Good evening and welcome.
I'm Susan Galassi, I'm Senior Curator at the Frick,
and it's a great pleasure to introduce
our speaker this evening,
Mark Strand, one of America's leading poets.
Mr. Strand is the 14th speaker in our
Artists, Writers, and Poets series
sponsored by the Drue Heinz Trust.
I want to express our great thanks to
Mrs. Heinz and to her Trust
for supporting programs on contemporary
art and literature at the Frick.
While many painters, video artists, novelists, and biographers have accepted
our invitation to speak,
Mark Strand is only the second poet, the
first being James Fenton in 1998.
I want thank some of my colleagues who
have contributed so much to
this evening, Alexis Light, Adrienne Lei,
Caitlin Henningsen, and Sean Troxell,
for all they've done to bring this
evening together. Mark Strand's prolific
and versatile literary and artistic
career encompasses poetry in translation
from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian,
literary and art criticism,
anthologies of poetry, children's books,
paintings, and illustrations. This
in addition to twelve books of poetry.
He's also taught
literature and creative writing in
universities throughout the US and abroad,
and he is currently professor of English
and comparative literature at Columbia University.
Mr. Strand was born in Prince Edward
Island, Canada,
and he spent his teenage years in
Central and South America.
He received a BA from Antioch College and a BFA from Yale,
where he studied with Josef Albers. By
this time he was about twenty.
He was already a recognized poet and he went on to the University of Florence on
a Fulbright Fellowship
where he studied the work of the 19th
century Italian poet
Giacomo Leopardi. He continued his
studies at the Iowa Writers' Workshop
where he earned an MA in 1962, and a few years later
he spent a year as a Fulbright lecturer
at the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.
During the nineteen sixties and
seventies he brought out
seven books of poetry including "The
Story of Our Lives,"
which won the Poe Prize from the Academy
of American Poets.
He also published translations of the
work of the Spanish poet
Rafael Alberti and the Brazilian Carlos
Drummond de Andrade.
With Charles Simic he brought out an
anthology of European and
South American writers.
He turned to other pursuits than poetry
in the nineteen eighties.
There were two books on art criticism,
"The Art of the Real"
and a monograph on William Bailey who
is with us tonight,
a book of short stories, and three
children's books, including
his wonderful "Rembrandt Takes a Walk." In
1987 he was awarded the MacArthur
Fellowship, and he was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
to the Library of Congress in 1990. For the last twenty years
Mr. Strand has continued to publish
highly-acclaimed volumes of poetry,
winning such honors as
the Bollingen Prize
and the Bobbitt National Prize. "The Monument,"
of 1991, which combines poetry and prose,
was described by one critic as one of
the most astonishing books in the English language.
John Updike reviewed Strand's book on
Edward Hopper, which he published in 1994.
And he characterized Mark Strand's prose as Hopperesque,
saying he was coolly and eerily attentive to how we are moved and disquieted
by formal elements in painting. His beautiful "Blizzard of One" won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1999. In the following year,
he brought out two critical works on poetry
"Weather of Words: Poetic Invention"
and with even Eavan Boland a Norton
Anthology of poetic forms.
He also edited several
anthologies of poetry for the Echo Press
and Norton. His most recent book of poetry is "New Selected Poems"
of 2007. In the past few years he was
awarded three international prizes,
including the Premio D'Annunzio,
and his work at the last forty years was
recognized in 2009
with the Gold Medal for Poetry from the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
a prize which is awarded only every five
years.
Any reader of Mark Strand's poetry is struck by the precision of his language
in describing things intensely seen and
the quality of light
in imagery that has often been referred to
as surreal
or dreamlike. Tonight he takes distilled
moments of
seeing, in paintings by Vermeer at the
Frick and at other museums
as his starting points to share his
thoughts on painting and poetry,
seeing and knowing, a dialogue that has
very richly informed his work.
Please give a very warm welcome to Mark
Strand.
[applause]
Thank you very much, Susan.
