Kingfisher
 a Journal of Northwest Art and Literature

Dedicated to the appreciation of poetry, fiction, painting,
 literary criticism, drawing, sculpture, music, movies, video,
 but not exclusively that produced in the Pacific Northwest

Spring 2002

Volume One, Number Two,

 Copyright 2002 Kingfisher Press
 

3M:The Long Poem Today:

Merwin, McHugh, Muldoon

Filled up to the ears with haiku and other Oriental forms of brief poetic expression, it was wonderful to come across some poets who haven’t permanently discarded the long poem—a form made famous by Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron. Not that we Americans didn’t have practitioners of the long poem, for we did, but it  has fallen in eclipse for decades, and now a handful of poets have breathed life into the form, but with widely varying results and success.

It takes a poet sure of him- or herself to make the attempt.  I mean, if you fail at haiku, what have you lost?   A little more than two handfuls of syllables (17), and that’s all. It’s not enough of a pretzel to choke on. But Paul Muldoon, a poet born in Ireland and now a chaired professor of poetry at Princeton, has attempted to translate the form into a series of three-line stanzas of the kind he is used to writing in rhymed verse, and loses us in the process.  A haiku is not something that you grind out.  One has to live a certain contemplative life style for it to arrive on one’s doorstep and, like Sumi-painting, it simply can’t be produced with a churning mind and brush.  It has to be . . . achieved.  Meditation has something to do with it.

“Hopewell Haiku” consists of 90 short poems in haiku stanzas.  The first in the long series rhyme two of their lines. Hmm.  Non-haiku, I’d say.  But starting about poem 33 (he gives them Roman numerals, eg. XXXIII, I suppose to underline their ancient European antecedents (joke), he gives up his usual use of rhyme and reverts to traditional unrhymed triplets, which is more in the haiku tradition.  Okay:  let’s grant the poet his freedom of form, even to change form.  But the spirit of the haiku, its sense of physicality married to the shock of surprise, is totally absent.  Perhaps Muldoon has simply written too much good poetry in the Western tradition to step in and up to the Orient.  Most of the ninety haiku miss their mark.  Are there exceptions?

Here’s one that misses:

A muddle or mice.
Their shit looks like caraway
but smells like all spice.

Nice poem from a good poet, but not a haiku.  Nor this one:

We buy flour, bacon
and beans with pollen we pan
here in the Yukon.

Here are a couple that come closer.  Not at all bad. Maybe even haiku:

Raspberries.  Red-blue.
A paper cut on the tongue
from a billet-doux.

There would be no French in a real haiku, of course.

And:

Jean paints one toenail.
In a fork of the white ash,
quick, a cardinal.

There is the flash of enlightenment, the brilliant insight, the quick smile.  I only wish there were more of these.

In “Madoc: A Mystery,” we have a poem of 116 pages, in stanzas usually of  two or four lines each, some written in free verse, some that make use of true or else slant rhyme, many that don’t, with lines whose metric feet vary according to the poet’s need. “Madoc” consists of many individual poems, each preceded by a title in square brackets; the titles appear to be drawn to signify parallels to the poems found in Madoc’s wide reading in Greek and Latin.  The subject of the poem is obscurely ancient in origin as well. It ranges back and forth through time and place.  It is American in the sense it contains Indian tribes, Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, but it brings to his appropriated country the literary personages of Southey and Coleridge, among others.  It is a mix of sources and personalities caught up in a time warp, or a confusion of time zones.  In some ways, “Madoc: A Mystery” is intended to remain a mystery, a erudite puzzlement for the reader.  Few will hang around long enough to solve or partially resolve it, I fear.

More modern in theme and structure is “Yarrow,” whose stanzas consist of three lines.  In such poem the stanzas seem to be a device to permit opening up the poem on the page; that is to reduce its denseness, and, if so, it is a good one and works well.  Rhyme appears to be accidental; our language oddly rhymes even when you don’t want it to.  (Or haunt it to.  Or flaunt it to.)

“Yarrow” is an example of what Murdock does well and with aplomb.  His subject matter is too broad and complex to fit into a short poem.  It could well be written as a first-person short novel.  But Murdock is a poet, above all.  The long poem in my recent readings of them comes close to approximating the subject matter of fiction, complete with narrator who talks to us in a familiar voice in a language we recognize.  But the poet’s voice is often purposely obscured because his approach to his subject is too complex and widely referenced to be expressed in so simple a narrative.  So it is harder to read and understand but often well worth the effort.  The poet has said something that fiction simply isn’t up to stating.  Well, not usually.

“Yarrow” is a family of waterside plants that includes the noxious weed milfoil .that lines ditches in rural areas, such as the farming country of Ireland where Muldoon comes from. It takes him back to his boyhood and his relationship with his father, familiarly known as “Da.”  He moves back and forth in time deftly, from the killing of a calf on the farm to telling time by the readout on the VCR.   The flashback sequences are mixed with contemporary events centering around the poet’s relationship with a unnamed woman, who is (among other things) a drug addict.

