'These are not good translations'

Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz is my current crush.

Last week, I was particularly taken by 'What Luck', in the 1976 collection Selected Poems, translated by Adam Czerniawski:


What luck I can pick
berries in the wood
I thought
there is no wood no berries.

What luck I can lie
in the shade of a tree
I thought trees
no longer give shade.

What luck I am with you
my heart beats so
I thought man
has no heart.

This past weekend, I picked up Unease, a 1980 collection of poems from ten different volumes, translated by Victor Contoski. Skimming through it as I walked along the street, I happened on 'How nice'


How nice. I can pick
berries in the wood
I thought
there are no wood no berries

How nice, I can lie
in the shade of a tree
I thought
now trees don't give shade.

How nice. I am with you
and my heart pounding
I thought
man has no heart.

And I thought: ugh. How nice? HOW NICE? Ugh.

And evidently, someone agreed with me

Series and series-in-series

A few months after their launch, I've continued playing with Digital New Zealand's set functionality.

In particular, I have been mulling over an idea for a project with the McCahon database. Although the McCahon Trust has not yet given permission for the site to be harvested, the collections at Te Papa and Auckland Art Gallery have given me enough to work with as I start thinking through Wystan Curnow's  ideas about McCahon's series and self- and cross-references:

I know of no artist whose works so cross-reference themselves. As if there were no single works, but only sets, series, series within series and, finally, one work, the life work. To this end he dispenses with the frame to open his paintings at the sides to sequence and narrative, deposits motifs whose symbolic resonance transcends their use in anyone painting. ...
... McCahon is a painter with a symbolising mind which is always propositioning the world. His work records this meaning - making process as a flow of hypotheses. As an improviser, he obeys these injunctions: his art must change, it must be direct, it must be sacred - a matter of life and death. 

I've been using DigitalNZ to pull together groups of McCahon's work on different themes, and annotate them with some explanatory info - sometimes for my own reference, sometimes for the chance reader who may happen upon them. It has been interesting using the sets functionality as a kind of research tool - it brings up a lot of edge cases about what would be useful for me here. But for now, here are some of the sets that represent the inklings of this idea:

McCahon's Cubism

A landscape with too few lovers

McCahon and Caselberg

Muriwai

Signwriting

The Gates and the way through

Light and waterfalls

Rocks in the sky

This is the promised land

Adam Zagajewski's 'Mysticism for Beginners'

From the occasional reviews file - Adam Zagajewski's Mysticism for Beginners

>>>>>>

Adam Zagajewski might be a little quiet, a little plain-spoken, a little lacking in the electric-skin-flicker I'm looking for right now. Whatever the reason, these poems largely flowed over me without catching.

One thing did catch me though: his repeated use (or Clare Cavanagh's repeated use in her translation) of the zeugma, a rhetorical device in which two words or phrases are yoked together. Most of the examples you find online help not at all to explain this idea - my favourite is, I believe, from Dickens; the image of little girls dressed in muslin and tears. One literal description, one figurative, yoked by the verb. (It is entirely possible I made this example up. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

Once I noticed this in Zagajewski's writing, reading became a bird-spotting activity rather than an absorbing one:

The tablecloths smell of starch and morals

Mountain streams lay on their backs
greedily lapping up water and October

The taxi smelled of anise and the twentieth century

As always though, a couple of poems slipped under my skin. The double restraint (of the written words and the described world) of 'Transformation' is lifted by the tension and power of the final lines:

I haven’t written a single poem
in months.
I’ve lived humbly, reading the paper,
pondering the riddle of power
and the reasons for obedience.
I’ve watched sunsets
(crimson, anxious),
I’ve heard the birds grow quiet
… and night’s muteness.
I’ve seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September’s sweet dust gathered
on the windowsill and lizards
hid in the bends of walls.
I’ve taken long walks,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.

And then 'Three Angels', which I fell straight into, and emerged the other side feeling like I always do when a writer's words sink into me, like I've been coloured in a little bit, made a little richer and deeper ...

Suddenly three angels appeared
right here by the bakery on St. George Street.
Not another census bureau survey,
one tired man sighed.
No, the first angel said patiently,
we just wanted to see
what your lives have become,
the flavor of your days and why
your nights are marked by restlessness and fear.
That's right, fear, a lovely, dreamy-eyed
woman replied; but I know why.
The labors of the human mind have faltered.

They seek help and support
they can't find. Sir, just take a look
-- she called the angel "Sir"! --
at Wittgenstein. Our sages
and leaders are melancholy madmen
and know even less than us
ordinary people (but she wasn't
ordinary).

Then too, said one boy
who was learning to play the violin, evenings
are just an empty carton,
a casket minus mysteries,
while at dawn the cosmos seems as
parched and foreign as a TV screen.
And besides, those who love music for itself
are few and far between.