Before I begin this lecture I want
you to know it's
going to be very casual.
There's not
going to be any poetry in it.
I've set my sights on a few paintings,
which will become clear.
When Susan Galassi
took me on a casual but informative
tour of this museum with the notion that
I might lecture on some of
its paintings, I had no idea that I would
end up with the lecture
I'm about to give. I had noticed or
perhaps Susan had
pointed out to me that there were more
than a few portraits
of women in the collection. In the days
following I began to mull over the
possibility of writing about them.
So I went back for another look
and decided that because there were so
many I would have to narrow the scope
of my talk. I rejected paintings that were portraits
pure and simple. To write about them
would have demanded that I know
something, even perhaps a great deal,
about their subjects.
I compromised, selecting paintings that
were not strictly speaking portraits
but whose subjects were women.
I decided to write primarily about
Vermeer's "Mistress and Maid" and
secondarily about Chardin's "Lady with
a Bird Organ."
My talk would be an attempt to describe a
connection between the two that I found
intriguing, even mysterious.
As usually happens,
no sooner had I begun writing than what had been mysterious seemed less so.
I became side tracked by other
issues and finally
by other observations. Writers write,
I believe, to find what they have to say.
Though I began this talk with the idea of
saying something about a particular
Vermeer and a particular Chardin,
I ended up talking albeit briefly
about several Vermeers and more briefly
than I had intended about that one Chardin.
"Mistress and Maid" is one of six Vermeers in which a woman is reading a letter
or writing one. And of those, it is one
of three in which a maid is present.
In each of these the disposition or
attitude of the maid plays an important
role in providing the viewer with what
he is to make of the letter, regardless
of whether it is being received,
read, or delivered. Yeah, I'm going to do that. [audience laughter]
You came at just the right moment. [audience laughter]
Let's see.
Well, there.
In "Love Letter,"
there we have it, we look through a narrow
opening into a room where a woman
cradling a cittern on her lap holds a
letter just delivered by her maid
who stands beside her. It is as if we
were passing by and caught a glimpse of
what was going on.
The maid looks down at her mistress with
a pleasant,
knowing, and finally, reassuring
smile. The mistress looks up at the maid
with a look that is hard to decipher.
Now I want to interject something here.
Of course these first two paintings I'm
going to talk about are not at the Frick,
and I looked at them, um,
as rather small reproductions.
So you may be seeing something that I
never saw
because this is much larger than the original and certainly
much, much larger than the reproduction I
was looking at.
At any rate, she seems to want to be sure
of something,
that is, the mistress.
Can it really be
from him?
is what her eyes suggest, or even
more precisely, Is this the letter that I
have waited for?
Do you really think it is? The maid seems
certain that it is.
Her smile and her casual stance indicate
that she knows it is,
and all that her mistress must now do is
open the letter to prove her right.
In the slightly later painting of
1670-71,
"A Lady Writing a Letter with Her
Maid,"
no uncertainty is visible. The view of the
room
is an open one. The lady is bent over
concentrating on what she is writing.
The maid stands back and gazes out the
window.
The world of this painting is tranquil.
No perceptible signs of surprise or
anxiety trouble the lady or her maid.
The maid is absorbed in her waiting,
the lady in her writing. Nothing suggests
that we have walked in
on a problematic moment. A problematic
moment
is what dominates "Mistress and Maid,"
here at the Frick. The mistress, richly dressed in a bright yellow
fur trim jacket, is in stark contrast to
the maid,
who wears a brownish outfit that covers
almost all of a dull white shirt.
The maid seems to appear from the dark
whereas the mistress is well situated in
the light.
One could speculate that such a contrast
indicates a like contrast in the
contents of the two letters.
When looking at a Vermeer it is easy to
supply a narrative,
but just as easy to supply more
narrative than is necessary.
In the case of this painting, however, the
moment it depicts seems
so charged that the offering up of a
narrative
seems almost unavoidable.
The narrative hinted at
just a second ago I wouldn't take
seriously, of course.
The mistress whose face is turned slightly away from us so we don't see her eyes,
which might have told us much,
looks over at her maid. The fingers of
her left hand
touch her chin, a gesture that seems to be
happening in the very
instant of our looking. Her right hand
lightly holding the pen rests on a
partially written letter,
the writing of which has been
interrupted by the delivery of a note.
Although the content of the note
may not void the purpose of the
mistress's letter,
its appearance has put it on hold.
We feel the importance of its arrival
without in fact
knowing its content. Even the way the maid
leans slightly away from the mistress as
if to say,
Here, and her uncertainty as she looks at
her mistress
suggests its disruptive possibilities.
Assuming that the letter has come from
the person to whom the mistress is
writing -- and we are made to feel this --
its arrival is ominous.
It has after all broken the rhythm
that may be expected in any
correspondence.
One writes a letter, sends it,
and waits for a response. But if an unbidden letter arrives from the person to
whom one is writing,
it can only suggest the possibility of
crisis.
That the idea of writing, the receiving or
dispensing of information, is central to
this painting
is obvious. But what may also be true is
that this
is a painting that points up the
limitation
of painting. Its beauty is precisely in its
depiction of a common enough scene
that is finally unknowable and
impenetrable
and in which the familiar is on the
verge of being
undermined by the unexpected.
Here, explicitness is directly
proportional
to the mystery it accompanies.
What I mean is that Vermeer's detail
treatment
of surfaces, their clarity, the way they
absorb or reflect light, provides a
secure environment in which
uncertainty, or the consideration of
uncertainty,
are able to flourish. Flourish,
up to a point, for it could also be said
that what I am describing suggests
not the limitation of painting but its
immense
subtlety -- that the gestures belonging to
the two women exist more powerfully
than anything the letter or note might
say
or imply. The unaffected
matter-of-fact characterization of
domestic space,
the casual disposition of figures,
easily epitomizes what is most
natural about them.
Nobody seems to pose. Often, looking at a
Vermeer,
it is as if no painter
had been present to paint it. Each work
seems wholly absorbed within itself
generating somehow, without assistance,
its own life. This attests
to extreme detachment or extreme discretion.
Either way, it is a mark of Vermeer's
uniqueness.
He is most himself by being nowhere
visible, by giving himself over to
things as they appear
only as themselves. And unlike other
painters especially those in the tradition
of the painterly, he leaves in his wake
no telltale marks, no characteristic
strokes of
paint, no traces of drawing, no obvious
signature gesture. Nor does Vermeer
fit easily within the conventions of genre
painting.
Though there are overlapping elements,
mainly those that have to do with the
duties of daily life,
it is clear that Vermeer belongs elsewhere.
It is hard to detect in his work the
geneality,
simplicity, and openness that are so
characteristic of genre painting.
Instead it embodies in its formality
an element that strikes me as aristocratic,
or at least privileged, and which may
have something to do with Vermeer's
invisibility. His women
for the most part are idealized.
They have a maid in attendance, are
well-dressed,
wear pearls, they are writers and recipients
of letters,
love letters most probably, and so are
objects of desire.
When they stand they have a stately inwardness.
When they read they are wrapped in
stillness and manifest the same
meditative composure
that we find in the figures of Piero della
Francesca.
Theirs is a dignity that lifts them
far from the ordinary.
Everything about the spaces they occupy,
the dispersion of light, the strategic placement of tables,
drapes, maps, mirrors, and paintings,
is carefully constructed, but in this
painting
the elaborate compositional elements so
noticeable in other Vermeers
are done away with. Two figures are set
against a dark curtain whose
folds are barely perceptible. Unlike the
drapes or curtains in other Vermeers,
this one is not pull back to reveal.
It is closed to ensure that nothing
distracts the viewer
from this moment of suspended thought.
The painting seems both to bear the
burden of this
infinite moment and to dissolve within it.
The twin gestures, the maid's offering,
the mistress's uncertainty, are its focus.
The bared forearms of the maid and
mistress,
in parallel though opposing alignment,
only reinforce and extend the moment,
which in its in immateriality looms so
large within the picture
that it seems to be its sole subject.
One letter will never be finished,
the other will never be delivered,
and uncertainty will have been given a
permanent place
in the history of art. [audience laughter]
One thing, although I am sure there are
many that I have
not mentioned, is the quality of intimacy
that is so palpable
in this painting and in other Vermeers as well.
One notices it especially in the
paintings with one or two figures in them.
I would exclude the elaborately staged
paintings which though brilliant
are not especially intimate. In this
context,
what do I mean by intimate? I suppose
what I mean
is the visible inwardness of his subjects,
those engaged in reading or writing a
letter
or making lace or seeing how one looks
in a pearl necklace. It is their
absorption in what they are doing that moves us,
along with, as I have mentioned, their
naturalness,
their lack of posturing. We feel our
access to them is privileged, that a
private moment
has been entrusted to us, and to us alone.
At first glance, Chardin's "Lady
with a Bird Organ" appears to have
little in common with the painting I've
just discussed.
A lady sits near the back of a room
turning the crank of her bird organ,
surrounded by objects that suggest
something close to clutter.
Well, maybe. [audience laughs]
It's a very small painting
and so everything seems very close
together. At this size everything
looks rather spread apart. [audience laughs]
In the foreground to the left,
a birdcage with a canary perched inside
sits on a stand. Further to the left,
partially visible,
a tall window lets in light that
illuminates the lady but does little to
brighten the room.
Well that's debatable, too.
A picture hangs on the wall behind
her which along with the window is mildly
suggestive of many Vermeers,
but not the one I have
just discussed
in some detail. Despite its gloom
it has a quaint charm, which is not
something one could say about
any Vermeer. Charm perhaps, but quaintness never.
Maybe it is the bird organ that I find
quaint,
or maybe it is the kerchief the lady
wears over her head.
It is probably both, as well as the
singular act of playing the organ
either to please the bird order to get a
response from it.
So what are the similarities
"Lady with a Bird Organ" shares with
"Mistress and Maid?"
The lady's intense interest in the
bird's response to sounds coming from the
organ strikes me
as similar to the way Vermeer's women
appear totally engaged by what they are doing.
Although the lady's expression
is tempered slightly by a bemused smile.
Her eyes suggests one thing, her mouth
something else. Another similarity has to
do with the feeling we get
that the scene before has not been staged.
The world of the lady and her canary,
though open to view, is essentially closed off.
That is, whatever action there is,
the lady communicating with the bird
does not seem intended to resonate
beyond the picture.
Perhaps the most important similarity
between the two pictures,
despite their their vast stylistic differences,
is that communication is central to both.
Chardin's lady tries to reach her bird
with mechanically produced birdsong,
Vermeer's mistress is writing to someone
beyond the world of the painting.
In each case the content what is communicated
cannot be known. We do not hear the
bird or bird organ and we cannot
read the letters.
Language, bird language included,
though presented as a medium of reciprocal interchange,
becomes an occasion for mystery. The longer we look,
the more these paintings are enlivened
by what we cannot
know. The temptation to
create a narrative, that is,
despite one's best intentions -- let me
start that sentence
again. First I need a glass of water.
The temptation to create a narrative
that is, despite one's best intentions,
doomed to irresolution and therefore
to offering limited pleasure, may not
appeal to everyone.
Likewise, concerning oneself with matters
that are largely formal
may not amount to more than a sterile
exercise in academic thought.
For some, the experience of looking at
Vermeer's "Officer and Laughing Girl" may
prove more satisfying, though even
in this painting, the high degree of resolution,
if tested, could also prove fragile.
That is, the officer's imposing presence
is domesticated by the girl's
eager appreciation of what he is saying.
It is only through her that he can be explained,
that his presence can be understood. This
is the beginning
of a story whose end we can anticipate
all too easily. The same
could be said of "Girl Interrupted at her
Music."
