Another Opening, Another Show: July 2024

July is usually a light month, but this July appears even lighter than usual, which, sadly, confirms the trend of scaled-back performances & lowered expectation among performance venues. Time to show whatever support you can by buying tickets &/or donating to your favorite groups!

Theatrical

The Marsh Berkeley presents The DMV, a one-person show written, directed, & performed by Don Reed, from 7 June to 19 July.

The Marsh San Francisco presents Hick: A Love Story, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Letters to Lorena Hickok, written by Terry Baum & Pat Bond, directed by Sarah Albertson & Bill Peters, & performed by by Terry Baum, from 9 June to 14 July; then from 7 to 28 July they revive Dirk Alphin’s Axis, directed by Alphin, a revival of his play about a family dealing with their sinking fortunes in a sinking town.

Berkeley Rep presents The Best of the Second City, featuring old & new sketches written & performed by famed comedy troupe The Second City, directed by Jeff Griggs & playing from 16 to 28 July.

Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage present Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties by Jen Silverman, directed by Becca Wolff, in which "Five people named Betty clash and connect in this queer fantasia of riotous self-discovery"; that starts 20 July & runs through 18 August.

BroadwaySF presents Ramy Youssef in his one-person show at the Curran Theater on 27 July.

BroadwaySF presents Girl from the North Country, written & directed by Conor McPherson & featuring songs by Bob Dylan (orchestrated by Simon Hale) at the Golden Gate Theater, from 30 July to 18 August.

Operatic

The Merola Opera Program presents the Schwabacher Summer Concert on 11 & 13 July at the SF Conservatory of Music; conducted by Louis Lohraseb & directed by Omer Ben Seadia & Anna Theodosakis, the concert features this year's Merolini in "extended scenes from works by Donizetti, Gounod, Leoncavallo, Massenet, Puccini, and Richard Strauss, among others."

Pocket Opera & Cinnabar Theater present Puccini's beloved (though not particularly by me) La Bohème, conducted by Mary Chun & directed by Elly Lichenstein, on 14 July at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 21 July at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, & 28 July at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

At the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on 12 & 14 July, Festival Opera gives us a double-bill of Poulenc's La Voix Humaine (conducting & piano-playing by Robert Mollicone, directed by Céline Ricci, starring Carrie Hennessey) & Purcell's Dido & Aeneas (conducting & harpsichord-playing by Zachary Gordin, directed by Céline Ricci, starring Kindra Scharich as Dido, Lila Khazoum as Belinda, Matthew Lovell as Aeneas, & Sara Couden as the Sorceress).

Ars Minerva offers a preview on 17 July at the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco of its next revival, La Flora by Antonio Sartorio & Marc'Antonio Ziani, scheduled for full performances this coming November 15 - 17 at the ODC Theater.​

Choral

The celebrated Blind Boys of Alabama will appear at the SF Jazz Center from 25 to 28 July.

Vocalists

On 5 July, Old First Concerts presents soprano Jill Morgan Brenner with pianist Alex Katsman performing Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, & lieder by Alma Mahler & Schubert.

Orchestral

On 11 & 13 July, Carlos Miguel Prieto leads the San Francisco Symphony in Spanish Favorites, a program with featured soloists Pablo Sáinz-Villegas on guitar & soprano Caroline Corrales performing selections from Suite Española by Isaac Albéniz (orchestrated by Frühbeck de Burgos), Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo, & The Three-Cornered Hat by Manuel de Falla.

On 25 July, Earl Lee leads the San Francisco Symphony in Fate Now Conquers by Carlos Simon, Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto (with soloist Stella Chen), & the Tchaikovsky 4.

The San Francisco Symphony has a couple of movie-themed concerts coming up: on 12 & 14 July, Sarah Hicks leads the group in Disney in Concert: The Sound of Magic (the specifics have not yet been released); & on 19 - 20 July, Edwin Outwater leads them in Movie Music of John Williams, featuring pieces from Superman, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Jurassic Park, Munich, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s List, Lincoln, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, & the Star Wars series.

Ben Folds appears with the San Francisco Symphony, led by Edwin Outwater, on 27 July; the program has not yet been announced.

Chamber Music

On 28 July Old First Concerts presents Le Due Muse (cellist Sarah Hong & pianist Makiko Ooka) performing Ravel's Sonata posthume & his Pièce en forme de Habanera, Frank Bridge's Sonata, & Britten's Sonata in C for cello and piano, & selected songs.

