Sunday, May 11, 2008
In his new collection, "Trappings," Richard Howard makes an old question shine again.
Dec 17, 1999 | Artists and philosophers (and the rest of us, on occasion) have long tried to make sense of the relationship between life and art. Does art imitate the everyday world, or transform it? And if great art does have the power to enlighten, how can we understand the less-than-enlightened personal lives of many great artists? In 1889, Oscar Wilde wrote: "Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it ... keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style." Eventually, Wilde felt, "Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness." Then the cycle continues. In his new collection, "Trappings," Richard Howard steps into that cycle and examines the curious, symbiotic relationship within it from a dazzling variety of perspectives.
Howard is probably as well known for his translations from the French as for his poetry, and a mesmerizing poem called "The Job Interview" details a meeting in 1957 (when he was 28) with the esteemed Surrealist Andri Breton to discuss a translation of Breton's novel, "Nadja":
I knew the danger:Breton's legendary loathing of queers ...
Ever since Jacques Vachi had overdosed
on opium in a Nantes hotel, naked
with another man,Surrealism's pope had unchurched men
of my kind ...
Howard passes the test --
I left the Master of the Same New Things
with every warrant of his trust in me
as his translator
-- but represses his urge to identify his sexual preferences:
of course I knew in my heart that the one
surrealist act-- O coward heart! would be to challenge this
champion of liberation, this foe of all
society's constraints, but I could do
nothing of the kind,
nor need I have. O reason not the need ...
The poem is a meditation on the way the world struggles to catch up with its own radical instincts, as well as on the way that process is embodied in the conflict between art and life. The homophobic Breton wasn't as open-minded as the artistic movement he led. But as Howard points out, it's possible to circumvent such prejudice for the greater good. He finishes off the poem with a beautiful flourish:
Where are we?
"Nadja" in Englishis still in print, and people still hate queers.
I allay that heart of mine with the words
Breton wrote to Simone, first of his wives(and a Jew like me):
criticism will be love, or will not be.
And we're off. This deceptively narrative poem about a meeting is one of many in "Trappings" in which Howard blurs the line between art and life. It's a graceful, insistent argument for the idea that not only is there no way to determine whether art imitates life or vice versa, there is no need to do so.
There are poems that directly address works of art, such as "Dorothea Tanning's 'Cousins.'" On the surface, it's a description of a sculpture, but Howard writes about Tanning's work as though it were a pair of people in the throes of a familiarly complicated relationship:
She came to him in dreams, as he to her
in waking. And that was how they would meet,
ever wrong from the start, however right
for the act, melting
together yet somehow sadly apart,
orifices certainly unmatched to
protuberances ...
Other poems address the makers of art themselves. Considering Antonio Canaletto, the 17th- and 18th-century Italian who painted perfect cityscapes, Howard notes that the Venice of his paintings, though it originally came from real life, was ultimately the Venice not of stone and canals but of memory:
Venice might change,
storeys be added,
campaniles fall,
but master-drawings in the studio
perdured his pattern
Serenissima
years on end, a topographical hoax.
The artifice was so powerful that at last "Venice had become/
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