Archive - July, 2011

Composer Paul Brantley on the Sacred and the Subversive

July 30, 2011 in Sounds with Comments Off

“I’ve long been drawn to…’gnostic’ texts–-those rejected, supposedly heretical texts from long before Christianity became an organized religion.” (Photo by Greg Kessler)

Paul Brantley is a man who moves between worlds. A multifaceted musician, he has performed as a cellist with Trey Anastasio, recorded for Béla Fleck and James Morrison, toured with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, gigged with Chester Thompson, produced for and co-composed with Royel “Futureman” Wooten (the Flecktones), conducted for David Binney, and arranged for Ethel, Todd Rundgren, and Christian Scott. He shifts easily between jazz, classical, experimental music, and pop, and over the years he has worked with everyone from Leonard Bernstein, Vince Gill, the Atlanta Symphony, Betsy Jolas, Dave Gregory of XTC, Alan Harris, Emanuel Hurwitz, John Jorgenson, Kenneth Kiesler, David Loeb, Claire Lynch, and Ned Rorem.

Brantley’s own compositions also respond to a multitude of influences. He has a gift for synthesizing musical styles and creating new, original sounds. He has recorded solo cello for Sony/Columbia, Rounder, Warner Bros., Polydor, and Compass.

When you meet Brantley in person, he is unhurried and thoughtful in conversation. An energetic performer, he is calm and attentive in his personal interactions. The texts he has chosen to set to music reveal his diversity of tastes, but also his interest in philosophical and spiritual matters: Rilke, Apollinaire, Beaumont and Fletcher, Rumi, Wallace Stevens, Cocteau, e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, Biblical “wisdom” texts, among others. “There is, behind all of these poets and works,” Brantley says, “a tradition deeper than those of time and place we normally associate–one that has to do with an essentially archetypal response to living and creating.”

Like most contemporary composers, Brantley stays busy meeting commission deadlines, conducting, teaching at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where he lives, traveling and attending performances and festivals, making recordings, performing, and composing new work at residencies like The Banff Centre in Canada.

When I heard that he had written a piece called the Gnostic Cantata, I was eager to learn more. Brantley is also a composer in residence at the Monadnock Music Festival in New Hampshire this summer. Another new composition by Brantley will have its premiere at the festival in Peterborough, New Hampshire next week.

“That nearly all organized religions are in a deep state of crisis, most people would agree. Christianity, in all its myriad forms, is only the most conspicuous.” (Courtesy Photo)

Paul, you’ve just finished a piece called the Gnostic Cantata. You’ve worked in a diverse range of styles and musical genres in the past. What compelled you to write a cantata?

Yes, the Gnostic Cantata was just premiered in New York City back in March. It is a “pocket cantata” for just three performers. Jesse Mills was the extraordinary violinist, I was the cellist, and Rachel Calloway was the wonderful mezzo-soprano. My desire to compose this piece is somewhat mysterious to me.

I do know that the idea of composing some kind of cantata–a vocal and instrumental sequence with some kind of “spiritual” narrative–has always been very compelling. All of Bach’s nearly 300 cantatas are masterpieces–but they are also workaday pieces that he turned out on a weekly basis–workaweek. At the same time, and this is just my opinion, they are also all deeply theologically subversive. And so the opportunity to creatively encounter these so-called “gnostic” texts, that are already spiritually subversive, was very appealing.

Bach “theologically subversive”? Can you elaborate?

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The Sunday Poem: D. Nurkse

July 28, 2011 in Sunday Poem, Words with Comments Off

 

 

 

The Present

 

We made models: this is a moment of happiness,
this is a maple-shaded street, its yellow median line
littered with double wings: some day we might know such things
in our real lives, not just in desire.

We invented Cherryfield, Maine, nine pearl-gray Capes
with sagging porches held together by coats of gesso.
Behind the scrim of birches the Middle Branch River
glittered like the galvanized roof to a tackle shed.

We were quick and replicated a shack with a chalk sign
CHUBBS SMELTS CROAKERS; there was barely time to read it
before it whirled into the past. And she who was driving said,
we know the coming disaster intimately but the present is unknowable.

