THE CRY OF THE BEAST A review by Christopher Bernard
Opera Parallèle presents a new production of Peter Maxwell Davies “The Lighthouse.” From left to right: Thomas Glenn, David Cushing and Robert Orth. At Z Space on Thursday night, April 28, 2016.
The Lighthouse
An opera written and composed by Peter Maxwell Davies
Produced by Opera Parallèle
Z Space
San Francisco
April 29 – May 1, 2016
The Grim Reaper’s over-exercised blade this year – which has seen the loss of so many figures from popular culture, from David Bowie to Merle Haggard, from Patty Duke to Alan Rickman – has not spared high culture. The Hungarian writer and Nobel laureate (and Holocaust witness and survivor) Imre Kertesz died this spring, and also Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, arguably – or rather, inarguably – Great Britain’s most significant composer since the death of Benjamin Britten.
By coincidence, serendipity or synchronicity, Opera Parallèle (San Francisco’s production company of modern opera), was preparing a new production of Davies’ most popular dramatic work. And the fine results, a triumph of talent over budget, were on view this spring over a handful of performances in San Francisco’s Z Space at Theater Artaud. These were dedicated to his memory, and it’s a great shame he didn’t live to see them: I think it’s fair to say he would have been more than happy, not only from the point of view of musical integrity and skill, but also of inventive and satisfying staging.
San Francisco’s well-known drama group Word for Word, which for 23 years has been staging short stories with ever-increasing theatrical sophistication, recently brought to the stage two finely wrought tales by Irish writers about Irish writers at SoMa’s Z Below. The results were a pleasure for both lovers of literature and of the stage.
Word for Word’s cunning device is so obvious one wonders why nobody ever thought of it before: take a good short story and stage it as a play, with every word spoken by a character in the story. The opportunities for theatrical magic are patent, and potent, and taken entire advantage of by Word for Word and its talented staff.
Tonight’s embarking (I saw it on April 1st) brought two stories, one by Colm Tóibín, the comfortable, fashionable middle-brow writer (“middle-brow” is sometimes mistakenly taken for a putdown, though it isn’t; a sturdy literary culture needs a strong middle-brow culture to keep the low-brow aspiring and the high-brow honest), based on an anecdote from the notebooks of Henry James. The anecdote was told to him by Isabella August, Lady Gregory—the Lady Gregory—writer, playwright and Irish folklorist, probably most famous in this country for her association with the poet W. B. Yeats and their mutual support of the celebrated Abbey Theater, now the National Theatre of Ireland. Henry James never worked up the anecdote into a story, but Tóibín uses it to draw out a tale about an affair between the unhappy Lady Gregory and the poet and womanizer Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and her long, puzzled savoring of what seems to have been the one great physical passion in her life.
There are books of poetry that, if only readers could be induced to pick them up, might change their minds for good about the supposed incomprehensibility, preciousness and irrelevance of modern poetry. Ernest Hilbert’s new collection, Caligulan, belongs to that rare class.
After his beautifully rendered Sixty Sonnets and the eloquent All of You on the Good Earth comes this richly wrought (if curiously titled—more on that below) new collection. Hilbert is a classicist in the finest sense of the term: he has a firm grip on the formal orders that have dominated the great tradition of Anglophone verse from the skalds of Beowulf and the Pearl Poet to the tight gems of darkness of Thomas Hardy, and he uses them to write poems that ring with very contemporary truths. A skillful artificer of forms of verse that have sometimes gone wanting or are unjustifiably neglected or despised after the earthquakes of modernism, he is afraid of neither tight meter nor demanding rhymes: he proves there is nothing whatsoever anachronistic about well-tooled verse; the rage of authenticity can speak as sharply in a sonnet as in a calligramme.
The book is divided into four sections, named after the seasons, beginning with Summer. The landscape is mostly North Atlantic, eastern seaboard, in the countrysides of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and the city streets of Philadelphia, where Hilbert lives, and which he knows intimately; he throws out the name “Atlantica” in a poem of that title: a place half mythic, half real, torn in the perpetual strife between love and time.
Hilbert has a strong feeling, expressed with great skill, for this “scape” and its denizens – not only human, but the animals and birds that squirrel in among the human detritus. It’s a world full of life:
“Daffodyls, two of them, astonish me
Ambushing me from winter’s nowhere …”
“A thin rain fastens banks of last night’s snow
With ice …”
“The gull pulls bags from trash and drags them clear.
He’s big as a cat, a blur of snow and soot.”
Cats are among the book’s household gods:
“She stalks the May yard,
… moves
Like a shadow …
… a helpless curl
Of fur in her jaws.”
One dies, another lives; and another rules:
“Ospreys orbit rule here, ruling as lords
Their drowned domains.”
A taxidermized moose rises in a museum diorama:
“You still startle, filling half the false sky.”
And yet the central, not always welcome but inevitable figure is of human beings, the planet’s caught, lost invaders:
“It’s pitch dark and pissing down so hard
You see nothing but tearful shards of light.”
“Wind conveys a muffled tune from a truck
Up from a valley, and they make out
Eddie Money’s ‘Two Tickets to Paradise’ …”
“The ship is locked beneath frozen mountains.
It crunches by inches against white floes.”
“He’s stranded in a place remote and sunless …
…
Above him … lie
The archaic stars whose light still shapes the sky.”
The poet here—the “I” of the poem’s fantasy, which is always the poem’s truth—is immersed in the baroque world of things and meanings, a sympathetic (if also sometimes moping and self-absorbed) character, embattled (as we all are, which makes his struggles so like our own) with the shaggy monster of meaning and its opposite, the tough, shiny thing that stares up at us from the bottom of its absence, and that will not, paradoxically, leave us alone:
“… where is our monster, the one we thought
Would always be there somewhere, though hidden?”
as he puts in “Cryptid,” about a visit apparently to Loch Ness, in search of the fabled monster. Then he finds that the monstrous absence is precisely the human, is precisely himself:
“… I catch the shallow
Smudges of my face in the cabin window.”
We haunt the world between a presence we can never find and an absence we cannot accept.
The poems rock between the contemporary and the archaic, binding the modern and the ancient into an embossed shield against time, demonstrating how the old invests the new with a palpable presence, and the new is often merely the latest mask of the ancient, which finds a dented, dulled, coruscating glamorousness in such poems (of particular accomplishment) as “Dishwasher” and “Judgement.”
Some of the poems have an almost palpable feel to them, like finely worked objects you can weigh in your hand, or even smell:
“The man holds the flaccid, bulging wet
Shape up to shine in the sun a moment
Over the slobbering jaws, then drops it.”
This the result of the gelding of a horse. (A tiny preface, tucked away on the copyright page, states, with a kind of reticent irony, that the author “wishes his readers a few uncomfortable moments.” Well, he succeeds—but never without compensating us with an eloquence more memorable than the discomfort.)
So we come to the odd title, a coinage that is explained in two pages of faux lexicography at the start of the book: it is, of course, a qualifier meaning “like Caligula,” the vicious, half-mad Roman emperor, who presided over Rome in a period of supreme decadence (any parallels with contemporary America are, no doubt, entirely coincidental!) and notoriously named his horse as consul; except that here the word is taken to mean “illogical fear of disaster … constant worry for the safety of oneself … obsession with cruel and irrational behavior.” And there is a poem with the same title at the very end of “Autumn”: about a panic attack the poet suffers after an almost comic avalanche of petty but ominous disasters (rolling together, in a rococo goo, among other sleights to human dignity, tasteless television broadcasts, coffee withdrawal, a call from his bank, a crashing computer, and the curses of “Olympian Jupiter”), portending (though it “just hasn’t happened yet”) his own mortality.
Other poems sometimes suffer from the risks and harrowings of an excessive self-consciousness: the poems that forget the brooding “I” and clasp our attention undistractedly to their subject (“Mother’s Day,” “The Gelding,” “Penrose Diner,” with its admirable cinematic “zoom” and neat reversal of relations:
“The waitresses smell of fresh laundry
And menthol cigarettes, arrive with winks
Like busy nurses. All around is cement,
And there’s a hotel in a lot filled with debris.”)
often reach the reader most keenly.
Though a constant trembling of anguish informs many of these poems, like a quiet ostinato rumbling constantly in the bass, what is most notable is how the poet’s anxieties are, in the main, transmuted from personal spasms of what sometimes sometimes feels like merely neurotic terror into objects of great beauty, a beauty that transforms the anguish that generated them into victories, however temporary, of grace.
