Poem: Shuzo Takiguchi

Shuzo Takiguchi
(Mirador. Blog de Joan Miró,
Cultural y Arte, por
Antonio Boix.)

Keeping with the theme of ekphrasis and with the principle that an ekphrastic poem or poem about art need not describe a specific artwork, as Monica Youn's poem yesterday demonstrated, today I'm sharing yet another approach: you could write a poem about a specific artist, an homage/femmage/themage, with references however overt or subtle, to their oeuvre. Such is the case with Shuzo Takiguchi (1903-1973), the Japanese Modernist poet, painter and critic, who was associated with various movements in Japan, including Surrealism and Dada. I happened upon Takiguchi's tribute below, and two others--to fellow Surrealist artists Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró--on the Poetry site (the three translated poems appeared in the October 2014 print issue of Poetry Magazine), and was intrigued.

"René Magritte," once you read it, is an open tribute to the great, popular Belgian Surrealist, who lived from 1898 to 1967, and who produced some of the most iconic art work of the Surrealist movement--though he broke with André Breton over his decision to stay in Brussels instead of returning to Paris before the war. Allusions to various recurring Magrittean images, such as silhouettes, water, mountains, and hats appear, but it is not just the imagery, but the incantatory repetition of phrases, privileging sound and juxtaposition over clarity and immediacy of meaning, the unmooring of realist logic, that also underpins Takiguchi's own Surrealist poetic practice, and the way he translates his understanding of Magritte into poetry. His translation is not literal, but imaginative and contextual.  Additionally, the end words, when read aloud, almost make the two stanzas feel like the opening or ending to a sestina, though it clearly isn't one.

So was there a particular Magritte painting or were there paintings that Takiguchi had in mind? He mentions "silhouettes / flow incessantly like water," as well as "a mirror trick, / like a human echo / burns a silk hat endlessly." Given these references, two Magritte paintings, "La Belle Société" (1962) and "Décalcomania" (1966) come to mind.  In both there are human silhouettes that open up, like windows, onto beach landscapes with water flowing in the distance. As it turns out, Takiguchi created his own set of decalcomanic artworks, keeping the media as the title. The final stanza seems to refer to the two paintings above as well as to another famous Magritte image, "The Masterpiece Or the Mysteries of the Horizon," featuring three men, angled in various ways away from the viewer, and three crescent moons that could also be eclipses. (The poem could also be titled "Giorgio de Chirico" given the landscapes Takiguchi describes and paints.)

Yet what I want to argue is that even if Takiguchi had these two paintings, or just the latter one, in mind, his poem's language and imagery capture the spirit of Magritte such that any painting could stand in. His approach stands against literalness in favor of something more elusive and strange, not unlike Magritte's often very beautiful and bizarre paintings. Here I quote from Mary Jo Bang's and Yuki Tanaka's "Translators' Note," which shares a bit more information about what Takiguchi was after:

With Takiguchi, the surrealist estrangement has to be maintained in today’s poetic world where defamiliarization is not as surprising as it once was. To that end, we have had to be careful not to normalize the poems or alter their dialogic relationship to French surrealism. Takiguchi was actively involved in that literary movement. He corresponded with André Breton and translated his 1928 Surrealism and Painting into Japanese two years after it was published in France. An Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, compiled by Breton and Paul Éluard for the International Surrealism Exhibition in 1938, recognized Takiguchi as a “poète et écrivain surréaliste.” The present poems were first published in 1936 in L’échange surréaliste, a collection of writings and drawings by European Surrealists in Japanese translation, designed to foster international exchange. Takiguchi also helped revive the avant-garde scene in postwar Japan by spearheading an interdisciplinary art group called Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), which was active from 1951 to 1957. The experimental fervor of French surrealism can be felt in the radical texture of Takiguchi’s poems and his decision to call them “poetic experiments.”

You can find more about Takiguchi here. There's also his archives, where you can view some of his drawings.

And now, the poem.

***

RENÉ MAGRITTE



by Shuzo Takiguchi



Translated by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka

Released silhouettes
flow incessantly like water,
flow between mountains
swiftly like a kaleidoscope.
The solitude of  the North Pole
bustles with human silhouettes.
Endless transmission of  ABC.

On the shredded shore
a silk hat burns
like a mirror trick,
like a human echo
burns a silk hat endlessly.
Then the flames
were received like ABC.

On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse
the silhouettes smiled.

                     
                 Translated from the Japanese

Translators’ Note: Three Poems by Shuzo Takiguchi

Here are the three paintings by René Magritte, followed by one of Takiguchi's "Decalcomania" series:

René Magritte, The Beautiful Society,
oil on canvas, 1962.

René Magritte, Decalcomania, oil
on canvas, 1966.

René Magritte, The Masterpiece or Mysteries of the Horizon,
oil on canvas, 1955, private collection.

Shuzo Takiguchi, Spirit of Matthias
Grunewald, decalcomanic painting on paper,
1962.

Poem: Monica Youn

Monica Youn

I should start today's post by saying I'd initially imagined, as I often do, that these entries would be brief and that the poems would speak for themselves. In a few cases, that's how things have unfolded. In others, like yesterday's...well, one paragraph leads to another, followed by another, and then I've written far more than I intended to. I hope none of it is boring, and that, for readers who might not be familiar with the poem and poet, the commentary is at least somewhat interesting and perhaps even a little insightful. But I am going to strive for brevity or I'll struggle to finish these posts.

Today's poem takes the idea of writing about art and ekphrasis in yet another direction. Instead of focusing on a particular art work or artist, Monica Youn's "Drawing for Absolute Beginners" starts from a more basic principle: drawing--that is, learning to draw--for absolute beginners. Whether in art school or browsing bookstore shelves, you can come across courses and books geared toward "absolute beginners" that presuppose no familiarity with picking up a pen or pencil and sketchbook t all, a state utterly foreign to someone like me who began drawing at 18 months old.

But there are absolute beginners in almost everything out there, and with drawing, a quick Net search showed one such course at The Cooper Union, as well as Andrew Loomis's various instructional series, which include the line quoted as an epitaph in Youn's poem. Yet Youn's poem is about more than drawing per se than, I would venture, exploring how we assemble meaning out of various strands of experience, information, knowledge we encounter, the lines and hatchmarks and shadings of art and life, and how, almost like beginners, we have to interpret what we hope to understand. That also is one definition of how we "read" a poem. We can approach it, as I once suggested in a micro-essay entitled "The X-Ray of the Poem," in a variety of ways, and perhaps we should.