Instrumental

On 7 July, Old First Concerts presents pianist AnnaLotte Smith in Songs My Mother Taught Me, a program consisting of Sofia Gubaidulina's Chaconne, the Brahms Intermezzi, Reena Esmail's Rang de Basant, Debussy's Reflets dans l’eau, Monica Chew's Ice Calf, & Rachmaninoff's Moments musicaux, No. 4 in E minor.

The Art of the Piano Festival runs at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 24 June to 7 July, featuring master classes & recitals from HieYon Choi, Mikael Darmanie, Simone Dinnerstein, Vladimir Feltsman, Jeremy Jordan, Alexander Korsantia, Marina Lomazov, Yoshikazu Nagai, Jon Nakamatsu, Garrick Ohlsson, Awadagin Pratt, & Stephen Prutsman.

Early / Baroque Music

Jeffrey Thomas leads the American Bach Soloists in Viva Vivaldi, a program consisting of The Four Seasons, the Sonata for Cello and Continuo in A Minor, the Sonata for Two Violas and Continuo in E Minor, & the Concerto for Four Violins in D Major, & that's 27 July; on 28 July the ensemble performs Theater of Fate, featuring vocal soloists soprano Maya Kherani & mezzo-soprano Sarah Coit performing Handel's Agrippina condotta a morire, Vivaldi's Cessate, omai cessate & Amor hai vinto, (the program also includes Corelli's Concerto Grosso in C Minor); both performances are at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco.

See also Ars Minerva's preview concert under Operatic.

Modern / Contemporary Music

On 17 July at Brava Theater in San Francisco, Other Minds presents pianist Adam Tendler in Inheritances, a program of new works he commissioned after getting a legacy (in the form of "a wad of cash received in a parking lot") after his father's sudden death; the composers include Devonté Hynes, Nico Muhly, Laurie Anderson, inti figgis-vizueta, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Angélica Negrón, Christopher Cerrone, Marcos Balter, Missy Mazzoli, Darian Donovan Thomas, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Scott Wollschleger, Mary Prescott, Timo Andres, & John Glover.

Jazz

The Django Festival Allstars bring their School of Django Reinhardt stylings to Freight & Salvage on 20 July.

Dance

ODC / Dance presents their Summer Sampler, consisting of A Brief History of Up and Down by Brenda Way & 10,000 Steps: A Dance About Its Own Making by Catherine Galasso., from 18 to 21 July.

Art Means Painting

Kara Walker's Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by / Kara E-Walker opens at SFMOMA on 1 July & is scheduled to run through next spring.

Cinematic

BAM/PFA continues to roll out its summer series of films; this month on 12 July they launch Made in Italy: Morricone, Leone, and More; on 19 July, Hiroshi Shimizu: Notes of an Itinerant Director; & on 26 July, Something Different: The Films of Věra Chytilová.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival runs from 18 July through 4 August in a variety of venues; check out the schedule here.

Friday Photo 2024/26

 

San Francisco City Hall, June 2024

Poem of the Week 2024/26

Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell

At midnight tears

Run into your ears.

– Louise Bogan

Your reading of & reaction to this poem are likely to depend on your reading of & reaction to its title, a title which is actually longer than the poem for which it sets the stage. Is this a solemn claiming of space for personal anguish? Or a melodramatically inflated bit of self-importance? As with panegyrics to Louis XIV or Stalin, is the rhetoric just slightly overheated enough so that some irony is intended (albeit with plausible deniability)? Or is interpretation here a matter of other factors – personality, gender (yours as well as the poet's), & maybe above all, age – coming into play?

It's probably significant that when I started remembering & considering this poem, I realized, when I looked it up, that I had over the years mentally rewritten the title into something much more understated & ironic. This is probably a function of the way aging (& whatever life experiences I have accumulated) plays against my naturally theatrical emotions: over the years, you get, or hope you get, a better sense of how you fit into the world, & how you fit in with other people, & adjust the temper of your temperament accordingly. (This is why some poems by Sylvia Plath that I loved when I was younger now strike me as ludicrously overblown & deeply narcissistic.)

Sojourn in Hell, in particular, sounded suspiciously grand when I read the poem this time around. A sojourn is a short stay or visit, & at least one website tells us that it is a fancy way of saying that: a borderline example of the sort of elevated "poetic" diction that many poets have tried to purge from their language. Of course the word does get used regularly enough (& to what extent, at least for an American, is the word elevated by association with the powerful figure of Sojourner Truth?).Hell, of course, is its own kind of ultimate; the word here is assuredly metaphoric, as Hell, assuming the poet believed in it, is famously a place you don't get out of. So to sojourn there does carry overtones associating the poet with epic heroes (Aeneas or Odysseus, for example), who visited the Underworld & returned, or with the even grander figure (for poets) of Dante, who walked through Hell, Purgatory, & Heaven & emerged to tell all.

