Book Review

Jester (a volume of selected poems)
by Grace Marie Grafton

Not wishing to be confined to the single window of her own perspective, the poet finds traveling companions, sets out, and writes poems on what she finds. Who are these companions? They are other poets, painters and sculptors whose work inspired most of the poems in this book, particular works being cited at the bottom of the poem. For the most part, this is a collection of ekphrastic poems, which are poems on works of art. The poet points out in her Artist’s Statements, that these art works provide the inspiration, but are not the subjects of the poems. The reader is, in fact, discouraged by the poet, in that statement, from seeking out the particular works referenced in the poems. So, the poet doesn’t present a “mediated” world to us– the poems are not mimetic or imitative poems, but stand on their own, as as much as any other poem, which necessarily draws from the poet’s experience.

The ekphrastic poems clearly use images from the art works, as overlays. This creates extra richness in terms of the “texture” of sensory experience for the reader. It also introduces new layers of understanding and interpretation, or levels of discourse and dialogue, that are absent in a non- ekphrastic poems, One could also discern many streams of consciousness, in which the poet evokes an image from her past, and projects it onto the new tableau of the art work. This helps fashion the poem into its own distinct works of art. The ekphrastic poem becomes a kind of thing-in-itself, a bare scaffold, opening itself wide, toward a future construction.

Play as in dramatic play, figures prominently into the book.The poet presents a kind of performance art for us, speaks as the inspired voice of the art work, and her speaking is the poem. Indeed, this is in keeping with what she writes at the beginning, in her Author’s Statement. The poem comes in upon her,displacing her ordinary sensibility with something new. The buzz in her head that the poet describes in seems to announce this change in awareness. To be moved by a poem results in heightened sensibility, and, in the case of perceptions of paintings or sculptures, with changes in perception. This seems to be a natural high – an exhilaration, exaltation, inspiration, ek-statis, out of normal place sensation seems to occur, along with a kind of synesthesia – a blurring of the different senses, as if the different sensory pathways cross, which sometimes manifest as poems, for the poet. Artists gives voice to their subjects, by momentarily negating their own ego. Keats calls this negative capability and we could explore similar approaches in terms of other writers and traditions, East and West. This is a basic theme or motif through the poet’s three volumes of collected verse that is discussed later in this article.

The Author’s Statement is helpful in approaching the poems in Jester, given the fact that they are many image-streams converge, from the poet’s imagination and the referenced art works. particularly in the ekphrastic poems. In the end, the poem is what it is – a work that greets the reader and stimulates certain thoughts and feeling in them.

** Jester has a total of 75 poems, with approximately a dozen being non-ekphratic poems scattered through the book. Shall we call those poems unsigned works or unsigned poems by the poet? Among these unsigned works, we might look for more direct expressions of the poet’s actual thoughts and feelings, without the overlay of imagery from works by other artists. Yet, these poems are hard to classify, and it’s hard to generalize about comparisons between the poet’s ekphrastic poems vs. her “unsigned works,” except to say they are both result from artistic inspiration.

The poems in Jester are divided into four sections, Improv, Impersonation, Singing the Blues and Last Act, which are terms from performance art, and life. Jester, the book, is also a life-form, and we can trace Jester’s development through the Table of Contents, which is the tale of his life. Depicted in 26 different poses on the cover, Jester develops his dramatic skills in improv, perfecting his improv enough, presumably, to write poems and get to his next period of development. Let’s follow him as he moves from from the 1st Improv section to the 2nd section, Impersonation, which Jester may find to be a more exacting art, requiring more specialized skill. The majority of the non-ekphrastic poems, which I’ve taken to calling “unsigned works” by the poet, occur under Impersonation. So, here, we are being warned by the poet, we need to be vigilant, for if we seek her, we may instead find one of the 26 poses of Jester. Jester continues to develop, and express himself in singing, and finally in Singing the Blues, the third section. There are sad poems here which expresses the transitory nature of beauty, which sings of its own demise. But there are transformational poems too. In Singing the Blues we have a very powerful poem, one of the poet’s “unsigned works” called Transparent, (p.57) one of my favorites, in the book, which I will save for the end. It expresses a Buddhist attitude of death, rebirth and transformation. The final section is Last Act which also contains poems on death and transformation. **