Which disaster, I wondered, sexual or geological? But I was shy:
her beauty was like a language she didn’t speak and had never heard.

Then we were in Holyfield and it was the hour when the child
waves from a Welcome mat, his eyes full of longing, before turning
inward to his enforced sleep. We waved back but we were gone.

The hour when two moths bump together above a pail of lures.

The hour when the Coleman lamp flickers in the screen house
above the blur of cards being shuffled and dealt amazingly fast.

All my life I have been dying, of hope and self pity,
and an unknown force has been knitting me back together.
It happens in secret. I want to touch her and I touch her
and it registers on the glittering gauges that make the car darker
and swifter and we come to the mountains and this is all I ever wanted:

to enter the moth’s pinhead eye, now, and never return.

 

 

About D. Nurkse

D. Nurkse (Photo by Jemimah Kuhfeld)

D. Nurkse has published nine books of poetry, most recently The Border Kingdom, from Knopf, who will publish Nurkse’s new book of poems next summer. Nurkse is also the author of The Fall, Burnt Island, and Shadow Wars. He received a 2009 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is currently a finalist for the Forward Prize in Great Britain. Formerly the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, New York, Nurkse has received the Whiting Writers’ Award and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Rikers Island Correctional Facility.

 

Would you like the Sunday Poem delivered to your email box each week? Subscribe to Gwarlingo by email. You can also connect on Twitter or Facebook. You can read Gwarlingo’s entire Sunday Poem series here. Explore books by D. Nurkse and other poets in the Gwarlingo Store.

 

“The Present” © D. Nurkse. Reprinted with permission by the author. This poem first appeared in The Kenyon Review.


Olafur Eliasson: Your Blind Passenger

July 25, 2011 in Images, Spaces with Comments Off

Olafur Eliasson's "Your Blind Passenger" (Courtesy Photo)

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish artist who brought the sun to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and created man-made waterfalls in New York City, has a new project at the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen.

Eliasson’s installation Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) is a 295-foot-long tunnel filled with dense fog. Because of the tunnel’s limited visibility, visitors passing through the tunnel must use senses other than sight to orient themselves.

Din blinde passager is the sort of quality, experiential artwork that is attracting larger crowds to contemporary art museums and galleries in recent years. The worst examples of this type of installation art are a bit like a ride at Disney World–they give us a short-lived thrill, can be gimmicky, and lack resonance. But thoughtful works like Eliasson’s offer a deeper museum experience and allow us to engage in the world in an original way. I love the fact that Eliasson’s exhibit disorients museum-goers and invites them to pay close attention to subtle environmental changes like sound or the slow shift of light.

Your blind passenger uses many types of white light–bright daylight, a golden sunrise, chilly blues, deep twilight. Normally, these changes in our environment are so slow and commonplace that we hardly notice them, but Eliasson’s piece condenses an entire day down to a singular, intense experience. With the distractions of our surroundings eliminated, with limited visibility in a contained space, we notice light in a way we never have before. Eliasson’s piece is a reminder that we are enveloped by changing light (both natural and unnatural) on a continual basis, but few of us detect it as we go about our daily lives.

Arken Museum

"Eliasson's exhibit disorients museum-goers and invites them to pay close attention to subtle environmental changes like sound or the slow shift of light." (Courtesy photo)

Eliasson’s exhibition is the final instalment in ARKEN’s three-year UTOPIA series, which examines the role of utopia in contemporary art and culture. “For me, utopia is linked to the now, the moment between one second and the next,” Eliasson explained in an interview. “It constitutes a possibility that is actualised and converted into reality, an opening where concepts like subject and object, inside and outside, proximity and distance are tossed into the air and redefined. Our sense of orientation is challenged and the coordinates of our spaces, collective and personal, have to be renegotiated. Changeability and mobility are at the core of utopia.”

