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Morton Marcus: Hello, everybody, welcome to the Poetry Show this Tuesday night. I'm your host Mort Marcus. And I think tonight you'll be very interested in the program I've prepared, but first KUSP thanks Stapleton's Natural Foods Grocery for providing

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support that helps to make the following half-hour programming possible. Stapleton's Natural Foods Grocery specializes in organic and commercial produce at 415 River Street in Santa Cruz. Thank you, Stapleton's.

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This is Mort Marcus again. And several months ago, I was approached by the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County to put on a program in which the relationship between literature and art would be manifest. And one of the programs I worked out

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is about to take place this Thursday night and it is called very simply, "Poets and Painters," and includes four other poets and that is our co-host, Joe Straud, Anita Wilkins, Claire Braz,-Valentine, and Robert Peterson. They will

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read their own poems on works of visual arts, that is photographs and/or paintings. And then we'll also read several poems by great poets on great paintings. And this entire evening will be highlighted rather lavishly by slides. And every poem that the

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poets read will have a slide or more to go with it. And so tonight, to talk about this and to have people out there find out about it I have invited three of the other participants to talk about the relationship of art and poetry as they see

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it, and maybe read one or two poems for the evening. It will be an evening that will be very hard to record, because what you will be missing will be the slides themself, which are from all over the world, poets all over the world, art from all

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over the world, brilliant color and moods and approaches, both by the poets themselves and by the poems they've chosen to read which will be quite different from each other. It should be an evening that is really enjoyable. And in case you have

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a pencil with you and I will announce it later, this is happening this Thursday at seven o'clock at the Main Library in Santa Cruz at 224 Church Street, and that is upstairs in the meeting room. At this time, I would like to, by the way,

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there's one member of this quintet that is not here and that is Joe Stroud, who many of you know the co-hosts of this show and today is Joe's birthday and he is out celebrating that. But I am here with Robert Peterson, and Anita Wilkins and

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Claire Braz-Valentine. And so, we will pop down Respighi in the background, and we will begin to talk to our guests. Well, welcome all. And I, what I would like to do first is just have you generally speak about your attitudes towards art and poetry

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and the relationship where the two different mediums meet. I have a lot of ideas about it, and I'm sure that you could do. Then again, I'm liable to find out that maybe you don't. But why don't we start with Claire who has got, at this point in

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her writing career, a very intimate relationship with the painter she is going to read either poems from, or actually parts of plays from, part of a play from. Claire Braz-Valentine: Thank you Mort, I've been working the last

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few years on a play that contains a lot of poetry and the play is about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and I chose to write about Frida because I found a very close relationship in her paintings to the writing of poetry. Often a poet or a

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writer writes autobiographically and shows their vision of the world through their eyes. And poetry is a very personal art. And when I saw the paintings of Frida Kahlo I was very moved at the way she was showing the world her vision. And the reason

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for that is out of her two-hundred paintings, the majority of them are self portraits, so that Frida chooses not only to show the world through her eyes, she shows the world through her eyes looking at the world, in other words,

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you don't see what she's seeing, but you see it in her, in the way she portrays herself so that it's a joy to write about, about a woman, you know that chooses to paint almost always herself. And you know, there's a lot of other reasons why I chose her

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personally. But it's that blend of poetry and autobiographical paintings that I find particularly interesting. Morton Marcus: That is very interesting and people will remember that you have read some of these poems on the air. When

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I thought of doing this program, the four poets, in fact, people out there may be interested in how you four poets were chosen. I had in mind immediately that all of you have written very striking poems on visual artworks. Anita, for example,

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had done- Well, she'll talk about what she's done hers on, which I was very, very familiar with. And of course, we had just done a program with you, Claire, on the Frida Kahlo poems, and I thought even while we were talking that day, and you were

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reading excerpts from the play, "My, wouldn't this be really wonderful if we had this on TV, and we could be showing the striking colors and the paintings in which Frida was expressing her pain or anguish, and also her joy, and sense of

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self, and we were missing that dimension." And the minute they asked me to do this, I mean, I just immediately- this was my first idea,was to do this program. And I just thought immediately of you and then Joe, and the people out here, no one

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can talk for Joe. But Joe has a poem I don't think he has ever read in public, it's in his last book, and it is just exquisite. I mean, it is one of the finest poems on painting that I think I have ever read and, so I cajoled him into reading it and he will

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be doing that. And it really is a chance for people to hear Joe read because he never reads in public. And secondly, to hear him read a poem that he never reads in a poetry reading in the few times that he gives poetry readings, so it should be very,

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very interesting and it is a very rare painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, in his case, which to make a slide of it, it became impossible. I finally had to go over to his house and take the painting off his wall and bring it over to

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the slide projection, that's the Cabrillo Amy Schuster, who's just been so wonderful in shooting all of these slides, many of which are just in private books or paintings hanging on walls by the poets. And so we will be seeing that,

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it's going to be a very rare evening is what I'm saying. Bob, what about you? Tell us what you're going to do and what you think your relation to poetry and painting is. Robert Peterson: Well, what I plan to do is- on Thursday,

