Inni di St. Bridget

e altri scritti

Daniela Daniele

• Publisher: Mimesis Edizioni
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9788857570761
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

St. Bridget è un angolo di quartiere a Sud di Manhattan che confina, a ponente, con la chiesa sconsacrata di St. Mark, nei cui pressi – in piena temperie modernista – fu inaugurata una "poesia in performance" che ha trovato il suo sviluppo naturale nelle odierne sfide di slam poetry. Inni di St. Bridget è il taccuino di annotazioni liriche raccolte da Bill Berkson e dal poeta e curatore del MoMA Frank O'Hara sui luoghi da loro frequentati negli anni della Guerra fredda. Composto a quattro mani, questo divertissement lirico muove dall'Inno al campanile sbilenco e – anche architettonicamente – non allineato della chiesa cattolica irlandese su cui dava il piccolo appartamento di O'Hara. Le loro "improvvisazioni" poetiche generano una serie di narrazioni disarmoniche che trovano la forma ora di una recensione teatrale, ora di un burrascoso carteggio tra fratellastri, fino a quella scheggia di romanzo erotico redatto, con la partecipazione di Patsy Southgate, secondo uno spirito decisamente avverso a ogni censura. Nel DVD allegato, Daniele Pomilio documenta in stile videoartistico la visita di Bill Berkson all'Art Park di Verzegnis e il racconto del suo incontro creativo con quella che è ritenuta la voce più significativa dei New York Poets.

MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS

NOTES FROM ROW L

Row L, center orchestra at the City Center was where Edwin Denby liked to sit for dance performances because the rise there was just high enough for you to see the dancers’ feet. Just before Frank and I traveled together to Europe in October, 1961, Edwin, who had been invited by Lincoln Kirstein to edit writings by poets for the coming season’s New York City Ballet program, invited each of us to contribute. Frank suggested that we write something together. We wrote the text, alternating paragraphs, in the dinette of Paul Jenkins’ Paris studio on the rue Vercingetorix. Edwin later told us that Balanchine hated all the poetry and prose that Edwin had assembled for the booklet, which included pieces by Auden, James Merrill, Marianne Moore, LeRoi Jones, Kenneth Koch, Robert Lowell, Joe LeSueur, Diane di Prima, and Saint-John Perse.

Apart from the various ideas about the ”machine” order of the dance, ballet remains, in America (and elsewhere, one hopes), a triumph of the modern romance of personal action of autobiography over the blank stone face of Parnassus. What we love in that “Melissa” or “Diana” or “Patricia” (known without being known) did that, gestured so miraculously last evening. It is our selfishness, our lack, perhaps, that we seem to soar usually in our descriptions of their feats, that we imitate them by a “noble” uprightness of our faces or a grand gesture of our arms. It is called identification – the movies’ hat trick.

*******

It all depends on whether you want your heart to beat, your blood to pound through your veins and your mind to go blank with joy, until you are brought back to self-consciousness by an embarrassing tear your neighbor might see (we are still Americans, aren’t we?). We have a helpless admiration for any one who dares to do anything beautiful in public, perhaps to do it at all. Ballet is the most modern of the arts. It is made up exclusively of qualities which other arts only aspire to in order to be truly modern: daring, risk, chance, personality, individual and unique beauty. No two dancers dance alike, but poets, painters, musicians and sculptors have found a way to be alike. In our hearts there is a permanent theatre and as we walk along the rainy streets certain performances are created over and over again, though never repeated.

*******

It is theatre, after all. It maybe many steps above the Cole Porter song, but there was often a clown or a juggler dressing in the next cubicle to the prima ballerina. Ballet has its stars, and they have their theatrical aura. America did not invent the star; some fools even doubt that there are any ballet stars in America. And, luckily, America’s systematizing of the stars has not extended to the ballet – an instance, perhaps, of the benefits of keeping the dangerous ignorant. The unsystematized star is granted an extraordinary brand of admiration, one which does not extend to the irrelevancies beyond the performance and which, thus, gives fuller import to the heights of the star’s work. Ballet lovers have the knack of turning away at the right time during a wrong move; they are always enchanted.

*******

Whether the Firebird clears the sleeping stage with her toes, knees or fingers is of the utmost importance, just as in “Pas de Dix” Raymonda’s slap should be a striking variation in her variation, but not because of its sound. It is actually a courtesy to the movement: if she did it three times it would be Japanese theatre. The ballerinas of the New York City know these details and their function, so their movements are away from dramatic exaggeration and into the organic pulse of the ballet. One is not surprised to notice them breathe since they are not pretending: they are being. One of Balanchine’s greatest achievements is in making the dancers be the dance. They can do this as well by projection (in the traditional repertoire) as they can in the dances like Agon and Episodes where the movements seem to fit them as if they had grown into them from childhood. The poise is natural, the action seemingly free; the opposite of that is artificial style which is capable of so much brilliance, unless the audience should notice suddenly that the dancers are human and then the whole thing falls apart.

*******

One evening’s program can be staggeringly satisfying – a series of visions: Allegra Kent appearing on the shoulders of four male carriers in the “Eternal Question” section of Ivesiana (Poetry): Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell going through their steps in the competitive atmosphere of Agon (Tension); Jilliana, Jacques D’Amboise, Violette Verdy and Edward Villella yankeedoodling it with supreme showmanship in Stars and Stripes (Exuberance).

