Daniel Barbiero : Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Tony Kitt

Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Tony Kitt
SurVision Books, 2023

 

 

 

 

Of all the pioneering avant-garde movements of the last century, Surrealism inarguably was the most successful in terms of its reach and lasting influence. Long after Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism have been relegated to museums, Surrealist groups continue to be active in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, and likely elsewhere as well. Beyond these groups, which are dedicated to carrying out the original Surrealist program as defined by movement founder and chief theoretician André Breton, many others—individuals working in various art or art-related fields—have found in Surrealism a source of ideas, methods, and concerns to be adopted and adapted, more or less loosely, to their own ends. Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry, an anthology of recent Surrealist-inspired poetry largely from the Anglosphere, shows just how fecund and adaptable Surrealism has been and continues to be as model and inspiration for the poetic manifestation of language.

As poet and editor Tony Kitt notes in his introduction, the designation “Tangential Surrealism” derives from art historian Dickran Tashjian’s description of a wartime American avant-garde pursuing “goals that were sometimes derived from, sometimes at odds with, sometimes tangential to” orthodox Surrealism. By the same token, the forty-two poets from nine countries included in Kitt’s multigenerational anthology connect with classic Surrealism in a variety of ways, sometimes closely and sometimes more tangentially. It isn’t a movement so much as a tendency uniting disparate writers who share a general relationship to language. Each pursues expressive ends of his or her own. Some, but by no means all, seem to be explicitly motivated by the pursuit of classical Surrealism’s main goals—the revelation of the workings of the mind, the pursuit of the marvelous, the reconciliation of the dream and wakeful life. And yet just by writing as they do, these poets often do achieve these ends almost as a matter of course. That’s because, as Kitt describes it, Tangential Surrealist poetry is poetry grounded in “wonder, intuition, and surprising connections” embodied in “associative leaps, from word to word, from phrase to phrase, and from image to image.” The kind of associative logic Kitt describes is a core element of any kind of Surrealist writing, which leverages analogical rather than logical thought processes as it cuts a path through language’s dense forest of symbols.

The basic unit of Surrealist poetics, the form its associative logic canonically takes, is the catalytic image: an image made up of spontaneous and logically incongruous verbal associations which provoke thought by revealing hidden affinities between seemingly unrelated phenomena. The idea goes back to Lautreamont’s strange analogies (“beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and sewing machine on a dissecting table”) as well as to Reverdy’s definition of the poetic image as the product of the imagined juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities: the more distant the realities, the truer and more powerful the poetry of the image. Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry is replete with such catalytic imagery.

Here, for example, is the beginning of Angela Cleland’s “Cross,” a poem about a (real? Metaphorical?) sparring match: 

Needling of jabs, riddle of ducks and feints,
you wait a clear target. 

It comes, as brief as a sparkplug’s discharge,
as a flash of knicker.

The irregular movements of the boxer’s bobbing and weaving becomes a “riddle”; the fight itself is a “needling.” The analogy in the second stanza brings together phenomena from two ontologically distant realms—a sparkplug’s firing and a fleeting view of an undergarment are two very different things—but they’re linked analogically by the shared property of momentariness. Similarly, Helen Ivory’s “The Square of the Clockmaker,” a short poem featuring de Chiricoesque images of trains, squares, and clocks, plays an arresting game of one-into-the-other when it sets up an analogy between a train track running into a tunnel and a tongue rolling up into a mouth. Kitt himself brings together distant realities in his “A Collage Has a Thousand Mouths” by analogizing politicians to cathedrals and creating strange compounds like “matchstick horseracing,” “headwings,” “caterpillar dog,” and “spider flowers.”

Critic Robert Baker characterized Surrealist writing as embodying an aesthetic of the extravagant—a wandering beyond the limits of everyday experience. It’s also extravagant in the plainer sense of lavish. We see this particularly in Will Alexander’s “Texas Blind Salamander Feelings,” a virtuoso poem that transmutes the sightless, cave-dwelling amphibian into a marvelous creature whose essence is defined by what it lacks:

Its sonar glowing
its eyes
inverted aphid’s scrolls
having taken on the tenor of nautical-turpentine sparks
creeping reptilian polyps
being sulphur as in-lunation
not unlike flameless snow fields re-inverting
being the dialectical polarity
of magma
being molten underground intarsias
their movement
not unlike the wind from a primitive whispering axe

That was just the first stanza. Over the course of the poem Alexander works an elaborate transvaluation in which the salamander’s sightlessness becomes an asset, a “sight/not unlike prophecy,” making it a kind of non-human Tiresias in the underworld.

