Before leaving London the first week in June, I crowded in lots of events—dinner at Adam Mars-Jones’ in Herne Hill with his partner Keith King; attending the launch of Cahal Dallatt’s excellent new book The Year of Not Dancing at the Troubadour Café, a program where other poets, including the gifted newcomer Maura Dooley, read; coffee with Sandeep Parmar, while James Byrne was in Belgrade receiving a poetry prize; spending an afternoon strolling around Hampstead with Mimi Khalvati; and having coffee with Anne-Marie Fyfe in the Embankment Gardens.
Also, I paid my invariable visit to the Tate Modern, lingering in the “Poetry and Surrealism” galleries; saw one art exhibition, the Kuniyoshi prints being shown at the Royal Academy, and two plays at the National Theatre. The first was Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, at the Olivier, with Nonso Anozie as Elesin, the “horseman of the king,” and Claire Benedict as Iyaloja, the “mother of the market,” and Giles Terera as the Praise Singer. The director Rufus Norris had the inspiration to cast all the roles, even the British colonials, with black actors, the latter roles played in “whiteface.” Which could suggest that underneath the externals, we are all Africans, an idea well supported if you consider the origin of the species Homo sapiens is African. Anyway, it was a vigorous evening, with ample, Brechtian crowd scenes in the market, singing, drumming, dancing, and satiric upbraiding of fools. To say it was an indictment of colonialism is correct but doesn’t sum up the various psychological forces involved. It is a mysterious work and I’d like to see it again.
The second play was Ted Hughes’s version of Racine's Phèdre, starring Helen Mirren, with Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus and Margaret Tyzack as Oenone. The translation seemed good, the only problem being that I have quite a few of the French lines in my head, and could hear them when Hughes’s English equivalents were spoken, which became the source of a dissonance probably not too many in the audience had to deal with. I’d say most of the performances were good (and this was the first preview), though tending to go over the top. Mirren may have been away from the stage too long to feel altogether comfortable there, especially in something so grand as Phèdre. I liked Dominic Cooper, partly because some of his working class flavor infiltrated the performance, and partly because he has an angry intensity that he is able to draw on when apt for the lines. Of course the audience laughed at several points, which is inevitable for classical tragedy in our ironic era. But Nicholas Hytner probably shouldn’t have had Hippolytus vomit into a fountain basin on the stage-left wall after hearing Phèdre’s avowal of love. This provoked the loudest laughter of the evening. On the other hand, when she is giving us a portrait of her despair, Mirren smiles a lot, which is quite effective, marking out as it does that strange no-man’s-land between tragedy and comedy that we all know only too well. The production is also sited in an in-between time-space continuum, not archaic Greek nor yet modern but a mixture of the two. The same for the characters’ names, some of which keep their French form, others adopting the familiar anglicizations of classical names.
Departure: I came to Newcastle (strictly speaking, one should add the suffix “upon Tyne” to the name) on the fifth of this month settling in a short-term rental I found only at the last minute. I’m on the 13th floor of a high-rise building, next to the river and directly across from the Baltic Museum of Contemporary Art on the south bank of the Tyne, in the borough of Gateshead. The Museum is the result of a makeover of a flour mill built there in the 1950s and can be compared to the Tate Modern, though it only hosts temporary exhibitions. The current one has to do with the influence of Darwin on contemporary art, which is timely, given his bicentenary. Another spectacular feature of this part of town is the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, designed by Christopher Wilkinson and influenced by Calatrava’s harp-like creations. A huge parabolic arc connected to a pedestrian walkway by eighteen cables, it has an unusual feature: it can be tilted back so the walkway is lifted while tall ships pass under. The hoist occurs every day at noon, and sometimes twice. I watched it on Sunday and found the spectacle impressive. Across the river are other postmodern buildings, and, all in all, the quays of the city make a handsome, welcoming public space. Also on the Gateshead side is the ultramodern Sage Gateshead concert hall, designed by Norman Foster, a long, rounded, flowing structure in reflective glass, containing three separate performance halls. This week the Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Thomas Zehetmair, has been giving a series of four performances of 20th-century music. I’ve attended two extraordinary programs so far, the first featuring Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, and the second, Stravinsky, Messiaen, John Cage, and Stockhausen. The Cage work was his notorious 4’33, which asks the performer to sit at a piano without playing anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. I’d never heard (seen) it done, so I have no way of commenting on the relative excellence or inferiority of this rendition. Certainly it’s not true to say the point of the work is silence because after about ten seconds the spectators begin making various noises. This time there were coughs, nose-blowings, barely suppressed giggles, and whatnot. You might think the audience would have responded to programmed silence with “the sound of one hand clapping,” but, no, there was a real explosion of applause, as though to compensate for the unbearable absence of audio that preceded it. In the modern era, only Quakers and Buddhists welcome silence. For nearly all others, it is experienced as a deathlike void and must be filled. So I must be Quaker or Buddhist.
The city center, sometimes called Grainger Town, features the gorgeous Grey Street, lined with wonderfully varied neoclassical buildings as it mounts and curves up to Eldon Square, where a monument to Charles, Earl Grey, dominates. Yes, this is the Prime Minister for whom the popular bergamot-flavored tea was named. His statue stands atop a very tall fluted classical column, rather like Nelson's in Trafalgar Square. For reasons unknown to me, Newcastle didn’t much follow the vogue for Neo-Gothic architecture in the Victorian period. Instead, you get 19th-century neoclassical style, which is rather rare until the fin de siècle when many Beaux Arts masterpieces were constructed in Paris and New York.
But there are many medieval architectural survivals in Newcastle, including remains of the old city wall and the eponymous castle, first built in wood by William the Conqueror’s son and then later rebuilt in stone. In the Morden Tower part of this structure, Basil Bunting, a proud native Northumbrian, first read to the small public gathered there in 1965 his long poem Briggflatts. I was first introduced to Bunting’s poem by Jonathan Williams, who appears in this blog for March 2008, when I spoke of him on the occasion of his death. Jonathan was Bunting’s publisher in America. When I came to visit Jonathan at his summer home in the dales of Cumbria thirty years ago, he drove us up to see the Quaker meeting house at Brigflatts (that is the correct spelling, though not Bunting's). We didn’t push on to Newcastle, and I didn’t then know Briggflatts had debuted there. In 1966 it appeared in Poetry (Chicago) and launched Bunting’s reputation as a modern master.
Partly because the poem mentions the semi-legendary warrior king Eric Bloodaxe, one of the U.K.’s most important poetry publishers, located in Newcastle, took his epithet for their name. (Non-U.K. readers may or may not be familiar with Bloodaxe Press, which has a large and important number of poets in its catalogue.) Newcastle University, too, has in recent years marked out a place for itself on the poetry map by inviting leading poets like Sean O’Brien and W.N. Herbert to join their faculty. So no one should fear I will be a fish out of water up here, far from London and its cultural abundance. The truth is, I wanted to get to know the North a little better, and the process is well underway.
I have one friend in Newcastle, Paul Attinello, an American who teaches in the Musicology department at the U. of N. I mentioned staying with him here back in December, which is when I conceived the plan of coming to Northumbria for the summer. We’ve had a pleasant reunion, attending the concerts together, and I expect to see him many times during my stay, which is now begun and will continue until early September. And several London friends have promised to come up for a visit as well. Maenwhile, I've begun drafting some new work.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Reviews and Objectivity
The book review seems to be the topic of the moment, maybe because online discussion of new books has partly supplanted reviewing in the print media. Tonight in New York the National Book Critics Circle has planned a roundtable discussion of the topic. A young poet named Jason Guriel prefaced a recent review (in Poetry) of three books with a justification of writing negative reviews and received a long letter in response to it further examining the question of negative reviews. This became the subject of a long exchange of comments on Poetry’s “Harriet” blog. The debate was then picked up by an online magazine called Mayday, which invited guest comment on the topic; their online forum was in turn linked by the blog of Magma magazine here in the U.K. So clearly it’s a subject that excites enormous interest, no doubt because book reviews can affect the careers of both reviewer and reviewee; and we live in an era where career is everything. We might wish that the practice of the art of poetry itself was the main attraction for anyone drawn to it, but, considering the public rewards of being a successful poet nowadays (high-paying teaching posts, prizes in excess of $100-thousand, lucrative reading fees) that wish is clearly quixotic. The following comments are informal, composed at random, and necessarily incomplete.
The conventional wisdom about reviews in the fine arts is that the worst review is no review. To gauge the value of a review, get out the tape measure and see how many inches of column it occupies. It doesn’t matter what is said. A pan can interest readers just as much as a puff. The author’s name recognition increases, and that is all that matters in terms of material success.
But surely the conventional wisdom is too simple. A rave review in The Sunday Times Book Review or Poetry can lead to copycat raves elsewhere and then to the awarding of a prize. There is a high correspondence between prize-winning and favorable reviews in the Times and the New York Review of Books. If the reviewer is a person with great prestige, like Helen Vendler or Harold Bloom, a review can form the basis for lifelong career prominence.
Fairness and objectivity are the stated goals of review editors, leading to questions like “Do you know the author?” (always asked at the Times) and “Has the author ever reviewed a book of yours?” This is admirable but doomed. Almost everyone in the poetry world knows, with varying degrees of closeness, everyone else. The insistence on impartiality also ignores literary history, which gives us Coleridge’s ecstatic reviews of Wordsworth as well as his qualified praise of the same; or Jarrell’s rave about his best friend Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle or Bishop’s (also a close friend) North & South; and the list goes on (add your favorite examples). One of mine: When Chester Kallman’s first collection of poems appeared, W.H. Auden, his partner of thirty years prefaced a highly favorable review with these words (which I'm robably not remembering exactly): “The fact that I have been in a close association with this author for three decades shouldn’t prevent me from doing a little log-rolling.” Honest? Yes. Objective? No.
