The Beautiful Anthology (14 page)

Melite, yours are eyes of Hera, hands of Athena,

Breasts of Aphrodite, ankles of Thetis.

He is happy who beholds you, thrice happy who hears you,

A demi-god who kisses you, and immortal who shares your bed.[
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Then there was Dante’s Platonic abstract of Beatrice, whose beauty was more the knot in the hyperbola of God’s order than anything bound to real life, and then Petrarca’s Laura, far less ethereal than Beatrice, given the poet’s clear, personal exploration, but no more earthy. Earthy came along with Boccaccio’s Griseida, at which point the stereotype made a start toward including even real women the writer knew. Of course, this realness came with an undercurrent of contempt, which carried through to Villon where his extremely earthy women nevertheless did not often range beyond “orde paillarde” (“filthy slut”). In England, poets expressed their own passions within the chivalrous orders of neo-Platonism from Chaucer through Herrick, with his famous poems for the possibly imaginary (and certainly idealized) Julia.

As for descriptions of beauty in men, this was clearly shaky ground, despite the extent to which the ancient Greeks reveled in such descriptions. Much European description reaching to Adonis as ideal has had a decidedly effeminate touch. Yes, there are effeminate, beautiful men, but once again the type was restricted to a tiny fragment of the actual species. You start to feel the spectrum expand among nineteenth-century French poets, but perhaps it was not until Whitman that we got a reasonably broad approach to the aesthetics of man-flesh. Perceived beauty of men’s souls, however, was much more vigorously engaged and didn’t seek the absolute bond between physical beauty and good that reached its apex in characterization of women with Dante. Aesthetics compatible with same-sex romance is just another frontier into which poetry in the twenty-first century will continue to expand.

As poetry expands into such frontiers, it will finally begin to catch up to the diversity of real men and women, almost certainly with greater speed than Hollywood, where within the span of a single century Mae West slew the Gibson Girl, and then came Ursula Andress and Liz Taylor, and now Halle Berry, Gong Li, Jessica Alba, and Aishwarya Rai from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong. The public is dominated by the aesthetics of artfully photographed and airbrushed leading stars whose main livelihood is beauty and fitness training. The sprawl of the supermarket magazine rack is far more influential through ubiquity than the occasional glimpse of a princess on her litter passing in the street in olden days, and this reality has driven so much of the modern anxiety over image of beauty. I think a lot of this anxiety is misplaced, and that the Hollywood example shows how rapidly precepts are evolving as diversity takes root in the population itself. But where is the poetry that celebrates this evolution in personal beauty?

I wanted to write you a letter

my love

a letter of intimate secrets

a letter of memories of you

of you

your lips as red as the tacula fruit

your hair black as the black diloa fish

your eyes as gentle as the macongue

your breasts hard as young maboque fruit …[
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There is plenty of poetry that expresses the anxiety, even of dubious desirousness. Suheir Hammad warns:

Don’t seduce yourself with my

Otherness

the beat of my lashes

against each other ain’t some

dark desert beat it’s just

a blink get over it.[
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There is an entire institution of poets concerned about girls confused in consciousness of their appearance, offering these endangered an aesthetic that does not offend their mirror.

where I stand whole/deconstructing

past nicknames

like zebra, mutt or half-n-half

while remembering my father

held me through 11-year-old

tears calling me by name

calling me beautiful

Now, some say

must be Black

could be white

maybe she’s pinay

Add Mexican to the list

Puerto Rican

tan white girl

Are you from the South?

Or the best one yet

Are you Egyptian?[
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Even some of the greatest paeans to non-European beauty in the past century seem laced with anguish.

Bare lady, dark lady

Ripe fruit of firm flesh, somber ecstasies of black wine, mouth that inclines

My mouth lyrical

Savannah of pure horizons, savannah that stirs to the fervent caresses of

the Westerly Wind

Carved tomtom, taut tomtom which groans under fingers of the Conqueror

Your deep contralto voice is the spirit chant of the Beloved.[
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Plato’s marker passage includes the concept of purer regions, which send healthy breezes about.[
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] The usual Greek inspiration for such paragon country was the province of Arcadia, and
The Republic
itself expanded upon such a tourist’s interest, gilding it into a complete utopia of ways as well as vistas. Utopia before and after Sir Thomas More gave it its name, has remained a topic large in Western poetry, rarely treated with more effect than by Coleridge.

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.[
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The draw to the pole of Plato is so strong that critics have developed an elaborate system of how the iconic locales of this poem are analogous with poetry itself. But of course Coleridge merely mentioned an exotic Chinese locale and threw in the likes of Abyssinia as if it wasn’t clear that he really meant Arcadia. Such blinkered confusion was every bit as common in descriptions of the New World until its denizens undertook descriptions themselves.

Water sensual, slow as molasses,

sugar port, torrid bay,

with the light in repose

scudding the clean waves,

and the drowsy murmur of beehives

congealed from the bustlings about shore.

[ … ]

With voiced parts of the Song of Songs,

You are brown because the sun watches you.[
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And the same can be said of Africa, for which you need not look any further than the ridiculous descriptions Joseph Conrad reports from the mind of his characters. Yet even when Africans thrust forth their own poetry in colonial tongues, they did so with their own dystopian bent fueled by outrage ver colonialism. Africa among twentieth-century African poets is a bleak landscape that I certainly do not recognize insofar as I’ve traveled the real continent.

How much changed in perceptions when Europe evolved from the vanity of the Ptolemaic universe, with Earth at the center through the spheres to God upon the outer
primum mobile
, to the contemporary idea of Earth as “pale blue dot” among the “billions and billions” of Carl Sagan’s famous expressions. Or more topically, as the map of the world evolved from medieval to the modern globe, and now Google Earth all the way down to Street View.