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right? Tonight? Morton Marcus: Tomorrow night. Robert Peterson: I'm planning to read several poems by the late poet Richard Hugo, which are part of a series about- poems

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about paintings, which was published in Contact Magazine in the early 60s when I was a poetry editor there. And at the time, I was already very interested in painting because actually, I'd started out painting before I wrote. And so

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that meant that I was interested in painting very early, and I've sort of ended, I still hang out with a lot of painters. And so, that's what I plan to do onThursday, mainly, and probably mostly because I admire these Hugo poems very much, and I

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think it's a very easy way to demonstrate how poets get interested in painting and the things that they, a good poet will say about a painting, just letting himself [unintelligible]. Earlier today, and in line with that, I started

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making some notes about this whole subject. And, as usual, these notes began to go all over the place. And that idea of just telling them, hey, I started out as a painter, and still paint seems to be the best place to keep talking because for one

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thing, the kind of drawing I do and painting involves lines and that lines kind of dance and I was thinking of the comparison between music and dance and poetry and painting and the way the two always seem to go together and they even all four

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of them often go together, but that seems an easy way to divide it up and I've always been quite aware that there isn't really any separation between the kind of art I do and the feelings I get from writing poems. So, if I'm scribbling something on a

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page, it's, it's a half a step from there to drawing a line on a piece of art paper. I mean, the feeling's not too different at all and I could go on about that later. It's very satisfying but the the thing- the note I made early today was just

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occurred to me that the attraction between poets and painters is pretty easy to understand because poetry is verbal and- and the finished painting is always silent, so that any verbal person, excuse me, is going to be excited about

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trying to put this side you know, do something with the silence that's sitting there. And then there's the added incentive of the fact that most writers are starting with a blank page and when you're talking about a painting, it's

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like you're dealing with a rough draft, if somebody has already done the preliminary work and you're still free to do what you want with it, but there's something there to start with. And I've always found that's interesting when you're trying

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to write, when you get interested in writing a poem about a sculpture or a painting, there's something there that's already gone through one convolution as it were, and the raw material's been sort of set before you and you're free to do

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what you want with it. So that's a little bit of the notes I have. Morton Marcus: I don't want to stop them and that sounds really great.

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Robert Peterson: But there's one more thing. Morton Marcus: Good. Robert Peterson: This may mean that I may have nothing to say for the rest of the hour but it did occur to me also that on the

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West Coast, particularly for the last twenty or twenty-five years now there's been a great interest in oriental art, and particularly Zen Buddhism, and in which the emphasis is not so much on thinking and seeing. And I'm convinced, I know a lot of

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this has filtered down into my consciousness, and so that the writers, for instance, are very oriented out here just to looking at things and starting out from what they see, because there's so much visual beauty to start with. And I think this had

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a lot to do with the fact that the line of writing about art does occur here, maybe more than any other part of the country because we're used to looking at things, we're always talking about seeing things, and seeing things growing and looking at an

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animal life and hills and sand dunes and so forth. So, I think this, we're naturally inclined to want to put emotions about what we see. And if we happen to be looking at paintings and we know that painters are used, even better at seeing than we

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are so there's an easy affinity there. Morton Marcus: And as you know, I have described you in an article once as being one of the authentic Chinese Sages in America. So, in fact, those last comments of yours, I think, just

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about proved it. Robert Peterson: Well- Morton Marcus: Now he's not gonna say anything for now. Well, that was- those are some very nice statements and so now

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we come to Anita and- Anita Wilkins: I know it was such a nice statement. Morton Marcus: Well, keep talking, Anita. Anita Wilkins: Oh, what do you want me to say, Mort? I liked

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when you were flattering, I mean complimenting, Robert that it his face turned red so it was very colorful and visual and I- Morton Marcus: Yes, it's almost sadistic on my part whenever I compliment-flatter him, because I know he hates it. Anyway,

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Anita Wilkins: As a Chinese sage would. Morton Marcus: Yes. Even the Chinese- I won't do that again because I didn't [unintelligible] afternoon. But what about you and painting, which- I mean in each one of

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your books, certainly the visual arts have had an effect. So, what what do you see as your relationship or just poetry in general as a relationship with- Anita Wilkins: Well, I also started out in life not

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intending to be a verbal person but I started drawing when I was about four or five years old. And my whole growing up was spent drawing and then ultimately painting. And it was only in my early 20s that I started changing over to poetry

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and gradually stopped drawing or painting. Over the years I did less and less of it, and the poetry more and more took over. But I don't think that generally I tend to write poems about the visual arts. One of the poems that I'm going to read is

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called, "Waiting for the Will," and it turned out to be- to have an inspiration in the visual arts, but in a- not in the sense of writing a poem about a painting or about a sculpture. It was, I started out with three lines that would- starting out

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to identify that feeling that you have when you've been dreaming maybe somewhat powerful dreams during the night, but when you wake up, nothing is left of the dreams in terms of images, but you have a feeling that stays with you and you