What is this Hell the poet has undergone? It is unspecified, though it is surely hellacious. But we have no reason to think it's one of the more terrifying tragedies of our (or rather the poet's) time: genocide, gulags, bombings . . . . it appears to be ordinary, everyday human suffering: horrible for those undergoing it, but (& this is part of the misery), nothing grand or world-historical. The temptation (perhaps guided by the poet's gender, or just by the fact that she's a poet) is to assume there is some sort of romantic / sexual unhappiness going on, but there's nothing that narrows the situation that way. It could be any number of things: finances, regrets, aging, solitude . . . . What does it mean, in the aftermath of the Holocaust & the atomic bomb, to describe oneself as residing in Hell, even for a sojourn, when one is, as Bogan was, a lauded poet & in the culturally significant role of poetry critic for The New Yorker? I'm not saying that her deserved acclaim negates any private suffering: people, even outwardly successful ones, have the right to their own unhappiness. But does it push self-regard too far to sweep aside history & the daily news & proclaim one's own sorrow exemplary and perhaps unique? At one point does exalting one's own unhappiness become self-indulgent, even smug, & lacking in empathy for the widespread & considerable sufferings of other people?

Whatever this poet's Hell is, isolation, whether self-imposed or inflicted upon her, is clearly part of it: the first word here is solitary, & though it modifies observation, suggesting both an observation made in solitude & the one & only observation made during & brought out from the sojourn, the word carries over into our image of the poet: there is no one beside her at midnight to wipe away the ear-bound tears. Is it part of the hellaciousness of her condition that she is so isolated? Or is it just self-centered of her not to realize that her alienated misery is a condition shared by many, many other people? (And of course, the two propositions might both be true.)

Suggesting that the poet realizes there is a perhaps a bit of posturing in her title is the poem itself: a tight, lapidary, & very musical description of a specific bodily phenomenon: she is lying down, presumably in a bed since it's midnight, she is sleepless & crying, &, since she is lying down, the tears don't drip down her cheeks, they roll into her ears. This is an actual thing that happens; I have experienced it, & I assume most others have as well. There's something if not outright comic then lightly amusing about the misdirected tears pooling in her ears. (There might be a suggestion that her emotions are as misguided as the tears.)

Did she feel this irony at the time? Most likely not: would it be a sojourn in Hell if you were carrying that kind of self-awareness with you? But perhaps the self-awareness, or some part of it, was indeed there, & that's why she had a sojourn in Hell & not a permanent residency. Either way, some element of that self-awareness must have been with her, allowing her to make the observation. And it's the only thing she's says she's bringing back from this time: a distanced, elegantly phrased, slightly amused observation of a physical phenomenon caused by intense sorrow. The observation & its tone form a bit of a protective shell over an obviously rough & painful time, & perhaps that carapace hardening over her misery is something else she's brought back from the depths of her undefined Hell: a hardening, a self-removal, which is another outcome of aging & life experience.

I took this poem from The Blue Estuaries: Poems: 1923-1968 by Louise Bogan.

Museum Monday 2024/26

 

detail of Alphonse Mucha's poster advertising Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux Camélias, seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2019 as part of the special exhibit Toulouse-Lautrec and the Stars of Paris

Friday Photo 2024/25

 

Strand Theater, Market Street, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/25

Song

I had a dove and the sweet dove died;

    And I have thought it died of grieving.

O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,

    With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.

Sweet little red feet! why would you die –

Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?

You lived alone on the forest-tree,

Why, pretty thing, could you not live with me?

I kissed you oft and gave you white peas;

Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?

– John Keats

According to the endnotes in my Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats, from which I took this poem, Keats more or less dashed off this little poem while listening to some music (unfortunately, the music in play is not specified). It does have the hallmarks of verse written to be sung: the diction is fairly simple, the rhyme scheme doesn't make you wait to long for the chiming reward, & the picture is made vivid with simple & direct color references: the dove's red feet, the white peas, the green trees.