This is S__.  She does cocaine and mainlines “curare,” which is her pet name for heroin.  She has a labial ring with a salamander dangling from it and lesbian friends.  But she likes men, too, and the poet makes pretty clear the oral nature of his relationship with  her.  She is wild, intellectual, and hopelessly lost.  She gets a tattoo of a heart pierced by an arrow on her upper arm.  Sores soon cover those arms from shooting up and venereal disease.  She is part of the poet’s gang and they range round the world.  She stinks of sweat and patchouli oil. The smell both repels and attracts him.  He says, “I myself flap like a little green heron.” She offers him peyote, joking, This bud’s for you.”  They live in the world of Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton and Robert Hughes, but the poet’s mind is also occupied with images of Freud and Charlemagne. The couple has a Porsche, or she does, and they travel to faroff lands, often by ship.  They are in New Haven (Yale) and she is hospitalized for heavy menstrual bleeding associated with cancer, which may be ovarian or uterine.  At one time she wears scrubs, which may mean that she works as a nurse in a hospital, or else is there to obtain drugs.  She is very sick and dies.  The poet grieves and mourns.

Not very cheery stuff, but it is the makings of life today, and the poet is part of it and feels it is not to be excluded from the subject matter of poetry.  The poet’s world of words,  word origins, word associations, historical antecedents, poetical allusions, boyhood’s eradicable incidents, city life, travel, eating and drinking are all here.  Muldoon melds them nearly seamlessly and offers them as his version of a life lived today.  It is unmistakable and an important statement that he makes.

W.S. Merwin—long a favorite poet of mine—approaches the long poem as autobiography, namely, his version of what aging poets find themselves doing, writing a family memoir.  It is full of ancestors, as  determined not to leave any relative out and uncharacterized.  This is “Testimony”—which could just as well be titled “Testament.”  It appears in The River Sound, Knopf, 1999.

It is written in rhymed tetrameter, ab, ab, cd, etc., and is, gasp, 58 pages long.  Paradise Lost it ain’t.  In fact, in many places it comes close to doggerel.  Perhaps it is the tight rhyme scheme that produces the sing-song sound.  This is most unusual with Merwin, whose lack of punctuation often causes intentional (and unintentional) syntactical error and confusion.  Sometimes this quality is charming; other times it is annoying.  Usually it produces powerful images and strong poetic lines. Not so much here.

“Testimony” begins, “The year I will be seventy/who never could believe my age/ still foolish it appears to me/as I have been at every stage . . . .”    So the poet is now seventy.  (My age, when I first read the poem, and quickly identified with it.  His ancestors came from Ohio, as did mine and Ian Frazier.  What is it about the state that, a generation or two later, makes people highball out of there for “the far territory?”

Ohio is a prosaic place.  Therein lies its appeal and its lack of distinction.  It is full of plain,  lovable people.  It is the kind of place you might will your ancestors to come from.  Only, there is no need to.   We are all  made of memories, both chained and lifted up by them.  We are memory’s prisoner; the trick is, not to drown in the nostalgia we generate.  Let the past pass, if you can.  Trouble is, we can’t.

Nor can they, the others, who are also us.  He writes that they would happily give up the “open repeatable present” to “glimpse the place where they were small/or in love once and be able/to capture in that second sight what in the plain original they missed and this time to get it right[.]”  This is Freud’s theory of neurosis, of course, but that doesn’t mean Merwin’s insight isn’t relevant, the language penetrating and original..  A bit later, but still early in the long poem, he states that “I hear the same linnet notes in the morning air that I heard laying when I came now . . . I am the child still listening.  . . .”  We remain our essential selves, whatever our age.  That is the lesson brought about by aging.

Family enters into it; no, it is all about family.  His mother moved from idyllic Ohio to Pittsburgh and lived to regret it.  Her aunt Marie, called Ride by them, had married wild Jack, but divorced him because he lied and ran around.  She herself was not much better, characterized by her sister as haughty and vain.  We have known them all, known them already.

Her family starts to tell stories, stories invaluable to the poet, for it is the stuff out of which he builds his poems of memory, but the family members never finish their tales; they drift off on the wings of nostalgia and forget to finish, or else they are interrupted by another and purposely end the tale, while the boy, the future poet, is left without the knowledge he already knows he will need to build his house of poesy.  So it is a long, long poem of memory and loss.  The loss is sad but inevitable.  In the absence of building materials the poet must make do with shadows and fragments of memory.