A young girl has been engaged with a
young man in going over a musical score,
only to be interrupted by someone who has
suddenly appeared. She and the young man,
more than exhibiting a shared interest in
the music,
clearly share an interest in each other.
The mutuality of their interests can be
surmised from the way they both hold
the score, and the way with decorous
indulgence he leans towards her.
Besides courtship or lovemaking, as it
used to be called,
was often associated with music
and still is. Just think of all those
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies
or the phrase "full of innuendo,
they made music together." And to further
emphasize the love element, a painting of
Cupid with one arm raised
hangs on the wall behind them. This,
according to a note in the Frick
catalogue of its collection, is a motif
derived from a popular book on
emblems of love, published in 1608,
and symbolizes fidelity to a single
lover.
The one questionable aspect of this painting
is what to make of the intrusion.
Because it seems
sudden and momentary, it could not be
blamed on the painter
as painter. Making a painting takes time,
so much time that the interruption would
take months
if the painter were its cause. As already
noted, Vermeer with his propensity for
self-erasure,
has put someone in his place, and that someone,
we are made to feel, is ourselves.
And yet Vermeer is unquestionably the source,
the sole cause, and true creator,
of the interruption for which he has cleverly
shifted the blame. I want go back to the Chardin
for a moment, and this is the comic
conclusion, or near conclusion, to my
little talk. The more I look at it,
the odder it becomes. It is not that
playing a bird organ is a peculiar past-
time for a grown woman,
nor that the quality of any exchange
between a woman and a bird is bound to
be limited,
rather it has to do with the lower half
of the woman's body.
It strikes me as abnormally large.
This may be due to the way the stiff
material of the dress refuses to follow its
actual lines. But even so, the legs would
have to be remarkably long for the dress
to break where it does.
On prolonged looking, the torso also looks long,
or is it that the woman's head is
unusually small?
In any case this wayward consideration
having to do with physical
proportion brought to mind another painting here at the Frick.
The doll-like Madame Boucher has a curiously small foot,
no longer than the width of her forehead, a
shortcoming that is pleasantly made up
for by the beautifully articulated folds of
her dress. As amusing as it
would be to continue a discussion of the physical anomalies that appear
in the paintings here at the Frick,
it is probably wise to stop now
and take one last look at Vermeer's "Mistress
with Maid," where the anomalous
appears in the form of letters
at the instant of their crossing.
I mean that is the conclusion of my
little talk, but I'm very happy to answer questions,
although my answers may not
satisfy anyone. [audience laughter]
[audience applause]
So, you're in the dark and I'm in the light.
Now, yes? [indistinct question]
Oh yeah? Maybe that explains her desire to
communicate with the bird.
[audience laughter]
Yeah, I hadn't noticed that but. Yes?
[indistinct question]
Well I didn't want to write about too many paintings and I thought, the
Vermeer struck me as more compelling, to be truthful.
I, uh, the
Boucher doesn't interest me that much.
I included it at the end because I
fixated on that little teeny foot,
and I thought I just had to
mention it, you know. So many of the paintings here at the Frick are portraits, and as I said in my
talk, one would have to know a great deal
about the subjects, and I know nothing
about,
well I know a little about a few of them but, I thought it would be more fun to
speculate on
that suspended moment in Vermeer and
how it resonated in my own, you know,
thought. Yes?
[Question]: Is writing about painting similar to writing in translation? Is there something about those that are different than writing about poems.
Well, um, well
writing about painting is different from
writing a poem because
you're writing about something when you're writing about a painting -- there it is
before you -- and when you're making something up from scratch,
you're facing a white sheet of paper and
you've got to put something there.
Translating is perhaps
a little closer
to writing about painting, but here
again you're dealing with language
and, um,
you're writing with language as language, you're not
translating visual language into
verbal language. And not that I feel that
when I'm writing about painting that I'm
translating.
I'm merely responding.