The oracular implications of Alexander’s poem bring to mind Surrealist interest in myth and archetype, as realized in ideas and images drawn from what poet Clayton Eshelman called “the floor of human imagination.” This strand of Surrealist or Surrealist-inspired writing was particularly strong in American poetry of the 1960s and 1970s; it’s represented in the anthology by Jerome Rothenberg, whose “To Dream Infinity” alludes to cosmogenesis and “the far look/ of an ancient/ god/ his hands/ ready to bring us/ down.”

Stefania Heim’s “From Hour Book: 6:35 PM” seems to reach back to Surrealism’s original efforts to manifest the unfettered workings of the mind through writing-let-off-the-leash: 

Slide projector rain in the space
of sought solitude. Wishing
for leaf shadows that are ever-more 

distinct. I came at the appointed
time, but that time was in error...

From a few fragmentary images there emerges the recollection of a mundane event—showing up at the wrong time—that may have been floating on the surface of the speaker’s mind at the time of writing. That time is memorialized in the poem’s title, which names a discrete moment in time, implying that the text that follows is a record of the unfolding of verbal consciousness in and from that moment. By putting the non-logical associations of her imagery in the context of a given moment, Heim shows how, as moments of time coalesce into words and phrases, time’s sequentiality is put under a microscope that reveals the fissures and cracks that run through its ostensibly smooth and uniform flow. Time-as-thought-as-stream of verbal imagery is lumpy in a way that the everyday, unreflective experience of time generally isn’t.

Charles Borkhuis, writing with a plainer diction than most, subverts both the form and conventional wisdom of the cliché as he brings his own critical eye to everyday experience. His poetry, which engages the limitations and inadequacies of the existential reality we’re all condemned to inhabit, embodies the kind of dark humor that was an important element of Surrealism in its early years. “Further Instructions” advises us that there’s 

no need to panic
most ideas only go so far
then someone blows a whistle
and you pick yourself up off the ground
maybe we’re not made to get
to the heart of the matter
maybe nothing sticks around that long

This disillusioned, or better, unillusioned, acknowledgment of where things stand with us—that we’re hampered by our incomplete knowledge and the inevitable failures that follow from it--is in its own way an assertion of a strange kind of pleasure over the reality that would run us into the ground.

These are only a few samples of what’s in Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry; there is much more. George Kalamaras’ vivid imagery creates hallucinatory scenarios in which the imagination is freed from mundane constraints; Andrew Joron and Andrew Zawacki put stress on disrupting language at the structural levels of grammar and syntax in order to take Surrealism’s verbal liberties one radical step beyond; Michael Leong’s intertextual “Disorientations” uses Surrealist collage to explore issues of identity and authenticity; Alison Dunhill’s “Cloud Construction” situates itself within the tradition of the Surrealist prose poem. The one non-Anglophone poet represented here is the Ukrainian Julia Stakhivska, whose work is translated by Anatoly Kudryavitsky.

But this only gives a hint of the imaginative provocations to be had in Kitt’s anthology. It leaves little doubt that just a little over one hundred years after its founding, Surrealism and its poetic offshoots continue to thrive and inspire.

 

 

 

 

Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, and elsewhere. His essays on poetics have appeared in the books Telling It Slant (University of Alabama Press), and The World in Time and Space (Talisman House); he is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press. His score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.

Daniel Barbiero : Kaaterskill Clove, by Joseph Stanton

Kaaterskill Clove, Joseph Stanton
Shanti Arts Press, 2025

 

 

 

Early nineteenth century North America knew itself – through its writers and artists, as well as outside observers – as a thinly-inhabited land, part pristine Eden and part desolate wilderness. Of all the artists whose images contributed to this perception, arguably none made as deep or as lasting an impression as the Hudson River School painters. Their landscapes, mainly of the Northeastern American mountains and forests, depicted a natural environment of expansive scale and emotional force. In Kaaterskill Clove, his new collection of ekphrastic poems, Joseph Stanton writes in response to their work and shows what it still can mean to us, nearly two hundred years after it was created.

At the time they were created, the landscapes of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Albert Bierstadt, Asher B. Durand and others were bound up with the idea that the grand scale and sweep of the rugged American landscape would give rise to a particularly American style of art. Although critic Benjamin T. Spencer would describe this a century later as a “topographical fallacy,” it nevertheless is true that the Hudson River painters attempted to address something deeper than the stylistic possibilities then thought to be open to American artists. Their vision, essentially Romantic, was of a vast and partly untamed land in which the human presence takes an ambiguous place both at home in and transcended by the powerful forces of nature.