Because they reference other art works, ekphrastic art often contains additional overlays of meaning and interpretation. In this collection of poems, certain motifs from the life of poet, especially as she grows up – dresses, hair, flowers, relations with her mother, father and grandmother – appear in Jester. These elements also figure prominently in other works by the poet. Indeed, why should such leit motifs not appear in the collection, since they are part of the poet’s experience? Perhaps, the poet authored a book of ekphrastic poems to give her voice new referents, and permit the old ones mentioned above, to continue to speak.

Irony, or reflective distance figures throughout the poems that appear in Jester, as well as in her earlier poetry collections, Other Clues and Whimsy, Reticence and Laud. The irony is not mean-spirited or cynical. It is vivacious and playful, even coyly seductive, in that the attention of the reader is drawn to the different levels of meaning as it purveys the referenced art work within the new poem. In Jester, while the particular art works referenced are perhaps, likely to be unknown to the reader, the artists are often famous. The poems sometimes describe details of art works that are not visible to the readers, the poet having a kind of privileged access to them, The resultant images are private to the poet, but are spoken of in a public way So, portions of some poems appear to be written in a kind of private language, or the reader may feel like they are eavesdropping on a private discussion between the poet and art work that has inspired the poem. This can sometimes be frustrating to read. At such times, the reader must take solace in Author’s Statement at the beginning of the book, that her ekphrastic poems are inspired by, or evoked by the art works, and are not imitative, or mimetic poems. But if the art work remains veiled, the poem can become all the more alluring, perhaps like covered vs. uncovered flesh. A dialectic between concealing and revealing, and the known and unknown may emerge, a dialectic at is simultaneously at work, and at play.

There are others I could choose. However, I think this is particularly fine poem in which one the various image-streams move very well with each other, converging, yet keep their separateness, as the poem proceeds – the image- streams of Pandora, the subject of the poem, the readers own image of that famous mythological figure, the narrative streams of the poet’s own life, the poem itself, and the referenced art work.

Pandora

Swarmed, flash to the heart, she wants

to grab it back, wants to fan out with the forms:

be winged. And understands why she’s been

warned. Nothing would ever fit again.

Straight scattered into zigzag and myriad —

a fluvial harmony she’s only in dreams.

Her mother’s wishes, Father’s protection,

even her hiking boots and down vest,

she’ll have to beg for them now. Oh honey, honey

bending skin to dazzle. Fecundity a fragmented

architecture, her body filled with fluff and too much

laughter. Shy, earth, animal legs, ears,

total voice, how can she hear them all,

now she’s dedicated to float and flow into

every interstice, all the wrinkles in the elephant’s hide,

dedicated for the rest of her life to find, to find.

.........to Mary Frances Judge’s painting “Pandora”

Apart from interpreting art, it is often difficult to describe to others, what one thinks or feels, in general. This has been called the egocentric predicament, since we inhabit different skins which necessarily tie us to our own egos, our subjectivity. Artists, knowingly, or unknowingly, often draw from the unconscious. Psychotherapists sometimes visit this realm too, viewing the unconscious not just as the source of creativity, but the source of neurosis or psychosis. Freud’s famous phase is that the purpose of psychoanalysis is make the unconscious, conscious. A famous rejoinder to that attitude, was made by the famous poet, Rilke. Rilke was asked, in the early years of the 20th century, also the early years of psychoanalysis, why he wouldn’t enter analysis. His reply, so the story goes, was that if his demons left him, he was afraid that his angels wouldn’t want to stay. In fact, a recent book has been published(Freud’s Requiem by Matthew von Unwerth) on an imagined summer walk and discussion among Rilke, Freud, and Lou-Andreas Salome.