Hilbert tends to write in a kind of contemporary Augustan “high style,” which has the congenital, Miltonic problems he does not always avoid of over-portentousness and patchy magniloquence. There are related problems when a poet has made his commitment to strict meter and rhyme: an occasional strained and contrived phrase hammered into a line with an ugly pruning of articles and dislocated enjambment (you can sometimes hear the phrase suppressing a snarl at the pinch) so that the blamed thing will fit.
But more often, and on the whole, the strictness of the procrustean bed to which Hilbert has bound his verses is a strengthener – and then the tight rhymes and the enjambed lines sing.
The collection, growing in strength as it moves through the seasons, ending in the resurrecting life of a typically glorious Pennsylvania spring, concludes with what, for me, is its strongest poem, marshalling the poet’s strengths in a swell of quiet, deep, and endearing, eloquence: “Who Is He Dares Enter These My Woods?” a poem that evokes a spring morning in center city Philadelphia with great precision (having grown up there, I can attest to it) and a moment of joy and affection that is entirely winning, that made me feel, surprised and admiring and, strangely—or perhaps not so strangely—grateful.
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs and Dangerous Stories for Boys. His latest book is the novel Voyage to a Phantom City. He is co-editor and poetry editor for the webzine Caveat Lector.
“Who needs atheists?” he said. “ ‘We
do not believe in God’? Well, I
don’t b’lieve in your blessed humanity.
The sooner humans are wiped out,
the sooner the rest of us can rot
in peace.”
I was intrigued, if startled. Cool,
he looked, rational, serene.
He smiled wanly. But it was no joke
to him, I could see. Nor did he preen
himself on his intellect or heart,
his courage to face the monstrous worst.
“We are, to put it bluntly,
the condign damnable Nazis of the earth,
her Kozentrationlagers’ kommandants,
her curse.” He looked grimly
around at the rumpled bustling street.
Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P. Ticas and Mauicio Espinoza
Tavern Books
66 pages
$17.00
A review by Christopher Bernard
There is a compulsive uneasiness to being a poet in the contemporary world. He (or she) has little place in a society that only respects makers of goods or providers of services that can “turn a profit.”
But poetry has little place in a market economy; neither the work itself nor any way of presenting it can make enough money to provide a poet with even a modest living, let alone anything like a fortune for himself or his publisher. And, as we all know by now, if your creativity can’t leverage you, at the very least, a few million in investments, with a hundred mill in loans, for the transparency of a billion in mid-term prospect (a modest enough ambition in the world of globalized twenty-first century capitalism), what real value does it have?
Because to be a poet in the modern world means knowingly and deliberately to choose a life of almost indecent poverty, or at best a tight little corner in the dwindling middle class doing something that does not deprive the poet of the time, energy and emotional and intellectual freedom to make the poetry that gives his life meaning. Poets keep the wolf from the door by doing something—anything—else.
In even the recent past, the respectable poverty of the poet was mitigated by respect, even fame: the poet was the voice of his people, of their hopes, loves, defeats, victories, during the great period of nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The poet wrote his people’s love songs, laments, elegies, odes, satires, lampoons, manifestoes, gibes. People loved and admired their poets; they quoted favorite poems to themselves for pleasure and consolation. They found in poems the words they could not find for themselves.
Gratuitous piece of poetry from a regular contributor, posted today in preparation for the upcoming January issue, which goes live at midnight PST tonight. Please enjoy!
Last Day of 2015
By Christopher Bernard
As in any other year
each day the sun rose, it set.
Mothers, friends, partners, lovers,
after laughing at us for longer than we cared to remember,
vanished overnight.
Where they used to be now is a hole in the air.
The monarch butterflies move in mists of wings
across the plains between Canada and Mexico,
rain takes a stroll across parched California,
and the moon glows down on everything on the earth.
The snow lines the pockets of the mountains with rebukes
as sharp as memories of kitchens on winter mornings.
A crocus breaks through the whiteness, a small pink fist,
sleek as rebellion, calm, deceptively delicate,
wagging in the wind.
Your partner is ice, hollyhocks, poppies.
Your lover is a fox hiding under a felled cedar.
Your mother is the wind.
Every day the sun set, it rose.
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. His poetry can be read at The Bog of St. Philinte.
