XX, page 4
a long period of peace would prove unbearable to me.
Picasso & Olga Khokhlova (1921)
Olga
Señor Picasso is hardly the romantic suitor
one had imagined, though of course my girlish dreams
of troikas and Russian princes would seem
to have been irrevocably neutered
by the revolutionary Bolshevik unpleasantness at home.
Still he is a man possessed of dramatic charm
if not exactly elegance. He adores the ballet,
for which he has created many beautiful designs,
and considers Nijinsky and Massine
as nearly equal to great painters in their artistry.
He is persistent in pursuit of his desires!
On my demurral, his dark eyes radiate Spanish fire
though he understands my circumstances
and so forgives me, a bit grudgingly.
It seems one has so little upon which to rely,
in these times, except one’s innocence.
Having dwelled so long in a bohemian demimonde
one can feel sure that Pablo is eager to ascend
society’s ranks from such depravity, and is prepared
to keep a wife in the appropriate manner.
He appears très chic in evening clothes,
with freshly polished shoes and pomade in his hair
amidst the opening-night pomp and glamour
at the theater. And so we are betrothed!
I have met his dear, plump mother in Barcelona,
and his family of course approves. Et voilà!
Pablo’s enormous fame in both Spain and Paris
promise a future of wealth and happiness—
just last month in Madrid a royal performance
was commanded by King Alfonso, a lover of the dance
though not, one surmises, a dancer in his own right.
Pablo and the King got along famously,
though Diaghilev, alas, has quarreled with Nijinsky,
and the Ballets Russes dims towards twilight.
Thus does one surrender a tutu for a trousseau,
to assume a starring role as Madame Picasso.
Picasso
Even the worst model is content
to sit for her portrait, but will the portrait
sit for the painter? A guitar resembles
a woman geometrically, cones and trapezoids
assembled upon the table’s plane,
pipe, bottle, lemon, but
where is that composition situated, in space
or in the mind of the artist?
Yes, color can be symbolically expressive,
but color is color. Paulo sits happily
on his donkey whether the room is rose
or burgundy or charcoal,
as I too may be said to feel childish joy today.
Paulo smiles, the donkey is a photograph,
only the painting seeks an escape,
like a bank robber riding a golden butterfly.
Hurry, pin its wings to the canvas.
Work fast and regret nothing.
August Sander:Citizens of the Twentieth Century (1922)
Because time is ahistorical but our institutions
embody the formal structures of their age,
what we retrieve from his photographic folios
is an inventory of the folk, a social typology
in a world of class appellations—Bourgeois Couple,
Children of the Rural Proletariat, Baron von Maltitz—
a visual elegy etched in chemicals and light
for a culture arisen from medieval dreams
to become a realm of mustachioed bankers
and bespectacled revolutionaries,
a world of itinerant carpenters in silk hats,
tramps in long coats subsisting on windfall apples,
a farm girl with luxurious braids primly seated
before a pathway angled between brooding trees.
And because the history of their century
would be fire and ash, götterdämmerung,
his work composes a black-and-white memorial
for a society on the brink of absolute destruction,
census of the oblivious, roll call of the doomed:
blacksmiths, cobblers, millers, field hands;
page after page of farmers tan as leather,
wrinkled as the fields they plough with teamed oxen;
amateur pilots in goggles and flying scarves,
confident architects as avatars of the zeitgeist
bearing blueprints of modernist structures
never to be built or built and destroyed
in onslaught or downfall; nurses and theologians,
a leering Dadaist, an unemployed sailor
on a bridge over a canal of mule-drawn barges;
industrialists, magicians, blind children
holding hands at the asylum—everything lost,
the world alike with its representations,
image and body reduced to ruin.
Even the customs officials in brass-buttoned tunics.
Even the proud hod carrier with his brick-laden shoulders.
Even the girl with black-ribboned braids on a bench
where the narrow lane enters the woods.
Everything about her cries out from a bygone era—
her prim dress and elaborate bows,
everything but her ageless, unarchivable face.
In her hand she clutches a slim volume, a diary
or psalter or pamphlet of sentimental verse.
Her head is turned expectantly, as if waiting
for a tram to convey from the electrified city
all the cosmopolitan aspirations of modern times
but we know, as she does not, that there will come
no rescue from the direction of the future.
And the past?
Already the path behind her is disappearing
into the gloom, consumed, as in a folktale,
by the grim, insatiable shadows of the forest.
Matisse: Nice (1923)
This city resembles the bored, immodest women I paint by the dozens,
louche houris in harem pants
baring their breasts to the Mediterranean wind.