Names of dead and nearly forgotten relatives flit in and out of mind, almost as though the mind were a window, a window on time, a window often obscured by the gauze of memory, as though it were a curtain caught up by a faint breeze.  “Testimony” is also a snapshot album of words, the photo words yellowing from fixer failure, the highlights diminished or entirely gone by exposure to the air, the shadows without detail.  But it is all the poet has with which to build his nest or hive.  And build it he must.

There is much beautiful poetry here—brilliant lines, resounding words and phrases, the marriage of the expected with the sudden and unexpected.  I used to kid that I would spend my old age punctuating Merwin, since his poems are nearly totally lacking in those common guideposts of reading put in by writers to keep readers from foundering.  But the joke is on me.  If you read Merwin with the inner ear, that is, aloud, or silently slowly spoken to oneself, the need for punctuation disappears.  There is a natural rhythm to what he is saying and the only obscurity is a syntactical illusion.

“Testimony” is a family album that should be familiar (familiar meaning recognizable by how everything is related to every other thing, that is, by a family of things) to us all.  Don’t we have relatives like his?  You don’t have to come from Ohio, or Nebraska, as Dorothy did, to recognize the Wizard. Born with the coming of Haley’s Comet, Merwin expects his life to be rounded out by its second appearance.  He anticipates it greatly in a mystic sense, while at the same time he dreads it, because it will bring in its wake another kind of wake, the one where they hang a black wreath on your front door.  And all who know you, or know of you, will recognize the significance of one more death in the litany of family demises that comprise our collective history and irrevocable heritage.

Death too is the subject of Heather McHugh’s fine long poem, “Not a Prayer,” and we may think she is begging the question, for if it is not a prayer it is then a substitute for prayer and in fact a prayer after all.  It is prayer whispered in a time when there is no longer any belief in the power of prayer, or a God accessible by prayer, but a bullet aimed at the void where prayer used to live.  An anti-prayer is a curse aimed at the heavens, I think.

It is the first and featured poem in her latest book, The Father of Predicaments, that predicament being Being. It begins, “We sleep inside a bullet—cheek to cheek, in public anonymity—and then we wake.”  This is indeed strong stuff, but it is what we expect from McHugh and she does not disappoint us.

I had thought the death she watches and tends so bitterly and lovingly was her mother, but was not sure enough of myself to state it in public, and she told me she “was not my mother (who is still alive) but my artistic mother, a cellist named Raya Garbousova-- a dear friend since 1970 or so until she died—(and a friend now, in certain drifts and slants)—“  The “certain drifts and slants” is the poet ever at work, the poet who can never truly rid herself of that essential voice that must speak the emotional truth of what’s happening, or else die trying, but partly obscure the expression, too, because of the pain it causes her.  Hey, that’s okay, and I can appreciate what’s involved.

How do you face the death of a friend except angrily, bitterly?  Any other way is to declare a truce in the battle with god or God, and if he or He (or she or She, for that matter, though a female god would never permit such suffering) doesn’t exist, the exercise is good for what ails you.  And it is life or Being that ails us all.  To a writer words are a way to purge the agony that otherwise would lead to madness or suicide.  Take your choice.

I don’t worry about these pseudo-solutions in McHugh’s case.  (Is she a case?  Aren’t we all?)  She strikes me as being too sound of mind and spirit to seek the direct or indirect solution that many poets take— death by one kind of injection or another.  There is too much work yet for her to accomplish.  And a healthy anger opens up the pores.  (It is why those Swedes sit in a hot tent, then jump in the polar sea.)

The poem is long, but not so long as Muldoon or Merwin’s.  There is an economy of words at work here.  But there are enough words, words to describe the awful drawn out hospital death of a friend, as people drift in and out of her room, wrapped up in themselves and their private fears, their routines, their alibis and excuses, their business concerns and inattentiveness and constructed vagueness.  Fear.  Meanwhile, death goes on, that is, the dying process does, until life loses the battle because of the attrition of its vital forces.

The poet stays.  It is the least she can do, not cop out.  She records what is going on with a ruthlessness not many would reveal.  What is it really like—the old woman on the “high” bed, her deaf socialist husband who denies her the morphine that as an eighty-year-old doctor he knows she needs but doesn’t want to administer, then does because of pressure from their sons, and does the job badly, missing the vein and popping the drug under the skin, where it can do her no good and only harm?  So this is how it goes—a jumbles of people and opinions,  deeds and misdeeds?  It is what happens.  The daughter not a daughter but a friend, even closer than if related by blood.  The handyman, whom she once called “a genius,” two men in different uniforms, the nurse who remains professionally calm for, after all, this is no loved one of hers.  It is but a job.  Another death, ho-hum.  (I’m on my break.)

