patrickkanouse.com Blog

Titian and the Emperor Charles V

Years ago I read a paragraph from Philip Ball’s wonderful book Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color that has stuck with me. I’ve even tried to fashion a – as yet unsuccessful – poem from it.

Legend has it that Emperor Charles V stooped to pick up a brush that the master [Titian] dropped as he worked in his studio, a gesture of supplication the gravity of which it is hard for us to appreciate today. For centuries afterward, painters must have felt that they were working in Titian’s shadow.

While probably apocryphal, the story resonates and must surely have resonated with the people of the 16th and 17th centuries, when hierarchy, class, and respect for order permeated more deeply into core values and attitudes than anything we could possibly recognize in today’s world.

Here is a version of the poem I’ve been working on based on this legend, “Titian and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V”:

The world’s ancient order overturned briefly
By a single act and long told after
The master’s death by apprentices who
Still smelled of egg and cochineal, whose hands
Still blue from azurite flitted gestures
As they told when the studio fell swift
To rare silence as the master’s brush fell
From his arthritic fingers
And the Emperor stooped and gave the brush back.

When Charles returned to his white marbled
Palace, he sought to set the world aright,
To lift up again the scales of Empire
By razing four rebellious towns, torching
Thirty heretics, and beheading his uncle
For plotting his own separate kingdom.
With blood, Charles found the scales even again
And retired to live his last with monks.

The master returned to his work
For the years left to him, never once
Noting the day that unbalanced Europe:
When the Emperor knelt not to God but to art.

I do wonder if it might work better as

The world’s ancient order overturned briefly
By a single act and long told after
The master’s death by apprentices who
Still smelled of egg and cochineal, whose hands
Still blue from azurite flitted gestures
As they told when the studio fell swift
To rare silence as the master’s brush fell
From his arthritic fingers
And the Emperor stooped and gave the brush back.

The master returned to his work
For the years left to him, never once
Noting the day that unbalanced Europe:
When the Emperor knelt not to God but to art.

Paul Muldoon’s “Moy Sand and Gravel”

I’m trying to square Paul Muldoon’s comment on The Colbert Report, “What poetry is attempting to do, of course, is to help us make sense of our lives,” with the utter mess of Moy Sand and Gravel. The casual “of course” in the statement is telling and completely Muldoon. Here it is a toss off, a seemingly empty phrase that actually carries a great weight in meaning. “Of course” brings the theorizing about the art to a mundane, casual, obvious statement: “Of course this is what poetry does. Why bother talking about it beyond that.” At the same time, it is a grand statement about art and poetry and its purpose, nor is it a statement I am in the end about to disagree. One of the purposes of art does, it seems to me, to attempt to help us to make sense of our lives. How it does this we can discuss endlessly and will ultimately remain as much a mystery as it always has been. We are as likely to understand how art and why we pursue art-making with such relish as we are to understand the motivations of the aurochs on the walls of Lascaux.

As I read Moy Sand and Gravel I kept coming back to Muldoon’s statement and I kept saying to myself that I do not see how these poems help me to make sense of life. They routinely fall flat. There are some pyrotechnics, but to what end:

Brillo pads? Steel wool?
The regurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgitations, what,
of a long-eared owl?

Perhaps this is meant humorously, but I never get these sense that that is Muldoon’s attempt. Certainly he’s more capable than most poets of injecting sly wit into poetry (read some of the poems in Hay, for instance). This book is continuously just blah. Razzle-dazzle but no guts, no feeling. It feels like a poet putting in the motions. Give me bad poetry over this. At least then we can wrangle about its merits, but this “blahness” just provokes boredom. Oh, and this won the Pulitzer…

Perhaps one poem in the collection merits a more positive assessment, “Cradle Song for Asher”:

When they cut your birth cord yesterday
it was I who drifted away.

Now I hear your name (in Hebrew, “blest”)
as yet another release of ballast

and see, beyond your wicker
gondola, campfires, cities, whole continents flicker.

