Chekhov’s Mistess

October 19, 2005

Frank Bidart’s Star Dust

 

Peter Campion (link via The Page)on National Book Award finalist Frank Bidart’s excellent book of poetry Star Dust:

“…The poet complicates his collection with at least two narratives, both of which oppose yet somehow inform the acts of creation. One is the frustrated love story that runs through the book, the story of an erotic connection that gains stinging intensity from its unconsummated suspension. The other is a narrative of destruction, which he sees as the twin of creation. He ends the final poem, ‘’The Third Hour of the Night,” with a violent account of murder by an aboriginal Australian shaman.




That character acts as the nightmarish mirror of the central figure of the poem, the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. And even Cellini carries a streak of destructive energy. His statue ‘’Perseus With Head of Medusa“ stands in ‘’Star Dust” as the prime example of making. Yet throughout the sections of Cellini’s autobiography that Bidart has transformed into poetry, the artist appears as a tormented soul, propelled by the most disordered emotions. The very process of creating his sculptures (known for their perfection) turns out to be one of great messiness…“

I’ve previously mentioned ”The Third Hour of the Night,“ which was published in Poetry magazine last (I think) April. That poem took up the entire issue – a few readers wrote in to bitch about that, but I think it was the most memorable issue of the year.

The murder in third hour Peter Campion talks about is particularly brutal, but by the time you get there, Bidart has you wrapped. His poetry has this nearly perfect combination of story or ideas and a sense of rhythm that allows him to pull off surprising combinations of words, and hey, that’s what it’s all about.

Bidart puts footnotes at the end of the book – like ”…I have not met Mr. Dekker; he is not the ‘you’ of ‘Music like Dirt.’ Think of ‘Advice to Players’ as a manifesto written by someone who doesn’t believe in manifestos.“ Funny, I think, but part of the personality of the poet and when he gives sources it’s interesting.

For the poem Curse, he explains in his endnotes, ”The ‘you’ addressed here brought down the World Trade Center towers; when I wrote the poem I didn’t imagine that it could be read any other way, though it has been. The poem springs from the ancient moral idea (the idea of Dante’s Divine Comedy) that what is suffered for an act should correspond to the act.“

Reading the poem, you can feel the horror (this is an excerpt of ”Curse“):

May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking you




head upward you hear as if in slow motion floor




collapse evenly upon floor as one hundred and ten




floors descend upon you.




May what you have made descend upon you.


May the listening ears of your victims their eyes their




breath




enter you, and eat like acid


the bubble of rectitude that allowed your breath.




May their breath now, in eternity, be your breath.

I’ve not read much out of 9/11 that I found worthwhile, but this poem, at the risk of sounding glib, gets to the heart of the matter, but both on a visceral level and at an ideational level (particularly given that he spells it out for the reader).

Also from Star Dust (printed at poets.org,)

For the Twentieth Century


Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand


technologies of ecstasy




boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water


rises without boundaries,




I push the PLAY button:—




. . .Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti




you are alive again,—




the slow movement of K.218


once again no longer




bland, merely pretty, nearly


banal, as it is




in all but Szigeti’s hands




*




Therefore you and I and Mozart


must thank the Twentieth Century, for




it made you pattern, form


whose infinite




repeatability within matter


defies matter—




Malibran. Henry Irving. The young


Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of






newspaper clippings, become words


not their own words. The art of the performer.

• posted by Bud Parr
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