Youngs Poets at the NAC

Dara writes:

The young poets night I organized last week at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park went smashingly well. Several people in attendance asked me when the next event was. Poetry does have readers!

http://picasaweb.google.com/jamespanero/ThreeOfPoetrySBrightestYoungStars

A glimpse, above, of the beautiful club, where the poets and I and members of the Literary Committee ate dinner before the readings. (I have also pasted the Url for our Picasa page, with more photos.) Adam Kirsch, Cate Marvin, and Meghan O'Rourke did fantastic jobs. I am pasting here my introduction of the poets:

They each write in a different style, but at least a few qualities unite them: intensity, intelligence, and courage. In this age of free verse, it takes chutzpah for Adam Kirsch to write so convincingly in traditional form. In tightly controlled lines, Cate Marvin conveys wildness, and this tension captivates us. Meghan O’Rourke examines the world with an Xray vision.

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. Adam makes rhymes seem effortless. In his poem “Washington,” he exclaims, “Another Fourth! Again the capital/Is emptied out along the Nation’s Mall,/Where the elaborate fireworks display/Mounted in tribute to the holiday/Gives us the satisfaction of pure leisure/Tinged with the echo and the show of danger.” Unlike some contemporary poets, Adam is not afraid to tackle the big issues—war, love, politics—which have nourished poetry over the centuries, but away from which some of today’s poets shy because, quote, “too much has already been said on the subject.” Adam risks redundancy and it pays off.

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. In her first book, Cate weaves a spell and often compels with an acid tongue. She writes, in her poem “On Parting,” “Before I go, let me thank the man who mugs you.” She uses neat lines to tell wicked thoughts: a seductive trick. Yet, she can move between casting a hex and reeling us in. All the while, her poems heave with passion. She speaks of “an air tinged with blizzard.”

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 hot off the presses! On a personal note, I first noticed Meghan’s gift when we were college classmates! One thing that strikes me about her new book is her ability to move between sophistication and simplicity. In her poem “Peep Show,” she observes: “Someone is always watching--/don’t you think?/Duck, turn, and wink./Bodies at a distance--/that’s what we are,//raises, renovations, Florida.” Meghan uses irony, but never to show detachment; she always engages passionately. In her prayer-like poem “Pilgrim’s Progress,” she coaxes: “ What made you worry?/That whisper the earth makes, turning in space?/I hear it too. It only does what it must.//So hush, hush, hush.”

***

This summer I will organize a reading series at the Ansche Chesed synagogue on New York's Upper West Side. Stay tuned!

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

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'

THE NEW YORK SUN
Books

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'
BY JAMES PANERO
March 14, 2007

The problem with art biographies is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, art biographers toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink — the models and the mistresses, the comrades and the critics. But without direct contact with the work — the reason we are reading the biography in the first place — can an art biography ever really describe the heart of its subject's life? And I'm not talking about including a few color reproductions.

In just more than 200 pages of "Marc Chagall" (Schocken, 256 pages, $19.95), Jonathan Wilson solves this problem with an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted. This is not a biography that settles on describing an artist's life. It is a book that looks out from the artist's work — the literalization of an oeuvre.

"The man in the air in my paintings ... is me," Chagall said to an interviewer in 1950. "It used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me. I'm not fixed anyplace. I have no place of my own." In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist's life, that's where Mr. Wilson finds Chagall.

Mr. Wilson filters his story through a Jewish lens. His biography is just one of several dozen new and forthcoming books on "Jewish Encounters" published by Schocken/Nextbook in a series edited by Jonathan Rosen. Rather than limiting the narrative, Mr. Wilson's focus reveals Chagall in high relief. As an artist, Chagall discovered a unique resonance between the modern Jewish Diaspora and the modernist condition. Born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall utilized the color-and-line principles of the French avant-garde to document the "twilight of a Jewish world."

In life, as in his art, Chagall floated over adversity. He skirted the race laws of Imperial Russia to study art in St. Petersburg. He made his exit of the Iron Curtain just as Kazimir Malevich's "Suprematist Academy" was moving in on his Vitebsk Free Academy. He took his last step on Vichy soil, with the help of Varian Fry and other American supporters, just as the Reich was sealing up the French borders.

Chagall also floated over distinctions that might have hemmed in more Earth-bound personalities. "His work and his life both reveal a reactive desire to be a Russian to Russians, a Jew to Jews, and a Frenchman to the French," Mr. Wilson writes. In his paintings Chagall often incorporated the figure of Jesus, whom he saw as the embodiment of Jewish suffering as a stand-in for the artist and, after the war, the Shoah. "[T]he Holocaust takes place on the streets where Chagall grew up and Jesus, frequently wearing a tallith (prayer shawl) around his waist, is repeatedly crucified there." Mr. Wilson argues that as a Jew working in Christian iconography, Chagall was like Irving Berlin, his painting "White Crucifixion" like the song "White Christmas." For Chagall, this meant imagining a "pre-Christian Jesus" who was "a great poet, the teaching of whose poetry has been forgotten by the modern world," as the artist said to Partisan Review in 1944.

In subject matter, Chagall drifted between the ascetic parameters of high modernism and the nostalgic sentimentality for a lost home. For art purists, this has been the one fact that grounds Chagall's reputation. The critic Robert Hughes once called Chagall "the Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism." But Chagall was more than a mere Jewish Surrealist, as Mr. Wilson writes, "preserving it in schmaltz." A novelist and literary critic, Mr Wilson himself floats above the etiquette of art biography to write magical paragraphs like this one:

A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality ... has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desper ately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists — think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Mr. Wilson begins his book with the acknowledgment that "sophisticated art aficionados weren't supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark." Two hundred pages later, Mr. Wilson returns his subject from the dustbin of college poster art to the skies above Vitebsk, where Chagall belongs.