Others spoke up and their laments
surged into a swelling sonata of wrath.
If you gentlemen want to know the truth,
one tall student yelled -- he'd
just lost his mother -- we've had enough
of death and cruelty, persecution, disease,
and long spells of boredom still
as a serpent's eye. We've got too little earth
and too much fire. We don't know who we are.
We're lost in the forest, and black stars
move lazily above us as if
they were only our dream.

But still, the second angel mumbled shyly,
there's always a little joy, and even beauty
lies close at hand, beneath the bark
of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration,
and another person hides in each of us --
universal, strong, invincible.
Wild roses sometimes hold the scent
of childhood, and on holidays young girls
go out walking just as they always have,
and there's something timeless
in the way they wind their scarves.
Memory lives in the ocean, in galloping blood,
in black, burnt stones, in poems,
and in every quiet conversation.
The world is the same as it always was,
full of shadows and anticipation.

He would have gone on talking, but the crowd
was growing larger and waves
of mute rage spread
until at last the envoys rose lightly
into the air, whence, growing distant,
they gently repeated: peace be unto you,
peace to the living, the dead, the unborn.
The third angel alone said nothing,
for that was the angel of long silence.

... there's always a little joy, and even beauty / lies close at hand, beneath the bark / of every hour - beautiful. 

A short list for grief and joy and wonder

This has been a strange year. (Someone told me recently that 2012 was 'astrologically complicated'. If I believed in such things, I'd be tempted to agree.)

It's been year of love and loss and adjustment. It's been a year for being broken open (but not broken. Not broken.) And I have channelled much of that into, through, and back out of the words I write and the words I read.

A conversation with a new friend this week made me think about this harder. To articulate something - a thought, an idea, a feeling, a relationship -  is to give it a shape. Once it has a shape, it is something you can grasp. And when you can grasp it, you can do something with it. And that's where I want to be. 

The following are pieces of writing that have given shape to me over the year. They have moved me, and helped me understand things, and made me want to embrace the world more tightly. 

The first poem to sink into me and stay there was Charles Simic's The North:

The ancients knew the sorrows of exile:
If you weren't hanged, they'd pack you off
To the far ends of the Earth,
To go on grumbling, writing endless petitions
That would never reach the Emperor.
The North always the place of punishment:
Unforgiving cold, rags on your back,
And the company of a few sullen barbarians
At day's end when the wind parts the clouds
And the stars seem to be mocking.
Every few years a garbled message from home.
Memory paying a call in the wee hours:
A mother's face; the company of merry friends
At the long table in the garden;
Their wives baring their throats in the
afternoon heat…
"The sages suffered, too, exiled from truth,"
That's what you tell yourself…
Not many are meant to retrace their steps
And behold the splendors of the capital
Even more seductive than when you knew them.
The North always the place of punishment.
Deep snow. Blue-veined trees and bushes
Rising against the pink-colored morning sky…
So that briefly, in that one spell,
Your heartache hushes at the beauty of it.

(full review)

I start passing Tadeusz Rozewizc's Busy with Many Jobs on to friends. It's hard to explain why, except that it is a deft articulation of something I feel - that mortality isn't a threat, but an urge towards living:

Busy with very urgent jobs
I forgot
one also has
to die

irresponsible
I kept neglecting that duty
or performed it
perfunctorily

as from tomorrow
things will be different

I'll start dying meticulously
wisely optimistically
without wasting time

(full review)

The immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub told me that Officially the heart / is oblong, muscular, / and filled with longing. And he gave me Autumn:

And it is all over.

No more sweetpeas,
no more wide-eyed bunnies
dropping from the sky.

Only
a reddish boniness
under the sun of hoarfrost,
a thievish fog,
an insipid solution of love,
hate
and crowing.

But next year
larches will try
to make the land full of larches again
and larks will try
to make the land full of larks.

And thrushes will try
to make all the trees sing,
and goldfinches will try
to make all the grass golden,

and burying beetles
with their creaky love will try
to make all the corpses
rise from the dead,

Amen.

(full review)

Adam Zagajewski  grabbed me with Three Angels:

Suddenly three angels appeared
right here by the bakery on St. George Street.
Not another census bureau survey,
one tired man sighed.
No, the first angel said patiently,
we just wanted to see
what your lives have become,
the flavor of your days and why
your nights are marked by restlessness and fear.
That's right, fear, a lovely, dreamy-eyed
woman replied; but I know why.
The labors of the human mind have faltered.

They seek help and support
they can't find. Sir, just take a look
-- she called the angel "Sir"! --
at Wittgenstein. Our sages
and leaders are melancholy madmen
and know even less than us
ordinary people (but she wasn't
ordinary).

Then too, said one boy
who was learning to play the violin, evenings
are just an empty carton,
a casket minus mysteries,
while at dawn the cosmos seems as
parched and foreign as a TV screen.
And besides, those who love music for itself
are few and far between.

