Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Mouth Carved Shut: Ekphrastic Poems

I wrote last month about the road trip I took with some friends to visit the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and participate in the ArtLines Juried Competition.  This week I've been working on those poems.  Here are three of them, along with the works that inspired them.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC HARP
Wrapped in the trunk of a Sapele tree
I heard an elephant bathing in
the rainforest bai.  Light poured down through the leafy
canopy; every beam sugared carbon
strings into mahogany heartwood.  This
was before the sawmills, the tree
hewn by hand, bush cricket my first music. 
Forged copper scraped me a hollow body,
elegant neck, elongated head achieved
by binding the infant skull.  The sharpest
blade cut me a mouth.  The green mantis
folded its arms and prayed.  I was made to be
African elsewhere.  I never learned
Mangbetu language, its voiced and unvoiced
trill.  I speak only with a mouth carved shut.

 

JADE HAND

This is my blade hand, cutting through
    rainforest vines
    enemy flesh
    false hope
    flattery
on my way to you.

Before it can fade, hand over
    the cheek slap
    what’s in your wallet
    peony bouquet
    our love
and I’ll keep it safe for you.

This jade hand-shaped pendant, look at it
    blue-green translucent
    ripple like ocean waves
    stiff with regal power
    empty to the gods
now drilled with holes, waving at you.

 

ALLEGORY OF EUROPE

It’s a gamble, a gaming
purse tossed on the floor
and open for business.

Blue velvet and the ace
of spades, space available
in another place not here.

Riches by chance, bitches!
Advance token, pass go,
past those other monkeys.

Keys to the city withheld,
meld Igbo and Bantu pell-
mell into Africa.  Scramble.

The Swan of Litchfield

This week's project (already past deadline!) is to write a book proposal for a new edition of poems by Anna Seward.  Here's an excerpt, followed by one of my favorite poems by the writer who made her small English city famous in the eighteenth century as "The Swan of Litchfield."

Seward (1742-1809) was one of the most popular and prolific poets of the early Romantic period.  So high was her reputation that none other than Sir Walter Scott edited the standard edition of her poems, the three-volume The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, in 1810.  Among other achievements, Seward was admired for renovating the sonnet form in English.  Arguably the dominant form in Renaissance English verse, the sonnet had gone into eclipse during the eighteenth century in favor of more public forms such as epic and satire.  Seward, along with two other important women poets, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, initiated a renewed interest in the form, which then became a prominent aspect of nineteenth-century poetics. 

Seward was admired by canonical first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, but her reputation went into decline with the emergence of the bardic role of the poet in later Romanticism.  Shelley, Keats and Byron, as famous for their athletic and sexual exploits as for their poetry, emphatically masculinized the image of the poet, and for the first time the term used to refer to women poets became the denigrating “poetess.”  The formative role of late eighteenth-century women poets in the emergence of Romanticism was obscured in literary history until the last thirty years of feminist scholarship.  Following on two decades of archival recovery work, the 1990s saw the publication of new editions of the work of Smith and Robinson (Oxford, 1993, ed. Curran; Broadview, 2000, ed. Pascoe).  What is missing is the third leg of the stool of the early Romantic sonnet revival:  a new edition of the poems of Anna Seward. 

I first became interested in Seward as a poet of love between women.  In my book Sister Arts, which includes a chapter on Seward, I describe the trope of "lesbian death wish elegy" in which the poet writes about the loss of her beloved after marriage, mourning it as if it were a death.  Here's one of Seward's notable contributions to the tradition.  It's addressed, as were many of her poems, to a beautiful younger woman, Honora Sneyd:

Sonnet XII

Chlll'd by unkind HONORA's alter'd eye,
"Why droops my heart with pining woe forlorn,"
Thankless for much of good?-what thousands, born
To ceaseless toll beneath this wintry sky,
Or to brave deathful oceans surging high,
Or fell Disease's fever'd rage to mourn,
How blest to them would seem my destiny!
How dear the comforts my rash sorrows scorn!-
Affection is repaid by causeless hate!
A plighted love is changed to cold disdain!
Yet suffer not thy wrongs to shroud thy fate,
But turn, my soul, to blessings which remain;
And let this truth the wise resolve create,
The Heart estranged no anguish can regain.

Remembering Stourhead

[End-of-semester dry spell!  I'm re-posting an oft-visited story from my summer's garden tourism.  More new posts soon....]

Stourhead Park is one of the greatest eigheenth-century English gardens,

designed by the wealthy landowner Henry Hoare ("the Magnificent Hoare," a nickname that gave my students lots of giggles) after his return from the Grand Tour of Europe.  Like so many other Grand Touring aristocrats, he had fallen in love with the landscape paintings of Claude,

Poussin,

and Dughet.

Returning after several years loaded down with precious artifacts, including rare books and paintings, Hoare decided to create an Italian landscape in the English countryside.  Unlike other gentlemen of taste, he did not hire a professional landscape designer but did the work himself.  He had the Elizabethan house pulled down and replaced by a Palladian villa,

and also created, over many years, an exquisite landscape garden on more than two thousand acres.  Stourhead landscape garden is considered, in the "sister arts" tradition of the eighteenth century, to be both "painterly" and "poetic."  It is one of the chief examples of the notion that gardens, paintings and poems are "sisters" among the arts, capable of the highest form of aesthetic expression and thus each possessed in some degree of the qualities of the others.  Henry Hoare's garden, then, not only looks like a Claude painting, it also has a poetic meaning, a narrative that unfolds in time as visitors make their way around the property.  The most famous of the circuit gardens at Stourhead presents the visitor with a choice between the Path of Virtue, which leads up a steep and rocky climb to the Temple of Apollo

where one is rewarded with a spectacular view across the lake to the misty, Claudian horizon, and the Path of Vice, which leads, by a short, easy downhill walk, to the pub. 

I've always loved bringing students to Stourhead and I consider it one of my favorite walks in the world.  But on Monday, I decided that since I know the gardens fairly well, I would concentrate on two things:  looking that the spectacular collections in the house, which I had never visited, and finally getting some time for a little sketching of my own.  It was hard not to feel guilty as I sent the students (and Sam) off up the steep climb while I plopped myself down in front of a hydrangea bush.  But my talentless, completely untrained sketches are a major way that I relax, focus, and really see what's in front of me, and I have been missing the practice.  Besides, Stourhead's hydrangeas were beyond gorgeous that day, whether seen from a distance,

in a medium shot,

close up,

or even in an amateur's notebook.

And that's why the last four photos in this post are the only ones I took myself.