Even then this poem seems built on a house on the sand. The opening couplet is striking in its imagery, takes me someplace I had not expected, while the last couplet brings this poem to a strong close. “Whole continents flicker” is particularly evocative with imagery and emotion to me. The middle couple seems precarious. The parenthetical in particular seems contrary to the flow, the rhythm of the poem. Specifically, as I scan this poem (iambic pentameter with half-foot opening foot – or one could describe it as trochaic that ends with an extra stressed syllable, but it sounds iambic to my ear):

Now | I hear | your name | (in He | brew, “blest“)

the parenthetical phrase interrupts in a very jarring manner the iambs, breaking down the tonal rhythm of the poem. If a reason for this wrenching break exists, I am not sure what it is. I am sure it could be justified any number of ways (the jarring first breath of the baby…but the listener hears the name, not the breath). My point is that this parenthetical disrupts the whole flow of the and thus tone of the poem, which lingers on the edge of melancholy and joy.

Much of Moy Sand and Gravel reminds me of Stephen Spender’s comment on James Wright: “To me, this conveys more the feeling of a kind of poetry that Mr. Wright has read than of an experience he can really have had.”

That Beauty Thing Again, with Essays

Recently, I’ve been forwarded a couple of articles. One, Roger Scruton’s “Beauty and Desecration” in the City Journal, is about beauty and it’s place in the modern world, particularly in the arts. Jed Perl’s “Slaughterhouse” in The New Republic is, in its way, about the same subject, though it focuses on a retrospective of the painter Francis Bacon at MoMA.

I have often blogged about the subject of beauty, particularly as it relates to poetry, so my sympathies with these two authors is pretty clear. I will not rehash my Wilfred Owen commentaries though. This is where Scruton’s essay is particularly interesting to me. He notes the change of value of art from beauty to expression. In essence, anti-art is valued more than “art.” Opposition to beauty is seen as necessary (at least by academics and decision-makers in arts).

For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

Of course, Scruton hits on three of my favorite artists of the 20th century in this paragraph. He continues this paragraph:

But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.

Barber certainly has lost his place, but I might disagree about Stevens, who seems to have only risen in poetic value. Nonetheless,  L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry and oodles of gagging confessional poetry and the perceived high value of these modes of expression seem to me the very essence of pushing “beauty” to the margins, that tricks and expression are more valued. Scruton’s article also addresses how we often find beauty, which I’ve broached in my way in talking about finding “quietness” or “cinema moments.” Essentially places of stillness. So much of the world around us is ugly. Ugly is easy:

In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

Scruton is liable to be skewered for his “romantic” fantasies of beauty, of his reaches for understanding of what beauty is, and for his frontal assault on bad art for its desire to push beauty out as a value. Jed Perl, by contrast, will probably be broiled for his unwillingness to simply accept Francis Bacon’s art as great simply because others say it is. Both Perl and Scruton are small cries in the wilderness, and I hope they are not overlooked simply because they challenge preconceived notions.

Perl’s strand really follows up on the idea of expression, that the artist is more important than the art (I think of Andy Warhol with this statement). And Perl says something extraordinarily true and so matter-of-factly that I wonder if it will be noticed at all:

The fact is that an artist’s outward behavior has no fixed relationship to the development or the value of his or her work. But to accept this fact, which really ought to be self-evident, one must accept also the freestanding value of art, an idea that today is devalued when it is not entirely rejected.

Art necessarily stands outside of the artist. We may be fascinated by artists (I am by Shakespeare, Shostakovich, and Caravaggio), but that interest is different than the value of the art. I’m led to my interest by the art (as I’m interested in Roosevelt by his actions) – without the art, I could care less.

Indiana Authors Award

The finalists for the Indiana Authors Award can be found here. Congratulations to my friend Jared Carter for the nod in the Regional category. However, that category is tragically misnamed. All writing is inevitably regional (i.e., we all come from somewhere and we write from that somewhere…that somewhere is called a region by many).

Nonetheless, Carter deserves the recognition.