Others spoke up and their laments
surged into a swelling sonata of wrath.
If you gentlemen want to know the truth,
one tall student yelled -- he'd
just lost his mother -- we've had enough
of death and cruelty, persecution, disease,
and long spells of boredom still
as a serpent's eye. We've got too little earth
and too much fire. We don't know who we are.
We're lost in the forest, and black stars
move lazily above us as if
they were only our dream.

But still, the second angel mumbled shyly,
there's always a little joy, and even beauty
lies close at hand, beneath the bark
of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration,
and another person hides in each of us --
universal, strong, invincible.
Wild roses sometimes hold the scent
of childhood, and on holidays young girls
go out walking just as they always have,
and there's something timeless
in the way they wind their scarves.
Memory lives in the ocean, in galloping blood,
in black, burnt stones, in poems,
and in every quiet conversation.
The world is the same as it always was,
full of shadows and anticipation.

He would have gone on talking, but the crowd
was growing larger and waves
of mute rage spread
until at last the envoys rose lightly
into the air, whence, growing distant,
they gently repeated: peace be unto you,
peace to the living, the dead, the unborn.
The third angel alone said nothing,
for that was the angel of long silence.

(This slays me: there's always a little joy, and even beauty / lies close at hand, beneath the bark / of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration, / and another person hides in each of us -- universal, strong, invincible.)

(full review)

Rebecca Lindenberg's Love, An Index undid me completely. I compared my experiences with her - found myself lacking, puzzled, totally understood. From The Girl with the Ink-Stained Teeth:

knows she's famous 

in a tiny, tragic way. 

She's not 

daft, 

after all. 

(full review)

Louise Erdrich's Jacklight was a tough read - she uses beauty to lure you in then pins you down so you have to listen to her. There is a widow sequence - I try not to linger. I cannot rip my eyes off The Strange People:

All night I am the doe, breathing 
his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it 
and I have gone burning 
to meet him, the jacklight 
fills my eyes with blue fire; 
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack
in the back of his pickup,
I wipe the death scum
from my mouth, sit up laughing 
and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,
when he sharpens his knife
and thinks to have me, like that,
I come toward him,
a lean gray witch
through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house
drinking coffee till dawn
and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,
crawling back into my shadowy body.
All day, asleep in clean grasses,
I dream of the one who could really wound me.

(full review)

I almost entirely stopped reading novels or non-fiction. Poetry is the only thing that makes it through. But I have been back to C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed - searing, honest, loving, and, of all things, exquisitely erotic:

I see I've described H. as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have balanced it. I ought to have said, 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered.'

(full review)

It's not all tragic, of course. Being broken open to the world - it is miraculous, marvellous, magical, almost bewilderingly overwhelming at times. This is what Wislawa Szymborska's Allegro Ma Non Troppo captures:

Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaily,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.

I'm trying to court life's favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I'm always the first to bow,

always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.

Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren't conceived myself!

Life (I say) I've no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone's clone.

I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order – gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.

I just don't want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I've been trying
to appease you with my smile.

I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?

(full review)

Likewise, James Schuyler anchored me back into the real world, even at his most oblique:

Poem

I do not always understand what you say.
Once, when you said, across, you meant along.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

Words' meanings count, aside from what they weigh:
poetry, like music, is not just song.
I do not always understand what you say.

You would hate, when with me, to meet by day
What at night you met and did not think wrong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

I sense a heaviness in your light play,
a wish to stand out, admired, from the throng.
I do not always understand what you say.

I am as shy as you. Try as we may,
only by practice will our talks prolong.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

We talk together in a common way.
Art, like death, is brief: life and friendship long.
I do not always understand what you say.
What is, is by its nature, on display.

(full review)

And then one day, Mark Leidner comes along, a total surprise. I hunt him down. He delights me more. I start stalking him on the internet. He favourites one of my fan-girl tweets. I blush.

The River

The woman told me the saddest thing I had ever heard. I told her I loved her because of what she had told me. Her expression soured. She warned me not to love her for her telling me that. She told me it was okay, and maybe even good, to love her – only not for that. I responded that I did not love her for that, exactly, and that she had misunderstood me. I admitted that why I loved her was related to what she had told me, yes, but only tangentially, and was that alright? She asked me to elaborate, so I told her that I loved her, not for the thing she had told me, but for the courage involved in telling someone something like it, something that sad, which seemed to me to be a great deal of courage – and I told her I also loved her, though far less than for the courage part, although plenty still, for the way in which she told it to me, which I explained had been, in all seriousness, eloquent and mesmerizing. She had a small build and at that point she laughed like a flower, wilting and blooming. Her nose was in the center. I decided to show her the river. I picked her up in my hands and carried her, crisscrossing back and down through the steep and elaborate cragwork of the slope of the riverbank. When my feet were finally in the water I looked at her and said, the river is deep, and fast, and it drowns many people, but I still love it. I still love the river, I told her. But I do not love it because it is deep, and fast, and drowns many people. I love it because it runs behind my house, and I have lived above it forever.

