There's a website devoted to them, with a story about Kaspar Hauser, Wild Child of Europe.
He was wearing a round felt peasant's hat lined with yellow silk, an old pair of high-heeled half boots that didn't fit, a black silk scarf, a grey cloth jacket, a linen vest, and grey cloth trousers. He was carrying a white and red checked handkerchief with the initials K.H. embroidered in red, and some rags decorated with blue and white flowers, a (possibly) German key, a small envelope containing gold dust (!), and prayer beads made of horn. He also had some printed religious texts in his pockets, including a spiritual manual entitled 'The Art of Replacing Lost Time and Years Badly Spent', a cynical title in view of what was later found out about his history.
I remember studying this poem in German in college - I wrote out these stanzas in the notebook I was keeping at that time. I have almost memorized them.
Kaspar Hauser Lied
Für Bessie Loos
Er wahrlich liebte die Sonne, die purpurn den Hügel hinabstieg,
Die Wege des Walds, den singenden Schwarzvogel
Und die Freude des Grüns.
Ernsthaft war sein Wohnen im Schatten des Baums
Und rein sein Antlitz.
Gott sprach eine sanfte Flamme zu seinem Herzen:
O Mensch!
by Georg Trakl
I feel like I owe surrealism an apology for the lame critique in yesterday's post ... this post is an attempt at reparations ...
Gioia's essay on Tate and "American Surrealism" ignores the political component of surrealism. Surrealism was/is anti-capitalist, anti-clerical, sexually open, and politically radical. How we forget that when we say a scene was oh - gee - so surreal or equate surrealism with dream logic and free association. No teeth there!.
From this point of view, animated cartoons did not participate in the tradition of surrealism. Gioia's essay is not very insightful on this point.
Dana Gioia is Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I knew that.
And - other thoughts -
what about "private" versus "public" subtext?
who's to say what is deeply communicative and what is not?
what is communicated when the poet is non-communicative?
why is the private kept private?
Power - communication - canon -
I am intrigued by private symbolism, private allusions, private resonance. I don't like the paragraphs of Gioia's essay where he dismisses Tate so quickly for lack of subliminal communication. It's politically irresponsible, as is his discussion of surrealism.
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James Tate and American Surrealism, an essay by dana gioia
Delighted to find this essay online after stumbling onto it in the library and neglecting to check out the book.
Points that stuck with me:
How do you tell the difference between
And a reminder: look up Austrian Expressionist Georg Trakl. His text and subtext supposedly cohere.
I want to know stuff like this.
Quoted from Dana Gioia, James Tate and American Surrealism
Finally, I have one more serious reservation. Despite its surface brilliance, stylistic originality, and consistent invention, Tate's poetry often fails to make a deep emotional and intellectual connection with the reader. It isn't just matter of accessibility (though Tate's habitual avoidance of logical structure, his aversion to psychological realism, and his instinctive denial of conventional meaning surely contribute to the problem). Difficult poetry can be deeply communicative. The great Modernists like Pound, Eliot, Cummings, and Stevens demonstrated how powerfully complex poetry can speak to the common reader. They understood, however, that if a poem renounces the obvious pleasures of clarity and overt coherence, it must then provide the compensation of strong subliminal communication. In the best poetry, even if the reader doesn't always understand the surface meaning of a text, he or she intuitively feels the emotional power of the subtext.
In Tate's work, however, there hardly seems to be a subtext–only marvelously crafted but enigmatic surfaces. Whatever deeper meaning the poems have–if, indeed, they do cohere at a deeper level–remains largely inaccessible to the reader. Tate provides vivid and abundant images but no intuitive sense of their relation to one another. A reader can witness Tate's dreamscapes but rarely enter them fully. Rereading Tate's Selected Poems to prepare for this broadcast, I was reminded of the Austrian Expressionist, Georg Trakl, who died during the first World War. Trakl is an opaque and hermetic poet of extraordinary originality–a far more challenging poet in many ways than Tate. Yet, as one studies Trakl's richly lyric work, the poems acquire powerful resonance and meaning. Text and subtext cohere for the reader–intuitively, emotionally, intellectually. Even if the reader is at a loss to paraphrase the literal meaning of a poem, he or she feels it holistically. In comparison, Tate remains deliberately elusive. Not only the author disappears behind these poems but also ultimately the poems themselves–vanishing like the Cheshire Cat behind its own sly smile.