The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales

Finally finished this. I picked it up months ago when I decided to write my beast fable/bestiary. As a kid I was obsessed with "The Bremen Town Musicians" which we had on vinyl and to which I would listen over and over again. After studying the tale I decided to read all 99o-some pages of this and have lots of thoughts/observations about these tales and their common motifs.

Pretty much, if you have a stepmother, she's wicked and dabbles in witchcraft. Trials and events happen in threes. There's always a dress of the sun, a dress of the moon, and a dress of the stars that a beautiful maiden will exchange with a false bride so that she may sleep in the same chamber as her beloved, but the false bride will give the groom a sleeping potion so that he won't hear the beautiful maiden's story and remember who she is. Luckily the servants will inform the prince and all will be made well. The cleverest son is usually the one deemed stupid or daft. If you can slip from the skin of an animal, a form you are required to take by day, and someone steals the skin and burns it, then you are free from your curse and will remain human. And on and on. I learned many ways to cheat the devil, so that's handy. It was enjoyable to read the original, darker versions of the tales Disney "cleaned up" and to read the tales no one ever mentions, like "Allerleirauh" which in the German means "of many different kinds of fur." "The Bremen Town Musicians" and "The Master Thief" are two of my faves.

Winner of the 2007 Beauty/Truth Press Chapbook Competition

Just found out my sequence Narcissus Resists won the 2007 Beauty/Truth Press Chapbook Competition. They are estimating the print date will be December 1st, and you can check in on their publication schedule here: BeautyTruthPoetryPublications

Derek Walcott Reads at the 92nd St Y

I heard Derek Walcott read at the 92nd St Y last night (and ran into some poets from NYU I met at Calabash back in May, including Dante Micheaux). The British poet Glyn Maxwell introduced Walcott, and I have to say Maxwell gave one of the best introductions I've ever heard. His homage to the line (and though he spoke about rendering the line right in painting, he clearly meant the metaphor to poetry), and the squiggle vs. the line was spot on. Though your squiggle might look new and pleasurable at first, and spare you the headache of trying to capture the line, after a hundred years when everyone is doing squiggles, it’s no longer unique and you’re still left with the simple fact that there’s no greater power than being able to get that line right, even if your attempts end as more squiggles.

Walcott read mostly new work, and I quote "so you can mark the decline" which I hate to say I felt, especially in the sequences upon sequences of poems inspired by his European travels, where he seems to be spending most of his time these days. He even said "I never thought I'd say that" upon announcing "Here is a sequence of poems in Italy" and again about Spain, "I never thought I'd write a sequence about Spain" and then about England “this is a really show-off book.” But there are only so many poems written while on a train in Europe I can stand—it seems all too done before, not only by others, but by him in his recent books, most notably the disappointing The Prodigal. The St. Lucia poems were his best—“The Acacia Trees,” “The Sea Change” (about St. Lucian politics), “The Egrets” (which the program had a hand-written draft of for us to follow along, already revised in many spots, making it interesting to see how he reworked the final lines) and “St. Lucia” as were the numerous “For…” poems since “the older we get, the more we write elegies.”

His final two poems were striking—the penultimate about when he first came to New York and was exiting the subway, only to find everyone huddled on the stairs and not a soul on the Avenue above. He then realized it was a Cold War nuclear holocaust drill. The final lines were amusing: “it was no way to live no way to die / but if we were it was at least New York.” And the final poem, his famous “The Light of the World” which elicited gasps from the audience upon him uttering its final syllables.

Two poems in the Fall/Winter 2007 Issue of Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry

The Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry is out now and includes two poems: "The Problematic Pear" and "Lamp". You can check out Beauty/Truth and order copies here: BeautyTruthPoetry

Margaret Garner

I saw the new opera Margaret Garner last night at New York City Opera, popping my opera cherry here in New York (long overdue given how long I’ve lived here). The opera’s libretto was written by Toni Morrison and the music was composed by Richard Danielpour. Morrison based her famous novel Beloved on the historical events concerning the fugitive slave Margaret Garner who fled Kentucky to the free state of Ohio in the 1850s, but upon recapture slit the throat of one of her four children (in the opera she only has two and slays them both, like Medea) rather than have them return to a life of slavery. One of the notes in the program stuck with me: whereas Beloved is about forgetting, Margaret Garner is about remembering, and the final scene of the opera proved this as Tracie Luck, who plays Margaret, wanders as a spirit about the stage fully illumined in her white dress, weaving her way through the assembled cast who all stand in silence and darkness, her story and the memory of her story restless, haunting us to this day. That was perhaps the best choice of the entire production.


I found myself editing the pacing of the opera as many scenes seemed to go on a tad too long. I know part of the convention of opera is to slow things down and to repeat single, simple lines over and over again in the arias, but the supposed emotional return of such a drawn-out convention had little impact, instead causing the entire production to lose its forward momentum. I also found myself taking issue with the music—too often it did not complement the libretto text. Now I can imagine a smart work that puts the text and music at odds or angles to each other to great effect, but this just seemed a blatant disregard for the words and their meaning (and from what I’ve learned about Danielpour’s ego, I’m not surprised).

