Abstract: In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's unnamed narrator refers to Johann Sebastian Bach's six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello in definitive performance by Don Pablo as the most accomplished pieces in all of music. Gerald Stern's sonnet, Casals, functions not simply as homage to elegy for celebrated cellist (1876-1973), but, like many of his poems, as ars poetica. All art is about saying yes, insists artist John Currin, and all art is about its own making.To call this poem a sonnet, even a very loose sonnet, is to stretch anyone's definition of form. Basically, Casals is a fourteen-line, free verse poem. There is no rhyme scheme no volta. Still, Stern might think of it as one of his American sonnets (the title of his 2002 volume), in which formal constraints of Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet give way to rhythms of American vernacular compressed into twenty lines or less, way a jazz musician, Miles Davis or Keith Jarrett, for example, might acknowledge American songbook yet subvert it by improvising within structure of Someone to Watch Over Me or some other standard.Stern is also fully aware of history of elegy, itself originally a form rather than a style: a couplet consisting of a line of dactylic hexameter followed by a line of dactylic pentameter, suitable in its brevity, it turned out, for gravestone epitaphs. is only since 16th c. that an elegy has come to mean a poem of mourning for an individual, notes J. A. Cuddon in A Dictionary of Literary Terms. By infusing his free verse, itself a search for form, with muted acknowledgment of traditional scaffoldings, Stern allows Casals to function as palimpsest, poem an additional, textured layer upon a deepening body of work. That work can also be read horizontally, a body consisting not only of Stern's expansive oeuvre, but one that means to embrace work of those artists whom Stern considers essential, among whom Stern hopes to take his place. Surely Casals' longevity did not go unnoticed by Stern, eighty-six when he wrote poem.For Stern, creative impulse originates in community of poets writers, musicians, composers, philosophers, visual artists, past present, among whom he mingles as if a guest at some celestial cocktail party. Stern's poems are rife with allusions, often direct, to Dante, Schubert, Kant, Magritte, Shelley, Stieglitz, Pound, Proust, Nietzsche, Ginsberg, Picasso, Vivaldi, Emerson, Auden, Villa-Lobos, Hobbes, Bartok, Shostakovitch, Bela, among many other luminaries in creative firmament. Pop culture barely rates a mention in his work. Sid Vicious makes a fleeting appearance in a poem about exilic Ovid, about whom Stern writes, myself / feel almost happy that he came before me, / that my own wailing / found such a model in his book of sorrow (The Same Moon Above Us). He continues:In my lighter moments when my cheeksare dry my heart is not yet poundingI like to compare his heaviness to mine-or mine to his-to see whose chair is older,whose rug is thinner, whose hands are colder,although world I live wander inis really not like his, at least not yet-This, then, is Stern's occasional method: to bring forward lives works of kindred spirits, reveling in what he calls his gorgeous retrieval. It is this active ongoing community of his making that prods his own work: Poems from poems, songs / from songs, paintings from paintings, / always this friendly / impregnation, writes Adam Zagajewski.As above list of compatriots might indicate, Stern is attracted to outsiders, those like Galileo, subject of another poem, who stood outside social, civil, religious institutions. Bach too had his detractors. These suites had been deemed academic rubbish, mechanical studies without musical warmth-can you imagine that? …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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