(full review)

Another Simic poems suggests to me that living near the strained edges of experience may bring harder, stranger, more interesting things into your life than dwelling in the warm comfortable centre:

Nowhere

That's where No lives,
Happily ever after.

Its sky has no stars,
No morning or evening,
No earth under its feet.

It's happy because
It only has a word for them,
And the poor Yes
Has a place,

Has a kitchen and a window
To go along with the place,
And an onion
That makes him cry.

And it's his Ditty that I want to close with. Because it made me think, You can. You can wake up every day and put one foot in front of the other and take a deep breath, square your shoulders,  lift your face to the sky and let life in. 

Could you live in the middle of
nowhere Virginia
could you live as in the game
of tag

live as a bride of no one
the sister of algebra
could you love and remember
and remember only to forget
could you live as a dog without a master

and you do of course you do
with the river the wind and the evening star
your little insomnia their big insomnia
each night clenching your eyes hard
clenching them with a sigh

Could you live knowing nothing
of why and where and how
live as a balmy day in dead winter 
live as the kitchen radio
blaring all the sad old lyrics

and you do sweetheart you do

(full review)

On the radio

Today on Nine to Noon on National Radio (at about 11.45am, give or take a national emergency or a long-winded legal commentator) I'll be focusing just on the current Adam Art Gallery exhibition Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011. Curated by Marcus Moore, the exhibition explores the connections between the 20th century’s greatest artist and New Zealand-born and based artists working in the past 50 years. (I've written briefly about the show before.)


And a few links:

A gallery of images on the RadioNZ site

The public programme calendar 

(Lovely) gallery of (outraged!) press coverage from the 1967 Sisler Collection touring exhibition, from Christchurch Art Gallery

Catalogue from the Sisler Collection exhibition, from Auckland Art Gallery (warning, PDF)

An article by Marcus Moore, explaining how the Duchamp works came to New Zealand

Louise Erdrich's 'Jacklight'

From the occasional reviews file - Louise Erdrich's Jacklight

>>>>>>

I am slowly tuning my ear in to poetry. I no longer need regular rhythms to carry me through a piece, or bind me to it. 

But I'm still on the hunt for beauty. I can't help it. I want to be touched and moved. Beautifully. I don't want to be made uncomfortable by imagery, even as I master less familiar structures and rhythms.

Louise Erdrich unsettles me. She hints at beauty and paces out a circle around it and uses it to draw you in, and then takes it away from you, leaving something rougher and scarier in its place. She scares me.

But she scares me in such a way that I can't tear my eyes off the words. 'The Strange People' has travelled from being one of the poems I found hardest to read to being the one I have gone back to the most frequently.

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.
Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows, transcribed and edited by Frank Linderman (1932)

All night I am the doe, breathing
his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it
and I have gone burning
to meet him, the jacklight
fills my eyes with blue fire;
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack
in the back of his pickup,
I wipe the death scum
from my mouth, sit up laughing
and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,
when he sharpens his knife
and thinks to have me, like that,
I come toward him,
a lean gray witch
through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house
drinking coffee till dawn
and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,
crawling back into my shadowy body.
All day, asleep in clean grasses,
I dream of the one who could really wound me.

Not everything is frightening. Some poems strike deep and clean. This was particularly true for me in the sequence 'The Butcher's Wife', which sets the life of a widowed woman against a small Midwest town at the start of last century. The last poem in the series is 'New Vows':

The night was clean as the bone of a rabbit blown hollow.
I cast my hood of dogskin
away, and my shirt of nettles.
Ten years had been enough. I left my darkened house.

The trick was in living that death to its source.
When it happened, I wandered toward more than I was.

Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,
As if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.
I drank, without fear or desire,
this odd fire.

Now shadows move freely within me as words.
These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.
And I can’t tell you yet
how truly I belong

to the hiss and shift of wind,
these slow, variable mouths
through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

Part Chippewa Indian, Erdrich's poems in this collection often weave Ojibwa myths and legends into Western poetic forms. Another favourite work in this collection shows this, and also the strong and sinewy yet lyrical nature of these pieces - 'Night Sky':

I

Arcturus, the bear driver,
shines on the leash of hunting dogs.
Do you remember how the woman becomes a bear
because her husband has run in sadness
to the forest of stars?

She soaks the bear hide
until it softens to fit her body
She ties the skinning boards over her heart.
She goes out, digs stumps,
smashes trees to test her power,
then breaks into a dead run
and hits the sky like a truck.

We are watching the moon
when this bear woman pulls herself
arm over arm into the tree of heaven.
We she her shadow clasp the one rusted fruit.
Her thick paw swings. The world dims.
We are alone here on earth
with the ragged breath of our children
coming and going in the old wool blankets.