One moment I’m not sure is clear to the audience is that Garner takes her own life in this version of the story (I believe historically she was just sent down river and died of typhoid fever). The statement is obvious: that she will be the master of her own fate and take her own life and through such an act of will defy the slave culture and make a statement that she is not someone else’s property but she and she alone owns her life and will decide when to end it.

The trial is interesting as they debate whether to try her for theft and damage of property since her children were considered the property of Gaines, or for murder since she killed two human beings. Both had the same result: execution, but for the lone daughter of Gaines who was advocating an end to slavery, the latter would grant human status to an entire population seen only as property. It ties into the discourse on love that runs throughout the production which too often runs to cliché (sometimes on purpose to make Margaret’s thoughts on love seem fresh and unique) but lines such as “love’s weapon of choice” left me shaking my head no no no.

My other quibbles concern the odd time jumps, done in part to show her children growing up, but the escape scene in Act II could have been condensed into a few days rather than telling us three weeks pass by; it would have had greater urgency to feel as if the slave owner Gaines was always on their heels. And then at her trial and execution no time jump is indicated, and we’re to believe it all happens overnight, Garner’s elderly mother Cilla somehow managing to travel to the sit of the execution. Finally, though Luck uses more of her lower registry in Act II to mark her deepening sorrow, I felt that on a whole that deeper register could have been used in many of the spirituals and laments. That shrilly soprano range did nothing for the events and story at hand.

I plan to see more opera, hoping I get over my distaste for the melodrama and the “opera voice” as I’ve been calling it, which rings unpleasant in my untrained ear.

Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones

Aimee recommended this to me months ago and I bought it back in the spring but just finally picked it up. God, what a heart-wrenching story set against the very real and disturbing 1937 Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic where tens of thousands of Haitians were slaughtered. Almost missed my subway stop a few mornings this week, that's how intense it gets. Something about a compelling narrative that localized and colored in an historical event I knew nothing about--I just couldn't put it down until I had read through and knew. And the knowing at the end will haunt you.

Derek Walcott's The Prodigal

I was disappointed in this "last" book (did I read somewhere that he claimed this would be his last poetry collection?) if anything for its self-indulgence. Just when I couldn't handle another scene of light likened to some painter, he parenthetically breaks in and makes fun of himself for his knack for making such a move:

"the light / out of pearl, out of Pierro della Francesca / (you could tell he would mention a painter)"

Of course he continues to do it, and such self-poking didn't save the poem for me but deepened my sense of the project as the whimsical musings of a major poet at the end of his life, his twin brother dead, his romances failed, his former lovers and friends dead. It felt as if he were spinning his wheels.

And there was something about his acknowledgment that he missed the 20th century that struck a chord with me:

"In the middle of the nineteenth century
somewhere between Balzac and Lautreamont,
a little farther on than Baudelaire Station
where bead-eyed Verlaine sat, my train broke down,
and has been stuck there since. When I got off
I found that I had missed the Twentieth Century."

I'm coming at this from an odd angle, but his love for formal English prosody does continue through from the 19th century, almost as if he missed the Modernist revolution. I mean on one hand that sense of tradition, of writing back to the empire having mastered their language better than they speak it lends him great formal power, which I've always admired in his work as the rhyme schemes never seem forced or sing-songy thanks to the power of enjambment. And I never find the poems archaic; he is Modern, just look at the brilliant reinterpretation of Homer's work in Omeros. That sort of re-interpretation and re-presenting of our cultural inheritance in contemporary terms appeals to my imagination and makes me think of books like Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. But I think his sense of Art with a big A is definitely a Romantic notion, especially when he makes comments like this in an interview: "There is no history in art...the criticism of art is historical, but art itself does not contain history." Come again?

His obsession with History vs. history has always intrigued me, and there's been a shift from addressing London and England as empire center to Paris and France in his last two books. It speaks to his mixed cultural legacy (St. Lucia, the Helen of the West Indies, exchanged hands between England and France again and again, so it makes sense he would write back to both). But where his preoccupation with England in his earlier work was to gain literary credibility, I find the shift to France an attempt to gain artistic credibility, especially with his identity as a painter. Just look at Tiepolo's Hound: it included 26 of his own paintings.

I would have thought the Art history, painter, ekphrastic lover in me would have appreciated his musings on art in this book, but it's far from the investigative scrutiny and illuminating connections found in Tiepolo's Hound and operates on this level of exclusivity where if you know the style of the artist or painting in question you'll get his comparison and reference; if not, it has the power to distance the reader as it sounds like name-dropping and lofty elitism. I found it a cheap shortcut to really describe a scene in a fresh way.

Maybe one of these days I'll return to that thesis I wrote on his work and flesh out some of those essay chapters.