Putting aside the question of possible damage done to the career of someone attacked in a review, Auden said we shouldn’t write negative reviews because it was bad for one’s character. I can see what he means. Because it is so easy to find fault, we can lull ourselves into feelings of superiority over not only the poor scribbler we’re mopping the floor with but also humanity at large. We can become absurdly vain about our ability to find funny one-liners that skewer a poem or its author. In fact, we can become so entertaining (almost everyone loves satire) that we get more and more assignments in ever more prominent forums, writing reviews that are much sought out for their satiric readability, not for their ability to clarify aesthetic goals of the authors in question. We can build a whole career on cleverly phrased pans, but if we are poet-critics our poetry books probably won’t meet with the same success. Other reviewers will avoid writing about them for fear of reprisal. Since prize committees are composed of poets and quite possibly poets whose work the savage reviewer has trounced, the latter won’t win prizes. So it’s easy to imagine the case of a young poet who started out with the high ideal of doing something comparable to Keats or Geoffrey Hill and then, after a decade of reviewing dabbled in only as a sideline, ending up as a celebrated reviewer-satirist; but meanwhile never discussed as a poet and largely unread as one. So perhaps it’s a paradoxical kind of success.
To return to objectivity, it can only exist in relative terms in the field of the arts. To appreciate any work of art, you must greet it with a kind of welcome, with sympathy and a disposition to appreciate. This can arise from many sources, especially friendship with the artist. It can also come from a reputation of greatness that precedes the first encounter with a given work. It can also be created in the mind of a reviewer who knows the author is in a position to give him or her a leg up in the world. By the same token, the readiness to dislike can precede a first reading of the work, either because of personal antipathy to the author or to the artistic circle or social or ethnic category to which she or he belongs; or because the author has often been negatively reviewed before. Also, it’s possible to give a bad review because you are aware the disparagement will please someone with power and patronage to dispense: they may decide to dispense some of it to you.
Those reviewers who want to approximate objectivity must do two things: they have to quote generously from the text being reviewed and they have to construct arguments that are plausible, based on common sense and fresh insights into the nature of verbal communication. It’s good to adduce opinions about the art of poetry (or about experience) stated by generally admired poets and critics in support of a point of view. What's thoroughly lame is a bald, “I love this” or “I hate this.” Opinion divorced from demonstration is nearly useless, even when stated with vehemence. That is why short reviews are nothing more than notices of publication. They shouldn’t be taken seriously as reliable appraisal because they can neither quote at length nor argue in detail. Wait, there’s a third thing that helps us trust a review: the reviewer must write well. A sloppily written review implicitly calls into question the validity of the reviewer’s judgments about others’ writing. I won't go so far as to say no one should review who hasn't published a book, and yet a published book is a credential more than usually valuable because we can read it and form an independent opinion of the capacities and biases of the author.
We always focus on the problem of objectivity of reviewers, but the discussion should move back one domino in the whole process and mention the decisive role of the book review editor. It’s so obvious, no one states it: assigning or not assigning a book is a kind of review. Because, remember, the worst review of all is the one never written or published. I doubt that the decision on which books to review can be any more objective than the eventual review itself. It is based on considerations similar to those involved when the review actually comes to be written, and we should recall that more than half of book review editors are writers, too, and themselves interested in publishing, being reviewed, and rewarded.
A dismissive review can throw formidable obstacles in the path to acceptance and admiration. But the same is true of a failure to assign books by a given author. Indeed, as a means to hinder, it is probably more effective. A negative review at least makes known the book’s existence. Readers may be prompted to read a book despite sharp critiques. But if they don’t know it exists, they won't look for it, won't read it, and can't arrive at any opinion about it, positive or negative. Book review editors have more influence on the fate of books than any single reviewer. Letters to the editor expressing dissatisfaction about negative assessments of books are very common. I don’t ever recall seeing a letter to an editor criticizing him or her for failing to assign a book. But the principle of accountability, in a society attempting to align itself with justice and fair dealing, applies to everyone.
Glancing back over the above paragraphs, I see that much of it touches on what could be described as venal behavior. Unfortunately, the history of literature shows that such behavior is common. And the answer to the natural question, "How do people who behave that way live with themselves?" clearly has to be, "Oh, very easily." Perhaps once in a while a spark of self-knowledge is struck by something seen or read, but the task of extinguishing it is pretty quickly handled, by alibis and ad hominems of one sort or another.
I think we'd also have to say that book reviewing is, in the universal sum of things, not so important after all. Very few book reviews are reread, and they do not in the long run determine the continued admiration or disapproval of authors, e.g. Melville (panned) and James Gould Cozzens (puffed). They are ephemeral. Still, here, as well as in contexts immensely more crucial, I like to call to mind what the great Jewish sage Hillel wrote: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?"
The conventional wisdom about reviews in the fine arts is that the worst review is no review. To gauge the value of a review, get out the tape measure and see how many inches of column it occupies. It doesn’t matter what is said. A pan can interest readers just as much as a puff. The author’s name recognition increases, and that is all that matters in terms of material success.
But surely the conventional wisdom is too simple. A rave review in The Sunday Times Book Review or Poetry can lead to copycat raves elsewhere and then to the awarding of a prize. There is a high correspondence between prize-winning and favorable reviews in the Times and the New York Review of Books. If the reviewer is a person with great prestige, like Helen Vendler or Harold Bloom, a review can form the basis for lifelong career prominence.
Fairness and objectivity are the stated goals of review editors, leading to questions like “Do you know the author?” (always asked at the Times) and “Has the author ever reviewed a book of yours?” This is admirable but doomed. Almost everyone in the poetry world knows, with varying degrees of closeness, everyone else. The insistence on impartiality also ignores literary history, which gives us Coleridge’s ecstatic reviews of Wordsworth as well as his qualified praise of the same; or Jarrell’s rave about his best friend Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle or Bishop’s (also a close friend) North & South; and the list goes on (add your favorite examples). One of mine: When Chester Kallman’s first collection of poems appeared, W.H. Auden, his partner of thirty years prefaced a highly favorable review with these words (which I'm robably not remembering exactly): “The fact that I have been in a close association with this author for three decades shouldn’t prevent me from doing a little log-rolling.” Honest? Yes. Objective? No.
Putting aside the question of possible damage done to the career of someone attacked in a review, Auden said we shouldn’t write negative reviews because it was bad for one’s character. I can see what he means. Because it is so easy to find fault, we can lull ourselves into feelings of superiority over not only the poor scribbler we’re mopping the floor with but also humanity at large. We can become absurdly vain about our ability to find funny one-liners that skewer a poem or its author. In fact, we can become so entertaining (almost everyone loves satire) that we get more and more assignments in ever more prominent forums, writing reviews that are much sought out for their satiric readability, not for their ability to clarify aesthetic goals of the authors in question. We can build a whole career on cleverly phrased pans, but if we are poet-critics our poetry books probably won’t meet with the same success. Other reviewers will avoid writing about them for fear of reprisal. Since prize committees are composed of poets and quite possibly poets whose work the savage reviewer has trounced, the latter won’t win prizes. So it’s easy to imagine the case of a young poet who started out with the high ideal of doing something comparable to Keats or Geoffrey Hill and then, after a decade of reviewing dabbled in only as a sideline, ending up as a celebrated reviewer-satirist; but meanwhile never discussed as a poet and largely unread as one. So perhaps it’s a paradoxical kind of success.
To return to objectivity, it can only exist in relative terms in the field of the arts. To appreciate any work of art, you must greet it with a kind of welcome, with sympathy and a disposition to appreciate. This can arise from many sources, especially friendship with the artist. It can also come from a reputation of greatness that precedes the first encounter with a given work. It can also be created in the mind of a reviewer who knows the author is in a position to give him or her a leg up in the world. By the same token, the readiness to dislike can precede a first reading of the work, either because of personal antipathy to the author or to the artistic circle or social or ethnic category to which she or he belongs; or because the author has often been negatively reviewed before. Also, it’s possible to give a bad review because you are aware the disparagement will please someone with power and patronage to dispense: they may decide to dispense some of it to you.
Those reviewers who want to approximate objectivity must do two things: they have to quote generously from the text being reviewed and they have to construct arguments that are plausible, based on common sense and fresh insights into the nature of verbal communication. It’s good to adduce opinions about the art of poetry (or about experience) stated by generally admired poets and critics in support of a point of view. What's thoroughly lame is a bald, “I love this” or “I hate this.” Opinion divorced from demonstration is nearly useless, even when stated with vehemence. That is why short reviews are nothing more than notices of publication. They shouldn’t be taken seriously as reliable appraisal because they can neither quote at length nor argue in detail. Wait, there’s a third thing that helps us trust a review: the reviewer must write well. A sloppily written review implicitly calls into question the validity of the reviewer’s judgments about others’ writing. I won't go so far as to say no one should review who hasn't published a book, and yet a published book is a credential more than usually valuable because we can read it and form an independent opinion of the capacities and biases of the author.
We always focus on the problem of objectivity of reviewers, but the discussion should move back one domino in the whole process and mention the decisive role of the book review editor. It’s so obvious, no one states it: assigning or not assigning a book is a kind of review. Because, remember, the worst review of all is the one never written or published. I doubt that the decision on which books to review can be any more objective than the eventual review itself. It is based on considerations similar to those involved when the review actually comes to be written, and we should recall that more than half of book review editors are writers, too, and themselves interested in publishing, being reviewed, and rewarded.