The old woman drifts in and out of consciousness.  Tubes feed her.  She is sometimes surprisingly lucid, other times comatose, then awake and incoherent.  The poet records all, unflinchingly.  If I am going to be here, she seems to  say to herself, I am not going to let any of this get on by me.  The poem is documentary and might well be written as non-fiction or cleverly fictionalized with an appropriate distance worked in, but the person who is self-assigned to write the account just happens to be a poet, and hence it is poetry that comes out.  Poetry, we learn, isn’t much different from the other forms of communication that might offer themselves up for grabs.  It resembles ordinary speech, only doesn’t let itself pull any colloquial punches. It is too honest to say anything less than the awful truth in the only possible way.

She admits,

“I thought I would be earth-struck,   terrified, there in the body’s room with nobody, or only a body, by my side.  Instead

her calm’s my haven—most specifically from the swarm of friends who loved her bright society, and so

assemble in the aftermath.  Each visitor dips once into the study’s pool of quiet where she lies

so self-absorbed, preoccupied
then flees toward the living,
in the living room.”

She sits there, as the others pay their obligatory call and quickly leave for the room in which the others have warmly congregated. She toughs it out by the bed until a photograph of her friend in better days undoes her.  She wryly comments to herself, and us:  “(You shouldn’t let a body out of sight.)”

And in the next stanza, the poet tells us that, all the way there on the plane, she played the child’s game with herself:  “If I ever fall asleep, the plane would plummet from the sky.  And so I kept the watch.  That’s  how I kept them all alive.”

This rings true to the essence of the child that lives deep in all of us still and clings to  superstitions designed to ward off evil spirits and the horrible deeds they bring with them.  Another fine poem brought to us, whatever the personal cost, by Heather McHugh.

Morris Graves, shortly before his death in May, 2001
Photo courtesy Art News.

Poems by Tim McNulty, from his book, In Blue Mountain Dusk,
Broken Moon Press, Seattle.  Distributed by  Pleasure Boat Studio <http://www.pbstudio.com>).  Also available through Amazon.com and at the MONA Store.

Little River Love Poem

 The early summer light
steps birdlike
down the east slope of Green Mountain
and stirs low mists along the river
into flight.

Back inside, you lie
still asleep in your summer skin.
A blue sheet thrown back like a dress,
your dark hair
spilled rain over your shoulders.

Having so much and nothing at all to say,
I slip cold arms around you.
You turn, sleepily,
and a deep green river
drifts away in your waking eyes.

From a wooden skiff
tied to a salmonberry bush,
you step ashore,
holding in your arms
everything I ever slip away.

Spring and the River’s Answer

1
Dusk and the old trees stir
on the far bank, a warbler
trills across the springthaw torrent,
soft winds
preen in the bankgrass.

2

Down from the chill snowy pass

my friends

have followed out to the road,

voices ebb

at the edge of a clearing,

move off soft

as a deer.

3

And those same thoughts that

drew me away—

once here

have slipped like thin papery husks

at the tips of branches

at budburst.

An unnamed poem that serves as the book’s introduction or prefaces goes:

He wouldn’t answer

but followed the last light

up a steep broken ridge,

a cloth shirt and not

water enough for a cup

of broth.

From a shadowed meadow,

I watch him disappear

among boulders, too far

to hear my shout

and too late to make it

back by dark.

Nothing now, but to follow

in blue mountain dusk

those heedless tracks across a snowfield,

the blind vision leading

headlong toward some fall

or ascendance.

Note:  None of the paintings below are in the book or a part of the show.

Mark Tobey, Glowing Fall, 1969

Mark Tobey, World Egg, 1944

Tobey as a young man in Paris,
about 1925

Kenneth  Callahan, Stump Landscape, c.1934

Kenneth Callahan, Rocks and Shore, c. 1930

Kenneth Callahan, Untitled
(Small Bird) nd

Kenneth Callahan,  1983

Photo Marsha Burns

Guy Anderson, Still Life, c. 1934

Guy Anderson, Laocoön, 1978

Guy Anderson, Sharp Sea c.1943

Guy Anderson, August 19747

Photo Phyllis Dearborn Massar

Morris Graves,

Logged Mountain. 1935

Water Birds,1933

Hooded Falcon With Urn, 1932

Morris Graves, Self Portrait,1933

INGMAR BERGMAN REVISITED

The Passion of Anna

Bibi Andersson

Liv Ullmann

Max von Sydow

We are aging.  That is, getting old.  Imagine what it must be like to be, say, an actress such as Liv Ullmann and watch one of your movies from 1969.  Not so long ago, it still is thirty years.  Where did they all go?  Half a lifetime for her, and for us.

With her strong bones and large fine features, there is more structure present than with the rest of us to hold her face together.  Yet she and we must marvel at what she looked like during her first years together with Bergman.  She was a Nordic beauty.  Her face caught the cold light from off the sea and mirrored it luminously.  She ain't so bad today, either.  And neither is Bergman.

