth reading for whatever pleasures they can deliver are unique. We know the universal aesthetic produces a poetry that becomes nothing more than talking points and marching orders, don't we?  "Clothesline", though, seems to have been knocked out before it had a chance to get going and wound up unconscious on the permeable border between gong and bong poetics. The title, in fact, is ironic, as it is also the name of a notorious move in professional wrestling, where one fighter bounces an opponent off the ropes and catches with a fore arm to the throat to the rebound.

Poet Bohince is attempting to dredge up memories from a time in her life when what is revealed are only scattered images of places and time-bound details; In this case there is the association of safety, her mother's womb, of tight, warm, snug places where one felt secure and protected against an incoherent , violent, noisy commotion in the near distance, but what this poem lacks is the emotional cohesion that would make this associative pastiche compelling. This has the feeling of something that has been rewritten and revised continuously, starting at first as something of epic length, eventually whittled away to a skeleton of it's former verbosity, with vain attempts to flesh out the bare bones with imagery to make these meager lines become somehow evocative. Rather, it reads like some one who is attempting to accommodate suggestions from a poetry workshop:

Though I sloshed inside the machine
of her body, as our whites swam in a soft boil,
were wrung, hung,
then flew,

or tried to,into the pain and ultimate

forgiveness of pines. …

I realize that one can't really depend on a poem to make sense in ways those in supermarket lines might mean the term, but there is a logic, an intuitive sense that we demand; these opening lines are less organic than they might be, seeming instead to be the result of an edit that rid this sentence of a qualifying phrase in the center of the expression, conflating washing machines, wombs and clotheslines in one gamy sequence. Not that the clause would have fared better with an explication, short or expansive; it was bad writing to begin with, a clumsy entrance into a badly decored room.

Paula Bohince, in fact, seems the voice of the workshop, with the sort of inarticulate , choppy cadences that are intended to duplicate the moment of realization, the epiphany,

The Y branch hoisting the heaving line,
spiders who'd snooze
in undershirts. Shook awake,
would climb air.

My mother
who was there
in every crevice.

There is a built-in halting here, a manufactured pause that does not convince you that the speaker is holding their breath; even in print you can feel the technique being worked on you, you can sense the writer counting the beats between what passes for stanzas, one , two, three...line!, and then reading the succeeding sentences in a whispery croak, anticipating the appreciative sighs. Bohince straddles that ground between catering to audience expectations of what a poem should be and a cartoonish version of abstraction, in an effort to leave something for would-be critics to rave about . It fails at both, and it is an intensely unsatisfying poem. It's like tossing stones and twigs into a bowl of hot tap water and calling it soup.

"Salt Walter" by Peter Campion

Peter Campion has a  poem I enjoyed  posted recently in Slate, a lyric called "Salt Water" , a tract in which he does a skilled job of combing a number of different elements--a personal relationship, a landscape, an abstracted terrain-- and  persuasively reveals what the elements have in common without seeming even to try. It is the sort of effortlessness that tells you that this was something considered and redrafted a number of times--I can imagine Campion not writing a word for long stretches until the right one finally  came to him. That I admire, as one does come across a good many poems in a good many volume of poets who write things that make them sound as if they are still trying to get to the poem they imagined they had  in their possession. The result of that is a lot of  subdivided autobiography that amounts to only so much clutter--think of someone you know who talks too much of themselves trying to get along in the world.

As with the idea of sea air the title suggest, I find something unusually relaxed in Peter Campion's poem "Salt Water"; it is airy, not in the sense of being breezy or light headed, but rather in the sense one gets of going for a walk along a beach or perhaps being close to a coast line on a spring day. The world seems to assemble itself at will, spontaneously, the scents of the daily things--salt air, incidental gasoline aromas, meals on stoves --mingle with the bits of conversation , garish radio music, the slapping of waves against rocks adding a counter point to the persistent hiss of traffic that always closer than we want them to be in our perfect moments.

Campion allows this poem to breathe , providing space for his details, described in ways that are unusual but not grudgingly opaque ; there is the sense of something Suddenly Realized, a Wonder Beheld. It is a poem composed not unlike a classic Miles Davis improvisation over an old song that has been reduced to it's basic components that both solo and foundational melody seem an organic unity, moving in unison, perceived for a moment in its essence, in itself. An epiphany, perhaps, a string of relationships of oneself and another against a larger framework, composing a counter narrative than the practical instructions one might tell his or herself about getting from point A to B; Campion selects his words, his phrases the way the improviser selects his notes and assembles his phrases, with the effect being delayed somewhat, not immediate, gestating in memory until the stealthy metaphors or musical units recombine in memory with other sensory recollection. This is the poetry of surprise.