A dismissive review can throw formidable obstacles in the path to acceptance and admiration. But the same is true of a failure to assign books by a given author. Indeed, as a means to hinder, it is probably more effective. A negative review at least makes known the book’s existence. Readers may be prompted to read a book despite sharp critiques. But if they don’t know it exists, they won't look for it, won't read it, and can't arrive at any opinion about it, positive or negative. Book review editors have more influence on the fate of books than any single reviewer. Letters to the editor expressing dissatisfaction about negative assessments of books are very common. I don’t ever recall seeing a letter to an editor criticizing him or her for failing to assign a book. But the principle of accountability, in a society attempting to align itself with justice and fair dealing, applies to everyone.
Glancing back over the above paragraphs, I see that much of it touches on what could be described as venal behavior. Unfortunately, the history of literature shows that such behavior is common. And the answer to the natural question, "How do people who behave that way live with themselves?" clearly has to be, "Oh, very easily." Perhaps once in a while a spark of self-knowledge is struck by something seen or read, but the task of extinguishing it is pretty quickly handled, by alibis and ad hominems of one sort or another.
I think we'd also have to say that book reviewing is, in the universal sum of things, not so important after all. Very few book reviews are reread, and they do not in the long run determine the continued admiration or disapproval of authors, e.g. Melville (panned) and James Gould Cozzens (puffed). They are ephemeral. Still, here, as well as in contexts immensely more crucial, I like to call to mind what the great Jewish sage Hillel wrote: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?"
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Postscript
Since yetserday's post, Ruth Padel has given up her appointment to the Oxford Chair of Poetry. In view of the critiques that have been made, and the loss of the prize, I feel the debt should be put paid, and she shouldn't continue to be hounded. Besides, it's good to remember Shakespeare's "Unless this general evil they maintain:/All men are bad, and in their badness reign."
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
London and Controversy
This blog having just been named as one of the top 100 poetry blogs by Online University Reviews, I feel I ought to post something today. It was good to see other blogs I read mentioned as well—Ed Byrne’s, Mark Doty’s, Paul Lisicky’s, Sandra Beasley’s, for example, and I’ve begun to explore others on the list that I didn’t know about. Also, I don’t see why they omitted Joan Houlihan’s or Terry Hummer’s, and even Reginald Shepherd’s, despite the fact that Reginald died in September. It has been carried forward some time after his death by his partner and, anyway, what he wrote there before his death is worth rereading.
I arrived in London last Wednesday and first off saw James Byrne in his new Hampstead digs, and then a few days later again at a dinner party he gave with Sandeep Parmar. Somehow unpacking and jet lag haven’t prevented me from seeing people and attending events. Mimi Khalvati and I attended the celebration of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai at the National Portrait Gallery, the participants including Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Padel, Ruth Fainlight, Alan Sillitoe, Danny Abse, Yvonne Green (the organizer), and Hannah Amichai, widow of the late poet. She was impressive and attractive—warm, level, direct. This emerged during questions after the readings. One that interested me was the relationship between Mahmoud Darwish and Amichai. Darwish admired Amichai’s poetry and said so. They were associates for a while until Amichai interpreted one of Darwsh’s poems as being against the State of Israel. After which, Amichai said he couldn’t appear on the same platform. This puzzled me because Darwish never denied the legitimacy of Israel’s statehood. Just because you are for the Palestinian people doesn't mean you can't be for the continuance of Israel. What Darwish opposed was the refusal of right of return to those who had to to leave their homeland during the disruptions of the transition, and the reduction of large numbers of Palestinians to second-class status in the new state. Not to mention the harassment of checkpoints and the bulldozing of houses and the imprisonment of anyone even suspected of dissidence. As for the ensuing war, the most general kind of humanitarian guidelines as established by international law, irrespective of where war occurs, couldn’t possibly condone what happened. Heads of state and military officers make decisions that ultimately the civilian has to pay for. At this point it’s futile and destructive to try to say who is right and who is wrong. Blockading an entire region is wrong and from time to time depriving it of water, electricity, and food is wrong; firing rockets on civilian targets is wrong, the same as saying you intend to destroy a sovereign state; making settlements on land not recognized by the U.N. as belonging to you is wrong; suicide bombings are wrong; using phosphorus weapons is wrong; preventing the wounded or ill from getting to a hospital is wrong; shutting down peaceful gatherings is wrong; and refusing to negotiate is wrong. The only important issue now is how to bring the violence to an end and to establish viable, peaceful government. That issue should override any prideful clinging to punctilio and protocol. Clearly the people at large want the strife to end. If no move is being made to end it, then it’s the leaders who have to accept the blame. Because the peace and safety not only of the Middle East but the entire world depends on speedy resolution of the conflict, then the world at large should exert pressure on the leadership to put a stop to rhetoric and get down to negotiating.
I seemed to have arrived in the U.K. during scandal season. The misdeeds of MPs who misappropriated public money for private purposes has been so much discussed that there’s nothing to add here. On the other hand, the scandal surrounding the Oxford Poetry Chair is still recent enough to bear examination. I was angry when I heard that Derek Walcott had withdrawn his candidacy for the position because of a history of suits involving sexual harassment in years past had been cited as a reason not to appoint him. I don’t like the following analogy, but it is all I can think of to point up the issues. Compare Walcott to the convicted offender who serves his time and is released. Once he has “paid his debt to society,” this person should be allowed to make a new life for himself. If he isn’t allowed to, he will either harm himself or others. If we don’t believe in rehabilitation, then we have to hand out life sentences only. The smear campaign against Walcott was like convicting someone in advance of a crime not yet committed. Note, too, that the Chair of Poetry doesn’t involve courses and evaluation of students but only public lectures. It’s fair to say that Walcott in one of the three most important living English-language poets. Add to that the non-negligible fact that he has African ancestors—non-negligible in an era when Britain is trying to make up for the injustices of the colonial period. He would have been a brilliant choice. (I can’t help wondering, incidentally, if African ancestry didn’t turn against Walcott here. Overt or subtle, sexual predation of students among white professors is as common as student cheating on exams. But a black professor who attempts this is going to be called to account much more quickly and severely.)
Certainly Ruth Padel is one of the leading poets in the U.K. There were many good reasons for appointing her Oxford Professor of Poetry quite apart from the fact that she was a candidate who hadn't been involved in sexual harassment suits. It’s not a minor consideration that she would have been the first woman to hold the post. Her recent book about the life of her ancestor Charles Darwin would have made the appointment timely not only because of purely calendrical facts but also because we live in an era when fundamentalists are challenging Darwinian theory. Any reminder, any prestige conferrable, any fact that can weaken the fundamentalist case, wherever we find it, is welcome.
But her candidacy has come a-cropper because she at first denied she had anything to do with the smear campaign. Two emails to newspapers now show that she did. To overly aggressive lobbying tactics we have to add a public lie. I think this is intensely sad. First, because it attests to a lack of confidence that personal merit alone was sufficient reason for being appointed. (And in a tradition where women have been discouraged from believing in themselves, we can understand how this might be.) And, second, because it has been the source of pain and perhaps career damage for two poets.
And what happens now? Will the Chair be offered now to Walcott? If offered, will he accept? Will it go to another poet, and if so which poet? Should be interesting to see.
I arrived in London last Wednesday and first off saw James Byrne in his new Hampstead digs, and then a few days later again at a dinner party he gave with Sandeep Parmar. Somehow unpacking and jet lag haven’t prevented me from seeing people and attending events. Mimi Khalvati and I attended the celebration of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai at the National Portrait Gallery, the participants including Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Padel, Ruth Fainlight, Alan Sillitoe, Danny Abse, Yvonne Green (the organizer), and Hannah Amichai, widow of the late poet. She was impressive and attractive—warm, level, direct. This emerged during questions after the readings. One that interested me was the relationship between Mahmoud Darwish and Amichai. Darwish admired Amichai’s poetry and said so. They were associates for a while until Amichai interpreted one of Darwsh’s poems as being against the State of Israel. After which, Amichai said he couldn’t appear on the same platform. This puzzled me because Darwish never denied the legitimacy of Israel’s statehood. Just because you are for the Palestinian people doesn't mean you can't be for the continuance of Israel. What Darwish opposed was the refusal of right of return to those who had to to leave their homeland during the disruptions of the transition, and the reduction of large numbers of Palestinians to second-class status in the new state. Not to mention the harassment of checkpoints and the bulldozing of houses and the imprisonment of anyone even suspected of dissidence. As for the ensuing war, the most general kind of humanitarian guidelines as established by international law, irrespective of where war occurs, couldn’t possibly condone what happened. Heads of state and military officers make decisions that ultimately the civilian has to pay for. At this point it’s futile and destructive to try to say who is right and who is wrong. Blockading an entire region is wrong and from time to time depriving it of water, electricity, and food is wrong; firing rockets on civilian targets is wrong, the same as saying you intend to destroy a sovereign state; making settlements on land not recognized by the U.N. as belonging to you is wrong; suicide bombings are wrong; using phosphorus weapons is wrong; preventing the wounded or ill from getting to a hospital is wrong; shutting down peaceful gatherings is wrong; and refusing to negotiate is wrong. The only important issue now is how to bring the violence to an end and to establish viable, peaceful government. That issue should override any prideful clinging to punctilio and protocol. Clearly the people at large want the strife to end. If no move is being made to end it, then it’s the leaders who have to accept the blame. Because the peace and safety not only of the Middle East but the entire world depends on speedy resolution of the conflict, then the world at large should exert pressure on the leadership to put a stop to rhetoric and get down to negotiating.