We can see this in two similar movies made three decades apart.  In "Trolösa" (Faithlessl), Bergman is more than a marionette moving his characters around on a somewhat wooden stage; he is a character himself.  But then in "The Passion of Anna," the presence of the writer/director was also made known when he had each of the characters step aside in turn and describe the character he is portraying.  He insisted in telling his audience that they were watching a movie, not life.  Typical Bergman, one might add, whether you like it or not.

I like it, and I like him, though often his movies drag and the scenery is bleakly beautiful.  There is an omnipresent Swedish despair that broods over all human endeavor.  People say things to each other that my friends and never say, though we may be thinking such thoughts.  In America (and I suspect in Sweden, as well)  we are burdened by overwhelming guilt and depression, but we hide it carefully, and it isn't until our acts of desperation result in  newspaper headlines  that we learn the horrible truth of the matter.  Presently the story of the pig-farming brothers in Vancouver, B.C., is the news, and the excitement is that they may have killed up to 50 area prostitutes and rendered them into fat in kettles as they did their hogs.  The question is, what did they do with the bones?

Bergman only has some mysterious character slaughter sheep and burn a horse in its stable, after first unsuccessfully trying to hang a puppy, rescued by Max von Sydow, in the part of Andreas Winkleman, a writer and an alter ego of Bergman.  He falls in love with Anna (played by Ullmann), who is distraught because her husband and child have been killed in an automobile accident and she was driving.  She is idealistic in her memory of him and faithful in her love, but it is time to move on, and Max is the object of her affection. Similarly lonely and despondent, it is a natural match up, and she moves in with him.  Gradually Max learns of Liv's  duplicity and the anger not so deeply buried in domestic routines.  On the edge of breaking up, she tries to kill him too in a car wreck, along with herself.

Another couple is their friends.  They are played by Bibi Andersonn and Erland Josephson.  They too are disenchanted and Bibi offers herself to Max as an opportunity for an interlude.  Who would say 'no' to the fetching Andersonn?  Bergman skillfully reveals the depths of his characters through dialog and behavior.  He deftly cuts back and forth between the two couples, studying them as individuals, and noting closely their interaction.  It is a pleasure to watch the Master of Despair at work.  What he does best nobody does any better. No wonder Woody Allen not only emulates him but respectfully imitates him at every opportunity.  It is the highest compliment.

And how does Bergman treat similar material more than a generation later?  Similarly, but not as well, I'm afraid.  Yet the master's touch is still present, and the author/director continues to intrude and remind us, hey, this is not Life but Theater.  As if we could forget!  

Erland Josephson as Bergman, the playwright and director, who listens

Lena Endre as Marianne, the unfaithful wife, who narrates most of the movie

Again Bergman wants to remind the audience that they are watching a play, or rather a movie.  The characters are actors and the actors are summonsed forth, one after another, by the writer/director/producer both to interpret the characters and to narrate the story.  This makes Bergman (played by Josephson, who played the architect thirty years ago in "Anna" a totally passive character, or persona.  He does not participate in the dram but merely observes. It is much more complicated than that, of course, this being Ingmar Bergman, the Imprisario.

Marianne is also his muse, or else one of them.  She is called into being by the writer sitting at his desk at a beautiful seaside retreat in Sweden to both inspire him (like all the actresses out of his theatrical group she is beautiful and photogenic) and to define the character that she plays.  So the story line is often confusing.  She appears when summonsed, or else when she decides to appear of her own volition.  Quickly she becomes Marianne and both plays the part and advances the plot line.  Bergman simply trots alongside and jots down the action.  He is abetted by Marianne speaking is soul-baring asides, much as he was in "The Passion of Anna" when Liv Ullmann and Bibi Anderson resumed the guise of actresses and simply told Bergman what was going on in the minds of their characters. It is a devise unique with Bergman, but with antecedents in drama throughout the ages.  In movies it was originally a big surprise to the audience, but Woody Allen, a longtime Bergman fan, appropriated the device and other directors have followed Allen's lead and today it is pretty familiar.

The story again is one of faith and betrayal, and over all again looms a dismal fate that none of the actors can escape.  If the theme is faithlessness, it is repeated faithfully through the movie in the form of marital betrayals that pile up so repeatedly that the audience at the end feels itself violated.  Again there is the feel of Greek tragedy recreated in a bleak Scandinavian setting, where normal seeming people talk endlessly (and fascinatingly, I must admit) about the meaninglessness of life and all human endeavor.  And is there not a hint of cosmic retribution (hard to achieve, when there is no vengeful god agreed on) for the sins of the marriage partners, who have violated their vows?

Bergman likes ambiguity, and so do I. I saw the movie twice, with only a week's interval between viewings because my wife and I remained perplexed about the relationships of the characters. They are complex.  We are told that the two couples are close friends; well, sometimes proximity produces relating (to quote from my favorite author, Elaine May) and Bergman seems pornographically slow in showing how the friends end up in bed with each other, and are awakened to each other, but do not have sex.  What?  It's what he tells us. Don't despair, for they soon make up for lost time, though that time was brief.  Adultery runs rampant.

