Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
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She Breaks Up with Paintings / commentary by Alan Clinton, poems by Amanda Tai
<1> Amanda Tai’s first collection of poems, Symptoms of Breaking, institutes a new relationship to mimesis where it is most apparent in poetry, the ekphrastic poem. Of course, it is problematic to speak of mimesis when it comes to ekphrasis even though one might say that it is one of the most obvious cases of poetic mimeticism. From the Greek meaning to "out speak" suggesting a certain eccentric effect at work, we already have a sense of removal when it comes to ekphrasis, not to mention that this terminology did not originally refer to "art on art" but on "the thing itself" in general, the thing of course already being a removal from, to use Plato’s terminology, the "pure form" of the particular thing.
<2> The artist, or the poet in this case, in ekphrastic work nevertheless, generically speaking, has an "original representation" in mind which she then proceeds to comment on in some way. The work of art to be subjected to more art, generically speaking, must be accessible to the poet’s audience for the poem to have any meaning, and in this aspect of the genre, Tai has kept with tradition.
<3> What Tai’s poems present, nevertheless, is the dilemma of the ekphrastic poem as such. Stick too close to the original, and you’ve added nothing, most likely rendered less brilliantly a subject better suited to its original genre. And, even when something has been added, it must have a certain distance from the original or it does not wear well. How many times, really, can one read Williams’ and Auden’s reflections on Breughel’s Icarus before never wanting to read them again? What they say, however "true" or clever it may be, is rather obvious. On the other hand, if you distance yourself too far from the work in mind, then the "original" becomes lost altogether, which is not something a poet who is inspired by a work of art would ever want.
<4> It was in considering Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s volume I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) and its oft anthologized poem "Alakanak Break-Up" (not an ekphrastic poem in its contemporary sense) that I sensed what we are talking about here, in the new mimesis of ekphrastic poetry, is the most complex form of love affairs, and that this most complex form is exactly that of the break-up. It is hard to say what a break-up is, since when "you come to the edge of it, you realize you are / already veering away from it" (32). The distance between you and the "beloved" is forever changing, forever uncertain, always subject to haunting.
<5> Amanda Tai’s ekphrastic poems run away from the paintings and return to them, back and forth, like people do when they "break up"---a process which cannot, whatever we may wish, have a delineated temporality. I think breaking up is one of the most complex human events I’ve experienced (several times) and yet it is always seen as abject and pitiable, pitiful, not as what it is, a true experience of our relationship to the other in all its complexities.
<6> Thus, I declare the new mimesis to be a seen as it is often sensed, but seldom baldly stated, a simulation of something human, of the break-up, which we still have not yet defined because the break-up is an indefinable question of changing distances.
----Alan Clinton
From Symptoms of Breaking by Amanda Tai...
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I’m under construction, right? All There is of Me, Aida Cui, Oil 72x18 |
On the Italian table cloths for export. What have you been eating and sexy women in your area. Should have those printed soon. Are the hydrangeas just right? I promise when the barista cuts me in two, I’ll be good enough to eat, it’s just that I’ll be eaten. They’ve been worried about food safety.
On a bar stool, when I’m sugared to taste, when they cut me in half, when my cast will fall in two, when I eat scissors from your operating suite. It’s just that I’ll be eaten. Could you imagine a more lovely paralysis? I’m dead like the New York Times.
I have been her kind. They’ve been worried about food safety and live births. Pharmacology is the new art, expect a renaissance. It was the best accidental drugging I ever had, good stuff and it did the job. Tongue removal is the latest trend as long as the hydrangeas are just right.
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Bogdan Chiritoiu "The Blue Scarf" (Esarfa Bleu) (Painting) |
Am I blue in the middle of your day? They won’t argue your sanity if you wave. Let me be a tenant in your house of mirrors, on the floor of horrors. Wondering what you’ll hear when the dressers turn. Is that what you wanted me to say? There’s some sky stuck to me. It wasn’t very nice when I said, "I’ll cut your scissors in absinthe and as long as." Tulips spill from dresser drawers, to argue in the angry of your day. Let me be a season, I won’t make a sound. Have you heard the dressers turn? You would disappear for days at a time; that was funny. I’m your second try and your blue swell scissor dream. Are you some new lover in a Chiritoiu season? I had hopes to make it to the tiles, but I got stuck in the square you took from the sky. You’re always wanting to see how many birds will come. I was your second try. At some point I started waiting with you. To train my suspicion, to sit like a warning. Watched you count the birds, chests hallowed by pink installations---of your arms and fluorescent QT’s. Will you bring us all down with you and the carpets? Will we find you waiting with him when there is nothing to be angry? The radio prepared us for his mug shot with hors d’ouvres . The headline simplified your warning; "Expired Tenant, Rolling in Like Empty Tulips." The police report said there was some sky stuck to you.
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"Looking at You my Love Shining" Cathy Condon, oil and enamel on plastic |
It swallowed him whole on a Monday. Stepped into Columbus Ave. from the corner of the night and almost mistook himself as sand in the reverse privacy window of the pharmacy. Good thing the ocean was there for sale in front of him, just had to make it to Chinatown - where turtles go for next to nothing on the black market. All he needed was to climb a shell and ride back to the morning where he had come from, but his pockets answered like shadows of the sky - and just as empty. Throwing up his hands to see how he landed was becoming something he looked forward to on nights like these, but as he fumbled to place bills on the dirty counter it was all he could do not to let the thousands of shells fall to pieces on the market’s industrial flooring. It ran unevenly to the pavement and reminded him of where the waves lick the shoreline to reclaim their bones; he kept expecting the floor to move as if new water was coming in to make the pavement darker, but the only moving line was the trail of shells he forgot to hold tightly. Unable to complete the transaction due to lack of friction, he climbed a turtle without paying and felt like a thief bringing rain into tomorrow.
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