It is just this complex relationship of the human to the natural that Stanton focuses on in many of his poems. Here, for example, is the beginning of his poem about Thomas Cole’s 1838 View on the Catskill, Early Autumn:

Cole loved this hillside overlooking a creek
a picnic spot, a short walk from his home.
He shows his wife and child at play…

Stanton describes a scene of domestic idyll, of Cole’s wife and child playing in a sunlit clearing by the water: nature in its benign form. But there’s more to it than that. Looking more closely at the painting, Stanton sees a harbinger of disruptive change in its details:

In the distance we can see the mountains

that edge the Hudson River.
Approach within a few inches
of the canvas and you can spy
the smokestacks of the growing village 

that crowds the far side of the river.
By the time Cole painted it,
this view could no longer be seen
because a railroad had cut through it…

A very close look is needed to see the houses, smoke rising from the chimney of one of them, in the middle distance. It’s an easily missed detail, but for Stanton, it becomes the painting’s center of gravity and the latent meaning of the family idyll. The human presence, so seemingly minor here, is about to expand, alter, and eventually overwhelm the landscape. Which it in fact did. As Stanton notes, by the time Cole painted the picture some of the forest had already been cleared away for construction of the Canajoharie and Catskill railroad. We might even see a premonition of the intrusion of the human on the natural in the way Cole has balanced elements of light and dark: given the predominance of shadow covering the valley, it seems likely the painting depicts a moment in late afternoon. After reading Stanton’s poem, we might see the lengthening shadow as a metaphor for the encroachment of human development on the local ecosystem.

But the human encroachment on and despoliation of nature isn’t the end of the story, as Stanton shows with his ekphrasis of Cole’s The Course of Empire: Desolation (1836), the last of a series of five paintings Cole made depicting the life cycle of an empire from its raw tribal beginnings to the height of its wealth and dominance and ending with its inevitable destruction. Desolation shows the moonlit site of what once was a hegemonic city but now is a ruin being reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation. Stanton’s response to the painting takes the form of a loose sonnet culminating in a rhyming couplet that serves as both an epitaph and an expression of hope for regeneration:

The Empire’s deconstructed; its frenzied screams
have becalmed, the harbor now abandoned.
All that’s alive here is a scatter of trees
and, perched on a capitol Corinthian,
a heron nesting as if a world could go on and on-- 

despite all loss, despite all despair,
as if new life could happen anywhere.

The poem’s modified sonnet form, occasional rhymes, and inverted phrase “capitol Corinthian” (which uses Cole’s original spelling for the architectural feature) lend it a quasi-archaic character that fits the temper of the painting.

Many of the paintings Stanton writes of carry a force that derives from their ability to evoke a sense of the sublime – that feeling of awe and exaltation, tinged with an undertone of terror and existential unease, that one might feel when viewing a rugged landscape from the distance and security that an image in a painting affords. The representation of nature as sublime was a hallmark of the Hudson River painters. Sanford Robinson Gifford’s A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove is one example. Gifford portrays an abyssal ravine on an autumn afternoon in a hazy sunlight that half-dissolves its distant contours into a wash of gold and yellow-green. The loftiness of the view, the vastness of the geological features, and the pervasiveness of a light that paradoxically obscures rather than illuminates some of its objects – all of these are qualities Burke identified as characteristic of the sublime. In Stanton’s reading of the painting this scene retains its ability to awe, but his focus is on the human story it implies, as embodied in the foreground figures of a hunter and his dog:

Gifford gives us a cluster of birches
on a precipitous ledge at far left.
The birches and the ledge are vivid,
sharp-edged in detail in the gleam
of the late-afternoon light of the sun
that shines center-cut directly at us.

Below the ledge a hunter and his dog
struggle upward towards this amazing
view of a vast ravine, bright
and golden, dazzled by delicate
mists rising from lakes and ponds
and creeks and the dimly visible 

line of white that is, we know,
the tumbling falls of Kaaterskill… 

We cannot quite make out the disk
that is the sun, it’s a near-white,
a pure, unrelenting intensity.
A clearing in the deep distance
holds a small house, tiny,
from where we stand. 

Smoke rises from its stack,
speaking of a fireplace,
where a stew is cooking,
for the belated hunter,
whose return is,
perhaps patiently, awaited.