I'm not going to repeat the plot  and ruin the movie.  As in many Swedish movies, there is a suicide, multiple marital dissolutions, traumatized children, and characters wandering off along a stormy seashore, muttering to themselves about the hopelessness of everything.  It's what we've come to expect of Bergman, over the years, and if he didn't serve us a generous helping of ennui we'd be disappointed.

We put up with a lot from him--ceaseless self-analysis, silly bed scenes with characters who seem to wish they were elsewhere, or with somebody else under the sheets, light playing on the faces of his favorite female actors as the minutes tick by, wooden dialog, characters who move as if underwater--simply because he is so good at what he does.  It all comes together, film after film.  He is the master.  Watching him, time after time, one is disappointed at the inferiority of so  many American movies.

Oh, yes.  To complete the cycle, Josephson repeats and Ullmann directs the picture.

MO' BETTER BLUES

One American movie that is in no way a disappointment is Spike Lee's "'Mo Better Blues."  I had thought that Lee pandered to the worst qualities in both black and white society and avoided his movies, after walking out of "She Has To Have It."  Well, my apologies, Spike.  You know how to write a movie, direct it, film it, and act in it.  I say, "Three  Thumbs Up."  (Hey, somebody lend me a hand, will you?)

It would have been good without Denzel Washington, I suppose, but it is even better with him playing the part of a Miles Davis-type be-bop trumpeter.  He got the part down cold and, IFC tells me, went through six months of trumpet training to be able to play the part so well--lipping, fingering, cheek puffing so correctly it sent a chill down my spine.  He is one of America's finest actors and, thinking back, has a list of impressive credits as long as his arm.

The movie is totally convincing.  Everybody is great--Wesley Snipes  as Shadow Henderson, Cynda Williams as sexy Clarke Bentancourt, Spike Lee as Giant , the tiny gambling band manager, and John and John and Nicholas Turturro as Moe and Josh Flatbush, two Jewish booking agents, done for low comedy.

Denzel Washington as Bleek Gilliam

It is Denzel's movie, however. He is electric.  The camera loves him.  He acts with a surgical purity.  There are no extra words for him to speak and what he says in laconically riveting.  What he knew about acting, so long as twelve years ago!

Bleek Gilliam is first seen as a young boy resenting his trumpet lessons, as the neighborhood kids call him out to play and he can't go.  Cut to Bleek as grown man with a band of his own, Wesley Snipes on sax, Giancarlo Esposito on piano, Bill Nunn on bass, and Jeff Watts on drums.  Oh yes, Cynda Williams wants badly to sing with the group.  How badly?  Guess.

Spike Lee almost steals the show as the compulsive gambler manager who bankrupts the group and leads to himself and Bleek being beaten so badly that the trumpeter can never play again.  Cynda goes off with Wesley's new band and careers are made of such opportunistic alliances.  Bleek,  now musicless, marries his old paramour and has a child by her.  How he makes his living we are not told.  Time passes and the child is handed a trumpet to practice on. When kids from the 'hood call boy out to play, a wizened Beek nods permission.  We sense the future will be different, however slightly. For one thing, there will not be the great music that only talent and relentless dedication will produce.

Everybody is excellent in the well defined roles given them by Spike Lee, and the camera work, lighting, and invisible direction he gives his cast produce a excellent film. In the past there were "Young Man With a Horn" and "Cotton Club" as two of the best jazz films to contend with.  Lee's is by far the winner.

NORTHWEST ART 101 (or is it 501, the Graduate Course?)

Delores Tarzan Ament, with photographs by Mary Randlett,  Iridescent Light:  The Emergence of Northwest Art, University of Washington Press, March 2002. 388 pages, color and black and white plates, index, bibliography, $40.  

by Robert. C. Arnold, Editor

What if there were no such thing as The School of Northwest Art, only a loose association of artists, friends, and sycophants, at its peak at mid-century, and you had to create such a school? (A school, after all, is but a pedagogical device for organizing, teaching, and writing intelligently about a subject.)  So, how do you go about creating one? And whom do you include in your school? 

Actually, such a school was created by Life  Magazine in 1953, when it published its seminal article, “Mystic Painters of The  Northwest,” which included Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, and Kenneth Callahan, and elevated them immediately to mythic status. It matters not if some of them were no longer speaking to each other at the time; they sure knew who the others were, and soon everybody else did, too.

Thus the school concept was born.  It has been hard to get rid of ever since.  However, who  else belongs in the so-called school will ever be a controversial matter, since reputations, careers, money, and friendships (such as they are, tenuous things each) depend on inclusion. 

