Series Reviews
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Biographers
& Brunch Series at the 92nd Street Y:
Lilith
Magazine Celebrates its Twenty-Fifth at Makor
Peacock
and Sapphire at the 14th St Y:
Makor's "Poetry
& Mentorship" Series
~ ~ ~ Series
Review:
Shining Sounds*
British biographer Graham Robb explored the life of French poet, visionary and adventurer Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) at the February 25th session of the "Biographers & Brunch" series presented by the 92nd Street Y. Robb, also the author of Victor Hugo (Norton, 1999) and Balzac (Norton, 1996), is a specialist in French literature and an impressive wordsmith in his own right. According to Robb, Rimbaud's montage of images in "Le Bateau Ivre" ("The Drunken Boat", 1871), arguably his finest poem, are not haphazard nor disordered: "Although the poem lacks a central, unifying metaphor, each image in it is used as a separate space station from which the poet launched further flights."** Robb placed Rimbaud's free-associative innovations in the context of contemporaneous French poetry, describing him as a precursor of the Surrealists and, indeed, one of the founders of Modernism, even though he quit writing poetry at the age of 19. Rimbaud freed French poetry from formal constraints and incorporated language play, welcomed the subconscious and barred the inner censor. A literary iconoclast, he rebelled against the strict metrics and rhyme then regarded as imperative for serious verse; a social hooligan, Rimbaud deliberately vexed people of status and sometimes had to flee police. He once tried to stab a poet in Paris who called him as "a little toad." ["Shithead." Ed.] Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), older, married and already successful at conventions, poetic and societal, became his mentor, lover, and assailant. "We love like tigers," Rimbaud boasted of the savagery of their romance, which included regular skin lacerations. They debauched like humans. Drunk, Verlaine shot Rimbaud when the two were in Brussels, wounding him in the wrist , and was tried and sentenced to two years hard labor for attempted murder. Graham Robb's speaking style was cool and detached in the typical Oxbridge manner, but over the hour of his presentation, his wit and colorfulness became apparent (well, not colorful in the Andy Warhol sense; rather his is the muted palette of Constable, subtle in the British manner). Rimbaud as a subject both attracts and repels Robb. He notes the poet's "savage cynicism," yet appreciates him as "one of the great Romantic imaginations, festering in damp, provincial rooms like an intelligent disease." Robb's lecture at the Unterberg Center of the Y dished out juicy biographical details not found in most other accounts of the poet's life, but he took pains to balance Rimbaud's personal flamboyance with demythologizing descriptions of Rimbaud's careful and sober craftsmanship. Although the poet, like so many others at the time floating in the absinthe haze of Parisian cafés, sought mind-altering, even transcendent experiences in drugs, Robb emphasized that the poet cleaned up his act when he was composing. The French critics, for example, claimed that Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell" (1873) showed evidence of absinthe drinking, but Robb documents that the poet wrote it during a sober sojourn on his family's farm in Charleville. It was then carefully edited, although according to Rimbaud's self-proclaimed poetic goal, it showed the mind in disorder. One might compare Rimbaud to one of his artistic progeny, Jackson Pollock, who followed the path to the unconscious that Rimbaud cleared for artists coming after him, and who also abused mind-altering substances. This American Abstract Expressionist was depicted in the press as a cowboy, throwing paint around his studio like a cattle-herder with a lasso, while in fact, as his critic and friend Clement Greenberg observed, Pollock positioned his paint as carefully as any Renaissance painter. Rimbaud's aesthetic grew out of his faith in "l'inconnu," the unknown spirit that he believed animates all matter. His poetry was a means by which he surrendered to this life force, allowing it to use his individual consciousness as an instrument. I have seen sideral
archipelagos! Islands
