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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting, Autumn
2002
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Bursting
Into BLOSSOM:
The Poetry of James Wright 1 As a rule, poets of the Fifties wrote highly structured verse. Sestinas and sonnets were routine. With their copies of Untermeyer’s Forms of Poetry and Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry tucked under their arms, they were well prepared as they trudged off to class. Roethke at Washington, Miles at Cal Berkeley, and Lowell at Harvard were among the leading poet/teachers and each had his or her following. Their students soon became a cash crop, well, at least to the extent that publishing poetry paid anything at all. Poets became teachers who were well paid in academe. It was not a large group of practicing poets that resulted, but it was a significant one. I watched from my adjacent perch (fiction writing), but did not really appreciate them and their achievements until recently. Now I realize that they were a damned and privileged group. I admired them, but am glad I am not in their numbers. It was a high price they paid for their art or craft.. Most of them died early, died young. But they had achieved a lifetime's output in so short a time. Madness (in the formal sense of receiving professional treatment for mental disorders) was prevalent. I wouldn’t say that mental illness is necessary for writing good poetry, but it seems to have accompanied the process and been part of the result. Lowell and Roethke were in and out of mental-treatment centers; so were many of their students. It is not necessary to name them all, I think, for they comprise a catalog of Who’s Who in modern poetry. Seen from a perspective of some fifty years, their achievement seems extremely worthwhile and a retroactive visit may be highly productive. As an undergraduate at the University of Washington in the early part of the Fifties, I was editor of the English Department’s undergraduate publication, "Month’s Best." That is, I worked my way up to editor by being on the board with several others, who became editor in turn—Les McIntosh, Ursula Spier, Levi Thompson among them. Then I was drafted into the Army. When I returned in mid-decade, the scene had changed significantly and many students had obtained degrees and departed. New ones had arrived in my three years away. David Wagoner was now on the faculty and Richard Eberhart was hired as a temporary replacement for Roethke, who was undergoing confinement at Firlands, a sanitarium nearby. But many of the same student/writers hung around campus, either taking classes still or else living on The Ave for the sake of the intellectual, bohemian, and social life it provided. Almost without exception we smoked and drank heavily. (I mention this because it soon began to take its toll.) Drugs were not in wide-spread use yet, but some experimentation was going on with peyote and mescaline. Pot smoking (unless I missed that part of the scene) was infrequent and not practiced by most of us. This is the context for much of what follows. Jim Wright was one of those newly arrived when I returned to Washington to complete work on my M.A. The Army had let me out three months early for this express purpose and now I had the GI Bill to help support me. "Month’s Best" was in the process of changing its name to Assay. It was published quarterly and the first issue was to be type set, just like a real literary magazine. Only the quality of the material we deemed inferior, and we decided to hold off its initial publication for three months, at which time our initial issue had doubled in size, for we had an annual budget. I was its editor. I had strong feelings about the fiction submissions. I knew less about the quality of the poetry (which I was writing, too--terrible stuff), and was heavily influenced in the selections by Poet Richard Eberhart, who was faculty advisor to our new journal. He bade me be more inclusive and broad minded. So I chose a poem by a student named Jim Wright, one that I didn’t much like. Dick approved. It began, "We tossed our beer cans down among the rocks/And walked away." It was called "The Fisherman." Well, I was a fisherman, and an early environmentalist, and I simply was opposed to what the poem said was happening as well as how the poem said it. How many times can a man be wrong in his lifetime? It was Wright’s third published poem, as nearly as I can tell, and an important building block in the series of poems that comprised his first book, The Green Bough. Echoes from this poem appear throughout his writing career, and a master’s dissertation could probably be made from tracing themes from early to late. Jim was in at least one course of mine, perhaps more. He was married and working nights, and when he came to his morning class in one of the seminar rooms of Parrington Hall, he immediately fell asleep, dropping his head on his chest, and slouching low on the writing arm on his chair, or else, if up at the