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Overview
"To write what is human, not escapist," is Henri Cole's endeavor. In The Visible Man he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics--poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life--that make up this exuberant book. This work, wrote Harold Bloom, "persuades me that Cole will be a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane is beautifully extended in The Visible Man, particularly in the magnificent sequence 'Apollo.' Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The Visible Man."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466877795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 08/12/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 226 KB |
About the Author
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published ten previous collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.
Read an Excerpt
The Visible Man
By Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1998 Henri ColeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7779-5
CHAPTER 1
I
Truth is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. MARIANNE MOORE, In the Days of Prismatic Color
Arte Povera
In the little garden of Villa Sciarra,
I found a decade of poetry dead.
In the limestone fountain lay lizards
and Fanta cans, where Truth once splashed from The Source.
How pleased I was and defiant because
a dry basin meant the end of description & rhyme,
which had nursed and embalmed me at once.
Language was more than a baroque wall-fountain.
Nearby, a gas-light shone its white-hot tongue,
a baby spat up — the stomach's truth-telling —
a mad boy made a scene worthy of Stalin.
Ah, to see the beast shitting in its cage!
Then the lying — "Yes sir, Daddy" — which changes nothing.
My soul-animal prefers the choke-chain.
Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting
FIRST STYLE
To become oneself is so exhausting
that I am as others have made me,
imitating monumental Greek statuary
despite my own feminized way of being.
Like the empire, I was born of pain —
or like a boy, one might say, for I have
become my father, whom I cannot fathom;
the past is a fetish I disdain.
Since they found the bloodless little girl,
with voluptuous lips, buried in me,
I am unsentimental. I do not see
the gold sky at sunset but blackbirds hurled
like lava stones. I am like a severed
finger lost in the wreckage forever.
SECOND STYLE
Unable to care for people, I care
mostly for things. At my bitterest,
I see love as self-censorship.
My face is a little Roman theater
in perfect perspective — with colonnades
and landscapes — making illusionistic
reference to feelings I cannot admit.
Painted in Dionysiac yellows and reds,
my unconscious is a rocky grotto
where flies buzz like formalists.
Despite myself, I am not a composite
of signs to be deciphered. In the ghetto —
where Jews, prostitutes and sailors once lived —
I am happiest because I am undisguised.
THIRD STYLE
Tearing away at an old self to make
a new one, I am my most Augustan.
I grieve little. I try to accustom
myself to what is un-Hellenized and chaste.
I let my flat black dado assert itself
without ornament. Can it be, at last,
that I am I — accepting lice clasped
to me like a dirty Colosseum cat?
On a faded panel of Pompeian red,
there's an erotic x-ray of my soul:
a pale boy-girl figure is unconsoled,
pinned from behind at the farthest edge
of human love, where the conscience is not whole,
yet finely engraved like a snail's shell.
FOURTH STYLE
If great rooms declare themselves by the life
lived in them, each night I am reborn
as men and boys stroll among the ruins,
anonymously skirting the floodlights,
sinking into me tenderly, as they do
each other during their brief hungry acts.
"As brief as love," they used to say, Plato
and his kind, exiling man from happiness,
but I am more than a cave whose campfire,
swelling and contracting, is all that is real.
Tomorrow, when I am drunk on sunlight,
I will still feel the furtive glances,
the unchaste kisses and the wet skin
imprinting me until I am born again.
White Spine
Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others,
how can He love me and hate what I am?
The dome of St. Peter's shone yellowish
gold, like butter and eggs. My God, I prayed
anyhow, as if made in the image
and likeness of Him. Nearby, a handsome
priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back,
not desiring to go it alone.
The college of cardinals wore punitive red.
The white spine waved to me from his white throne.
Being in a place not my own, much less
myself, I climbed out, a beast in a crib.
Somewhere a terrorist rolled a cigarette.
Reason, not faith, would change him.
Folly
In the Doria Pamphili garden,
most of the granite niches are empty,
the male gods have lost their genitals,
and the Great Mother, Hera, has no head.
Something has gone awry
in the artificial lake.
Burrowing deep into the black banks
enclosed by wire mesh,
families of nutria are eradicating —
with webbed hind feet,
blunt muzzled heads
and long orange incisors —
Pope Innocent X's pleasure garden's
eco-system.
Gothic as the unconscious,
the heavy tapered bodies
root along the irrigation ditches,
making their way in a criminal trot
toward the swans, whose handsome,
ecclesiastical wings open out
obliviously.
Each day I come back.
The sky is Della Robbia blue.
As I rise to my feet,
a swan — immaculate
and self-possessed as the ambulance
bearing my half-dead Mother —
grasps into the depths
and tears a weed up,
dripping like a chandelier,
while paddling behind are the derelict rodents,
hankering — with big sleepy eyes,
suggesting something like matrimonial bliss,
and plush gray fur,
undulating like the coat my mother wore —
to hunt the grass-shrouded
cygnet eggs and gut
their bloody embryos.
Charity
Naked but for dainty shoes, garter
and a ribbon in her long red hair,
she takes him in the way history takes us in:
with an unperturbed hand across the breast.
Stroking into her, the way a boot strokes a stirrup,
he seems as banal or irrelevant
as a birthmark or a hairdo. On screen,
it's her pointy attenuated legs,
smaller than life, that strain to do their work.
What he feels, for good or bad, I cannot feel.
What she feels frees her. Tenderness,
even to a stranger, corroborates the self.
Unlike the pretty jar of libidinal grease
knocked from the bed, she will not break.
The Black Jacket
At the Hunt Club, two architects,
a curator, and I arrived for supper
in palace rooms where a prince once slept.
We'd come to see the frescoes,
though I confess
a crude interest in the titled,
dispossessed of sovereignty or land.
"Tell me," one of the footmen queried
at the gate, "what nation is home?"
Though we wore good tailored suits,
my speech made plain I was not Roman.
Then one of us, in their mother tongue, spoke,
and we were waved to the next station.
If they judged us men without
families or religion, I reasoned,
surely cardinal virtues — strength, justice,
wisdom, moderation — would help us here,
where Bishops mingled with believers.
Yet, on the peristyle, facing us down
without emotion, their chamberlain found
the hound's-tooth jacket worn by James,
a shy farmboy from Napoleon, Ohio,
beneath code, all but black forbidden.
And so with perfect simple manners,
having little to do with class,
he donned the ill-cut garment found for him,
and we were welcomed.
In the drawing room,
Europa sat on the broad back of a bull
who lowed and licked her sandaled foot.
Her rape was something not yet accomplished.
Our solemn waiters wore knee-breeches,
tail-coats and shirts with mended lace.
As I cut open the partridge on my plate,
I felt wine in my veins like scorched silk.
Years ago I stood in line with others,
hands polished as a case of knives,
serving senators and their pretty wives,
who chewed on baby lamb and looked at me
but saw no swimmer rising from the deep:
I was not me. History, its white teeth
jammed with gristle, had not yet set me free.
Unlike dear James, the architect of rooms,
who would choose to dismantle them
rather than conform,
who said nothing
while swallowing the hot forkfuls.
As he scratched the collar
of his borrowed coat,
his eyes were watering.
A little puddle of pink lamb juice
seemed to be admonishing him
for progeny that would not be.
From a lintel, a leopard gazed at us.
Something pricked us like a saw:
captivity was breeding consciousness.
In the carpark,
James came back to us
wearing his Sunday best.
Dirty gravel scraped my polished black boots.
Someone remarked on the blue bougainvillea —
nailed up like Christ.
Somewhere a she-wolf suckled the young,
who would hunt each other.
The Scholars
In the elegant prison,
most of the time, like an elephant,
I feel immovable and alone.
Day & night,
beauty is a scorned thing and is not everlasting.
Fragments of statuary ornament the cortile,
like bodies sinking in quicksand.
Even a luckless prick
is frozen in the stucco.
Room unfolds into room, gleaming white.
High-heels crisscross the parquet,
assaulting contemplation
like hail battering wheat.
Do not mention little boys trained as "minnows"
to lick and nibble Tiberius
when he went swimming.
Do not mention Cleopatra,
reprehensible because she was
neither madonna nor whore.
Never mind that might begets fear, which orphans us.
Never mind that the weak do not inherit the earth.
Like cultists drinking from a vial,
a new generation is pledging itself to a past,
which is not, they say, inchoate,
and to a world, which is not,
they say, primal:
no war's sound is heard.
So we speak often of good Augustus,
instead of blood, hate & hunger.
At dinner a cat with a tragic mouth —
like drowned Antinoüs — strokes our calves,
pawing scraps of meat we throw at it.
Our high-sounding debate of Modernism and Marx
is derivative and indiscriminate.
Why do we even bother,
since everything post-Christianity,
post-Constantine, is regarded with dismay?
On the lawn we play croquet,
slamming each other's balls
through tired wickets. I, Janus-faced,
can see that the grass is groomed like a cemetery's.
Sublime umbrella pines and proud cypresses
remind us of two ways of being:
why do we choose the cypresses,
so rigid and self-possessed?
Of course, all men want to be strong;
but must their minds, buried in scrolls,
making little hatchet strokes,
be so disengaged from their bodies?
They grow old in their studies,
with bony thighs and baggy stomachs,
reading languages that are countryless,
revising history & art with a lens
that is cracked like the empire.
Jasmine sprays the air,
the same to them as cigarette smoke.
A baby Hercules wrestles a serpent in the fountain,
but it too is uncataclysmic.
They envy nobody and nothing.
They eat big bowls of pasta
and drain their preposterous bowels.
Out there, it is Sunday
in the country of our origin.
As the sun goes down,
a vast palette of edifices
is changing travertine into Vatican gold.
Listen to the swallows capsizing in a pink sky
folding over the gated prison.
Etna
Who are you, whose pornographic voice
and little surreptitious breaths
are meant to taunt me,
again and again, at home on tape?
Who are you, whose straining tumescence
and plundering come-cries
make a man a mule?
Are your white teeth showing?
Are your pectorals waxed like a prostitute's?
Are your taut thighs spread like a dead man's?
Hearing your exhortations,
I feel invisible and gritty and cold
as when I hiked a long volcano slope,
feet snow-soaked, eyes prismatic.
It was Easter Monday,
something gathered and broke.
A hand stroked the back of my neck:
it was mine, smeared with sweat.
White smoke radiated everywhere.
White ice chopped underfoot.
I glimpsed myself, reddish like an ant,
crisscrossing the lapilli,
twisted like rope.
Goodbye, I said to God's looming hand.
Air: Easter lily bright.
Goodbye, to false art, evading life.
Fire: I coughed asthmatically.
Goodbye, to the Sodomite's self-loathing.
At last, Earth was pollinating me,
with my curly white hairs and aging belly.
More: I rubbed mineral Water on my face.
Stranger, with genitalia greased,
whose "brotherly love" can be bought or sold,
whose avaricious body disdains the effeminate,
I have been waiting for you.
Come, unlace my boots; I chose you.
To a Prince
At the sound of your name, I turned my head.
How does it feel
to meet a man and know he'll acquiesce?
You make no avowals
because you cannot keep them;
your only worship is that monolith,
the patrician past —
you, whose nocturnal addiction is flesh,
you, with whom I streaked through Rome
on a motorino.
I want the external world
to continue the interior monologue of who I am:
hence, the narrow mattress under me,
with sinking springs,
symbolizes solitude,
instead of my inferior class.
Ensconced in your period rooms of white and gold,
you couldn't care less. What a pity
you cannot kiss yourself.
In the steamroom,
where there is no moral order
and secret emotions channel themselves
toward the idolized body,
I could see the back of you,
lowering your head to a cock,
brown as a speckled egg.
If it's true you're marrying,
be kind to her. Public lies sow the seeds
of private shame. Yours and hers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Visible Man by Henri Cole. Copyright © 1998 Henri Cole. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Author's Note,
I,
ARTE POVERA,
SELF-PORTRAIT AS FOUR STYLES OF POMPEIAN WALL PAINTING,
WHITE SPINE,
FOLLY,
CHARITY,
THE BLACK JACKET,
THE SCHOLARS,
ETNA,
TO A PRINCE,
GIALLO ANTICO,
THE COLOR OF FEELING AND THE FEELING OF COLOR,
THE BLUE GROTTO,
PAINTED EYES,
ADAM DYING,
26 HANDS,
II,
CHILDLESSNESS,
CHIFFON MORNING,
THE COASTGUARD STATION,
ANAGRAM,
HORSES,
COLLOQUY,
THE WHITE MARRIAGES,
THE LONG VIEW,
MESMERISM,
THE SUICIDE HOURS,
JEALOUSY,
BLACK MANE,
PEONIES,
BEARDED IRISES,
APOLLO,
Also by Henri Cole,
About the Author,
Copyright,