Christian Gether, director of ARKEN, believes that Eliasson is unique in how he engages with gallery spaces. “Eliasson is extremely interesting because he takes a new view of the institution of the museum,” she says. “He does not see the museum as separate from the world but as a concentrate of the world – a space made available for the contemplation of human relations. Hence, he is the ideal artist to conclude the UTOPIA project.”

Olafur Eliasson’s Your blind passenger is open through November 2, 2011. Luckily, for those of us who can’t make it to Copenhagen, there are two excellent videos of the piece available here. The first video was produced by the Tate and includes an interview with Eliasson, as well as footage of his installation. The second video is from Eliasson’s own website. Because the second video contains no voiceovers or cuts, it gives a better sense of what it is like to walk through the 295-foot-long tunnel in silence. (If you’re reading this article in an email, click here to watch the videos).

 

 

 

Din blinde passager – Arken museum from Studio Olafur Eliasson on Vimeo.

 
To leave a comment or share this story on Facebook, Twitter, etc., click here. Don’t forget to check out the Gwarlingo home page, which is updated regularly. Right now, you can preview music by Mountain Man, see the latest Gwarlingo recommendations and reader comments, plus view Gwarlingo’s “Photo of the Week.”

Also, for those of you following the fundraising campaign of filmmakers Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton, there’s only one week left. They’ve raised over 50% of the funds they need. You can see an update on the campaign on the Gwarlingo home page.

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The Sunday Poem : Meghan O’Rourke

July 23, 2011 in Sunday Poem, Words with 1 Comment

 

Meghan O’Rourke (Photo by Sarah Shatz)

 

 

 

Extraneous

The wind is alive, it lifts and swings;
the river is alive, it drifts past
the sugar factory;
the grass is alive, it trembles or shakes,
the ants are alive, they move through the brown grass;
the dirt is alive, moist with rain.
In endeavor and industry
the stones among the earth all live.
What then are you, captive
of glass, moving so slowly and dully?
A delinquent; nobody’s darling,
a daughter in the way of the wind—

 

 

 

About Meghan O’Rourke

Meghan O’Rourke began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate, as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Vogue, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. O’Rourke has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a finalist for the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts and Letters.

O’Rourke is also the author of the poetry collection Halflife (2007). The poem “Extraneous” will appear in her forthcoming collection, Once, which will be published by Norton in October of this year. In April of 2011 her book, The Long Goodbye, a memoir of grief and mourning written after the death of her mother, was published to critical acclaim. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and in Marfa, Texas. For more information about Meghan O’Rourke and her work, please visit her website.

 

Click here to learn more about The Sunday Poem series and to read last week’s poem by Andrea Cohen. You can also add a comment about “Extraneous” or share this poem on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

While you’re here, don’t forget to check out the Gwarlingo home page, which is updated daily. Right now, you can preview Gwarlingo’s Pick of the Week–Made the Harbor by Mountain Man, view art by painter Mark Wethli, see the latest reader comments, get an update on the fundraising efforts of filmmakers Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carelton, plus view Gwarlingo’s “Photo of the Week”–a striking image of summer sea ice on the Arctic Ocean.

If you enjoy Gwarlingo, please consider subscribing by email. (It’s easy, safe, and free, and you won’t have to remember to keep checking the website). You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook or share a “like” on the Gwarlingo Facebook page.

 

“Extraneous” Copyright © Meghan O’Rourke. Reprinted with permission by the author.

 

 

Designer Milton Glaser on Creativity and the Fear of Failure

July 22, 2011 in Design, Images, Process with 2 Comments

You may not know graphic designer Milton Glaser by name, but you undoubtedly know his work. He is best known for the “I ♥ NY” logo, his “Bob Dylan” poster, the “DC bullet” logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the “Brooklyn Brewery” logo. He also founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968 and was one of the co-founders of Push Pin Studios in 1954.

Following September 11th, Glaser updated his iconic “I ♥ NY” design.

Many of Glaser’s designs have achieved iconic status. ”The hallmarks of his work are its simplicity, wit and elegance,” said Stephen Holden in the New York Times. “It may be commercial art, but with a capital A.”