I don't feel that my writing necessarily
is a, um, a version
of what one is looking at. I,
my writing is if anything
an act of homage to the painting, in my
writing about painting.
I only write about paintings that I really like,
otherwise what would be the point?
Yes, over there?
[indistinct question]
[indistinct question]
[indistinct question]
That's a very interesting idea. I hadn't
thought of it but I can see what you're . . .
it's a possibility, certainly.
Yeah. I'll look at it again and check it out.
Yeah, way back?
[indistinct question]
Yeah, I think they are related,
and a few others. I mentioned Piero della
Francesca here, too.
Yeah, there is something about
those painters
and I think I mentioned it a little in
this piece on Vermeer, the absorption,
the self-absorption of the figures
in the paintings. They seem to be drawn
inward
or drawn so far out that we can't
guess what their, you know,
what they're thinking of. And
it's more pronounced in Vermeer that
there is absolutely no
posing going on, that there is . . .
It's almost as if there were no painter.
You know, it's very odd. The more you look
at Vermeer, the more invisible
Vermeer is, but
yes there is that, a meditative
atmosphere that certainly characterizes Bailey and Hopper,
Vermeer, certainly, Piero,
especially, yeah. Yeah?
[indistinct question] I think so  [audience laughter]
[indistinct question]
Mm, I might not see
anything that you wouldn't see but I
would
write it differently, perhaps.
You know, I think that
I don't feel things any differently than
you would feel things, but
I have an inner obligation to
write and to
present, in some way, what it is -- or to reflect
on, verbally,
and present what it is that I feel or think.
I don't feel poets are any different
from anyone else
or feel any deeper than other people. I just
feel that they
write poems. In fact. And that's the one
thing that sets them apart.
That what they feel and what they think finds its way into poems.
And for most people who don't write
poems, it finds its
way into other things.
Cooking, for those lucky people. [audience laughter]
Yes.
[indistinct question]
Well some of the titles in the
paintings,
one of them, a love letter, is being written, and one can,
um, I don't know what is, I mean I
say I don't know what's in the
letters, but one feels looking at
"Mistress and Maid" that a critical, that it's a
critical moment. That the letter is
unexpected.
Everything in the painting suggests the
unexpectedness of the letter,
and, um, I'm perhaps wrong but I have a
feeling
or I had the feeling looking at the painting
that the letter is probably coming from
the person
to whom another letter is being written.
But I have no proof of that.
It just, I want to believe
that because it livens the painting. If
the,
I mean, if the letter is just coming
from
Joe Blow and not from Darling
Bill, um, then
who cares? You know, but there is
something in that painting
that compels our attention,
and I didn't talk about this, that
eroticizes it.
And this is true
in many Vermeers. This sense of expectancy,
sense of interruption, and
sometimes,
satisfaction, but not that frequently.
Yes?
[Question:] Have any of your poems been inspired by looking at individual paintings?
Yes, sometimes unconsciously but
sometimes rather consciously. I wrote two
poems after
two Giorgio de Chiricos,
one in Chicago and one at the
University of Iowa.
That's the only time I've delved into
writing ekphrastic poems.
But since looking at
painting is a big part of my life, my psychic
enjoyment, I, um,
I may have been influenced by paintings and not
have known it. I'm not somebody who
looks at the landscape and says, I like
those trees over there, I'm
going to put those in a poem. I'm more likely to look at a painting and
receive some sense of its order, and that
will find its way into
my poems. I respond to
order more than I do
to chaos. Way back there, yeah?
[Question: Have these narratives changed for you over time?] [indistinct]
You mean the titles of
the paintings? Well,
clearly they have influenced me.
I mean, but some titles, I mean the titles
in Vermeer are just
descriptive of the characters, you know.
Lady with Maid, Woman Writing
Letter, uh, you know
Woman at the
Clavier, um, The Painter.
You know, these are very
you know, indicative of what we're
looking at. They don't induce a counter-
fantasy of any . . .