The view is “amazing,” the ravine is “vast” and the light “dazzl[ing]” – qualities of the sublime, to be sure, but what ultimately engages Stanton is the hunter, whom he imagines as being out late and perhaps a cause of worry to the people waiting for him in the distant house. It’s a choice of the concrete over the abstract, and the homely over the metaphysical.

As throughout the collection, “Kaaterskill Clove” gives us a sensitively detailed description of the painting written with plain language. The poem is structured in neat, six-line stanzas and additionally features frequent alliterations that move the rhythm along and provide at least one visual pun: the recurrence of the letter “v” in “view of a vast ravine” cleverly mimics the plunging shape of the cleft. Beyond its descriptive fidelity to the images on the canvas, the poem elaborates a narrative possibility that Stanton sees in Gifford’s painting. This reflects Stanton’s expansive approach to ekphrasis, which sees paintings as what he has elsewhere called “frozen moments” – scenes that have “multivarious narrative implications” waiting to be articulated through imaginative interpretation.

The narrative Stanton finds implied in Martin Johnson Heade’s 1868 Thunderstorm on Narragansett Bay, an ominous seascape of black storm clouds and rain over some small boats and smaller human figures by the waterline, focuses on the scene’s psychological dimensions. Stanton writes of the boats “hurrying back toward shore,/ driven by the dark and what the dark portends” – an “unrelenting argument of heavy weather,/ its shouted rhetoric of rain and wind.” The potential for destruction is in the air, literally; the storm’s threat is read off of it as a portent, as one would read a sign. But in the closing couplet Stanton suggests that an element of psychological ambiguity is at play as well, when he writes of the scrambling figures that “They know that even this garish sky can be/ a comforting sort of grief, a dark abode.” What he captures here is one of the paradoxes of the sublime – the strange sense of satisfaction that accompanies the terror, or what Kant in his third Critique described as a “negative pleasure.”

When we respond to the painting of a landscape we respond as much to the artifice of the painting’s way of making the landscape present as to the landscape itself. Nature here isn’t natural so much as humanized -- mediated through the means and conventions attendant on representation. Stanton brings this out in his poem on Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868): 

Bierstadt built his grandeurs piece by piece
from quantities of sketches and photographs.
Stereographs helped him to grasp
and render meticulously. 

He wanted to be theatrical,
but he wanted, too, to get
all the details correct, absolutely
and three-dimensionally right. 

He gives us Sierras, lit by a sun
whose light explodes through the clouds
gathered on and amidst snow-capped peaks.
As usual, Bierstadt makes it more 

of a profundity than it could
by any shift of eye or mind --
possibly, plausibly – be…

What we see in this proto-Photorealist painting has been carefully crafted, put there through a series of technologically afforded choices that result not only in a picture, but in a “mythos, too wonderful to be true,/ while looking, to our eyes,/ entirely and ridiculously real.” Bierstadt’s simulacrum is striking not only for its accuracy, but for its dramatic enhancement of the scene it depicts. The reality it conveys is hyperreal, its beauty is at once profound and “ridiculous.”

Stanton’s own use of artifice in his poems is present but understated. His tone is conversational and his language direct and unpretentious; his occasional use of rhyme doesn’t call attention to itself. He has a good eye for the kind of detail a more casual viewer might overlook, which allows him to expand on some of the nuances in the paintings. The inclusion of color reproductions of most of the paintings he writes about is a welcome feature of this stimulating collection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, and elsewhere. His essays on poetics have appeared in the books Telling It Slant (University of Alabama Press), and The World in Time and Space (Talisman House); he is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press. His score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.

Daniel Barbiero : Léon-Paul Fargue’s Mundane Comedy

 

 

 

 

“The first time that I saw, under the sapwood of Paris, really saw, like a true damned one, Hell [l’Enfer]  and Heaven [le Paradis] in mobs of men and old women, the first time that we looked into each other’s eyes, it was, I believe, a night of vague rioting. I was having an aperitif in a genial little bar, not far from the Rue de Lancry, in a sort of cul-de-sac [impasse] as greasy as the bottom of a frying pan, and which snaked with the smirks of a distinguished tributary toward Boulevard Magenta.” (p. 64)

This is the opening sentence of the prose poem “Paris” by Léon-Paul Fargue. I read it as Fargue’s Mundane Comedy – a kind of counterpart to Dante’s Divine Comedy, but abbreviated and transposed to the night streets of a working-class district in 20^th century Paris. It runs straight from Inferno to Paradiso and indeed telescopes them into each other. We can’t always tell where one leaves off and the other begins; Fargue leaves no boundary between them.