In 2009, Glaser was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, among others. Milton Glaser, Inc., which was established in 1974 in Manhattan, is still producing work in a wide range of disciplines. Philip Roth fans may recognize the numerous book jackets Glaser has designed for his friend over the years.

 

A poster Glaser designed to raise awareness of the Darfur crisis and benefit the International Rescue Committee.

Glaser is an articulate speaker, as well as a talented artist. In this seven-minute video, the renowned designer shares his own views on the creative process and the inevitable fear of failure that all artists confront.

Continue Reading…

Four Egyptian Women, Two Filmmakers, One Revolution

July 21, 2011 in Images, News, Words with Comments Off

Filmmakers Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton in front of the Ziggurat of Ur in Nasiriyah in 2004. (Photo courtesy of Four Corners Media)

If forwarding an email or sharing a story could bring an important creative project to fruition, would you do it? If giving $10 could help us better understand the lives of four young women living in the Middle East or unravel the causes of a cultural revolution, would you donate?

If so, then I’d like to connect you with two talented journalists and filmmakers, Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton.

You may remember their story, if not their names. In 2004 the couple was in Iraq filming The Road to Nasiriyah, a documentary about the looting of archeological sites following the 2003 Iraq war. Although the filming was dangerous, they were determined to document the large-scale looting that was occurring at many Sumerian sites in the region.

Near the end of the project, Marie-Hélène flew back to New York, while Micah stayed behind to complete shooting. Just two days before his scheduled return to America, Micah and his Iraqi translator, Amir, were kidnapped by a local Shiite group.

The kidnapping made news around the globe. Marie-Hélène immediately turned her New York apartment into a command center and began contacting journalists, Muslim organizations, friends, and aid workers all over the world–anyone who might have contact with the kidnappers and be able to lobby for Micah’s release.

After five days, Micah was forced in front of a video camera with four masked kidnappers, a scene reminiscent of both Daniel Pearl and Nick Byrd. Unlike Pearl and Byrd, the kidnappers didn’t kill Micah or Amir, but while they were held hostage, Micah and his translator were beaten, and Amir’s jaw was broken. Fearing for his life, Micah wrote a message in mud to Marie-Hélène on the back of a matchbook.

Thanks to the hard work of Marie-Hélène, her family, and her global network, Micah and Amir were released after ten days of captivity. They have spoken about the kidnapping on National Public Radio, CBS News, CNN’s Larry King Live, Democracy Now, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. They have also recounted this remarkable story in detail in their book American Hostage, published by Simon and Schuster in 2005.

An Italian soldier looks out across Mesopotamian plain from the top of the Ziggurat at Ur. July, 2004. (Photo © Micah Garen/Four Corners Media)

I have known Micah and Marie-Hélène for many years now, initially through their residencies at The MacDowell Colony, where they wrote American Hostage and worked on their film The Road to Nasiriyah. What continues to impress me about them is not only their bravery and generosity, but also their dedication and sense of purpose. It is refreshing to see two artists so interested in the lives of others and willing to risk their own safety to bring these stories to the larger public.

“The kidnapping was a reminder of how much journalists have become targets,” Marie-Hélène recently told me in an email. “At the same time, it was also a reminder of how important passion is in this kind of work…You do this because you are passionate about it and you feel that these stories need to be told. To me, it’s important to continue on and focus on what you think is important despite everything, to remain true to how you want, or feel compelled, to live your life.”

The kidnapping incident has not stopped Micah or Marie-Hélène from working in conflict and post-conflict zones throughout the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and southeastern Turkey. The couple’s latest film project is called If and is the coming-of-age story of four young women during the Egyptian revolution.

Shimaa in downtown Cairo after Mubarak fell in February 2011 (Photo © Micah Garen/Four Corners Media)

For If, Micah and Marie-Hélène have closely documented the lives of four Egyptian women–an art curator, a student, a cancer researcher, and a journalist advocate. Their footage gives us a glimpse into the inner-workings of the revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak’s regime early this year. In the film Shimaa, Mona, Sarah, and Nora explain how they used online networks to spread information and mobilize people, how they came to join the protests, and how their involvement in the revolution changed them on a personal level.

I particularly enjoyed listening to the insights of Sarah Rifky, a curator of the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. In this excerpt Marie-Hélène and Micah created for BBC World News America, Rifky explains how the Egyptian revolution created an environment where all citizens, including artists, were better able to express themselves.

For too long, people watched the news instead of participating in the news, says Rifky, they watched politics instead of participating in politics, and they went to art shows, instead of making art themselves. The Townhouse Gallery now hosts the Cairo Complaints Choir, a participatory art project that allows people with no professional experience to turn their everyday complaints into a song. The gallery has become a hub of cultural activity and a rallying place for those who took part in the revolution.

Sarah Rifky, curator of the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and one of the women profiled in Micah and Marie-Hélène's new film about the Egyptian revolution.

This is one of the best ways to learn about political events–through the eyes of everyday people who have been directly affected. As the filmmakers explained, these young, independent women “are representative of both the discontent that led to the revolution and the incredible optimism and activism that propelled it.”

Micah and Marie-Hélène have until 10:07 a.m. on August 3rd to raise the $15,000 they need to fund their new film If. They will use the money they raise on Kickstarter.com to return to Egypt and continue filming their characters’ stories. These funds will also allow them to begin editing If, a process that takes a great deal of time and focus.

A few days ago, Micah and Marie-Hélène shared this update:

Continue Reading…

Gwarlingo’s Pick of the Week: PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake”

July 18, 2011 in Images, Sounds with Comments Off

PJ Harvey (Photo by Seamus Murphy)

On my recent visit to the UK I talked to several music lovers about the British music scene. One classical pianist I met in London recommended the choral work of British composer Jonathan Harvey and urged me to investigate the excellent website Sound and Music, which covers the contemporary music and sound art scene in the UK.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, the young guitarist Kiran Marvin Pearce kindly gave me a rundown of some of his favorite British indie bands. The Bombay Bicycle Club, Mark Ronson, The Coral, Noah and the Whale, and The Black Ghosts stood out during our musical tour.

I also stumbled across the new band Yuck, a young, London-based garage band whose self-titled debut album is worth a listen. Although the band members were still in diapers during the 90s indie rock explosion, their passion for the music of this era is infectious and owes something to bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.

Despite these great, new musical discoveries, in the end my takeaway album from the UK trip was not by some obscure indie band as I had anticipated, but instead, was the eighth studio album by musical veteran PJ Harvey.

In this age of listening to music on the go and on perpetual “shuffle,” it is uncommon that I come across a record that compels me to stop and pay close attention. But Polly Jean Harvey’s Let England Shake is one of those rare musical gems that has everything going for it–original sounds and textures, poignant lyrics, an overarching theme of war and violence that is never too didactic or heavy-handed, thoughtful pacing, and creative vocalization that utilizes Harvey’s upper range.

Every track on this record stands alone as a solid, inventive work in its own right, but each song also contributes to the project as a whole. There is no musical filler here. The album gets better and better with each listen and deserves to be heard in sequence in its entirety as Harvey intended. It is a very English record, drawing on Harvey’s West Country background, English vernacular songs, and the country’s military history. The Thames and the White Cliffs of Dover both make appearances.

Let England Shake proves that Harvey is capable of reinventing herself and pushing her creative talents to their limits. Not only is it PJ Harvey’s strongest work to date, but it is one of the best albums of the year so far. Its brilliance lies partially in its contradictions. The record opens with the line, “The West’s asleep. Let England shake, weighted down with silent dead. I fear our blood won’t rise again. England’s dancing days are done.” Harvey sets these somber lyrics about war and violence to lively, upbeat melodies that draw inspiration from traditional folk tunes. Her thoughtful, restrained lyrics are punctuated by jaunty autoharp, brass instruments, electric piano, and off-beat samples.

