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Overview
Jim Barnes’s familiarity with the European poetic traditions has been deepened through long periods spent in France, Germany, and Italy, and through his translations of European poetry. In Visiting Picasso he repays Europe for its gifts to him in a series of poems that evoke the lush poetic history that ties European culture together, sometimes darkly. A heightened sense of place and purpose infuses the poems of Visiting Picasso with meaning drawn from actual landscapes, events, and observations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252090462 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Series: | Illinois Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 294 KB |
About the Author
Jim Barnes is an internationally recognized poet and translator. He is the author of many books of poetry, including The Sawdust War, Paris, and On a Wing of the Sun, as well as an autobiography, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions, which won the American Book Award. He is the Poet Laureate of Oklahoma for 2009-2010.
Read an Excerpt
Visiting Picasso
PoemsBy Jim Barnes
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2007 Jim BarnesAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07373-1
Chapter One
Homage To Nabokov The day is sharp with blades of wind thrown down from the Bernese Alps, the glinting sun cruel in its insistence upon an icy shine. Today nothing happens above Montreux except the roiling clouds and Norway pines whose heavy limbs speak of memory in lieu of snow. Yet, as we enter the gate, the sound of song flows down the hill from the gray fold of Châtelard, where hands are pruning vines. Black granite slab, a black stone lettered in gold, the one last name. We come too late to ask your pardon for the letter I sent, my old request for your contribution, to which Véra answered curtly, in type bolder than my Royal's had been, that VN did not send things for consideration. Too late we know humility and the aching rot of pride. Forgive me for my once rude state of imbecility: indeed I did not know your life. We hand you the wrinkled fruit from the persimmon tree, its flesh a hot pale fire on our tongues. There is no great risk in eating the fruit in this graveyard: the frost of November has cooked the skins and mist from Evian has washed them clean. At most we will stay an hourand feel we are blessed to have leaned upon your good name, a host of vines at our backs, and made our visit. Leaving Chillon Something dark stays with you on leaving the Château de Chillon, not the memory of Byron's name graved on the column where Bonnivard was chained below nor the fog that rides the surface of the lake. The lame gatekeeper gives you the evil eye when you go past the stile and leave no Swiss francs. Not the same dark that you know from deep night but the dark of threat that is dreamed palpable. The history of sweat and blood, the prisoner chained for years, the holy war between the towns-all this falls away. But the stark weight of Chillon bends your back for miles along the shore. You try to shake it from your thoughts, consider shades of trees at water's edge, or roses that are more at bloom than you have ever seen up the brick way to Villa Isabelle. The monkey trees and palms are darkly green, and at gloaming Lac Léman is calm in the growing fog. You speak and try to calm your mind. No one is near except the birds. You say a verse or two from Byron's poem, something like strove to rend my bonds, and stop. You have lost nothing here from first to last visit. All is fictive, a sham of mind you walk into along this promenade. The birds are quacking at your loss of sense. Dark in low flight, Chillon hangs above the lake, below the coming night. L'Exposition A cold day in Martigny and we come to see the work of Marie Laurencin. Her portraits blur into form, lurk oriental and light. Something dark from the eyes holds us. The pastels are smooth as dream, the brush she used cream to touch. All the eyes seem oval slants, all the robes leant by the gods long absent from this Celtic place Romans built on. The road in named us native as scree above our heads. We feel stone threaten the figures that her light touch turned into a tone that is hers alone, but know that the flow of color will remain glacial and frozen into forms that open still. Charlie and the Funicular Rare December day: the sun breaks into a radiance over Alps few are witness to. The perched clog car is almost empty. Knees ache from the altitude and cobblestones. After over a mile up you feel a need for valleys, fields of grain and butterflies. Charlie Chaplin lies far below. You can barely see Clarens. My head reels with a dizziness comic and free as a tramp in spring. Vevey and Montreux are spread along the lake under blue haze. If Chaplin were here, the line would break, the clog wheel slip from greased cups, and we would take one hell of a ride back down to where we started from, alive and well, no worse at all for the fast fall down, except hats gone and shirttails in the