conference table, simply dropping face down on it with a thud. I too worked nights, and probably did my fair share of dozing off. Our teacher was kindly Wayne Burns, who loved us, no matter what we did--what our offence was. There was no danger of failing his class or getting a low grade. Wayne was heavily into sex and flower symbolism; D. H. Lawrence was his mentor. The course was a lot of fun, with a lot of pretty girls in it. Jim later went on to get his Ph.D. degree under Wayne, writing on Charles Dickens. (Some chapters from his dissertation were reprinted in The Collected Prose of James Wright.) He was a serious literary scholar, and when he went on to teach it was always literature, not poetry writing. In this he differed from the other poet/scholars of our group and those at other universities. The life and time of a poet who teaches is precarious. Donald Hall has done a careful job of detailing Wright’s life in his introduction to Above The River, The Complete Poems. (It is important to know that Wright’s Collected Poems came out long before the Compete, and they are not one and the same thing. The Complete was assembled posthumously by Wright’s second wife, Annie, and by Donald Hall, a loyal and trusted friend. To me it is astonishing, the body of good work Wright published over the course of his thirty-some years as a practicing poet. And though dead at 52, the poet who produced the work is not really dead, for he lives on in the poems, which is one of the reasons he worked so hard to write and publish them. Illness and early death were likely prospects for the kind of life he led. Often he underwent treatment for bipolar disorder (as it is now called: then it was manic/depression); heavy smoking, and hard drinking no doubt shortened his lifespan. In retrospect, they seem so much the necessary accompaniment to the writing of poetry of that time that they cannot easily be separated out from the man and his work. In other words, they are integral.
2 It is such a large body of work, comprised of so many notable poems, that it resists easy approach and analysis. The frontispiece of the Complete lists an even dozen books, most all of them poetry. The first is The Green Bough and "Fishermen" is number four. (I still don’t like it, but am getting more fond of it and tolerant on repeated readings.) Almost all of the poems in it and in the succeeding volume, Saint Judas, are in traditional verse forms and make use of complex rhyme schemes; additionally they employ Wright’s special use of off- or slant-rhyme, and it takes some getting use to. (I often thought that a poem ought o be approached as one would a cactus.) Once gotten use to, thought, the poems are a delight. A poem needs to be consumed slowly. It is good to have puzzled out the rhyme scheme and the poet’s possible alteration of the verse form. Often much of the meaning of a poem only begins to emerge when it is heard aloud after several readings. And repeated readings—often with years in between—produce kernels of illusive meaning missed on the first or second or third efforts. Rather than being seen as laborious or discouraging, such rereading often turn out to be illuminating and delightful. There are many good and important poems in Wright’s first two books. In fact, I think I enjoy him most when he is working in these tight, traditional forms, though often the lines sound a bit stilted or old-fashioned. Brownonian, one might say. But there is a nice taut sound to him; his models for these early poems were Frost and Robinson. They served him well in forming his own means of personal expression. Writing poems like these is hard work. But the intense training produces a professional whose later work in free verse, or in less structured forms, avoids many of the pitfalls and careless constructions that other poets never outgrow and in the future prove to be embarrassing for them. Wright’s later work shows the same degree of craft when it is not inhibited by rhyme and iambic meter. Later, near the end of his short career, he returns to these earlier forms, and surprises us with how well he can handle them. They are a pleasure to encounter, sprinkled as they are in among the freer, looser poems. Plath was writing tight metric poems about the same time Wright was. She too broke away in the late Fifties and early Sixties. They were influenced by the same contemporary poets who had preceded them by only a few years—Frost, Roethke, Lowell, among others. One might think that Wright would condemn the poets of his time who did not begin by writing structured verse but he didn’t, at least not in the cases of Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, both of who he spoke highly of and was quick to recognize as talented and skilled poets. He spoke and wrote about them frequently. Wright’s prose and literary criticism are surprisingly polite and overly considerate; often he sounds Southern, addressing his subjects as either Mister or Misses. This is practically unheard of in critical writing. He is also lavish with his use of superlatives and every gentle adjective has an adverb of formal politeness attached. 