_______________________


A Slate reader who'd listened to the audio version of the poem (featuring Campion reciting his own work) asked the question about who started the trend of writers reading their stanzas in a series of stylized moans instead of letting the rhythms of the work direct the style of recitation. Indeed, Campion on the recording sounds like he's coming out of a very bad sleep.


I suspect it's an MFA program thing, beholden to what Ron Silliman calls the School of Quietude; roughly speaking, that would a school of poetry that places the extremely sensitive personal of the author in the center of the poem who acts as a passive conduit through which all the universe's particulars must flow. The poems of this style vary incredibly, from amazing to god awful, but the default style for reading the poems aloud is passive, as if the poet is overwhelmed by the sensation and is about to pass out. In some cases it seems the writers are trying to pass an extremely contentious turd. This is quite the opposite of Campion's poem: though hardly requiring an Al Pacino type of exclamation, one can, I think, up the energy and highlight the rhythm and music of the the work. A reader ought not sound as if sounding out their work is a burden. It makes the reading of the poem a burden in turn, for the reader.

"Skyline": helping Roger Corman improve with age

Skyline had an impressive trailer, but once you pay for you ticket, you realize that every bit of impressive imagery and special effect was in the ad. The movie , a bone bare variation of The War of the Worlds, has the most flat-line scripts of the year; the dialogue lacks even the campy elan of a choice Roger Corman picture.

Corman , King of the B Movies when he was the lead exploitation director and producer for American International Pictures, at least winked to the audience about how silly his horror and science fiction plots were; one need only remember the serial coffee house bus buy / Beat artist wanna be /serial killer in the director's goony masterpiece Bucket of Blood as he keeps uttering "Art is a hitchhiker catching a ride on the omnibus of art". This is said by the schlep several times, adding a comic jargon to the bizarre series of murders that occur through the movie. Corman's signature in his minimalist absurdities was his willingness to dive without flinching straight into the grungy strands and strains of pop culture without flinching, concieve  a rickety plot  device concerning Aliens, Alienated Teens, marginalized personalities a mere nervous laugh away from a kitchen knife homicide, a monster in a hairy mask going crazy in the halls of an unmonitored girl's dormiotory--and make a fast bit of   oddness that both amused amd distrubed; I always had the feeling that I was both the sophisticated viewer laughing at what was conspicuously idiotic, and that I was additionally the one with the abbrevidated interests that made exploitaters like Corman a success. This is to say  that his movies remain compelling after the shock value has worn off; Corman may well have been the premiere  American  Film Expressionist. After a time YOU get the feeling of what phrases and rationalizations might be cycling through the mind of a psychopath as he or she attempts to complete their obsessed missions in the world. The special effects, of course, are impressive to a degree, but you realize before long that that was the film maker's highest priority. "Skyline" has an an attractive veneer and can boasts some artfully composed images, but it is a sober minded, without a relief laugh, a monotonous series of sudden stops and starts meant to startle. We are merely annoyed.

The most glaring consequence in emphasising a few well tweaked effects is that the characters remain in a static situation--trapped in a pricey high rise condominium by convincingly repulsive aliens-- and that characters remain static as well. There are some attempts to bring some complexity to the character lives, with issues of infidelity and love vs individual survival filtered lightly through the inane banter , but none of this adds dramatic tension; all there is left to do is observe one character after another get gobbled up by alien creatures, watch the population of Los Angeles get lifted , Rapture like, to a serrated edged alien vessel, to wait for a surprise ending that's more dead end than brutal revelation.

Smoke

A man walks his dog but the dog holds the leash between bottom and upper rows of teeth that know chew toys and biscuits as distinct from the rest of the world contained on these few blocks to the park.

The man lights a cigarette  and drops the match in front of the swings at the playground where he sits on a bench, waiting for his dog to find a favored spot to remember in later days when it might be a kingdom for a friendly scent when there is only barking from behind the fences the two of them pass gong to and from the store or some such place near home.


