Books
Poetry Roundup
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)
Half of poetry is suspended silence… a white blank on the page. Frank Bidart cultivates that space as he collects the seeds of language and positions them. High tone and complex diction set the stage for fear, ghosts and tragedies.
Bidart has been described as fastidious—the work is chiseled but admits a touch of humor and genuine piety. “Your new poem must, you suspect, steal from// The Duchess of Malfi. Read it tonight alone.” The internal aside of “you suspect,” advances a dry (yet droll) argument—backed up by the rigorous instruction to read it.
The poet strings communication lines between the living and dead. The casualties of Gettysburg file by accusing us of betrayal (and recalling Robert Lowell’s “Union Dead”). The title poem is based on Tu Fu’s observations of an imperial fete in 753. Power is illustrated, exposed and recognized as dangerous.
In a later poem, Bidart returns to the “Festival” and accepts responsibility for “the problems of making// art.” He even identifies one big problem: “a great abundance/ which is the source of fury.” His moral compass isn’t lost in the bid for immortal verse.
Finally, “Collector” is a reverie in which the poet hoards and stores seeds (read words) to carry sustenance and design into the future.
Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover, eds. and trans.,
Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry
(Milkweed Editions, 2008)
The flavor of a country is best savored in its poetry. The history shared by a people brands their collective zeitgeist, and poetry, by noting local particulars, can reveal the universal.
In considering Vietnamese poetry, one expects a meditative and naturalistic kinship with ancient Chinese poetry… a topography of rivers, flowers, lanterns, rice, bats and perfume. But that’s only one ingredient.
Vietnam’s French colonial history supplied an impatient surrealism just as Communism brought Mayakovsky and Neruda via Russia and Cuba. This comprehensive overview spanning sixty years (and including Vietnamese Americans) makes for a supreme read. It also represents that rare combination of insiders and outlaws.
Poetry is serious business in Vietnam. Several of the best poets included spent years in the “prison without bars,” excluded from civic life and sometimes sent to reform camps—for poems!
Dang Dinh Hung fought for freedom of expression in the 1950s. His long poem “From the New Horizon” was seminal in creating a modern style and melds Western existentialism with traditional folk songs. His metaphors are arcs of triumph: “I eat new silent symbols, feeding myself one/ at a time with the fork of memory.”
Vietnam’s war for independence evokes heroism, sorrow and undying resolve, while the countryside provides endless delight, from Dong Quang to Ba Trai.
Gabriela Jauregui, Controlled Decay
(Black Goat/Akashic Books, 2008)
Jaguar warrior, globetrotter, political provocateur, shape-shifter—Mexico’s Gabriela Jauregui is off to a propitious start with her debut. Lean and lithe lines spill and unfold down the page, sometimes breaking out into liberating open verse. This freedom captures the spirit of an inventive maverick (who still respects her elders).
Aztec plant names, Saharan place names, an assassinated Lebanese journalist’s name; Jauregui’s range vibrates with worldliness. From a Paris window we imagine Jules Verne. Mandelstam’s widow writes a letter to Anna Akhmatova. We hear soliloquies from grassroots revolutionaries fighting for indigenous rights in Chiapas. And in the tradition of the late Cuban artist Anna Mendieta, nowhere is the poet more at home than in her own body.
“Twig” is a taut little three-stanza poem. “I keep coming back/ to the same aridity/ I call home.” That’s solid. Sometimes Jauregui disconcertingly mixes metaphors. “Tough” turns a heart into a Kleenex and then into stale bread.
When Jauregui rips the cord on the chainsaw though, she cuts straight through. “After Goya (and Fallujah and Kigali and Juarez and Da Nang…)” reaches a passionate fever pitch we associate with Latin giants like Ernesto Cardenal and Nicanor Parra.
The neo-rococco cover by Assume Vivid Astro Focus complements the poems, presenting a non-hierarchical bustle of organic and technical beauty.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Julie Mehretu: about the space of half an hour
By William CorwinDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
In this new body of work—actually three different sets of paintings and etchings—Julie Mehretu is inscribing marks from a series of hands: her own, the fingerprints of digital interventions, and even the hand of the Almighty (at least by implication), on a series of roiled and undulating backgrounds.
Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979
By Megan N. LibertyNOV 2020 | Art Books
This addendum to the history of concrete poetry makes evident the connections between concrete poetry and artist books. Chance visual connections between the diverse works included make visible the materiality of language, the unifying component of concrete poetry.
The Aesthetics of Silence: New Books by Ilya Kaminsky & Donna Stonecipher
By Kristina Marie DarlingMAY 2019 | Books
In a 2007 essay, Chris P. Miller asserts that “silence is a chronology, a beginning collapsed into the end.” For Miller, silence manifests as the first—and truest—form of compression, a charged and dense rhetorical space in which even time folds in on itself. Susan Sontag describes this remarkable compression not as a destructive force, but rather, as transcendence, a sure sign of language sublimating into dream, insight, and artistic vision. Approached with these ideas in mind, the gaps between words, lines, stanzas, and prose paragraphs becomes charged with possibility, a liminal space in which the rules governing speech no longer hold.
Artists Space
By Nancy PrincenthalJUL-AUG 2020 | ArTonic
Shocking but true: Artists Space, essential model for a generation of feisty, funky, youth-driven nonprofits, is nearly half a century old. More surprising still, initially it depended entirely on government support, at a time when both the governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller) and the US president (Richard Nixon, newly re-elected) were Republicans. Promising to make up for a dearth of opportunity for young artists, Artists Space’s founders rounded some up and offered them the chance to call the shots, all on the state’s dime.