The basic template, however, is that initial instruction beginning "Take any desired height...." And then we proceed from the top of the head to the feet or, as Youn's numbering suggests, from the bottom up. Each eighth is a clue, a glimpse, an answer, with some, like section (or stanza) #7 replete with subsets. What answers to we draw up by the time we're done? Desire is here, tenderness and brutality, relationships of various kinds, loss, and yet, by #1, we hear, overhear, someone saying they want to leave the friend, the beloved, the person with whom they have connected, exactly as they found them. So much has been drawn, indirectly and with a great deal of mystery, but the addressee has not been erased. The relationship between the speaker and the addressee has deepened considerably, though.

Monica Youn is a poet and lawyer who grew up in Houston, the daughter of Korean immigrants, and was a Rhodes Scholar.  She has published three award-winning books of poetry, Barter (2003), in which the poem below appears; Ignatz (2010); and most recently, BLACKACRE (2016), which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also book on one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions of the last 30 years, entitled Money, Politics, and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United (2011). She currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University, and is a member of the curatorial group The Racial Imaginary Institute and chairs the Lewis Center Committee on Race and Arts.

DRAWING FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

by Monica Youn

Take any desired height, or place points for
top of head and heels. Divide into eights. . . .




8.  Head tilted back between the headboard slats. Eyes glass boxes
     filling up with light. Later, drained to a blue-gray, the color of
     good government.
 
7.  Thus, we see that commodification is a function of local necessity.
     a.  As Angelenos collect percolating shade in shallow pans, to
          leach the arsenic out of the light.
     b.  “And then I buried it.”
          “Where, exactly? And when?”
          “In the chest. Insertion point at the base of the throat. You
          were still asleep.”
          “But what is it, exactly? I mean, I can’t figure out its precise
          extent. I mean, I can feel it there sometimes, like stitches, or
          sometimes like a flanged or branching bone.”
 
6.  Cross-hatchings of street noise and the Minotaur with his boy’s
     body. Narrowing. Rib cage the verge of a canoe. Armpit a whiff of
     pencil lead.
 
5.  “If you want to fuck me with that bottle, Mr. Arbuckle, best take
     the foil off first.”
 
4.  osculation:
     a.  The act of kissing. A kiss.
     b.  Math. A point where two branches of a curve have a common
          tangent and extend in both directions of the tangent.
     c.  To the ankles. Or to the knees. Or just unzipped enough.
 
3.  Charmeuse chemise. A shuddering fall. Miss Adelaide Hall on
     the chaise longue singing I ain’t much caring / Just where I will
     end. Then jerked upright, skirt hiked to the knee, that bridge
     stretching out under every skip-step. Slaphappy scat-puppet of
     the fixed smile, the meanwhile, Ain’t got nobody to love now.
 
2.  The bone begging bowl. The foot that pushed it away.
 
1.  “I want to leave you exactly as I found you.”

Monica Youn, “Drawing for Absolute Beginners” from Barter. Copyright © 2003 by Monica Youn. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org

Poem: X. J. Kennedy

X. J. Kennedy

One of the most controversial works of 20th century art--and American art--was Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) landmark painting "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2." Perhaps it is most commonly linked to its scandal-provoking appearance at the Association of American Painters and Sculptors' 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art show, also known as the famous Armory Show, in New York, where it spark outrage and tirades, a good deal of mockery, and profound inspiration among the artists who saw its map towards the art that was to come. Its detractors included very high profile figures, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who commented:

Take the picture which for some reason is called "A Naked Man Going Down Stairs." There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, 'A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder', the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the 'Naked Man Going Down Stairs'. From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture."

(Despite his otherwise positive comments about the artistic daring on display, Roosevelt apparently hated the Cubist work and decried the fact that anyone would buy "a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint." Critic Julian Street remarked with exasperation that what he saw in Duchamp's work was "the explosion of a shingle factory."

The 1913 Armory
Show catalogue page
showing Duchamp's
exhibit entries

Even before arriving in New York, though, Duchamp's succès de scandale had provoked dissension. A work in oil on canvas, it fuses elements of Cubism, in its recourse to the diagram, the superposition of planes of reality and unconventional perspective, with Futurism's emphasis on motion and the technological. Duchamp was aware of African, Indigenous and Asian plastic art, as well as stroboscopic photographic and cinematic studies of human movement that had begun to appear in the 1880s and 1890s, and which were influencing peers like Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger, among others, in France, and the Futurists in Italy. Their Salon des Independents "Salle 41" show in 1911 had served as the coming-out party for Cubism as a movement, though Picasso's famous Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, arguably the first Cubist work, appeared three years earlier in 1907, and Braque's blocky, abstracted Maisons à L'Estaque debuted in 1908.

As it turned out, Duchamp's initial attempt to exhibit the painting in March 1912 was a failure, though it did appear in the Société des Artistes Indépendentes exhibition catalogue, as exhibit 1001, but as "Nu descendent l'escalier," not "Nu descendent un escalier, no. 2." The hanging committee asked him to withdraw the painting, allegedly because of its lyrical title; the fact that, unlike the work of the other Cubists, the figure was not seated, but in motion, and thus being disrespected; and because it seemed also to reflect the detectable influence of Italian Futurism. (You can see correspondences in the contemporaneous paintings of Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, and Severini, and the American Joseph Stella.) The painting did, however, appear later that year at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona, and then again amid the work of the Société exhibit artists at the Salon de la Section d'Or at the Galérie de la Boétie. The next year, it appeared the Armory Show, and such was the sensation that it provoked comments from critics, including the President of the US, as well as immediate parodies and jokes. But its influence upon American painters and viewers who saw it was immediate.

The painting toured the US, and continued to spark a furor while also galvanizing Duchamp's fellow artists. You can see it on display, when it is not traveling, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along with other Duchamp treasures. In fact, you can see four versions, in various media, of the nude--No. 1 (1911), No. 2 (1912), No. 3 (1916), and No. 4 (1937)--on the museum's website even if they're not on the wall. The main and best known one, it turns out, will soon be on exhibit as part of the museum's  "Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950," which runs from April 18 through September 3, 2018.