To Robb's great credit, he shows how Rimbaud's artistic goals and his efforts to effect social change both grew out of his desire to awaken others spiritually. In that light, Rimbaud's early incarnation as a poet and his subsequent twenty years as a benevolent businessman in Africa do not appear unrelated. Rimbaud employed drugs, alcohol, fasting and volatile emotions to achieve "le dérèglement de tous les sens" (the disordering of all the senses) by which he sought to suppress his self or will and allow "l'inconnu" to express itself through him. In doing so, he opened a floodgate of currents that would be traveled in various directions by painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, cinematographers and multi-media artists, in fact by all art-makers who eschew academic conventions and work intuitively. One thinks of James Merrill's channeling an entire volume of poetry via a ouija board, to cite an heir to Rimbaud's legacy whose Collected Works, published in 2001, shows the French genius's influence 109 years after his death! Robb traced Rimbaud's eventful life from his days as a precocious schoolboy who won prizes for his Latin compositions to his emergence as an anarchist and defiant son of the bourgeoisie in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, to his painful death in Marseille at the age of 39. He suggested that the dramatic changes Rimbaud's persona took, such as his abandonment of poetry at the age of 19 in favor of an entirely different career as a gunrunner and trader who helped set up modern capitalism in Abyssinia, stimulated the creation of the Rimbaud myth. Robb speculated that Rimbaud abandoned poetry because -- ahead of his time -- he had few readers. Only Verlaine, who published Rimbaud's Illuminations (1886) after the latter's disappearance in Africa, appreciated his prose poems. (Oddly, Robb made no connection between the brutal suppression of the Paris commune and the collapse of Rimbaud's political ideals with the abrupt change in the course of the poet's life.) Robb presents a fair and balanced portrait of the French poet. "Not a nice person," Rimbaud was aggressive, dishonest, crafty, sadistic -- especially in his treatment of Verlaine. But he had amazing poetic gifts that he exercised with passion, vision, courage and an admirable refusal to engage in literary careerism. Richard Howard, reviewing Robb's book recently in The New York Times, calls it "superior to all its predecessors in English or French" (and there are many). As Robb humbly noted, a lot of newly discovered Rimbaud material provides depth to the poet's biography. Robb's book contains a family tree, maps and illustrations, descriptions of contemporaneous events in France and Abyssinia that affected Rimbaud, and French texts of poems he presents in translation. Robb's stated goal was to present Rimbaud's "life and work . . . as one thing, a unity not severed by a trench of silence between the poet and the adventure . . . I have tried at least to allow Rimbaud to grow up." And for that we are grateful. The Y presents a groaning board of comestibles for the Sunday bruncher: salads, pastas, crudités, crusty bread, rolls and bagels, spreads and desserts, coffee, tea, sparkling water and juices are topped off with flaky pastries, layer cakes and the best peach pie this reviewer has every gorged upon. Biographers & Brunch at the 92nd Street Y is offered several times each month, and even if an author is disappointing, the feast that follows will exceed expectations. (The 92nd Street Y is located at 1395 Lexington Avenue (91st/92nd), NYC 10128. Call (212) 415-5500 for program information or consult the web site at www.92ndsty.com) [*"Departure from affection, and
shining sounds" from Rimbaud's "Departure", a poem from Illuminations.
©2001 Big City Lit(tm)
Lilith Magazine
Celebrates its Twenty-Fifth at Makor
Lilith Magazine
celebrated its 25th anniversary on March 1 with a dialogue on Jewish feminism
at Makor, a West Side Jewish cultural center catering to younger people.
"Lilith Writers Dish!" the evening's publicity provocatively promised,
but the dish served was, after all, a hearty stew or bone-warming soup.
Not necessarily chicken soup, though, for the emphasis here was on youth
and innovation, as three editor/writers, introduced by Editor-in-Chief
Susan Weidman Schneider, discussed what it means to navigate the "Third
Wave" of Jewish feminism from an emphatically Jewish perspective.
Named for Adam's legendary, uncooperative first wife (an early feminist
who boldly walked out of Eden when her husband refused to accept her as
an equal), Lilith Magazine was founded in 1976 to fulfill two needs:
to create a Jewish presence in the feminist movement (which tended to be
hostile to "patriarchal" religions) and a feminist presence in Jewish culture
(which tended to be…well, patriarchal). Lilith Magazine has survived
25 years, according to Schneider, partly because it presents a mix of various
women's concerns, and addresses women of various cultures, backgrounds,
and ages.
This evening's accent
was definitely on younger women -- twentysomething or thirtyish. The three
speakers, Rachel Kranson, Danya Ruttenberg and Sarah Blustain, are all
part of the latest, or "Third Wave," of U.S. feminism. (We who came of
age in the 70's are the Second Wave; the First Wave, of course, refers
to the abolitionists and suffragists of the 19th Century.) Thus, all three
grew up in a society where, in Danya Ruttenberg's words, "feminism was
a given." An example of how things have changed: in its early days, Lilith
Magazine
daringly called for women to become rabbis. Today, female and feminist
rabbis are a significant cohort, happily transforming Jewish life.
The three women spoke
of their experiences both on the magazine and in the larger world. Rachel
Kranson spoke first. Now a scholar and pop-culture writer for Lilith
(her
article on Barbara Streisand in the latest issue analyzes the singer's
"retreat into myth"), Kranson was raised in a Modern Orthodox environment,
where she received two conflicting messages: (1) As a girl, one can be
and do anything --this is America! -- and 2) As a Jewish girl, one occupies
a lower rung on the spiritual ladder than boys and men. Her epiphanal moment
came as a teenager in Talmud class. Both she and her best pal Noah, a boy,
hated the class, defiantly scribbling notes and poems during sessions.
Rabbi X, a man, met separately with the two rebels. He promised Noah private
tutoring to help him "relate to Talmud." Rachel was given a book to read:
Love and Marriage the Jewish Way. At this point, her divided belief
system broke down.
Danya Ruttenberg comes
from a suburban Reform Jewish background; her Bat Mitzvah was expected
to end her Jewish life. She became committed to "atheism, feminism and
punk rock," until a religion class in college utterly captivated her. Today,
she identifies herself as a religious Jew, but embraces an egalitarian,
"Hey, we're all human beings" form of Judaism. Her forthcoming book, Yentl's
Revenge, features work by young Jewish women and asks such questions
as, 'How do younger women feel about Judaism?' 'How will the transgender
movement affect Jewish law?' (a good question!), and 'How can we deal with
"rampant class-ism" in the Jewish community?' Ruttenberg was the most politically
radical and activist member of the panel.
Sarah Blustain has
recently left her work as Senior Editor of Lilith for a position
at the New Republic. For the first time in her career, she
is not part of a Jewish or feminist milieu, and sometimes feels "awkward"
in an environment where men habitually call her "sweetie," and only two
co-workers (at this "liberal" magazine) consider themselves feminists.
Less connected to the organized women's movement than the others (in college,
she thought feminism was "icky", but later found herself unexpectedly in
tears at a women's seder), Blustain sees herself primarily as a journalist.
Yet, all her stories for Lilith deal with the important -- and feminist
-- question: Who owns the tradition? Obviously, if its ownership can change,
so can the tradition.
As a fiftysomething
Second Waver, I found it interesting that all three women are, in various
ways, connected to organized Judaism: they attend services, study traditional
texts, and even consider having a religious marriage service. This is definitely
a change from the old days, when the tone -- dare I say, the spirit --
of such a gathering would be decidedly secular.
Further discussion
included the audience, and was lively, intelligent, and incisive. Topics
ranged from the recent un-election, the religious right's anti-woman agenda
(their latest thrust appears to be a bizarre connection between having
abortions and later developing breast cancer) Schneider gave this claim
a "high mishegoss [craziness] rating), the reluctance of young women,
who agree with feminism's visions, to identify themselves as feminists,
the cultural incorporation of women's movement ideals, often watering them
down to sell products, and misogyny in the Jewish community. Rachel Kranson
had the last word, emphasizing the importance of building coalitions "even
with the people who voted for Bush."
The dialogue could
have continued, and obviously will -- in the pages of Lilith Magazine.
(Edith Dame is a poet, author and
professor whose work has been widely published. She lives in the metropolitan
New York area.)
©2001 Big City Lit(tm)
Peacock and Sapphire
at the 14th St Y
How Personal Does the
Political Have to Be?
The impetus behind
"Women Writing the World," a poetry reading featuring Molly Peacock and
Sapphire at the Sol Goldman YM-YWHA Center for Cultural and Performing
Arts, was the celebration of International Women's Day, March 8. The event
was one of nearly 250 March readings organized by Ram Devineni, publisher
of RATTAPALLAX, in honor of the U.N.'s Year of "Dialogue among Civilizations."
