Only Connect, the leitmotif of E.M. Forster's novel, Howards End, could be the theme of everything I write. My last post, on the poet Anne Carson, ended with that epigram. Carson the classicist often refers to Greek subjects, which have been in the front of my consciousness for several weeks now. And I haven't even seen the new Clash of the Titans movie.
The present arc began with a "review" of Jose Saramago's Death with Interruptions (in March), and continued with a ranging essay from Auden to Tippett (see below). Writing about Auden and his British colleagues' adaptations of Homer and the classics piqued my curiosity and renewed an interest in spending time with these fantastic tales.
Another subject to which I've returned often the past several months has been the career of the recently deceased tenor, Philip Langridge. My tribute to his artistry is below the essays just mentioned. One of the most remarkable facets of his career was the fact that he--like Placido Domingo--created new operatic roles into his late 60's (his last staged performance was this past January at the MET, after turning 70). One of the most engaging of these new creations is another modern adaptation of an ancient Greek tale.
Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur premiered at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden in 2008 (Langridge was 68). Birtwistle's music is difficult, uncompromising, and can be abrasive. He is one of those composers whose music I have wanted to like more than I actually do. I bought the DVD of the Royal Opera house production, and had to change my plans for the evening after I started watching it. I could not budge from my seat, I was so enthralled. And as with much difficult/complex/unfamiliar art, attention fosters understanding, thus my appreciation of Birtwistle's brilliant and challenging score has deepened upon repeated viewings. The production was directed by Langridge's son, Stephen, and features the stentorian bass, John Tomlinson, in the title role. One of my colleagues and friends from my last gig in the UK, Becky Bottone, was featured in the supporting role of one of the Minotaur's victims, the first "Innocent." As opera makes a belated entry into the world of modern theatre, videos like this one carry notices such as "Warning: contains scenes of violence and of a sexual nature." Suffice it to say the Minotaur, half-man, half-beast, is one messed-up creature. It is remarkable how Birtwistle humanizes this character so that we cringe when Theseus winds his way through the Labyrinth and kills him/it.
"Language born out of primitive sound" is one of the descriptions of Birtwistle's operatic style. Within a tightly argued score, a scintillating palette of color emerges. Ariadne--the sole female lead--is accompanied by a hauntingly evocative alto saxophone. The first of the Minotaur's victims is a high coloratura soprano, who's birdsong-like trills are cut short by the Minotaur's beastly grunting. In Tippett's King Priam, Achilles' has a not dissimilar "war cry:" a wordless and animalistic cadenza, as his blood-lust is aroused after the death of Patroclus.
The death of Patroclus gives Louise Glück's book of poetry, The Triumph of Achilles, (Ecco, 1985) its name. In language as crisp and delineated as Birtwistle's music, she recalls the tale:
In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Good poetry has a knack for imparting insight. Such verse illuminates the proverbial lessons (obvious or obscure) of life in ways prosaic speech simply cannot. Glück continues with one such observation:
...though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.
Is the poet talking about the Greek myth, a contemporary situation, and/or a personal relationship? Though the "confessional" style of poetry that came into vogue in the 60's (with Robert Lowell as commander-in-chief, spilling the guts of his failed marriage in verse) still lingers, that voice is all but mute in the spare world of poets like Louise Glück (and the present poet laureate, Kay Ryan).
That does not mean, however, these poets are immune from that openness, that, even if for only a moment, phrase or line, allows the reader a glimpse inside. Her bittersweet tribute to the greek hero ends with that double-edged sword of hard truth and human beauty poetry evokes with perfect pitch:
In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.
The Triumph of the Achilles was the National Book Critics Circle award winner for Poetry in 1985. Almost 25 years later, another uncompromising collection of work rooted in the classics was a National Book Award Finalist. Carl Phillips' Speak Low (Farrar, Straus, Griroux, 2009) is another modern take on the Greek myths. Like Anne Carson, Phillips is a classicist and scholar. Phillips' unique voice is also shaped by sexuality, race and religion. References to Homer and Virgil keep company with jazz standards, reflected through a prism of rigorous intellect and explicit sensuality.
Also like Carson, Phillips is a poet whose book jacket descriptions can be trusted. "Moving effortlessly from the body as a site of conquest to the human history of power, Speak Low weighs the human cost of ambition, desire, and risk."