II

Does she ever find him?
The sky is full of pits and snagged deadfalls.
She sleeps in shelters he's made of jackpine,
eats the little black bones
of birds he's roasted in cookfires.
She even sees him once
bending to drink from his own lips
in the river of starlight.

The truth is she cannot approach him
in the torn face and fur
stinking of shit and leather.
She is a real bear now,
licking bees from her paws, plunging
her snout in anthills,
rolling mad in the sour valleys
of skunk cabbage!

III

He knows she is there,
eyeing him steadily across the hornbeam
as she used to across the table.
He asks for strength
to leave his body at the river,
to leave it cradled in its sad arms
while he wanders in oiled muscles
bear heft, shag, and acorn fat.
Her goes to her, heading
for the open,
the breaking moon.

IV

Simple
to tear free
stripped and shining
to ride through crossed firs

Web muster

NPR polls its listeners on their top 100 teen novels.

An interview with my indie games hero, Pippin Barr.

Because you should always read anything Atul Gawande writes.

Tension between an influential Canadian collectors and the director of the Vancouver Art Gallery (with the interesting suggestion: instead of one $300 million new gallery, how about 8-10 $30 million ones scattered throughout the city?).

Dan Hill on using print-on-demand publishing to produce persuasive tools (aka booklets). Only, they're much mor than booklets. You should read this. And then you should watch his 2010 National Digital Forum keynote. Because he is amazing. (You'll want to fast-forward through the first few minutes though. Trust me.)

Dan made me think things like - what if we started off planning and exhibition by writing the comments we want to see in the visitors' book, or the recording a curator's interview with a 'journalist', or writing the exhibition review. By painting a picture of the end experience, we can start planning backwards towards achieving it (if you know what I mean).

They pay brisk money for this crap?

Between Brain Pickings, FiveBooks, Melvyn Bragge's In Our Times, Slate's Culture Gabfest and Letters of Notes, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the recommendations for stuff you should be reading.

So, I say no. Mostly. At least occasionally. I often Instapaper to assuage my guilt. (Occasionally, I email links to friends to achieve the same goal.) But more and more I am coming to accept the fact that I'll never be able to read even a corner of the internet, let alone the whole thing.

And that's also why I avoid reposting stuff from these sources here. Mostly because it's pointless (why would you come here to find it?). But also because I don't want to pass that guilt forward.

However. I was so utterly charmed by this letter from Raymond Chandler to his agent about science fiction that I for once am not resisting:

6005 Camino de la Costa
 La Jolla, California 

Mar 14 1953 

Dear Swanie: Playback is getting a bit tired. I have 36,000 words of doodling and not yet a stiff. That is terrible. I am suffering from a very uncommon disease called (by me) atrophy of the inventive powers. I can write like a streak but I bore myself. That being so, I could hardly fail to bore others worse. I can't help thinking of that beautiful piece of Sid Perelman's entitled "I'm Sorry I Made Me Cry."  

Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It's a scream. It is written like this: "I checked out with K19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn't enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn't enough. He was right." 

They pay brisk money for this crap? 

Ray

[Originally posted on Letters of Note]

Ouch

From the NYT review of the new Bravo series 'Gallery Girls'

“People think that I just live off my dad, and they think I’m a brat, or whatever,” Liz complains, though really she’s just describing.

nowhere is more welcoming to arrivistes and pretenders of all stripes than the art world.

There’s also Kerri, from Long Island, who plainly admits she knows little about art, but has great bone structure, and therefore an internship with an art adviser.

Chantal, who emphasizes melody over content in her speech, every sentence sounding like a question

The New Yorker has chipped in too:

Joining the ranks of the fifties ladies lounging against sea-foam green Cadillacs on showroom floors, and leggy eighties game-show assistants, poofing their perms and purchasing vowels, are the “gallerinas,” who now find themselves spending long hours vamping in retail. The show was briefly named “Paint the Town,” which is a groan-inducing title. But at least it gave a better sense of the show’s focus. While real gallery girls may face tedium and menial tasks at their desks, Bravo’s gallery girls need galleries like the real housewives need husbands: as an entrée into and excuse for a life of shopping, cocktail-drinking, and backstabbing.

Mark Leidner's Beauty was the case that they gave me

From the occasional reviews department - Mark Leidner's Beauty was the case that they gave me.

>>>>>>>


I am crushing so hard on Mark Leidner right now that it's getting distinctly sticky. If you're of a sensitive disposition, you might like to turn away.

I came to Leidner by way of young Wellington poet Hera Lindsay Bird, who wrote about him in a post for National Poetry Day. She offered up 'The River', and I was hooked

The woman told me the saddest thing I had ever heard. I told her I loved her because of what she had told me. Her expression soured. She warned me not to love her for her telling me that. She told me it was okay, and maybe even good, to love her – only not for that. I responded that I did not love her for that, exactly, and that she had misunderstood me. I admitted that why I loved her was related to what she had told me, yes, but only tangentially, and was that alright? She asked me to elaborate, so I told her that I loved her, not for the thing she had told me, but for the courage involved in telling someone something like it, something that sad, which seemed to me to be a great deal of courage – and I told her I also loved her, though far less than for the courage part, although plenty still, for the way in which she told it to me, which I explained had been, in all seriousness, eloquent and mesmerizing. She had a small build and at that point she laughed like a flower, wilting and blooming. Her nose was in the center. I decided to show her the river. I picked her up in my hands and carried her, crisscrossing back and down through the steep and elaborate cragwork of the slope of the riverbank. When my feet were finally in the water I looked at her and said, the river is deep, and fast, and it drowns many people, but I still love it. I still love the river, I told her. But I do not love it because it is deep, and fast, and drowns many people. I love it because it runs behind my house, and I have lived above it forever.

On the strength of this and a few other pieces I read and listened to online (Leidner obviously writes to read aloud) I ordered this chapbook. 'The River' turns out to be the sweetest and saddest of the poems (how do you like 'Mutually Assured Childhood Molestation' as a title? Because it turns out I like it very much) in the collection - the least ironic, the least undercutting. I could find - in fact, if I knew more of this kind of writing, I daresay I would - find some of Leidner's acrobatics juvenile and tiresome; as it is, I'm captivated by the energy and freshness.

There's a sense of anticipation as I read, that jumps between the amused, the appalled, and the aroused - as if each line is being written out just before my eyes get to it, a gleeful tumble to keep the words and images flowing just for me ... (from 'Blackouts')

It's like cutting your hand on a piece of metal during sex. 

It's like punishment meted out at night by a giant tractor. 

It's like losing at chess to a caveman. 

It's like a caveman losing at chess to a dinosaur. 

It's like a dinosaur losing at chess to a primeval forest ... losing at chess to a primeval star. 

It's like punching your children to a tune.

I grabbed those lines from about 10% of the way into that piece. These are start anywhere, stop anywhere poems. I have read 'Romantic Comedies' numerous times online in the past few weeks, but now I have the book, where it is broken out into six or eight stanzas per page over 18 pages, I find myself reading it from the start, the end, the middle, piecing it together in new ways, lingering over lines I've come to love ('She's like get a load of this and he's like whoa'; 'He calls Nashville, laughingly, Nashvegas, but she calls Nashville, icily, Nashville'; 'He is rain and she is smoking a cigarette out on the patio'; 'She likes things one way and he like them the other'; 'They both have perfect coital timing'), being surprised by lines that seem to have been added in when I wasn't looking. (The poem is loooooooong so I'm popping it at the end of the review, if you want to read it.)

This could be annoying, if you were looking for narrative flow, but I love the pile-on effect. I love how Leidner himself seems to make fun of the neatly-ending poem, the dog-tail-flick Bill Collins referred to in 'Lines Lost Among the Trees'

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door. 

From the end of Leidner's 'Gossip'

Forgive me,
the grand finale is going to be
a final, grand simile: 

Talent is to honesty what love
is to gossip, if we are poetry.
Or is it, talent is to honesty in poetry
what gossip in poetry is to love in life?
I don’t even care. Okay, really,
this is going to be over soon. I want a million dollars,
and you, but I would take either.
But I would rather have you,
and if gossip moves through love
like money through time, I basically do. 

I am leaving, but like the leopard on the branch,
and a daunting number of other things,
you are looking at me again,
and so the poem will continue, like gossip.

It's also the doubleness that reminds me of Billy Collins here: the potential po-facedness of Collin's 'Litany' in type, for example,  versus the fondly amused tone it takes on when he reads it. Leidner could be serious, but I'm picking he's not. Unless he is. In which case, he's serious like cancer. Only he'll never let you know it. (Also, 'I am leaving, but like the leopard on the branch, / and a daunting number of other things, / you are looking at me again, / and so the poem will continue, like gossip' - that's totally the rhythm of 'You are still the bread and the knife. / You will always be the bread and the knife, / not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.')

Actually, that passage also makes me think about how self-consciously writerly Leidner is. He's not all Hey, look at me, writing this poem here. Instead, he pokes fun at his own style and, somehow, I feel, at all the earnest young boy-men wannabe lyrical poets out there, seducing wide-eyed girls with their buff words. I find this knowingness very attractive. From 'Love in the time of whatever disease this is':

time almost stops moving
as my pants magically lower 

like a Niagara Falls of Levis.
You drip like a ship of physical aristocracy 

Your undercarriage is drizzling stars
We make love like a church burning down 

in the imagination of a eunuch
then flee together out of simile into you. 

When we climax together I tell you I love you
but it comes out, "I hate language."