After all the buildup, the question is: where's the poem about this painting? One famous version that I read in junior high was X. J. Kennedy's 1961 three-stanza poem "Nude Descending A Staircase." The poem was not assigned but it was in a poetry anthology and had "nude" in the title so I read it. I realized a few years later that because we were in Catholic school we probably were not going to be asked to read a poem about a "nude" (though we did read Lysistrata and parts of The Clouds in 9th grade Greek). What stuck out for me was that the poem rhymed in an A-B-A-B fashion and it was somewhat funny. Did I have any of the background I detailed above? No. This was in the pre-Internet days, and I surely would not have gone to my school or local library to look up the background on a poem I wasn't being assigned to read. Instead, I came across an image of the painting and more about Duchamp later, and it was around that time that I read up a bit more about XJ Kennedy. I cannot say that I am a huge fan of his poetry, but this poem has always remained with me.

XJ Kennedy (1929-) is a native of Dover, New Jersey, and the author and editor of 21 books of poetry, fiction and translation; 10 introductions and guides to literature and writing; and 20 works for children. Nude Descending a Staircase: Poems, Songs, a Ballad, published by Doubleday in 1961, was his debut volume. It received the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Award and made his name and reputation. For a number of years he taught at Tufts University, but left to become a freelance writer in 1978 and has, as is clear by the book totals, been nothing less than prolific. By the time I came across the poem, he also was serving as the poetry editor of The Paris Review. Kennedy's poems are notably formalist, and he has long been a proponent of formalism in American poetry. (It also strikes me today that the most famous poem about Duchamp's radical artwork is about as conventional as you can get, but such are life's ironies.) If you like the poem below, click on his hyperlinked name, and you'll find many more such poems on Poetry's website.

NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE


by X. J. Kennedy



Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

Copyright © X. J. Kennedy, from Nude Descending

A Staircase: Poems, Songs, a Ballad. New York:

Doubleday, 1961. All rights reserved.

Finally, here is Duchamp's painting--the 1912, No. 2 version:

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) Oil on canvas, 58 inches x 35 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.

Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)

Another one of the greats, Cecil Taylor, is gone. He passed away on April 5. As longtime J's Theater readers know, I've posted about Taylor many times, including on his 86th birthday, back in 2015; when he appeared on NPR back in 2012 (along with my poem about him and his music, "Dark to Themselves," which appeared in Jazz Poems, edited by Kevin Young); my afternoon in 2007 watching the marvelous documentary Imagine the Sound with Northwestern colleagues Kevin Bell and Ed Roberson; back in 2005, on his 75th birthday; and again in 2005, when I saw him perform live at the Blue Note, in Manhattan ("Apraxia, apraxia, apraxia!"). (I wanted to meet him then but only got a glimpse of him peering out through the crack in his green room door.)

I described how he opened the performance like this (the Keith I mention is Keith Obadike, who was there with his wife and fellow artist Mendi, as were Christopher Stackhouse, his partner Kelly Kivland, and a friend of theirs named Lute):

Taylor, as Reggie H. and others have described, entered dramatically, this time in his striped socks after his bassist and drummer had opened the set as a duo, Balgochian doing some interesting moanful bow-work with the lowest portion and register of his bass strings. Then he extracted a handwritten score/graph/chart, which I assume, in my gross musical ignorance, contained the melodic kernel he was going to develop and improvise off of, as well as some harmonic guides and cues, some text and the gods know what else (scribbles? quotes?), CT proceeded to recite an opening poem that riffed off "Chinampas 1," which I listened to again today. Then he and the trio launched into this long and furious set. Afterwards I told Mendi and Keith that it reminded me of a player piano that had caught the Spirit (and spirits) and was revved up by multiple motors. Keith put it more succinctly: "A player piano speaking tongues." Krall, who appears on CT sessions from around 1996 forward, seemed to flow well with CT, sometimes pacing, other times mirroring, other times chasing CT's polymetric races along the keyboard, but Balgochian sometimes seemed out of sync as if he couldn't catch up or missed some of his cues (sometimes his expression betrayed this) or just wasn't up for it, though he gave it a valiant effort. He did know enough to stop on a dime, like Krall, when CT (maybe giving a visual cue) ended the pieces.

Reading some of the obituaries of Taylor, I appreciated how they captured differing facets of who he was and what he accomplished. He was, as the 2005 performance demonstrated, at his very core a poet--experimental, searching, daring, profound, uncompromising, his medium and grammar extending from words into space, and onto the keyboard, via notes themselves. Sound and time were his true media. Pushing the evolving jazz conventions from the very beginning, Taylor kept developing and trying out new possibilities, individually and with ensembles. A native of Queens, he deftly combined a wide array of influences, drawing from the blues, other African-American, Euro-American and European sources--he studied at the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory--to an often sublime invention, and though one could draw throughlines from his early career to the works of the last few year, Taylor almost never repeated himself.

Among the musicians Taylor recorded with are innumerable greats: Earl Griffith, Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger (who passed earlier this year), Sunny Murray (who passed late last year), John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Jimmy Lyons, Andrew Cyrille, Mary Lou Williams (!), Max Roach, Dewey Redman, Elvin Jones, and Peter Brötzmann. He also performed with dancers, including Min Tanaka and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Taylor's detractors, including Miles Davis (another great innovator) and Branford Marsalis, were legion, but so were his admirers, including former President Jimmy Carter, who invited him to perform at the White House. (Just imagine the current resident even vaguely considering such a thing.) One of my favorite albums of his is Great Paris Concert of 1966, which includes the masterpieces "Student Studies (Part 1)," "Student Studies (Part 2)," and "Niggle Feuigle." I also love his late-career trio recording with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones, Momentum Space, particularly the songs "Is," "It," and "Spooning." One commemoration I especially appreciated was Jason Moran's discussion of Taylor's artistry, and how it took him years to grasp what Taylor was up to.

Cecil Taylor was outed by the critic Stanley Crouch, and became one of the most high-profile gay figures in jazz, though he sidestepped that term while remaining unapologetically himself. His oeuvre, I would argue, queered jazz as we know it, and its influence continues to ripple out in instrumentalists who may or may not appear to have any direct ties to him. Taylor's relationship to his blackness was solid and complex, and was a topic about which he could be combative, as when, back in 1964 while participating in a "Jazz Weekend" at Bennington College, he defined  what jazz was and could be, avowing its roots in African-American life, culture and experience, to the displeasure of some on a panel discussion and in the crowd. In 2013, he received the prestigious Kyoto Prize; the Inamori Foundation, the award's grantor, praised his life's work, though "free jazz" only scratches the surface:

One of the most original pianists in the history of free jazz, Mr. Cecil Taylor has developed his innovative improvisation departing from conventional idioms through distinctive musical constructions and percussive renditions, thereby opening new possibilities in jazz. His unsurpassed virtuosity and strong will inject an intense, vital force into his music, which has exerted a profound influence on a broad range of musical genres.