[See related article, "The Poem's Embassy" in the March 2001 issue,
Archive.
Ed.]
Veronica Golos, the
host for the reading and resident poet at the Sol Goldman Y, introduced
the evening and noted that it was fitting to celebrate International Women's
Day on the Lower East Side, the site of the historic march by women garment
workers demanding the eight-hour day (a demand whose time has come round
again for many women).
A delegate from the
U.N.'s Staff Recreation Council Society of Writers was on hand to bless
the event, quoting Sri Chimoy and teaching the audience the Hindi word
for 'poet' (kabi, "one who envisions"). After this, the reading
entered the realms of 12-Step qualifications, women's magazines, and solipsism.
The jazz trio began,
featuring a soupy base, squeaky violin, and the misfortune of original
compositions, and then Golos led the reading off with a series of poems.
I personally hate it when middle-aged women read sex poems, and therefore
won't comment on the opener ("our marriage, the color of syrup" on her
interracial marriage.) However, the poem, "Lilith Lets Eve into a Little
Secret," was fun, with Lilith chiding Eve for being "thin as a rib" and
averring: "Knowledge comes of flesh." After singing "Respect," Golos ended
with a beat rap about the myriad small failures aging flesh is heir to.
Golos then introduced
the featured readers, who had elected to read in rounds as a form of poetic
dialogue. Molly Peacock, former president of the Poetry Society of America,
read first, declaring that "there are only two subjects of lyric poetry:
sex and death." And earrings, a motif in her work, as she later admitted.
Her first poem was the well-known "At the Fair," about preparing her mother
for burial. "Bury me in my pink pantsuit .../ I had never dressed you before."
The narrator adorns her mother in uncomfortable clip-on earrings. Regretting
this suffering for beauty, Peacock ends by asking her mother to be comfortable
in death. Women need comfort, the poem seems to conclude, even if it is
a poor thing compared to joy.
The next poem remained
in the nuclear family. "My College Sex Group," a dialogue between Peacock
and her sister, had the memorable line, "clitorises like chicken wattles."
The round ended with a pop-up poem called the "Hotel Peach."
Sapphire, looking serene
in brown velvet and, by her own admission, "less angry," took the stage
next. Her work as a writer -- more than "the redemptive power of unmerited
suffering," as Golos termed it -- may have helped her be happier, or so
the God-narrator implies in her "Cabin in the Sky" dream as he tells Sapphire's
abusive father how his daughter made her life right. Sapphire did mention
women other than her mother and herself in one poem, "Poem for Jennifer,
Marla, Tawana, and Me" about violence against women ("It was not her fault
/ It was not her fault / It was not / It was not / It was not her fault"),
but soon returned to the nuclear family and poems about an alcoholic mother
and abusive father. Family, abusive or loving, is still family, and still
the dominant concern of female artists, if the work of these two poets
is evidence.
The next round brought
poetry about Peacock's alcoholic father, and a love villanelle with the
cute line, "No use getting hysterical / All words other than 'I love you'
are clerical" (well, we do live for love, don't we?). Sapphire followed
with a series of Breaking Karma poems, primarily about her abuse at the
hands of her parents and boyfriend.
Don't get me wrong:
I have nothing against poetry about Mom and Dad, or about the internal
experience of poets in relationships. And domestic violence is a real women's
issue. But it would have been nice to hear someone talk about the other
issues women face. As a U.N.-related event, a mention of the recent cutbacks
in U.S. abortion funding abroad, or the persecution of women under the
Taliban* might have been appropriate. Barring overt politics, it would
have been nice to hear any poem that was not about, well, boyfriend, Mom
and Dad. The major disappointment of this reading was that the avowedly
feminist poets didn't write the world, but rather, remained in the province
of the nuclear family, where women have always been told to stay.
(Larissa Shmailo, who is a poet and
an editor for a major New York publishing house, writes frequently for
Big City Lit(tm).)
[*For an eyewitness report on the
human rights abuses of the ostensibly Islam-based Taliban regime in Afghanistan,
international reaction, and the oil interests at stake there, see
http://mosaic.echonyc.com/~onissues/su98goodwin.html. Ed.]