If we can pull these two approaches together, Rilke’s point, to let the unconscious express itself through art, is different than making the unconscious, conscious. Rilke point seems to be that art can retain its numinous quality, and and its symbolism, without being reduced to psychoanalytic descriptions of events in the psyche. Certainly the poems in this collection gravitate around the pole of Rilke’s attitude rather than that of Freud. Yet, in the book, all sorts of attitudes and situations are given voice, not necessarily the rational, self-aware voice of the poet, but the voices of various aesthetic experiences that speak out directly, in the poems.

At this point, three poems vie for attention for a spot here. I can include only one, but I wish to acknowledge two other poems, “As Might be Predicted,” an ekphrastic poem to Roger Capron’s ceramic sculpture, and with its multiple images of musical revelry, and her poem on an artist, “He Paints The Sleep of Caliban” by Odilon Redon in which the poet describes the painter painting his own dream inside the picture. The image-streams of the poem that will appear now, are not as complex as in these two other poems, but the meaning lies just below the surface, in a way that I think might appeal to both Freud and Rilke. And it is a lovely poem, sensuous, sensual with social commentary as well.

I cannot ring a world quite round,

Although I patch it as I can

She lends him one long hair from the many on her head.

Token to dispel what he things is his workday.

This is before everything turns grey and the river

is diverted into a viaduct that runs

between altered fields.

She understands the meaning of the mill

with its great grinding he must attend.

Life is no longer reverie. Still, she lends him

her long brown hair before it turns grey.

He tucks it under his shirt.

Before the day becomes a grind and he’s

covered by alteration’s veil.

To dispel the notion that dawn is a trap

to draw them into the viaduct at the place

where frogs are swept away.

At sunset he returns. She draw the long hair

from the sweat on his chest and leads him

by the length of it upriver, viaduct and mill left behind,

into the smell of what men haven’t planted:

violets, mugwort, horsetail fern.

....... Title from poem by Wallace Stevens

**

Story-telling bursts Its bounds, when Jester is viewed in the context of two earlier volumes of poems by the poet, Other Clues (2010, composed of prose poems) and Whimsy, Reticence and Laud (2012). This writer has had the pleasure to review these two earlier works. The prose poems of Other Clues are often phrases, images, or sentence fragments with a staccato quality. Toward the end of Other Clues, the post writes and reflects on art works, which the author Acknowledges at its beginning. As in Jester, the poems tend to declamatory, and they share the quality of being “performance art,” Play figures prominently in them. By this, I mean that the poems are dramatic presentations of the poet’s engagement with other things in her life or thoughts that have conspired with each other, and inspired her to write the poem. In other words, the declamatory elements express dialogue among the subjects in the poem, the poet’s emotions and her recollections from the past. Motifs from Jester — a young girl growing up, dress, hair, flowers, her mother, her grandmother, life as she experiences it— also are prominent in the two other collections. The works are also serious and playful with irony figuring in to no small degree. Inspiration vies with reflection, one observes what one feels, and then one writes.

The Style of Jester is very much that of Whimsy… —- expressive, reflective, and playful dialogues between the poet and her subjects . There seem to be more image-streams in Jester, even in the “unsigned poems” of the poet. One might say that the very act of writing ekphastic poems, implies a heightened sensitivity to what other artists express through their work. So, Jester represents an expansion of the poet’s own artistic field and vision. However, Other Clues, the poet’s 2010 collection of prose poems, includes poems on artists and art work in the final section, “The Inadvisable.” These include prose poems on Kandinsky, Degas, the contemporary poet W.S. Merwin, and various artist friends, whom the author Acknowledges in Other Clues. Works by these artists and others, like Chagall, also enter into the ekphrastic poems of Jester.