This was the big question facing  Delores Tarzan Ament when she decided to write this fine book.  She started out with a list of more than a hundred artists, culled that down to around sixty, found that still too large for a book that would do biographical and critical justice to each of the important artists, and finally, painfully, reduced that to the number 22, sure that she would offend many competent painters, sculptors, and photographers. 

Which she did. 

She was urged to write the book and seek funding for it by her old-time friend, Mary Randlett, who had lovingly photographed all of the artists since a child; Randlett was born into a fortunate situation, for her mother was Elizabeth Bayley Willis, confident, booster, and agent for first Toby, then Graves, and for a short time object of either of their affections, when Toby (at least) wanted to marry her.  Graves was vehemently opposed, for reasons he did not care to state. 

At the turn of the century Randlett was aware that many of the artists were sick or already dead; she knew that she and Ament had but a short time in which to conduct interviews and to take fresh pictures.  Much personal information was collected and brought up to date in 1999.  (Anderson died two years earlier and Gilkey the previous year.  Leo Kinney hadn’t  much longer to live, but was able  to see his first major one-man show at MONA last year.)  

Twelve of the artist are painters, two photographers, and the others either sculpt or sculpt and work in mixed media.  The book contains 21color prints, one illustrating each of the artists except for Randlett, who works only in black and white and whose photographs are reproduced in sparkling duotone throughout the book.  The artists are presented chronologically, that is, according to birth date.  This brings Tobey to the fore, though many might put him there for other reasons. 

The biographies that Ament writes will probably never be surpassed for accuracy or completeness of detail. Access to Elizabeth Bayley Willis’s papers at the UW archives supply an astonishing amount of personal anecdote.  This is the key to the intense personal relationship of the artists and their friends revealed in the book.  It is no surprise to learn that of the four, Callahan was decidedly heterosexual.  Bill Cummings was married seven times. 

Tobey maintained that his relationship with Per was not homosexual.  But it is a surprise, and an anomaly in the book,

to learn that Neil Metzler picked up Morris Graves and invited him home for the night—that home being Kenneth Callahan’s Granite Falls retreat, and Graves delighted in what took place in his painter friend’s home, knowing that Callahan (with who he was on the temporary outs) wouldn’t approve.  (Page 305.) 

This is odd because Ament proclaims on page xvi of the Preface that “Sexual and economic ties existed as well, which it is not the place of this book to discuss,” and immediately tells us of the monthly stipend that Dr. Richard Fuller paid to Tobey (and others).  For more than 300 pages we are let in on the economic aspects of the artists’ relationships, which are complex and informative, but left to wonder about the sexual peccadilloes that surely occurred.  And suddenly we are told about Metzler and Graves, one long-ago dark night of the soul.  We can only surmises that Metzler made the story flagrantly known in a recent interview and wanted it told.  His reasons, and Ament’s, remain unknown and surprising. 

Much valuable new information is advanced in the book, not all of it favorable to the artists’ character but most of it important in gaining a sense of what it was like to be an artist in those times.  For instance, Tobey did not have a solo show in NYC until he was 54 years old; all that time before he was relatively unknown, or simply part of the local scene of artists and writers.  Afterwards, of course, his star was a comet.  To this day he remains an enigmatic figure.  Patron John Hauberg characterizes him in old age as ”a wretched old man, paranoid, terribly self-centered.  He thought everybody owed him something.”  Perhaps they did. 

The personality of an artist is not that of a model citizen.  If it was, he would probably not create anything of value and spend his time making money or playing golf.  This was a motley assemblage of quarrelsome personages.  Ament hits the nail on the head, but weakens her thesis somewhat, when she states, “Although they  have been identified as the Northwest School and labeled “mystics,” most of the artists profiled in this book responded to such labels with scorn.  None of them shared any feeling of groupness.  They weren’t painting buddies; most of them barely tolerated each other.” (Page xiv.) 

Similarly the image of “iridescent light,” does not apply to all of them, only a few.  And such painterly light is not the sole property of the Northwest.  Turner comes first to mind, El Greco (who influence several of the so-called school), and the American Hudson River School; startling, luminous, transcendent light is sought by artists for its dramatic quality. It enhances what otherwise might be ordinary, drab. It is not the sole property of painters but greatly sought by photographers. 

Which brings us to the two photographers included in the book.  Ament is somewhat defensive of the artists she included in the book and in her Preface immediately offers an apology for the many fine artist excluded from the book.  (She does not apologize for some of the doubtful ones in it, however.)  Randlett’s rather wooden but nicely cross lighted and fully toned black and white pictures of nearly all of the artists in the book are documentarily invaluable.  I can’t imagine the book without them, or without her invaluable contacts resulting from being Elizabeth Bayley Willis’s daughter. But to have them represent the very best of photography done in the past fifty years is, well, an extreme kindness. They belong in the book, surely, but she does not as a principal artist.   Nor does Johsel Namkung, whose huge nature scenes refuse to break down and continue to surprise and delight viewers. 

