Poésie Buffo
Self-portrait at 35. After many years of spiritual beggary and lackadaisical destitution I recently saw Akira Kurosawa’s Ran again. According to the DVD box the title translates into chaos. And why should chaos interest us? We value order, or at least the idea of order, and yet it is chaos, easygoing and detached, but chaos irregardless, that fills our art. Our poetry keeps pointing to a vast schism we all immediately identify with but have yet to pin-point in words. Words being the tool we turn back to, to try to explain this rift, schism, rupture of the soul. I think we buy into this conceit too easily. In the May 2005 issue of Poetry, Jane Hirshfield writes in Assay Only Glimpsable for an Instant:
Moment. Moment. Moment.
…….Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.
Without transformation,
yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.
The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose. (page 135)
As I write this a letter is delivered by snail-mail, post; it is almost one o'clock in the afternoon and I must be getting ready for work. It is from the Carnegie Museum of Art, and for reasons beyond me the outside reads like a found poem: "it was the 1930s/ the heyday of radio/ the birth of swing/ it was epic movies on sultry nights/ it was gershwin, cole porter, duke and bing." This constant looking back, reassessing1, fictionalizing. It was the age of "epic movies on sultry nights," it is "the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens." I have kept wanting to write a momentous, epic, monstrous poem, a thousand pages of villanelles or sonnets or haiku, a vast sweep of ordering/form/pattern, create whole mythologies with the back of my hand, yet all I have are fragments. I feel drawn to these fragments, yet something deeper feels insulted by them. They are devoid of emotion, of sensation and libido. There are artists who can take those fragments, though, and string them together. They can make something bigger out of the ruins. David Ng writes in his review of Ran:
… [the film] is that rare epic picture, at once enormous and intimate, simultaneously melodramatic and nuanced. The superlatives that seem permanently attached to its name (magnificent, grand, breathtaking) betray its very nature: this is a quietly pessimistic movie, one that peels back the layers of deceit in its characters to find a Godless universe. Weaving together momentum and stasis, Kurosawa fashions a nimble motif of juxtaposition. Visual formality masks emotional anarchy. Like so many of its characters, Ran seems to be one thing but soon proves itself infinitely complex.
Let's say it again: we live in a nihilistic time, our art "peels back the layers of deceit … to find a godless universe."2 If this is nothing more than: "Moment. Moment. Moment," as Hirshfield puts it, where does this mystique, creative impulse, splendor, negative ecstasy come from? I am not even going to argue about some sort of supernatural father/ patriarchal divinity that certain tyrannical religio-politicians believe in and are actively engaged in inserting into our Constitution. Rather, in the face of Hirshfield's rationalization that: "… [we] step forward: choosing to enter, to lose;" I say that there is no loss, destruction, no sacrifice. None except what we decide to sacrifice.
See here, though; I am not advocating the tiresome journey to some far-off Arcadia, the "et in Arcadia ego,"3 that poets who are dissatisfied with their current surroundings seem to hanker for. Why make things better now when we can drown in nostalgia for a world we've never experienced? No, why don't we start with something simple, something almost reflexive? Yes, let's start here:
this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/
That is the poem I want. After all, at the end of Ran, at the end of all the destruction, the viewer is still left, both passionately and passively watching, but still, the viewer remains. We are not King Lear or the old warlord Hidetora. We are the viewer, as you are the reader of this, passive yet alive, "the chorus, to whom nothing happens.” Can we not reach back into our past, our "heyday of radio," and pull something forward? Like DJs who take disco music from twenty five years before and add a new twist to the beat and call it rave? Can we not go back, before the World Wars filled us with horror? Before the Genocide of the Armenians? Before Cabaret Voltaire wrote: "We [have] lost confidence in our culture. Everything [has] to be demolished. We [will] begin again." Before Modernism and Nihilism and that willingness to say we choose "to enter, to lose"? That is the poem we will write.
Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our land/
Line two (b)
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/
Line four (A2)
Line five (b)
Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
Line six (A1)
Line seven (b)
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/
Line eight (A2)
Line nine (b)
Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
Line ten (A1)
Line eleven (b)
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/
Line twelve (A2)
Line thirteen (b)
Line one (A1) this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
Line three (A2) recall/ soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/
As I wrap this up to get ready for work4 I have put on Rossini's La Cenerentola, it will be played next year at the Detroit Opera House. Rumor has it Rossini wrote it at age 25 in about three weeks. I would very much like to see it. It is in the style known as "Opera Buffo." Where are our poets who write Poésie Buffo? Why has the joy of laughing fallen out of style? Everyone is so serious and those who aren't are terrible to read. As Allen Ginsberg put it:
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me …
"Everybody's serious but me." Yes, I think we buy into this swagger of seriousness that is suppose to lead us to rapture, ecstasy, possibly even beatification; but simply masks our woebegone souls all too well. I call to all the Poèts Buffo in the audience: "We have a challenge at hand." Can ecstasy and comedy be interlaced? Is it possible to remember euphoria, joy, delight in our words? Won't that lead us to a new Arcadia? Somewhere closer to the Latin transcription: I Tego Arcana Dei (Begone! I know the secrets of God)?
this air/ once sung long ago/ in our lands/
filled all this/ recall, body/ simple things/
recall, soul/ the joy of moving/ our hands/
our lips/ breath on our flesh/ pleasure demands
little/ sprinkling on our flesh/ shavings
of air once sung/ long ago in our lands
we marveled/ at air/ how each lung expands
for glee/ simply to expand/ my cravings
to recall, soul!/ joy of moving my hands
over my body/ lush hair/ pulpy glands/
flesh/ dew/ glorious!/ pump lungs!/ find blessings
in the air/ sing long ago/ in our lands
we were filled/ glorious air!/ what withstands
such air?/ when did we neglect/ bare teachings/
let there be/ great joy in moving our hands/
our lips/ breath on our flesh/ fever commands
us to/ recall, soul/ we rave/ our ravings
for this air/ sung long ago/ in our lands/
recall, soul/ the joy of moving our hands/
- Were critics in the 1930s asking of themselves: "this feels so 1892″? [back]
- Or, as Whimsy Speaks put it, the School of "Evocation by Juxtaposed Imagery." I am rather fascinated with this website; the author is funny, organized and extremely well-read (it staggers my mind the number of new books of poetry I am missing out on! Thanks Whimsy Speaks, who ever you are!) [back]
- As the radio sings: "Oh bondage up yours" [back]
- Ah, the "honorable" life of a nurse aide; which should read suspiciously underpaid and unethically understaffed. [back]