Published by Seren
The use of the mask is a long established tradition, from Japanese Noh drama to modernist poetry. For Yeats, the use of the Mask represented the repression of the ego, a means of escaping subjectivity and sentiment by exploiting ideas of ‘the self and anti-self’. The idea of the mask is used once again in new collections by Carol Rumens and Pascale Petit. While each poet adopts something of Yeats’ strategy, there is in both books a large amount of post-modernist picking and mixing.
Carol Rumens has fourteen full-length collections under her belt. Her poetry delights in erudition, form and wit. Her copious use of curious, exotic and humorous metaphors has its roots in Martian Poetry, the movement that Wikipedia – fairly or unfairly depending upon where you stand on the cultural spectrum – calls, ‘a minor movement in British poetry in the late 1970s and early 1980s’ that aimed at breaking the grip of ‘the familiar’, by describing ordinary things in unfamiliar ways. That Martian poetry was related to surrealism is very apt given Rumen’s relationship, in her new book, to de Chirico.
Rumens prefaces the first poem, ‘The Birth of Venus’, (which is from a sequence entitled ‘Sonnets for Late-Elizabethan Lovers’) with a quotation from Bernard Fontenelle’s 1686 description of Venus. She then continues with passages of description based on ‘Hubble’s filter’, colloquialisms such as ‘we’ve learned a thing or two/Since then’, and language culled from the tabloids, Renaissance maps and space odysseys:
In ‘Alba’ we move within the space of four lines from REM sleep, via Kwiksell and Costsaver, to the gift of a latuca sativa (that’s a lettuce to you and me) proffered by ‘my boss’. It’s witty and sharp, with the ‘green gleam of his glances’ leading us through to the final lines: ‘he beckons me onto his office-lounger, /And offers my lips his salad-bowl, prêt-à-manger’ – and all within the sonnet form.
More curious is the ‘verse-drama with soundscape’ entitled ‘De Chirico’s Threads’ which gives the collection its title and, considering it is around forty pages in length, involves a huge cast that includes not only Giorgio, but his brother Alberto Savinio, his dead sister Adele, his parent Ariadne (of Minotaur fame), along with André Breton and various forgers and fakers. The play explores in verse, using (here as elsewhere in this book) the Italian canzone form, de Chirico’s rejection of surrealism and his return to classicism, when he chose to pit himself (and lost) against such masters as Titian, and to ‘copy’ versions of his own early work – which was what sold.
The play asks various questions: ‘Does art have only one song, does it die after adolescence?’ And, perhaps by extension, ‘Is it merely the clutter of toys/ Untidied, the under-the bed of little boys?” A nasty Forger (ya-boo-hiss!) says:
But do we learn any more about de Chirico from this than we would by reading a good biography? I’m sure this collection will garner plaudits such as ‘erudite’ ‘playful’ ‘a fusion of the philosophical with the personal’ – but perhaps I’m just not that easily riveted by the ‘clever’. As Henry James said of John Singer Sargent, he seemed to suffer from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness.’
Pascale Petit
What the Water Gave Me
Poems after Frida Kahlo
Published by Seren
‘Never has a woman with a moustache been so revered – or so marketed – as Frida Kahlo,’ wrote Stephanie Mencimer in the Washington Monthly in 2002. ‘Like a female Che Guevara, she has become a cottage industry… Volvo has used her self-portraits to sell cars to Hispanics, the U.S. Postal Service put her on a stamp, and Time magazine put her on its cover. There have been Frida look-alike contests, Frida operas, plays, documentaries, novels, a cookbook, and now, an English-language movie…’ The Kahlo cult first emerged thanks largely to Madonna, an avid collector who claimed to ‘identify with her pain.’ Susan Fisher Sterling, NMWA’s chief curator, once suggested that ‘Each group seems to find some validation in Kahlo. In some ways we’re obsessed with ourselves and sexuality. Kahlo was very much a part of that narcissistic body culture.’ The paintings reflect her tumultuous relationship with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and her deteriorating health as a result of a bus accident. Kahlo had more than thirty operations, and her gangrenous leg was eventually amputated. But without ‘her pain’ would she have made it as an artist at all? It is doubtful, as there is little original in her manner of painting. Her talent was to dramatize her life in her paintings, cultivating a self-image as a ‘heroic sufferer.’
A tragic bio has been the prerequisite for greatness for women artists and writers from Artemisia Gentileschi to Gwen John, from Sylvia Plath to Anne Sexton, in a world not sympathetic to female talent. Yet one of the tenets of feminism was to remove the feminine from the yoke of victimhood. Of the 150 or so works by Kahlo that have survived, most are self-portraits. As Mercimer suggests, ‘Kahlo’s art is to painting what the memoir is to literature – self-absorbed, confessional… The inflation of the artist over the art is certainly not unique to Kahlo… Feminists might celebrate Kahlo’s ascent to greatness – if only her fame were related to her art. Instead, her fans are largely drawn by the story of her life, for which her paintings are often presented as simple illustration’.
So where does that leave a British poet who has based a whole collection on Kahlo’s life and work?
Fourteen of Pascale Petit’s poems from this collection first appeared in 2004 – at the height of Fridamania – as a pamphlet entitled The Wounded Deer – Fourteen Poems after Frida Kahlo, which was a first-stage winner in the Poetry Business Book Competition. In England, it was not until a major retrospective of her work at Tate Modern in 2005 that Kahlo’s popularity really took off.
Petit has always been an autobiographical writer. Like Plath and Anne Sexton before her she has made ‘pain’ her hallmark. Now, in a consummate act of ventriloquism, she has given voice to Kahlo’s work and life ‘to focus on how she used art to withstand and transform pain.’ In many ways this suits Petit’s exotic, surreal style very well. The ‘I’ of her more autobiographical poems of the past has been transformed into the voice of Frida; the Frida of ‘Suckle’, for example, whose ‘nurse is Mexico – one breast is Popocatéptl,/the other, Lake Xochimilco,’ or the Frida of the painting The Broken Column who says ‘When I tried to dress this morning/a crack opened in my chest,’ or the Frida of ‘The Blue House’ who claims: ‘My pelvis is a palette/on which night/is mixing day’s colours’, or the Frida of ‘Living Nature’, where:
The surrealist imagery of Kahlo’s paintings – André Breton fell in love with her – perfectly suits Petit’s voice, allowing her to plunder Kahlo’s dreamscapes, often to startling effect. As a sometime artist herself, the poems are full of colour and visual pyrotechnics. To research the book Petit spent time in Mexico, and the poems are peppered with authentic references to Mexican deities and places. With the help of a mirror, after her accident, Kahlo began painting her trademark subject: herself. ‘I paint myself… because I am the subject I know best.’ These words might have been Pascale Petit’s, which is what makes this is such a perfect pairing.
Content and Texts © Sue Hubbard 2011
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