I seemed to have arrived in the U.K. during scandal season. The misdeeds of MPs who misappropriated public money for private purposes has been so much discussed that there’s nothing to add here. On the other hand, the scandal surrounding the Oxford Poetry Chair is still recent enough to bear examination. I was angry when I heard that Derek Walcott had withdrawn his candidacy for the position because of a history of suits involving sexual harassment in years past had been cited as a reason not to appoint him. I don’t like the following analogy, but it is all I can think of to point up the issues. Compare Walcott to the convicted offender who serves his time and is released. Once he has “paid his debt to society,” this person should be allowed to make a new life for himself. If he isn’t allowed to, he will either harm himself or others. If we don’t believe in rehabilitation, then we have to hand out life sentences only. The smear campaign against Walcott was like convicting someone in advance of a crime not yet committed. Note, too, that the Chair of Poetry doesn’t involve courses and evaluation of students but only public lectures. It’s fair to say that Walcott in one of the three most important living English-language poets. Add to that the non-negligible fact that he has African ancestors—non-negligible in an era when Britain is trying to make up for the injustices of the colonial period. He would have been a brilliant choice. (I can’t help wondering, incidentally, if African ancestry didn’t turn against Walcott here. Overt or subtle, sexual predation of students among white professors is as common as student cheating on exams. But a black professor who attempts this is going to be called to account much more quickly and severely.)
Certainly Ruth Padel is one of the leading poets in the U.K. There were many good reasons for appointing her Oxford Professor of Poetry quite apart from the fact that she was a candidate who hadn't been involved in sexual harassment suits. It’s not a minor consideration that she would have been the first woman to hold the post. Her recent book about the life of her ancestor Charles Darwin would have made the appointment timely not only because of purely calendrical facts but also because we live in an era when fundamentalists are challenging Darwinian theory. Any reminder, any prestige conferrable, any fact that can weaken the fundamentalist case, wherever we find it, is welcome.
But her candidacy has come a-cropper because she at first denied she had anything to do with the smear campaign. Two emails to newspapers now show that she did. To overly aggressive lobbying tactics we have to add a public lie. I think this is intensely sad. First, because it attests to a lack of confidence that personal merit alone was sufficient reason for being appointed. (And in a tradition where women have been discouraged from believing in themselves, we can understand how this might be.) And, second, because it has been the source of pain and perhaps career damage for two poets.
And what happens now? Will the Chair be offered now to Walcott? If offered, will he accept? Will it go to another poet, and if so which poet? Should be interesting to see.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Leaving Ledig House
A little backtracking. As described in the previous blog, the procedure at Ledig House is for residents’ arrival and departure to be staggered. So Amy Waldman and David Machado left, and after that, Christian Haller, and Dy Plambeck. But then new people came: Rob Schouten, a poet and critic from the Netherlands; Kaspar Schnetzler, a novelist from Switzerland; Alex Halberstadt, a writer of non-fiction who was a class member in a poetry course I taught in the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia, I think about ten years ago. And just a few days after, Chloe Aridjis left, and Joanne Wang arrived. Joanne, originally from Beijing, is now living in New York and working as a translator. Xu Xiaobing, the Chinese novelist whom Joanne recently translated, was scheduled to arrive at the same time but, finally, was denied permission to travel, which is too bad.
The international character of Ledig House sharpens your perspective on what it means to be a writer outside the U.S.A. in the 21st century. Among the short-term visitors to L. House was Taslima Nasrin, who had to leave Bangladesh fifteen years ago because of her controversial publications about the difficulties women have to face in Bangladesh. Since then Taslima has lived the life of an exile in Sweden, Germany, France, India, and now New York, where she has a fellowship from N.Y. U. to do her work. But she would like to return to Bangladesh, her home, and the place where she feels there is a lot of work to do. That same weekend we had the fiction writer Ma Thida, on a fellowship at Brown this year, but expecting to return to Myanmar at the completion of her stay. She was imprisoned there for six years on the sole basis of her publications. I found both women (who have medical degrees, incidentally) formidable in their courage and commitment to basic freedoms that Americans take for granted. I mentioned Abiye Teklemariam in the earlier blog. He received the news that several people he knew in Addis Ababa have been arrested, and that the outlook isn’t good—which raises questions about his own return to his homeland. All of this can make being a writer working in modern Western-style democracies seem very easy indeed, with our freedom to say anything we like (and be unread or ignored), our comfy teaching posts, our well-paid reading tours, and (blush) our subsidized stays in artists’ colonies. But of course we know that there are things we can do to help others in countries where circumstances are riskier.
Other weekend visitors have included Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan, who now directs Bard’s Chinua Achebe Center for African Culture. Before doing that he founded a literary magazine in Kenya called Kwani?, which was innovative in several ways. For example, it published what is probably the first short story by a Kenyan dealing with gay themes. Also up from Bard that same evening was Gabi Ngcobo, South African, who is doing a graduate degree there in curatorial studies. We had a lively conversation about contemporary South Africa (whose post-apartheid constitution guarantees gay civil rights, by the way), and the recent inauguration of Jacob Zuma, about whose government-in-formation there is a lot of discussion.
We also had visitors from the publishing world: Jill Schoolman, who is the publisher of Archipelago Books. Almost everything Archipelago brings out is translated from other language traditions, which of course sets them apart from the bulk of contemporary American publishing. Jill is extraordinarily nice, and it’s instantly clear how dedicated she is to getting important foreign-language works to an American readership, which tends to fall behind in this area. We had one literary agent, Jen Auh, who works at the Andrew Wylie agency and happens to represent Alex Halberstadt. Finally, a night's visit from Anna Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich, who run the Ugly Duckling Presse [sic] in Brooklyn, also mainly concerned with translated work, poetry in particular.
As for the writing, my main reason for being here, it went sailing along, with only a few days when the anchor dragged. I’ve written several new poems, done some translation, and gone through the ms. of a new collection of poems and unmistakably improved it, adding, dropping, rearranging. And, finally, I have a draft of my two-act play about Robert Lowell.
Weather was unusually changeable. Though we had sun most days during the latter part of April, days were on the chilly side. And then mid-month the temperature suddenly jumped to the high eighties, a heat not recorded locally for April since the 1920s. It rushed up the flowering of the apple trees and the lilacs, but also their leafing, so the blossoms were quickly crowded out by foliage. Then things got cooler, and back we went to the expected cloudy, damp springs of the Hudson Valley.
I gave a reading in Hudson at Carrie Haddad Gallery, an event that was arranged by Bill Sullivan. My co-reader was Star Black, who came up from New York just for the day. We were both still upset at the news that our friend Darragh Park, whom I hadn’t been in contact with for a long time, had died by his own hand a few days earlier. Darragh was a painter, whom I met more than thirty years ago through John Ashbery. I used a painting of his for the cover of my second book, a New York cityscape, and among the best of those he did in that decade. Apparently he’d lost his eyesight and had become dependent on others. His death is understandable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t regrettable. Star dedicated her reading to him, which seemed right. Other friends in the audience were the poet/art-critic Carter Ratcliff and his wife Phyllis, Karen Clark and Jonathan Bernstein, who drove up from New York, and Brooks Peters, who now lives across the river in Athens and whom I first met when he was a Yale undergrad back in the 70s.
It’s been a spring with a lot of sad news, beginning with deaths from the H1N1 flu, both here and abroad. And then, the poet Deborah Digges. Though I wouldn’t claim a friendship, I did meet her once, just after her first book came out, and liked her. Opinions differ on whether her death was a suicide, but in either case, a terrible thing. Equally hard to come to terms with was the death of Craig Arnold, whom I didn’t know but whose poems I’ve read. Exploring a volcanic island off the coast of mainland Japan, he fell into a deep ravine, a shock his family and friends haven’t yet recovered from.
Finally, I had an email post from Langdon Hammer the first week of the month saying that my friend Eleanor Perényi had died, at the age of 91. (In the blog describing my visit to Budapest last June, I speak of our friendship.) The immediate cause was a brain hemorrhage, and at least things went very quickly. A sad event that had an effect on my last week at L. House. We won’t see Eleanor’s like again.
I’m beginning to feel that television has been following the same track as this blog. Last June, when I was in Warsaw, I wrote here about the heroic figure Irena Sendler, a nurse who rescued 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. One evening during my residency, I turned on the TV and there was her story on something called “The Hallmark Hall of Fame.” Well done, gripping, and at moments hard to watch. And then, this past February when I was in New York, I wrote about seeing Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, a story based on the Soviet slaughter of more than two thousand Polish officers shortly after Soviet troops occupied Poland. Another night I randomly went through several channels and happened on a documentary about the period following the Nazi-Soviet pact, which once again told this terrifying story.
I realize the above paragraphs are shadowed with sadness, but I don’t want that to alter the fact that I had a stimulating and productive month at Ledig House, with the non-negligible bonus of making several new friends. Let me close with a brief mention of a dinner the painter Stephanie Rose gave in Hudson during my last week. Guests were the novelist and poet Jaime Manrique, Bill Sullivan, Carter and Phyllis Ratcliff, and Al Roberts, who collects paintings and curates shows for the Albany Institute of History and Art. I spoke of a commission from the Gulbenkian Foundation to translate fado (Portuguese popular song), something that my friend Mimi Khalvati arranged. So Stephanie played a disc of Amalia Rodrigues, the classic performer of fado, while we had our meal. Raised glasses, jokes, eye catching an eye, laughter, quiet moments of reflection, warm goodbyes.
Tomorrow I fly to London.