It is winter the sun is caught in the bare branches of trees that have surrendered their leaves to the season, the light of the sun is cold on the breath, man walks dog in jerky steps, the dog raises his head and growls, drops the leash from his teeth, a car passes by and a dog in the back seat has head sticking out of the window, yelping against the wind the envelopes his face in a perfect wrap of jet streams pinning his ears to the back of his head,

The man's dog runs after the car, barking and baying along the street lined with snowdrifts and grey, runneld slush, gone into the cold, leash less in the cold gasping for the man's hand and the leash he swings like lariat catching cattle the size of boxcars.

Duncan Shepherd found distinctions

It is not altogether settled, among those who care about such things, whether the retirement of Duncan Shepherd from his post as the film critic of the San Diego Reader after 38 years of service is a cause for celebration or lamentation. The detractors of Shepherd, who are legion, contend, with wearying predictability, that he was a misanthrope who never found a movie to his liking, that he dispensed his black dots with reckless abandon, and that, most daringly, he harbored a deep-seated animus against the very art of cinema. I confess that I was drawn to his writings precisely because he was not easily amused by the offerings of Hollywood–at last, someone who dared to castigate the mediocrity that pervaded the screen–and I find the accusation that he loathed movies altogether to be a symptom of a reader who either skimmed his reviews superficially or failed to grasp his arguments. One of the delights of reading Shepherd was to discover his occasional praise for a movie that would otherwise escape notice despite its modest charm and crafty execution; he had a discerning eye for those filmmakers who could respect the genre they were working in and make it fresh without resorting to grotesque gimmicks. This is what good critics do, make distinctions, find exceptions.

It is hardly astonishing that the movie critics have been unsparing in their dissection of the movie version of Bewitched, given the dismal track record of television shows adapted into cinematic features. The presence of Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Shirley McLaine, and Michael Caine has not mollified the skeptics. It surprises me only marginally more than Shepherd found some merit in it. It is not a matter of someone making fatuous pronouncements for provocation. Shepherd is more fastidious than that; he sticks to specifics and illustrations, and compares the current movie with a host of other recent works by the same participants. It amounts to arguing that the movie is good because it is less bad than its predecessors; it is an inelegant way of making a case for a movie and a nightmare for studio publicists looking for a flattering blurb. But it gives the reader an intriguing glimpse into how one critic thinks popular entertainment should be conceived and executed.

Shepherd is, in my estimation at least, a masterful if idiosyncratic prose stylist, a peerless historian of film art, and a refreshing breeze of honest opinion when he renders judgment on a feature. He has an aesthetic he will not compromise, and the endless tide of grueling gimmickry has not worn him down. I am less exacting in what it takes to entertain me at the movies, and I am usually more charitable than Shepherd tends to be. That may only mean that my standards are more relaxed and that Shepherd’s love of the movie art is such that he deplores seeing the medium squandered on plots that would not satisfy the requirements for a dime novel. Yet I read him all the same, given that he is the sort of critical contrarian who makes a case instead of pontificating about what aesthetic absolutes are being violated. He is not a critic who bemoans the death of the movies; it is one movie at a time, wryly observed, and judgments rendered in witty and incisive fashion. He is the sort of man you dread to see on the opposite side of a debate since it would mean that you would need to shore up your argument to a sounder foundation.

Three decades into his job, and his reviews are as brutal if elegantly phrased as ever. He does catch you surprised, though, and finds sensibly lovely things to say about films other critics have attacked like packs of hungry dogs. He gave Prince’s star-writer-director vehicle Under The Cherry Moon three stars out of his five-star rating system, appreciating the film’s look and measured style and the director’s ability to create a fantastic sense of place without making a mess of the art he’s trying to create. Likewise, he awarded five stars to Walter Hill’s seriously under-estimated Streets of Fire. Among other comments, he cited that virtually every other critic missed or chose not to discuss, that the ostensible rock and roll fable was actually a Western with its narrative conventions set in the mid 20th century America. Shepherd’s discussion of the Hill film is more nuanced than I’ve given here, but let it suffice that he was right about both films.

The Fate of the Novel: Franzen Frets So We Don't Have To

 Jonathan Franzen is a major novelist who seems fated to be remembered for being a weenie as much as being an important writer. In his June appreciation of Christina Stead's 1940 novel, The Man Who Loved Women", the stress-tested author feels at ease to share with us his suspicion that ths thing we love, The Novel, is an affection of vanity, not practical need.

" ...haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about."

I found myself rather stunned by Franzen's smugness in having it both ways; at times he wants to defend the literary novel from the barbarians who would turn the form into a fast food for the shrinking reading taste for reading, and now he hints that he thinks the Novel in general is a dated, creaking contraption. The eclipse of the novel, the death of the novel, the erasure of the novel are things that have been argued before, and lo, here we are, still reading novels and talking about them, arguing about them, still trying to minimize their importance. Tom Wolfe argued with typical bombast in his anthology of New Journalism that fiction had become irrelevant because reality had outstripped the novelist's imagination, and that the narrative techniques of he novel were better used for non-fiction.

The fiction writer's concept of the world had become a sorry trove of self-reflective theory and it was up to the journalists and the historians to properly tell the tale of our time. Wolfe, of course, desires to be the Dickens or the Balzac of our time, and considers the nineteenth century ideal of precisely capturing the surface the surface of things to be enough for those tasking themselves with working the long quills; to know a man, merely observe what things surround him.

To dare to think that a novelist could render a character's interior life negotiating the flow and flux of the external world (to say nothing of the task of making an entire cast of main characters just as complex) amounts to a terrible heresy against the storyteller's art. Or at least Tom Wolfe's version of what a story teller is; but we remember, Wolfe is a journalist, finally, not a story teller, he is beholden to the 4 W's, who, what , where, when. Pesky novelists, though, strayed beyond the bemoaning and constraining tide of naysayers and they continue with their stories, dealing with people and their complexities, and readers continue to read them. The only task of the novelist, I would say, is to put the reader in the respective shoes of a set of characters in a world they , the reader, might not otherwise experience; the notion is to live a little fuller without having to buy a plane ticket, to experience the world for a period in a way that has nothing to do with what one's instinctive resistance to change instructs us to do. Novels matter. Fiction matters. Arguing that they don't is a species of tedious grand standing. It's a rumpled horn section bleating the same old chord changes on a song that's old and sticks to the table top like a grime-primed coaster.Jonathan, Tom, take the lampshades off your heads.

You had me

You had me at "no so fast"

when my mouth ran like a faucet

that filled up the sink, 

you had me between centuries

I asked when the moon would be full, 

you  had me in stitches

and unconscious for days  ,

 you had me in hospital clothes

with a blood and iron on my breath, 

you had me with my marker,

the document I signed

with needle and thread,

 you had me going for a minute,
you had me guessing along,

you had me the way a fat man has an appetite,
you had me for lunch,

you had me rewrite the love letters I wrote you,

you had me going for a moment,

you had my heart 

and I never got it back.

THE RUMBLE OF THE GRUMBLE

Robert Pinsky offers up Sir Walter Raleigh's poem "The Lie" in this week's Slate poem selection and offers up a cogent argument for the ability of the poet , when provoked and inclined, to puncture pretension, artifice and reinforced falsehood with more precision and pointedness than a mere counter assertion could.  In another era, perhaps, in a bygone day, when writers opposed to one another's notions of what constitutes justice and moral righteousness had to wait for however long it took for letters, pamphlets, books, the like, to be written, processed, and delivered.

The period gave the conflicting bards time to hone their craft and compose the rhymes , with all their indicting hooks and barbs, so that they had a sharpness that would cause the deepest wound. The gift of this was a spirited exchange, a correspondence of heated verbal dexterity that could be enjoyed and examined years beyond the relevance of the original topic; this is the literature we parse in college, these are the examples we are supposed to appreciate to learn our rhetorical craft.

he art of the inspired exchange of views, seems lost on the Internet , as one is hard pressed to read an otherwise interesting article and not find a comment stream that is less discussion or debate than it is a boiling stew of vulgarity. It goes beyond the pointed use of F Bombs for added emphasis or  colloquial texture, as that word and it's barnyard cousins often times are the conversation, verbatim.  One might consider their own adventures into the comment streams of many a web forum and consider  what happened to all those fine cadences it seems everyone said they loved so much in graduate school; these were the syntaxes that were supposed to give our oppositions to bad faith the clear, cutting sweep of Truth.

 There are a few exceptions, truth be told, not every web zine readership is composed of aggravated boobs typing their congealed rage with clubbed fingertips; Slate and Salon , among others, seem to inspire  generally thoughtful responses. Still, the loud , baggy monsters are out there, cursing their own eyes for seeing the light. Small wonder, it seems, that a good number of better online forum contributors have , seemingly, gone elsewhere. There are better things to do than continually lean into that sucker punch you know is waiting for you.

I WAS A TEENAGE POETRY POSER

I was in high school during the late sixties and early seventies, suffering from all the belated-arrival blues that was the usual blend for teens who wished they were older than they were, thus more experienced and hip. The daily aggravation started with a look in the mirror and sighing loudly, too loudly, that my facial hair wasn't coming in thick enough. I was particularly pissed that I'd missed out on the Beat era, and that I was too young to truly be involved in the college folk revival.

Still, I took my Dylan very seriously, although I considered him at the time to be an also-ran--the last great age of hipness was the fifties--and I went about my way, my rather self centered and self righteous way, to become a campus poet, seer, gadfly, intellectual, man of mystery. I had long hair, wire frame glasses, I wore as much black as I could, which was absurd since I was living in Southern California, a terrain where I still hang a shingle and get my mail.

Black clothing makes sense, I guess, if you're in colder, damper, more overcast climates, ala NYC, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, but in So Cal there was and remains a surfeit of sun, which made attempt to be a gloomy, dark, frost-bitten avatar of hip a ridiculous enterprise. It's only beginning to occur to me how absurd my middle class yearnings for street credibility really were. I'd lived up to that point as a self-conscious, shy, hard-of hearing and overweight nerd who was often the brunt of abuse from others because I was thought of as dull and dumb do to my hearing loss--I didn't always catch on to what others were talking about and tried, often times, to bluff my way through a conversation. My responses to what others had said or had asked me , or what I put forward in attempts to become part of a conversation already in progress, were as often as not guesses at the topic, based on what the words I thought the phonemes resembled . It was a poetry of its own sort, and I felt absolutely exhilarated when what I had offered at risk wound up being dead on, and it was even more electric when my mad stab at relevance somehow managed to jump the rails of the subject and introduce a related tangent that others hadn’t considered and thought was a brilliant leap on my part. Too often, though, my remarks caused a quiet in the room that had the dead solemnity of a tombstone; I was the Coltrane of Confusion, the Mozart of Misspeak, and the Picasso of Puzzlement. It went something like this:

"I just got a new bike..."
That's great. What kind is it?"
"One o'clock..."
Norm Crosby, a comedian who was a regular player on the Ed Sullivan Show, came up with that joke, but it got the experience of a hard of hearing fellow trying to make his way through the world without letting on that he had a loss. Crosby got the absurdity of it precisely right and I still use the quip as a reference point some forty years later Even so, I wrote poems, did special readings in 7-11 parking lots, and performed some original verse at an ersatz antiwar rally where in an especially precious ad lib I announced that Bob Dylan was "...the father of us all". One might have wondered how I discovered half the paternity of the counter culture. My nonsense utterances gathered many rueful looks; I was among those weenies that went to dances to listen to the band. During my senior year I'd made something of a name for myself as a faux bohemian, dark and mysterious as previously described, taken to mispronouncing names of famous men and writing reams of awful poetry of which there is not a single line in existence; I tossed the poems into the trash one night, all three folders and four notebooks. It was liberating, if that word ever had any meaning. It was as if someone had taken a big boot from my throat. I was now free to be a pompous git on my terms alone. Not perfect, but progress, no?

When Reviewers Attack.

Josh Board, film reviewer for Sandiego.com, does an amazing job of regurgitating 38 years of proletarian complaints against the retiring Reader film critic Duncan Shepherd. The thrust of Josh's argument seems to be that DS is a bad critic because he didn't like the movies he thought were the cat's pajamas.


He concludes that DS hates movies. We must note that Josh does not deal with the substance of Duncan Shepherd's critiques; he reminds me of the sort of guy who would listen to a reasonable criticism of a movie he thought brilliant and would respond with the old fallback "Oh, yeah, that's just YOUR opinion." 


True as that cliche maybe, it does not diminish the four decades of Duncan Shepherd's film appraisals, since the unspoken addendum to that tired saw is that NOT ALL OPINIONS ARE CREATED EQUAL. Josh as well cannot seem to get his head around the fact that you can regularly read someone you usually disagree with on a particular subject. I don't know why this is hard him to fathom, but it does get back to the "Not all opinions are created equal" remark from two sentences ago--Duncan's wit, knowledge, and elegance as a writer made his opinions worth keeping up with.

Edvard Munch swallows himself

One looks at a reprint of Munch's most famous painting The Scream and then regards the subtler, more somber depressions of this painter's angst soaked paintings, such Girls On the Jetty, and wonder why he was such a glum Gus. The reason is more practical and less mysterious than some of our more mystical critics would insist.He was good at it. With all the impressionist swellings, swirling clouds, jaggedly mad crows, blurred lines and obscured faces moving about his canvases under the darkest, deepest shades and tones he could manage, what Munch saw in the world wasn't nice formations in pleasing shapes and arrangements, but rather as a thin film of appearance under which each and everyone of his dark moods and skewed perception pulsed, ached and persistently throbbed. Munch and his allies did a rather nice job of freeing the artist from having to make pretty pictures for dentist offices. Not that it was a bad mood alone that motivated his brush strokes.

The desire to depict reality in a different way, to find a truth that hadn't yet been brought forward, is a permanent impulse among artists who are the least bit figurative, and Munch's penchant for gloom and depressed spaces were a perfect inspiration, it that's the word, to take the image of the world apart, tweak the essential elements, and reassemble it, askew, fuzzy, angular. Munch's genius was also his pathology, and the crazed energy in his head which drove him to relentless distraction was additionally his ugly gift to the world. It still commands our attention generations later.

Writers tend to over state the depressive elements in Munch's paintings and speak of them as if every stroke he applied to a canvas produced works like the scream. Hardly the case, of course, and the slide show shows that he could manage pastorals, country scenes, bits and pieces of everyday life. What is obvious, though, is that his preoccupation with death, with mortality, finds it way into the scenes with his choice of deep hues, grave undertones, with no distinct lines but rather rushing, brush-textured dimensions that made his surfaces seem to tremble underneath the placid tableau. The particular painting, Girls on the Jetty, has them looking over the bridge, faces averted, staring over and into a flat lake or pond whose reflection is dark even on what seems to be a sunny day and finally gives itself over to blackness. However vital our daily lives are, however serene our present circumstances, death is always with us, informing our choices even the denial of death. Munch was a depressed man, no doubt, but aside from the constricted fury of The Scream, he had subtler ways of transmitting his unease with existence.

The depressive elements in Munch's paintings and speak of them as if every stroke he applied to a canvas produced works like The Scream. Hardly the case, of course, and the slide show shows that he could manage pastorals, country scenes, bits and pieces of everyday life. What is obvious, though, is that his preoccupation with death, with mortality, finds it way into the scenes with his choice of deep hues, grave undertones, with no distinct lines but rather rushing, brush-textured dimensions that made his surfaces seem to tremble underneath the placid tableau. The particular painting, Girls on the Jetty, has them looking over the bridge, faces averted, staring over and into a flat lake or pond whose reflection is dark even on what seems to be a sunny day and finally gives itself over to blackness. However vital our daily lives are, however serene our present circumstances, death is always with us, informing our choices even the denial of death. Munch was a depressed man, no doubt, but aside from the constricted fury of The Scream, he had subtler ways of transmitting his unease with existence.

"Mother and Child" - By Rosanna Warren - Slate Magazine

"Mother and Child" - By Rosanna Warren - Slate Magazine

None among us relishes the idea of spending inordinate amounts of time with someone who seems to have no vocation other than to wait for their own personal End of Days, but there is shared in our endless ranks the issue of family, loyalty, a grudging paying back of the attention that was given to us unconditionally, if grudgingly, by our parents. In adulthood , our tasks multiply , among them the giving of care and attention to aging patriarchs and matriarchs, together separately. We grit our teeth, we mix our thoughts with high, chiming music, we go to lunch, we make the bed, we distract ourselves with airport novels and movies about imperiled women that rotate like plates on one of the plethora of cable channels; coping with the deadened time, the terse conversation becomes itself an art, an artifice radiating in the mind alone, unseen, a psychic mask that allows us at least a composed visage , if not assuaged nerves.

