Irene Ladwig, Artist Getting It Right the First Time

Irene Y. Ladwig (May 17, 1925 – March 30, 2013) was an un-acclaimed artist who specialized in Chinese brush stroke painting and the highly evolved artistic craft of Fabergé eggs in the dioramatic format. The Steiny Road Poet here publishes a tiny art show for a woman of strong convictions, starting with her wish that no memorial service be organized. She told her niece, the person named her heir since she had no children, that dead is dead.

Years ago, Irene asked to see the musical score of my opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On,   the collaboration with composer William Banfield. She no longer had a piano having given it to our condominium association for general community use, but she said after she finished reading the score that she could hear the music in her head as she read the notes. She liked the music, but noted that some of the word settings were not inflected correctly which made me keenly aware of how talented my neighbor was. Before she married her husband Marion Ladwig at age 40, she had been a music teacher in her home state of Texas. Another neighbor of ours told me recently that she had had a beautiful singing voice.

When I decided to study Mandarin in preparation for a 21-day trip to China, Irene gave me numerous Mandarin resource books including dictionaries and how-to-shape-the-characters guides. She also gave me special paper to practice my writing of the characters. She had studied Mandarin for years but she said her teacher did not have the best accent, a problem I ran into when I signed up for Chinese 102 at the local community college after having a superb Beijingnese professor for Chinese 101.

Among the many things I saw in China were the misty mountains of Guilin. Irene’s painting puts me back there on a foggy morning on the boat traveling down the Li River as well as reminds me of the spiritual side of Chinese culture. In the tradition of the art form, Irene has placed a tiny dot of a man, probably sitting zazen, within our sight, but probably not his, of an almost hidden temple. In the philosophy of Chinese brush stroke painting, the artist is given one chance to get it right. No corrections are allowed. This is the life philosophy Irene Ladwig embraced.

Here is a tiny glimpse of her eggs. These are most likely not her best pieces since much of the 90-some eggs she retained in her collection were given away quickly to her family and friends, something she would have approved since she said there was no amount of money that could satisfy the time she put into making these jewels. She did however want to exhibit her collection and that never happened. Few artists are good at marketing their creations. Therefore the Steiny Road Poet shall be her curator. 

BPR LIT TRIP 30 with Asekoff

In this last trip through the Birmingham Poetry Review volume 40, the Steiny Road Poet humbly chases after L. S. Asekoff’s “Lyre.” While the Steiny Poet has tripped through poems on themes of death, love, poetry, the natural world, and design/creation (David Starkey’s “The Ways of God to Man” on intelligent design, Carmen Váscones’ sonic design poem “46)” as translated by Alexis Levitin, Melanie Jordan’s ekphrastic poem “The Kiss of the Cage,” and Andrew Sofer’s musically focused sonnet “Hautboys”), nothing reviewed so far matches the vast reach of Asekoff’s “Lyre,” a free-verse poem written in one stanza of 44 lines.

“LYRE,” A LOOK AT CIVILIZATION

As best as the Steiny Poet can understand, “Lyre” is about civilization and the morality and love that might happen in a chaotic universe. As the poem opens, the lyre is addressed by an unidentified narrator whom the Steiny Poet presumes to be Asekoff.

You have witnessed the sorrows of the rose-grower’s daughter,

The ivory grin of the lacquered beast

& where aging fingers once lingered lovingly.

The lyre is a stringed instrument of the harp family. Relative to the size of modern day harps, the lyre is small and hand held. In ancient Greece the instrument accompanied poets or entertainers reciting poetry. The lyre is a symbol for the Greek god Apollo, known as the god of music and poetry.

According to Greek mythology, Hermes crafted the first lyre from a tortoise shell and the intestines of cattle he stole from Apollo. Apollo forgave Hermes for the stolen cattle when he heard the music produced by the lyre and then traded more cattle for the musical instrument. Dear Reader, hang on to this image of the first lyre being made from tortoise shell.

For now, the Steiny Poet is stumped by the reference to the rose-grower’s daughter, but she thinks daughter is a critical element but only understood by the closing lines of the poem.

PERSECUTION OF THE ROMANI PEOPLE

So, shipwrecked on the shores of time,

They hauled their great stringed instruments

Upright over the wagons like sails.

The last two lines are a quote from Isabel Fonseca’s 1995 book about the Roma people, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey. The quote is about members of Papusza’s family who were harpists. Bronislawa Wajs (1908-1987), the most famous Romani poet and also known as Papusza ("doll") stood out because she defied her Polish Romani family and their people by learning how to read. During World War II, German Nazis and Ukrainian fascists murdered Romani people in Poland. Various governments also pushed Romanis to settle in one place and so many gave up their carts and horses but retained their heavy lyres. With this information at hand, the Steiny Poet thinks she now understand lines four and five:

The dream of a man wheels

Takes precedence over the gathering of colors.

The Steiny Poet thinks the gathering of colors might refer to national flags and the various European countries lining up for war. It might also refer to the gypsy predilection for brightly colored clothing.

THE CHANGING WORLD AND HENRY ADAMS

Lines six and seven are italicized and the Steiny Poet knows where part of the quoted passage derives.

So the prosodic hallucinarium,

Physics stark mad in metaphysics,

Physics stark mad in metaphysics comes from The Education of Henry Adams, a memoir by the same Henry Adams. Here’s the passage:

In these seven years [between 1895 and 1902] man had translated himself into a new universe, which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his sense, perhaps even to his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley  seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused – physics stark mad in metaphysics.

Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably replay, with one voice, that they never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about.

This passage goes on to say that Adams was not satisfied with ignorance and he worked hard, but in vain, to uncover the meaning. Meaning comes only with breakneck force. Adams continues:

Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure. He cared little about his experiments and less about his statesmen, who seemed to him quite as ignorant as himself, and, as a rule, no more honest; but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could reach it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the irruption of forces totally new.

Returning to Asekoff’s poem and picking up at lines six and seven, observe the interplay between the Adams text and “Lyre,” especially the line “Shamed into speech by such voluble silence”:

So the prosodic hallucinarium,

Physics stark mad in metaphysics,

The theorist in pain

Playing the black keys against the white

While across the long twilight this windowless room

Offers a door to the shoreline

With its abundant shifting sands

& self-delimiting sadness—

a glimpse of an eighteenth-century sea.

Shamed into speech by such voluble silence,

You think: The hand, a tortoise; the mind, a hare.

The Prince of Infinite Space inherits the Kingdom of Ends.

While the Steiny Poet is not entirely certain, she believes that prosodic hallucinarium refers to Asekoff’s poem “Lyre” and that the theorist is Henry Adams (1838–1918) though the imagery of the piano seems ascribed by Asekoff to the theorist and Adams was not a musician of any measure, let alone the piano. Nonetheless Adams acknowledged the importance of music in his education. In his memoire, Adams referenced the eighteenth century frequently though he is clearly a man moving into the twentieth century. However, he is formed by the Age of Enlightenment and his more famous grandfather John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) and great-grandfather John Adams (1735–1826).

THE TALE OF THE TORTOISE AND HARE

The narrator tells us the theorist, put on the spot, begins to ascribe the tale of the tortoise and the hare to himself, likening his hand (where action begins and is sustained) to the tortoise and his mind, which is quicker than the hand but undisciplined, to the hare. Then Asekoff makes a huge leap of imagination saying the prince of infinite space inherits the Kingdom of Ends. Shakespeare has his tragic hero Hamlet say, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” (Act II, Scene ii) Therefore, Hamlet remains prince and seems to be bound in Asekoff’s statement by moral imperative. Why? The Kingdom of Ends is a thought experiment in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and is tied to Kant’s categorical imperative. Rational beings live in the Kingdom of Ends and must choose to act and be judged by a set of standards that imply absolute necessity (categorical imperative).

DISCOVERING THE FLOWERING ROSE

From this point until the last three lines, the poem open out to the universe in a description that seems to chart ritual and chaos theory and then the Steiny Poet conjectures, that poem turns back to the gypsy life where two teenagers steal away for their elopement which is hinted at with these phrases: half-closed buds open over unfurled leaves,  amorous awakenings, lilies afloat in a pool,  final inscription. The Steiny Poet also believes now that rose-grower’s daughter may be someone depicted in Forseca’s Bury Me Standing.

Surfing the night’s black static, neon glow

Everywhere you see the golden section—

A keyhole into the lesser dark.

Wind blows over snowy windrows, rattles the corn.

The shaking of a buffalo blanket spooks an Indian pony.

As the range rises,

Fingers move across strings of an invisible lyre—

Heartbeats, flapping wings, water waves,

The periodic motion of heavenly bodies,

Chirr of cicadas, ticking clocks, a dream of stones.

Now a colorless hiss zeroes in on

Random fluctuations of electrical resistance.

Wandering beyond the keys, a pale melody

Remembers where it’s been;

The dark sea points to a lovely flickering curve,

Underground currents, spectral densities,

The nervous system of Tokyo traffic flow,

Daring conjectures of the changing landscape.

Haunted by such arabesques,

Half-closed buds open over unfurled leaves,

The longing of the asleep for amorous awakenings,

A frieze of water lilies afloat in a pool,

Adrift & drifting as they are towed toward

The perpetual velleities of their final inscription.

The Steiny Poet imagines there are other ways to approach this impressionistic and philosophic poem with it loose connections between lyre and the tale of the tortoise and the hare, between lyre and the piano which has an internal harp.  For example, one could just talk about the engaging word choice and the music of the lines like “Wind blows over snowy windrows, rattles the corn.” Also Asekoff’s “Lyre” resonates with Kathy Fagan’s “Sycamore Envies the Cottonwoods behind Your Place.” Both have an other worldly dimension. One other observation is that Asekoff chooses to capitalize the first word of every line. While the Steiny Poet sees this stylistic choice as a throwback to the 19^th century, other contemporary poets choose this style element. Those in BPR 40 reviewed during this thirty-day project who capitalize the first word of each line include Kathy Fagan in “Sycamore Envies the Cottonwoods behind Your Place,” Daniel Anderson in “Someone Is Burning Leaves,” and Erica Dawson in “Chinquapin Leaves on the Riverbank.”

SUMMARY OF THE BPR LIT TRIP PROJECT

To sum up the project, the Steiny Road Poet found the Birmingham Poetry Review volume 40 to be an exceptional collection of book reviews and contemporary poetry of varying styles, formats, and forms that also included translation. The eye-catching artwork on the cover “Man Pretending to Read Like a Hawk” by poet Debora Gregor makes a political statement about the state of poetry today—not enough readers! The BPR, printed on high-quality paper and beautifully laid out with an easy-to-read font,  is worthy of a wider audience. This volume included 59 poets and the Steiny Road Poet reviewed one poem by 30 of these 59.

Poets reviewed included: Claudia Emerson (the featured poet), Deborah Ager, DanielAnderson, L. S. Asekoff, Ned Balbo, Chad Davidson, Erica Dawson, Caitlin Doyle, Jehanne Dubrow, Kathy Fagan, Joshua Gottlieb-Miller, Edward Hirsch, LesleyJenike, Carrie Jerrell, Melanie Jordan, David Kirby, Carmen Vásconesas translated byAlexis Levitin, James May, Laura McCullough, Nick McRae, Dan O’Brien, RicardoPau-Llosa, Todd Portnowitz, Jane Satterfield, Andrew Sofer, Jane Springer, David Starkey, David Wagoner, Charles Harper Webb, Amanda Yskamp.

Other poets included in BPR 40:

Betty Adcock, Tory Adkisson, Jo Brachman, Gaylord Brewer, Robert Collins (founder of the Birmingham Poetry Review), JamesDoyle, Alex Fabrizio, Brett Foster, Jeff Hardin, Katie Hartsock translating St. Augustine, William Logan, David McLoghlin, Zachariah McVicker, Sandra Meek, Erika Meitner, Homer Mitchell, Mary Moore, Emilia Phillips, John Poch (also translating Enrique Barrero Rodriguez), Christine Poreba, David Roderick, F.Daniel Rzicznek, Martha Serpas, Megan Sexton, Patty Seyburn, Rawdon Tomlinson, Sidney Wade, William Wright, and Matt Zambito. 

BPR LIT TRIP 29 with Andrew Sofer

Andrew Sofer’s “Hautboys” captures moments of sound in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. In this the next to last trip through the Birmingham Poetry Review volume 40, the Steiny Road Poet’s project to celebrate National Poetry month, we encounter a nonce sonnet organized in four tercets and a concluding couplet. The rhyme scheme is ABA/CDE/DEC/FBF/GG. The end words are: blinks/appear/sinks air/woods/haut gods/blow/overture mousetrap/ear/stirrup heed/reed.

