Poem: Adriano Spatola

Adriano Spatola

Georges Seurat's (1859-1891) 1884-86 painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," or "Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte," which now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, may be one of the most famous and recognizable works of French art from the late 19th century Neo-Impressionist movement, and a master-work of pointillist painting. A series of carefully placed dots that in combination depict an afternoon world of (mostly) bourgeois leisure on a Seine riverbank. The picture indexes a social world, rewarding repeated viewings, even in reproduction, and provoking a range of possible interpretations.

These everyday, fin de siècle characters are in shade because of the sun, but might Seurat not be implying more? What is the little girl in white, staring directly at the viewer, saying through her steady child's gaze? There are sailboats and rowers, but also a woman fishing; how common was this, and who is she? Is this for sport or sustenance, or both? Why does the one woman with the immense bustle hold the leash to a pet...monkey? Off scene, across the river, lay the working-class suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine, which Seurat, as well as many other important 19th century French painters, including Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, also depicted. Lastly, there is the famous border, which inverts the colors of the painting, as if to underline the idea that another world or worlds lay just at the borders of this one.

Seurat's painting is a flash impression containing a vibrant narrative; the colors, in Impressionist fashion, pulse before our eyes. This informs the approach that Italian poet Adriano Spatola (1941-1988), known for his linguistic experimentation that often uses fragments and run-on syntax, employs in his tribute, translated by poet Paul Vangelisti, to Seurat's painting. Spatola also taps into the darker veins of the scene Seurat painting; supposedly it was a spot where middle class men could, amidst the bathing, rowing and picknicking, meet prostitutes, and that shadowy boundary between the visibly respectable and the invisible desire and vice lurking in the interstices of social relations appears in Spatola's poem in words such as "tricked out," "penance," "shadow," and "anger," among others. He records the social and emotional tenor of the scene more so than what it is overtly depicting: as poetry often can do, he holds up a lyric stethoscope to the image, and shares what he hears.

It is a beautiful image that even spurred a musical--Stephen Sondheim and James Lepine's famous 1984 musical Sunday in the Park with George--as well as numerous recreations and parodies, but also repays viewing. I did have the pleasure several times of viewing it up close, and urge visitors to Chicago first to go to the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the nation's best, but above all to spend even a little time with Seurat's painting, one of its treasures. And now, Spatola's poem:

SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND
OF GRANDE JATTE (1884-85), Georges Seurat



by Adriano Spatola



The wonder the sense of lacquered objects
bolted measured tricked out in the clock
generous happy mature penance shadow
that the sun disbanded sews on the leaves
trousers hair parasols and gowns and gloves
anger drowns sighing the groan resounds
against the decorated and blank wall against the scale
unraveled dry whirlpool enameled Gongorism
congenital with thirst with gloomy astonishment
or wonder or the sense of lacquered objects.

Adriana Spatola, from The Position of Things: Collected Poems 1961-1992, translated by Paul Vangelisti. Copyright © 2008 by Adriano Spatola and Paul Vangelisti. Used by permission of Green Integer Press.

And here is the painting:

George Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, oil on canvas, 1884-1886, © Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Poem: Joshua Marie Wilkinson

I am surprised I've never featured a poem by Joshua before, though I have mentioned him on this blog, I think, but he's a friend and local favorite, a wonderful poet and teacher and filmmaker and critic, who has lots of pots cooking wonderfully on the creative stove. Here is his bio from his blog:

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, teacher, editor, and filmmaker born and raised in Seattle. He is the author of five books, most recently Selenography, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books 2010). His first film, a documentary about Califone co-directed by Solan Jensen, is called Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape (IndiePix Films 2011). He lives in Chicago. He's at joshuamarie |at| gmail |dot| com.

Actually he has many more books out--tiny gemstones of books--that you can find on his blog, which he made fun of in an interview with bomb, though blogs really old-hat now and established--and according to the New York Times allegedly being abandoned by the young'uns and some old'uns (Ron Silliman?). He also doesn't mention Rabbit Light Movies, his visual archive of poets reading their work and other fine things, or evening will come, the new online journal he edits. Or that he teaches at the fine university that I can walk to and have from time to time, Loyola University of Chicago.