But the poem, really a dramatic monologue, shows great psychological acuity & subtlety. The suffering of the formerly free dove is made more poignant by the owner's inability to accept that that is its nature: he realizes that the dove was in misery, but his blithe narcissism prevents him from understanding that he was the cause of that misery. The situation is made even more poignant by our seeing it through the lens of the benevolently, cluelessly cruel master (in this it might bring to mind another famous dramatic monologue in verse, Browning's My Last Duchess).

The opening quatrain uses an abab rhyme scheme, & presents the situation: the narrator is consistently, at least in his view, loving; his pet is sweet, & he is bewildered at his loss. He has considered the possibility that sorrow killed the lovely bird, but is mystified as to why the bird should be sad: he himself wove the gentle silken thread that kept the creature captive. Doves have a Biblical resonance; they are the bird of peace, & the sign of heavenly blessing, & the bird that brought Noah the branch that signified the receding of the waters; memorably, they are the ideal of Psalm 55, where the singer cries out "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest": all signifiers of peace & freedom. Even a silken thread, though woven with care by an owner who thinks he is loving, would be inimical to such a creature.

After the opening quatrain, the poem is written in couplets, as if our speaker is unable to stretch things over more than two lines. He is baffled: why would the bird prefer liberty & solitude to . . . well, yes, captivity, but captivity with him? The white peas to me suggest a refined, almost unnatural, diet, &, again, the speaker cannot understand why any creature would prefer the green trees. White suggests innocence & purity, perhaps an imposed innocence & purity, as contrasted with the wild red of the bird's feet & the vivid green of its native habitat. The narrator never does learn to understand, & we can be pretty sure he never will, no matter how many "pretty things" pile up at his own untrammeled feet.

Keats obviously had a fecund imagination, but I wonder if somewhere in his mind the seed for this poem had been planted by Juliet's remarks in the celebrated balcony scene of Romeo & Juliet:

'Tis almost morning. I would have thee gone –

And yet no farther than a wanton's bird,

That lets it hop a little from his hand,

Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,

And with a silken thread plucks it back again,

So loving-jealous of his liberty.

(Romeo & Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, ll 176 - 81; Romeo's response: "I would I were thy bird"; clearly he is no sweet dove longing for liberty)

Barbara Pym, who often used lines from the English Romantic poets as titles for her novels, wrote one late in her career titled The Sweet Dove Died; it's a brilliant dissection of such a relationship: a well-off, elegant & detached woman has a romantic (though not physical) relationship with a handsome young man, complicated by his more straightforward uncle, a young woman he has a fling with, & then a young man he has an affair with (the young man is an American scholar who quotes the Keats poem, though he has a single thread rather than a silken thread; I don't know if that's a variant reading of the manuscript or a memory slip on Pym's part). The novel is written with Pym's characteristic wit & understanding, but there's something almost cold in its clarity which, to me, sets it apart a bit from her other novels, which tend to be warmer. I recommend them all, cold & warm.

Museum Monday 2024/25

 

detail of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, now at the Art Institute of Chicago

humid nightblue fruit

    What did each do at the door of egress?

    Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.

    For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

    For a cat.

    

     What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

    The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

    With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

    Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) to lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably, remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

    Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

    Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

Once again, Happy Bloomsday to my mountain flowers.

Friday Photo 2024/24

 

stairway, North Beach, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/24

Weeds

    The pigrush, the poverty grass,

The bindweed's stranglehold morning glories,

    The dog-blow and ninety joints –

They ask so little of us to start with,

    Just a crack in the asphalt,

Or a subway grate with an hour of weak light.

    One I know has put down roots

As far as a corpse is buried, its storage stem

    As big as my leg. That one's called

Man-under-ground. That one was my grudge.

    And suddenly now this small

Unlooked for joy. Where did it come from,

    With these pale shoots

And drooping lavender bell? Persistent

    Intruder, whether or not

I want you, you've hidden in the heart's

    Overworked subsoil. Hacked at

Or trampled on, may you divide and spread,

    Just as, all last night,

The wind scattered a milkweed across the sky.

– J D McClatchy

Anyone with a garden (or, less grandly & intentionally, a yard) is familiar with this phenomenon: the "weed" – the wild flower, the stubborn strange grasses, the volunteer, the bird-planted, the revenant – that prospers in place of the pampered & often expensive plants we labored to see in their place. Sometimes the results are better than what we intended; other times, the initial beauty deceives. A few years ago a wonderful plant sprang up all over my yard, with lacy green leaves & little cloudlets of white flowers (I assume it was some variant of wild carrot or Queen Anne's Lace; it had that kind of look). I was taken with it & decided to let it bloom wherever it was growing, which was all over. But then seed time came, & the plant turned on me: the seeds were sticky little burrs that got everywhere. When I walked through the yard, I would end up with them all over my arms (& in my arm pits), my hair, my yard gloves, my clothes, my shoes . . . everywhere. I brushed them off until I realized I was just spreading the seeds. The next year, I ruthlessly yanked up any of these plants I saw, even in their early beauty stages. I pulled them up by the dozens. A few still show up, of course, despite my dedicated efforts.