Joseph Scalea (not my favorite, by a long way) probably does. And there are many qualified others.  Marsha Burns is one.  Steve Wilson.  Harald Sund.  Galen Powell.  Jerry Gay. And of course Art Wolfe. 

There are painters missing, as well, and Ament is quick to name some of them in her preface.  She evokes special criteria in her defense of a few who are included (long-time residence outside of the Northwest, for instance, or else cases where iridescent light is not apparent in their work) that would justify the inclusion of other very fine artists who are excluded.  She names a few.  Jacob Lawrence, William Ivy, Ambrose Patterson, Hilda Morris. 

I would agree with a list that includes Anderson, Tobey, Graves, and Callahan.  Also with the selection of Horiuchi, Tsutakawa, Cummings, Kenney, Metzler, and Levine.  I will respectfully name a few more:  James Martin, Norman Ludin, Alden Mason, Hilda Morris, Ward Corley, Jan Thompson, Joel Brock, Wendell Brazeau, Walter Issacs, Margret Tompkins, Winsor Utley, and Frank Okada.  Not  all would fit, admittedly, nor are they of equal merit. 

Ament is already speaking of a second book, perhaps a third. So many fine artists in the region that wouldn’t fit in the first.  Skillful, hard-working artists who have accumulated a body of work that is uniformly good and important. 

To faintly damn this book is high praise and deserves to be seen as such.  Ament has done a dutifully fine job. It was a lot of loving work. The book has instantly become a primary source for anybody even vaguely interested in the art of the Northwest.  It will be looked at time after time; it will be included in course curricula locally and across the country; it will find its way into libraries and become a principal reference source when information about art is sought by all kinds of readers. And Randlett’s photos will give a visual clue as to what it was like to be alive at such a rich time and to be part of the mélange.

  THE IRIDESCENT LIGHT EXHIBITION AT MONA

An exhibition featuring the 22 artists included in the Ament/Randett book, Iridescent Light; The Emergence of Northwest Art, opened January 12, 2002, with the two authors delivering talks and a slide show.  The room was packed. It made it hard to see the show, but I saw a lot of familiar faces, both in the crowd and hanging on the walls. It was more than a week before I could get back and see it at my leisure.  

Many of the paintings and sculpture were from the museum’s permanent collection.  They were more than a little familiar.  There is a lot of art by the 22 featured artists that was produced in the past century and a number of museums in which to house it, once its owners decided to pass it on to the public.  

The Henry Gallery and Seattle Art Museum are just two sites.  The MoNA collection is good, but it is not the only one or the finest.  Many of the pieces are not first rate. But two major collectors,  John and Mary Hauberg and Marshall and Helen Hatch have enriched the collection with gifts or promised gifts.  This makes what is up on the walls at any given time quite a decent representation.  I continually marvel at Hatch’s good taste over so many decades and how he could pick out the very best of what was made available to him.  Of course having money helps.  

I was glad to see Anderson’s “Eggs in Winter”—an example of how good he can be when he works small.  So many of his huge canvases dominate any area large enough to admit them in the first place.  This painting is only 15X9,”yet it is quietly impressive.  In the corner of the gallery displaying Tobey and Graves, side by side, perhaps in unwelcome eternal brotherhood, Tobey’s “Broadway After the Theater,” 1942, is a fine example of his work from this period, as is “World Egg” (not included in the exhibit, however).  

“Broadway” belongs to the Hatches, but will end up in the museum’s permanent collection and boost it.  Three other Tobey paintings are on loan from the Haubergs, including a portrait of Richard Gilkey and one of a friend of Tobey’s that I always mistook for a self-portrait.  

Graves’s “Masking Bird, ” 1953, is an excellent example of the artist’s work from the year in which I think he did his very best work.  There are a number of masked bird drawings and painting that come onto the secondary market from this year and the next, but none so fine.  It too belongs to the Haubergs, but is promised.  

“Walking, Walking, Singing in the Next Dimension,” 1979, was reproduced with permission for the cover of the book and as a flyer for the museum show.  It belonged at the time to the Schmidt Bingham Gallery, but since has been sold to a private collector, Mrs. Glenn Janss.  She must have paid a hefty price.  But if anything is worth it, this one is.  

“Eagle of the Inner Eye with Chalice”1941, belongs to the Hatches, as does “Spirit Bird,”1979.  They are Graves at his best and well worth a trip to LaConner to see, even if you’ve seen them before.  

Upstairs, and occupying one wall is the 63X108” “Korea” of Johsel Namkung.  It is an Asian forest and example of what the photographer does best.  You can practically reach out and touch the trees, or step way back and count their branches.  It is like having your own window on nature.  What a view!