“The Glorious Land” is one of the album’s highlights and is a fine example of the way Harvey is able to create a truly original sound by blending her lilting voice with feverish guitar, drums, and an out-of-time, out-of-tune military bugle sample.

PJ Harvey (by Seamus Murphy)

In “The Words That Maketh Murder” Harvey sings from the point of view of a soldier who has witnessed horrible atrocities: “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget; I’ve seen a corporal whose nerves were shot climbing behind the fierce, gone sun, I’ve seen flies swarming everyone….” At the end of the song, Harvey brilliantly turns a line from Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” into a jaunty refrain: ”What if I take my problems to the United Nations?” This is dark comedy at its best.

Although Harvey explores the themes of violence and war, Let England Shake isn’t a protest or message record. Harvey’s lyrics remain skillfully restrained and ambiguous throughout and give the album a timeless quality. She is never overtly political or preachy, but assumes the role of an observant narrator instead. While Harvey references specific battles and wars, she always leaves some space in her lyrics. She could be speaking of the Great War, Afghanistan, or Iraq. The specifics are blurred, and the end result is compelling, atmospheric, and mysterious.

Harvey recently explained her creative approach to the BBC’s Andrew Marr. I’m “always trying to come from the human point of view,” Harvey said, “because I don’t feel qualified to sing from a political standpoint I sing as a human being affected by the politics, and that for me is a more successful way because I so often feel that with a lot of protest music, I’m being preached to, and I dont want that.”

A still from Seamus Murphy's short film "The Last Living Rose" (in collaboration with PJ Harvey)

Let England Shake was recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset on a cliff-top overlooking the sea. Flood, John Parish, and Mick Harvey all make their own musical contributions to the record. Harvey spent over two years writing the lyrics for the album, and her commitment to the project, as well as her own creative evolution shows.

As Harvey explained to Dorian Lynskey in an interview in the Guardian, she sits down to write every single day. “You have to be more disciplined, and you ultimately end up with a much stronger piece of work…If it takes 10 years then I would rather wait and know that I felt each piece was strong than feel that it was time to put something out but five pieces are a bit weak.”

“I wanted to get better,” she told Lynskey. “I wanted to be more coherent, I wanted there to be a greater strength and depth emotionally, and all these things require work – to hone something, to get rid of any superfluous language. I’m inspired by the other great writers I go back to and read again and again, and think how did they do that?”

PJ Harvey (Photo by Seamus Murphy)

In the Lynskey interview, Harvey expressed her admiration for writers like T.S. Eliot, Yeats, John Burnside, James Joyce, and Ted Hughes. Harold Pinter’s poems “American Football” or “The Disappeared” were singled out as particular favorites.” All of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people…I think as a creative artist it’s crucial to be open – to feel. You can’t do it with a closed heart. You almost have to hand over your soul to that action. And so there can be times when you can feel too full of the piece that you’re making. It’s almost like being a sponge and you just have to absorb everything in order to have all of the goods to make something out of that.”

Continue Reading…

The Sunday Poem by Andrea Cohen

July 16, 2011 in Sunday Poem, Words with Comments Off

Andrea Cohen (Courtesy Photo)

I’m excited to announce the first installment of Gwarlingo’s new Sunday Poem series.

I want to thank Andrea Cohen for sharing her new poem “Tender” with Gwarlingo readers. I’m a long-time fan of Andrea’s work, and I’m grateful she agreed to be the featured poet for the series debut.

Why a Sunday Poem Series?

Of all artistic mediums, poetry may be the one that is criticized most for “preaching to the choir.” How many times have I heard, “The only people reading poetry today are other poets”? This isn’t true, of course, but it is true that it’s increasingly difficult for poetry to attract a general audience the way films and novels can.

But poetry can be just as rewarding as these other mediums. Poetry doesn’t have to be difficult or obscure to be meaningful, and it doesn’t have to be trite or sentimental to be accessible. My favorite poets, like many of my favorite photographers and songwriters, are able to capture the small, fleeting moments of everyday life, as well as expose larger patterns–they are able to compress and connect disparate ideas and images using inventive language, rhythm, and forms. The poet’s gift is knowing what is most essential.