©2001 Big City Lit(tm)
Makor's "Poetry &
Mentorship" Series
In just eighteen months,
Makor has become the unofficial literary adjunct to the arts campus known
as Lincoln Center, a complex comprised of the Metropolian Opera, Avery
Fisher Hall, NY City Opera, NY City Ballet, The Vivian Beaumont Theatre,
The Performing Arts Library, The Walter Reade Theatre (film), Alice Tully
Hall, and The Juilliard School. Only Barnes & Noble's Lincoln Square
monolith separates Makor's double brownstone on 67th Street from direct
discourse with the complex.
One of the best representatives
of quality programming at Makor is the Poetry & Mentorship series curated
by poet Eve Grubin. Richard Howard and Lucie Brock-Broido (Knopf, The
Hunger, 1988; The Master Letters, 1993) appeared there together
on February 22, less as one-time mentor and student than as poets who have
each mentored many, many others.
Upon the death of her
mother, Brock-Broido wrote, "I am magical no more." Responding to
those who have called her language 'Pre-Raphaelite,' she announced her
new obsession: legibility. By this, she quite clearly means not
penmanship, but rather, the effort to afford the reader immediate apprehension
of the words on the page -- though their meaning may lie deeper.
First my father
died,
Borrowing on some seventy
titles in the notebooks left by Wallace Stevens, Brock-Broido read a piece
called, "Dire Wolf". Sorrow, she writes, "comes in packs." Another of Stevens's
titles was "The Halo That Would Not Light". This instantly put her in mind
of a favorite, if underused word of poets, "lucubration," the practice
of many, even, likely as not, herself. Brock-Broido's low-toned, vowel-embracing
voice suggests acquaintance with the 40-watt night. For her title, she
chose a slight attenuation: "The Halo That Lit Twice". The result, a double
sonnet, "lit and faltered, halted," offered some of the rewards Baudelaire
had in mind when he wrote, "Rhythm and rhyme are responses to man's immortal
need for symmetry and surprise."
"Self-Deliverance by
Lion" is a poeticized account of a news event. A despondent woman travels
by train from Chicago to the Washington zoo to die, not by man-made tool
or machine, but by claw and fang. The lilac shadings and frost-crewled
windows that open the poem slowly give way to quick, primordial crimson.
The choice to borrow on another's inner life, to tell it for her, is a
risky one. In writing the first-person Helen in Egypt, H.D. chose
a public life, one already much written about at distance and brought it
close. For all that Brock-Broido's piece is evocative and its detail convincing,
one's discomfort in hearing it is due more to a sense of a well-intentioned
invasion than to its violent imagery.
Brock-Broido engages,
not by showmanship or performance, rather, her delivery exemplifies the
deferential service to the poem urged in a recent essay here. [See
Feb 2001, "Ego-Free, The Poem Aloft", Pt. 2, Archive.] Speech is
a gift and she knows it. Her voice is relaxed down to its natural position;
as instrument, she breathes the poem out as she breathed it in, with the
result that legible becomes audible. As director of the Writing
Division at Columbia, she sets an important example which can help the
next generation of serious writers resist the influence of their semi-literate
peers whose truncated speech bears the imprint of advanced devolution.
Despite a list of publications
and variety of accomplishments that could make even Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)
seem narrow, Richard Howard is praised by his students for the generosity
of his attentions. Following Brock-Broido, he complained graciously that
she had read too briefly. So then did he. If, as Howard says, the poet
is in a constant state of desire and longing, these two draw on very different
states of imagination to express that longing in art, which is, as he and
others have said, "the only available secular faith."
With a voice as reedy
as Brock-Broido's is resonant, hair as scant as hers is yard-long plentiful,
Howard too offered work of full engagement, richly and imaginatively realized.
At Makor, he wove together a letter written to The New York Times
by a young gay man who was solicited by a stranger for sex in his truck
and then severely beaten by him with a one-sided phone conversation between
the assailant's wife and her sister. The victim's account of the incident
("If he took part, who took all?") reveals that the husband had the HIV
virus, and alternates hauntingly with the sister's appeal to a woman reluctant
to recognize her husband from the newspaper description, own his crime,
his multiple deceits, and the likely effect of their infrequent, but deadly
spousal intimacy.
