THE MOONLIGHT IS A BROKEN WINDOW

Last week I read Marjorie Perloff's Frank O'Hara: A Poet Among Painters, a critical study of O'Hara's work in the middle of which I felt unhinged and suddenly able to read a few contemporary poets in a new way, poets like John Ashbery and Sarah Vap. I might call this moment Opening a Broken Door, or

The Moonlight is a Window. My first loves fall into two camps, poets like James Wright and Ai, with a modernist flare for the lyric line, and Jean Valentine, whose lyric is abstract--a meditative consciousness full of oblique reference. Mark Doty's essay "Ghost Sonnets" published in Jean Valentine: This-World Company, part of the University of Michigan's Poets Under Discussion series, sheds some rhetorical light on why so many of her poems have a classical resonance for me; their music is clear if their subject is not.

As ever, there are too many books, and not enough time to read them--much less time to write about them. Just now the California Fall has swept in, something off the coast is washing the leaves of the Chinese Banyan and my windows are open on a half moon outside, the spruce across the street are stabbing the night with a darker, softer, more mellifluous passion, life and death belong to me. They steer and bend forward like great sails. I want to walk. I want to be alone.

Perloff's book-length study explores O'Hara's realism, his relationship with the abstract painters of the 50's and 60's, painters like Motherwell and Jasper Johns and Grace Hartigan and Norman Bluhm and Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock, placing his approach to the poem in context with Abstract Expressionism and in reaction to Lowell's confessional mode. O'Hara has less in common, I'd say, with Michael Burkard and Sarah Vap and with Jean Valentine, than John Ashbery, though I feel as though reading Perloff's explanation of O'Hara's "Personism" helps me as a reader to approach these other poets, their momentary meditations, the consciousness that moves in their poetry without narrative, their mindfulness.

In the final chapter to the book, Perloff makes a smart comparison, contrasting the metaphysical restraint of Ashbery's sentences to the exclamatory jargon of O'Hara's syntactic ambiguity and phrasing.  How often have I tried to read a whole book of Ashbery's and found myself drowning suddenly in a comical phantasmagoria without a horizon? Reading Perloff's assessment of O'Hara reminds me that life is like that too, a sequence of external experiences. Full of meaning, and meaningless. Today online the new 9 gigapixel zoomable picture of 84 million stars in the milky way, jeweled and clouded with galactic dust. What a silly void, full of such bewilderment, mesmeric and glittering filth. But it's ours. O'Hara is a poet of surfaces. The poem for him is a canvas of action, of contrary tensions in which Time is fluid, and cubist. It happens all at once.

To John Ashbery

I can't believe there's not
another world where we will sit
and read new poems to each other
high on a mountain in the wind.
You can be Tu Fu, I'll be Po Chü-i
and the Monkey's Lady'll be in the moon,
smiling at our ill-fitting heads
as we watch snow settle on a twig.
Or shall we be really gone?  this
is not the grass I saw in my youth!
and if the moon, when it rises
tonight, is empty--a bad sign,
meaning "You go, like the blossoms."

One criticism of O'Hara's collected is that it's full of little useless moments too, and I might make that same claim for some of these other poets--what do we call them? Post-post-modern? Post-confessional? Hybrids? Whatever. "So much depends" on so little, after all. My own work is too sentimental and garish, but I like a violent splash of color, an offense, my little stain.

. . . . . . .

O, FRANK. MY LOVE IS COMING

TO GIANNI BATES

"Like a piano concerto your black
and white eyes, your white face and bright black hair.
And then, reclining in silence, you're there
with a hall of echoes arching your back
and forcing you to sigh. In me the lack
of sound is merely that I hear your stare.
And when you leave there isn't any air;
though I should stay aloft, I have the knack.
But you leave. There isn't any reason
to be silent; in halls the audience
disperses as the instrument's wheeled off
and through jet tears and wet mascara scoff
the year, boring heart-and-concert season.
Too, I've not been silent again, or since."

by Frank O'Hara


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I've been wanting to see Schnabel's new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I miss whatever it is that flares into feeling. A bit of struggle, but with something deep. A small rip in the lining. A little ruin, a little beautiful desperation. Schnabel and a deep splash of color. O'Hara. Sold out. So to Francis Ford Coppola's YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, a slow, strange, philosophical fantasy. Friends and Strangers, I'm not romanticizing. You've got to prepare yourself for this one with a moody shore. You have to be receptive to the idea of yearning, the question of time. It's as strange as a lovestory by Calvino, and as creepy, in some places, as a medieval fear of the werewolf. Anyone looking for Shakespeare, beware. Anyone looking for the marriage of theoretical physics and eastern philosophies, welcome. Think Mishima's SPRING SNOW palimpsested over Adolfo Bioy Cesares THE INVENTION OF MOREL, or Wilde's PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY. Isn't the first line of that book pricked by roses? Aren't the dreams of lovers murderous?

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Read Orhan Pamuk's MY NAME IS RED for my birthday this year. I'm going to try to say something substantive about this one later, because it's really too rich to explain. Love, murder, art. And the 16th century struggle in Istanbul to resist Western technique and religion. It's a serious novel, in terms of the balance of its characters and ideas, the sophistication of its plot and structure, and its gorgeous, daggering lyricism. My favorite novel of the year by a lightyear.

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And two lines from Mr. Ancel, Paul, for the new RAT:

Nun aber schrumpft der Ort, wo du stehst:
Wohin jetzt, SchattenentbloBter, wohin?

But now shrinks the place where you stand:
Where now, stripped by shade, will you go?

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