I created Gwarlingo because I wanted to share great work–regardless of the artistic medium–with an appreciative, smart, open-minded audience. I also wanted to do this in a conscious way that reduced online noise, instead of adding to it. Many of us are in a continual state of information overload. We are overwhelmed by too much choice, too much hyperbole. It’s not that we don’t care about poetry or painting, it is just hard for these mediums to compete. We need quiet, contemplative sanctuaries in our online lives.

And so it occurred to me…Wouldn’t it be nice to open your email on a Sunday morning and find a specially chosen poem nestled between that Facebook message and that dire plea from the Nigerian prince? Many of us begin Sundays with a cup of coffee, a walk, the newspaper, brunch with friends, or some meaningful spiritual pursuit. Poetry is a fitting companion to these leisurely activities. Gwarlingo’s Sunday Poem series is also a nod to Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sunday Morning,” a work I’ve loved since my college days.

This is the only time I’m going to clutter the Sunday Poem page with a long introduction. From this point forward, the series will be short and simple–a single poem along with a brief biography. I look forward to sharing the work of some of my favorite poets with you in the weeks and months ahead.

But enough from me. It’s time to turn this space over to Andrea…

 

The Sunday Poem: “Tender” by Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen’s poetry collections include Long Division, The Cartographer’s Vacation, and her newest book Kentucky Derby (a collection I heartily recommend).

Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, Memorious and elsewhere. She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, the Owl Creek Poetry Prize and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. Andrea also directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts (if you’re a poetry lover in the Boston area, you should check out this great series).

On April 13, 2011, Cohen reached her largest audience yet when her work was featured on National Public Radio’s Writer’s Almanac. (Garrison Keilor’s rendition of “Truth in Advertising” can be heard here.)

In a review for The Guardian, Kate Kellaway observes, “Cohen writes conversational poetry. Her lightness of touch and her lack of self-importance are a tonic. She never travels heavy. Her poems are dominated by the idea of transformation (the outside world is always promising us release from ourselves).”

For more information about Andrea and her work, please visit her website. Her latest poetry collection, Kentucky Derby, is available at Amazon or at your local bookstore.

 

 

 

Tender

Unfolded, crisp–here

are your dollars, with

interest, with blood

 

and sweat, with

antiseptic and the elbow

grease that couldn’t

 

quite clean them. Here

are your dollars, with

their dead men, with their

 

flags, with their pyramids

chiseled and eagles flattened.

Give me back my hours.

 

 

 

 

 

The Discomfort Zone:
Love and the Male Novelist

July 14, 2011 in Words with 3 Comments

Female writers are sentimental and have “a narrow view of the world.” At least that is how V.S. Naipaul sees things.

Back in June, in an interview at the Royal Geographic Society, Naipaul was asked if there were any female writers he considered his literary match. “I don’t think so,” the author replied. They are “quite different…I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

Naipaul argued that this is because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world…And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” Naipaul added. ”My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.” Of Jane Austen, Naipaul said that he ”couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.”

The British writer Diana Athill, whose work Naipaul flippantly dismissed as “feminine tosh,” handled the criticism with her usual grace and good humor. “He doesn’t realise what a monkey he’s making of himself,” she told the Guardian. Naipaul deserves to be taken to task for his sexism and hubris, as well as his lack of empathy. The best fiction writers are able to inhabit the lives of others, and assuming a position of superiority can only be a detriment to the literary imagination.

The recent Naipaul controversy brought to mind last year’s big sexism uproar in the literary world, which centered around the release of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom. Franzen, through no fault of his own, found himself in the line of fire when the critical acclaim of his novel became a useful vehicle to debate gender inequalities in publishing.

Franzen responded to the “Franzenfrenzy” controversy in interviews and at public appearances. “There are too few books by women that receive the attention they deserve,” I heard him say at an event last year. Franzen is not simply paying lip service to his critics. He has consistently advocated for female authors and championed talented writers like Paula Fox, Alice Munro, Jane Smiley, and Lorrie Moore.