A contractor he had befriended stole nearly the entire amount, before being caught, tried and convicted.

A few videos about Taylor, including one of my favorites, "Les grandes répétitions":

"Les grandes répétitions"

A fragment from Ron Mann's Imagine the Sound

Interview, from the Snapshots Foundation (full interviews here)

Cecil Taylor performing at Ornette Coleman's memorial, in 2015

Dark to Themselves

As I concluded in my poem tribute, "Their ears are still learning." 

Poem (Excerpt): Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis

One of the leading volumes of poetry published in 2015 was Robin Coste Lewis's debut, The Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf). A collection in the truest sense, it brought together Lewis's shorter lyrics with her pièce de résistance, the long conceptual, epic title sequence. To summarize it hardly will do it justice, but in essence, Coste Lewis detourned and transformed, with impressive vision and skill, the titles, catalogue entries and exhibit descriptions of a range Western art works that referred in any way to female figures of African descent (see below). Not unlike M. Nourbese Philip, she has shown us a new way to think about the poetics and practices of revision and resistance in relation to the (Western) archive.

Coste Lewis avers that her poem is narrative--and taken as a whole it is--one could also read it as a counter-lyric, engaging the objective alongside the subjective in its metonymic, externalizing gestures of drawing in thousands of years of history into the poem while also drawing the reader beyond lyric interiority, without resorting to strategies of documentation, non-lyric discourses, hybrid forms, and the like. Instead, as she details below, the titles, their framing, placement and relation to each other, the friction and conversation they produce in and through their proximity, procession and totality, achieve her goal.

"The Voyage of the Sable Venus" queers the possibilities of what narrative, conceptual and lyric poetry might look like, while also grounding these genres profoundly in a black-centered perspective; whereas those titles, catalogue entries and exhibit descriptions centered the European/white, hetero-patriarchal gaze, in its global colonialist and imperial formations as objective definitions of aesthetic artifacts, Lewis, by repurposing and transforming them, unsettles the foundations on which they draw their meaning. Moreover, in its articulation, Coste Lewis's long poem does not sacrifice poetry's emotional impact; the effects, instead, may be awe, astonishment, anger, and a profound appreciation for what she has achieved, the lost voices she has unarchived and restored to individual and collective subjectivity and expression, that she has invited into her chorus.

To put it another way, The Voyage of the Sable Venus presents a distinctive way of writing poetry about and in relation to works of art that runs against the grain of much of much of what you might learn in a workshop or a literary studies class. It also suggests other options for conceptual writing that challenge some of the orthodoxies of that method and approach, while also resuming a conversation about poetics, race, theory, art practice, and performance that conceptual art predecessors including Raymond Patterson, Yoko Ono, Charles Gaines, Adrian M. S. Piper, and others took up, but which have tended to be obscured or elided altogether in too many critical surveys and discussions of contemporary conceptual writing.

Given its length, I am presenting two sections that originally appeared on LitHub, on September 30, 2015. The first is her introduction to the poem, describing her methodPlease visit that site for more sections, and above all, if you can purchase a copy of the collection or at least borrow it from your nearest library, please do so. Robin has held a wide array of fellowships and received many awards, including the National Book Award in poetry from The Voyage of the Sable Venus. A fellow alumna of Harvard and NYU, and received her PhD from the University of Southern California, where she lives and teaches.

***

VOYAGE OF THE SABLE VENUS

And never to forget beauty,
however strange or difficult 

                 REGINALD SHEPHERD

Prologue:

What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.

The formal rules I set for myself were simple:

1) No title could be broken or changed in any way. While the grammar is completely modified–I erased all periods, commas, semi-colons–each title was left as published, and was not syntactically annotated, edited, or fragmented.

2) “Art” included paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, lithographs, engraving, any work on paper, etc–all those traditional mediums now recognized by the Western art-historical project. However, because black female figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs.

3) At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many 19th century historically-specific markers, such as slave, colored, or Negro from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well-intended), I re-erased the post-modern “African-American” and changed all those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror to allow that original horror to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, art institutions and art historians have all been in participating in–if not creating–this history.

4) As an homage, I decided to include titles of art by black women artists and curators, whether the art included a black female figure or not. Most of this work was created over the last century, with its deepest saturation occurring since the Cold War. I also included work by black queer artists, regardless of gender, because this body of work has made consistently some of the richest, most elegant, least pretentious contributions to Western art interrogations of gender and race.

5) In a few instances, it was more fruitful to include a museum’s description of the art, rather than the title itself. This was especially true for colonial period.

6) Sometimes I chose to include female figures I believed the Western art world simply had not realized was a black woman passing for white.

7) Finally, no title was repeated.

***

And what follows is but one section of this magnificent work.

CATALOG 1: ANCIENT GREECE & ANCIENT ROME



Here is your name
said the woman
and vanished in the corridor


                              ­MAHMOUD DARWISH


 

I.

 

Statuette of a Woman Reduced
to the Shape of a Flat Paddle

 

Statuette of a Black Slave Girl
Right Half of Body and Head Missing

 

Head of a Young Black Woman Fragment
from a Statuette of a Black Dancing Girl

 

Reserve Head of an African Princess
Statuette of a Concubine

 

Full Length Figure of a Standing
Black Woman Wearing Earrings

 

Statuette Once Supported an Unguent Vase
Vase with Neck in the Form of a Head

 

of a Black Statuette of a Female
Figure With Negroid Features

 

Figure’s Left Arm
Missing Head

 

of a Female Full-length Figure
of a Nubian Woman the Arms Missing

 

Bust of a Draped Female Facing Forward
One Breast Exposed   Black

 

Adolescent Female with Long Curls and Bare
Breasts Wearing a Voluminous Crown

 

Partially Broken Young Black Girl
Presenting a Stemmed Bowl

 

Supported
by a Monkey

 

Element of Furniture Decoration
[Two Nubian Prisoners Bound

 

to a Post] Protome [Probably
the Handle of a Whip

 

or Other Implement]
Oil Flask Back

 

View Head of an African Prisoner
Statue of Prisoner Kneeling

 

Arms Bound at the Elbows
Left Arm Missing      Bust

 

of a Nubian Prisoner with Fragmentary Arms
Bound Behind Funerary Mask

 

of a Negro with Inlaid Glass Eyes
and Traces of Incrustations

 

Present in the Mouth
Censer in the Form

 

of a Nude Negro Dwarf
Standing with His Hands

 

at His Sides upon an Ornate Tripod
and Supporting on His Head

 

a Small Cup
in the Shape

 

of a Lotus
Flower

 

Standing Female Reliquary Figure
with Crested Coiffure and Hands

 

Clasped in Front of Torso, Holding
a Staff Surmounted by a Human Head

 

Figure Has Prominent
Vagina Bended

 

Knees and Oversized Head
with Half-Open Eyes

 

and Semicircle Mouth
that Juts Out

 

from the Face Some
Fine Scarification

 

on Chest and Belly
Dark Brown Almost Black

 

Patina with Oil Oozing
in Several Places

 

Numerous Cracks
on Back of Head and Hole

 

on the Coiffure
One Nipple Appears

 

to Be Shaved Off
or Damaged Black Woman

 

Standing on Tiptoe
on One End of a Seesaw

 

while a Caricatured Figure    Jumps
on the Other

 

Copyright © Robin Coste Lewis, from The Voyage

of the Sable Venus, New York: Farrar Straus,

and Giroux, 2015. All rights reserved.

Poem: Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin

The first time I came across this poem at wildness by Derrick Austin, directed there via Twitter (and I think I retweeted the link before reading the poem, and am happy I did), I stopped and thought: wow! It is only one stanza, with a sonnet's brevity and length, but as only poetry can do, it achieves quite a bit, pointing our gaze both towards the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo di Dono, also known as Paolo Uccello's (1397-1475) work and life--"His name meant Humble Bird"--and beyond the poetic frame, to the absences in our knowledge about Uccello's and everyone's lives that imagination and emotion fill in, as well as that "grief and art" from somewhere just outside our ken that arrive sometimes when we expect them, but also when we do not.

Yet, as every poem reminds us, we have the aesthetic artifact itself as a gift, a form of proof, of consolation, however, brief, and the best poems, no matter how difficult or painful the subject matter, the themes or the content, are also little vessels of beauty. Also embedded in the choice of Uccello, I think, is his fame as a pioneer in the development of perspective in visual art; his mastery of depth of field was legendary, particularly in the paintings that the poet names, depicting the Battle of San Romano. That theme, perspective, is crucial to this poem.

So: this poem, is a work of speculation, and may be about work that does not exist, which is another component of its charm. Unlike the other works I have posted so far, for which there is an artwork or artworks (cf. Rilke and Aragón) to which we can refer as a source of sorts, a touchstone, in the case of Uccello, there are winged angels and dragons but from my cursory searches, as Austin's poem suggests, no birds. Into this negative space, Austin pens his beautiful poem, much as Giorgio Vasari had to fill out his sketch of Uccello's life beyond the facts and anecdotes that he could glean, the interpretations he could make based on the paintings themselves.

Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water, which poet Mary Szybist selected for the 2015 A Poulin Jr. Prize and which was published by BOA Editions in 2016. A Cave Canem fellow and MFA graduate of the University of Michigan, he was the 2016-17 Ron Wallace Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Memorious. I follow him on Twitter and you can too, at @ParadiseLAust. You can also find more of his poetry, and other writings, at his Tumblr site, The Mad Scene.

PAOLO UCCELLO'S BIRDS


by Derrick Austin


It must have been about sacrifice,
a parable of sorts within the art. Why else
would Uccello, who so loved birds
as to have sketched their wings,
never paint one? His name meant Humble
Bird. No place for fluttering gloss
in rendering plain our linear perspective.
All recede into mathematical dark.
No space for swallows between lances
in The Battle of San Romano. So much tension
in all that Roman stillness: the banners
of nations and gold-plated weapons free of the gore
vultures will eat when they come
like grief and art from somewhere just outside our vision.

Copyright © Derrick Austin, 2018. All rights reserved.

Here is a Paolo Uccello painting with some birds:

Flood and Waters Subsiding, c.1447-48 Fresco, 215 x 510 cm Green Cloister, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke & Francisco Aragón

Francisco Aragón (YouTube.com)

Several days ago in my post featuring a poem by Valerie Martínez I mentioned poet Francisco Aragón, who had organized the "PINTURA: POETA, a project in Ekphrasis program" that Martínez, Carmen Giménez Smith, Blas Falconer, and a number of other leading contemporary Latinx poets had participated in back in 2013. I do plan to feature more of those poets and poems, but you J's Theater readers did not think that I would mention Francisco without sharing one of his poems, did you? In fact, a while ago I thought about posting his poem below, and then, in the swirl of...well, you know the drill. A day, a week, a month, years pass. So, how fitting that this month has provided a reminder to do so.

One of the most famous ekphrastic poems ever written is German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's (1875-1926) "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," a sonnet that initially appeared in his Neue Gedichte (New Poems) of 1907. These poems, and those in the second volume of 1908, were landmarks in European Modernist literature; while many appear in fixed forms like the sonnet, their combination of objective description, incantatory lyricism, and metaphysical heft appeared to mark a new stage in German and European poetry. At times, Rilke's poetic speaker engages in dialogue with himself--or his selves--and the poem's subject and themes, incorporating the reader in the dialogue, in a way that feels distinct from the dialogic approach one finds at times in Romanticism, or the abstractions of Symbolist poetry.

Rilke's "Archaic Torso" is fairly straightforward compared to some of the other poems in the two volumes, but it is less for the description than for its final line that its fame accrues. Many people who  perhaps have never read the German, let alone the English version of the poem know that famous dictum that concludes the sonnet: "You must change your life." As I have pointed out a number of times over the years, this translation is correct, and yet it loses one key component of the German, which is the verb "ändern," meaning to change or alter. "Ändern," and its cognates "ander/e," meaning "other," are directly related etymologically to English's "other." We lost the "n" and in the consonant shifting that occurred, and we got the "th" where German has a "d." Think "thorn" and "Dorn," or "thistle" and "Distel," or, well, "to think" and "denken." The languages, at least in their root words, are close. 