The poet here starts off with some really unattractive-sounding plants, their unwanted wildness contrasting with the regularity of his lines & stanzas. I may know some of these by other names (such is the nature of "weeds"), though I don't recognize most of these names, but then I'm sure they were chosen for sound & connotation: pigrush, poverty grass, bindweed, dog-blow (it's an interesting phenomenon that every dog-related term I can think of in English is an insult of some sort), ninety-joint: they sound mean, low-natured, gross or balky.

But then the mood changes a bit: they ask so little of us. It can be a relief not to have to deal with their needs. Is their self-sufficiency generous or indifferent or powerful or all of those and/or something else? Despite the unappealing names we stick on them, there seems something admirable in their tenacity & self-reliance & independence (& aren't those supposed to be great cultural virtues for Americans?).A crack in the asphalt, a subway grate: the plants aren't even interrupting the visualized flow of some ideal garden here; they're just trying to live (I remember a passage from a long-ago reading of Crime & Punishment, a description of how even the suffering will cling to life, even if they are stuck on a bare rocky ledge: still they cling to life). The poet tells of one weed that has sunk down as far as a corpse is buried: that's presumably a human corpse; the plant finds life amidst our death, & maybe even through our death. This plant's storage stem (a type of root that stores food & other nutrients) is as thick as the poet's leg. Things are getting personal! The comparisons to a man's leg & the vicinity of corpses & the name Man-under-ground & the storage stem all suggest that the plant's vitality is somehow feeding off of our (defunct) bodies. No wonder the poet has a grudge against it. It's doubtful that he managed to defeat it, though: a root that massive is difficult to remove completely, & unless you do that, that plant is returning.

The mood changes more significantly in the second stanza: the poet does not begin by describing the "weed", but by relating how he reacts to it: And suddenly now this small / unlooked for joy. It's not even clear at first that he is, in fact, describing a plant. The line break lends subtle emphasis to unlooked for. Joy is rare & fleeting enough in life, even small joys, so an unlooked-for one is welcome. After the emotion comes its cause: pale shoots / and drooping lavender bell. The plant is still an intruder, but not a fragile beauty, despite its paleness & drooping & pastel shade; it is persistent, not just in showing up where it wasn't planned for but in its insistence on its own existence & loveliness. Where did it come from? The it is emphasized with italics, bringing out the singularity of this particular weed. It refers to this plant, but perhaps also to the unexpected apparition of the plant's loveliness.

The poet is not completely won over (perhaps he's had an experience similar to mine with the lacy beauties): whether or not I want you. He's not ready to give up his plans for his garden, but he does admit the persistent intruder with pale shoots & a delicate bell-flower has worked its way into the heart's / overworked subsoil. Again, the body is linked to the world of nature as shown in the garden; the heart, seat of love, is compared to a garden (gardens are a traditional erotic image in many poetic traditions). And this weed has not just lodged there superficially; it is in the subsoil. The heart is cultivated, even overworked, but still receptive to the surprising bit of joy brought unexpectedly by an unlooked-for & unwanted discovery.

With that, the poet gives the plant his unnecessary blessing to bloom in his garden. Acknowledging the weed's likely future of being hacked at  / or trampled on (it is still an intruder, & hacking & trampling are how people treat weeds), he also wishes it to divide & spread, those two terms balancing the earlier two: dividing is a sort of hacking, a separation (it is also a deliberate process by which gardeners keep their plants healthy; here, it is the plant itself that is keeping itself healthy by division); spreading seems related to trampling: both expand the plant outwards, even if crushed. And most gardeners have had the experience of realizing they were carrying & spreading seeds stuck in the ridges of their work boots.

The poem so far has dealt with the ground, & what's underneath it; in the last two lines, it takes flight into the sky. First the way is prepared by the introduction of the metaphor: Just as, all last night. . . . Night prepares us for a dreamlike vision: The wind scattered a milkweed across the sky. On one level, this is a factual statement of the natural process by which some weeds are spread: the wind blows the light seeds through the air. But of course they aren't blown "across the sky"; they cover only a bit of territory, fairly low down in the atmosphere, before they fall to earth. What the phrasing gives us is a wonderful evocation of the seeds of this weed, the milkweed, as a kind of starry Milky Way spread & suspended dazzlingly overhead. The seeds of this unwanted plant become a generous celebration of the powerful glories of Nature itself.