wind. Funny how you can think death would pass you by if and when this or that were real. We begin the descent and feel our hearts sink at the thought that death could happen, that indeed it eventually would, in some form, comic or otherwise. We come here to visit Chaplin and ask for his forgiveness should we think the world as simple as his odd little Charlie Chaplin man. There is no way to get away from our piddling complexities, but to fall completely down. Then who's there to care? We are not saved even under stone and cedar trees. Waiting for Recognition Mid-February and we are standing in the railway station of Basel, waiting to be fetched by a stranger host. Four languages come and go and others I cannot identify. Choctaw ghosts take my arm: we want to be recognized this far from home. A native walks as if she is looking for long hair, a feather dangling down an ear. I wait until she doubles back and asks, you aren't him, are you? My skin shrinks palely in the frigid air. How to explain ashes and my DNA scattered way back into black Wales and Mississippi. Even Muskrat Coyote Crow would dodge that one. Next time we will carry drums, a full pouch of medicine around our necks for luck and perseverence. These Swiss have an eye for detail. We might chant, start a small fire. Or maybe next time have long hair and beads. She thinks we would like to walk to the place the reading is to be, saying something about our lineage and reservations we do not understand Tóntóly clear. Talking, talking, not stopping, not knowing the silence of snow, the silence of blood. Remembering Cap Canaille So just how many poems do you have to write before 1 from somewhere like Cassis' harbor where a lighthouse with its low illumination green and of a mysterious hue comes up from a depth beneath your heart in the house on the little cliff Where Signac painted pointe après pointe Cap Canaille and the sea, the changing light thrown by gods from heights that we can never know or long forget, then an effervescence of mind only the one artist perceived in his long regard of sea and land and light that still in our day holds the same need to understand all that vanishes from our life, all that we constantly try to call back? février 1996 Fondation Camargo Always Completely at Home The days we meant to stop in St.-Maximin were always full of sun and the lure of mountains toward the north. We never did in all the passing of the cloister take the time to find the narrow road up to the door: we were not penitent enough to drag our indolent bodies through the summer heat that hung about us in halos of blue flowers from the Cézanne fields. Perhaps we were a bit afraid of the spirits that we thought might still linger there in the dark and gilted skull. Heaviness of monks made us skirt holy ground and drive round the city square where old men smoked and played boules in the slower hours of Provençal afternoons. In all that passing, we never stopped. And now, months past, our minds unfurl that world: we are driving still in place: the steeple of St.-Maximin comes in view, and we see swirling robes of prostitutes and pizza vans and a deep dust rising from round a game of boules that will last well into the evening hours. Still we drive on through the broad fields and up the winding road past Pourriéres as we did before, waving at the old shepherd with his fall flock near le Puits-d'Auzon, and the bare summit of Ste.-Victoire glows in the last light poured from the sun, blessing all the valleys in rose and blue. In the village that is Vauvenargues, we may atone with an Amaretto-for we are lovers, wine if we were not-and contemplate the azure valley below our table or the château that is vined with the tangled years of Picasso's art and folly. He is, locals say, always completely at home. In Cassis, Early March The mistral comes down from the north trailing furies of snow in its wake, and we close shutters against the dearth of sun. No one stirs for the sake of bread or wine. The red tiles quake and shift in the falling light. The thick courtyard doors strain in the hard surge of sound that claims the streets. The quick wind takes our souls: we sing a dirge for the slammed boats and the blown birds and the lost dogs prowling in the dark of the moon. The lighthouse parts the waves and trembles in the flow that marks the stone pier deeper than the days of chisel and maul. In the deepening haze we want to pull the walls of the room closer about us, drink warm tea, and paint the summer coming soon to Provence, dream of what should free us from the wind and calm the sea. For all that we are sheltered from keeps pounding in the conch of ears, the drumming becoming a cadence some few sojourning souls might fear the beat of. But now we draw our sepia days lightly and brush bare branches with mimosa blooms, thousands of serins in a rush of flight, and trace the dying drone of wind into the sea, its home, and wait for the change that will come down from the white harlequin hills above Vauvenargues. Our walls hum under the fading sun and sills are roosts for magpies from those hills.