Anyways, here's Joshua's poem, beginning "cuttings," from Selenography, and read it aloud and see if you can't hear his breaths as he reads, those "thes" hanging in the air:

cuttings
shoveled

up into a fortress
hiding behind where
the dead
woman bakes lemon
& mincemeat pies
we live inside the

seam of the wind the
breaker's froth the
swarm's
sleepy landing

a pond divided

by an upside-down moon more
animals learn to hollow
grow wary

& withhold their math from us

From Selenography, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili.  Copyright © Joshua Marie Wilkinson and © Photography by Tim Rutili, Sidebrow Books, 2010. All rights reserved.

s(NO)w + Art (Free) + Rogers Park ≠ Hipsterville + Klein/Agbodji Rule NYC + Super Bowl Prediction

Chicago, I'm glad to say, did not suffer the Snowpocalypse. Or "Snowmageddon," I should say. It's cold, but it's always cold in the winter. The sidewalks are paved with ice, but people here frequently don't shovel or salt the walkways in front of their homes (as people in New Jersey do), perhaps in the belief that they will not be sued if someone took a violent spill on the glassy lake stretching the length of their easements (perhaps New Jerseyans are more litigious?). There's residual snow from earlier in the week, but there always appears to be residual snow, even when the sun finally appears and the temperatures rise above freezing. It's just the way things are. It also didn't snow in New York, which was supposed to be buried alive. Instead, I imagine, people went about their business, and laughed once again at the frenzied excitement of the local media. Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, and parts in between and south do appear to have received the snow gift, though. The photos of Washington in particular look really beautiful.

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Since it a snowless Saturday, and it's free admission all month to the Art Institute of Chicago, I hopped on the El (which is now $2.25) and traveled down there. I was very glad to see that many Chicagoans, including many brown and black ones, were also taking advantage of the free admission; it was packed. I hadn't seen the new Renzo Piano extension, which sits behind the famous Michigan Avenue Beaux Arts façade, but it really is impressive, airy, bursting with light, easy to navigate, and almost cinematographic in the dramatic views it offers of Daley Millennium Park. It also serves the art well, at least to my eye, an impression which the smaller crowds in the contemporary galleries only heightened.

Yves Tanguy's "Untitled"(screen), 1928

On this trip, I decided to drift forward through the museum to see what I might come across. My first stops were at the architectural artifacts from historic Chicago, which included various pediments, spandrels, caryatids, gratings, and so forth, from buildings by important Chicago architects like Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. I found myself repeatedly impressed by the workmanship and intricacy, the delicacy and beauty, of many of these pieces, especially those by Wright, who was, as I need not tell anyone, a visionary. From there, I kept walking forward, into what turned out to the 1800-1900 European art galleries, which included furniture and other material artifacts, as well as many of the Museum's best and widely known treasures. I must say, it's one thing to see reproductions of Gustave Caillebotte's iconic 1877 painting "Paris Street, Rainy Day," or Georges Seurat's giant masterwork, "A Sunday on la Grand Jatte - 1884" (1884-86), for example, or Monet's various later paintings, such as the ones in London, or the haystacks, or the water lilies at Giverny, but it's another thing altogether to be able to look closely and deeply at them, to engage them and truly take them in, at length. Time really does fall away, and some opens up in the encounter, the exchange.

Pierre Joris @ SAIC + Free All Month: The Art Institute of Chicago

I am still confusing New York time with Chicago time, though I thankfully have not done it with my classes, but I do have to keep rechecking when all other events are happening, because although a month and a week have passed, my brain is still churning a hour ahead, and I somehow unchecked something on my phone calendar, which then reset every Central Standard Time event I'd keyed in to Eastern Standard time. That included events, like Pierre Joris's recent reading in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection (which I'll have to check out again at leisure) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (it was jointly sponsored by the Poetry Center of Chicago and the University of Chicago), which I did nevertheless manage to make. Joris is a poet, translator, and professor at the University of Albany, and primarily known to me as one of the best translators of Paul Celan, through Joris's translated volumes of Celan's poems, Breathturn (originally published by Sun & Moon Press, 1995, and reissued by Green Integer in 2006), and Threadsuns (Sun & Moon Press, 2000). In 2005, Green Integer published a third volume, Light-duress, which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award. I also knew of him from the huge and hugely important anthology that he edited with Jerome Rothenberg, Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry (2007).

According to the event bio, Joris, the author of 40 books of poetry and other works

in 2007 & 2008...published Aljibar and Aljibar II (poems, a bilingual edition with French translation by Eric Sarner, Editions PHI, Luxembourg). Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 came out in 2009 from SALT in the UK. His 2007 publications are the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; & Mitch Elrod, guitar) issued by Ta¹wil Productions and Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj 1-21 (Anchorite Press, Albany). Other translations include Paul Celan: Selections (University of California Press) and 4×1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour translated by Pierre Joris from Inconundrum Press.

(Photos & more after the jump!)