The international character of Ledig House sharpens your perspective on what it means to be a writer outside the U.S.A. in the 21st century. Among the short-term visitors to L. House was Taslima Nasrin, who had to leave Bangladesh fifteen years ago because of her controversial publications about the difficulties women have to face in Bangladesh. Since then Taslima has lived the life of an exile in Sweden, Germany, France, India, and now New York, where she has a fellowship from N.Y. U. to do her work. But she would like to return to Bangladesh, her home, and the place where she feels there is a lot of work to do. That same weekend we had the fiction writer Ma Thida, on a fellowship at Brown this year, but expecting to return to Myanmar at the completion of her stay. She was imprisoned there for six years on the sole basis of her publications. I found both women (who have medical degrees, incidentally) formidable in their courage and commitment to basic freedoms that Americans take for granted. I mentioned Abiye Teklemariam in the earlier blog. He received the news that several people he knew in Addis Ababa have been arrested, and that the outlook isn’t good—which raises questions about his own return to his homeland. All of this can make being a writer working in modern Western-style democracies seem very easy indeed, with our freedom to say anything we like (and be unread or ignored), our comfy teaching posts, our well-paid reading tours, and (blush) our subsidized stays in artists’ colonies. But of course we know that there are things we can do to help others in countries where circumstances are riskier.
Other weekend visitors have included Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan, who now directs Bard’s Chinua Achebe Center for African Culture. Before doing that he founded a literary magazine in Kenya called Kwani?, which was innovative in several ways. For example, it published what is probably the first short story by a Kenyan dealing with gay themes. Also up from Bard that same evening was Gabi Ngcobo, South African, who is doing a graduate degree there in curatorial studies. We had a lively conversation about contemporary South Africa (whose post-apartheid constitution guarantees gay civil rights, by the way), and the recent inauguration of Jacob Zuma, about whose government-in-formation there is a lot of discussion.
We also had visitors from the publishing world: Jill Schoolman, who is the publisher of Archipelago Books. Almost everything Archipelago brings out is translated from other language traditions, which of course sets them apart from the bulk of contemporary American publishing. Jill is extraordinarily nice, and it’s instantly clear how dedicated she is to getting important foreign-language works to an American readership, which tends to fall behind in this area. We had one literary agent, Jen Auh, who works at the Andrew Wylie agency and happens to represent Alex Halberstadt. Finally, a night's visit from Anna Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich, who run the Ugly Duckling Presse [sic] in Brooklyn, also mainly concerned with translated work, poetry in particular.
As for the writing, my main reason for being here, it went sailing along, with only a few days when the anchor dragged. I’ve written several new poems, done some translation, and gone through the ms. of a new collection of poems and unmistakably improved it, adding, dropping, rearranging. And, finally, I have a draft of my two-act play about Robert Lowell.
Weather was unusually changeable. Though we had sun most days during the latter part of April, days were on the chilly side. And then mid-month the temperature suddenly jumped to the high eighties, a heat not recorded locally for April since the 1920s. It rushed up the flowering of the apple trees and the lilacs, but also their leafing, so the blossoms were quickly crowded out by foliage. Then things got cooler, and back we went to the expected cloudy, damp springs of the Hudson Valley.
I gave a reading in Hudson at Carrie Haddad Gallery, an event that was arranged by Bill Sullivan. My co-reader was Star Black, who came up from New York just for the day. We were both still upset at the news that our friend Darragh Park, whom I hadn’t been in contact with for a long time, had died by his own hand a few days earlier. Darragh was a painter, whom I met more than thirty years ago through John Ashbery. I used a painting of his for the cover of my second book, a New York cityscape, and among the best of those he did in that decade. Apparently he’d lost his eyesight and had become dependent on others. His death is understandable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t regrettable. Star dedicated her reading to him, which seemed right. Other friends in the audience were the poet/art-critic Carter Ratcliff and his wife Phyllis, Karen Clark and Jonathan Bernstein, who drove up from New York, and Brooks Peters, who now lives across the river in Athens and whom I first met when he was a Yale undergrad back in the 70s.
It’s been a spring with a lot of sad news, beginning with deaths from the H1N1 flu, both here and abroad. And then, the poet Deborah Digges. Though I wouldn’t claim a friendship, I did meet her once, just after her first book came out, and liked her. Opinions differ on whether her death was a suicide, but in either case, a terrible thing. Equally hard to come to terms with was the death of Craig Arnold, whom I didn’t know but whose poems I’ve read. Exploring a volcanic island off the coast of mainland Japan, he fell into a deep ravine, a shock his family and friends haven’t yet recovered from.
Finally, I had an email post from Langdon Hammer the first week of the month saying that my friend Eleanor Perényi had died, at the age of 91. (In the blog describing my visit to Budapest last June, I speak of our friendship.) The immediate cause was a brain hemorrhage, and at least things went very quickly. A sad event that had an effect on my last week at L. House. We won’t see Eleanor’s like again.
I’m beginning to feel that television has been following the same track as this blog. Last June, when I was in Warsaw, I wrote here about the heroic figure Irena Sendler, a nurse who rescued 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. One evening during my residency, I turned on the TV and there was her story on something called “The Hallmark Hall of Fame.” Well done, gripping, and at moments hard to watch. And then, this past February when I was in New York, I wrote about seeing Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, a story based on the Soviet slaughter of more than two thousand Polish officers shortly after Soviet troops occupied Poland. Another night I randomly went through several channels and happened on a documentary about the period following the Nazi-Soviet pact, which once again told this terrifying story.
I realize the above paragraphs are shadowed with sadness, but I don’t want that to alter the fact that I had a stimulating and productive month at Ledig House, with the non-negligible bonus of making several new friends. Let me close with a brief mention of a dinner the painter Stephanie Rose gave in Hudson during my last week. Guests were the novelist and poet Jaime Manrique, Bill Sullivan, Carter and Phyllis Ratcliff, and Al Roberts, who collects paintings and curates shows for the Albany Institute of History and Art. I spoke of a commission from the Gulbenkian Foundation to translate fado (Portuguese popular song), something that my friend Mimi Khalvati arranged. So Stephanie played a disc of Amalia Rodrigues, the classic performer of fado, while we had our meal. Raised glasses, jokes, eye catching an eye, laughter, quiet moments of reflection, warm goodbyes.
Tomorrow I fly to London.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Ledig House and its Residents
April 23: One of the calendar’s red-letter days, at least for those who like sonnets and plays written in blank verse. Also, mythic saints who were dragon-slayers.
It’s taken me some time to post here again, partly because from day one of my residency at Ledig House I began writing and have hardly stopped since. Hitting a lull, I’ll pause long enough to say at least a few things about being here. The colony is situated on perhaps 300 acres of rolling land, with meadows, woods, and magnificent vistas toward the Catskills. We’re about twenty-five minutes from Hudson, New York, where I lived for two years, so I’m familiar with the environs. Besides Hudson, there are the nearby towns of Kinderhook and Chatham, charming upstate villages colonized by New Yorkers who like the country.
Ledig House consists of a handsome Italianate Victorian house, where meals and social life take place, and two outbuildings where residents have their rooms. There are about seven or eight residents at a time (plus the Ledig House Director, D.W. Gibson, on weekends). Shortly after I arrived Amy Waldman (American journalist and fiction writer) and David Machado (Portuguese fiction writer) completed their residency and left. The group is now comprised of Chloe Aridjis (Mexican fiction writer who writes in English), Christian Haller (German-language Swiss novelist), Abiye Teklemariam (Ethiopian journalist and essayist), Dy Plambeck (Danish fiction writer), Lee Tulloch (Australian fiction writer), and Lara Vapnyar (Russian-American fiction-writer who writes in English). Oh, and your blogger. In a few days we expect to be joined by new residents, and the process continues over the next weeks, with some leaving as others arrive. I didn’t in advance know any of the current guest writers, though I had met Chloe’s father about ten years ago, when he attended a reading I gave at the Casa Lam in Mexico City. Homero Aridjis is a distinguished poet and prose writer who now lives in Paris, serving as Mexico's delegate to UNESCO. He was for many years the head of International PEN and also the ambassador to the Netherlands. Chloe’s first novel is set in Berlin where she lived for a time. One reason she writes in English is that her mother Betty Aridjis (whom I also nce met in New York) is American; and so Chloe spoke English from childhood up, along with Spanish. Then, too, English is nowadays the global lingua franca, providing access to a huge readership if you can use it.
Lee Tulloch lived in New York City for many years, so we belong to the automatic freemasonry of former Gothamites, with shared points of reference such as the East Village (where some of her fiction is set) and SoHo. She’s now working on a novel set in the Hollywood of the 20s and 30s. Because I’m curious about Australia and would like to visit there (invitations welcome) she gives me insights into its geography, politics, and culture. Thank you, Lee! Then, as a result of his seriousness and knowledge of literature in several languages, Christian Haller creates around him an aura of respect; and I hope his novels will soon be translated into English. Dy Plambeck began as a poet but she now writes novels, including one set, surprisingly enough, in Texas. But then some of Apollinaire’s poems take place in the Lone Star State, so why not? Dy’s boyfriend Meds had dinner with us two nights ago and after dinner accompanied himself on guitar while singing Neil Young songs; this, with a perfect reproduction of Young’s accent, but, more to the point, an agile, tuneful voice. Because I have been close to other Russians who became American citizens, I feel a familiar affinity with Lara Vapnyar (who has the same accent as other expatriate Russians I know). She is reticent and prefers working quietly in her room to colony social life, but even so makes a distinct impression. We all feel quite spoiled, I think, when we compare our lives to Abiye Megenta’s. Abiye has been jailed several times in Ethiopia on account of articles he has published about the present government. He says convictions led to only short-term sentences and plays down the inconvenience of it all, but still. When Ledig House residents gave a reading in Hudson, two weeks ago, he presented an article composed in excellent English—again, a useful lingua franca for those whose language is Amharic. (If you google Ledig House, you'll find more complete information about the colony and its current residents.)
Later in the season, writers will be succeeded by visual artists, and one appealing aspect of Ledig House/Art Omi (the colony’s complete name) is that the grounds are dotted with dozens of art works, most of them on a monumental scale. During my hikes, I think I’ve now seen all of them. They range from satiric pieces like Steven Rolf Kroeger’s Toaster, an Oldenburgian VW bus whose roof has been been opened to admit a giant slice of bread, to works of Platonic austerity like Beverly Pepper’s minimalist Corten steel tetrahedron (four-sided pyramid) with a tetrahedronal space cut inside it. (Ms. Pepper has a famous daughter, the poet Jorie Graham, who publishes under her married name.) Also, I like the three monumental female heads in matte white plexiglass that rise from a meadow near the Visitor’s Center, like those huge statues on Easter Island. But these are works by Philip Grausman, whom I once met in the late seventies at his studio in Connecticut. His wife is the choreographer Martha Clark, and some of the faces of the sculptures resemble her. I like as well works by Willard Boepple and Tarik Currhimboy, but probably my favorite single sculpture here is one titled Valledor, by Forrest Myers, which consists of two intersecting cubes outlined in aluminum and balanced on their angles. Viewed from different sides and at varying distances, the work presents an array of complex silhouettes. The interplay of negative and implied positive space provides a sort of jungle-gym for the spatial imagination; and perhaps we could as well lend a human sense to the purely abstract intersection of two cubic forms. I don’t know the meaning of the title, though it sounds like a Spanish place-name.
Walking is my favorite exercise, so I’ve ranged far afield from the main house so as to enjoy the woods, ponds, and streams on or near the estate. Early spring is the ideal time to be here. Close to the house there are daffodils, squilla, and narcissus, and farther on the familiar cadmium yellow of forsythia. In swampy areas of the woods, skunk cabbages are now unfurling, and I’ve seen shadblow, marsh marigolds, trillium, clumps of wild chives, and the small white flowers of bloodroot. The ferment of early spring is in the air, and, though we’ve had sunny days, it has remained generally chilly, so the flowering trees are still holding off.
Working in an artist colony has a monastic aspect, for sure. But I’ve stayed in many over the past two decades (the Djerassi Foundation, the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts) and have a theory about colonies and the artistic process. The first thing they do is plunge you back into childhood, a time when food and shelter are taken care of by someone else. Needless to say, that situation stimulates creativity, the carefree, inventive sense of play that children all have. What’s more, you get to meet other resident “children,” companions in the playful exploration involved in making art. But then, as weeks pass, residents “mature.” They see their colleagues begin to leave, a process that has the poignant tinge of mortality. As the date of your own departure comes closer, something autumnal enters the mind, even if your stay is booked for one of the spring months. The prospect of the coming expulsion from Eden is its own kind of stimulus. I guess my point is that an artist’s residency can be experienced as the microcosm of an entire life. Ars longa, vita brevis, according to the old Latin tag. I'm at the midpoint of my stay. Time to get back to work.
It’s taken me some time to post here again, partly because from day one of my residency at Ledig House I began writing and have hardly stopped since. Hitting a lull, I’ll pause long enough to say at least a few things about being here. The colony is situated on perhaps 300 acres of rolling land, with meadows, woods, and magnificent vistas toward the Catskills. We’re about twenty-five minutes from Hudson, New York, where I lived for two years, so I’m familiar with the environs. Besides Hudson, there are the nearby towns of Kinderhook and Chatham, charming upstate villages colonized by New Yorkers who like the country.
Ledig House consists of a handsome Italianate Victorian house, where meals and social life take place, and two outbuildings where residents have their rooms. There are about seven or eight residents at a time (plus the Ledig House Director, D.W. Gibson, on weekends). Shortly after I arrived Amy Waldman (American journalist and fiction writer) and David Machado (Portuguese fiction writer) completed their residency and left. The group is now comprised of Chloe Aridjis (Mexican fiction writer who writes in English), Christian Haller (German-language Swiss novelist), Abiye Teklemariam (Ethiopian journalist and essayist), Dy Plambeck (Danish fiction writer), Lee Tulloch (Australian fiction writer), and Lara Vapnyar (Russian-American fiction-writer who writes in English). Oh, and your blogger. In a few days we expect to be joined by new residents, and the process continues over the next weeks, with some leaving as others arrive. I didn’t in advance know any of the current guest writers, though I had met Chloe’s father about ten years ago, when he attended a reading I gave at the Casa Lam in Mexico City. Homero Aridjis is a distinguished poet and prose writer who now lives in Paris, serving as Mexico's delegate to UNESCO. He was for many years the head of International PEN and also the ambassador to the Netherlands. Chloe’s first novel is set in Berlin where she lived for a time. One reason she writes in English is that her mother Betty Aridjis (whom I also nce met in New York) is American; and so Chloe spoke English from childhood up, along with Spanish. Then, too, English is nowadays the global lingua franca, providing access to a huge readership if you can use it.
Lee Tulloch lived in New York City for many years, so we belong to the automatic freemasonry of former Gothamites, with shared points of reference such as the East Village (where some of her fiction is set) and SoHo. She’s now working on a novel set in the Hollywood of the 20s and 30s. Because I’m curious about Australia and would like to visit there (invitations welcome) she gives me insights into its geography, politics, and culture. Thank you, Lee! Then, as a result of his seriousness and knowledge of literature in several languages, Christian Haller creates around him an aura of respect; and I hope his novels will soon be translated into English. Dy Plambeck began as a poet but she now writes novels, including one set, surprisingly enough, in Texas. But then some of Apollinaire’s poems take place in the Lone Star State, so why not? Dy’s boyfriend Meds had dinner with us two nights ago and after dinner accompanied himself on guitar while singing Neil Young songs; this, with a perfect reproduction of Young’s accent, but, more to the point, an agile, tuneful voice. Because I have been close to other Russians who became American citizens, I feel a familiar affinity with Lara Vapnyar (who has the same accent as other expatriate Russians I know). She is reticent and prefers working quietly in her room to colony social life, but even so makes a distinct impression. We all feel quite spoiled, I think, when we compare our lives to Abiye Megenta’s. Abiye has been jailed several times in Ethiopia on account of articles he has published about the present government. He says convictions led to only short-term sentences and plays down the inconvenience of it all, but still. When Ledig House residents gave a reading in Hudson, two weeks ago, he presented an article composed in excellent English—again, a useful lingua franca for those whose language is Amharic. (If you google Ledig House, you'll find more complete information about the colony and its current residents.)
Later in the season, writers will be succeeded by visual artists, and one appealing aspect of Ledig House/Art Omi (the colony’s complete name) is that the grounds are dotted with dozens of art works, most of them on a monumental scale. During my hikes, I think I’ve now seen all of them. They range from satiric pieces like Steven Rolf Kroeger’s Toaster, an Oldenburgian VW bus whose roof has been been opened to admit a giant slice of bread, to works of Platonic austerity like Beverly Pepper’s minimalist Corten steel tetrahedron (four-sided pyramid) with a tetrahedronal space cut inside it. (Ms. Pepper has a famous daughter, the poet Jorie Graham, who publishes under her married name.) Also, I like the three monumental female heads in matte white plexiglass that rise from a meadow near the Visitor’s Center, like those huge statues on Easter Island. But these are works by Philip Grausman, whom I once met in the late seventies at his studio in Connecticut. His wife is the choreographer Martha Clark, and some of the faces of the sculptures resemble her. I like as well works by Willard Boepple and Tarik Currhimboy, but probably my favorite single sculpture here is one titled Valledor, by Forrest Myers, which consists of two intersecting cubes outlined in aluminum and balanced on their angles. Viewed from different sides and at varying distances, the work presents an array of complex silhouettes. The interplay of negative and implied positive space provides a sort of jungle-gym for the spatial imagination; and perhaps we could as well lend a human sense to the purely abstract intersection of two cubic forms. I don’t know the meaning of the title, though it sounds like a Spanish place-name.
Walking is my favorite exercise, so I’ve ranged far afield from the main house so as to enjoy the woods, ponds, and streams on or near the estate. Early spring is the ideal time to be here. Close to the house there are daffodils, squilla, and narcissus, and farther on the familiar cadmium yellow of forsythia. In swampy areas of the woods, skunk cabbages are now unfurling, and I’ve seen shadblow, marsh marigolds, trillium, clumps of wild chives, and the small white flowers of bloodroot. The ferment of early spring is in the air, and, though we’ve had sunny days, it has remained generally chilly, so the flowering trees are still holding off.
Working in an artist colony has a monastic aspect, for sure. But I’ve stayed in many over the past two decades (the Djerassi Foundation, the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts) and have a theory about colonies and the artistic process. The first thing they do is plunge you back into childhood, a time when food and shelter are taken care of by someone else. Needless to say, that situation stimulates creativity, the carefree, inventive sense of play that children all have. What’s more, you get to meet other resident “children,” companions in the playful exploration involved in making art. But then, as weeks pass, residents “mature.” They see their colleagues begin to leave, a process that has the poignant tinge of mortality. As the date of your own departure comes closer, something autumnal enters the mind, even if your stay is booked for one of the spring months. The prospect of the coming expulsion from Eden is its own kind of stimulus. I guess my point is that an artist’s residency can be experienced as the microcosm of an entire life. Ars longa, vita brevis, according to the old Latin tag. I'm at the midpoint of my stay. Time to get back to work.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Boston and Hudson
I haven’t written here this past month, and instead used Facebook to keep friends posted. But there’s more going on these days, so here we are, back on Blogspot.
This past Wednesday I took Amtrak to Boston’s South Station where Robert Pinsky met me in his black BMW to drive us to lunch. I hadn’t seen Robert for a couple of years, depending instead on email to keep in touch; but we always instantly pick up the thread where we left off. It’s a friendship that began in 1976, when we were both tapped for the “Introduction” program New York's 92nd Street YMHA used to host. The idea was that four first-book poets were chosen each year to read in a program at Kaufman Hall. (The other two that year were Tess Gallagher and Maura Stanton.) Robert is among the contemporaries I most admire, a poet of wide sympathies and solid poetic achievement, which has won him an ardent following. His most recent book Gulf Music is world-class poetry, which leaves me wondering why it didn’t win all the major prizes when it came out. But then prizes are anybody’s guess, aren’t they?
We drove to a restaurant near Boston U., where Robert teaches, and had a light lunch, exchanging news, opinions about recent books, and thoughts about mutual friends. Seeing Robert is always an upbeat occasion, because he is a mensh; we agree on nearly everything. Old friends are best, to wax proverbial. After lunch, Robert let me off at the Gardner Museum, with no sense that we’d exhausted topics of mutual interest. I’m determined not to let a long interval pass before our next meeting.
My afternoon plan was to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the legacy of a 19th century heiress who exemplified many of the ideals of America's Brown Decades. That period’s widespread preoccupation with European art was expanded in her case by an enthusiasm for Asia and Asian art. I’ve visited the collection several times during the past three decades, but only under rushed conditions. This time, several free hours were available. I strolled and lingered and, sure enough, focused on things that had escaped notice before. People who haven’t visited may even so know about the notorious theft of several art works (including a Vermeer) from the Gardner several decades ago. The crime was never solved and the works haven’t been returned. As it happens, I mention this incident in a long poem from ten years ago titled “Seeing All the Vermeers” (found in Contradictions). Curators at the Gardner have left the empty frames on the walls where the paintings used to be, a sharp reminder of the loss.
Mrs. Gardner commissioned this building on Boston’s Fenway in order to house an art collection too large for normal domestic spaces. Rooms are arranged around a central courtyard incorporating architectural elements brought from Venice, notably, four corner balconies down from which stream lianas maybe twenty feet long, a cascade of orange nasturtiums that were a special favorite of the patroness. It’s an effect that requires careful training of the annual plants by staff gardeners. The courtyard garden these days is very done up, exhibiting pots of orchids and a quartet of tree ferns and large palms in the corners. Plus other tropical plantings among the statuary. Colonettes integrated into the brick arcade at ground level are medieval, but, really, everywhere you look bits of European stone carving drawn from many different periods are incorporated into walls and corners, so that the whole becomes a sort of historical anthology of architectural ornament.
Though Gardner collected some statuary from classical antiquity, she seems to have had an aversion to the neoclassical 18th century; possibly she felt Boston proper already provided enough from that period. Instead, the emphasis is on Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 19th century, and Asian art. One corner is dedicated to the memory of Okakura Kakuso, Japanese author of The Book of Tea. He came to Boston shortly after 1900 and became a friend and advisor of I.S.B.'s, part of whose fortune was based on the China trade. He became her primary channel for insight into Buddhism and Japanese culture—ink painting, ceramics, ikebana, and the tea ceremony. Considering it all, you begin to understand the cultural matrix that produced Amy Lowell’s Orientalism and the related esthetic of Imagism she espoused once Pound had announced the movement. Several local fortunes were built on the China trade, and of course the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has one of the greatest collections of Asian art outside of Asia. Gardner had a descendant of the same name (known to her friends as “Belle”) who wrote poetry (not at all in the Orientalist or Imagist vein); she was Allen Tate’s last wife. It has occurred to me her work is due for a revival, so maybe we’ll see that in the coming years.
As for paintings, I had forgotten that the Piero della Francesca Hercules is there, though its provenance I don’t know. It’s an eroticized treatment of the mythological hero and certainly not a typical subject for quattrocento art; so it would be interesting to read an art-historical account of it if readers can direct me to one. The Gardner’s Botticelli Madonna (the first major artwork that I.S.B. bought) is a fine example, not as saccharine as other works of his. And there is the famous El Jaleo of Sargent, a chiaroscuro rendering of flamenco musicians and their silk-skirted dancer. Also, a youthful Rembrandt self-portrait that I’d say doesn’t figure as a great example of his self-portrait series. And the Titian Rape of Europa, which, though dynamic, has a certain gracelessness atypical for this painter. Meanwhile, the subject provides a neat analogy for American rubber barons’ raids on the art treasures of an impoverished Europe during the late 19th century. Many of the works are secondary, if not merely copies of notable paintings, and quite a few could use some cleaning. Paintings are hung among pieces of furniture, tapestries, and decorative pieces of varying quality. The jumble aspect, which has to be maintained in accordance with Gardner’s will, is disconcerting. But certainly the whole provides access to the ambiance of the Jamesian era in American cultural history.
After leaving the Gardner Museum, I took a T train to the Boylston stop and walked on Boston Common for a while, trying to speculate where exactly Emerson might have had his “transparent eyeball” vision, the one recounted in his magisterial “Nature” essay. Possibly near the band shell at the center, a gray stone structure with a small dome. It wasn’t built when he wrote that essay; but if the band shell's stone hemisphere wasn’t the source of the eyeball image, there was still the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House directly in view. I recall that on quite a different occasion Emerson took a stroll across the Common with Whitman and sagely warned his younger disciple against writing poems with explicit sexual content—advice just as sagely ignored.
I walked up toward the State House and, once I got to Beacon Street, paused to look at the Colonel Shaw memorial, a bronze relief sculpture commemorating the slaughter of Colonel Shaw’s 54th Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863. The 54th was the first African-American regiment in our history. The story is, by the way, told in a stirring film that came out more than a decade ago (Glory, with Matthew Broderick providing an appealing Col. Shaw). Is it an accident that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued the same year when the Fort Wagner massacre occurred? The sculpture is, unmistakably, St. Gaudens’s masterpiece; and it served as the point of departure for Robert Lowell’s powerful poem “For the Union Dead,” an excellent example of the public poem bearing political content. Beneath the bronze relief you see verses by an unidentified author inscribed on the granite base:
Right in the van on the red rampart’s slippery swell
With heart that beat a charge he fell
Forward as fits a man
But the high soul burns on to light men’s feet
Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet.
The Shaw monument is directly across from the State House, a handsome structure in Georgian-style brick with white trim. It is the design of Charles Bulfinch, built in the 1790s on ground that used to be John Hancock’s cow pasture. Since it was directly in front of me, I decided to have a look inside. Easy enough, though you have to pass through security check. On the second level I found the Flag Room, ornamented with the flags of historical importance, under a dome of many-colored glass. This addition to Bulfinch’s original design dates from around 1900. Up another level, you can find Massachusetts’s lower and upper legislative chambers, connected by a hall where portraits of former governors hang, including a 17th c. Governor Bradstreet, who must have been related to Anne B., this continent’s first English-language poet. The Senators convene in a blue and white neoclassical hall designed by Bulfinch, its dome directly underneath the exterior gold counterpart.
That seen, it was time to leave and recross the Common. After some browsing in the venerable Commonwealth Bookstore, I went into one of the buildings that house Emerson College, directly overlooking the Common, to find the office of my friend Jason Roush, who teaches there. Jason has just published his third book of poems, titled Crosstown. I met him six years ago in Provincetown, when we were both participants in a gay literature conference. We became friends, and I’ve followed his work since then with a lot of enthusiasm. He had invited me to attend a reading scheduled for that evening at Emerson, and, after catching up a little, we walked to the building next door to find the hall where he would perform. Excellent poems, presented with heartfelt skill, warmth, and good humor. The new book has several poems about London, which he visits every year. It’s one of our affinities, but not the only one. Many of the poems involve rock music, which he knows a lot about; in fact, he’s become my main source of knowledge about the music scene. As happened earlier with prose fiction, film, and jazz, we are seeing rock escape designation as mere popular entertainment and enter the realm of the fine arts, with sophisticated critical discussion and college courses devoted to the subject. So it’s inevitable that contemporary poetry has begun to deal with the music that has the largest share of the global audience.
It was one of the topics we touched on next day during a drive from Boston to Hudson, NY. Jason had volunteered to drive me there since there’s no direct public transportation to take. The trip lasts something over two hours, and we had good weather. Once in Hudson, Jason left me off at Bill Sullivan’s house on Prospect Street, where we were invited in cordially. But Jason had to get back to Boston, so we made our goodbyes fairly soon. I’ve known Bill for a couple of decades, meeting him through Jaime Manrique, another close friend who lived with Bill in New York City for many years. Bill is a painter who has been showing since the 1960s, one of the few contemporary artists who have been able to make use of 19th century American painting, in particular, the Hudson River School. Where better for him to live than Hudson, across the river from Thomas Cole’s house in Catskill, and in the same town where Sanford Gifford once lived? Actually, Bill is working on a new show that will open in Hudson this May at the Carrie Haddad Gallery. The theme this time is portraits of young men who have tattoos. He's finishing up the works in the show now, but with luck he'll find (before the show is complete) someone who has a tattoo of the Hudson River; painting that, he could unite the two themes.
