B.H. Fairchild on Art, Craftsmanship, and Poetry

With the Labor Day weekend upon us, I’d like to offer the following excerpt from a review I wrote of B.H. Fairchild’s Local Knowledge, which was published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This section of my review addresses the important influence on Fairchild’s developing perspective as well as his eventual composition of poetry by the poet’s early witnessing of an attention to careful workmanship or a pride in manual labor exhibited by his father and other workers.

* * *

Fairchild's attitude toward art and craftmanship arose when he was a boy witnessing his father and other machine shop employees display great care and pride in their work. Fairchild tells Paul Mariani in an interview that appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of Image, "among my earliest memories is standing by my father as he operated a lathe. He was a perfectionist and so introduced me to the idea of craft, 'a small thing done well.' The odd fact that I fell in love with craft itself before I ever came to poetry has had a huge influence on the way I think about poetry. I vividly remember how he would point out something another machinist had done as 'good work,' clearly the highest kind of praise, and how disdainfully he would refer to other work as 'sloppy.' It was a moral distinction as much as an aesthetic one and made a deep impression on me."

Consequently, the afterword to Local Knowledge, bearing the title "Lathework," details this influence even further: "The first image, I was to discover, holds the model for everything I have written, especially poems: lathework. In machine shops in Houston, Lubbock, Midland, and Snyder, Texas, I would as a boy stand on the wooden ramp next to my father and watch his hands move gracefully and efficiently over the lathe, maneuvering the levers and rotary handles and making the bit move in and out, back and forth, as the huge chuck spun a section of drill pipe in its iron grip." Indeed, the younger Fairchild developed a sense of reverence for the perfectionism exhibited by his father and the other men he watched work those machines.

Repeatedly, Fairchild has returned in his poetry to actions observed in the machine shops. In "Toban's Precision Machine Shop" Fairchild speaks of the shop's "spiritual" atmosphere, attentive to the search for "perfection," and the "possibility" of aesthetic pleasure he recognized as evident in the tools of the trade:

. . . It is a shop
so old the lathes are driven by leather belts
descending like some spiritual harness
from a long shaft beneath the tin roof's peak.

Such emptiness. Such a large and palpable
sculpture of disuse: lathes leaning against
their leather straps, grinding wheels motionless
above mounds of iron filings. Tools lie lead-
heavy along the backs of steel workbenches,
burnished where the morning light leaks through
and lifts them up. Calipers and honing cloths
hang suspended in someone's dream of perfection.

There are times when the sun lingers over
the green plastic panels on the roof, and light
seems to rise from the floor, seems to lift lathes
and floor at once, and something announces itself:
not beauty, but rather its possibility... .

Throughout his poetry, readers discern not only Fairchild's respect for the craftsmanship of the workers he watched in the machine shops, but often a deep regard for the intelligence and character of the individuals as well. Fairchild's personae are people who do not support the easy stereotyping or dismissal by others that might exist elsewhere. In the closing stanza of the poem, readers see Toban, the shop owner, as he "sits in his office among his books / with music settling down on his shoulders / like a warm shawl. He replaces the Mahler / with Schubert, the B-flat sonata, and sends it / unravelling toward me, turning the sound / far above the cluttered silence of the lathes." Fairchild makes note of this poem, and his attempt to counter others' stereotypical depictions of characters like those in his poems, in his conversation with Mariani:

I resent the way blue-collar labor is often stereotyped as being utterly divorced from high culture, as if it were performed only by men and women whose lives are a cycle of beer drinking, Monday night football, and NASCAR, and who have never read or wanted to read The Brothers Karamazov or Anna Karenina. I have a cousin, for instance, who is a machinist and comes in and sets the parameters on the lathe (they're computerized now), then leans back and reads Heidegger. Maybe that's exceptional, but I also have a poem, "Toban's Precision Machine Shop," that resulted from walking into a very old shop in San Bernardino (so old the lathes were driven by belts connected to an overhead shaft) where a Mahler symphony was flooding the air.

Fairchild further praises the men in his memory who now populate his poetry: "The men in those shops, including my father, were highly skilled laborers who performed tasks whose intellectual complexity was at least equal to if not more demanding than those performed by academic intellectuals."

[Visitors are invited to read the rest of my review of Local Knowledge. I also recommend readers visit the Lannan Foundation web site to hear a reading by B.H. Fairchild and an interview of the poet by R.S. Gwynn.]