Richard Howard signed
copies of his latest collection, Trappings: New Poems (Turtle Point
Press, 1999) after the event.
~ ~ ~ Agha Shahid Aliwas scheduled to appear at Makor on March 15, with Amanda Schaffer and Daniel Paley Ellison but had to cancel due to a long-standing illness. Schaffer and Ellison, grads of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, read their mentor's poems. In here it's deliberately dark so one may sigh in peace. Please come in. How long has
it been?
in life. But for small invisible hands,
no wall
in. But look how each room's been refurbished: [. . .] Listen, my friend, But for quick hands,
my walls
in. But for small hands. Invisible. Quick
. . .
Even as each of the ten stanzas begins with 'in,' that preposition ends the preceding sentence or phrase, bringing the invalid back to his confinement, though it is the visitor who is comforted. Read with fine shape and clarity by Amanda Schaffer, the dignity of this poem's voice was felt throughout the rest of the evening. A native of Kashmir, Ali is the author of several collections of poetry, beginning with Bone Sculpture (1972) and including The Country Without a Post Office (Norton, 1998) which was offered at the reading, as well as of T.S. Eliot as Editor (1986), and is himself editor of the recent Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). Ms. Schaffer selected her poems based on her mentor's urging to let her language be as "extravagant" as possible, and so began with "Self-Portrait Miscopied from a Brain Scan." On the floor of the stock exchange, someone "throws up his hands and reads a novel." The layered irony delights. Her work is fresh, her observations and her sadnesses genuinely and precisely expressed. "Behind every eye is a river scene." Elsewhere she speaks of the eyes long dim of patients not just etherized but dissected on a basement table. Schaffer, a scientist, appears to hold the scalpel. One particular cadaver has served in multiple sessions: "I feared my Edgar couldn't take much more." Edgar's tissues have changed colors in a continuing evolution. As bodily outcroppings have Latin names which correspond to features of the face, Edgar's ribcage has ears. In a display of imagination seemingly spontaneous, not the result of academic probings of the world for ideas, Schaffer concluded -- to sustained applause -- with a found poem, ready-made from an index of that most individual of human features, the fingers: Index Finger, milk flowed
from A's
Daniel Paley Ellisonread from his mentor's dream poems, one, "I dream I returned to Tucson in monsoon," and the other, where the glass bangles on his mother's arms at bedtime, are a comfort to the child, even as they sound to him like ice breaking. Ellison indicated that he too seeks to let suffering and comfort inhabit the same breath, then went to exemplify "how memory lives in the body" with a poem called "Knife". This young man read each of his pieces, several about his grandparents and the duty of memory owed by him to their suffering, with a reverence similar to that applied to his mentor's lines. Unfortunately, the lines worked the more conventional for the excessive awe with which each was uttered. "Billboards of illusion" are pushed aside to seek Ginsberg in the "wilds of Brooklyn." Skies in dreams of Ukraine are "snowy"; silence "devours"; dead chickens lie inside (a psyche?), "small and waiting"; rotting black locusts erupt from white. "She [the grandmother] is dying / as you will be." The cumulative awe began to wear into a sense of self-satisfaction that proved as distracting as the late arrival of apparent extended family members. Yet, if the expression in Mr. Ellison's work is not yet fully achieved, the poetic vision nevertheless holds promise. In "Snakebit", he isolates the moment in a relationship, as the lovers splash in a sunset pond, when all was over between them though they continued for some time beyond it. "I saw you led back into your grief, . . . cast your body back, your name, 'Rachel, Rachel,' on my lips." He releases love and holds it, arguing it later, as any poet does, with himself. But to the mentor goes the last word, spoken, as before, as invalid: Now that God
The March 15th session concluded the series. On April 5, Franz Wright and Sapphire appear in a special National Poetry Month event at Makor. On May 3, "Men on Men" presents Yusef Komunyakaa, Tony Hoagland and Jason Shinder, followed on May 23 by "Letters to a Young Poet", an evening with U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz and National Book Award winner Lucille Clifton. Details and updates appear on the web site: www.makor.org. -- MH
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