The people we meet in hell we can find in heaven because the one is the other. These people include a miscellany of types existing at the margins of the city:

Tripe sellers, leather workers in their rooms, girls at the windows, with heavy and cold legs, card shooters, toothpick bureaucrats, hair-scratchers and follow-me-young-man-madams, Czech vendors, Saar emigrants, bank clerks, all the creeping vegetation of the houses of Paris rushed in fragments of bodies toward the sky...(pp. 72-73)

Fargue's heaven, as he describes it, is likewise filled “with living things of all kinds, such as have populated Breughel and Bosch.” (p. 75)

Fargue’s people can inhabit both heaven and hell because they all are located in the same neighborhood of the same city. This neighborhood – “this corner of living-dead men” – is the tenth arrondissement, a working-class section on the northern outskirts of Paris with its apartment buildings, train stations (the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est), and cafés. It is there, rather than in a dark wood, that Fargue finds himself. There are no circles there, just the city streets and the bar which provides the center of gravity for the night's events.

The poem begins with the hint of a diffuse but palpable tension. Fargue recalls a taut atmosphere of anticipation which made him

think of the specific fears, of the eternal attitudes of the populations that live in the shadows of volcanoes. The day before an eruption causes short fevers and bursts of granules to run over their skin. Invisible sarabands gallop at the level of kneeling fields. Mustard columns are diluted in the green sky. Then, at the first gasp of the boiling mountain, the earth retracts, man flees bent in two, flowers break, cattle whirl round. (pp. 64-65)

But will the volcano erupt? Fargue reports that in the 10^th arrondissement, he and the others “know that a fire will not suddenly spring from the chest of Paris;” rather, it would appear not to be the workers but rather the intellectuals of his acquaintance who, “in the drawing rooms in which we get together,” are concerned with thinking about revolution. It is “part of their snobbism.” (pp. 65-66) We get the impression that the unrest in the streets is rather desultory and short-lived. While it lasts, Paris is “an anthill bungled [bousillée] by the wooden shoe of a cowherd” (p. 73), but then things simply drift back to normal, and for Fargue the evening ends with a vision of paradise “above the roof of the city.” (p. 74)

Fargue can make Paris simultaneously heaven and hell because his Paris was a Paris in which observation, sensation, recollection, and imagination blended together into a world of phenomena uniquely his own. Rather than being guided through his imaginary Inferno by the shade of a deceased poet, Fargue is guided by the ghosts of his own memory and the inventions of his imagination. Fargue’s Paris was an imaginary city, which isn’t to say that it wasn’t real. It was, but it wasn't entirely real either. It was surreal in the original sense of a reality-above-reality made up of the factual and the counterfactual, of the waking perception and the dream vision, of the abolition of the contradiction between the objective and subjective. In effect, Fargue’s Paris was the objective witness of his own subjectivity. It was this at least in part because Paris had been, since the nineteenth century, what Roger Caillois called a modern myth -- the

world of supreme grandeurs and unforgivable crimes, of constant violent deeds and mysteries; the world in which everything, everywhere, is possible at all times, because the imagination has sent there its most extraordinary enticements ahead of time and discovers them at once…(Caillois, p. 178)

If Fargue could superimpose heaven and hell over the physical reality of the city’s streets, cafés, and inhabitants, it was because the city’s imaginative infrastructure had already been put in place by predecessors such as Baudelaire, Breton, and Aragon. It was a transformation as dramatic as anything Baron Haussmann had imposed.

In Fargue’s own mythical Paris the tenth arrondissement is a neighborhood of “sooty trenches” with its

stenches [relents], its cats entangled in carapaces, like insects, its large blackish crepes that the man kneads with his foot, mixing under his weight carrots, lettuce, corpses, and dark heels of bread. (p. 64)

Some of this is real, some of it might be, and some of it isn’t. Where to draw the line between them isn’t clear, as Fargue’s imaginative transformation of the facts on the ground introduces a deliberate poetic ambiguity into his record of the night’s events. Take, for example, his description of the moment he sets out for the café in which much of the poem takes place:

I throw myself into the street, into this beneficent water that dozes between banks with windows. Fresh water from a street in Paris where one mingles with reflections, water purer than in any city in the world, comforting water, a miraculous spring, from which emits a mixture of courage and hope. I enter a shady café. (p. 69)