In Vauvenargues -Picasso est-il chez lui? -Ah, oui, complètement. The proprietor of Le Restaurant Couscous swears over his café, he saw the bald head bob down the hill and into the Tabac one dark day and exit, a carton of Gaulloises beneath an arm, or was it Café Crème Noir? Though it's quite enough to have just seen the arm, the head, the rest of him strolling back up the hill, pale in the veil of smoke wrapping around him like a shroud. The wind was still as death, he says. His ghost needed smokes and came back for more. The mistral did not blow for weeks, but it was cold. I kept a cup of expresse tabled outside in case he needed a hit to keep his spirits up. Gwawdodyns for the Fisher King When I last spoke with you, my old friend, frost was on the lavender. Low wind cut our eyes so that one would think the ice on the streams presaged some bitter end of an age or race, doomed abstract as dust. I left San Raphael too fast. I regret, old friend, my lack of a bold query. You know I saw the gray ash upon your face, a mask of torn flesh. Hindsight tells me I was a fool, flush with an innocence that has sped me hence to where I now can say, with no fresh perspective, you could have made me ask. Though forbidden words, you could have cast a runic hand before the hollow doors that were your eyes, signed me a small cask, a loaf. But instead, your claws around the pole, you fished-cursed, cast, reeled, spat, frowned at the Estérel beyond us-the dream growing dull as the dent in your crown.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Visiting Picasso by Jim Barnes Copyright © 2007 by Jim Barnes. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents Homage to Nabokov Leaving Chillon L'Exposition Charlie and the Funicular Waiting for Recognition Remembering Cap Canaille Always Completely at Home In Cassis, Early March In Vauvenargues Gwawdodyns for the Fisher King Rue du Faubourg St.-Honor¿ Ballade Weather The Poetry Reading near La Californie after a Day on Golfe Juan The Judgment of Paris (Whereabouts Unknown) Watching TV at Dooley's, the Early 1950s Zen Winter's End, 1970 Sibyl F¿ria de P¿ques, Arles 1996 The American Heritage Potato Postcard to Andrew Grossbardt from the Confluence of the Fourche Maline and Holson Creek, Summerfield, Oklahoma, 1 September 1975 By the Ruins Postcard to David Ray from Poteau Mountain, Runestone State Park Corniche de l'Est¿rel The Artist as Beachcomber Picture of Creeley, after Hearing Him Read in Munich, February 1995 A Book of the Dead Winter's End Fin de Si¿cle at Schloss Solitude Birkenkopf 1998 These Flat-Topped Pines Crouch In St.-Maximin-Ste.-Baume with the Old Men at Boules, Looking for the Maestro Deputy Finds Dean's Tombstone on Highway Epitaph for J(ohn). B(erryman). Monsieur le Marquis de Vauvenargues The Marsh Bird The Cave on Cavanal Mountain Portrait in Seven Parts with Nightscape Heading East Out of Rock Springs Birkenkopf 2000 Giuseppe's Song for His Annelise in Her Absence . . . The Fox at Agay Visiting Picasso La Vieille Madame ¿ la Machine ¿ Sous Rubaiyat for a Pair of Heroes On the Hill Back of La Ciotat Ithaka 2001 Lay 4 The First F¿ria of the Third Millennium, Arles Easter Monday In Aix-en-Provence The Poet's Paradise Agamemnon The Snow Bird Twister Ikaros 1940 Owl Rondeau for a Shovelbill Catfish, at the Buffalo Hole, Fourche Maline River, ¿ la Research du Temps Perdu, January 2003 Magpie West of Cassis Taos as Purgatory Epithalamion: Villanelle for September 7, 2002 In Memory of Dora Maar Elegy for the Old Man beside the Road to Nans les Pins Villa Serbelloni Revisited, February 2003From the B&N Reads Blog
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