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know, you have the sense that something important happened, but you have no idea what it is because you have no other remnant other than this intangible sense of something. But sometimes that stays with you all day long. And it gives a

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dimension to the day that changes your feeling about everything. But it doesn't have anything you can hang it on. So, I started out with that and just like the, the real life experience, I got the three lines identifying this- the

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sense of the dream being underneath your day. But then, well, I had no imagery, and I worked on it for a couple of weeks, and I couldn't get any further than that. And I was at a friend's house who interestingly enough, is Charis

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Wilson who is very much involved with the visual arts, having been the wife and model for Edward Weston. I was starting to leave and I saw sitting on the desk this beautiful book in a, you know, stiff cover, a box. And it was a publication that

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her brother, who worked at thge Metropolitan Museum had sent her, and it's called, "Eighteen Songs for a Nomad Flute," and it was eighteen poems written for eighteen Chinese paintings. The poems were also Chinese, translated into English of

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course, that- The poems followed the story of lady Wenji, who was the daughter of a rich merchant, who was kidnapped by barbarians and taken out into the the northern deserts and married to the Nomad chieftain, ultimately had children, was in exile from

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her luxurious life out in the conditions of the nomadic life for twelve years before she was finally ransomed and returned to her Chinese life. The paintings are really beautiful, and the book is really a beautiful production with the poems and

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the paintings. And so I spent about fifteen minutes looking at that, and then went on. And I was very taken by it, but it settled back somewhere in the back of my mind. And the next time I took up this poem, suddenly what happened was that

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this experience of this book, the paintings, hooked up with these opening three lines, and I said, "as if," and that story and the imagery took over and became the objective correlative. It became the concrete, or the way of making

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concrete this really intangible thing which I had no imagery for. So, I was able to complete the poem because I had found an equivalent. But the poem doesn't describe the paintings, it changes and uses and changes the story.

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Morton Marcus: Well, I think that the approach, you know, this was actually the subject of a workshop that I took when I was a student. Because back when I was young, which is way before all of you people, everyone was writing in the 50s, they were

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writing poems on paintings. It was because no one really wanted to write honestly about their own emotions, that was the reason that it went on there. And in my early years, I wrote a lot of poems on paintings and attempted to really perfect my

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closed metrical style and rhyme schemes by describing these paintings. And one time a Philippine prose writer who has become very famous, by the name of Ben Santos said, "I really object to this kind of poetry because: one, it is dishonest,

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it does not let you get to your own emotions, but two, the painter has painted the painting. I mean, why do we need your words on it?" You know, it's never going to be as great as Rembrandt. It's never going to be as great as Wang Wei, you

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see. And this started a great debate in the workshop, which was really one of the most interesting debates that we had. And it got into my thick skull, you know, that you don't write about painting really, it's some aspect of the painting becomes a

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touchstone and lets you go on from there, it's a place you can go off from, and all the poems that I know that are being read, do that. I mean, they're not describing the painting but the painting may be the central issue.

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Robert Peterson: There's another, there is another slant to that, though, Mort, I think. I know I thought of this before you both, which is that in some cases, for instance, in Hugo's poem, he, it seems to me, is trying to mind-read a painter in

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a very playful way. I mean, he's not trying to give an accurate rendition of the consciousness of the painter, he's trying to mind read, in a playful way, again, what he thought the painter was doing and what he was putting in there. I mean,

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now I'm talking particularly about, well, I'm not talking particularly about abstract or representational painting, but I think that may become clearer later when I read one of these. And I think that's a perfectly valid way to do it. I think

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there are many, many ways to do it. For instance, while you're speaking, it's clear to me that the person who objecting was objecting that the paintings were being used for the poets like models were used for paintings.

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Morton Marcus: Exactly, right. Robert Peterson: That's as starting points to take off on. [Crosstalk] The meaning of the painting and the painters, I don't think it does- I think any good painter, the ones I've

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known have been delighted that any poet would be interested in writing, I mean, not in any condescending way, but if you're interested in writing about a painting, all the painters I've known have said, yeah, you know-

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Morton Marcus: Well, that's true. Robert Peterson: I think that you're interested- that interested in the painting- Morton Marcus: Oh, no, I think that's how Ben was just coming-

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that's from totally the poet's angle. And saying, because these people, if a model is used as a taking-off point, fine, but what Ben was saying, and it was true, he was- he was criticizing one of my poems at the time. What I was just trying to do is render

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the painting verbally and say, well, I'm not going any farther than that. Robert Peterson: I think any poets at all, any painter worth his paint, of not insult to, in fact object at all if you want

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to say- try anything as long as you're not trying to act like an art critic. That's, I think not fair to do that. Claire Braz-Valentine: Yeah, I don't think it's fair either. Part of the joy of working on Frida Kahlo for me has been that

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not only looking at her paintings, but then reading in her diaries how she would write about something that was on her mind, and then shortly thereafter painted. So, she also wrote things that were like poems, very beautiful. And so,

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sure. Robert Peterson: In that vein, among many things that fascinate the two art forms, I think in this instance is the one that of how eloquent painters can be about their own work. Like, I'm

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thinking of Van Gogh's letters now, but I mean, they're very, very well-known by now. Just generally the way that painters like, for instance, the things they write about, that they put up in shows about what they were doing and what they're trying to

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do, more often than not, are extremely eloquent things and approach poetry in themselves. And there's, you know, there's very little separation. Claire Braz-Valentine: I think, sometimes the blending between

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the words and the visual arts just flow. I mean, in Frida's diaries, she would have partial sentences, and then little drawings, and then more words, and then little figures, and it would just all blend in.