This could be a description of a rain-wet street, or it could be an elaborate metaphor for the street itself as a kind of river whose banks are the windowed buildings that front it on either side. If we take Fargue’s “water” literally, then “reflections” (“reflets”) would refer to the images of buildings and other objects appearing in the water running over the pavement below. But if we take “water” as a metaphor for the street, “reflections” turn out instead to be moments of introspection which, given Fargue’s tendency to weave memory into his prose poems, would take the form of recollections. (In describing the dead-end street on which his bar is located as a “tributary” [“affluent”] of the Boulevard Magenta, he sets a precedent for reading the street as a river.) As an imaginary river in an imaginary Hell, Fargue’s street is like a mirror-reversed Lethe. Rather than being a river of forgetfulness it is a river of remembrance, where the past’s “ghosts had lined up in single file along the steps eaten by tides of feet.” (p. 67)

As for the café he enters, this presumably drab working-class watering hole becomes an exotic place where Fargue

had the feeling that I was in a tent pitched by nomads, a tent that a sort of hereditary approval of poor devils stretched to the limits of a country, and I saw love, usury, loneliness, conspiracy, debauchery and fury in it. But like a showcase of objects. (p. 70)

This last line betrays a certain detachment in Fargue’s imaginings. The lives of the others around him here are so many objects on display, to be seen from the outside. But it is a detachment that will eventually break down.

Inside the bar, Fargue takes a seat next to a young couple. If this is his Inferno, they are his counterparts to Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, banalized as befits the setting:

Two young folks drink from the same glass: one in overalls, one in a bodice, laughter. He, the common man from Larousse, a widespread type, without originality, without value: a good mechanic from the village with hard hands and dog white teeth. But her, the Fleur de Marie... (p. 69; ellipsis in the original)

The man apparently is drunk, as Fargue describes him in a striking set-piece:

And the man, who was barely the master of his impatient hands, rose by arpeggios toward spheres where his dark dreams sparkled. He felt splendor, strength, vertigo. He was walking like a Resurrected Man in a strange ether. He suddenly saw Museum frescoes flit through his ramified & sensitive head. He came face to face with his double [sosie] at the summit of whirling planets. He heard postcard stands tilt toward his immense ears. He was dying on the battlefield, distraught, thin and transparent as in a nightmare, very small & endless, and as he saw himself in the purple stars of drunkenness with his buddies. (pp. 71-72)

Fargue’s description shades over from observation to metaphor to simile to a speculative identification with the man’s internal state. “Rose by arpeggios” is a beautifully turned metaphor for a staggering walk – an arpeggio leaps in asymmetrical intervals, like the unevenly spaced steps of someone who’s had one too many. Fargue captures the physical disorientation, distorted perception, and dreamlike fantasies of intoxication – the vertiginous feeling of moving within a “strange ether;” the alienating experience of coming face to face with one’s reflection in a mirror and seeing it as a doppelganger rather than one’s actual self; the illusion of seeing the café’s lights as “whirling planets;” the experiencing of the strange chain of images that Fargue imagines rush through the man’s head. When he reaches this last point, Fargue abolishes the distance from which he originally observed the couple; he takes this objects out of their showcase. He pulls off the neat dialectical trick of not only experiencing the interpenetration of his own inner states with external reality, but of seeing the inner states of another – of grasping that other as a subject by observing him first as an object, and then subsequently re-subjectivizing him through the empathetic reach of imagination. At this moment Fargue is a subjectivity confronting another subjectivity, recognizing him in his interiority as he would recognize himself in his own interiority. Poetic projection takes Fargue from the visible known to the ordinarily unknown through a kind of inference that bypasses logic in favor of a lived analogy.

In the end the couple provide the occasion for Fargue to see his Paradiso within his Inferno. The unrest in the street has ended – “the derailment was averted” – and in the café Fargue sees that the two hadn’t been affected by it:

The upheavals hadn’t reached them. They were wise and passionate like characters in paintings. They saw everything in white. They climbed unsullied floors, they picked fruit, trampling on ravishing serpents, possessed themselves, twisted in a mirage. They were but cosmic dust: out of space, absent, eternal, and so strange, so comical, so barbaric in that display of glasses, spirits, and mouths...They lived, we were dead. They galloped in the divine, while we were preoccupied with revolutions. (p. 74; ellipsis in the original)

The “stupidities of these two monsters from the Infinite” show him that Paradise, with its “arabesques” and “great landscapes of staggered plains” is “nothing else” than “[l]andings, embankments, medians, half-moons, rotundas, fumivores and carriages loaded with human grapeshot” (p. 75)  – the mundane city around him.

 

 

 

References

Roger Caillois, “Paris, a Modern Myth,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, tr. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish (Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 2003). Internal cite to Caillois.

