Photo of the Day, November 6, 2009: Newburyport Night 1
Heroic MBTA Operator and Inspector Honored: Saved Woman's Life
Week Around the Ists, November 1–7
Sunday Happenings
Book It: Book Events November 8–14
Figures and Figurations, a recent husband/wife collaboration from New Directions Publishing, is a worthwhile read: Marie Jose Paz made Cornell-styled collages for little over a decade, and then Octavio Paz wrote poems to, about, and for them, twelve in all. The result is this book, which is coming out at the end of the month. The collages are gorgeous, given goodly sized color prints, and one--"The Forest Asks Itself"--is astonishing.
The book itself is divided into three parts: the first, the poems paired with the collages; the second, the poems in the original Spanish; and the third, afterwards by Paz and the late Yves Bonnefoy. Notable poems include the running/shifting syntax in "Cipher" and "Here," and this bit from "Door":
not the picklock of curiosity,
nor the little key of reason,
nor the hammer of impatience
Marie Jose's works are highly detailed and stand on their own. There's the petite trench-coated man in Aqui, standing amongst the whirligigs of marbles and other devices; the way the cloudy gray of La pleume bleue matches the Japanese woodprint in mood and style, despite it being made of a radically different material; how the sunflowers in "The Eyes of the Night" gain a slightly Gary Gygax, monster-like appearance.
For the most part, the poems correspond to the images; there is merit in offering up an honest echo to a partner's work, to be exact, and Octavio should be commended for that.
Paz's afterword has a wonderful section that ought to have been a prose poem in the book:
A flora of needles, vegetations ruled by a triangle's obsession and the eccentricity of an ellipse; optical pyramids; skyscrapers of chromatic aberrations; crossroads of perspectives; a universe made from a drop of water and a drop of ink; mirrors where glances sail and reason gets lost; immense deserts on an inch of celluloid; gardens of telephones; green, yellow, and blue stamps; cellophane gnomes with Roman numeral buttons; trapezes of thread and skeins of transparencies; princes and princesses of brown paper; ballerina propellers; sarabandes of reflections, echoes, forms; metal discs with wings: dragonflies! Animated objects that, without saying a word, speak to us in unknown languages that we almost understand.The only truly bizarre note is Yves Bonnefoy's afterward. In a discussion that focuses so much on the notion of "poetic space," his attempt to ascribe abstractions to--or, rather, into--a linear geography is extraordinarily silly: huffpuffery-mongering, if you will.
Get the scoop on Bonnefoy's huffpuffery, as well as some interesting English-Spanish correlations, after the jump. Post contributed by Evan Fleischer. Octavio Paz image from Wikimedia Commons.
Consider Bonnefoy's words:
Collage would seem to go directly against poetry's goal of reassembly in a place beyond the region of the spirit where signifieds construct and deconstruct their always abstract and partial representation of what is.
What is "beyond" the spirit? (Moreover: whither "spirit?") Non-spirit? Nothung? Praxis? Physical objects? The dissolution of the "I?" But if it's the dissolution of the "I," what does it lead to, and where? How long does it last? What acts or conditions engender it? What smells? What rhythms? And how do we quantify the length of the spirit? And what would a theoretical Bonnefoy think of Ashbery's youthful comment in an interview with Koch that poetry is a refraction of everything in the world, a negative space?
And what about liberation? What's so wonderful about cut-ups, collages, mash-ups, or lifting lines into songs (Henry Timrod/Dylan or Keats/Not Dark Yet) or structures into books (Howard's End/On Beauty; Odyssey/Ulysses) is the fact that they show us something doesn't end where we think it ends, that something staid and oppressive can have the curtain drawn back, a young bunny from an old hat, that moment of emergence, the act of which bursts us out from the old into the new, however long that may last or be.
A Handy List of Abstract Words and Phrases Bonnefoy Uses in His Afterward
Timelessness
Harmony of Form
Destructive Time
External Knowledge
Unity
Decomposition of the Immediate
Decentering
Signifiers and Signified
Dissociation
Transcends
Being-in-the-World
Why That Was Done
None of Marie Jose's work is described or cited by name in the afterword, nor is Octavio's. One wonders if Bonnefoy ever even saw it. So don't rely on his--or our--interpretations to judge the work; read it yourself.
Finally, this Bostonist always finds it interesting when he attends a film in a foreign language he knows and has his ears pricked by the difference between what was said and what was translated at the bottom of the screen, whether it's a completely different word or something in ballpark of being a cognate that sets off all other sorts of associations. In that spirit, we leave you a list of intriguing English/Spanish echoes for curiosity and perusal:
"Calm":
night empties out / la noche se vacia
"Your Face":
I want to be a face, says the palette / Quiero ser cara, dice la paletta
fountain of truths just born / fuente de verdades recien nacidas
"The Brushes Awake":
Little dragon, you lope / Dragoncillo, tu trotas
"Imperial Fireplace":
quiet geometry beneath an unmarked sky / quieta geometria bajo un cielo sin tacha.
"Cipher":
The windows are stamps
and the stamps are omens
turned into fortunes:
Las ventanas son sellos
y los sellos son signos
resueltos en sinos:
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