The specifics of the Franzen and Naipaul controversies are worth noting for their dissimilarities. In one case a male writer has said something truly contemptuous about women, and in the other a male writer has simply produced a fabulous novel that critics loved.

If we want to discuss gender inequality in the literary world, let’s look at the numbers that reveal that 62% of the books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and August 27, 2010 in the Sunday Times Book Review were by men (male authors wrote 72% of the books that received two reviews in the paper). Let’s discuss new research that shows a huge gender imbalance in children’s literature with male characters far outnumbering females. But let’s not turn Franzen into a literary whipping boy simply because he is a gifted writer, who also happens to be white and male.

The novelist Jonathan Franzen spoke about the subject of love in his recent commencement address at Kenyon College (Courtesy Photo)

No stranger to controversy, Franzen has learned the hard way about the perils of being a public figure in the digital age. David Shields has criticized the author for his “nostalgic,” “Flaubertian” novels, and Franzen is nostalgic in his way. He has devoted his life to books–an “old fashioned” medium that requires ample concentration, time, and focus. Franzen is at his best when he is given this space to explore an idea in depth. But deep attention is becoming rarer these days and as Franzen has discovered, context and true meaning are quickly obscured when an hour-long interview is reduced to a 10-second sound byte. Is it any wonder Franzen remains skeptical of technology?

Regardless of your opinions about Franzen’s work, he deserves credit for his willingness to enter the fray of public discourse. Most writers choose their profession because they have a penchant for solitude and prefer to meticulously craft their ideas in private and let the work speak for itself. For many writers I know, public speaking is about as enjoyable as a visit to the dentist.

But Franzen, regardless of his appetite for solitude and love for the novel, has decided to leave his desk–to investigate politics in Washington D.C., the poaching of songbirds in Southern Europe, amongst other subjects. He is growing, both as a public figure and as a writer. He has become a more eloquent, impassioned speaker in recent years. When I recently listened to his interviews and readings from a decade ago during The Corrections tour and compared them to the latest round of interviews for Freedom, I found Franzen to be more open and honest not only about his personal life, but also about his fears and struggles as a writer.

But nowhere has this growth been more apparent than in the evolution of his fiction. Franzen has always had a sharp eye for social and cultural criticism. He excels at the big picture. It is one of the gifts he brings to his prose–the ability to make connections between our personal consumer choices, our relationships, and the environment we live in. In Franzen’s world, there is a direct correlation between the cars we drive, the places we live, the pills we take, the people we love, and the desire to relieve loneliness and personal suffering. A single choice–to take an anti-depressant, to marry, to use sex as a salve for unhappiness, to be your own child’s best friend, to let the cat outdoors each night–has a ripple effect, not only on the character’s internal life and the other characters they interact with, but also on the neighborhood, the song birds, the soldiers fighting a war in another country. The idea that everything and everyone is connected in some way is one of Franzen’s central themes.

While Franzen has always excelled at these larger thematic ideas, until recent novels, he has kept his characters safely at arm’s length. His ability to zoom out and obtain a bird’s eye view (as he did so well in The Twenty-Seventh City) can be a handicap when it comes to creating memorable, complex characters. But with each new novel, Franzen has moved in closer. He has risked intimacy not only with his characters, but also himself.

Franzen likes to quote writer Alice Sebold when she describes “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” But this is exactly what he has done in both The Corrections and in Freedom. He has waded into the messy murk of human emotions, exploring pain, longing, loss, insecurity, jealousy, and the most difficult emotion of all–love.

Love is tricky literary territory, especially for a male novelist. Many writers, such as Naipaul, prefer to avoid the subject entirely. But regardless of the writer’s gender, the pitfalls of writing about love are the same in fiction–sentimentality, triteness, melodrama, and maybe worst of all, the risk of being unhip, of being caught wearing your heart on your vintage t-shirt sleeve. Which book jacket symbol would be most embarrassing to a male reader on the subway I wonder–the Oprah Book Club logo or a bright red heart?

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