[indistinct question]
Vis-a-vis the paintings? Well um
that's an interesting question
I would hope that they've changed but
not turned me against any paintings
that I've loved any more than I would
wish to be turned against myself
at a previous time. Um,
I have always liked Vermeer a great deal and I've always liked Piero,
Bailey, Hopper, these are all
super painters in my estimation,
and my feelings about them have not changed.
Certain painters however
maybe I thought less of Stuart Davis at one time than I do now,
for example, or you know,
once I loved John Marin, now I don't
feel that much about him.
That sort of thing, yeah. Yes?
[indistinct question]
I think it's possible that it can. In
this paper I wasn't that responsive to
color, except the yellow
of her, which is so obvious. Yeah, it's not color that
I think of when I look at Vermeer, that I
take away from a Vermeer. When i turn my
back
from Vermeer and reconstruct,
try to reconstruct, what I've seen,
it's not, it's not the color that
I take with me, nor is it with Hopper,
nor is it with any of the
paintings that I really like. I mean,
if I'm looking at Josef Albers then of
course
it's color, if I'm looking at Rothko it's color.
I'm not sure how much to the,
hmm,
it's a lapse on my part clearly.
[audience laughter] Sorry. Yes?
[indistinct question]
I can't hear you.
indistinct question
Yep.
[indistinct question]
Well, yeah I mean, it's hard to
imagine that a painter in the seventeenth
century is
putting into his painting what somebody in
the 21st century is taking out of it.
But I think it wouldn't be a great painting
unless there was something.
And all great art
taps into something that's continuous
in human experience.
Doesn't matter whether it's a poem. I
mean if,
if there was a great difference, if
we were different in
the year 1000 BC than we are now, we wouldn't be able to read
the anthology, the Greek anthology, with any pleasure.
But we've, one of the things that binds us
together as human beings is the
consistency with which we experience
certain things.
We feel fear, we feel
joy, we are afraid of the
dark, you know these are things that
we understand from age to age. What
changes
is the packaging. The language changes.
The technology may change.
But we're pretty much the same primitives
that we have always been,
no smarter, no dumber. Yes?
[indistinct question]
Well I saw it for about, well, it's
certainly in the painterly tradition,
and it's so I mean, the just the
passages of paint are so exciting, how he's
able to describe so much
with just a flick of the brush. I mean the
eyes in that painting are sensational.
I mean you just you look at them and there is such
depth, and there's something
so convincing about her presence
that it's awesome, to use a much overused word. [audience laughter]
But it's really applicable in this
case.
I find that the crackling and the
dark background disturbing, I can't,
but the, just the articulation of the features
I think is magical. To use another word
that's probably overused. But here I am,
human. [audience laughter]
Yeah?
[indistinct question]
At how who? [indistinct question]
Yeah, he looked very well. [laughs]
Of all the novelists, of all the writers who have ever lived, he's been
probably the most responsive. There's a
very interesting little book called
"Paintings in Proust," in which the paintings that
Proust looked at and mentions,
they're reproduced.
And yeah he's just amazing,
I mean he's amazing in so many ways, I mean he's the great
novelist of the twentieth century without a doubt. He's um, yes,
thrilling. I mean the book is a marvelous
idea because when you read Proust you
want to see the painting right away.
Yeah, absolutely. Way back there,
yes, you.
[Question:] I'm hoping you could develop further your comments on why you've so seldom
written ekphrastic poetry. Your comment that it's partly because you don't write description
is certainly telling. But of course there's a lot of ekphrasis, take for example Jorie Graham, that is descriptive.
So, I'd be interested in other reasons you might have avoided that tradition, and also any comments
you have on the role of ekphrasis in poetry today, examples that interest you, or that you've seen in the MFA workshop.
Well, you know there are
different, you're right, there are different
kinds of ekphrasis,
and the um, some fail
because they're so, they're just, you know, verbal descriptions
of a  painting. Um,
I mean I've only paid attention to
two paintings that fall into the category
of ekphrastic
poetry. It's become
something of a pastime for
many poets, I don't know why. Maybe
paintings provide instant subject matter
for them.