Like the focus of the poem on hautboys (high-pitched wind instruments that in our day we might call oboes), the rhyme scheme is rather exotic in that the ear knows repetition of certain sounds is occurring, but these similar sounds are far enough apart in the middle of the poem to make the ear strain to understand the sonic texture. Appropriately Sofer makes his opening line What noise is this asked by Macbeth in Act IV, Scene 1, where Macbeth confers with three witches as hautboys sound.

What noise is this? He blinks.

Shadowy kings appear

as the witches’ cauldron sinks

and hautboys fill the air.

Next come these lines that play with French words driven by the compound word hautboy where haut in French means high.

Whose are these high woods

whose voix are always haut

left in the wake of gods?

The Steiny Poet assumes the gods are the dead (shadowy) kings Macbeth sees in the dumb show while he is consorting with the witches. So the hautboys (also referred to as the shawm) play a grim overture that ushers in the dumb show, a chorus of presumable detractors, and Hamlet’s play The Mousetrap. Shakespeare set his tragedies of Macbeth and Hamlet in and around Elsinore Castle.

For Elsinore they blow

in a grim overture:

Dumb show. Chorus. Mousetrap.

The shawm enters the ear

past hammer, anvil, stirrup—

the note no one will heed,

ill wind in a double reed.

So the sound—the voices (voix)—of the hautboys (high woods) enters the ear going past the three critical bones of the middle ear— hammer, anvil, stirrup—perhaps a warning sound that no one pays attention to. No love poem this, as traditional sonnets have often been, but certainly a beautifully rendered poem showing control over the line and compression in its storytelling.

BPR LIT TRIP 28 with Melanie Jordan

In Melanie Jordan’s “The Kiss of the Cage,” a first-person singular narrator says, “Magritte’s Healer can’t leave me, not even/ with his cane.” In this 28^th trip through the Birmingham Poetry Review volume 40, the Steiny Road Poet observes an anguished soul whose father fears might suicide, but the narrator has taken solace in René Magritte’s bronze sculpture of a headless man whose rib cage is an airy birdcage. Still this person must be acting strangely because “the docents watch me, carefully unobservant,/ make sure I’m no defiler, no bomb.”

Like Leslie Jenike’s “I Am Love,” Jordan crafts a peripatetic meditation using art to talk about her emotional life. The main difference between these two poems is that Jordan spends time detailing a single piece of art and Jodan's poem is clearly ekphrastic.

Here’s how this poem of eleven tercets, three couplets, and one single line stanza opens:

Only a block or so to visit him, the sculpture

seated like a man: a birdcage for a torso,

gangling legs in littletramp shoes. Funny

The littletramp shoes bring to mind Charlie Chaplin and the word Funny following the shoes melds without levity as the narrator states she is being watched by the worried docents. (Though the Steiny Poet chooses the feminine pronoun she to discuss the narrator, the poem does not reveal the gender of the narrator.) The complete thought is, “Funny// how the docents watch me, carefully unobservant,/ make sure I’m no defiler, no bomb.” Beginning with the Healer’s cane, the narrator sketches the sculpture using a pen and then ruminates on an earlier part of the summer when her father stood watch worried she might take an overdose of pills. Then she returns to the present moment:

So here I stand, ask, dare: I smile

sometimes from the pressure, amused at the two

silhouettes on the blank gallery wall,

happy raconteurs.  . . .

Who or what are those two silhouettes on the gallery wall? At first glance, the Steiny Poet thought it was the narrator and Magritte’s Healer, but as the poem progresses those happy storytellers (raconteurs) are more likely the narrator and her former lover, the one who has caused her this angst, the one who now seems to be represented by the sculpture with the birdcage torso that is a man without a head or internal organs like a heart, the seat of love.

happy raconteurs. Whatever poison is urned

in me burns like a floe. It looks for exit

from my catacombed head. I’m a room

with eight walls. I’m an ancestor asking

him to trepan. The ember moves up my spine;

I can feel him at the core, feel the thumping

call from my own chest, regular, meaning

I’m still here I’m still here

like a droplet of glass next to its lover,

a cracked window glittering the earth. . . .

Again, expectations for an uplifted mood are dashed when the line beginning with happy raconteurs moves to whatever poison. The narrator’s description of herself seems to mirror the sculpture in its oddity. Her body becomes an urn. Her head is catacombed (a set of burial chambers for all the happy moments passed?). And she is a room with eight walls. The octagon-shaped room—or should the Steiny Poet dare to think those walls are contiguous?—reminds her of David Wagoner’s “Poem” that has an exterior world of six sides. Both Jordan’s and Wagoner’s worlds are disorienting. Jordan’s insistent line in the first of the three couplets, “I’m still here I’m still here” socks in the disorientation and the desire to overcome that chaos.

The poem ends as the narrator observes the bird sitting on the ledge at the opening of the Healer’s torso-cum-birdcage.

a cracked window glittering the earth. The bird

could be hobbled, the way it hovers there on edge.

But it isn’t. She willingly meets her double there,

and the kiss of the cage which is always open.

The narrator expects the dove-like bird is waiting for her mate. The position of the bird seems to indicate she has left room for her double. The kiss of the cage might be the door of the cage closing but in this sculpture, the opening is without closure. The narrator, like the bird, seems to waiting for love to return and this is why she keeps "sapping the gallery,// regular as a junkie, not sure at first/ what pulled me to the bronze and satchel/ of a hollow man, to the cloaked cage// we're all made of."

Lots of musical lines in this poem to savor, starting and ending with the phrase the kiss of the cage. The Steiny Poet thinks this poem has operatic potential.

BPR LIT TRIP 27 with Alexis Levitin’s Translation of a Poem by Carmen Váscones

Language as sonic design comes across clearly in Alexis Levitin’s translation of Carmen Váscones’ “46).” In today’s trip through the Birmingham Poetry Review volume 40, the Steiny Road Poet approaches a poem of language that depicts art without reference to painting or drawing. The original poem is in Spanish and the translator is a man who loves words without claiming to be a poet—yet you, Dear Reader, can judge this for yourself in the following video interview.

Here is the original poem:

Un punto blanco en un fondo negro

un fondo blanco en un punto negro

un punto negro en un fondo blanco

el fondo de un punto sin blanco y sin negro

el punto del fondo sin fondo

un blanco fuera del negro

un negro fuera del blanco

(un negro y blanco sin…)

Un punto sin punto.

--by Carmen Váscones

Here is the English translation:

46) [from Life without a Name]

A white spot in a black space

a white space in a black spot

a black spot in a white space

the space of a spot neither white nor black

the spot of a space without space

a white outside black

a black outside white

(a black and a white without .  .  .

A spot without a spot.

--translation by Alexis Levitin

The poem is organized in one eight-line stanza and one single-line stanza that rhymes exactly most of the lines in Spanish using these four words negro, blanco, fondo, punto (black, white, space, spot). To understand this minimalist poem that is heavily abstract, the Steiny Poet began drawing what each of the lines described. Easy for the first three lines. The fourth line put a spot, which the Steiny Poet chose to color black, placed in a space of gray. The spot without space narrowed to a tiny dot into a tiny perimeter. The last four lines presented conceptual challenges and the Steiny Poet chose to consider the undefined white and black as spaces versus dots. The last line of the octet presented the biggest challenge and seemed to negate the choice of space and spots. Finally a spot of white seemed like the best rendering for A spot without a spot. It also made the Steiny Poet think of the invisible dots she uses when formatting indented lines of poems for her posts on her blog. The entirety of the poem seems to suggest celestial space not on this planet.

The Steiny Poet thinks that this poem has talking points with Kathy Fagan’s “Sycamore Envies the Cottonwoods behind Your Place.”  In Fagan’s poem, these lines pop into the Steiny Poet’s head:

So once went my habit of mind: poppies, paper, stars.

Tonight the tenderer planets take cover,

Bodies abuzz in their own demise.

Also there seems to be a correspondence in a Rimbaud-like way (try his poem “Voyelles” where he equates sound with color) between the words place (in Fagan’s title) and space (Levitin’s translation of Váscones’ poem). Fagan’s poem talks about what the narrator’s thinking habit might have been and since it is hard to tell who or what the narrator of Fagan’s poem might be (the sycamore? A cottonwood? Fagan herself?), the Steiny Poet stopped her 25th BPR lit trip analysis at this point in the poem. However, Váscones’ poem seems to concentrate abstract thinking that goes beyond poppies, paper, stars. Perhaps Fagan is referencing the sound stars make in the universe as they wear themselves out of existence— maybe a black and a white without .  .  .