Music like Dirt
2003; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoFrank Bidart. Music Like Dirt. Quarternote Chapbook Series. Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande Books, 2002. 32 pp. $8.95 This chapbook presents fourteen poems on a common theme, which Bidart describes as human need to Making, or poiesis, is a traditional way to define the work of literary artists, but in Bidart's vision we are all engaged in such work whether we like it or not. Here is how he puts the matter in Advice to the Players: There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need to make. * We are creatures who need to make. * Because existence is willy-nilly thrust into our hands, our fate is to make something-if nothing else, the cut by the arc of our lives. (14) Bidart, each life is an object like an artwork, and living is identical with making. His image of the lifework-a shape that is cut-invokes sculpture, but it also calls to mind the recording of musical performances: DJs still speak of cuts on vinyl LPs, and the the needle makes is a continuous arc. Perhaps Bidart's difficulty in finding more precise figurative language is that, in his view, the maker and the object always merge. Self-understanding can only proceed via self-dramatization: we cannot know who we are without shaping our lives, and this necessity brings with it risks of error and suffering. Further on in the poem he says: Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves. * Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune. (16) Adam's curse was said to be labor, but Bidart's vision is closer to that of Marx: the curse is not that we must work, but that we do not behold ourselves in the objects we make. Bidart's best image of this painful state is probably the paradoxical one presented in Hammer: stone arm raising a stone hammer / dreams it can descend upon itself(21). Perceptive readers will recognize this image as yet another translation of Catullus's Odi et amo, which has been such a powerful embodiment, for Bidart, of the contradictory nature of human experience. Poems such as these help us to understand why Bidart has always been so interested in artistic performers and in the performative possibilities of lyric. If one reason is that life itself is a performance, another has to do with the performing artist's special kind of pathos. In For the Twentieth Bidart notes gratefully that modern recording technology has preserved the performances of artists such as Joseph Szigeti (1892-1973), but he ends the poem by acknowledging that the more typical fate of such artistry is pure obliteration: Therefore you and I and Mozart must thank the Twentieth Century, for it made you pattern, form whose 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 of the performer. (7-8) The singer Maria Malibran (1808-1836), the actor Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), and the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) were all legends within their respective arts, but only scholars know their names today. Though the art of the performer may live on in recordings, in itself it is mortal. Of course, one of the technical virtues of poetry is that it, too, has infinite / repeatability and may thus outlive the artist. Bidart's interest in performance (and in the poetic text as a kind of voice transcription) is thus partly due to his knowledge that poetry is different. Indeed, there are moments in the chapbook, such as the poem Little Fugue, when he becomes critical of a performative view of life and art. It begins, at birth you were handed a ticket beneath every journey the ticket to this journey in one direction (13) Bidart offers two metaphors for this movement of life toward death: a conveyor belt, and a moving walkway. …
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