(You can listen to Leidner reading this poem in front of an audience, and hear him lose it over 'Niagara Falls of Levis')

Leidner is endlessly extractable. You can pluck so many of these lines and imagine them as an inscription on a tombstone or a slogan on an ironic t-shirt - or both, at the same time, a very Leidner notion. Having said that, a couple of the poems do feel like full stories:  'Pretty Girls', 'Mutually Assured Childhood Molestation'. They're simultaneously shock-statements and wry-smile love stories.

So. Overall, there's a youthfulness and a puffed-chested-ness and a joy in the fomenting fermenting bubblesome powers of language that catches on me here. Leidner doesn't rip my heart out, stomp it in, then stitch it back into my chest so I feel fresh tenderness with every beat, like some poets do. Instead, he takes me out for two bottles of wine after someone else has done that to me, and gives me 86 different ways to laugh and cry the experience off. And I love it.

>>>>

TANGENT. A SOBERING MOMENT OF SELF-DOUBT IN THE HEADY DAYS OF FIRST LOVE.

I woke up this morning, after drafting this review late-ish on a Sunday night filled with end of weekend happiness, with work-week doubts. Had I been sucked in by a stylish, stylised poet of the Twitter generation? I mean, we're talking about a guy who releases videos of animated robots reciting his poems. Whose first book was actually a collection of tweet-like aphorisms. And then, fearing I had fallen for a hipster, worried that my bubble of infatuation was about to be pricked by the pin of maturity, in the pre-dawn dark I drew Leidner's book to me again. And I re-read 'Story'. And I was reassured. Because it felt true to me. It's too long to type out here, and too carefully constructed to extract from without giving you a group of wrong impressions, like ten people in a blacked-out room, each with one hand on an elephant. But it is true, grown-up, nuanced, beautiful understanding of the power and danger of words between people who love one another.

>>>>

(And you made it to the end! As promised, here is 'Romantic Comedies')

........

ROMANTIC COMEDIES

He has a turtle and she has a shell.

She’s the principal and he’s the janitor.

She’s a widowed social worker looking for a father figure and he’s an elderly vagrant.

She’s a woman and he’s … a woman.

He’s unprincipled and she’s … principled.

Everyone in his life has drowned and he hates dogs and she’s a collegiate swimming coach with a thousand dogs.

He’s a collapsing star in the heart of the galaxy and she’s an ex-con with 5,000 spacebucks and nothing to lose.

He’s clever and she’s stupid.

He’s good-looking and she’s ugly.

She’s sort of interested in him, but he’s not sure how interested he is in her, though he is, a little bit.

He is always being ironic and she is disdainful of irony.

He’s a prosperous historian living in the present day, and she’s a historian struggling to make ends meet … from the future.

She’s a Nereid and he’s a Dryad.

She’s a sassy black oncologist and he’s a racist with prostate cancer.

She’s a plucky explorer of catacombs with a lust for adventure and smoldering good-looks, but he’s the quiet type, content to stay at home, reading about the exploration of catacombs only in books.

He’s moneyed and she’s a bitch.

He’s squeamish around blood but she is courteous around blood.

He’s a Muslim terrorist and she’s a normal Muslim.

He blew up the World Trade Center and she blew up when she heard he blew up the World Trade Center.

She’s a singer/songwriter but he’s just a songwriter/gay.

They’re both gay.

He’s a foot fetishist and she’s an amputee.

She’s a world-renowned gourmet cook and he’s a world-renowned fast-food restaurant mogul.

He’s a highly sought-after model caught up in the spree of drugs and sex that is the Berlin fashion scene, and she died in a car wreck six years ago in Zurich.

It’s midnight on the mesa, a dry breeze rustles across the colorless sand, and high atop a wind-chiseled monolith, they are two black cobras, drenched in silver moonlight, coiling in a furious act of forbidden cobra love.

She likes things one way and he likes them the other.

He’s hungry and doesn’t care where they eat, and she keeps saying she doesn’t care either, but every restaurant he offers up, she shoots down.

She likes monogamy but he likes sleeping around.

He’s bored but she keeps talking.

They’re both vegetarians but are both picky eaters and it’s almost enough to drive each other crazy.

They’re both the same.

They’re exactly the same person.

They’re in love.

They’re both in love … with murder.

She’s a pacifist and he’s a warmonger … until the tables turn and she becomes the warmonger and he the pacifist … though during the turning, on vectors bound for where the other just left, as they pass each other in the middle, like passengers on opposite trains, they see each other and reach out into the void, and for a few brief seconds, before their forward inertia pulls them irrevocably apart, they simultaneously occupy a single position.

He is the ocean and she is the sea.

He knows where a rare ore is and she knows metallurgy.

He said a curse word when he was in space, and she was at mission control and overheard him and reported him to his superiors, after which he was not to be allowed back into space.

