Modern Kicks

ain't much changed

The Most Expensive Picture in the World

We stand in line all morning long to see it,
And finally when we do come face to face
With the seamy canvas and its crackling glaze,
Where the figures hover and glow from a black smoke
Of dried and crusted oils, we are impressed—
How could we fail to be impressed? and yet
With a distinct sense of something’s having failed.
The most expensive picture in the world?
Either we are edified by that, or else
Not edified at all; though someone says,
Just as we leave, a rather thoughtful thing
That might have saved the day if saying could:
“It is the most expensive picture, yes,
                 But only in the world.”

--Howard Nemerov

a gift in return

"For many of us who were educated under the old curriculum of Great Books and Masterpieces of English Literature, who spent a semester on the Metaphysical Poets, another on the Romantics, a semester on Milton, and another on Spenser, Richard Wilbur is the greatest living English-language poet. Wilbur is our Donne, our Milton. As postmodern buildings pay homage to architectural styles of the past, Wilbur’s poetry pays homage to the great poets of the past, and we, his readers, take a kind of generational pride in seeing how he recalls and measures up to them. He was schooled in their verse and uses poetry to the same ends they did, conceiving his function as a public one and offering language that delights and instructs—though it doesn’t instruct by preaching but by clarification. Wilbur never harangues or bullies. He always seems graciously to assume we will understand him. He doesn’t try to impress or ask us to admire him. Other poets force us to observe their ambition, to note how style changes or themes evolve, to attend to their careers. Wilbur offers poem after poem, discrete pleasures. The shape of his career is of little interest. In a sense he has had no “career,” has merely produced a body of work of singular, self-effacing consistency and absence of unseemly over-reaching. The unchanging devotion to form, clarity, and brevity relieve us of much. We like—or do not like—the poems. If we like them, we rejoice whenever another is given us. They are gifts."

From Phyllis Rose's September 2005 article on Richard Wilbur's Collected Poems, 1943-2004.  I don't think I've read a lovelier appreciation since I last looked at Momigliano's words on Herodotus.

"There used to be gods in everything, and now they’ve gone."

Advice to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

--Richard Wilbur

assimilation

Poseidonians

"[We behave like] the Poseidonians in the Tyrrhenian Gulf, who although of Greek origin, became barbarized as Tyrrhenians or Romans and changed their speech and the custons of their ancestors.  But they observe one Greek festival even to this day; during this they gather together and call up from memory their ancient names and customs, and then, lamenting loudly to each and weeping, they go away."

Athenaios, Deipnosophistai, Book 14, 31A (632)

The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival's end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remebered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.

--C. P. Cavafy

UPDATE: Meant to write more about this but then didn't.  So let me just say: inspired by.  

back and forward

What little time I had today to devote here went to the comments, where I did my best to push my Renoir case to the sceptics.  Good times, and further thoughts are welcome; thanks to both Bunny and Dan for joining in.

My earlier plan had been to second the Exhibitionist's advice and urge everyone to read Charles Giuliano's review of the 2006 DeCordova Annual Exhibition, as well as the Globe's.  So now I have.  I won't get a chance to visit there for a least a couple of weeks, so nothing more from on it now.  OK, one thing: without getting too much into specifics, from what I have seen online of the artist included, several of them have a more pronounced New York feel to their work.  Or perhaps not New York so much as my rather hazy idea of what gets shown in some galleries there.  It's just a thought, and not much of one, so I'll see how I feel after viewing the show.

In any event, writing my most recent comment on the Renoir post below, I was reminded of one of my favorite poems, posted here long ago and discussed as well.  It seemed rather apt, and here it is.  As a thought for the evening, here's part of what I had to say when writing about it a few weeks later:

. . .It’s here that I’m always reminded of the Nemerov poem I posted, “In Memory of the Master Poet Robert Browning.”  The poem has two stanzas of characteristically blank verse, the first a long, loving single question, the second its terse reply.  The poem asks about our relationship to the history and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mixing reverence with salty descriptions (“the stuffed shirts in the stalls”, “Rhine Maidens with their swimming tits / Behind the scrim”) in Nemerov’s typically learned but determinedly unpretentious manner.  The varied allusions combined with the frequent caesurae create both a sense of wry affection for the subjects (Verdi’s “Violetta, croce e delizia, / coughing her love away”) and a build toward the question’s plaintive climax: “now how could that have changed / And gone beyond our caring and our care?”

