Odalisque
Ben
Fama. Bloof Books, $8 handmade chapbook (16p)
As she launches into her brilliant
defense of novels in the early pages of Northanger
Abbey, Jane Austen’s narrator opines:
“And what are
you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady,
while she lays down her book . . . . Now,
had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of The Spectator, instead .
. . how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name . . . .
Substitute “a chapbook” for “a novel”
and Interview for The Spectator, and little has changed
since then. Of course, Austen wrote for
readers who would appreciate this point of view, who would get the joke – and,
just as the problem remains the same today, such readers are still around
too. It’s not that one wants poetry alongside
ads in the glossies, these readers will tell you, but it might not be so bad if
the ideal situation were the ordinary one: if fine poetry editions were as
accessible as mainstream stuff, no big deal.
When Ben Fama writes, in a poem called “Tumblr Skies” midway through his
new collection Odalisque, “I’d like
to perform something / not dominated by industry,” one gets the feeling that
these readers are his people, and that they’re paying attention.
The speaker of these
poems invokes the Parisian flâneur,
that solitary hip pedestrian of the nineteenth century who is always out for a
long stroll, and whose leisurely appearance is a protest against the division
of labor which makes people into specialists.
Fama memorializes and revives this long-extinct ethic in “Flâneur”:
It’s an honest
joy
To be shocked by
beauty
In the 21st
century
I was shocked
when my lover was caught stealing
From Dean &
Deluca
I was thinking
of a line
By Robert Hass
The floor
manager stopped us
We simply went
to a different store
Poetry
A requiem for
leisure, pleasure, thought
I cannot take
your high school friend’s
Hoop earrings
seriously
And every
picture on my phone is obscene
Seriously, look
at it—
All these
fucking effetes
Boring travel
stories
Details of
somebody’s dreams
Champagne
condensating
On leather seats
All summer long
Traveling unmolested among the general
populace in Ben Fama’s poems, so to speak, it dawns on us, facing the dullness
and callousness of existence, that we aren’t responding to our fellow humans in
kind, but rather that we’re addressing them with a fabulous civility.
Just as the work
of a Florentine poet must necessarily represent the same atmosphere and way of
life which produce that city’s traditions of architectural ornament, sculptural
proportion and oratorical harangue, so too does a New Yorker’s art exemplify
that city in its familiar character as a nexus of the social, commercial and
political aspects of life. Fama’s work
is so much of its element that he can write a poem like “Los Angeles,” named
for localities where a very different industry lends its charm to everything
else around it:
What does it
take to start a new life?
You take lonely
trips to the city
you are
interested in moving to.
Saturate the
market with your resume.
During
interviews order both coffee and juice.
Masterfully
handle the acceptance of ontological incompleteness
by affecting the
persona of the applicant they want to hire
a winning
assurance that you never intend to realize
obvious to all
parties six months into the job.
John Paul
Gaultier staged his Chic Rabbi
collection at
Fashion Week FW’93
Very beautiful,
very elegant, the orthodox religious
clothing and the
gender bending
fits with his
interest in tradition and iconic imagery
as well as the
fact that he’s treating somewhat impertinently
something that
most people wouldn’t dare play with in couture design.
When Gaultier
talks about himself though he sounds dumb.
In this least alienated of poems,
modernity is neither a place to hide nor a clearing-house for ready-made
metaphors, but a quandary shared as part of the common lot; and because of this,
contemporary realities can be treated good-humoredly and with respect for the
reader’s intelligence.
The odalisque of
the title is the recipient of a love letter that no one could possibly find enough
words or time to compose or read in the course of an ordinary day; the piece
says what slips past in the crush and hustle:
There’s a
picture of you on my phone
I look at when
I’m bored
It’s basically
an American Apparel ad
In a world I
have access to
I’m looking at
it now
Or possibly
through it
And listening to
“Gymnopédie no. 3”
Sometimes I think
it is a perfect song
I wonder what
you are going to wear
To this cocktail
event
At the Gershwin
Hotel
We are going to
tonight
But when I left
you were sleeping
And I don’t
think you are awake yet
The jocular tenderness of this formal
declaration of intimacy ushers in a meditation upon mortality that briefly
reveals the other side of its author’s joie de vivre (“I will die / Under
conditions / Premeditated by myself”); and, all the lightness, tendresse and culture
appear in their proper light as the things which make life worth living.
Recent discourse
concerning poetry has dwelt on questions of the relationship between aesthetic
commitments, distribution and audience.
A fixed idea seems to prevail among readers and writers of various
inclinations that the size of a print run has a direct bearing upon readership
– as if, in short, independent, small press and micropress writers, readers and
publishers must be aware of their large publishing house counterparts as a
matter of necessity, but not the other way around, except insofar as chapbooks
are available to the magnanimous investor as collectible items. Besides being at best inaccurate and at worst
mendacious, this reckless sort of assumptive statement misrepresents what
actually happens among members of an engaged artistic community, making the
whole enterprise look pretty unimportant to the general reader, and among
poetry devotees fomenting distrust of the commentators whose high profiles
might otherwise make for trustworthy leadership. As things stand, poetry simply ignores these
concerns, in favor of its own preoccupations.
This is from Fama’s “Fantasy”:
What I think I
will miss most
When I die
Is color
And the light
Sometimes it
just comes to you
Amidst
occasional instances
Of radiance or darkness
I mean
Everyone has
their shit
Then enough time
goes by
That’s your life
Maybe I expect
too much
I wouldn’t know
how not to
In my room
With these
portraits
In gold frames
There are poets who give one the
impression that they see everything as if through their own semitransparent
reflection in a pane of glass which precedes them by a few feet at every
turn. By contrast, Ben Fama’s poetry greets
the violence of contemporary life with a sophistication that needs no defense
or attack; Odalisque’s practiced
poise doesn’t come off as studied, but as a disarming ease, even at its most
challengingly elegant. The truth is that
everyone reads everyone, regardless of status; you beg, borrow or steal, if
necessary, to keep your hand in the game.
Understandably, perhaps, the contentious nature of American public life,
with its din of competing interest groups, takes its toll on the poetry world (how
could it not?); and, as apparently is not the case with many other disciplines,
infighting among poetry devotees all too often results in a confusion of
pronouncements that’s tantamount to bickering – with no agreement even as to
the terms of the conversation, and with posturing on all sides – rather than
being productively transformed by the work itself. In the rare poetry which rises above such
internecine divisions, one finds a refreshingly frank acknowledgment that we’re
all wholly unknown to each other, in the gray area of daily life – and that
even so, it’s all good, as they say. The
seven poems in Ben Fama’s Odalisque (no
matter that they appear in an edition of only a hundred copies) achieve such transcendent
scope.
It’s consonant
with Fama’s project that the cover image of Odalisque
is a gorgeous flamingo-and-palm-tree silk scarf print in puce, ochre and teal by
London-based fashion designer Francesca Lahiri-Langley, entitled “Ocean Drive,”
presumably in tribute to Gianni Versace, who lived in Miami on a street of that
name. As essential as Style itself,
these poems parlay tragedy and mystery alike into the everyday glamour that they
ought to be. (February 2014)
Purchase Odalisque HERE.
Reviewer bio: Erik
Noonan is the author of the poetry collections Stances (Bird &
Beckett, 2012) and Haiku d’Etat (Omerta, 2013). He lives in San
Francisco with his wife Mireille.
