(for C.B and A, true soul-mates)
Sustenance, or Poetry & Survival
What a party!
“Fetes and fireworks!”
Younger than Springtime
we must keep marching…
“Yes, indeed. Thanks. You, too!”
What song is next, mommy?
Cup-cakes or cakes-in-cups?
Whitman / Dickinson
As far as the east is from the west…
A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism.
The Figure Five.
Brodsky. And Sontag. In Venice
Poetry and Exile.
BACH / DSCH
“crossing over” vs. “starting over”
Fantasies. Delusions. Attachments.
Justice is in the soul…the grand natural lawyer
I am satisfied…I see, I dance, I laugh, I sing
I am the poet of the body / & I am the poet of the soul.
I am large…I contain multitudes.
(from Walt Whitman, Selected poems 1855-1892,
A New Edition. Gary Schmigdall, ed. St Martins, 1999).
****************
On Madness. Part 6. (or Poetry & Survival, part II)
for C.B.
Foucault: History of Madness
Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie et l’age classique
The importance of distinctions.
The absolute insistence on them, in certain cases.
The importance of reading “other” literature / Outside one's “normal” cultural experience.
The Importance of Being Earnest.
the Picture of Dorian Gray.
De profundis.
The Serbian poet Ivan Lalic (1931-1996)
Before the earth’s double breast stops / Divided by the knife of memory –
like a ripe fruit (from “the roll call of mirrors”)
Art and madness. In Bosch, for example.
Disturbing. Unsettling. Visionary.
“I am afoot in my vision”
Whitman’s mad, ecstatic manifestos.
Opera’s greatest mad scene?
1. Lucia
2. Ophelie
3. (Does Salomé count?!)
And for a male character:
1. Peter Grimes
1B. Boris Godunov
3. Tom Rakewell
3B. Nabucco
Attila’s nightmare scene in Verdi’s early masterpiece of historic fantasy cum verisimilitude.
The Madwoman in the Attic.
Dickinson & Whitman as contemporaries.
Shostakovich’s sardonic, demonic, wickedly-delightful scherzos!
Dances of Death.
Poetry / Duende
Open this evening like a letter
I’m hidden in the handwriting
Like a shadow in the still leaves of a cherry tree,
Or like noon in our blood.
(from The Horse Has Six Legs, An anthology of Serbian Poetry. C. Simic, ed. 2010).
Lorca would affirm that Lalic is possessed of the duende.
Great is justice; Justice is not settled by legislators and laws…it is in the soul.
Can I get a Dead Poets Society “Yawp!” for Uncle Walt!?!
The mad ecstasy of “Calamus 5”:
States! / Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on paper? Or by arms? / Away!
Shostakovich’s thumbing his nose (wordlessly) in his mercurial & witty, if not crazed 9th. And Bernstein’s inspired & manic conducting of it.
The Enchanted Isle, the MET’s premiere Baroque pasticcio.
Pastiche. The art of which is central to creative choral music programming.
A distinction underappreciated in the wider musical world
(Like the art of professional choral music in general).
the naivety of our positivism believed that it could recognize the nature of all madness (Foucault).
Like wild animals. Beasts. Berserkers.
Frenzied. Ecstatic. Possessed. Inspired. Proleptic. Peripatetic. Crazed.
(Analogs to / for madness, obviously).
I can only take Foucault’s Madness in small doses, man.
Like Proust. James (Henry, that is). Thoreau, even.
Yeats was crazy. Like psychic occult new-age weird
Camille Paglia considers his “Leda and the Swann” the “greatest poem of the twentieth century” (in Break, Blow Burn. Vintage, 2006).
Of "The Second Coming" she is laudatory & penetrating. Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future. Prophetic. As the poem itself has proven to be.
We who are poets & artists…live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes
Yeats himself said.
Illumination is sporadic, partial, and costly. Paglia again, incisively so.
Sheer folly. Madness!
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