Wrestling with texts: review
When The Body Says It’s Leaving by Pansy Maurer-Alvarez
When The Body Says It’s Leaving by Pansy Maurer-Alvarez, 81pp, $14.00, Hanging Loose Press, 231 Wyckoff St, Brooklyn, New York 11217, USA.
‘If art were a specialist human activity of purely aesthetic value it wouldn’t matter to us’ said Douglas Oliver, epigraphing one of Maurer-Alvarez’s poems. That has given the poet pause for thought; while clearly influenced by the aestheticism of post-modernists, she resists the tendency that way. While she cannot, unlike Oliver, show herself as a poet committed to political causes (ie. the Southern African sequence of Oliver’s picked out by Ian Sinclair for his anthology Conductors of Chaos), she turns instead to anecdotalism to counterbalance the aesthetic preoccupation. In the interesting poem, ‘Jane Birkin’s Hair’, at the ‘Théâtre de la Ville’ in Paris, attending a dance performance, the poet finds herself partly distracted by the hair of the woman seated in front of her:
It shines
its silkiness
brown marbled auburn
Don’t bend forward
and touch
I watch the dancers
I watch Jane Birkin watching
I watch the dancers as intently as she does
...
whereas I’ve got the distraction of her hair
naturally she hasn’t got it of mine
Thus does art cease to have ‘purely aesthetic value’ as it gets connected, or re-connected, to life.
Another way she escapes the aesthetic fetishism of post-modernism is by imaginary anecdotes. In the poem ‘Vladimir’s Angel’, the vision of which is seen lying on the beach at Aldburgh:
seduced me into
thinking really big thoughts about the world
life and death and even evolution and humanity
as well as wishes and dreams and definitions
of things like angels
Disruption of syntax in order to disrupt the reader’s expectation, I first learned from Veronica Forrest Thompson (seeing how, like Rilke, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez has a thing about angels) ... the neurotic angel of the early 1970s post-modern Cambridge Movement whom I met a year or so before her suicide. But I cannot see the point of it in the title of a poem like ‘How the City of Salisbury Which Later Became Bronze’. What point is served by my asking ‘How the City of Salisbury’ did what? Or, perhaps, wondering if a word has been accidentally missed out of the title by the printers. And there’s quite a bit of this disrupted syntax in the body of poems that one finds difficult to justify, distinguish from simple mistakes of literacy.
Anyway, my wrestling with these texts apart, let me quote Harvey Shapiro’s view off the back of the book, ‘Pansy Maurer-Alvarez is beautifully tuned into her self and it’s an interesting self.’ True. As I’m sure many others will discover.
‘If art were a specialist human activity of purely aesthetic value it wouldn’t matter to us’ said Douglas Oliver, epigraphing one of Maurer-Alvarez’s poems. That has given the poet pause for thought; while clearly influenced by the aestheticism of post-modernists, she resists the tendency that way. While she cannot, unlike Oliver, show herself as a poet committed to political causes (ie. the Southern African sequence of Oliver’s picked out by Ian Sinclair for his anthology Conductors of Chaos), she turns instead to anecdotalism to counterbalance the aesthetic preoccupation. In the interesting poem, ‘Jane Birkin’s Hair’, at the ‘Théâtre de la Ville’ in Paris, attending a dance performance, the poet finds herself partly distracted by the hair of the woman seated in front of her:
It shines
its silkiness
brown marbled auburn
Don’t bend forward
and touch
I watch the dancers
I watch Jane Birkin watching
I watch the dancers as intently as she does
...
whereas I’ve got the distraction of her hair
naturally she hasn’t got it of mine
Thus does art cease to have ‘purely aesthetic value’ as it gets connected, or re-connected, to life.
Another way she escapes the aesthetic fetishism of post-modernism is by imaginary anecdotes. In the poem ‘Vladimir’s Angel’, the vision of which is seen lying on the beach at Aldburgh:
seduced me into
thinking really big thoughts about the world
life and death and even evolution and humanity
as well as wishes and dreams and definitions
of things like angels
Disruption of syntax in order to disrupt the reader’s expectation, I first learned from Veronica Forrest Thompson (seeing how, like Rilke, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez has a thing about angels) ... the neurotic angel of the early 1970s post-modern Cambridge Movement whom I met a year or so before her suicide. But I cannot see the point of it in the title of a poem like ‘How the City of Salisbury Which Later Became Bronze’. What point is served by my asking ‘How the City of Salisbury’ did what? Or, perhaps, wondering if a word has been accidentally missed out of the title by the printers. And there’s quite a bit of this disrupted syntax in the body of poems that one finds difficult to justify, distinguish from simple mistakes of literacy.
Anyway, my wrestling with these texts apart, let me quote Harvey Shapiro’s view off the back of the book, ‘Pansy Maurer-Alvarez is beautifully tuned into her self and it’s an interesting self.’ True. As I’m sure many others will discover.
Page(s) 46-47
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