3 Wright was subject to debilitating bouts of depression for much of his life. He drank too much, which may have resulted from these long down moods, or else the drinking may have been a byproduct of them. Both produced a kind of irresponsible behavior that cost him his first marriage and his teaching job at Minnesota. Even his best friends tended to lose sympathy with him over time. He considered his first two books failures. But these were not hard time or academic unfairness. The Fifties were nurturing to poets and fawned over them, giving them teaching jobs and publishing books that later were deemed not very good. So Wright proved to be his own worst enemy, at least in an academic way. Ralph J. Mills, Jr., published Contemporary American Poetry in 1965 and included Wright init and spoke of him favorably; he has said some of the most penetrating and enlightening things that have been said about him. But earlier, James Dickey had reviewed New Poets of England and America in Sewanee Review in 1958 and had blasted Wright and his poetry. A series of angry letters had been exchanged in the journal, with Wright participating, until, suddenly, he admitted defeat and acknowledged that Dickey was probably right. This was tantamount to caving in and admitting defeat. He acknowledged that his earlier work had been wrong-headed. This was not true, but the self-admission was enough to put Wright into a long funk. He stopped writing and did only some translations of a poet named Trakl. The influence of Robert Frost and Robinson were put aside for good. New models were needed, and he began a long search. Change is difficult and poetic change is most traumatic. When Wright began writing again, his poems were very different. This disturbed his earlier readers and fans, who expected more of the same out of him. Wright began to write about—almost to idealize—certain underground and criminal figures. And there were intensely personal poems he wrote about a man putting himself back together in a more or less natural world, not wilderness but certainly rural. He said he found contentment there--often at a friend’s farm. He tended to idealize nature excessively, and some of the poems from this period sound sincere enough, but emotionally a little off-center. And I think it is impossible to build a pantheistic philosophy out of a weekend visit to a few farm animals. Wright believed he could do it and the resulting poems are well done but unconvincing. There has never been any doubt about his ability to crank out good, enjoyable verse. His next book, The Branch Will Not Break, was not what anybody expected. He had found that he would heal, given some time in which to renew himself. His poem, “Lying in a Hammock, etc.,” [quoted in the next column over], is an oft-quoted illustration of the emergent James Wright, and its final line, “I have wasted my life,” been greatly argued about. Time after time he tried to explain to puzzled critics what he really meant, for they saw it as an abject and total surrender. Read (as it must be) in the context of the rest of the poem it is no such thing. Rather, it is an affirmation of life. The the natural objects of this rural world—the golden horse turds in the sunlight, cows with bells following one another, a leaf blowing in a green shadow, two pines, the advance of dark, a chicken hawk headed home at the day’s end—all combine to produce a wonderful calm and stillness. Call it tranquility, or as much as he was able to find in his troubled life. The poet's mock conclusion that he has wasted his life indicates that he now realizes he has pursued the wrong goals, tried to purge the wrong demons, all along, and much personal torment has resulted. Living, and the life that goes with it, are much simpler than he thought, than we thought, if only the simple farm life can be recognized for what it is, and its principles adhered to. Whatever they are. Thus, the center is calm, if only one can find the center. The calm is also short-lived and not easily renewable. His friend and in some senses mentor, Robert Bly, says that two powerful energies in his life and work have been struggling to be set free for some while: a natural American speech and [new accompanying] images. They are blossoming forth, to use his own words for them. And the vision will burst into bloom. Mills sees him joining a tradition of older poets, specifically, Roethke, Eberhart, and Kunitz. Odd, but all three taught at Washington while, or just after, Wright was studying there for his Ph.D. Is it an odd coincidence, or was there much cross-fertilization? It’s a good point, and Bly finds some correspondences with Roethke’s Lost Son and Praise To The End. The similarities, I think, lie more in the personalized aspect of how he uses his subject matter and his use of a kind of intense subjective idiom. Mills refers to the word “preconscious mind” for these images, and I will not argue against it, though I think it is more