I just picked up the book on a lunch break yesterday, but as with Birtwistle's opera, am enthralled by Phillips' tonal language and his original voice (this is the 9th of his 10 poetry collections in my library).
Just as Glück's Triumph of Achilles is a double-edged sword of irony, so too is Phillips reference to Achilles' grief at the death of Patroclus. "Happiness" opens with this anecdote:
The tears of Achilles were nothing compared
to the ones his horses famously wept at the death
of Patroclus, whom Achilles had loved.
Phillips humanizes the animals--but from the reverse perspective of Birtwistle's Minotaur--and in his typically rhetorical way, leaves questions unanswered. The poem continues:
Immortal,
and yet earthbound, hovering around their disbelief,
around their instinct not to believe--
He lingers on this image of the "hovering," disbelieving steeds, and comes to the conclusion that "they wept,/I think, not for the fact of death, not out of their inability/to make, from fact, some understanding, but because/they wept."
I enjoy Phillips most when he makes out of familiar language new shapes, inviting the reader to linger over a surface detail while a deeper meaning awaits discovery. He has a gift for finding an image that resonates on multiple levels simultaneously: like a chord that for the first time in a score brings together contrasting sections of the orchestra to create a hitherto unheard sonority.
Take the following sentence, and listen to the diction while absorbing the content and the image. It refers to another Greek myth, and is uncannily close to Birtwistle, entitled "The Centaur:"
And reason, that had once had over lust an effect
like rinsing,
now canceled it out.
Besides his individuated voice, Phillips' imaginative use of language makes his poetry a landscape of discovery. We might have expected the effect of "reason" on "lust" to be "cleansing," but "rinsing" is both stronger--it's less expected--and more evocative (it's ambiguous). The title poem refers to the Kurt Weill standard popularized by, among others, Billie Holiday. Here is another perfectly tuned stanza, in the middle of a poem ostensibly "about" the play of light on water stirred by the wind:
The light seemed
fugitive, a restiveness, the less-than-clear distance between
everything we know we should do, and all the rest--all
the rest that we do. Stirring, as the wind stirred it, the water
was water--was a form of clarity itself, a window we've
no sooner looked through than we've abandoned it for what
lies past that: a view...
Phillips, again like Carson, is gifted at shifting tone to move from historical reference to contemporary question. In another direct tribute to Homer, he refers to the famous exchange between Achilles and King Priam (so beautifully evoked in Tippett's second opera, about which I wrote earlier....only connect, only connect...).
This is from "Late Empire:"
the Greeks described fate as a thing of substance, weighable
on a set of scales, pourable into steep urns--one for happiness,
another for woe--
He describes how Zeus tipped the scales accordingly "which is only a way of/understanding fate, not a form of acceptance,/ nor a road to get there...There's a kind of fragility/that confounds appearances, where what little strength/that the body has left to it, though almost none at all, seems/inexhaustible."
Great writing like this is inexhaustible in its ability to speak, to sing, to evoke, and when necessary, provoke. I don't know whether or not Anne Carson and Carl Phillips are friends, but I'd love to listen to them riff on these themes. Another one of his poems refers to a writer close to Carson's heart, Simone Weil. "Living Together" is one of those poems where the specificity of the subject doesn't matter. As in Glück's poem above, whether the situation is personal or historical, the truth resonates. And in good poetry such as this, it causes even more of the overtones to vibrate sympathetically.
Here, an image from the natural world bends into a lesson on rhetoric, ethics, and among other applications, philosophy.
A finch settles
on a tiger lily like an intended kindness beneath
which the stem bends slightly, not so much
receiving as accommodating the new weight,
the way truth accommodates distortion, and can
still seem true.
"Not so much receiving as accommodating" is another typical Phillips-ian turn of phrase that contains much more than what appears on the surface. Unpacking a line like this reveals how much impact it has, as we sit with "the way truth accommodates distortion, and can/still seem true." This sets up the weighted reference to Simone Weil (from one of her essays on Homer's Iliad) which follows:
I keep thinking about force--its
dehumanizing effect, both on the victim
and on the one who wields it.
Theseus and the Minotaur could weigh in on the topic, as could Achilles and Priam. Auden's ironic observation that "poetry makes nothing happen" is but one curve in the spiral that will circle as long as we do.
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