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Robert Peterson: And another instance of this, of course, was Klee and the great titles he gave to all the paintings, little poems in themselves. And I think Klee, for instance, was one of the earliest people I picked up on about this, how

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close the two are. Morton Marcus: He is a very, very literary painter, and a lot of pure painters object to him for that reason. But you know, it is interesting, you think, and there is almost a cliche

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that painters and musicians are not verbal, that they can't- they express themselves in their own media, but it's not true at all. And to make this really mundane, when I was head of the English department, and we had to go through leave requests,

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the most eloquent, and it was even voted by the committee to compliment them on this, the most eloquent were the art department requests. And I mean they were beautiful. You could practically see what they were going to do right in the words

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that they used. And the art department people I told that were very, very surprised because they, of course, feel almost inferior because of their verbal gifts which are not so. Okay, well, oh look at this, it is almost 9:30 already, so let

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us take a break and then we will come back. Look at how fast time goes when you're having fun as they say but it's true. And we were really starting to get into something here. If you have just tuned in and wonder what we are doing, this is Mort Marcus and I

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am talking to Claire Braz-Valentine, Anita Wilkins, and Bob Peterson, who will be taking part with yours truly and Joe Stroud on Thursday in a reading of called "Poets and Painters," in which they will read their own poems on visual

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arts, and also poems by great poets. And when we get back we may read one or two of these. It should be a wonderful evening, there will be slides galore, colorful slides galore. And if you wonder where this is, this will be held at seven o'clock

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this Thursday, seven o'clock this Thursday at the Main Library upstairs in the meeting room, and this is a production of the Santa Cruz Art Museum. So, try to make it. We will continue to speak to the poets after we take a short musical

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break. And here we go. Claire Braz-Valentine: Tremendous amount of physical suffering in her life, she had polio when she was seven, and then when she was 17 she was severely injured in a bus accident in Mexico City. She

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was actually impaled by a piece of steel that went through her body and she had a series, through the rest of her life, of spinal surgeries so that many of the paintings show the suffering that she endured but also her great love of her mother Mexico

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and the colors and the love of life and animals. And she was a very sensual, gutsy, wonderful, funny woman so that her paintings incorporate all all of these aspects of her, and it's just going to be a joy to be able to read these and have

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people look at the slides at the same time. It'd be a pleasure for me because that's the first time I'll have had a chance to do that. Morton Marcus: Well, one of the things that I've not stressed

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with you as we talked on at different times about the reading coming up, is that I'll- it will be interesting for the audience to hear your very personal attitudes towards the pieces of art you've written about because it's not textbook,

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it's not, you know, critical. It is a different way of coming at painting, and it's a very serious way, and a very creative way, and it's the poet's way. And to me, seeing someone coming from a different medium, and talking about another medium of

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art always is profoundly enlightening. And what you've done with Frida, and I know, a lot of these things will really be fascinating. Would you like to read part of maybe one of the things you're going to read? Without the slides out there,

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folks, realize that this is all audio tonight. Claire Braz-Valentine: Yeah, I'd like to read something that would be a preface to what I'll read Thursday night. Morton Marcus: Terrific.

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Claire Braz-Valentine: Because I don't want to give away anything that I'm going to read. This is part of the bigger work that I'm working on on Frida. And this actually goes with a photograph taken of Frida when she was small. She had very clever ways

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of disguising her thin little leg that was crippled with polio and often in family photographs, she would be standing behind a bush, or she would wear men's pants or something, stand behind people.

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Morton Marcus: But before we begin, let me ask you how far from completion is- Claire Braz-Valentine: Well, that's always the question I can't answer. I guess I'm as close as I want to be, getting

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very close. I was just telling Anita that I love working on it and I don't want to let it go. I have to, I have to pretty soon, so it's getting close. So anyway- Also it, as will be evident Thursday when we show the paintings, there were always

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two Fridas in Frida's mind. And parts of what I'm going to read come right out of her diary and this is the first time that she actually confronts the fact that there were two Fridas, two different sides of her. And this is something that she rarely

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spoke about and this was her paint. She painted about it. She painted it, but she rarely spoke of it. And so that- and this is taken up in the middle of a play, so there is no natural beginning, and I'll just read it to you.