consciously derived.. This collection was followed by Shall We Gather At The River in 1968, and the incomplete Collected Poems in 1971. (The Complete Poems came out in 1990, published 10 years posthumously.) The poems become freer, but more obscure; simple-sounding but increasingly complex. Occasionally there is the return to a rhymed poem, almost as if to say to his fans (considerable by now), “See? I can still do it. And do it well.” The rhymes are distinctly his own still, slanted and often oblique and hard to find. It takes a search, it does. I find myself going back to these with considerable enjoyment, but less so to the earlier poems, though I can marvel at how well he handles these traditional forms. To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977) was his last book, a beautiful one, and his favorite. I quote from it in the column alongside. It is fun to read Wright's occasional prose. It has been collected and published by the University of Michigan Press a year after his death. His wife, Annie, edited it. I haven’t read a good poet yet who couldn’t write fine prose—Roethke, Wagoner, Hall, Hugo, a host of others. Wright's prose-poems were written while living in Italy, and evidence what seems to be a happy man, one full of benign reflections. As prose, they are models; if I were to teach a course in composition I think I might use them as my text. Wright’s bulletins from Rome and Verona are prose at its very best. They constitute prose-poems of high quality. They are terse, illuminating, and enjoyable. I delight too in the Goose Prairie poem, which is about fishing with fellow poet Richard Hugo. He discusses the background in an interview with Dave Smith, published in 1980 in American Poetry Review. There have been some memorable fishing trips in recent literature, including a great one for salmon with Gary Fisketjon (editor at Knopf), Richard Ford, and Raymond Carver, but this is Wright's is one of the best. I cannot truly say I wish I had been along on it. It is one of those experiences that is only fun when you read about it long afterwards. His last book, This Journey, comprised of important poems and prose-poems, was not published until after his death. He was sick for years, the decades of drinking, brawling, smoking taking their cumulative toll. First he noticed a sore throat. It would not go away, and doctors misdiagnoses it and treated it topically. It soon became an advanced cancer of the throat, mouth, and tongue. Eventually he was terminally hospitalized and friends came to pay their last respects. He handed a manuscript of his last book to James Hall, a long-time friend and fellow poet, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC in March of 1980. Hall read it beside Wright’s bed. Hall describes Wright as “my wretched racked friend.” He was a room for four, “noisy, shabby, and dirty.” Soon Hall and Annie got him moved to a clean, warm, friendly hospice, where he died. He had been happy, traveling in Italy at his wife, Annie, and teaching at Hunter College, following years of turmoil. Hall refers to these years often in his introduction to the Complete Poems. He details the less happy years as lovingly as can be done. These include barroom fights, the drunk tank, broken friendships, and long periods of confinement in mental hospitals. The truth must be spoken, yet Wright could not ask for a kinder yet absolutely truthful elegy. More than twenty years later Wright’s books still sell well. University of Michigan Press has had no trouble keeping him in print, and in 2001 his Complete Poems, my copy, was in its ninth printing. That is remarkable. He had a large group of fans and aficionados, and their ranks continue to grow. I can’t say he was a major poet, but he was among the best of his time. Hall said Wright had the best ear of his generation. It was a talent-driven, anxiety-ridden group and a rich literary time. Suffering produces a purging of extraneous elements in a poet's life, and this is what might account for the quality of the verse from this fecund time. A good example of this
quality might be a bit of prose he dedicated to his close friend and
fellow poet. It is entitled, “A True Voice, for Robert Bly.” It is
from the posthumous collection, This Journey: “In northern Minnesota the floors of the earth are covered with white sand. Even after the sun has gone down beyond the pine trees and the moon has not yet come across lake water, you can walk down white roads. The dark is a dark you can see beyond, into a deep place here and there. Whatever light there is left, it has room enough to move around in. The tall thick pines have all disappeared after the sun. That is why the small blue spruces look so friend when your eyes feel at home in the dark. I never touched a blue spruce before the moon came, for fear it would say something in a false voice. You can only hear a spruce tree speak in its own silence.”
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View paintings by Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson
What's Up?