I live now on a rectangular canvas stretched between the castle and the harbor,
between the tawdry glamour of the gamblers risking fortunes at the Casino
and the cross-hatchings of the old quarter where the Niçois
hang laundry and filigreed cages for parakeets along a web of alleyways congested as a Moroccan souk.
Alone with the goldfish in my studio, how is it
I fail again in my intention
to visit my family in Paris, seasons becoming years,
thinking only of painting, standing at the window in my striped work-pajamas,
walking the streets in sabots
through unfelt snow, chained to the ranks of my odalisques.
My birthday passes unnoticed.
To my children I become inscrutable, unreachable.
I am fifty-three.
Last night I came across the orderly chaos of a movie being filmed,
the Director shouting through his megaphone at 1 A.M.
while firemen turned their hoses to a cold drizzle falling on a caravanserai of camels and horses, robed sheiks,
all the exotic machinery of their masquerade,
the strange, illusory illumination of the cinema like the light of our world seen through the heavy glass of a fishbowl.
Only in retrospect can the life of the artist be understood for what it is,
only in the Thousand and One Nights
of his seduction by the muse and her lush confabulations.
My father was a seed-merchant in Flanders.
My people have lived in that unlovely precinct for centuries.
From treeless fields I have come to this place of salt-stained silk and inarticulable sadness.
From the labor of shopkeepers and tradesmen, from the loom-toil of village weavers.
From grim rectitude, from thrift and vigilance.
From oyster-shell to crimson and topaz, from ashen bistre to sumptuary light.
From the quietude of the Middle Ages I awoke
as a flight of arrows above the plain,
as a file of crows battling northern squalls.
From dream to dream, unending.
Kafka (1924)
That people truly are as they appear, wearing hats
in the street, chewing pencils at work,
even naked in bed, in passion—that this is so
continually arouses in me
feelings of the most extreme astonishment.
*
Gravestones are teeth in the jaw
of the devouring earth, are they not?
Precious incisors, holy relics.
Thus we explain the crooked smiles
on the faces of all the angels in the paintings.
*
The way water runs through coffee grounds,
taking on new life, scorched
and exhilarated by the process, the process,
and then the coffee comes into focus,
dark as blood, transformed utterly—
if our lives could aspire to such revision,
if we could mimic the miraculous
strip of celluloid through which the projector
casts its beam of light and desire
toward the awaiting movie screen.
*
This is no fairy tale.
The man approaching from the shadows is indeed a torturer.
The mouth he seals may be mine, but the wrists
he binds with shackles, the calipers, the subtle blades—
can you not understand
it is your own flesh to be torn?
*
Every draft, every notebook, every word—
burn it all,
Max, burn everything.
Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait Pierced by a Silver Rail (1925)
my squash blossom my rainsquall my unicorn
my quince and melon my torn garments my torment
my chalk slate my silver nitrate my metastatic autoretratos
my nation my hospital bed my sequestration
my thumbscrew my monkey paw my green macaw
my parrot feather my fetuses my head of lettuce
my seashell my curfew my you know who
my can my cant my revolutionary rant
my Diegos my no nos my yes yes yeses
my sister my disasters my star-crossed kisses
my hits and misses my cicatrix y cicatrices
my skirts and dresses my plaits and tresses
my pains my distresses my lisping s’s
my shyness my eyelessness my bloody messes
Rilke: Les Saltimbanques (1926)
Rilke’s preoccupation with strolling players would develop into a fixation on Picasso’s great Saltimbanques composition. Hertha Koenig, then owner of the painting, had loaned Rilke the Munich apartment where it hung. As he sat day after day meditating on this canvas, which epitomized the Paris he loved and thus helped him to forget the war, Rilke embarked on one of his most engaging elegies.
—JOHN RICHARDSON, A LIFE OF PICASSO
In Munich I passed an entire summer’s span
with his Saltimbanques feeding my eyes alone,
but it was not Bavaria, or linden-lined Berlin,
or Vienna or Prague or the City of Heaven
but Paris that awoke in me, city of my own
and the century’s irrecoverable youth,
saved from the Great War of man against man
but lost to the siege of time against truth.
These are no ordinary souls, Picasso’s tumblers,
enacting the acrobatics of Thanatos and Eros,
moving my heart as a red pin on the battle-chart
in a war room where officers administer
plans for Armageddon. O Angel, paradise
is not this earthly flesh, but its paraphrase in art.
Fiber 66: Meet the Latest Miracle Product from DuPont (1927)
Guess what? I’m the world’s first synthetic fiber!
I was conceived in a laboratory beaker
and born right here
at the DuPont refinery in Wilmington, Delaware,
but soon I’ll be everywhere!
Technically, I’m a linear cold-condensation superpolymer,
and so, like latex or mastic,
I’m resinous, translucent and amazingly elastic.