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It is sore, the leg is sore. People always stare at it. Don't they have anything better to do? Jesus, people are sick. They always want to know what happened. All right, I'll tell you, don't beg me. But just this once I'll talk about it, so

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listen. When I was six years old, this leg right here went bad. They bathed me. They washed my little leg in a small tub with walnut water and hot towels. I thought I was a goner. I spent nine months in the bed in my room. That's the first

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memory I have of pain, pain who became my sister. I used to draw on my window. I breathed out a breath and the window was my canvas. And with my finger I drew a door and then she came out or I went in. I called it, "Pinzon." It was a dairy. I

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would concentrate on the O in the pinzon and then flow deep to the center of the earth. I met her there. Do you know how much she laughed and danced? She floated, she moved as if she weighed nothing at all. I followed her in my mind, I

00:31:56.900 - 00:32:16.040

danced with her. I was six and I danced with her, she was always laughing, laughing without sounds. I was happy. I told her everything: my secrets, my problems, she knows more than anyone. She knows. You should talk to her. Sometimes I think

00:32:16.040 - 00:32:37.200

of her and it's funny, so strange in a way. She becomes more important to me every time I remember her. She was magic, she was me and I had polio. Morton Marcus: I love that drawing the little door and then

00:32:37.200 - 00:32:48.150

having the other side come out. Claire Braz-Valentine: Thanks. That was- that was- those lines right there were right out of Frida's diary. Morton Marcus: Hmm. She's an amazing woman. One thing you

00:32:48.150 - 00:33:02.650

haven't mentioned, so I'll mention, she was the wife of Diego Rivera, the great Mexican muralist which you may not want even to acknowledge [crosstalk]. Claire Braz-Valentine: It was interesting because in Frida's

00:33:02.650 - 00:33:18.450

life, she said, "Someday they will refer to Diego Rivera as Frida Kahlo's husband," and sometimes I forget to mention that, but yes, indeed she was Diego Rivera's wife. Morton Marcus: Yeah, the vibrancy and the color of-

00:33:18.480 - 00:33:31.050

because I've seen the- the slides that you're going to read from, are really amazing. In fact, what's so wonderful is going to be the different approaches by each one of the poets to subject, to painters, I mean, they're different

00:33:31.050 - 00:33:51.180

painters. Joe, for example, is going to read Czeslaw Milosz's five part poem on Bosch's, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." And then he's going to read on a photograph by Aaron Siskind of a throwaway work glove, which John Logan wrote about. And he

00:33:51.180 - 00:34:07.860

himself has written this wonderful poem, as I mentioned before on Pieter Bruegel the Younger's "The Lunch of the- Harvesters" "The Harvester's Lunch." So that totally different kinds of poems, you see? Bob, why don't you tell us

00:34:07.860 - 00:34:16.230

what you're going to read about and then give us an example? Robert Peterson: Well, I'm not going to do that strictly that way. Morton Marcus: Okay. You're cantankerous tonight, aren't

00:34:16.230 - 00:34:27.370

you. Robert Peterson: Maybe. I've been traveling for them. Most of what I'm going to do will be reading the Hugo poem with the slides. But I think it's particularly important now that

00:34:27.700 - 00:34:45.910

the slides be seen. And if not, then I'm going to try to explain it too much and interpret, inject something that wasn't intended upon. So what I'm going to do is read the poem I wrote about a painter friend, Walter Kuhlman, who was closely

00:34:45.910 - 00:34:58.800

involved in illustrating this book, "Wondering Where You Are," that George Hitchcock published in the early 60s. And- Morton Marcus: And it was wonderful slides by the way. Robert Peterson: Oh, great. Anyway, this developed because

00:34:58.860 - 00:35:09.930

of this topic I've mentioned earlier, which is that we got to be friendly and he got interested in reading poems and K AS IN CAVIAR I got interested in looking at his pictures at the same time.

00:35:09.050 - 00:35:20.240

If a ghost set him in good light, if a ram let him run like And then I would be saying things about the paintings that pleased him. And so this developed in the fact that we an omen, and if some nights are too damn dark, knife a candle

00:35:17.090 - 00:35:28.410

got permission to work together on the book. And along there burning for the myth. Set the tiger's dream in the portrait of somewhere in picking, I was able to, he allowed me to pick the paintings I wanted to go with particular poems or to go at

00:35:24.980 - 00:35:36.180

a prophet waking in blue rain from what-the-hell clouds. And certain places in the book. And really what happened was that I if a dwarf in love is ivory and tragic, life as a blonde didn't end up picking specific paintings to go with specific

00:35:36.250 - 00:35:48.200

poem. But there were places in the book where one particular arrowing to Orion's brain can be a sexy refraction, that feminine painting seemed to work and sort of resonate with two or three arm a tree, the tree swaying to pneumonic tangos, bogeys high on

00:35:43.960 - 00:35:55.160

poems. And then I ended up writing this way of thanking him, writing a poem about him which I call, "K as in Caviar," champagne, Crimson Gods brooding in opal, he knows the animal. because his name is spelled with a K. And by the way, he still

00:35:54.080 - 00:36:02.570

Our age stretched a nail. And beyond that mink-soft hill, the paints and is now I think teaching, just about ready to retire from Sonoma State as a professor of art there. And this moon, as tough as a skull.

