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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Could it be that such derangement can rescue us from a torpor of the senses?
Feb 14, 2002 | First: interminable demurrals, apologies, false starts, uncomfortable silences, a clearing of the throat, a shifting from foot to foot, why did I ever say I would do this, it always turns out badly, I have not read the French and Spanish, I cannot vouch for the translations, the surrealists were beyond interpretation, there is nothing new to be said, you must experience these poems yourself, I am merely a stenographer, I am hungry, I could be playing tennis, it's an unexpectedly gorgeous day, I am pleading with my wife to give herself to me but I promised to spend two hours at least writing, what if the poets' heirs come after me with knives?
For some it's baseball or politics or religion that sits at the back door night after night, where night after night you go out on the porch and say No, not yet, I'm not ready yet, half-hoping that the fate you would die for, the thing that says You belong to me, will get tired of waiting for you and seek another victim. For me it's poetry, the atom bomb of letters, the big Jesus in the garden.
So all this hemming and hawing is me just trying to be cheerful and aw-shucks about what is actually an endeavor of obeisance. Which is to say, before saying anything, that I bow, I scrape, I beg forgiveness, turn on my back, open my legs and offer up my throat to the poets who can make the moon rise in my heart.
I'm no scholar, no critic, not big on subtlety. I'm for poetry that can flatten you even when you're drunk, a poetry with the smash, crackle and pop of punk, the roar of rock, the noisy slap of love in a cheap hotel, the sensei's wake-up blow with that damn stick; I don't want to be getting out the slide rule.
And it's no good to be alone with your madness, to feel you're the only one in the room who sees the toothless woman with the Luger trimming her nails. So to read the work of inspired madmen is to experience a kind of communion, and to be inoculated with madness, like taking a tiny dose of subcutaneous laboratory-grade schizophrenia, to ward off the genuine heebie-jeebies.
Hey. Wake up. You were mumbling. Are you trying to write the whole review without mentioning the book?
So there was indeed a book, indeed there was, edited and translated by Mary Ann Caws ... I must have a snack. Some cheese and crackers.
Mary Ann Caws, the translator, teaches at City University of New York and has written other books including "The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter" and "Dora Maar With and Without Picasso: A Biography."
Listen to this by Thelonious Monk! (You can't hear that?) Sorry, have to take the poodle out. Be right back.
Ah. What glorious white dogs!
And so here in the church of the surrealist poets, as I was saying, the reader and the poet are conjoined by words.
"My love whose hair is woodfire," begins André Breton, leader of the surrealists. "Her thoughts heat lightning / Her waist an hourglass / My love an otter in the tiger's jaws / Her mouth a rosette bouquet of stars of the highest magnitude / Her teeth footprints of white mice on white earth."
Isn't that good? Oh, you can't hear that, can you? Oh, well, bend down there to your computer and maybe you can hear what I hear: "Her tongue a doll whose eyes close and open."
Did you ever go out with a woman whose breasts were molehills beneath the sea?
"My love her breasts molehills beneath the sea / Crucibles of rubies / Spectre of the dew-sparkled rose / My love whose belly unfurls the fan of every day / Its giant claws / Whose back is a bird's vertical flight / Whose back is quicksilver / Whose back is light." Oh, but there's more: "The nape of her neck is crushed stone and damp chalk / And the fall of a glass where we just drank ..." Help! I can't stop quoting! It's too gorgeous! "... My love ... / Whose hips are chandeliers and feathers / And the stems of white peacock plumes."
Enough of the great Breton? OK? You get it? Why? And why at Valentine's Day? Could it be that such derangement can rescue us from a torpor of the senses? That when in February the Romans filled the streets for Lupercalia they were still a little stiff and chilly from too much sleeping on the stone floors of Rome, and so had to create rites of extravagant sensuality? I don't know. But come dance with me, the days are getting longer.