For far above these heavens, which here we see,

Be others far exceeding these in light,

Not bounded, not corrupt, as these same be,

But infinite in largeness and in height,

Unmoving, uncorrupt, and spotless bright,

That need no sun t’ illuminate their spheres,

But their own native light far passing theirs.

And as these heavens still by degrees arise,

Until they come to their first Mover’s bound,

That in his mighty compass doth comprise,

And carry all the rest with him around;

So those likewise do by degrees redound,

And rise more fair; till they at last arrive

To the most fair, whereto they all do strive.

Fair is the heaven where happy souls have place,

In full enjoyment of felicity,

Whence they do still behold the glorious face

Of the divine eternal Majesty;

More fair is that, where those Ideas on high

Enranged be, which Plato so admired,

And pure Intelligences from God inspired.[
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But how does the concept of an ideal land, that eternal other country, work into a world where people come and go to lands the world over? Our cosmopolitan age stymies the idea of a universal ideal of ultimate beauty of any land, either in its nature or in its society. The dystopias that especially became popular in the twentieth century express the anxiety that utopia implies a dangerous level of forced conformity. I once read a classic science-fiction story in a utopian setting, described in terms of a scientific discovery of dimensional partitioning so that each person could live in an endless realm of his own choosing, alone or grouped as he desired. Such a solipsistic idea of isolated utopia is maybe closest to reality in terms of modern social networks, where we can adopt identities of our choosing, connect with fellows of our choosing, and even adopt simulated lives as farmers, vampires, mafiosi, mages, or what we like. It’s one foot into a William Gibson universe, but it’s worth remembering that even Gibson’s universes were dystopian in consequence.

I am not one of those with deep-seated anxiety about the fact that current generations spend so much time in virtual worlds. Nevertheless, for better or for worse, such worlds are an enormous part of modern life, and where is the poetry that describes these solipsistic worlds of virtually configured existence? Where is the poetry that allows us to reflect our own visions of beauty that we perceive through this shattered mirror? In the idioms of the day, our configuration of virtual living is a remix of life, and then a remix of the remixes. Perhaps it’s as simple as the idea that we might tend toward remix poetry. Certainly much of the poetry that remains popular today, from Slam to Def Poetry Jam, is heavy on remix themes and laden with the corresponding hip-hop style. Twenty-first-century poets will be charged with taking all the various approaches to beauty in the various ages and cultures they encounter, related to the various places and people in real and virtual worlds. It seems inevitable that there will come about tools to select and rework sentiments and passages that express what we love. Indeed, how might a GarageBand for poetry function?

This is a less fanciful question than it might seem. In the early twentieth century, the mechanical invention was the shift-key typewriter, and Hugh Kenner among other critics have pointed out how the stalwarts of that era such as Ezra Pound and W.C. Williams were influenced by that invention. Charles Olson famously compared the effect of the typewriter on the poet to that of the stave and bar on the musician. This is not even to mention concrete and other visual poetry. The typewriter, however, did no more than amplify the contemporary conceptual invention, that of collage style. Some of the most celebrated poems of the twentieth century, including “The Wasteland” and “The Cantos,” were largely collage of other verse and references, cryptically juxtaposed using what glue came from the poet’s store of inspiration. Much of this work carried the age’s typical dystopian flavor, as if to say: “Here are all these many worlds, compiled for you, and see? It’s still but a rotting mess.”

Here you observe the rump of Platonism, with its idea of inherent good in all things, and the concept of inner, intrinsic beauty versus what is perceived through the senses. This spirit inevitably informed the poetic schools of those days, especially as poets found echoes not just from Greek but also from other cultural keystone texts, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Persian poetry and philosophy, The Vedas and Upanishads.

As Kenner points out, Ezra Pound was a leading docent in this school, and in one of the great passages in one of the great poems of his century, he decried the clearly evolving aesthetics of the modern age:

Even the christian beauty

Defects, after Samothrace.

we see
τὸ καλόν

decreed in the marketplace [
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But this complaint marks precisely where Pound’s genius was grafted to his folly. He too often started with a brilliant insight, that the glories of art derive more from pure fervor and inspiration than from base motives such as profit, and took such insight to the extreme; for example, decrying any say of the marketplace in our understanding of beauty. In an article contemplating Pound’s iconic Canto xlv “With Usura” in the context of the financial meltdown of 2008, I wrote:

Pound argues that ideally [the smallholder, master craftsman’s] profit lies in direct commerce to the buyer, and not a mass production that drowns craft. When you are selling to ten thousand it is less about the personal palate, the longnegotiated boundaries of community or the carefully-measured cut of cloth. It’s all about the race to the average, to the mediocre, to the safe rather than the cunning. It’s not “commerce is evil,” but rather “petty commerce is the richest and most enduring commerce.” [
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Even before the heyday of Madison Avenue, Pound saw the power and peril of the marketplace decree in beauty, and saw that it would swamp the ideals of the old schools, but he went too far in assuming this implied a destruction of aesthetic good. What he missed is that the marketplace means a negotiation of what is beautiful. That such constant negotiation offers more richness and vibrancy than the diktat of any particular school. Ezra Pound feared the Walmart of beauty but missed the trick that the same basic capitalism also ensures an Etsy of beauty.

An Etsy[
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] of beauty in language is perhaps exactly what the twenty-first century of poetry will be about. The search and navigation tools, the community ratings, the poet who gets swept to fame possibly on the wave of a meme, and better yet on slowly accrued recognition of merit. The commerce of physical and virtual world brings to mind less a rigid Ptolemaic construction than good old Parliament/Funkadelic Cosmic Slop.