00:36:02.620 - 00:36:17.610

is a kind of poem and- where I'm not talking about any specific painting but trying to evoke the feelings that I got from these paintings and pay tribute to his skills appear so there isn't any particular literary text to this, it just goes.

00:37:14.360 - 00:37:28.710

Morton Marcus: That's great. Mink-soft hill, the moon, as tough as a skull. Robert Peterson: And to give a happy ending to this particular story, he was very pleased with the poem and it still is. And I

00:37:28.710 - 00:37:42.840

like to think this example of how poets and painters are all artists aren't really too far apart. In this case, he was delighted with the fact that I saw these things I saw in the paintings with which he- had not particularly occurred to him in

00:37:42.840 - 00:37:58.860

those terms. And this leads me to another remark which cause another note to be written to myself here, which is that generally it seems to me this interplay between, in this case poets and painters, there's a kind of mirror effect that

00:37:58.860 - 00:38:13.710

pertains here and so that one art form addressing or contemplating another one. You get the sort of mirror effect that shows itself in famous things like [unidentified] the counterfeiters, or Pirandello's plays about plays within plays,

00:38:13.740 - 00:38:30.060

or generally a kind of Chinese box effects with a lot of mystery, and fascination, and a lot of surprises and a little magic, which ends up really saying, which is something which I think is very true, which is that the arts are really not

00:38:30.060 - 00:38:44.910

very far apart, and they're continually talking to each other all the time, in one way or another. And I think, now I'm leading up to my really big point, which is that it seems to me that in this last part of the century, the art forms -- music,

00:38:44.910 - 00:39:00.810

dance, poetry and painting and film too -- are all, you know, becoming sort of indistinguishable from one another. I mean, a good poet knows music and a good painter knows words and more and more art forms which Laurie Anderson

00:39:02.400 - 00:39:15.300

is an avant-garde here, I know. And it seems that it's becoming less and less important to be a purist about art and poetry, that inevitably they're going to have to all use, you know, intermingle.

00:39:15.720 - 00:39:28.350

Morton Marcus: You know, it's very interesting you say that, Bob, because some- Al Young has been here several times. He will not even really define what he's doing in poetry anymore. He just thinks that it limits it too much that things are crossing

00:39:28.350 - 00:39:41.040

over and I- Robert Peterson: Well for instance, I'm- I dance more and I play my kazoo more often than I used to. Morton Marcus: Very good. I tried to save some of these

00:39:41.400 - 00:39:50.190

things for actually talking up there on the lectern, they're great points and eloquently stated. Robert Peterson: Thank you. Morton Marcus: Anita, I'm sorry I [unidentified] you again, but,

00:39:50.340 - 00:39:55.620

Anita. Anita Wilkins: Anita? Morton Marcus: Yes. Anita Wilkins: What do you want of Anita?

00:39:56.730 - 00:40:15.760

Morton Marcus: I A-need-a for you to say something. Anita Wilkins: Well, I'm torn between talking about Sylvia Plath and her relationship to the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico because I'm going to read a couple of Plath's poems,

00:40:15.760 - 00:40:40.150

one which takes the title of a de Chirico painting, "The Disquieting Muses," and relate to her own inner mind scape in a really illuminating way. I think if you see the slides and and hear the poem, it starts something going about Sylvia

00:40:40.150 - 00:40:57.700

Plath that I think makes Sylvia Plath more understandable. So I'm going to read an early poem, "The Disquieting Muses," and then show how the ingredients in that poem become more and more sophisticated and more integrated into her landscape.

00:40:58.240 - 00:41:14.320

Judith Crowe in her book in her study of Sylvia Plath, chapters in the mythology has a wonderful discussion of de Chirico and Sylvia Plath. And I don't know if she's the first person to make this connection, but I suspect she is, so I want to do

00:41:14.320 - 00:41:29.530

that at the museum on Thursday. So I'm torn between reading a difficult later poem of Sylvia Plath's that then will be illuminated when you see the slide. Or- Morton Marcus: Okay, if you want me to, therefore, I'm

00:41:29.530 - 00:41:45.650

[unintelligible] All right, why don't you do the "or"? Anita Wilkins: Okay. What I probably won't have time for on Thursday, Yiannis Ritsos, the contemporary Greek poet, is one of my favorites and having spent some time in Greece in the last

00:41:45.650 - 00:42:09.710

few years, it's always intriguing to me to try to understand how modern Greek artists can live with this enormous past that they have which weighs on all of us in Western Civilization. But for the Greek in the modern world,

00:42:10.100 - 00:42:28.730

as an artist, what do you do with this monumental past behind you? Ritsos has a poem called, "In the Ruins of an Ancient Temple," and he says something about the business of living in a daily way among the ruins of your past.

00:42:32.590 - 00:42:48.640

IN THE RUINS OF AN ANCIENT TEMPLE, then. The museum guard was smoking in front of the sheep fold. The sheep were grazing among the marble ruins. Further down, the women were washing in the river. You could hear the beat of the

00:42:48.640 - 00:43:08.560

hammer in the blacksmith shop. The shepherd whistled. The sheep ran to him as though the marble ruins were running. The water's thick nape shown with coolness behind the oleanders. A woman spread her washed clothing on the shrubs and the statues. She

00:43:08.560 - 00:43:29.320

spread her husband's underpants on Hera's shoulders. Foreign, peaceful, silent intimacy, years on years. Down on the shore, the fisherman passed by with broad baskets full of fish on their heads as though they were carrying long and narrow flashes

00:43:29.320 - 00:43:46.510

of light, gold, rose and violet. The same as that precession bearing the long ritually embroidered veil of the goddess that we cut up the other day to arrange as curtains and table cloths in our emptied houses.

00:43:47.530 - 00:44:11.200

And he comes down on that image of the emptied houses, which I think, I'm not sure exactly when this poem was written, but it is, of course, I think, part of his internal mind, his mindscape is this empty house, which is Greece, the Greek psyche, in the

00:44:11.200 - 00:44:27.850

contemporary world. And it contains in it, he has a poem called, "The Dead House," and it contains in it all of Greek history that is layered, but also the past comes up into the level of the present, and the present goes down into the past,

00:44:28.210 - 00:44:51.040

and it's all intertwined. But modern Greek history has been so tragic and so horrifying, that there's also a desolation in the present in our emptied houses, it seems to me has something to do with post World War II, the post Civil War, the whole modern

00:44:51.820 - 00:45:11.920

Greek world where so much has been destroyed and the country was set against itself in this really terrible Civil War. And the aftermath of that where the Left was decimated by the victorious Right. And people sent into exile, incarcerated,

00:45:12.550 - 00:45:33.250

tortured. And Ritsos, of course, was on the Left, and he himself was incarcerated and his books burned. And so that the devastation of his own psyche, as well as the whole devastation of Greece itself, it seems to me it's contained in that phrase,

00:45:33.250 - 00:45:54.520

in this poem that are emptied houses, but what they have is this, the everyday daily thing of the fishermen carrying their fish, but it rises to a really mythic epic kind of feeling down on the shore, the fishermen passed by with broad baskets

00:45:54.520 - 00:46:09.550

full of fish on their heads, as though they were carrying long and narrow flashes of light, gold, rose, and violet, the same as that precision bearing the long ritually embroidered veil of the goddess that we cut up the other day to arrange as

00:46:09.550 - 00:46:20.960

these very daily ordinary things, curtains and tablecloths in our emptied houses, so that there's something pulled up out of the past. Robert Peterson: I agree with almost all that and whilebyour

00:46:20.960 - 00:46:34.790

talking the idea came to me that Ritsos is especially a fascinating poet to invoke here because to me, he has the same kind of fearlessness in the use of his materials that certain painters-

00:46:34.820 - 00:46:44.600

Anita Wilkins: Yes, very painterly. Robert Peterson: There's this energy and absolute fearless handling with material, he can, you know, animate anything he wants, even statues.

00:46:44.960 - 00:46:57.170

Anita Wilkins: He also wasn't a visual artist himself. Robert Peterson: Well, yeah, it shows because there's this kind of wonderful energy and all this moment is absolutely courageous and fearless. The way he'll punch ahead and do whatever he

00:46:57.170 - 00:47:05.020

wants to do. Morton Marcus: In fact, in that- Robert Peterson: Wherever the effect he wants to go. Morton Marcus: Ritsos, you can read a Ritsos poem in many ways

00:47:05.290 - 00:47:13.720

by looking at it where he places things. He places things in forerounds, middle grounds, backgrounds, left and rights as though he really- Anita Wilkins: Like a painting.

00:47:14.170 - 00:47:28.720

Morton Marcus: And where and when he chooses to tell you things from that canvas he's making has the symbolic effect. He waits for those fishermen and in combination with the procession until the end, and then just, you know, unites the

00:47:28.750 - 00:47:42.610

historic and mythic past with the mundane, everyday life of today. And he does that over and over again, it really is astonishing. It sounds like surrealism, and certainly he was influenced by surrealism, but it goes way beyond that.

00:47:42.630 - 00:47:58.320

Robert Peterson: The effects are remarkably different than sort of standard surreal writing. I mean, there- I think it's- o e reason he has this rath r standing effect on me is, or n a lot of people, is that as a poet, he's doing all the

00:47:59.430 - 00:48:13.420

e painterly things I'm gonna ha e to use a corny wa Anita Wilkins: And sometimes the relationship of fthe elements of the poem really are almost purely visual. And they mean on that level of the visual relationship of this to that.

00:48:13.750 - 00:48:25.060

Morton Marcus: Well, I'm going to divert it from Ritsos, but I think it becomes evident that we're going to have to do a show on Yiannis Ritsos, in which everyone here will read their favorite Ritsos poem.

00:48:25.000 - 00:48:36.220

Robert Peterson: Maybe favorite ten Ritsos poems. Morton Marcus: They are short, a lot of them. Some of them are long, though and they are in translation, the longer ones, and they are magnificent. But anyway, that is another story. I

00:48:36.220 - 00:48:54.520

certainly hope you can read that because he's one of my favorite poets too. Well, what am I going to do on Thursday? Well, very simply, I am going to read poems that I wrote on different paintings and then I'm going to read such poets as Andrey

00:48:54.520 - 00:49:15.040

Vyshinsky, William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Du Fu among other people, and the one poem that we have not discussed here, and which may or may not get into the other reading on Thursday is maybe one of the most popular poems on painting

00:49:15.070 - 00:49:31.540

of the 20th century and that is W.H. Auden's, "Musee des Beaux Arts," which is another way of coming on paintings that poets have done, and that is to look at a painting and get an idea, you see, to talk about what painting does, and in a way, it

00:49:31.540 - 00:49:50.110

is interpretive of what all painting does. And in this case, you can see Auden musing in the Museum of Fine Arts in France, on great paintings and what great paintings do, and in this very, very wonderful colloquial expression that he has, he says:

00:49:51.680 - 00:50:08.150

About suffering, they were never wrong, the old masters. How well they understood its human position, how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. How when he aged are reverently, passiona

00:50:08.150 - 00:50:23.660

ely waiting for the miraculo s birth, there always must b children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a ond at the edge of the wood. The never forgot that even the drea ful martyrdom must run its cours . And anyhow in a corner, some

00:50:23.660 - 00:50:44.030

ntidy spot where the dogs go o with their doggy life and the orturer's horse scratches it innocent behind on a tree. In B uegel's, "Icarus," for instance how everything turns away q ite leisurely from the disaster The ploughman may have heard t

00:50:44.030 - 00:51:01.280

e splash, the forsaken cry but for him it was not an impor ant failure. The sun shone as it had to on the white legs d sappearing into the green water nd the expensive delicate shi that must have seen somethi g amazing, a boy falling out

00:51:01.280 - 00:51:15.860

f the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. It really is a- may have been he best poem he ever wrote actua Robert Peterson: All is well. ly. But it's, the language is ju t so perfect, so off-h

00:51:12.970 - 00:51:29.090

Morton Marcus: But as well, I thought this is not only a very nded with the subject and it' true. When you look at the old master's paintings, a lot of the , especially Bruegel, the cen ral issue is never really foc sed on. And in motion pic

00:51:29.090 - 00:51:42.380

ures, for example, Bob said thi gs cross over. This is the sec et of John Renoir's films. He' always taking you away from the central dramatic situation to how you all the peripheral lif around it, want to make sur that you see that there is all

00:51:42.380 - 00:51:57.800

this peripheral life and tha you don't have this mel dramatic effect of focusing on he issue when, of course, Ren ir was the son of the great pai ter Auguste Renoir, and again ha started out as a painter and a eramicist, so we're talking ab

00:51:57.800 - 00:52:13.180

ut these crossovers all ni ht. Well, believe it or not, it is ten o'clock and fast hour, but fascinating and I am very happy that I recorded it because I was just gonna say, oh, well you know who would want

00:52:13.180 - 00:52:28.060

to really hear this but all of you are really just exceptional. And I know you're all rather worried about what we were going to talk about here, but it just really shows that this evening on Thursday is going to be wonderful. Again, let me tell

00:52:28.060 - 00:52:41.170

you what we've been doing. Very simply, we have been talking with Claire Braz-Valentine, Anita Wilkins, and Robert Peterson, who will be three of the five poets, the other two co-host Joe Stroud, and yours truly, Mort Marcus, who this

00:52:41.170 - 00:52:57.670

Thursday at seven o'clock, will be giving a slide presentation, poetry reading, called "Poets and Painters," on the works that they have written on painting and great poems that have been written on painting by great poets, we hope. And that will be

00:52:57.670 - 00:53:12.700

this Thursday at 7pm at The Art Museum of Santa Cruz, which is really the Main Library at 224 Church Street upstairs in the meeting room, and it is free. We hope you all come. I think it's going to be a very enjoyable evening and just hearing my

00:53:12.700 - 00:53:28.540

three guests, I'm sure that you'll agree with me. They've got lots to say, their poems are really exquisite, and I just hope we'll see you there. Stay tuned for Tim Folger and his wonderful program, "Things Ain't What They Used To Be," and as I

00:53:28.540 - 00:53:43.060

go off here, I just want to say Plaza Books has provided a grant that helped make the last half hour of programming possible. Plaza Books is located on the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz, and I do, and we do at KUSP truly appreciate their

00:53:43.060 - 00:53:57.370

support, which is going into its third year now. That's it for tonight, Joe Stroud will be with you next week. Again, thanks to my guests for being here. And back to Mr. Respighi to take us out of here with a flourish.