Like a dinosaur hatchling at the dawn of the Jurassic
the world belongs to me—because this is the Age of Plastic.
Isn’t that fantastic?
I’m built from six-carboned adipic acid
and hexamethylenediamine, so “Fiber 66” is my secret identity.
Like you, I’m a product of organic chemistry.
Wood, fabric, metal—I can be all three.
I’m the purest form of consumer friendly twentieth-century
materiality, the epitome
of corn-fed American ingenuity.
Born in 1935, after an eight-year chemical gestation,
they had a hard time christening me—Adalon,
Supraglos, Lustrol, Neosheen, Hexafil, Dulon,
Yarnamid, Wacara, Pontex, NuRay, Shimaron?
Surprise, it’s me—good old Nylon!
Your pal, your buddy, your sidekick, from now on.
Edward L. Bernays (1928)
People will buy anything if you make them want it bad enough,
if you give them something to chew on, a little skin,
a little rhubarb, an elbow in the ribs. Looking back, 1928
was the true birth of the Public Relations Industry,
when Lucky Strike cigarettes decided to sell smoking to women
and hired me to create the first professional PR campaign.
I never yet met a lady who wants to look fat, so the first act
was to promote cigarettes after dinner instead of dessert,
affidavits from medical bigwigs declaring cigarettes would save you
from the dangers of eating sweets, the Ziegfeld girls
testifying that Lucky Strikes kept them svelte, so by implication
not to smoke is to be a fat-ass tub of lard, a sow, a hag.
Still, smoking was “unladylike,” so to crack that stigma
we came up with the Torches of Freedom march,
modern women parading down Fifth Avenue,
stylish, good-looking gals lighting up in public
as a protest against the oppression of their sex, the outrage
of being denied the right to kill themselves with cancer
on an equal footing with men, which is when I understood
that I could change anything, given time and money,
not just consumer choices but values, habits, social taboos.
The key is to leave no fingerprints, no paper trail,
to rely on indirect action through front organizations,
photo ops with matinee idols, expert testimony, lobbying
geared toward public fears aroused by one’s own scare tactics.
People will buy anything if you hook them on the narrative—
bacon and eggs as health food, the liberation of Guatemala
on behalf of the United Fruit Company, beer as a bulwark
against intemperance. Last time I saw my Austrian uncle,
the famous Doctor Freud, we walked together in the Vienna woods
discussing family matters and the application of his theories,
not yet widely known in the USA—this was 1913 and I was
still a press agent working with showgirls and vaudevillians,
coveting every column inch, pestering editors for ink,
so I understood the value of symbols and images, the power
of suggestion to shape desire, the need to ring the bells
that drive the herd—but how could I have known,
talking with Uncle Sigmund, how far his ideas would carry me,
that they’d find my book in Goebbels’s personal library after the war,
that the entire country would sell itself to the highest bidder,
that the President would end up packaged and marketed
like a box of frozen peas and carrots? Listen,
Henry Ford did not invent the car but who remembers
the name of the schmuck that did?
PR is my baby, no apologies, no regrets.
I wrote the rules and chopped the trees and paved the runway,
and when Felix Frankfurter denounced me to FDR
as a “professional poisoner of the public mind”
I admired a nimble piece of wordcraft, and I still consider it
as accurate a label as any my job will ever have,
but most of all I knew we had made it to the big time.
Greatest country in the world, America.
People will buy anything.
Woody Guthrie: Rusty Bedspring Blues (1929)
My mother, Nora Belle, had long been moody and strange, but nobody knew she was sick with the chorea, and after she burned up my father with kerosene across his chest she was sent to the asylum for good, and he, to recover for a year, leaving me and my brother Roy to fend for ourselves throughout nineteen twenty-seven,
Roy signing on at the market and me jig-dancing on sidewalks and rapping the bones for spare change,
working as needed shining shoes, polishing spittoons, picking cotton or washing dishes at the chili palace for seventy-five cents a day,
living sometimes with friendly families in town, the Smiths, the Prices, the Moores,
or just sleeping in haylofts and shanties, not caring what opinion was formed of me by the good citizens of Okemah, Oklahoma, which might as well have been the title of my very first song, the “Go Ahead and Call Me a Tramp Blues.”
Summer of nineteen twenty-eight, after school closed up, I set out on the road the first time, hitchhiking through Houston to the Gulf of Mexico,
following the sun-ruined roads from town to town, through fishing camps on bayous smelling like teardrops with torn-up nets in the branches and the lacework of fish bones and silver scales on bleached wood where pelicans clacked their bills to those “Gulf Coast Afternoon Rainstorm Blues,”