The superb last stanza answers, witty and sad:

When things are over that’s what they are, over.
Master, I too feel chilly and grown old.
Like Ike said, he that conquered Europe, things
Are more like they are now than they ever were before.

The finality of the sentiment strikes in the first line, almost all monosyllables with a single stark iamb alone after the caesura.  The second line comes close to repeating the same pattern in reverse. These two lines slam the door shut on the world evoked in the previous stanza.  What’s left?  A turn to Eisenhower, the gray eminence of conformity, called by the bland and genial colloquial, for wisdom – but then one is reminded by the archaic formality of the next phrase who, in history, Eisenhower was, his place along side the giants evoked previously.  With this reversed telescope, one feels the drumbeat of the simple concluding words expressing not, or not only, a Yogi Berra-like absurdity, but the condition of the time – the condition of modernism . . .

blue screen

Epitaph

Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses,
the authoress of verse. Eternal rest
was granted her by earth, although the corpse
had failed to join the avant-garde, of course.
The plain grave? There's poetic justice in it,
this ditty-dirge, the owl, the meek cornflower.
Passerby, take your PC out, press "POWER",
think on Szymborska's fate for half a minute.

--Wislawa Szymborska

a sing to shay

A busy work schedule and some misfired weekend plans have meant that I haven't gotten up to the MFA to see their new exhibits (the Cubism show, as well as Degas to Picasso, and, new this weekend, the David Hockney portraits), nor anywhere else, for that matter.  I hope to change that soon.  I will say that Charles Giuliano's review of the D2P installation of modern works from the collection calls it pretty much as I have expected it would be:

It is director Malcolm Rogers attempt to get some street cred in the field of modern art. Many of the works by minor modern masters haven’t seen the light of day for decades, if ever. Seen as a whole, these tandem exhibitions attempt to overwhelm visitors in their sheer numbers and command of wall space. There are some 280 plus works on view in the Degas to Picasso show. But, truth be told, other than the occasional painting, some of which are just terrific and a lot more not, this is a show of mostly prints, drawings and photographs; an area in which the museum’s curators collected intelligently and aggressively.

There's much more on the history of Boston collecting there, so check it out.

Giuliano also has a new column up at his own website on the recently concluded CAA conference.  Highlights include discussion of sessions on the Pollock Matters situation and art critics and criticism within CAA and other artworld institutions.  Lots of interest there for those who skipped the meeting and are even quite skeptical about it.  For my part, as I had no thought of going (though the joy of AAM looms on the horizon), John Berryman's great, drunken mockery  goes to show that nothing ever changes, over time or across disciplines.

Dream Song 35: MLA

Hey, out there!—assistant professors, full,
associates,—instructors—others—any—
I have a sing to shay.
We are assembled here in the capital
city for Dull—and one professor's wife is Mary—
at Christmastide, hey!

and all of you did theses or are doing
and the moral history of what we were up to
thrives in Sir Wilson's hands—
who I don't see here—only deals go screwing
some of you out, some up—the chairmen too
are nervous, little friends—

a chairman's not a chairman, son, forever,
and hurts with his appointments; ha, but circle—
take my word for it—
though maybe Frost is dying—around Mary;
forget your footnotes on the old gentleman;
dance around Mary.

--John Berryman

istanbul (not constantinople)

Theophilos Palaiologos

This is the last year, this the last
of the Greek emperors. And, alas,
how sadly those around him talk.
Kyr Theophilos Palaiologos
in his grief, in his despair, says:
"I would rather die than live."

Ah, Kyr Theophilos Palaiologos,
how much of the pathos, the yearning of our race,
how much weariness
(such exhaustion from injustice and persecution)
your six tragic words contained.

--Constantine Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

a glorious thing

The First Step

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritos:
“I have been writing for two years now
and I have composed just one idyll.
It’s my only completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry
is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I now stand on
I will never climb any higher.”
Theocritos replied: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done is a glorious thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it is a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done already is a glorious thing.”

--C.P. Cavafy
--Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

stop. listen.

The Gods Abandon Anthony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive -- don't mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen -- your final delectation -- to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

--C.P. Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard