Larkin? Transcendent?

I guess I’m still in the “Painters and Poets” mode, but I just had to find a picture to fit Larkin. It sure took a while…but this picture finally seemed to fit. That one eye—not happy, not sad—just watching, observing, absorbing the outer world from within. Shadows of dim neutrality dominate the picture in somber blues and dismal grays. There is not a ripple in the water (no dreaded emotion or sentimentality) and the submerged body is alone, hidden (commitment? Hell, no!)
…But that’s not quite right either. There does not seem to be a word or phrase to describe Larkin. Heaney calls him the “transcendent anti-romantic.” I have to admit that is probably a fairly apt description, but “transcendent” seems too bright, too strong, too transformational for Larkin. The same would apply to “anti-romantic” too. Larkin seems to be too full of yearning to warrant the label “anti-romantic”…and too full of doubt and loss to warrant “transcendence.” And yet, there is a small sliver of light lurking in his reality. And then again, there is enough reality in his relationships to darken any romance. Go figure. His work is so full of complexities, irony, and cynicism that sometimes it takes a second or third reading to wrap a rope around the meaning. The thing about Larkin, though, is that you don’t mind having to re-read his work. He is just so damn in control of language that what he says is almost secondary to how he says it.
He can be profound or hysterically funny with equal skill. Larkin conveys such a haunting, distanced loneliness in “Here,” where “silence stands like heat” and “leaves unnoticed thicken,” “neglected waters quicken” in this “unfenced existence.” We are “swerving” right along with the speaker on this road “to solitude” passing the “tattoo shops” and “grim head-scarved wives.” Then from this same poet we get, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you” (This Be the Verse). He then deftly solves the dysfunctional family dilemma—something psychiatrists have been working on forever. Get the hell out as fast as you can “And don’t have any kids yourself.” This man swerves through the English language dishing out loss and laughter with uncanny adroitness.
I don’t think I can really choose between “dark, witty” and “yearning” because I am drawn to his use of language. I love “Get stewed: / Books are a load of crap” after life interferes with the fantasies derived from them in “A Study of Reading Habits.” I love how he tries to convey reverence with his irreverence in “Church Going” with the “brass and stuff / Up at the holy end,” where he donates a worthless “Irish sixpence” in the place where he “always end[s] much at a loss like this.” Despite all of this, he still somehow manages to suggest a withered hope because he keeps coming back where “it pleases me to stand in silence here.” And who couldn’t enjoy just the sound of “Lecturers, lispers, losels, loblolly-men, louts” in “Toads?” Or the “toad-like” something that “squats” in him with “hunkers [as] heavy as hard luck?” Then there is the sadness of “Coming” where one envisions a young man touched with the beauty of spring who feels like a child “who comes on a scene / Of adult reconciling, / And can understand nothing / But the unusual laughter, / And starts to be happy.” That “unusual” speaks volumes of the not forgotten childhood and might shed a clue as to why the young man of “Places, Loved Ones” “…never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground” in a relationship.
But his alligator eye was sharp, wasn’t it? He saw the world and knew exactly how to say what he saw in his definably unique way. He did find his “proper ground” after all.

Sheer Beauty in Schuyler's "The Bluet"

My favorite line in the movie “City of Angels,” is when Meg Ryan is eating a piece of fruit and Nicolas Cage asks her to describe what it tastes like. She responds, “Don’t you know what an orange tastes like?” Get ready. Here it is. This is IT…THE Line… “I don’t know what it tastes like to you.” That line gets me every time. It’s so tender, so caring, and so full of generous, attentive love.

The answer to that line could well serve as the mission statement for the New York School of Poets and Painters. Each painting and each poem is the embodiment of a particular moment in time seen through the lens of the artist. These men and women (probably breaking out of the post war “one-size-fits-all-June-Cleaver-ideology) suddenly say no to the strictures surrounding society, literature, and art. They are brave, courageous, forward thinking, and in the right place at the right time. Like an explosion, their “in and of the moment’s transcendence” is behind each image—written or painted. They collectively “see” how important transient, random moments are…that living, breathing art just IS. There needs to be no definitive line between the art and the artist—nor the art, artist, and receiver. These poets and painters seem to hold almost a collective consciousness in their friendships, their support, and their unity in projecting these vivid images via the pen or the brush.

Schuyler’s “The Bluet” is a perfect example of “painting” a moment with words. We are watching this scene emerge with him…as if we are sitting just inside his eyes. He brings to life this tiny, blue flower, “So small /a drop of sky that / splashed and held, / four-petaled, creamy / in its throat.” We “see” the brown woods, brown leaves, “gray trunks of trees” juxtaposed against the wonder of this blue flower. We “feel” the “air crisp as a / Carr’s table water / biscuit” that “smells” of cider. We can almost “touch” the “frozen apples” on this late October day. With him, we lift our eyes to the hills where the leaves are vibrant in “oriental rug colors.” Then he brings us back to the focus, that single bluet—freeze-framed against all the other images he has framed for us. He tells us nothing matters but this image in time, nothing before “last spring,” or after “next spring.” He not only takes us into the moment with him, but he takes us into the heart’s moment… “unexpected / as a tear when someone / reads a poem you wrote / for him: ‘It’s this line here.’” God! I love the New York Poets!

                   

Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Jane Freilicher: Early New York Evening, 51 1/2 x 31 3/4 inches, 1954

JANE FREILICHER
The Painting Table
1954
oil on linen
26 x 40 inches
Collection The Flow Chart Foundation

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            Freilicher’s work speaks to me. Her “Early New York Evening” seems like a mirror image of O’Hara’s “A Step Away From Them.” Her paintbrush and his pen seem to yield the same result—frame by frame moments in time. One can just as easily imagine Jane sitting with her easel by the window as one can imagine Frank walking about on his lunch hour. Both manage to convey unique perspectives from solidly personal places, but with a seemingly effortless attention to imagery. We see New York from that one window out of thousands and we see the city block O’Hara saunters down through the clarity of his eye—almost like a movie. His poem and her painting both seem to be saying, art just “is”…it’s you, it’s me, it’s this particular second in time and it’s just as important as anything that has come before or will come again. Her painting with its cubist type structure, its frame within a frame container, and its off-center forefront perspective says, “it’s a new time, a new way to look at life, and a new way to ‘see.’” His poem says the same thing. Art is in the little things, the tiny moments, ordinary life, random views from windows, solitary walks, and random thoughts. The rules are gone. Anything goes. The imagination can go wherever it wants. As David Lehman says in The Last Avant-Garde, these poets believed that you could “make a statement without making a statement.” This New York School of Poets and Painters proved this in everything they created. How can anyone read about, “hum colored cabs,” “laborers feed[ing] their dirty/ glistening torsos sandwiches,” “cats playing in sawdust,” and “several Puerto Ricans” that make it “beautiful and warm” and not get a vividly clear picture of that particular street in New York in the 50s? Rapid-fire images chase each other but in a mesmerizing—meandering way. Nothing pops or jolts, it all floats…but at the end you have been somewhere special, you have been inside someone’s head—and they have let you in and you didn’t even have to knock.

            Freilicher uses soft, almost subliminal colors that evoke peace amid the chaos of a big city. The grey smoke coming from the chimney stacks merge with the clouds in an almost surreal, but real blending. Though there are no distinct or definitive lines in the buildings, the images are no less clear. The careful placement of light in splashes across the painting somehow evokes a comforting tone, a homey feeling, a quiet softness one feels at the twilight of the day. The opposition of the detail in the vase of flowers (with their lavender and green) juxtaposed with the endless, concrete buildings magnifies that same feeling.

            I had to include Freilicher's “The Painting Table” in this blog. It just seems to underline everything these poets and painters were saying. Even the tools used to create art can ultimately be, in and of itself, the subject of art. The art supplies carelessly strewn across the table speak of action, though no one is there. There is a potent air of possibilities. The atmosphere is expectant, waiting, pregnant with limitless imagination. The painter will be right back…in just a moment.

            As Holland Cotter said of the recent “Poets and Painters” exhibition, “I don’t believe in golden ages, but I do believe in golden moments.” And that’s what they gave us.

So Why Does Lowell's Familial Funk End with a Skunk?

               Lowell’s “Life Studies” is just that—a study of his life. It begins with the image of him as a five year old at his grandfather’s house for his Uncle Devereux Winslow’s funeral. The tension and struggle is present even at this young age as he sits “mixing black earth and lime,” with one hand feeling cold and the other warm as he tries to make sense of his family and his place in it. His confusion is reflected in the opposition of words used to describe his grandfather, “…manly, comfortable,  / overbearing, disproportioned,” himself as “formal” and “perfection” against “distorting” and “stuffed,” his aunt “thundering” on a “dummy piano,” and his uncle, “animated, hierarchical” against “dying.” The last line “Come winter, / Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color” suggests an image of hope for himself—that the physical, external mixing of “black earth and lime” would somehow manifest as a synthesis of his own internal strife. From here, Lowell walks with the reader showing intimate, vivid pictures of his family history—what his Mother was like, his Father, his Grandparents—to his father’s death, his mother’s death, and then his own private hells with jails (as a conscientious objector), hospitalizations (from manic-depression), and the demise of his marriage. Lowell manages to show the reality of his life, with its chaos and decay, with such a delicate balance of story and gentleness within the prose, that a line of light born of his innocent, but firm questioning and love run like a vein of marble throughout the work. So, how does “Skunk Hour” tie all this family funk together? It takes a heavy shovel to dig through the tone, nuances, and lines, but somehow this skunk stands as a symbol for acceptance and moving on with life.

               The first four stanzas of “Skunk Hour” seem to meander through a sleepy, small, coastal town. However, Lowell is playing with the reader with this style. The uneven rhythm of all the lines combined with a rash of enjambment and end stops, at first causes the reader’s eye to amble along, but closer inspection (hint-a second and third reading) of the word choices make one pause—and look at the style from a different perspective. The meandering is a path of decay, death, loss and futility as evidenced by words and phrases like “hermit / heiress,” “Spartan,” “still,” “dotage,” “thirsting,” “eyesores,” “lets them fall,” “season’s ill,” “lost,” “auctioned off,” “red fox stain,” and “no money.” Now the uneven rhythm takes on a different tone, one of heightened chaos, jarring enjambment and jolting end stops. Lowell takes the tension even higher with the use of the present tense in the first, second and fourth stanza juxtaposed with the past tense in the third stanza. There is an old, lonely woman buying properties all around her to further her seclusion from life and letting them fall into disrepair. She longs for a strict, Victorian-insulated past. The one millionaire is bankrupt and lost and now even nature itself has a “red fox stain” on it. Next, there is a gay decorator attempting to sell symbols from the past—that he repaints in a garish orange, knowing that since there is “no money” in it, “he’d rather marry.” Hopelessness is all around in the picture Lowell paints.

               The turn comes when Lowell leaves his role of distant on-looker behind and brings the poem to his personal “dark night of the soul,” in stanza five. He uses the past tense in his recollection of this “One dark night, / my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull” and “watched for love-cars” and then switches to the present for the remainder of the poem. Lowell’s caesura after “love-cars” and just before “Lights turned down” adds to the haunting quality to his lonely, searching journey.

               The rhythm is still wildly fluctuating in these remaining stanzas, but now there is a rash of end stops with only an occasional enjambment thrown in. This change of style, combined with his use of random, but more consistent rhyming patterns—skull/hull, down/town, cell/hell, eat/street, fire/spire, search/church, pail/tail and air/scare—give the reader the impression of control, a slow building toward some conclusion. Lowell realizes his “mind’s not right,” that love is careless and elusive, that “I myself am hell,” and that “nobody’s there,” meaning God. However, he does see something living with purpose, unafraid and determined. He sees skunks who conquer the night with “moonstruck eyes’ red fire” as they “march on their soles” (pun on souls) past the “chalk-dry” church he no longer believes in. Watching this march, he is able to stand and “breathe the rich air.” According to Native American lore, the skunk “does not get out of the way of any animal—it moves along at its own speed, with its own mind” (Andrews). Lowell seems to make the decision to learn from the skunk. Though the world is full of external and internal pain, there is a way to navigate it and march on. He has finally accepted exactly who he is and where he is. The black earth and lime he sifted as a child have finally blended.

"Howl" Blog

“Howl: II & III—From Rage to Resurrection and Resolution”

               The end of the first section shifts from despair to compassion and hope (almost like a death and resurrection) as Ginsberg himself seems to find a new energy, a determination of using his voice, his poetry, his art as his eternal transformation, “good enough to eat for a thousand years” (20). He also declares that he will continue to use raw, gut-wrenching truth as his vehicle for change, “…absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies” (20). The shift begins with “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe…” and contains multi-layers (19). This is only the third time Ginsberg uses the pronoun “I.” At the beginning of “Howl,” Ginsberg introduces the work with “I saw the best minds of my generation…” and in doing so casts the narrator as the survivor or spectator (9). The next time he uses “I” is on page 17 in a general sense “…to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision.” The shift and culmination that begins with “while you are not safe I am not safe” seems to cast the “I” as an integrated, compassionate whole being with transcendence co-occurring with the determined decision of his right to resurrect and unify his spirit and his art internally and externally—along with his colleagues.

               Section II begins as the container for the reclamation and integration of his voice, his art, his identity. With a confidence-filled rage, the poet loudly and profoundly names the evil that is relentlessly pounding the marginalized parts of society, individuality, and anyone who does not conform to the norms imposed by the ideology of capitalism. The use of exclamation points, the repetition of “Moloch”—a god who demands the sacrifice of children—accentuates the poet’s rage at the world’s inequities and injustices. Ginsberg manages to show the reader the damage done by this world to him as a person,

               “Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom

                              I am consciousness without a body! Moloch

                              who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!” (22)

In the next line, his takes back the right to live his life his own way, “Moloch whom I abandon!” Ginsberg’s choice of adjectives further demonstrates how total his rejection is of a world that strangles and kills: invisible, skeleton, blind, demonic, granite, and monstrous. Juxtaposed with the image of this “unchangeable” world where Americans deify money, is Ginsberg’s knowledge that some kind of heaven “exists and is everywhere about us"  (22).This contributes to the feeling that this poet who can see the luminous and mystical will not only survive, but also conquer the demons within and without. At this point, Ginsberg reflects this belief both personally and universally. With each repetition of “Moloch,” granite walls are not falling; they are being jackhammered away—bit by angry bit.  

               The last fourteen lines of the poem specifically refer to the beliefs of his generation as negated and thrown “down the American river” by a judgmental public (22). One would think that we were back to the hopelessness found in Section 1 on page 19 with images like, “Breakthroughs! / over the river! / … gone down the flood!” and “They bade farewell! / They jumped off the roof!” However, the poet’s tone manages to maintain the rage and convey a grit and strength that their voices (possibly in honor of those who died), imaginations, “visions…miracles, ecstasies,” “illuminations…the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit” will find a way to march out of that river, survive and thrive. Those telltale exclamation points, the unchanging flow of rage, and the transition of form—without the repetition of “Moloch”—keep the end of the piece from descending into suicidal “Despairs!” Ginsberg captures for the second time both a personal and universal commitment for those who think outside the box. As he screams at the loss of lives and spirits, his feet are squarely and firmly finding a place on the ground, with no apologies for who he is, for who they are.

               In Part III, the tone changes from rage to redemption. “I am with you in Rockland” almost takes on the sense of a lull-a-bye. We have been on a hellacious roller coaster ride with Ginsberg that burst into a crescendo throughout Part II. Now we are coming down into the calm cool waters of kinship and compassion and acceptance. The “I” is predominant here, but “with you” comes after it each time—taking us out of the alienation, loneliness, and loss of the first two sections. It almost has a Christ-like quality in sound. He still references the horrible treatment at the mental institution, “where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul / is innocent and immortal it should never die / ungodly in an armed madhouse,” but there is a quiet acceptance and belief in the spirit as well as the union of friendship—in not being alone (25). He still references the political, “…the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep” and both together “O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here” (26). He still has his sense of humor, “O victory forget your underwear we’re free” (26). However, the pervasive air of acceptance, hope, and redemption tempers each utterance with the strength of the preceding line, “I’m with you in Rockland.” The final dream image of Carl “…dripping from a sea- /journey on the highway across America in tears / to the door of my cottage in the Western night” solidifies and seals the redemption and resurrection from the chaos and despair. The walls have fallen. The spirit lives on. The journey can begin. And it did.

(If I had to describe the three parts of this poem in just three words, it would be I Death, II Crucifixion, and III Resurrection.)