*******

1961

REVERDY

Right after “Notes from Row L,” John Ashbery invited Frank to write something for an issue of Mercure de France honoring Pierre Reverdy who had died of a heart attack, July 17, 1960. Frank had the idea that we should collaborate for the occasion, and John agreed to translate what we wrote into French for the issue, which appeared the following spring. You Die with Your Eyes Open Don’t You and Wake Up and Die were two of the working titles for a Horace McCoy-type low-life novel Joe LeSueur was working on at the time.

Reverdy is not like Chopin. He is a long city street with small musical houses on it.

There is a word, rédacteur, in French, of which I cannot recall the meaning.

Here are two cups, a Keats, a comb and a brush, four packs of cigarettes, an ashtray labeled “Chance,” two boxes of matches, a rope, Always Love a Stranger, a wire brush and a carved piece of wood, which I cannot understand. This is where Reverdy still lives, inexplicable as ever.

What strikes the eye hurts, what one hears is a lie. What is written struggles through, and then has struggled through and is white. The snow lasts because of the sun. Never letters, always messages.

Here we are, getting ideas like the French, yippee!

We discovered many years ago that in French you can say anything… Except certain things which Eliot, Valéry, Claudel, Béranger and others have said. Yippee!

Reverdy is not a cubist. Who ever was? One hundred Americans a day are accused of cubism. “The pubic area of the male is not a a thing of beauty.” “The pubic area of the female is not a thing of beauty.” (These are two American sayings showing a lack of Reverdy).

Picasso is fire, Reverdy is flint. In America flint is used for arrowheads as well as tinderboxes. Do you like to hunt for what you eat? Are you a cannibal? Is there order outside of insanity or just a maelstrom of velleities and mistakes?

Je suis las de vivre dans le pays natal. When you get to the maelstrom let me know. If you have to pick the ashes off your cigarette, you are born to any given work of modern art. We no longer know what wires are wrapped around us than what air we breath. We no longer care who is next door; we know how they feel about us. One drinks more than one thinks. There is no sense in coming home “early.” We are already in the maelstrom which is why we don’t “know” it. I want to get up “early.”

In America there is only one other poet beside Reverdy: William Carlos Williams.

They are both alone. How do you feel about titles like They Are Both Alone, Wake Up and Die, You Die with Your Eyes Open Don’t You? Chair Vive, Poem?

We have made ourselves cretins for Reverdy’s sake.

We must all pretend to feel fine or get shot like a horse.

(Written for the French of John Ashbery, Paris, 1961)

IN THE MÉTRO

Written after a day trip with John Ashbery to visit Jim Bishop and Marcelin Pleynet in Sceaux, southwest of Paris, and to walk around the extraordinary seventeenth-century gardens there. Returning by métro, Frank and I stopped to watch the Seine from the Pont Mirabeau, recalling Apollinaire’s beautiful poem about the bridge and lost loves.

the year of

theatrical events is greatest

under the lamps the walk-ons

are nearer

you can see them better

especially if you’re near the sight the beat

map of us

tickets to Sceaux

no ruinous army in the landscape smoking with evening’s part of us

it’s no longer sunny in Sceaux

our thoughts (smoking)

wrench the future into predictability

no more fuzzy fatigue

though we’re still asleep

walking through the gardens of Sceaux

to the frozen dahlia exhibit

lying there like income tax forms

1961

SHOOTING THE SHIT AGAIN

Although a year apart, both this poem and “Hecuba” were written at Larry Rivers’s house in Southampton.

I was rattling along thinking – what was I thinking of?

I guess it was of the Coast Guard Beach (or was it les trois corbeaux?)

dans le spleen de la jeunesse dorée, je suis las de vivre au pays fatal

I was also thinking how much I like the flan de la jeunesse dorée

I think Martha Foley is a very nice woman, too, so are you

just because I love you don’t make me a woman unless it makes you one too (so

fuck you, you can’t put me in a “false” position – anyway all you ever talk about

is Robert Lowell anymore) mnyaaaa! Piss on your antediluvian head

I think you have a suspicion I’d like that, damn that private eye for squealing

oh god it’s hard….

And if you think that’s the typewriter you’re nuts….

4/4/61

HECUBA

I have spent your day on these papers

but I don’t think there is any twisty or messy solution

among these walls where it is the rag

the answer is walking rubber bands in the hall

Under these flakes, behind my shoes

my charm is like a preference for hail

What the rain, what this fire, so

at the syndacate I don’t like to fuck for lunch

so free when the March wind rattles us

3/16/62

FLIGHT 115
A play, or
Pas de Fumer sur la Piste

We wrote this little drama on November 19, 1961, on the plane returning from Rome via Paris to New York. The title is the PanAm flight number plus the French variant of “No Smoking During Landing or Take-Off.” We had a small portable Hermes Rocket, ready to be passed back and forth, supported on our knees, on which to write. Me by the window, Frank in the middle, and a man who described himself as “in government work” in the third, aisle seat. Obviously, much of the play attempts to fathom the interior monologue of this mystery companion who could not conceal his suspicions of us, as we enjoyed the novel excesses of collaborati...

Table of contents

• Copertina
• Frontespizio
• Copyright
• INDICE
• Dedica
• INTRODUZIONE
• INNI DI ST. BRIDGET
• MISCELLANEA