But there's another element
of ekphrasis and
that is notional ekphrasis,
that is, you write something that is a
picture even though the picture doesn't
exist.
And that interests me more because I
generate the picture verbally.
It's not dependent on a prior
formulation, an order to which I am
responding.
There's something, um, a
little undignified
about stealing somebody else's
formulation and, you know,
writing
your version of it and saying it's all yours.
No, you don't think so. [Audience member: I think of it as a dialogue.]
Well, it can be,
but very often it's simply not that.
It's just boring reiteration. [audience laughter] Yeah?
[Question:] Someone already mentioned the role of knowing the title of a painting to our understanding of it.
Do you find that it's important at all, or rather how important is it to read up on the historical background
of an artist? The same goes for a poem. Do you find that it's helpful
to know something about the background of a poet?
No. [audience laughter]
I mean I think it's interesting, but it may
not help you understand the poem,
because poems aren't necessarily a
reflection of the biography of the poet,
nor are paintings necessarily a reflection
or insight into the biography of the painter.
Sometimes art is an escape from biography.
You know, um, and not,
you know, an embracing of it, or presenting of it.
Yeah, Colin.
[Question:] Does it worry you that the letter that's being delivered in "Mistress and Maid" doesn't have a seal?
And that the letters we saw in some of the earlier Vermeers had that seal, and so they are about to go.
And it worries me that I can't see a letter that's [indistinct] . . .
Maybe it was sealed,
I mean maybe it wasn't sealed, it was
written in a hurry and
delivered that way. I mean there are so
many explanations one could offer,
but I'm not sure I would put so much
emphasis on the seal,
but then I'm not an art historian or an
expert in these matters or a
curator. It could have been an oversight
on the part of the sender,
it could have been a joke that Vermeer was
making, it could have been
huh, this time I'm not going to put a seal
on the letter. [audience laughter]
Yes? [indistinct question]
Yeah, well there certainly is a class
division
but there is also the possibility of
some intimacy between
mistress and maid, whereby since they're
together
a lot, there is undoubtedly dialogue
between them
and shared intimacies. [indistinct question] That
is a possibility as well.
Yeah, Adam?
[indistinct question]
Yeah, we know everything but what's in
the letters.
[indistinct question]
I see what you're saying and
it would be impossible for me to
speculate on Vermeer's intention.
[indistinct question]
Well, um. [indistinct question]
I think the artist, most artists want
something open-ended. If everything is
resolved,
there's no point in going back to the
work of art,
whether it's a poem or a painting. There is
something
always that is unfinished or
that draws you back, something you don't
understand,
some element of mystery
that will keep you
returning.
You know, if something is totally
resolved, you just put it on the shelf
and never think about it again.
It's in a sense over. The experience
is done with. Yes?
[indistinct question]
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that you're very right to make
that connection.
Okay.
One more? I could, yeah.
[indistinct question]
Well I don't go to the museum, look at a
painting, and then turn
my back on it. I'm talking about when I
look at a painting and I leave, I think
about,
I don't see a lot of paintings, usually I'll
focus on a few paintings,
I'll think about what I've seen.
While I'm looking at a painting I'm
asking myself what am I looking at,
what am I seeing, what's happening here,
and then,
I'll leave and then I'll continue
to think about the painting and
sometimes I'll have a less clear idea and
have to go back
to the painting and sometimes I'll be able to write about
what I've seen.
It's about retention.
I mean, one tries to hold onto
experiences that are valuable.
And, you know, if you just
experience and never think about what
you experience,
one can question how alive one
actually is.
I don't know how to put it any other -- one
more question, yeah.
[indistinct question]
In the absence of mystery . . . ?
I mean, mystery's part of beauty
and beauty is part of mystery. I'm,
I'm, you know, making a, I'm revising Keats.
[audience laughter]
[applause]