Though we are a quarterly, with issues that correspond roughly to the seasons, we intend to update our issues frequently, adding new pictures and articles. We hope you'll come back and visit us between issues. The featured artist’s work—usually a painting positioned
right below the masthead—will change, too, giving Kingfisher
a fresh look from week to week. And there are semi-permanent links to
artists whose life and work we consider important. fEATURED
POET: James Wright See Above The
River, The Complete Poems, 1990, for more fine poems We tossed our beer cans down among the rocks, And walked away: We turned along the beach to wonder How many girls were out to swim and burn. We found old men: The driftwood faces Sprawled in the air And patterned hand half hidden in smoke like ferns; The old men, fishing, letting the sea fall out, Their twine gone slack. You spoke of Saurian beards Grown into layers of lime, Of beetles’ shards and broad primeval moths Lashing great ferns; Of bent Cro-Magnon mothers beating Their wheat to mash; And salty stones Stuck to the fin and scale Of salmon skeleton, And lonely fabulous whorls of wood Drawn to the shore, The carping nose, the claws, not to be known From those dried fishermen: We watched the speedboat swaying in the scum A mile offshore, Or, nearer, leaping fish Butting the baby ducks before their climb; And last of all, before the eyes of age, The calves of graceful women flashing fast Into the fluffy towels and out of sight. You pointed with a stick, and told me How old men mourning the fall Forget the splendid sea-top combed as clean as bone, And the white sails. You showed me how their faces withered Even as we looked down To find where they left off and sea began. And though the sun swayed in the sea, They were not moved: Saurian faces still as layered lime, The nostrils ferned in smoke behind their pipes, The eyes resting in whorls like shells on driftwood, The hands relaxing, letting out the ropes And they, whispering together, The beaten age, the dead, the blood gone dumb.
[Above: Where is he, where in the world? It is a place I’ve never been, but then, maybe poetry is supposed to take you to such impossible places and make you believe they exist. Below, a famous James Wright poem that has been often discussed and whose meaning has been argued about, even while the poet was alive. His own pronouncements are interesting. He in no way means for the last line to be taken literally, "I have wasted my life." It is a poetic statement, and its meaning is entirely dependent on the string of images that precede the final statement. The meaning of the statement is not entirely one of irony, but possibly irony mixed with a sly sense of humor. To me, the statement is an epiphany and a joyous one. He may mean that his life, till now, had gone in the wrong direction—toward learning, teaching, intellectual suffering. Instead, he should have lived the pastoral life and delighted in natural phenomena, which includes horse apples and the flight of birds. What do they have to do with poetry and world literature? It is a sentimental longing and perhaps a wrong one. In his heart he knows this. But I am aware that I may be alone in this interpretation. The important thing is that each of us have our own reading of this and other poems of his. And—I warn you—yours may change over time, as mine have. I think this is for the good.]
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. [And another famous poem of his:] The Blessing Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the s kin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. [I believe not a word of it. It was not like that at all! It is a poem that the poet built out of a certain feeling, perhaps at the time, perhaps sometime later. Indian ponies—or for that matter, no horse, cow, or creature short of a dog—can exhibit emotions such as kindness and happiness. As for them bowing "like wet swans. They love each other." I say, crap. This is the pathetic fallacy carried, in the manner of the Romantic Poets, to absurdity. The phoniness continues: the pony’s mane falls "wild" on her forehead. Well, the poet may want it wild, for what it’s worth, but the mane simply falls, in the manner of manes. If the poet was not present, there would be no wildness to the mane’s fall. In fact it might droop, spill, or drop. The image of the mare’s ear being like the skin over a girl’s wrist is nice. I won’t argue it. And I agree that the poet, in this respite from urban life, teaching, drinking, and academic dispute, may well feel, if but for an evening, that all is well in the rural world. But the final line that is important to so many people is a tortured joke. Since he can’t (none of us can) step out of our bodies, the idea of breaking into blossom is patently impossible. We are locked, Jim, into those bodies until death liberates us from them. But the thought is a nice one. If true, in spring, we’d all resemble a pear orchard.] Written in a Copy of Swift’s Poems, for Wayne Burns I promised once if I got hold of This book, I’d send it on to you. These are the songs that Roethke told of, The curious music loved by a few. I think of lanes in Laracor Where Brinsley MacNamara wrote His lovely elegy, before
The Yahoos got the Dean by rote. Only, when Swift-men are all gone Back to their chosen fields by train And the drunk Chairman snores along, Swift is alive in secret, Wayne: Singing for Stella’s happiest day, Charming a charming man, John Gay, And greeting, now their bones are lost,
Popes beautiful, electric ghost. Here are some songs he lived in, kept Secret from almost everyone And laid away, while Stella slept, Before he slept, and died, alone. Gently, listen, the great shade passes, Magnificent, who still can bear, Beyond the range of horses’ asses, Nobilities, light, light and air. [There are some awfully nice things in
this poem. I have to like it, for I liked Wayne Burns and Roethke, and
they are in it, too. I also like Swift, but admit to not having read him
for decades. And I like the rhymes. Wright’s rhymes become deliciously
addictive. I take it (perhaps wrongly) that there was some sort of
Swiftian seminar at Washington, with professors whose specialty he was,
coming from afar to attend, after which they returned to their
institutions by train, planes being not all that common a means of
transportation back then, at least not for short distances. Macnama’s "lovely" elegy and Pope’s "beautiful, electric ghost" are fine images, and "Charming a charming man, John Gay" is Roethkean, and reminiscent of the older poet’s taking Yeats as his mentor. That Swift died alone, without his Stella, is sad but well known, and no sadder than how so many depart the earth, but Wright makes something more of it: "Gently, listen, the great shade passes, Magnificent, who still can bear... Nobilities, light, light and air." I omit the "horses’ asses," and wish that he had. But the lines are sonorous, wonderful. They make me think of Wallace Stevens and his great poem, "Sunday Morning." And I think the search for rhyme, appropriate rhyme, keeps the poem tight and taut. Excellent. Now, I’ve commented on the happiness he insisted on in "The Blessing" and called it artificial. (Actually I said it was phony.) But I accept as genuine a similar happiness presented in his fine poem, "Northern Pike." Here it is:] Northern Pike All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for. And every body Else is going To die in a loneliness I can’t imagine and a pain I don’t know. We had To go on living. We untangled the net, we slit The body of this fish Open from the hinge of the tail To a place beneath the chin I wish I could sing of. I would just as soon we let The living go on living. An old poet whom we believe in Said the same thing, and so We paused among the dark cattails and prayed For the muskrats, For the ripples below their tails, For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water, For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman. We prayed for the game warden’s blindness. We prayed for the road home. We ate the fish. There must be something very beautiful in my body. I am so happy. [Okay. I don’t believe it again, but in
a way I do. I am persuaded. You are happy, Jim, in a poetic sense (you’ve
proved it with this poem), and you are happy (briefly, comparatively, that
is) in real life. The torture has stopped for the moment and all is calm.
I’d like you to throw away the first eight and a half lines of this
poem; you needn’t necessarily start again. Keep the rest, for the rest
is magnificent, and that is a word I use rarely. It is . . . beautiful,
and nothing in it rings false, as is often the case. The words all fit and
are in the right places. There are no redundancies. The poem moves rapidly
forward in liturgical fashion, and the repetitions at the start of some,
but not all lines, bind the lines together. Nothing can be subtracted,
nothing can be added to; the images follow one another inevitably, full of
meaning. I love it. The Last Drunk Whatever kills my life, All that I have to lose With a knife in my back, It won’t be booze.
You, you, if you read this, I would give up the kiss Of strong drink, My secret root, my own Jackhammer that blew off The dead trees of my spine. Hooch was enough. For everybody else Who couldn’t take what I Can take through many hells Before I die. I sired a bitter son. I have no daughter. When I at last get done, I will die by water. She, what she might have been, Her shoulder’s secret gold, Thin as her mother is thin. I could have grown old! [The poem rings with uncanny insight, the kind an alcoholic experiences in that moment of terrible clarity in early morning, alone, when there is no taste to the last drink and it won’t help any to relieve the surrounding terror. (Don't ask me how I know this.) The poem is meant to be taken figuratively, but I insist on taking it literally, including all the wonderful, unexplainable images and the mysterious "she," whose identity and existence is entirely speculative. Is it the daughter he never had? That seems to be stretching the point. Whatever, whoever, she is as thin as her mother. So perhaps one can love an imaginary daughter. And the plaintive, prophetic, "I could have grown old!" and its exclamation point remind at least me of the "I have wasted my life," or for that matter, "I am so happy." They are hard to believe in literal fashion. I take them as emotional moments that are short-lived and perhaps unreal, that is, not true. They are pathetic outcries aimed at a universe that doesn’t care about individual lives and outcomes. And this is the stuff of world literature.]
