Modern Kicks

good call, horace

To a Jar of Massic Wine

Corvinus has called for a mellower wine, therefore,
O virtuous jar, born the same year as I,
In the consulship of Manlius, appear,
Descend, bring forth whatever there may be,

Laughter, or quarrelsomeness, sleepiness, or the complaints
Of dejected lovers, whatever it happens to be
The grapes were gathered for to make this Massic,
Mature to be just right for some special occasion.

Soaked in serious studies though he be,
Corvinus is not averse to the pleasure of wine.
Old Cato the stern and righteous, it's said, was accustomed
To use this pleasant means to warm himself up.

Your gentle discipline encourages
The dull to be less dull than usual,
And Bacchus, joyful Deliverer, reveals
What the sober wise man really meant to say.

You bring back hope to the despairing heart
And you give courage to the poor man, so
He's neither scared of tyrants in their crowns
Nor soldiers brandishing their scary weapons.

Bacchus attends thee, and Venus, if she's willing,
And torchlight, and the Graces dancing together,
Until the moment the returning sun
Puts all the stars to flight, and the party's over.

--Horace

a conceit comprehensible to fewer each year

Lines & Circularities

on hearing Casals’ recording of Bach’s Sixth Suite

Deep in a time that cannot come again
Bach thought it through, this lonely and immense
Reflexion wherein our sorrows learn to dance.
And deep in a time that cannot come again
Casals recorded it. Playing it back,
And bending now over the instrument,
I watch the circling stillness of the disc,
The tracking inward of the tonearm, enact
A mystery wherein the music shares:
How time, that comes and goes and vanishes,
Never to come again, can come again.

How many silly miracles there are
That will not save us, neither will they save
The world, and yet they are miraculous:
The tonearm following the spiral path
While moving inward on a shallow arc,
Making the music that companions it
Through winding ways to silence at the close;
The delicate needle that navigates these canyons
By contact with the edges, not the floor;
Black plastic that has memorized and kept
In its small striations whatever it was told
By the master’s mind and hand and bow and box,
Making such definite shudderings in the air
That Bach’s intent rises from the tomb . . .
The Earth, that spins around upon herself
In the simple composition of Light and Dark,
And varying her distance on the Sun
Makes up the Seasons and the Years, and Time
Itself, whereof the angels make record;
The Sun, swinging his several satellites
Around himself and slowly round the vast
Galactic rim and out to the unknown
Past Vega at the apex of his path;
And all this in the inward of the mind,
Where the great cantor sings his songs to God . . .

The music dances to its inner edge
And stops. The tonearm lifts and cocks its head
An instant, as if listening for something
That is no longer there but might be; then
Returns to rest, as with a definite click
The whole strange business turns itself off.

--Howard Nemerov

no inner resources

God, please, will someone give me something to write about?  I'm dying out here, day after day of nothing interesting and nothing seen.  Wait, that reminds me of . . . Jerry Saltz's recent article in Artnet about Rirkrit Tiravanija and a rehash of relational aesthetics in New York.  A generous excerpt:

For Rirkrit Tiravanija, art is what you eat. This Thai born, New York-Chang Mai-and-Berlin based artist became famous, starting in 1992, when he made "Untitled 1992 (Free)." This sculptural-performance consisted of Tiravanija (pronounced Tea-rah-vah-nit) removing all the contents of the office of the 303 Gallery on Greene Street in SoHo -- including its intrepid dealer, Lisa Spellman -- and setting up a makeshift kitchen complete with a refrigerator, pots, hot plates, rice steamers, folding tables and stools. He then cooked Thai curry; anyone who happened by could serve themselves, sit down and eat. For free.

Back then it was disconcerting and thrilling to be this casual in an art gallery, to go from being a passive viewer to an active participant, and doing it all for free. With this simple, almost metaphysical gesture, Tiravanija transformed the transaction of being in a gallery as viewers came to realize that the art was in them, not just because they ate it, but because all the relations they had there were theirs. In this very tangible, immediate way, Tiravanija seemed to bridge a mind-body gap that often exists in Western art; he was a medicine man artist who literalized art’s primitive functions as sustenance, healing and communion.

Tiravanija subsequently repeated this cooking-as-art sculpture all over the world. So much that by the late 1990s he was in danger of branding himself as the happy Thai guy who cooks. This obscured the latent identity-politics prickliness in his work. Often, Tiravanija prepares food the first day of an event then substitutes a Thai cook thereafter. All this is not only reminiscent of the cagy ways Andy Warhol sent surrogates to give lectures for him and let himself be thought of as a village idiot, the disordered highly social situations Tiravanija sets up also mimic Warhol’s Factory in that they provide unstable, clubby environments where people can act out, and every kind of behavior is sanctioned.

Far be it from me to harsh on free food.  And I haven't seen the exhibition, or anything by Tiravanija.  But this strikes me as less "disconcerting and thrilling" than really dull, the acting out of ideas that weren't new when John Cage explored them decades ago.  At least Robert Rauschenberg had the decency to "act in the gap between life and art" rather than just give us the former.  Saltz's comparison to Warhol doesn't in my mind complicate matters in the way he thinks it does; there's a great difference between hoaxing the rubes by sending an impostor and having a real cook serve gallery visitors.  While at some point in time, generally adolescence, everyone needs an environment to "act out," one would hope that Saltz would be more clear minded than to gush over one in which "every kind of behavior is sanctioned"--if he, or the artist, meant that seriously, which I suspect they do not.

But all that gets away from the main point, which is, to borrow from John Berryman, that "Life, friends, is boring."  We must not say so, of course, now more than ever apparently, but it remains true: add some art to it if you want me to care.  Serving up trivialities as epiphanies doesn't impress.  W.  J. T. Mitchell, I think in an essay in this volume, tried to turn Berryman to his own purposes by declaring that "Landscape, friends, is boring."  Quite apart from the fact that Mitchell didn't seem to notice that Berryman's poem immediately turned to landscape imagery, undermining his appropriation, landscapes could not possibly be any duller than some dude cooking rice.  Of course, Berryman wrote that literature and art bored, too, but he had problems.  Anyway, the more I read Saltz's article, the more unintentional comedy I see; maybe I was wrong--the artworld has humor after all, just not on purpose.

rat bastard

"The poet is the weak criminal whose confession implicates the others."

--Howard Nemerov

it makes us weep a bit for gratitude

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

--Philip Larkin

how to hold the axe to make its handle

To Lu Chi

(author of the Wen Fu, or Prose Poem
on the Art of Letters, A.D. 302)

Old sir, I think of you in this tardy spring,
Think of you for, maybe, no better reason
Than that the apple branches in the orchard
Bear snow, not blossoms, and that this somehow
Seems oddly Chinese.  I too, when I walk
Around the orchard, pretending to be a poet
Walking around the orchard, feel Chinese,
A silken figure on a silken screen
Who tries out with his eye the apple branches,
The last year’s shriveled apples capped with snow,
The hungry birds.  And then I think of you.

american idol

To Whistler, American 

On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery.

You also, our first great,
Had tried all ways;
Tested and pried and worked in many fashions,
And this much gives me heart to play the game.

Here is a part that's slight, and part gone wrong,
And much of little moment, and some few
Perfect as Dürer!

"In the Studio" and these two portraits, if I had my choice!
And then these sketches in the mood of Greece?

You had your searches, your uncertainties,
And this is good to know—for us, I mean,
Who bear the brunt of our America
And try to wrench her impulse into art.

You were not always sure, not always set
To hiding night or tuning "symphonies";
Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried
And stretched and tampered with the media.

You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts
Show us there's chance at least of winning through.

--Ezra Pound

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