He’s trying to solve the Middle East conflict, but she keeps stirring up trouble in the Middle East.

He’s on an important fact-finding mission for the U.N. and she shits facts.

They are the only two deer in the world who can walk upright on their hind legs and speak proper English in British accents, and their favorite activity is debating the superiority of Copernican models of the solar system over the alternate models.

She is a t-shirt full of eggs and he is an egg accidentally blown out of a lake by a strong wind.

He is expanding and she is shrinking.

It is her second day at Ruby Tuesday’s and he has worked there for five years.

He lied to her and she splattered paint all over his car except she made the paint the exact same color as his car to express the complexity of her anger but he didn’t get it.

She is naturally thin and he has to work at it.

She is involuntarily drawn into the story of every house she passes in her car, and he is unable to drive a car because of his leg.

She’s a pale-skinned aesthete who edits a webzine, and he’s a suntanned meathead completely perplexed by the masthead.

She’s his best friend and he’s sick of jerking off each night into the toilet.

He has a piece of turkey stuck between his teeth and she’s got a full Thanksgiving turkey stuck between her knees.

She is uncomfortable and he is fingering her.

She finally trusts him and he finally thrusts himself into her.

He’s thrashing around in a bathtub and she’s a flash flood happening somewhere far away.

He gouged out Christy Schumacher’s face in the yearbook and she is Christy Schumacher.

She’s the first female matador in Spain and he’s the first male bull impersonator willing to take male bull impersonating all the way … to its logical … and gruesome … conclusion.

He’s a carpenter and she’s a virgin.

He has a ponytail and she has no education.

He is widespread poverty, sweeping corruption, and violence institutionalized to a degree unseen elsewhere in the western world, and she is a tiny Latin American nation.

He is the farmscape at sunset and she is the silhouette of the barn, the windmill, and the silo.

She thinks she might be falling for him, but she is cautious because of how badly her last relationship ended, and he is okay with taking things slow because he is patient and cunning.

They both have perfect coital timing.

He is dangling her off a bridge and asking her what bridge it is and she is pleading for her life and screaming the Golden Gate Bridge.

His gaze carries calcium on it like a one-way conveyor belt that deposits massive doses of calcium into whatever he looks at, and she has a calcium deficiency once thought incurable by experts in the field of calcium.

His resemblance to her ex is superficial, but her resemblance to his ex is profound.

She was only joking when she touched her behind and made a sizzling sound, but he was the one who had to drive her to the emergency room to treat the third degree burn on the end of her finger.

He is the rain and she is smoking a cigarette on the patio.

He has always been ashamed of his membership in the militia, and he has always hated everything they stood for, but he has always been in love with her, and she never even gave him the time of day … until he joined.

He is Norway but she is holding out for infinite fjords.

He calls Nashville, laughingly, Nashvegas, but she calls Nashville, icily, Nashville.

She has just excitedly asked him to the annual charity dinner, and he has accepted, albeit reluctantly, anticipating yet another tedious masquerade of bourgeoisie apotheosis.

She thinks swoon is a funnier word than mulligan, and he thinks swoon is a funny word too, but no way in hell is it funnier than mulligan.

She’s a streetwise kangaroo in the last days of the crumbling republic, smuggling food and medicine out of the city, distributing it out of her pouch to the poor, and he’s a power-hungry possum prelate, who secretly convenes a midnight session of the senate, and with pledges of infinite eucalyptus tricks an influential coalition of koalas into illegally declaring marsupial law.

She’s like get a load of this and he’s like whoa.

She’s a lonely air traffic controller and his name is Eric Trafalgar and completely he’s out of control.

She’s a disorienting aroma and he’s a bee crashing into a mirror.

He’s a man running up a hill while morphing into a snowball and she’s a snowball rolling down a hill and morphing into a running woman.

Her very existence depends upon the capability of mimetic art, and he doesn’t even know what mimesis is.

He stabs her in the heart with an icicle, but when the icicle melts she resurrects.

He’s looking out across the fan-packed arena through a pair of high-powered binoculars, and she’s on the other side, pointing at him with one of those big foam fingers.

He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she has a map to the last known location of the Holy Grail.

He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she has a cousin who supposedly knows a guy who says he knows where the Holy Grail is.

He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she has little Holy Grail shaped pupils.

He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she’s a trapped cricket too small to leap out of the bottom of the Holy Grail.

He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she’s standing in front of the Holy Grail, smiling up at him impishly, as behind her the Holy Grail imbues the fringes of her body and face with soft gold light.

He’s searching for the Holy Grail and she just swallowed the Holy Grail whole.

She’s the Holy Grail but he’s searching for Atlantis.

He’s radiation and she’s a Geiger counter registering the current level of him in the surrounding rubble.

A fortune teller long ago warned him he would die in Egypt, and she walks like an Egyptian.

He is several flames and she’s a candelabra.