German does have other words for change too; "wechseln," meaning to "change" as in "exchange" money, sheets, etc.; "umziehen," to change one's clothes; "umtauschen," to exchange (something in a store); "verwandeln," to transform. (In the latter word, of course, "ande[r]" makes an appearance. Those "ändern" literally means "to make another" or "to make other." Or "to other." In this one word then, Rilke, as canny as they come, reminds us of the power of what not just the encounter with the work art does to the speaker, to us and any viewer, but what the artist herself must do--make oneself another, an other, other.

I have not forgotten Francisco, though. So below I am posting the German original of Rilke's poem, and Stephen Mitchell's famous translation. And then, I am posting Francisco's riff, which could be thought of also as a creative translation that manages to transform--verwandeln--the poem into something else, wittily but also with a serious little wallop. I think there are several different ways to interpret Francisco's version, but I'll leave that for J's Theater readers to pursue. I've already said quite a bit, though in case you are interested, Francisco is the author of two books of poetry, Puerta del Sol (2005) and Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and among his many activities (some of which I've mentioned on this blog before), he directs Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

ARCHAISCHER TORSO APOLLOS

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Shultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

From Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995). All rights reserved.

TORSO

by Francisco Aragón

    after Rilke

Despite the absent head (whose eyes

were the green of apples)
the supple flesh hums
with the afterglow

of those eyes
which is why the curve
of chest shimmers which is why

the twist of loin turns
that look into a smile, snaring
your eyes, leading

them slowly to regions
below the waist...That block
of stone more than a figure

disfigured and short; cascade
of shoulder glints
like a sinewy beast

of prey, whose edges blink
like stars—that torso:
gazing on its own. Step closer:

go blind

Copyright © 2014 by Francisco Aragón. From Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, 2010). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.

And, lastly, what might that headless torso of Apollo have looked like to Rilke, or how might it appear today?

Torso of Apollo, Roman copy
after a statue of the school of
Polykleitos, ca. 430–420 BC
Villa Ridolfi in Rome, acquired
in 1812 by Wagner for the
 Glyptothek, Munich
(courtesy of The Rapidian)

Poem: Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali,in 1967

I could have sworn I had posted the following poem, by Marianne Moore (1887-1972), a poet whose work I, like anyone educated even passably in the US before the last 25 years, was required to read at various intervals--in grade school, junior, high school, college, and graduate school--and which I have increasingly come to adore. She was, like William Carlos Williams, whose poetry I featured a few days ago, a leading figure in American Modernism, and, as many critics have noted, a superlative stylist and magician with language. Instead, it turns out I'd posted about Moore's poem "Poetry," which carries with a publication history worthy of a scholarly lecture. Moore also was, like T. S. Eliot, a poet I regularly heard about growing up because she was born and grew up in the near suburbs of St. Louis--in Kirkwood, Missouri, to be exact, the next town over from Webster Groves, where I spent a good portion of my youth.

In fact, I sometimes think that the deceptive simplicity and apparent naturalism of Moore's work leads readers, as it did for me, to assume they will "get" her work when in fact its complexity is right there before your eyes. But a little deeper reading usually opens the poem's meanings up, like paper flowers unfolding in water. Like Elizabeth Bishop (1917-1979), Moore's poems also avoid, at least on the surface, the personal and confessional, but her variable perspective on the world does eventually become clear, and that surface control seems at times to lie atop something burbling below, a rich vein of feeling. (As Dan Chiasson discussed in his thoughtful review, Linda Leavell's acclaimed 2013 biography of Moore, Holding on Upside Down (FSG), reveals how much personal tumult the seemingly placid Moore did live through, from childhood on.)

"No Swan So Fine" is one of Moore's briefest masterpieces, unsurpassed in its music, precision, wit, and irony.  I taught it most recently in "Foundations of Literary Studies," Rutgers-Newark's introductory course for potential undergraduate English majors and minors, and it left most of the students bemused, until we walked through it together and, as is so often with Moore's poems, it clicked. They started to get it and wanted to talk about it; some did with considerable exuberance. It was the direct result, critics have pointed out, of Moore's lifelong observation and careful notation. Scholar Patricia Willis writes that in March 1930, Moore saw in the Illustrated London News a pair of Louis XV candelabra, the "property of the late Lord Balfour," a friend of her friend, British critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933), to whom she had sent a condolence about Balfour earlier that year. She even sketched them (see below).

A year later Moore read a New York Times Magazine article (19 May 1913, pp. 8-9), by Percy Philip, about the Rockefellers' restoration of Versailles, and notated above a clipping of one of the featured images (cf. below) the line "There is no water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." I find it fascinating to consider how she fits that resonant aperçu into the poem, leaving it as a prose quotation but transforming it into poetry, not unlike the poem itself, which unfolds as an argument attempting to make sense of disparate and contrasting images, artifacts, ideas. The overtly rococo language not only evokes Louis XV but embodies that era--"with swart blind look askance / and ambidextrous legs, so fine / as the chintz china one with fawn - / brown eyes and toothed gold..." This tongue-twisting ornateness, which is nevertheless not superficial but full of depth and seriousness, continues in the second stanza, culminating in that falling final sentence, like a guillotine.

Lastly, the theme of the past and the evanescence of culture was in Moore's mind as well because, as Willis adds, she wrote the poem to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Poetry magazine, but with the thought that it would shutter that spring; it is, however, thankfully still with us, and Moore's poem appeared in that October 1932 issue, alongside poems by Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Witter Bynner, Eunice Tietjens, and others. Here, then is the poem:

Moore's poem, copyright ©
Poetry Magazine

And now, those images--the candelabra, Moore's sketch, and the clipping (all from the Marianne Moore Archive Online):

The actual swan candelabra
sold at Christie's

and

Moore's sketches of the candelabra

and

From the New York Times Magazine: "The Tapis Vert at
Versailles Where Melancholy Now Reigns as Queen"

Poem: Valerie Martínez

Valerie Martínez

In 2013, poet Carmen Giménez Smith posted a note on Harriet about a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit entitled "Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art," which was linked to "PINTURA: PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis," which she noted was "a national, multi-year initiative...bringing Latino writers to the exhibition." The initiative included workshops, conversations, and a great deal of poetry, by all involved. The project was the brainchild of poet Francisco Aragón, who had previously organized a program entitled "Poetas y Pinturas: Artists Conversing in Verse," which essentially reversed the relationship by inviting Latino visual artists to create new works based on the work of Latino poets. Taken together, as Carmen points out, the larger goal was and remains to enrich the discourse and conversations between Latino artists and poets.