The title is Weeds, not A Particular Weed I Happened to Like: the poet is suggesting, perhaps, a revised way of looking at the aesthetic imposition on & forcing of Nature that constitutes "a garden", into a broader acceptance of the strange byways & serendipitous discoveries of the living world.

I took this from Garden Poems, selected & edited by John Hollander, part of the excellent Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series.

Museum Monday 2024/24

 

detail of The Descending Geese of the Koto Bridge (Kotoji no Rakugan), from the series Eight Parlor Views (Zashiki hakkei) by Suzuki Harunobu, currently on display at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco as part of their special exhibit Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World

Friday Photo 2024/23

 

Market Street, San Francisco

Poem of the Week 2024/23

Upon Her Voice

Let but thy voice engender with the string,

And Angels will be borne, while thou dost sing.

– Robert Herrick

Length is an interesting phenomenon in poetry: often the long form, the epic, is rated the highest achievement of the art form, just as novels are often valued over short stories, but the lightning flash of a brief poem has its own art & its own fascination & power. Some poets naturally gravitate towards the brief (I can't imagine that any admirer of Emily Dickinson ever wished that she had attempted an epic). Herrick was one of those; his witty, sensuous, observational poems are mostly short & all the more memorable for it.

In this poem, two lines tell us all, though the title, which is sort of a line of its own, announces the subject (just as epics have a statement of subject & theme at the opening ("Arms & the man I sing"), so do briefer poems, if only to save time by pointing our minds in the right direction). The poet is speaking to a woman; she is not singing, but he hopes she will be; he must have heard her in the past, because he knows what delights to expect. There is a flirtatious undercurrent here, as he pleads with her to sing; it is not her voice alone, but her voice united with "the string" (a lute or violin or some such instrument) – not just united, but engendered. Engender means not only "to make people have a particular feeling or make a situation start to exist" – that is, her voice, united with an instrument, will create something new, something worth waiting for – but also to procreate, to beget – that is, art is generated by something akin to a sexual relationship, in which two procreators produce an independent, third, living being. (As Iago says, "My muse labors, & thus is she delivered".)

What sort of child is being produced? We find out in the second line: no squalling earthly babes, but angels. And not just one, but many; an abundance of heavenly messengers. Angels traditionally are shown hymning praise to God, often depicted in art with harps & other instruments. They also put us in mind of the music of the spheres that was supposed to result from the exquisite mathematical circling of the planets. The voice united with the string will remove us from this mundane reality to a higher existence.

And the angels are borne: the primary meaning of that word is carried (just as the sound vibrations we call music are carried to us through the air), but there is also the underlying pun, continuing the procreative theme, of given birth. The music floats, but is also rooted in our basic physical, as well as spiritual, urges.

Yet this glorious moment is as brief as this poem: it lasts only while thou dost sing (note the use of the intimate form thou; this word often strikes us as formal, because it is archaic, but it was once a living word in English, the equivalent of the intimate French tu). Given the sexual subtext to the poem, it's difficult not to see a glance here at the briefness of orgasm as well as the briefness of spiritual exaltation: a reminder that we are a complex mixture of the animal & the angelic. Herrick, perhaps most famous for the line Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, here pleads with an unidentified but crucial woman to produce, through the unlikely union of voice & string, a moment of earthly ecstasy.

Given the frequently saucy nature of Herrick's poetry, editions from the more decorous decades between his lifetime (he died in 1674) & the late twentieth century were frequently heavily edited & difficult to come by, so a complete edition of his poetry was one of the books I kept an eye out for. Oxford University Press published a wonderful two-volume set, but it's quite expensive. But several years ago, during yet another difficult period, on top of all my other difficulties, I had to help arrange a ridiculous offsite for a ridiculous group at my then job (which was also ridiculous). I vowed to myself that if I managed to make it through the week of the offsite without strangling one or more people, I would buy The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by Tom T. Cain and Ruth Connolly, without even waiting for one of OUP's occasional sales. Reader, that carrot kept this donkey on track & out of jail. Buying expensive books of poetry: preventing violence for untold years!

Museum Monday 2024/23

 

detail of Standing Crowned Buddha with Four Scenes of his Life, now in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco