Three of Poetry's Brightest Young Stars

Dara writes:

As a member of the Literary Committee of Manhattan's National Arts Club, I have organized a poetry event to which I invite Supreme Fiction readers. It is free.

On Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 8pm, the President, Board of Governors, and the Literary Committee of the NAC present three of poetry’s brightest young stars. Adam Kirsch is the author of The Thousand Wells, which received The New Criterion Poetry Prize, and The Wounded Surgeon, a critical study. He is the book critic of The New York Sun. Cate Marvin’s first book, World's Tallest Disaster, received the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, is forthcoming in August. Meghan O’Rourke is the literary editor of Slate and a poetry editor at The Paris Review. She received the 2005 Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Award from Poetry. Her first book, Halflife, is just out.

Where:
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
(20th Street between Park Avenue South and Irving Place)
Number 6 Train at 23rd Street

Date & Time:
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 8pm

Price:
Free

Auden the Admirable

Dara writes:

I have decided that I admire the work of 20th-century British poet W.H. Auden more than I love it.

I applaud Auden's moral seriousness, his commitment not to turn a blind eye to the horrors, including World War II, of his time. I applaud his deep investment in poetry, and yet his incapacity to inflate either his own influence or his verse's importance. I find this combination of profound dedication and self-deprecation very appealing, and also missing in many of today's poets.

Auden's command of the English language astounds me. Has there since Shakespeare been a writer so on top of his game in that regard? The poet's flexibility with form invigorates me. Really, he could do it all, and he bore the mark of a master, which is that his formal poems never seem like exercises. Instead, his rhymes fall trippingly off the tongue. I admire Auden the person. He seems like a congenial man with a sense of humor.

His personality was revealed last night at a tribute to him at New York's 92nd Street Y. The centenary of his birth was about two weeks ago. Oliver Sacks and Charles Rosen spoke, and charmed. Sacks has such a Princess Bride of a British voice--"Twu Wuv." Auden's friend Shirley Hazzard rambled at length. Unfortunately she seemed not get her bearings and repeated the phrase "he had good manners" several times.

What I gleaned from the event is that certain rhymes and vistas of Auden wow me, yet I get lost in the poems as a whole. He was such a philosopher; his discursiveness can ruin poems for me. I'm not left reeling from one sustained image, as I am with work by George Herbert, John Keats, or Robert Frost, as examples.

But lines do shine, and I do thank Shirley Hazzard for contributing to the evening this, about three friends sharing an idyllic June day:

That later we, though parted then,
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid
And Death put down his book.

I celebrate Auden the humanist and knower of human truths.

The Lives of Others

Dara writes:

"The Lives of Others," the German winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 2006, is a beautiful movie. What is it about Germans, that they can produce both the most extraordinary artwork and such brutal catastrophes?

The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, is my age, and already has incredible skill. His is a subtle movie that doesn't hit you over the head. Extreme violence is portrayed, but none of it physical. The torture shown is psychological, and maybe I'm relieved because I just saw "The Departed," but it was nice to see a quiet film, though an equally powerful one.

We don't tend to think about the gruesomeness of repression, how horrible it is not to be able to think freely. We have more obvious, genocidal terrors facing us. But "Lives" shows the terror of being an expressive person and not being able to expres yourself. The GDR created a poisonous regime in which you couldn't trust your neighbors. The Secret Police, the Stasi, employed 100,000 workers, yet 200,000 informants. They were obsessed with record-keeping. The Stasi protagonist in this movie, his sole job is to record every movement of a playwright and his girlfriend. We learn quickly that the only reason the playwright is to be watched is a high Stasi official would like hiim out of the way so the official can sleep with the playwright's girlfriend.

I lived in eastern Germany not long after the Wall came down. At the university where I was employed, there were "maintenance workers" whose sole job was to water 30 feet of potted plants. Since everyone had to be employed in the socialist state, meaningless jobs were created. This movie faithfully captures the dreariness of communism: the apartment complexes, the bland party headquarters, of course the Trabant cars in which so many were smuggled. The movie captures the split quite well. On the one hand the politburo types, on the other hand the gorgeous intellectuals. Sebastian Koch plays the lead intellectual, and by golly does he give George Clooney a run for his money.

Watching this film, I both missed my time in Berlin and loathed it. In one scene, the playwright carries groceries home in a wooden crate. Germans take their aversion to plastic bags and supermarket conveniences to an extreme. I almost fainted from fright when I stood in a checkout line and realized I had not brought my own bags. "Schnell, schnell," I heard. "Achtung."