The Ace of Spades Reversed

Returned to the Great Hall at Cooper Union last night for Auden's Centennial celebration presented by the Poetry Society of America. The program presented his work in a chronological manner, starting with "Taller To-day" from 1928, hitting highlights such as "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" and "September 1, 1939" and ending with "The More Loving One" from 1957 and three slides of him as a young man, middle aged man, and elder to delineate but three of his many personas. Alice Quinn opened, of course finding a way to work Elizabeth Bishop into her introduction (good quotes nonetheless). The rest of the program was for the most part good though a tad long, the lulls being two performances by opera singers and a handful of longer poems group-read. Let me start with the opera.

A Mezzo-Soprano sang Benjamin Britten's settings of "Funeral Blues" and "Johnny" but she seemed to be more into her melodramatic performance than allowing the audience to really focus on the words. There was no marriage of music and words here, or even a song where it doesn't matter what the words are but how the singer stylizes and sings. Clearly the words were more important than this woman's voice and even more important than the music (as good poetry should be), and yet she did her best to obscure it all with some vibrato opera stylization. Very disappointing. The other meldodramatic performance was by the Baritone who sang a scene from "Elegy for Young Lovers" that was all about an arrogant poet complaining about his reviews and critics and competition. Perhaps in the context of the opera it would have made more sense, but it seemed to mar the evening as a failed humorous attempt to show this character as a stand-in for sentiments Auden perhaps had in his own career as a poet.

The cast of presenters was interesting: John Ashbery, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rosanna Warren, Francine Prose, Glyn Maxwell, Maria Tucci, Michael Cunningham, Saskia Hamilton, Nicholas Jenkins, Katha Pollitt, and Carl Phillips. The best readers (in terms of clarity, tone, pacing) were Rosanna Warren, Francine Prose, Maria Tucci, and Carl Phillips. And some of the "group reads" worked, such as the "duet" on "Victor" of Francine Prose and Glyn Maxwell. And some failed, such as the long four person "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" where clearly some voices were better than others...

My favorite moment was Carl Phillips reading "If I Could Tell You." Something about his slight nerves (it was the first time he appeared in the program) and his voice that made the poem feel painfully intimate--as if I, or any of us in the audience, were the person the poem addressed, one lover confessing to another their inability to confess which also made it feel "overheard" and voyeuristic, calling into question whether the other, the you was even present to hear this utterance.

And two echoes: the first was the line "the ace of space reversed" from "Victor"--the Ace of Spades has been on my mind since I pulled it as my card at a Christmas party this past December. The second was Shakespeare's The Tempest represented here by Auden's "The Sea & the Mirror" where we learned from the Auden scholar Nicholas Jenkins (smart, but not a great reader) about Auden's relationship to Caliban. I drew a triangle on my program to denote the three identities a writer inhabits: Prospero (wisdom), Ariel (play), and Caliban (disruption/subversion).

And one last tidbit: the actor, Sebastian Shaw, who plays the unmasked face of Darth Vader in Star Wars was a childhood friend of Auden who appeared with him on stage in childhood performances, in particular one where Auden played Caliban.

Oh, and here's an NPR story on Auden's centennial: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7519773

The Tempest

I saw Sonnet Repertory Theatre, Inc.'s excellent production of Shakespeare's The Tempest last night at the 45th Street Theatre.

They made interesting use of video, projecting water effects superimposed over the eyes of the key players at the beginning, almost as if we were Prospero looking into the waters and divining future events to come. A similar effect worked later when Ariel confronted Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian in the form of a harpy, and when Iris, Ceres, and Juno were summoned to entertain the newly wedded Miranda and Ferdinand. As the actors spoke their parts, their ethereal heads were projected on the screen with their mouths moving deliberately out of sync with the words uttered. The delay between the visual and aural experience heightened the sense of otherworldly power.

The actors double and sometimes triple up their roles, so you get interesting pairings and foils like Caliban and Ferdinand, totally opposite (one handsome and fair spoken, the other misshapen and crude) but both bound to serve Prospero. In fact in one scene Caliban casts down his wood cord and renounces Prospero's mastery over him to follow Stephano and his liquor, only to have the same actor play Ferdinand in the next scene, picking up the cast down wood as a chore for Prospero as he strives to prove his love for Miranda. Miranda and Gonzalo are also paired, which makes sense: one the faithful daughter, the other the honest old counselor who remain true to Prospero.

One last observation: for those of you who watch LOST, there are nice echoes of survivors stranded on a mysterious island. Perhaps the writers of LOST would do good to consult their Shakespeare.

Men in the Elevator

Conversations overhead in the elevator:

1. Morning. Two trenchcoated, suit and tie men bemoan the cold. They pause and the one says "I didn't even do my hair today." The other says "Because of your hat? You can always fix it in the bathroom."

2. Afternoon. Two men, different from the first set, discuss their scarves. The one laments last year's lost scarf, its warmth, and then says to his friend "You're not wearing your red scarf today. Does it clash with that jacket?"

Strong Is Your Hold

The Great Hall at Cooper Union was filled to capacity last night for Galway Kinnell's 80th Birthday Celebration. Nice to see such an overwhelming turnout.

Highlights and the line-up:

Robert Bly opened with Kinnell's "The Bear" followed by a tennis anecdote from E. L. Doctorow and "On the Tennis Court at Night". Mark Doty highlighted transcendence in Kinnell's work and read from Kinnell's latest, Strong Is Your Hold , with Cornelius Eady finishing out the first third with Kinnell's influence on Cave Canem and I believe the poem "Insomniac".

Edward Hirsch read "St. Francis and the Sow" and Marie Howe followed with a moving story about the role "Freedom, N.H." has played in her life, how she still remembers the fluorescent light hum and the room in which she first read it with her students, how it said perfectly what she was feeling when her brother passed, and how Kinnell recited it last summer from a "house" her daughter had built out of pillow cushions after a dinner party. Yusef Komunyakaa and Anne Marie Macari finished out the second third.

Then we hit the memorable readings. Sharon Olds' delivery of the humorous "Oatmeal" before pulling a rhymed couplet veritable "Ode to Galway" from a wine bottle, glitter included. Grace Paley's irreverent and comic wind-up: "I'm going to read Galway's poem "Shelly". When I'm done, I may something, and I may not." And when she finished: "Alright. Enough of poets." And she promptly sat down with a wicked and mischievous grin on her face. And Gerry Stern, who read the last poem from Strong Is Your Hold after mentioning he tried looking up some of the difficult words in the poem, only, "They aren't in my dictionary." C.K. Williams ended the last third with "The Porcupine".

Which brought us to the man himself, Mr. Galway Kinnell. I hope I look and sound that good when I'm 80. He read a handful of poems, including "The Cat" and an entertaining story about how his editor, a cat lover, thought the poem dissed cats and wanted it removed from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone. But any cat lover would know the poem celebrates the feline for the very thing people hate about cats: the feline penchant for independence, mystery and causing trouble. Kinnell gave a haunting reading of "The Fundamental Project of Technology" and read an excerpt from "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World," starting at the very lines I quote in the "Notes & Conversations" to Euclidean City: "On the Avenue, through air tinted crimson / By neon over the bars, the rain is falling." I re-read his poem today and was struck at how much of an influence it was on me when I was composing Euclidean City.

A lovely night despite many of the annoying dilettantes whispering around us.