Carmen had previously written beautiful poems speaking to and about the work of the late Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), but expressed enthusiasm about a more focused exploration of ekphrasis, and the discussions that would arise among and between the participating poets and the works of art they would be viewing. (I hope to post one of Carmen's poems later this month.) In March 2016, Poetry eventually published a portfolio of some of the poetry that resulted from "PINTURA: PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis," and you can find some of the participating poets and their poems on Poetry's online site. Also considering ordering the print version and perusing it at the library. Since the poets' aesthetics differed, as did they artworks they were engaging with, you will encounter in the Poetry portfolio a rich and illuminating array of approaches to writing to and with art. One poem that struck me was Valerie Martínez's "Granite Weaving," which takes a sculpture by the late Jesús Moroles (1950-2015) as its subject, and manages both to give a sense of its solid and fixed materiality, and of the poem's and poetic speaker's dynamic dialogue with it.

Valerie Martínez is a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the author of five books of poetry and two chapbooks, including the book-length poem Each and Her (Camino del Sol/University of Arizona Press, 2010), a powerful meditation on the more than 400 women and girls murdered in and around Ciudad Juárez in Mexico in the early 2000s. Each and Her received the Arizona Book Award and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. She has edited three anthologies, including one focusing on Native American women writers, Reinventing the Enemy's Language--Contemporary Writing by Native Women of North America (1997). Martínez also is a translator; her translations of Uruguayan author Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) appeared as the collection A Flock of Scarlet Doves in 2005. She currently serves as Executive Director of Littleglobe, Inc., a nonprofit artists' collaborative that works in local communities, and was the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe from 2008 to 2010.

GRANITE WEAVING

by Valerie Martínez

To climb, in this instance, upon a horizon

Shadow-shadow. Lip-to-lip rock.

Ziggurat. Ah, from the base to the top.

Sideways. Upwards. Again, in succession.

Sprung and sprung

Frozen idiom.

Barre. Pietrasanta. Mouth and mouth.

Sung. Granite. Stitching

The way fabric gathers — pinch, scrunch.

Not in dreams alone. Not the knot.

Step, step, step, step, step. 35 up.

As if into clouds

Ur, Aqar Quf, Chogha Zanbil, Tikal.

Kin.

Plank upon plank upon plank upon

Little Blocks: ahem. don’t you forget us.


a, of, or, but, if, la, and


Close and closer to flattened.

Rock, Water, Bone: Noisy Pilgrim.

And Jesús Moroles' art work:

Granite Weaving, 1988, by Jesús Moroles,
gift of Frank K. Ribelin. Smithsonian
American Art Museum.

You can read the rest of the PINTURA : PALABRA portfolio in the March 2016 issue of Poetry. All images in this portfolio are courtesy of and with permission from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Granite Weaving by Jesús Moroles, gift of Frank K. Ribelin. Source: Poetry (March 2016)

Poem: William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

In the American Modernist pantheon William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) looms large as one of its most important poets, and rightly so; from his earliest collections to his last writings, he cut a powerful path of experimentation, using everyday American language and rhythms, and an array of forms, not unlike a painter or sculptor, that has continued to influence English-language poets of all kinds ever since. He may be best known for his short poems that children still learn--I hope!--in grade school and junior high, including "The Red Wheelbarrow" and the often-parodied but memorable "This is just to say," among others.

A trained physician and native of New Jersey whose mother was from Puerto Rico and whose father was from Great Britain, Williams published poetry, fiction, and criticism, with one of his greatest works, the long, elaborate, mixed-genre volume Paterson appearing late in his career. At the end of his life he again turned to shorter forms, and his Brueghel poem, in dialogue with Auden's (which I posted several days ago), appears in his last collection during his lifetime, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), which received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. (Like many a great poetry pioneer, he deserved numerous awards but was overlooked for many of them for most of his career.) I am not, however, going to feature his Brueghel entry (and I should note, he published several poems based on Brueghel's work, including "The Dance"), but instead, a poem from earlier in his career that I taught years ago and love: "The Great Figure."

Here the symbiosis differs from the usual poet's imaginative interaction with the art work. Williams wrote his poem, a Modernist pearl, first, and the painter Charles DeMuth (1883-1935), Williams' friend and one of many gifted artists who was conversant with the leading figures in the literary and visual arts in the first decades of the 20th century, painted his Cubist and Futurist-style oil painting, "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold" after reading Williams' poem, which despite its brevity brings a rainy city street at night fully to life though its flashes of imagery and its resonant music ("gong clangs"). Williams was on his way, after a long day at the clinic, to visit another artist friend, Marsden Hartley, and this poem, which could be considered exemplary of Imagism, was the result. DeMuth was enchanted, and produced his own memorable image in tribute. It has become a signature work of his and of the era.

THE GREAT FIGURE

by William Carlos Williams



Among the rain 
and lights 
I saw the figure 5 
in gold 
on a red 
firetruck 
moving 
tense 
unheeded 
to gong clangs 
siren howls 
and wheels rumbling 
through the dark city. 

Copyright © William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Here is DeMuth's masterpiece:

Charles Demuth, "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold," 1928, oil, graphite, ink, and gold leaf on paperboard (Upson board), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Wilson Harris, Among the Ancestors

Sir Wilson Harris, with his final novel,
The Ghost of Memory (2006)

Such is life, so death comes calling. Sir Wilson Harris (1921-2018), the great Guyanese-British author whose fiction, poetry and essays form a singular, ever experimental whole, left the earthly plane on March 8. I only learned about his passing recently, when Chris Stackhouse shared the news. Oddly enough, I had been thinking about Wilson Harris quite a bit of late, as returned to several longstanding fictional projects, and would wade back into various works of his for knowledge and fortification. He was and remains one of the most important literary artists in my personal firmament. His imagination, daring and craft really were peerless, as was his exacting inner aesthetic compass, which led him to write over two dozen books, at a steady clip, and it is fair to say that none of them are easy, but ever last one offers multiple rewards.