Virgil Suarez: "Song to the Banyon"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Virgil Suarez’s “Song to the Banyon,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue (Volume III, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Virgil Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962. He is the author or co-author of nearly twenty books—novels, short stories, a memoir, and collections of poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary journals, including The Caribbean Review, Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and many others. The Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue of VPR also includes a Virgil Suarez interview conducted by Ryan G. Van Cleave.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

An Elegant Epigraph: Charles Wright on the Free Verse Line

“Most of the great masters of the free verse line came to it through writing formal meters, formal verse. One of the things that it gave them was the sense of a line as a unit, phrases and lines as units, because when you’re writing in traditional meter—be it pentameter, or tetrameter, or hexameter—you always have to come down to a line. It’s a line, and then there’s another line, and then there’s another line, and they go together to make sentences, of course; but if you don’t know this, if you don’t come to free verse that way, it seems to me you tend to write sort of blocky little sentence stanzas, and you worry about line breaks. If people would worry less about line breaks and more about lines, the breaks would take care of themselves. There are six or so basic kinds of free verse lines. There’s the Whitman line, which is self-contained. Most of them are sentences, but they’re all self-contained units. Then there’s a Pound line, which is the syntactical unit line. The there’s a Williams line, which is asyntactical, cross-grain; it cuts at odd places, toward the direction of speech, as he said, toward the measure of speech. And then there are the Stevens and Eliot lines, which are much the same, except that Stevens’s is probably a bit more plastic, whereas Eliot’s is sort of expanded blank verse. Then there’s the Hemingway line, which is the proselike line, currently so popular, the long proselike line. I say it’s a Hemingway line just because he wrote such good prose. Somewhere in those free verse masters—Hemingway was not a free verse master—those six free verse lines, you’ll find an example of most of the free verse lines we write, that you write, that I write.” — Charles Wright

—From an interview of Charles Wright with Carol Ellis, which first appeared in the Iowa Journal of Literary Studies in 1986 and is included in Charles Wright’s Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-87 (University of Michigan Press, 1988).


[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

BEST OF THE WEB 2008 Published

I am pleased to note the publication of a new anthology, Best of the Web 2008, released by Dzanc Books. This book represents the initial volume in an annual series of collections that will highlight outstanding works of literature chosen from online journals. The series editor, Nathan Leslie, explains in the book’s introduction that such an endeavor serves as a “symbol” of the “collective significance” online literary journals have achieved in recent years. As Leslie correctly summarizes: “Good writing is good writing no matter where you find it. I would also argue that the Internet serves the purpose of making literature accessible so well that it actually levels the experience of reading. The audience for online magazines is, of course, infinitely larger than any print magazine.”

I am especially happy to report two poems that first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review—“Prophet Township” by Jared Carter and “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea” by Frannie Lindsay—were honored by being chosen for publication alongside nearly sixty other works. Once again, I am pleased when an opportunity arises for a couple of VPR’s splendid poets to reach a larger audience and find the greater recognition they deserve through inclusion in the anthology. I congratulate Jared Carter and Frannie Lindsay on the selection of their poems for this honor.

For full disclosure, I am grateful to be able to add that one of my poems, “Island Fever,” which first appeared in Apple Valley Review, received a nomination from that journal’s editor, Leah Browning, and it also was selected for inclusion in the anthology.

The Best of the Web 2008 includes works published online during 2007 in the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Steve Almond, acting as this edition’s guest editor, declares in his introductory comments about the book’s entries: “The significance of this debut isn’t just the individual evocation of beauty and insight, but the collective triumph of hard labor over cynicism. Each of these works represents a community of writers and readers who have decided that the Internet should serve the outrageous purpose of reinvigorating literature.”

In addition to the works selected for the anthology, the book includes a useful index of URL addresses for the more than 300 online journals considered by the editors, where readers may find further exciting and innovative works of literature by new, emerging, or well-known writers. The index also offers contact information for each journal that may be helpful to those authors interested in submitting their writings to the magazines.

As I have expressed in the past, I welcome the admirable efforts of the anthology’s editors to bring attention to the growing number of fine works being published in online journals, and I wish Dzanc Books continuing success with the series. Readers are invited to visit the official web page for Best of the Web 2008. Readers are also encouraged to check out the Dzanc Books blog, which includes convenient links to hundreds of online literary journals.

Thomas David Lisk: "Metaphors and Sausage"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Thomas David Lisk’s “Metaphors and Sausage,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Thomas David Lisk’s fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Amarillo Bay, Asheville Poetry Review, Blue Moon Review, Boston Review, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Connecticut Review, Free Verse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, Oakland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. His collections of poems include A Short History of Pens Since the French Revolution (Apalachee Press) and These Beautiful Things (Parlor Press). Lisk teaches in the Department of English at North Carolina State University.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara

Larry Rivers was born on this date (August 17) in 1923. His presence as an individual who figured significantly in the painting and poetry circles of New York during the second half of the twentieth century is unmistakable. Rivers also was a performing jazz saxophonist. Indeed, a product of the Juliard School of Music along with fellow student and lifelong friend Miles Davis, Rivers connected as well with those emerging musicians in the New York jazz set.

According to Frank O’Hara, he and Rivers first met at a cocktail party in 1950 hosted by mutual friend John Ashbery. O’Hara once confided his interesting first impression of Rivers: “I thought he was crazy and he thought I was even crazier. I was very shy, which he thought was intelligence; he was garrulous, which I assumed was brilliance—and on such misinterpretations, thank heavens, many a friendship is based.”

The close relationship between Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers continued for the next sixteen years until O’Hara’s untimely death in a freak vehicle accident on Fire Island. During those years, the poet and painter inspired one another and created works responding to one another. They also collaborated on various projects. Perhaps no other friendship epitomized as well the links between the art and literary communities in New York at the time. In his autobiographical book of collected memoirs, What Did I Do (Harper Collins, 1992), Rivers writes extensively about his relationship with O’Hara, explaining: “From the earliest moments of our friendship we were enthusiastic about each other’s work. Frank O’Hara was a big influence on me, but I think I influenced him too.” An excellent example of the inspiration and influence Rivers exerted on O’Hara can be detected in O’Hara’s well-known poem, “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art.”

One of the major artworks of Larry Rivers, Washington Crossing the Delaware, painted in 1953, served as a controversial piece that helped establish Rivers as an influential figure in the art scene. In his autobiography Rivers describes at length the painting’s beginnings, the process of composition, and its impact in the art world and elsewhere. He opens with the following: “In 1953 I read War and Peace. Tolstoy’s novel was not something I could see, not a figure or a landscape, a church or a mountainside. By meshing Napoleon’s invasion of Russia with contemporary life, Tolstoy set me on a course that produced Washington Crossing the Delaware, a seven-by-nine-foot work, plus a dozen drawings. The size and the research were going to prove that I was a serious artist, and if the painting turned out to be terrific, a talented one. This work was going to take my style of painting, charcoal drawing and rag wiping, to a new height. The mixture of grand art and absurdity was with me from the beginning.”

Rivers continues: “Shortly after Washington Crossing the Delaware was finished, Frank O’Hara wrote his ode.” Marjorie Perloff comments on Frank O’Hara’s poem responding to the Rivers artwork in her fine book, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters: “Although O'Hara’s poem is especially witty if read in conjunction with Rivers’s painting, it can be read quite independently as a pastiche on a Major Event in American History, an ironic vision of the “Dear father of our country,” with “his nose / trembling like a flag under fire.”

In his memoir notes about Rivers that Frank O’Hara once wrote for the 1965 catalog of a Larry Rivers retrospective exhibition in the Poses Institute of Fine Arts at Brandeis University, O’Hara reflected: “Where much of the art of our time has been involved with direct conceptual or ethical considerations, Rivers has chosen to mirror his preoccupations with enthusiasms in an unprogrammatic way. As an example, I think he personally was very awed by Rothko and that this reveals itself in the seated figures of 1953-54; at the same time I know that a rereading of War and Peace, and his idea of Tolstoy’s life, prompted him to commence work on Washington Crossing the Delaware, a non-historical, non-philosophical work, the impulse for which I at first thought was hopelessly corny until I saw the painting finished. Rivers veers sharply, as if totally dependent on life impulses, until one observes an obsessively willful insistence on precisely what he is interested in. This goes for the father of our country as well as for the later Camel aand Tareyton packs. Who, he seems to be saying, says they’re corny? This is the opposite of pop art. He is naïve and never oversophisticated.”

During a 1959 Frank O’Hara interview of Larry Rivers for Horizon, the painter had explained: “Luckily for me I didn’t give a crap about what was going on at the time in New York painting. In fact, I was energetic and egomaniacal and, what is even more important, cocky and angry enough to want to do something that no one in the New York art world could doubt was disgusting, dead, and absurd. So, what could be dopier than a painting dedicated to a national cliché—Washington Crossing the Delaware. The last painting that dealt with George and the rebels is hanging in the Met and was painted by a coarse German nineteenth-century academician who really loved Napoleon more than anyone and thought crossing a river on a late December afternoon was just another excuse for a general to assume a heroic, slightly tragic pose . . .. What I saw in the crossing was quite different. I saw the moment as nerve-wracking and uncomfortable. I couldn’t picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand-on-chest heroics.”

At Frank O’Hara’s funeral in 1966, Larry Rivers read a personal tribute, which included the following: “Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend. Without a doubt he was the most impossible man I knew. He never let me off the hook. He never allowed me to be lazy. His talk, his interests, his poetry, his life was a theatre in which I saw what human beings are really like. He was a dream of contradictions. At one time or another, he was everyone’s greatest and most loyal audience.”

Perhaps like the jazz musicians with whom Rivers played and maintained friendships—such as Miles Davis and Charlie Parker—who enjoyed improvising solos in response to cues in one another’s performing as a measure of respect or reverence, Frank O’Hara also took pleasure in reacting to the art of Larry Rivers or reciprocating with his own poetry as a sign of his admiration and affection.

ON SEEING LARRY RIVERS’ WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they're smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate's flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

—Frank O’Hara

Bill Evans and Sebastian Matthews

Next spring will mark the 50th anniversary of a monumental moment in jazz history, the production of an album that has stood apart from its contemporaries like no other. For nearly half a century, Kind of Blue, recorded by the Miles Davis Sextet, has maintained its reputation as a groundbreaking achievement and a work that has greatly influenced those generations of jazz musicians who have followed. In Ashley Kahn’s book chronicling the recording, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, the author refers to this release as the “premier album of its era, jazz or otherwise. Classical buffs and rage rockers alike praise its subtlety, simplicity and emotional depth. Copies of the albums are passed to friends and given to lovers. The album has sold millions of copies around the world, making it the best-selling recording in Miles Davis’s catalog and the best-selling classic jazz album ever.”

At the time of this recording, the Miles Davis Sextet consisted of Davis (trumpet), Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (alto saxophone), Paul Chambers (bass), James Cobb (drums), John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), and Bill Evans (piano). Wynton Kelly substituted for Evans on one of the tracks. Of the band’s members, Bill Evans seemed the most curious addition. When Davis had invited Evans to join the combo, the pianist was not as well known as the others in the group. Evans, born on this date (August 16) in 1929, was in his late twenties, and he had been appearing in some clubs as a sideman or had performed as a session player on a few recordings, but he lacked the kind of experience evidenced by the rest of the sextet.

Moreover, as Grover Sales notes in his book, Jazz: America’s Classical Music, being the only white member of the band, Evans was eyed suspiciously by some in the jazz community: “Black critic LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and white Third World polemicists like Frank Kofsky filled the jazz press with angry manifestos, insisting jazz to be the black music of protest and denouncing all whites as copyists at best and rip-off exploiters at worst. Miles Davis’s reaction to the oft-voiced complaints about Bill Evans’s color was, ‘I don’t care if he’s purple, blue, green or polka dotted—Bill has the piano sound I want in my group.’”

In addition, Bill Evans brought to the music a different perspective and more formal background, one that included classical training on piano and flute, as well as university studies in music theory. Indeed, Evans’s interest in classical composers—like Bartók, Beethoven, Debussy, Prokofiev, Ravel, and others—contributed to his distinctive style. Evans combined these influences with lessons learned from legends of traditional jazz, such as Art Tatum, and more contemporary figures, like Bud Powell. In his volume, The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia suggests the inclusion of Evans as an accompanist for Davis and the other band members greatly shaped the sextet’s style: “The cooler aesthetic of Davis and Evans tempered and counterbalanced the fire-and-brimstone exhortations of Coltrane and Adderley. . .. Bill Evans’s impressionistic harmonies added to the emotive power of Kind of Blue, and served to reinforce Davis’s zen-like insistence on simplicity of means. Coltrane and Adderley, who by temperament were much hotter players, responded with some of the crispest solos of their careers.”

Much of the commentary on the pieces comprising Kind of Blue usually focuses on an emphasis placed upon the moods and musical momentum engendered by modal jazz. For example, even Evans, who with his academic education in such writing had assumed the task of authoring the album’s now famous liner notes, described one piece as “a 6/8 12-measure blues form that produces its mood through only a few modal changes and Miles Davis’s free melodic conception.”

Shortly after the recording sessions for Kind of Blue, Evans left the band to continue his personal work as a soloist and as a leader of his own trio. The first trio he formed included bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, and that combo established Evans as an influential figure independent of his association with Miles Davis. Although the three performed together only briefly because of the tragic death of LaFaro in an automobile accident at the age of twenty-five, the trio set a standard for many of the similar mixes of musicians who would follow. Fortunately, a live recording of the combo performing during a two-week appearance at the Village Vanguard in 1961— a stint that concluded only ten days before LaFaro’s death—reminds listeners more than four decades later of the group’s greatness.

Despite a serious problem with alcohol and drug abuse for most of the two decades following the formation of that group, and the pianist’s gradual withdrawal into himself, Bill Evans remarkably produced more than fifty albums with his various trios or as a soloist. During this time he developed a singular profile at the piano at odds with his earlier conservative appearance in more formal attire: casually dressed, the bearded and longhaired Evans would hunch way over the keyboard with his head only inches above the keys almost as if in meditative prayer. However, Evans died in 1980 at the age of fifty-one due to health issues related to his addictions.

Nevertheless, Bill Evans’s influence and legend has continued. In 1984, a poll of nearly fifty top jazz keyboardists listed Evans as their favorite jazz pianist, and they placed him behind only Art Tatum as jazz history’s most influential pianist. Today, those contemporary jazz pianists who exhibit the influence of Evans include Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett, as well as dozens of others.

I know it is safe to say that Kind of Blue and the recordings of the Bill Evans Trio at the Village Vanguard are among my most frequent selections for entertainment in evenings when reading and especially at those times when I’m writing new poems. I confess that perhaps I sometimes rely on the distinctive rhythmic pacing and overall tones evident in the music to help guide my own phrasing and creation of mood when placing words or ordering images in my poetry.

Certainly, such an influence of jazz on poets appears commonplace. Yet, few poets have attached their writing to an influence from jazz or the blues to the extent William Matthews did. A devoted fan of jazz, Matthews was well-known for linking the two art forms: “There’s something I know about phrasing and how to keep a fairly long sentence afloat for seven to a dozen lines of free verse without it losing its shape or momentum. If I’m right in thinking I can do that, I learned it more from listening to music than from listening to poetry.” Furthermore, like some contemporary poets, Matthews envied the power of jazz or the blues to “communicate without soliciting consent” the way words need to “elicit agreement from a reader.” For further consideration of William Matthews’s poetry, readers are invited to examine my long essay on Search Party, his collected poems: “To Learn to Love the Blues.”

Indeed, much has been written about the connections between jazz and a number of contemporary poems, particularly as evidenced in various collections devoted to such poetry, including those Indiana University Press jazz poetry anthologies edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa or Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press), edited by Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey. Therefore, one would not be surprised to find a fair number of recent poets—including Peter Balakian, Alan Feldman, Gerald Locklin, Jeffrey Skinner, and Bill Zavatsky, among others—have been inspired by Bill Evans or alluded to the musician in their works.

Appropriately, Sebastian Matthews has produced one of the finest poems evoking Bill Evans and the period of modern jazz he epitomized. In his memoirs, In My Father’s Footsteps, Sebastian comments: “My father wrote well about jazz because he had taken what he had learned from its masters—Louis, Duke, Bird, Pres, Coltrane, Mingus, Miles—much of what he knew as cool. And he had a good enough ear to approximate its rhythms in his own verse. And, damn it, because he had soul.” As a poet similarly fascinated by jazz and the power of music, Sebastian Matthews definitely has followed in his father’s footsteps, as readers can witness in his excellent recent collection of poetry, We Generous (Red Hen Press, 2007), which contains a section of poems referencing music and musicians, such as Miles Davis, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins, and Louis Armstrong. The book even carries a lovely photograph of Armstrong on its cover. His poem in the volume alluding to Bill Evans:

LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD

Near the end of Bill Evans’ “Porgy (I Loves You, Porgy)”
played live at the Village Vanguard and added as an extra track
on Waltz for Debby (a session made famous by the death
of the trio’s young bassist in a car crash) a woman laughs.
There’s been background babble bubbling up the whole set.
You get used to the voices percolating at the songs’ fringes,
the clink of glasses and tips of silver on hard plates. Listen
to the recording enough and you almost accept the aural clutter
as another percussive trick the drummer pulls out, like brushes
on a snare. But this woman’s voice stands out for its carefree
audacity, how it broadcasts the lovely ascending stair of her happiness.
Evans has just made one of his elegant, casual flights up an octave
and rests on its landing, notes spilling from his left hand
like sunlight, before coming back down into the tune’s lush
living-room of a conclusion. The laugh begins softly, subsides,
then lifts up to step over the bass line: five short bursts of pleasure
pushed out of what can only be a long lovely tan throat. Maybe
Evans smiles to himself when he hears it, leaving a little space
between the notes he’s cobbled to close the song; maybe
the man she’s with leans in, first to still her from the laugh
he’s just coaxed from her, then to caress the cascade of her hair
that hangs, lace curtain, in the last vestiges of spotlight stippling the table.

Readers are urged to visit the fine “From the Fishouse” web site, where they may listen to Sebastian Matthews reading “Live at the Village Vanguard.”

Benjamin Vogt: "Uncle with Landscape—Kansas, 1954"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Benjamin Vogt’s “Uncle with Landscape—Kansas, 1954,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue (Volume V, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Benjamin Vogt’s work has appeared in a number of journals, including Adirondack Review, Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Diagram, Evansville Review, Fugue, Harpur Palate, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Southern Indiana Review, and Verse Daily, as well as a few anthologies, including Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (University of Iowa Press). Vogt’s poetry chapbook, Indelible Marks, was published by Pudding House Press in 2004. In addition, he has received or been a finalist for several awards and honors including the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University, the Louise VanSickle Fellowship, and a grant from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund. Benjamin Vogt is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in poetry and creative nonfiction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he teaches English and serves on the editorial staff of Prairie Schooner.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

An Elegant Epigraph: Louis Simpson on Truth in Poetry

“There is only one law for the poet—tell the truth! For years you try to write, and at last you are faced with two alternatives—either write what is acceptable, or tell the truth. If you write what you really think, you will find yourself in a lonely place. But if you are serious about it—and if you’re not, you aren’t a poet at all—you must get to that place sooner or later. The sooner the better.”— Louis Simpson

—From “On Being a Poet in America,” an essay included in A Company of Poets by Louis Simpson (University of Michigan Press, 1981).

[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

Andy Warhol and Gertrude Stein

In 1980 the Jewish Museum presented an exhibition of Andy Warhol paintings titled “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.” The international array of individuals included as subjects among the group Warhol labeled his “Jewish geniuses”—Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Golda Meir, and Gertrude Stein—represented various areas of the arts, education, entertainment, law, politics, philosophy, psychology, and science. At the time a number of critics faulted Warhol, some for his seemingly superficial blending of class with the crass, mixing high culture with coarse commercialism, and others for his repetition of a tactic he’d previously pursued, the silk-screen portraits of celebrities.

However, over the decades since the portfolio’s premiere, many have come to appreciate Warhol’s insight into shifting contemporary attitudes toward cultural icons and fashionable imagery, as well as his foresight in understanding changing relationships between elements of high art and popular media seen in American society when the twentieth century drew to a close. Therefore, this summer the Jewish Museum re-introduced Warhol’s portraits and invited viewers to reevaluate his work as it hosted a special exhibition, “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” that extended from March 18 to August 3.

Warhol’s portrait of poet Gertrude Stein might appear a surprising selection to some, and yet when regarding the two together, one is now allowed interesting discovery of some remarkable comparisons or contrasts concerning the pairing. At a first glance, one might expect mostly differences, particularly since Stein’s idiosyncratic writings seemed not to be intended for appealing to a large readership while Warhol’s art frequently seemed consciously designed for wider audiences with its apparent characteristics complementary to commercialization and a summoning of popular consumption. Most likely, these attributes were products of Warhol’s origins as a successful illustrator for commercial projects and advertisements.

Yet, the two figures have at least a few features in common. Both traced their beginnings to being born in the Pittsburgh area. Additionally, each of them displayed a well-known personality that at times rivaled the attention received by their art. Indeed, Stein and Warhol served as central figures around whom groups of writers and artists gathered—some were among the most brilliant or inventive individuals of their day, while others were merely hangers-on or sycophants who arguably possessed negligible talent.

In fact, all sorts of artists and intellectuals—painters, poets, fiction writers, and critics—journeyed regularly to Gertrude Stein’s Left Bank salon at 27, Rue de Fleurus. A number of them would achieve fame for accomplishments in their own fields that surpassed Stein’s own achievements. Some simply sought a celebrity status in certain circles of the avant-garde. Similarly, Warhol’s Manhattan studio, The Factory, served as a hub for artists, writers, and filmmakers with whom Warhol often collaborated, as well as a magnet for flatterers seeking favors and a variety of people who were merely amusing eccentrics.

In appearance, both Warhol and Stein displayed distinctive physical traits that nearly existed as trademarks of their unique personalities. Also, despite their repeated presence in social situations, neither seemed very adept at the best interpersonal skills or outwardly expressed a great deal of warmth toward others. Indeed, the pair sometimes might be defined as uncomfortable, awkward, or edgy in their interactions with others. Warhol frequently was seen as shy and timid. In a 1965 article for the New York Herald Tribune, John Ashbery described meeting Warhol in France for a Paris exhibition: “A shy, pleasant fellow with dark glasses and a mop of prematurely gray hair, Warhol seems both surprised and slightly bored by his success.” Those who knew Stein depicted her as opinionated and egotistical. In fact, although he’d once acknowledged Stein’s early influence on his writing, in A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway characterized her as occasionally condescending and ultimately not all that likeable.

Despite Gertrude Stein’s seemingly strong opinions and judgmental nature, she apparently shared with Andy Warhol an enigmatic image that frequently allowed followers to identify with qualities they thought were recognizable in these two individuals. As Stein once observed: “You see why they talk to me is that I am like them. I do not know the answer . . .. I do not even know whether there is a question let alone having answers for a question.” In the same way, Warhol usually refused any significant commentary about the aims or the effects of his artworks, even those containing the more serious subjects. As Robert Hughes once reported: “In one of his bizarre noninterviews on film, one sees an eager questioner asking Warhol about the meaning of his electric chair paintings, why he did them, and getting stonewalled every time with ‘Uh . . . I dunno.’”

As artists, Warhol and Stein produced innovative works, although the pair emphasized experimentation through a fairly basic approach to their craft and with a deceptive plainness. Stein simply declared: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Warhol portrayed a soup can as nothing more than a soup can. Consequently, especially early in their careers, critics sometimes mistook their lack of adornment for an absence of depth and concentrated on a perceived lack of sophistication when comparing them to their seemingly more adventurous contemporaries.

Both were influenced by photography. Stein’s initial publication in a periodical occurred in Camera Work, edited by Alfred Stieglitz. Warhol imitated photographic techniques in his portrait paintings, and he adventured into making movies. Moreover, Stein’s first works included many verbal “portraits,” in which she employed words the way painters—especially Cubist artists like Pablo Picasso, whom she admired and who had painted the famous portrait of Stein that held such a prominent position on her salon wall—might use brush strokes, thus allowing readers to see her perception of subjects.

In fact, Stein wrote a literary portrait of Picasso, “If I Told Him,” which begins: “If I told him would he like it. / Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. / If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if / Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.” Readers are invited to hear Gertrude Stein’s rare reading of the poem.

One certainly could contend that the influence exerted by each of these individuals on those around them and those of subsequent generations is even more significant than their own noteworthy artistic accomplishments. Surely, it would be difficult to imagine modernism during the first half of the twentieth century without the presence of Gertrude Stein. Likewise, Andy Warhol exists as an unmistakable icon of the postmodern period in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Since today (August 6) represents the birth date of Andy Warhol, born in 1928, readers may want to heed the suggestion of the Jewish Museum and take this opportunity to reconsider the artist’s work, including his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Indeed, viewers of this artwork perhaps might be reminded of the important cultural contributions provided by the two, while at the same time also obtaining a quick glimpse at a particular representative aspect of movement evident in the sweep of twentieth-century art by simply regarding Picasso’s 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein beside Warhol’s 1980 portrait of the author.

Jackie Bartley: "The Moon through Blue Glass"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Jackie Bartley’s “The Moon through Blue Glass,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jackie Bartley is the author of a number of poetry collections, including Ordinary Time (2007), Women Fresh from Water (2005), Hobo Signs (2004), Bloodroot (2002), The Terrible Boundaries of the Body (1996), and When Prayer Is Far from Our Lips (1994). Her work also has appeared in many literary journals, such as Artful Dodge, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and West Branch. Bartley teaches in the English Department at Hope College.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Listening to Louis Armstrong

If it hadn’t been for him, there wouldn’t have been none of us. —Dizzy Gillespie

You know you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played. —Miles Davis

There is no jazz musician regardless of instrument and no jazz singer today that does not owe their first debt of gratitude to Louis Armstrong. —Gene Krupa

There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. —Nat Hentoff

Armstrong left behind an enduring and endearing artistic legacy, marked by a world-embracing warmth and a universality that transcended musical genres and national boundaries. —Ted Gioia

A musical treat on this day as we listen and remember Louis Armstrong, born August 4, 1901.

A Confrontation of Fonts

Recently, I posted an article about a fondness for fonts among authors, especially poets. As I commented at the time: “Many poets maintain favorites among the numerous choices of fonts. Indeed, I recall dinner debates among classmates in my graduate writing program about the merits of certain typefaces, as well as the attitude or grace contributed to the page when a slight projection of a serif adorns particular letters or an italicized word leans tastefully forward in a line. My friends and I would pull books from our shelves and compliment the arrangement of print in the poetry as presented by publishers who took pride in such seemingly minor details.” Consequently, I appreciate the humor contained in the above video, and I thought many of the writers or readers who visit here regularly might enjoy this imaginary confrontation of fonts as well.

A Poetic Celebration of Horses

This week I received my contributor’s copy of Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses (Yarroway Mountain Press), a poetry anthology edited by Susan Jantz that includes one of my poems, “Above Beaver Creek, Colorado.” The volume presents nearly 300 works of poetry depicting scenes or events involving horses by an impressive array of contemporary poets. In the anthology’s introduction, Yantz informs readers:

Throughout history, horses of legend and real life have served as mediums between the spirit and material worlds. And, unlike cats or dogs, to which similar extrasensory attributes are often given, horses reputedly carry their riders between the seen and unseen realms and hold the power to lead humans to forms of lost knowledge.

Preliterate petroglyphs, pictographs, and other artifacts remain as testament that the horse has inhabited cultural human experience throughout millennia. Horses have been with us in war, in work, in leisure, in sport, in symbol, and in all manner of art.

The generous collection of poems in Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, which extends almost 500 pages, is handsomely presented and contains a number of familiar favorites for me, such as Maxine Kumin’s “Jack,” Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses,” Larry Levis’s “There Are Two Worlds,” C.K. Williams’s “Gas,” David Baker’s “October Storm,” Gregory Orr’s “Horses,” Henry Taylor’s “Riding a One-Eyed Horse,” and Robert Wrigley’s “Kissing a Horse,” just to name a small group. In addition, I located some poems I hadn’t known previously or had forgotten among those by authors with whom I am fairly well acquainted. I also discovered more than a few fine new poets from whom I look forward to reading more work.

The publisher's publicity notice describes the gathering of poetry:

The collection celebrates the enduring presence of horses in our lives. Contributors masterfully offer us entry into the world of the physical—heart warming as well as heartbreaking—and the metaphysical and magical realms in which horses play a significant role.

Horses show up in these selections through a wide range of written forms from litanies, elegies, odes, pantoums, sestinas, blank verse, and sonnets to free verse in both lyrical and narrative styles.

We hear the far-reaching voices of female, male, cowboy, novice, farrier, knacker, veterinarian, jockey, stable hand, parent, child, wife, husband, lover, and more—brought to us through poets who intelligently and artfully explore diverse perspectives on the venerable and long-standing relationship between horses and humans.

The complete list of poets contributing work to Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses: David Baker, Judith Barrington, Robin Becker, Margo Berdeshevsky, Stephen Black, Jonathan Blake, Linda Blaskey, Barbara Bloom, Deborah Bogen, Don Bogen, Alan Botsford, Kevin Boyle, Allen Braden, Lisa Brown, Michael Dennis Browne, J. V. Brummels, Louella Bryant, Elizabeth Wade Buckalew, Michael Burns, Grace Butcher, Edward Byrne, Cyrus Cassells, Grace Cavalieri, Sonya Hess Chamberlin, Tom Christopher, Jeanne E. Clark, Brad Comann, Star Coulbrooke, Darla K. Crist, Mary Crow, Claire Davis, Cortney Davis, Jon Davis, Todd Davis, Mark Defoe, Gregory Djanikian, Sharon Doubiago, Sean Dougherty, Chris Drangle, Barbara Drake, George Drew, Felicia Dubois, Denise Duhamel, Rebecca Dunham, Susan Elbe, Karl Elder, Margot Farrington, Annie Finch, Deborah Fleming, C. B. Follett, Alice Friman, James Galvin, Christine Gelineau, Danielle Georges, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, Benjamin Gotschall, Tzivia N. Gover, Alice Wirth Gray, Coppie Green, Gabe Gudding, Catherine Hardy, Joy Harjo, James Harms, Jana Harris, Lola Haskins, Wendell Hawken, Julie Hensley, William Heyen, Michael Hicks, Jane Hirshfield, Elizabyth Hiscox, Peter Huggins, Austin Hummell, Mark Irwin, Carrie Jerrell, William Johnson, Ilya Kaminsky, Ellen Chavez Kelley, Robert Morris Kennedy, Willie James King, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, John Kooistra, Josephine Koster, Judith Krause, Jeri Kroll, Maxine Kumin, Lance Larsen, Kerry Lawrynovicz, Dorianne Laux, Donna J. Gelagotis Lee, Joseph Leff, Ken Letko, Lisa Lewis, George Looney, Jacqueline M. Loring, Christiane Marks, Beverly Matherne, Gail Mazur, Linda McCarriston, Pamela McClure, Ron McFarland, Valerie Mejer, Ann E. Michael, Jen Michaels, Joseph Millar, Nathaniel Miles Millard, Judith Montgomery, Peter A. Nash, Charles Nauman, Sheila Nickerson, Biljana Obradovic, Carole Simmons Oles, Gregory Orr, Sarah Pape, Joy Passanante, Oliver de la Paz, Molly Peacock, C. E. Perry, Natalie Peeterse, Roger Pfsingston, Donald Platt, Ruth Porritt, Marnie Prange, Noah Raizman, Tony Reevy, Bethany Reid, James Richardson, Alberto Ríos, Anele Rubin, Benjamin Russell, Floyd Salas, Michael Salcman, Mark E. Sanders, Jeannine Savard, Maggie Schwed, Vivian Shipley, Sue Sinclair, Anita Skeen, Judith Skillman, Hannah Stein, Barry Sternlieb, Margo Stever, Leon Stokesbury, David Surette, Pablo Tanguay, Stephen Tapscott, Henry Taylor, Elaine Terranova, Diane Thiel, Matthew Thorburn, Georgia Tiffany, Annie Tobin, Daniel Tobin, J. C. Todd, Alison Townsend, Robert Tremmel, Eric Trethewey, Sarah Vap, Rosalynde Vas Dias, Miles Waggener, Scott Ward, Michael Waters, Ellen Waterston, Jonathan Weinert, Donovan Welch, Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Maggie Wells, Laurelyn Whitt, L. E. Wilber, C. K. Williams, Sam Witt, Cecilia Woloch, Doog T. Wood, Deborah Woodard, Chad R. Woody, Robert Wrigley, Gary Young, Karen Zealand, Su Zi, and Lisa Zimmerman.

For further information and ordering details about Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, readers are urged to visit the Yarroway Mountain Press web page for this anthology.


[Photo Credit: Logan Williams]