It was a stay of only one night, a stopover on my way to Ledig House in Ghent, NY. Ledig House is a working residence for writers from many countries. I am there now, but will postpone for a while giving an account of it. At some point during the coming week, I imagine.
This past Wednesday I took Amtrak to Boston’s South Station where Robert Pinsky met me in his black BMW to drive us to lunch. I hadn’t seen Robert for a couple of years, depending instead on email to keep in touch; but we always instantly pick up the thread where we left off. It’s a friendship that began in 1976, when we were both tapped for the “Introduction” program New York's 92nd Street YMHA used to host. The idea was that four first-book poets were chosen each year to read in a program at Kaufman Hall. (The other two that year were Tess Gallagher and Maura Stanton.) Robert is among the contemporaries I most admire, a poet of wide sympathies and solid poetic achievement, which has won him an ardent following. His most recent book Gulf Music is world-class poetry, which leaves me wondering why it didn’t win all the major prizes when it came out. But then prizes are anybody’s guess, aren’t they?
We drove to a restaurant near Boston U., where Robert teaches, and had a light lunch, exchanging news, opinions about recent books, and thoughts about mutual friends. Seeing Robert is always an upbeat occasion, because he is a mensh; we agree on nearly everything. Old friends are best, to wax proverbial. After lunch, Robert let me off at the Gardner Museum, with no sense that we’d exhausted topics of mutual interest. I’m determined not to let a long interval pass before our next meeting.
My afternoon plan was to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the legacy of a 19th century heiress who exemplified many of the ideals of America's Brown Decades. That period’s widespread preoccupation with European art was expanded in her case by an enthusiasm for Asia and Asian art. I’ve visited the collection several times during the past three decades, but only under rushed conditions. This time, several free hours were available. I strolled and lingered and, sure enough, focused on things that had escaped notice before. People who haven’t visited may even so know about the notorious theft of several art works (including a Vermeer) from the Gardner several decades ago. The crime was never solved and the works haven’t been returned. As it happens, I mention this incident in a long poem from ten years ago titled “Seeing All the Vermeers” (found in Contradictions). Curators at the Gardner have left the empty frames on the walls where the paintings used to be, a sharp reminder of the loss.
Mrs. Gardner commissioned this building on Boston’s Fenway in order to house an art collection too large for normal domestic spaces. Rooms are arranged around a central courtyard incorporating architectural elements brought from Venice, notably, four corner balconies down from which stream lianas maybe twenty feet long, a cascade of orange nasturtiums that were a special favorite of the patroness. It’s an effect that requires careful training of the annual plants by staff gardeners. The courtyard garden these days is very done up, exhibiting pots of orchids and a quartet of tree ferns and large palms in the corners. Plus other tropical plantings among the statuary. Colonettes integrated into the brick arcade at ground level are medieval, but, really, everywhere you look bits of European stone carving drawn from many different periods are incorporated into walls and corners, so that the whole becomes a sort of historical anthology of architectural ornament.
Though Gardner collected some statuary from classical antiquity, she seems to have had an aversion to the neoclassical 18th century; possibly she felt Boston proper already provided enough from that period. Instead, the emphasis is on Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 19th century, and Asian art. One corner is dedicated to the memory of Okakura Kakuso, Japanese author of The Book of Tea. He came to Boston shortly after 1900 and became a friend and advisor of I.S.B.'s, part of whose fortune was based on the China trade. He became her primary channel for insight into Buddhism and Japanese culture—ink painting, ceramics, ikebana, and the tea ceremony. Considering it all, you begin to understand the cultural matrix that produced Amy Lowell’s Orientalism and the related esthetic of Imagism she espoused once Pound had announced the movement. Several local fortunes were built on the China trade, and of course the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has one of the greatest collections of Asian art outside of Asia. Gardner had a descendant of the same name (known to her friends as “Belle”) who wrote poetry (not at all in the Orientalist or Imagist vein); she was Allen Tate’s last wife. It has occurred to me her work is due for a revival, so maybe we’ll see that in the coming years.
As for paintings, I had forgotten that the Piero della Francesca Hercules is there, though its provenance I don’t know. It’s an eroticized treatment of the mythological hero and certainly not a typical subject for quattrocento art; so it would be interesting to read an art-historical account of it if readers can direct me to one. The Gardner’s Botticelli Madonna (the first major artwork that I.S.B. bought) is a fine example, not as saccharine as other works of his. And there is the famous El Jaleo of Sargent, a chiaroscuro rendering of flamenco musicians and their silk-skirted dancer. Also, a youthful Rembrandt self-portrait that I’d say doesn’t figure as a great example of his self-portrait series. And the Titian Rape of Europa, which, though dynamic, has a certain gracelessness atypical for this painter. Meanwhile, the subject provides a neat analogy for American rubber barons’ raids on the art treasures of an impoverished Europe during the late 19th century. Many of the works are secondary, if not merely copies of notable paintings, and quite a few could use some cleaning. Paintings are hung among pieces of furniture, tapestries, and decorative pieces of varying quality. The jumble aspect, which has to be maintained in accordance with Gardner’s will, is disconcerting. But certainly the whole provides access to the ambiance of the Jamesian era in American cultural history.
After leaving the Gardner Museum, I took a T train to the Boylston stop and walked on Boston Common for a while, trying to speculate where exactly Emerson might have had his “transparent eyeball” vision, the one recounted in his magisterial “Nature” essay. Possibly near the band shell at the center, a gray stone structure with a small dome. It wasn’t built when he wrote that essay; but if the band shell's stone hemisphere wasn’t the source of the eyeball image, there was still the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House directly in view. I recall that on quite a different occasion Emerson took a stroll across the Common with Whitman and sagely warned his younger disciple against writing poems with explicit sexual content—advice just as sagely ignored.
I walked up toward the State House and, once I got to Beacon Street, paused to look at the Colonel Shaw memorial, a bronze relief sculpture commemorating the slaughter of Colonel Shaw’s 54th Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863. The 54th was the first African-American regiment in our history. The story is, by the way, told in a stirring film that came out more than a decade ago (Glory, with Matthew Broderick providing an appealing Col. Shaw). Is it an accident that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued the same year when the Fort Wagner massacre occurred? The sculpture is, unmistakably, St. Gaudens’s masterpiece; and it served as the point of departure for Robert Lowell’s powerful poem “For the Union Dead,” an excellent example of the public poem bearing political content. Beneath the bronze relief you see verses by an unidentified author inscribed on the granite base:
Right in the van on the red rampart’s slippery swell
With heart that beat a charge he fell
Forward as fits a man
But the high soul burns on to light men’s feet
Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet.
The Shaw monument is directly across from the State House, a handsome structure in Georgian-style brick with white trim. It is the design of Charles Bulfinch, built in the 1790s on ground that used to be John Hancock’s cow pasture. Since it was directly in front of me, I decided to have a look inside. Easy enough, though you have to pass through security check. On the second level I found the Flag Room, ornamented with the flags of historical importance, under a dome of many-colored glass. This addition to Bulfinch’s original design dates from around 1900. Up another level, you can find Massachusetts’s lower and upper legislative chambers, connected by a hall where portraits of former governors hang, including a 17th c. Governor Bradstreet, who must have been related to Anne B., this continent’s first English-language poet. The Senators convene in a blue and white neoclassical hall designed by Bulfinch, its dome directly underneath the exterior gold counterpart.
That seen, it was time to leave and recross the Common. After some browsing in the venerable Commonwealth Bookstore, I went into one of the buildings that house Emerson College, directly overlooking the Common, to find the office of my friend Jason Roush, who teaches there. Jason has just published his third book of poems, titled Crosstown. I met him six years ago in Provincetown, when we were both participants in a gay literature conference. We became friends, and I’ve followed his work since then with a lot of enthusiasm. He had invited me to attend a reading scheduled for that evening at Emerson, and, after catching up a little, we walked to the building next door to find the hall where he would perform. Excellent poems, presented with heartfelt skill, warmth, and good humor. The new book has several poems about London, which he visits every year. It’s one of our affinities, but not the only one. Many of the poems involve rock music, which he knows a lot about; in fact, he’s become my main source of knowledge about the music scene. As happened earlier with prose fiction, film, and jazz, we are seeing rock escape designation as mere popular entertainment and enter the realm of the fine arts, with sophisticated critical discussion and college courses devoted to the subject. So it’s inevitable that contemporary poetry has begun to deal with the music that has the largest share of the global audience.
It was one of the topics we touched on next day during a drive from Boston to Hudson, NY. Jason had volunteered to drive me there since there’s no direct public transportation to take. The trip lasts something over two hours, and we had good weather. Once in Hudson, Jason left me off at Bill Sullivan’s house on Prospect Street, where we were invited in cordially. But Jason had to get back to Boston, so we made our goodbyes fairly soon. I’ve known Bill for a couple of decades, meeting him through Jaime Manrique, another close friend who lived with Bill in New York City for many years. Bill is a painter who has been showing since the 1960s, one of the few contemporary artists who have been able to make use of 19th century American painting, in particular, the Hudson River School. Where better for him to live than Hudson, across the river from Thomas Cole’s house in Catskill, and in the same town where Sanford Gifford once lived? Actually, Bill is working on a new show that will open in Hudson this May at the Carrie Haddad Gallery. The theme this time is portraits of young men who have tattoos. He's finishing up the works in the show now, but with luck he'll find (before the show is complete) someone who has a tattoo of the Hudson River; painting that, he could unite the two themes.
It was a stay of only one night, a stopover on my way to Ledig House in Ghent, NY. Ledig House is a working residence for writers from many countries. I am there now, but will postpone for a while giving an account of it. At some point during the coming week, I imagine.
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