Léon-Paul Fargue, High Solitude, tr. Rainer J. Hanshe (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2024). Internal cites consisting of page numbers only are references to this source.

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021). Website: danielbarbiero.wordpress.com

Daniel Barbiero : The Magritte Poems, by Mark Young, with an introduction by Javant Biarujia

The Magritte Poems, Mark Young, with an introduction by Javant Biarujia
Sandy Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

For twenty years, Mark Young has been writing poems in response to the paintings of René Magritte. That the dialogue, which is still ongoing, has been a fecund one for Young is borne out by the sheer volume of poems written so far. The Magritte Poems, which collects Young’s Magritte-inspired poetry to date, contains more than 540 of them, along with other poems of related content.

Magritte’s work has been a creative provocation for a number of poets and other writers since, of all of the painters associated with Surrealism, he produced work that quite clearly was conjured from a conceptual core. Indeed, he described his art as the visible description of thought. At their best, his paintings involve an ontological sleight of hand that exploits the gap between our representations of reality and the reality they represent, in the process rearranging our everyday picture of the world and its furniture and unsettling our relationship to both. He inverts the ordinary relationships between things; deliberately mislabels objects; creates disturbing visual puns; and reframes our ideas of the values and functions of things by forging links between things inhabiting distant ontological domains. And with the exception of a brief “Renoir” period in the early 1940s and the caricatural “vache” paintings from later in that decade, he did all of this in a neutral, almost style-less style that deliberately resembles the most banal commercial art or dictionary illustration. That style turns out to have been both an asset and a liability. On the one hand it made the paintings approachable, the better for them to work their subversion almost surreptitiously. On the other hand it made them too approachable, which resulted in their popularization to the point of oversaturation and cliche. In the process, their edges have been dulled. Many of their images and motifs are familiar enough that it’s easy to become inured to their genuine strangeness. It is to their great credit that, by engaging Magritte’s paintings with a combination of seriousness and ironic humor, Young’s poems help us to see once again how these paintings could, as Magritte put it in his autobiography/artist statement “Lifeline,” make “everyday objects shriek aloud.”

Young’s poems are imaginative inventions grounded in ekphrasis. Some of them involve inferences spun out of the visual clues Young sees in the paintings; some are meditations on the philosophical problems the pictures appear to raise. All of them carry the titles of the paintings to which they respond.

Here is La Joconde:

The slice-of-sky curtain is
center stage — or should
that be center plage? Behind

it are two other curtains, red
this time, ready, when the
bell starts to ring, to move

slightly forward & draw to-
gether to conceal the other &
leave only sand & sea in sight.

The painting shows a seashore at dusk, with a round bell sitting on the sand. At its center is a wedge of bright blue sky flecked with white clouds. The sky, like the bell, is familiar as one of Magritte’s frequently recurring visual motifs. The sky is framed by two red curtains pinched in at the middle, the one on the left paralleling the half-hourglass shape of the slice of sky. Young’s response takes the form of a calligram using center-justification to mimic the curvilinear outline of the curtains and wedge of sky. His description of the painting is economical and precise; with an off-rhyme between “stage” and “plage,” he imagines the section of day-lit sky as a prop or stage set about to be hidden by the red curtains once the bell signals them to close. Will that closing mean the close of day, leaving only the twilit stretch of beach and water? Or, if this is all a stage set, does that mean that the world we perceive is simply a spectacle to divert us? Young answers this second question with Le Beau Monde:

The world which
we see
clearly

is the curtain
in front
of

the
world which
Magritte clearly sees.

Le Beau Monde shares the curtains-and-sky motif and general formal structure of La Joconde, but with differences. The wedge of sky is the same but the curtains here are solid blue, and the wedge is superimposed over an identical blue-sky-with-clouds that makes up the entire background; the bell is replaced by one of Magritte’s signature green apples. The scene as Young gives it to us is no longer a stage set; rather, the curtain appears to be an embodiment of the Veil of Isis, which occults the true reality of the world behind the apparent reality “we see/clearly.”