A basket of scones swaddled in blue-checked cloth, 

slanting floorboards, brass bedsteads, lace curtains to soften 

the narrow, 19th-century view of neighboring shingles— 

we had paid for quaint. The sea, three streets away, 

like a giant quilt an invalid had shoved down: 

low tide. We turned from the heave-ho dunes 

back to the boutiques, their improbable lingerie, 

leather halters, handcuffs, whips, and paper roses. 

Cafes proffered espresso and Portuguese soup. 

Affected, yes, but this prop-glutted language is likewise effective, the speaking voice creating the sense of stress that is obscured by perfect manners and well rounded phrases. The particulars are separated , ordered, relegated to a well honed description that makes the roiling issues under the activity's perfect skin appear only temporarily lulled into a fitful sleep. Not put to rest , not in the least.

 

Rosanna Warren , it appears , prefers a fussy, antiquated prose as she narrates her afternoon with a mother who seems too tightly wrapped in a generation of frustrated designs: the peculiar emphasis of the fussily described detail, the pristine diction of the adjectives and crafted application of verbs in the service of capturing a recent event seems to me an affectation--the style seems like an elliptical gathering of phrases from a Henry James novel , The American or Wings of Dove when a character's movements are no longer "closely observed" by the untrustworthy narrator but become obsessively detailed, a clue to an author's stalling action until a plot turn presents itself.-- but it is the artifice, perhaps, Warren wants to draw us to. It's a voice coming through the either as if from a hundred years earlier, underscoring the distance the daughter has created as a means of disowning whatever emotional damage might be radiating between her and her mother; this is an attempt to treat the circumstances like they were scenes from a novel, quaint, picaresque to a degree, a situation that one can get to with tenacity, like the last page of a book. And yet, and yet...for all the defenses and denials festooned in a mellifluous 'though dubious music, there are cracks in the defenses.

They are dying, side by side, at different rates, at different speeds, and this is the subtext of their day of tea, meals and mornings of small talk and walks among the towns people, they are where they are , locked in gestures and cadences that mirror one another across the decades, busy with small tasks and habitual tics, waiting, under it all, to leave this plane, one,and then the other.

So Long, Duncan Shepherd

San Diego Reader So Long

Duncan Shepherd is leaving his spot as The San Diego Reader's film critic after thirty years of imposing the hardest standard on new movies; I've read him continuously since the mid 70's , when I wrote occasional concert and record reviews for the reader, his prose , more than his knowledge, being the attraction.

 I was on a rather long journey to get something of the critic's tone and elegance--Shepherd and the late Steve Esmedina, another Reader critic, were my local stylistic models.Duncan's departure is a loss for film criticism ; there was something sublime about The Reader, one of the largest alternative weeklies in the country, having the single most "un-blurbable" film critic . 

His style and his nuanced, formalist arguments of movies, favorable or otherwise, were so that it was literally impossible to extract a single quote from them for a newspaper ad. That suited him fine, and it suited his readers.I left these words in the comment stream following his last column:

I am sorry to see you leave the pages of the Reader, web or otherwise. You've been one of the few  refusing to be swayed to the chorus of fluctuating fashion. Although I have to say that I disagreed with your judgments more than half the time, I respected and looked forward to your knowledge, your wit and the elegance of your prose. It was a good bet that if I wanted to defend a film you found wanting, I would have to "up my game". You have my gratitude that you kept up the good fight as long as you had; I hope someday soon I might again be able to read you again, on  terms that suit you, about what you find engaging.

 Good luck , Duncan.

More on Jane Hirshfield

"Two Poems" - By Jane Hirshfield - Slate Magazine

Hirshfield's "Alzheimer's " poem was actually the first of two poems published in slate, the second one being the bittersweet coda to the the former work's spare unraveling of expectations to aging and infirmity.
The poem, called "The Kind Man", picks up where the other poem ends, where the beautiful thing that was supposed to be forever--the memory of a great man, the beauty of the poem--slips into anonymity and becomes mere material for a younger generation to make use of. The survivor realizes that they don't want their lives becoming museums of those they can longer talk to , kiss, argue and have meals with. Small things become less mementos of glad times than they are stubbor pebbles in the shoe as one tries to move on.

The Kind Man
I sold my grandfather's watch,
its rosy gold and stippled pattern to be melted.
Movement unreparable.Lid missing.
Chain—there must have been one—missing.
Its numbers painted with
a single, expert bristle.
I touched the winding stem
before I passed it
over the counter.
The kind man took it,
what I'd brought him as if to the Stasi.
He weighed the honey of time.