How might we compare these three collections of poems? In earlier reviews, I described the poems in Other Clues as delving into the structures of things as they are, outside the perceiver, and Whimsy as more of an examination of the surfaces of things, as they perceived. Infused by the energy of the art works, the poems in Jester deal more with transformation – images from the poet’s present and recollected consciousness merge with the images evoked by the art works. These deepen the level of interaction of the poet with her subjects, create even more play, and sometimes more complexity for the reader to follow these different strands as they form the poem, right before our eyes. The words evoke and play with us, even as the poet plays with her words, as the very title of the books suggest, Other Clues, Whimsy, Reticence and Laud and Jester. As I’ve said, the greater fluency of imagery in Jester, is sometimes challenging for readers who wish to tease out the different image streams.

**

Truth, and irony live together as a couple, not always happily. Irony which is the comic restatement of truth, flirts with us, in all of these works. This is shown in the titles and the striking and unique cover art of all three poetry collections by Grace Marie Grafton. They all suggests a dynamic of discovery and uncovering, finding a reality that lurks behind appearance. And so, in Whimsy, Reticence and Laud, whose subtitle is ”Unruly Sonnets” a young girl on the cover, sits, half undressed in a bathtub, water running. But she is not really “there,” for she’s “lost” in thought. Then, there is the cover of Other Clues, which is my favorite cover. A young bride, dressed in a wedding dress (also the subject of poems, in the book), stands in a field, her head rests against a large mirror, besides her, which mirrors her complete reflection. She stands, head to head, and body to body with…herself. She gazes outward and upward, absorbed, not in the image of self-reflection right there besides her, but like the young woman from Whimsy, she is absorbed in her thoughts. A doe, a stag and two fawns stand beside her, signifying perhaps, fertility and future family. But the bride’s gaze is not on them, she’s not consciously part of that family grouping, her attention is elsewhere, upward and inward at the same time. Maybe the bride is imagining a future life and a future poem. Maybe she’s imagining the poem “Jostle” from the poet’s later work, Whimsy, with which I ended my review of Whimsy, for Jostle is a mating dance poem for all living beings. I’m going to include it here, because it leads right into another beautiful poem, Transparent, from Jester, which takes that mating dance energy beyond death, in to new life. Indeed, among the 26 poses of Jester, the one pose we do not see, is the Jester in death. We’ll end this piece with both poems. First,

Jostle

The world is never still. Moving, shifting,

rising. Is it that the molecules life

is made of are lonely, must constantly

nudge their neighboring manifestation?

Contact, communication, ‘lectrical

charge. Or could it be, life is so in love

that molecules must kiss and hug and mate?

Water specks into drops into streams into

rivers. Matter gathering into palm fronds

or beetle’s green lacquered wings beating

night air to bits that bump the eyeball

of a watching puma who wants to change

its prey into itself. Even in death

bodies transform. Not to exist is still.

(p. 31 from Whimsy, Reticence & Laud- Unruly Sonnets)

**

Transparent

Trapped in the nub of day, the woman

admits the inertia that accompanies rain.

Is where the borrowing begins. She thinks,

“There’s no end, there’s been no end since birth.”

Rung after rung, we climbed the ladder

down into her present body,

each rung more unconscious,

as though an angel stroked, hummed and wept

as it cradled her descent.

She argued with the ange

l to release her from what she knew would be

echo, each lifetime’s fallible promise.

But now she wishes for the sudden flush

into forgetting that always signals the new.

Futility subsumed by infant heartbeat,

five fingers that tingle with uniqueness

in their grooves, their singular ability

to insure, again,an unequivocal touch

on the repeated incarnations of Earth.

Jester (a volume of selected poems) by Grace Marie Grafton, Hip Pocket Press, 2013, Book Review & Analysis, by Paul Dolinsky

Whimsy, Reticence and Laud: Unruly Sonnets
by Grace Marie Grafton
Review by Paul Dolinsky
Editor, The Golden Lantern
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