With this terse poem, Young encapsulates in a few words one of the fundamental motifs recurrent in Magritte’s art – concealment, in the form of objects covered by or hidden behind other objects. Magritte’s biographer Alex Danchev quotes the painter telling an interviewer, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” Magritte seems to have meant this in a literal sense, but the paintings hint more generally that the visible is concealing something of a reality other than the mundane reality we see. Magritte was no metaphysician, but some of his paintings do suggest a dissociation or contradiction between the phenomenal world and whatever it might be hiding – the noumenal, the Ideal, thought: call it what you like, even if he might not have used those terms. The implication is that the phenomenal world is a screen hung on an invisible frame. If Magritte’s neutral style compels us to recognize the banal objects he depicts as physical things unproblematically present to perception, his subjecting them to bizarre arrangements or his opposing words to them, whether through incongruous labels or titles, tends to undermine what Stevens called “the eye’s plain version.” We’re left with the impression that what we’re supposed to see is that what we see is constituted by what we don’t see: that is, by the invisible image or idea that makes the thing present to us as the thing it is. As Young puts it in The Improvement,

Things might seem to be
how they seem until you

reach the door — or, more
probably, one of many doors —

marked Magritte the Magi-
cian, open any of them, &

discover the invisible that
resides behind the visible.

Young’s first of three responses to The Son of Man, Magritte’s famous image of a bowler-hatted man whose face is hidden behind a green apple, begins by raising a question concerning the relationship of the apple to the laws of physics, and hence to the nature of its reality:

Does this apple obey
the laws of gravity
& fall at thirty-two feet
per second per second?

Does time move slower
in the reality of an unreal
landscape? Do objects
invent their own velocity?

Is the apple’s downward movement through time and space something proper to the apple – does it “invent [its] own velocity” – or is it something we impose on it? Does our experience of time vary with the perceived reality of the place in which we experience it? The questions Young raises here seem to touch on the Kantian notion that such structures as time, space, and causation aren’t inherently part of an independent reality but instead are imposed by the conceptual apparatus of the human mind. This may or may not have been what Magritte intended, but Young’s imaginative questioning of the painting insightfully reveals a meaning provoked by the image itself.

One of the techniques Magritte famously used to provoke a surreal meaning was the pairing of images of objects with the names of other, seemingly unrelated objects. It was a technique he employed in a series of paintings titled Le Cle des songes, translated either as The Interpretation of Dreams or The Key to Dreams. Young takes a 1935, English-language Key to Dreams once owned by Peggy Guggenheim that depicts a horse, misnamed “the door;” a clock, misnamed “the wind;” a pitcher, misnamed “the bird;” and a suitcase, correctly labeled “the valise,” and responds to this painting of dual signification with a double-entendre of his own:

.....& then
there are
those rare
times when
our dreams
speak to us
in a language
we can under-
stand.....

Does the “language we can understand” refer to a decoding of dream symbolism in which an image of obscure meaning is translated into the word that reveals its true meaning (or vice versa)? Or to the fact that here Magritte uses English, a language we as Anglophones can understand?

One of the conceptual motifs Magritte addressed in various ways is the inversion or deliberate confusion of the relationship between inside and outside. One of his best-known works, The Human Condition, shows a room in which there is an easel holding a canvas in front of a window; the image on the canvas is a skyscape exactly continuous with the view beyond the window. The immediate meaning of the painting would seem to be a pun on the notion that a painting is a window on the world. But Young’s response goes further and sees a conundrum in the skyscape appearing both inside and outside of the room:

Inside the
outside

     is much
     the same

as outside
the outside

     except
     there are

far fewer
people. 

As the wry closing comment indicates, not everything in The Magritte Poems is a straight-faced meditation on metaphysics; Young’s signature ironic humor runs throughout the collection. It’s an attitude in keeping with the mordant wit that informs much of Magritte’s work. Young writes with a plain diction that is superficially analogous to Magritte’s flat, illustrational style, but whereas Magritte’s style conveys a sense of intellectual detachment and emotional distance, Young’s instead draws the reader in and signals his own involvement with the paintings he engages. That it is a vital involvement is apparent not only from the number of Magritte-inspired poems Young has written and collected here, but from the many registers in which Young writes as he responds to Magritte’s images and ideas. In addition to the more philosophically oriented poems that I’ve chosen to focus on, there are poems based on the facts of Magritte’s life, and poems of social criticism. The collection also contains Young’s “Florence Foucault” poems, which are sourced from Michel Foucault's Magritte book This Is Not a Pipe and from The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, an 1860 book by Florence Hartley. With The Magritte Poems Young has produced what is in effect his epic, but one that seems to want to be dipped into and read a little at a time. There is much here to please and to stimulate.

 

 

 

 

Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, and elsewhere. His essays on poetics have appeared in the books Telling It Slant (University of Alabama Press), and The World in Time and Space (Talisman House). He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III will be appearing in A Year of Deep Listening, to be published by MIT Press in December 2024. Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.