Benjamin Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn, 1842, oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

T. S. Eliot announced portentously in 1921 that “poets in our civilization as it exists at present must be difficult,” because modern life was confusing and difficult, too. The idea that new poems should be harder to read than prose, that serious poems pose a challenge to most readers, may seem like it began in the twentieth century, with the writers called high modernists (Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein), who distanced themselves from prose sense in new ways. And yet some poems have seemed hard to read for a while. Eliot made his announcement in the course of his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” about John Donne and the contemporaries of Donne. Lord Byron complained in 1819 that William Wordsworth had grown incomprehensible:

Wordsworth, in a rather long “Excursion”
…….(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),
Has given a sample from the vasty version
…….Of his new system to perplex the sages;
’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,
…….And may appear so when the dog-star rages—
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

Most readers who try The Excursion do find it hard going; almost all think it’s too long. The earlier, more influential Wordsworth—the one who liked daffodils—can be a challenge, too. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) consisted mostly of poems about peasants and rural scenes; its plain language seemed groundbreaking—or disturbing—for its apparent simplicity, like a Chuck Berry single on a playlist full of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. It might have seemed, even, literally revolutionary: Wordsworth’s new ways of writing about peasants and other low-status people came out of his sympathies with the French Revolution, which he and his friends first supported, then came to oppose. Read More

Prague

Karlovy Vary—Plzeň—Český Krumlov—Prague

In August 2017 my family and I traveled to the Czech region of Bohemia, my mother’s homeland and the setting of my new novel, The Organs of Sense. At the airport in Prague we rented a car and drove directly to Karlovy Vary, the birthplace of my grandfather, who had died the year before; then we swung southeast through Plzeň and Český Krumlov before returning north toward Prague. It was meant to be a tour of our heritage, but it would also, I hoped—though the melding of my familial obligations with my artistic ambitions gave me a twinge of guilt—provide material for the novel of which I was then in the middle.

Karlovy Vary

In the spa town where, a century earlier, my grandfather was born, a local genealogist I’d found online and to whom I’d sent a pdf of my grandfather’s death certificate took us first to the spot where once stood the dress shop of Felix and Elsa, names he uttered in a tone of such hushed revelation, as though he had taken us to a site that would obviously mean a great deal to us, that my mother did not dare ask him in what way the people who bore them were related to us. From the dress shop of Felix and Elsa we walked to the apartment building in which Helene and Max lived shortly before the First World War, and from there we climbed a steep staircase to the villa on the hill where the twin sisters Frieda and Clara (both murdered by the Nazis) grew up. Then we drove to the abandoned porcelain factory once run by Frieda’s husband, Julius. At each stop my mother’s mood grew bleaker; she reproached herself for her estrangement from this world; these names meant nothing to her, and the fact that it was now too late (but only just) to ask her father who they were and what they were like caused her—this was clear—exquisite pain, which, however, she kept to herself. Only upon returning to our hotel and locating some online reviews he’d managed to suppress did I learn that the genealogist, driven presumably by compulsions of his own, was notorious for taking foreign tourists to the former residences and workplaces of his own dead relatives, every day the same sites. My mother, whom I had never known to give online feedback, later left him a three-star review.

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On John Kane’s photography of Pilobolus and Momix.

John Kane, Where landscape becomes dreamscape, 2008. (All images copyright John Kane. Used by permission.)

In the hills of northwestern Connecticut there is a portion of the state, a rural and rural-suburban region, that I refer to as “Pilobo-land”: it includes Washington, New Milford, and other nearby towns, and has long been home to two of the world’s most celebrated dance-theater companies, Pilobolus and its sibling, Momix, as well as to a number of their most noteworthy friends, neighbors, and collaborators. It’s a community that tends to be on a first-name basis, even between individuals who have yet to meet directly. Pilobo-land, however, is more than a place; it’s also the overlapping worlds, on stages and in minds, that it creates. Just as Vladimir Nabokov dubbed his cherished intangible possessions “unreal estate” one might, in regard to Pilobolus and Momix, speak of “surreal estate.” It’s a place where landscape becomes dreamscape, where the rural and the theatrical are both strikingly pictorial, and no photographer has captured them more artfully or faithfully, through multiple decades, than resident John Kane. A selection of his work, a small number of images, dramatically enlarged, is now on display in the heart of the territory it documents, at the Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens, in the village of Washington Depot.

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