This is what we settle for, taking a deep breath and walking over the briarpatched fear of letting go of things imbued with inordinate associations of love and loss, frustration and small wonders, and passing on the things that have family value, accepting the encroaching sense of betrayal, seeing, finally, the watch as only a thing with a minor market value as far as anyone else is concerned. Painful, yes, but this something must be done to make one's life, one's home their own. Any of us who've had to close a parent's house, or say a few words at a good friend's memorial knows the ritual. This is where the life we've given us achieves full autonomy: we are more fully ourselves, more alone than we've been before.

A poem by Jane Hirshfield

An interesting couple of poems appears in Slate by Jane Hirshfield, dealing with the inevitable experience of death, the long shadow that falls over all of us. The first, "Alzheimer's", is a harsh lyric, a superbly connected bit of detail that makes a connection with a troubling fact of life; it is a terrific example of how to concisely travel the distance from the abstract to the specific without sacrificing emotional power. That poem can here.

The question goes "what's eating you?", and , as we get older, shakier, less full of ourselves because there are fewer people who care what we think, or what we've done, a proper answer would seem to be that it is other people who've picked up on your accomplishments and done something more with them. Their inventions and bits of genius are not possible without the base you laid out. So one is a rug, bright, colorful, an intricate weave of detail, experience, improvisations and inspiration, that is chewed on from the margins; the center remains ,the design is visible, but it is tattered and gnawed upon, unable to collect itself to a former glory. The glory never returns.

A thing of beauty is a thing forever, as it goes in the Keatsian sense, but in this instance, the rug standing in as metaphor for a man's presumably long life, the idea of "forever" hinges on the title of Hirshfield's poem,"Alzheimer's". The beautiful man will be so long as there are people to remember him and exchange stories about him, marvel at old photographs, trade details on conversatins they've had with him.

"Forever", Hirshfield implies, is merely another way to refer to describe what the historical record is for the likes of us who do not move mountains , win wars, or save nations from destroying themselves; it merely describes a reprieve against the amnesia that over takes all of us after a loved one dies. The survivors themselves die, and their children have nothing of the friendships to their memory, only the archive of deeds and repeated wisdoms, now uttered as common place phrases in the commonly held idiom. There is a bitterness here, a realization that one has had their turn in the sun and that soon enough the misery of fading away will be done; what remains after the funeral, the books, the furniture, the inventions, the best of what one has done and said, will be distributed among a variety of networks, and what is deemed useful will be judged by an anonymous population that perhaps has no knowledge of who we might have been . Not the example of Keatsian joy. Hirshfield's succinctly debunks the idea that we live on in the memory of others. The lights dim and go out on everything, to the extent that all that actually remains is the detritus of our individual lives, recognized as incidental paraphenalia, to be judged and used by the young in ways of decoration, not honor.

It was suggested by someone that this poem contains an embedded irony in Hirshfield's remembering this dying man in this poem, immortalizing him, in effect. Or so it seems.Preserved in a poem, perhaps, but not really, as most poems that are written and published get a minuscule readership, and that most are not remembered after a short duration. Trust me, as bookseller I have had to clean out houses of a lifetime's reading, piling stacks of old poetry books written by poets with names known only to retired librarians and specialists in arcana. A beautiful poem is not a thing forever, in most respects--someone like Yeats is rare, rare, rare. Poems, their subjects, and their authors fade with time; they become forgotten. What remains is an anonyous residue.

What the old man says about not being the picture of "Keatsian joy" offers a clue to Hirshfield's probable realization that even a metaphorical immortalization in a poem is subject to the recollection of the collection memory. Somethings last longer through the decades better than others, but it is a fact that most poems and their poets are not remembered past their century. Those of us that write poems long to be Shakespeare , Pope or Donne for the sake of longevity, but most of realize, at a gut level, that notoriety in poetry, in content and authorship, is the least reliable way to get famous, or stay famous. I don't think Hirshfied is telling us something so sentimental as to declare that somehow one is remembered in a work of art; this poem has a harder core, but not a cold one. She merely acknowledges, I believe, the limits of memory, of reputation for most of us now walking the earth. Most of us will land in the history books, most of us will not have poems written about us, all of us need to appreciate the joy that does come our way and to not become angry when sorrow occurs , as it must.