Over the years, I have invoked his name and work many times on this blog, particularly in conjunction with the annual folly known as the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award that almost completely debased itself when its jury gave the prize to Bob Dylan, arguably the most decision amidst a host of recent ones, while literary pathblazers like Harris, John Ashbery, E. L. Doctorow, and countless others died overlooked. One post from 2006 focusing on Harris bore the title "Four Books," and his was the second I discussed. I will repeat it verbatim here, because everything I said then I still believe, with even stronger conviction:

Speaking of passing through strange mirrors, I recently reread Wilson Harris's Carnival (Faber Faber, 1985, out of print) for the graduate course I'm teaching. I realized upon finishing it once again that it must be one of the most difficult novels written in English in the last 25 (50? 75? more?) years. Though it only runs to 168 or so pages, it serves up prose so densely lyrical, disorienting, distancing, and taxing that I have to admit my reading strategy involved pausing, then rereading, then rereading again certain passages, even though I'd already read the novel several times in the past. My conviction remains that this is a work of manifest artistry that manages tosimultaneously embody multiple genres and modes while also functioning diegetically as an allegorical narrative. I also think it stages, from the level of syntax all the way up to the level of the plot, a very complex textual embodiment and performance of epic and ritual, as a revisionary "Carnival" site in prose (Carnival and the carnivalesque, masking/masqueing, transformation and metamorphosis, performance and performativity, trauma and recovery). In this work, Harris employs a relentlessly dialectic, fractal, negative capability in writing the social, economic, political, and spiritual "history" of Guyana, the Western epic tradition, the Diaspora and diasporas, society and the self. I also suggested to the class that though he was (and is) interested at the time in quantum theory, which is most evident in The Four Banks of the River of Space (yet operative, in terms of ways of reading time and space in Carnival and the carnival), he seems also to have anticipated string theory in this book, at least as I understand it from many articles and Brian Greene's and Lisa Randall's books on the topic (which isn't very well). Harris brain nevertheless strikes me as having been on the branes before almost anyone else--in the literary world, that is.

I again looked at Carnival last fall, as I was mentoring one of my brilliant graduate students, Simeon M., and shared, by reading aloud, Harris's opening to that novel, a series of passages that seem to take metaphysical flight as the eyes and voice box move from word to word. It is a remarkable performance, refined in that novel to sublimity, and for it alone Harris should have received every award under the sun. As these things go, of course, it did not work out that way, but he kept writing, and published right into his 80s. I have his final novel, The Mask of the Beggar, and though a late(r)/last work, it glimmers with his distinctive genius. In his work, Guyana, the Caribbean, black diasporic and mixed people of the new and old worlds, the spiritual and scientific, the metaphysical, the cross-cultural imagination, as he once put it, all take flight.

I never had the opportunity to meet Wilson Harris, but I did work with him quite pleasurably for a brief period in the early 1990s, when I was the managing editor of a literary journal that was planning to dedicate an issue to him. This involved written correspondence, and I noted then his graciousness and warmth, but also his exactitude when it came to how his work should appear and what we would include. What provided me with a lesson I had never gotten before was to see his edited manuscripts, and to note how, perhaps more so than any other author I had ever read, he distilled everything on the page down to an intoxicating brew.  Covering the typewritten text like a spiderweb, his penned cross-outs and substitutions suggested a continuous search for concision not with the aim of efficiency but of discursive precision was incredibly instructive. To put it another way, Harris was not in search just of the right word, but the combination of words through which the force of his narration, his ideas, the presence of the story, would resonate most fully. To give an example, here are two paragraphs from my quotation, back in 2011, of his Four Banks of the River of Space:

"The flute sings of an ancient riverbead one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks. We shall see!

"So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

Out of that interaction came an intermittent dialogue, and I made sure to send him my work as it appeared. He also did one of the kindest things an established writer can do when back in 1994, I sent him a copy of the manuscript of my first book Annotations, and, busy though he was--and though we had never met in person and only communicated via letter or electronic means--he sent back a one-page assessment that both summed up the novel in impressive form, affirmed what I was striving for, and provided me with my first blurb. It was a generous gesture, which he did not take lightly, and I will be forever grateful to him for doing so.

Theodore Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam, British Guiana, now Guyana, in 1921. He studied at Queen's College in Georgetown, Guyana, then worked as a surveyor in the country's interior, an experience that informed his work for the rest of his life. One can see the landscapes of his native country in his first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), which made his reputation, and in one his late-career masterpieces, the beguiling, trenchant Jonestown (1996), which explores the US preacher Jim Jones' religious cult and its subsequent mass suicide that took place outside Guyana's capital. Harris took up a career as a writer and editor in the late 1940s, publishing poems and essays in journals such Kyl-over-Al, and emigrated to the UK 1959, primarily to foster and further his literary career.

Wilson Harris in 2006 (The Guardian)

The Palace of the Peacock also demonstrated his interest in an approach to narrative that broke down the strictures of realism, which he had linked in his critical work to the rise of colonialism, empire and the global slave system, in favor of storytelling which was more fluid in temporality, metaphorical and metonymic, speculative, oneiric, and philosophical. In as much as Harris took Guyana's multilayered history as his template, he also drew upon numerous European canonical texts, re(-en)visioning them so that his work entailed less of a rewriting and more of a dialogue with the prior texts. In this debut novel, the quest story leads to a profound reckoning for its characters but for the Caribbean novel, and Anglophone fiction, going forward. This was a new kind of mythic fiction, and Harris would, in all his subsequent work, demonstrate its numerous possibilities.

The Palace of the Peacock initiated what came to be known as the Guyana Quartet of novels, which appeared in rapid succession: The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). In each he explored aspects of Guyana's colonial history and present, while also delving into aspects of its indigenous past and the complex merger of cultures that opened up spaces within and beyond reality. The rainforest, the plantation, the bush, and the river become not just the sites where the novels unfolded, but chronotopes permitting an innovative mode of literary and critical exploration. Through the 1960s Harris would publish roughly a novel a year, the subsequent novels often centering on women protagonists grappling with various forms of loss, as the mythic component already present in the work moving ever more fully toward the forefront of the texts.

In the 1970s, his novels shifted to the UK and other points across the globe, including Mexico, but the revisionary conversation with Guyana's past and present, the Caribbean and Latin America, the African Diaspora and Amerindia's multiple currents, only deepened, as did his exploration of reality's multiplicities culminating in the remarkable Carnival trilogy of the 1980s, which includes the eponymous novel, as well as The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010, and received a lifetime achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Foundation in 2014. His wife of many decades, Margaret, predeceased him in 2010. He leaves four children by his first wife, Cecily Carew, as well as his sister, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.