Note: If you agree or disagree with these OPINIONS, feel free to write or email Kingfisher Journal. We'll publish the best ones--the ones that make their points coherently and intelligently.
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Featured Painter Alden Mason is a Northwest artist with a considerable following and his work is held by major museums, corporations, and private collectors. Born in Everett in 1919, he grew up on a farm near LaConner and has long had ties to that countryside, which he frequently visits.
He was a professor of art at the University of Washington, where he obtained his master of fine arts degree as a student and taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1981. An enthusiastic, personable man, he was well liked by his students. His own art is eclectic and has gone through many styles over his long career as a painter. His paintings have included landscapes in oil and watercolor (see page one) to abstract, cartoonish, whimsical renderings making use (and perhaps sometimes mocking) standard Northwest themes that have suffered from overuse. His paintings are full of odd characters, strange-looking birds, and smiling salmon. The thing that is remarkable about Mason's work is that--whatever he chooses to do--he does well. If he sometimes offends delicate sensibilities, well, perhaps he chooses to do so. He is perhaps best known for his watercolors, such as the one of Deception Pass shown on our front page. These grew in size until he was applying his washes with a house-painter's brush and using, he said, an entire tube of paint in one fell swoop. He became allergic to oil paints, especially when used in a confined, poorly ventilated space, and developed the technique of applying paint with a squeeze bottle. One of his murals created in this style hung in the Washington State Capitol Building, but was removed at the request of the State Legislature in 1989. These murals were done in the style that he became best known for, and greatly admired. His work is often exhibited at the Woodside/Brayseth Gallery in Seattle, and may be purchased there. See more pictures by Alden Mason
AT
THE MOVIES . . . There
are some books that defy movie making, and many had thought that Marcel
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is one of them. And so it
is. But director Raul Ruiz has tackled the impossible, or at least the
final book of Remembrance, Time Regained, and made of it a masterpiece.
It is probably the most incredible movie I have ever seen--and I've seen
a lot of them. It is a movie that bears repeated watching, even if
you've read your Proust and think you know him well. It will take
several viewings to get all the character relationships and
identifications straight. Since Sundance is frequently showing the movie
at the present time, best make yourself a high-quality tape (as I did)
and watch it closely over a period of time. It won't wear thin or
disappoint you. John
Malkovich nearly steals the show as the Baron de Charlus, a charming and
boisterous degenerate. Calling him this in a novel set among the French
aristocrats in World War I Paris is hardly to distinguish him from all
the others,however.
The movie, the book, is in fact a satiric inditement of the society of the Verdurins, Cottards, and the house of Princess Guermantes. Practically everybody is titled and everybody has slept with each other, men and women alike. Besides Odette, there is the beautiful Gilberte, played by Emmanuelle Béart. Chiara Mastronionni plays the lovely Albertine. And Pretty Marcello Mazzarella does a wonderful job as Marcel, whom he looks uncannily like. Yet liner notes reveal that much is not as it seems: Marcel's voice is not his own, nor is Malkovich's beautifully lip-synched French. Learning this was greatly disappointing to me, but any complex thing done so well should not be disturbing. The whole movie is based on illusion and deception. Past and present are layered and intermixed artistically, though often confusingly. The camera of Ricardo Arnovich and the subtle and tasteful director's touches of Luis (who co-wrote the script with Giles Taurand) are simply masterful. No; they are complexly masterful. A highly enjoyable three hours spent among superb actors and plot.. Must see!
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