Anne Marie Levine is a poet and artist
specializing in box art, miniature painting on wood, and digital art. She
is the author of two collections of poems, Euphorbia, and Bus Ride to a
Blue Movie.
Anne Marie Levine is a poet and artist
specializing in box art, miniature painting on wood, and digital art. She
is the author of two collections of poems, Euphorbia, and Bus Ride to a
Blue Movie.
Review:
Bus Ride to a Blue Movie by Anne-Marie Levine, Pearl Editions, 2003, $12.00 paper, ISBN: 1-888219-22-X
–Robert M. Stein, Harvard Review, Number 26, 2004, P. 205-207
Some readers may well have had the pleasure of already encountering Anne-Marie Levine’s poetry, for she has published in some of the most interesting small magazines. Her first book,
Euphorbia (Provincetown Arts Press, 1994) was a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist. Her second book of poems,
Bus Ride to a Blue Movie, gives us another opportunity to savor her artistry. She is a former concert pianist suffering from what she calls
amusia, the inability to produce musical sounds (“The condition is desperate,/ potentially fatal,/ I know”), but the poems themselves make a joyous music. It is, to be sure, a very edgy joy—the death of friends, the loss of lovers, the destruction of friendships, the aging body, annihilation, disturbing dreams, some very unpleasant sex, the whole outrage of the twentieth century—all this is played straight at the reader with a sharp attack, a sustained beauty of phrasing, and a deceptively offhand technical brilliance. Levine’s kind of playing has the power to transform a rather dire subject matter into something rich and strangely pleasurable.
“Four November 9ths,” a birthday poem, forms the beginning of an implied autobiography, of which we get fragments and hints throughout the book. Anne-Marie Levine tells us that she is the child of Belgian Jews, born fatefully on November 9, Kristallnacht (“It is not a simple matter, the birthday or the telling.”) Her parents fled, losing the members of the family that didn’t see the handwriting on the wall (“Our grandmother died immediately after/ they took her to the concentration camp./ She died a natural death.”), and they ended up ironically in Southern California (“My father ate an avocado half with his dinner every night.”). She went to Wellesley and, a California girl dripping with European culture, wound up in New York, a concert pianist and friend of some notable painters (ELLSWORTH KELLY—“the primacy of man’s need/ for color, the poignancy/ of man’s need/ for primary color”) She was married, has a son, is divorced, has lots of friends and a long-term boyfriend (“Bill’s still here though, and that’s good.”). She speaks about them throughout her poems, and by speaking of all these relations, intimate and otherwise, she speaks always about herself, even though, as she reminds us in “Autobiographical Poetry” (in
Euphorbia), “Edmond Jabès says speaking about oneself/ always embarasses poetry” to which she immediately adds: “But then, poetry can take care of itself.”
Levine’s voice seems so spontaneous and is so strong and direct, her intelligence is so palpable, and her subject matter so interesting, that some readers might think the poetry is indeed just taking care of itself. But the most powerful art, it was once famously said, is the art that hides its own artistry, and a good half of the wonder of Anne-Marie Levine’s poetry takes place in the shaping force of musical invention: repetition is key. You can see it in the series “primacy… poignancy… primary” in the lines quoted above and the way those same lines ring the changes on “man’s need for color.” You can see it too in “First Wife” ; like a deconstructed villanelle, the long line “He asked me to go through it with him and I said yes” echoes in pieces throughout the poem. And in the long poem “With Sophie,” the repeated lines “The Sophie I knew” and “I’m telling you because I’m upset” articulate the poem into long phrasal segments built out of repeated narrative fragments with variations. Levine has obviously learned much from Frank O’Hara—an influence she graciously acknowledges. Unlike many latterday New York poets, however, Levine’s poetry never sounds as though it would have been better if O’Hara had written it. And while her sense of what one can accomplish with repetition and abstraction has clearly profited from a deep acquaintance with the work of Gertrude Stein, about whom she has written critically, Levine never completely relinquishes the hold of her language on reality or moves into the realm of a pure formalism. Her poetry grows from the pressure of situation.
If half of the wonder of these poems is technique, the other half is the way the poems composed of private matters and small moments take on large public and historic resonances as if behind the reader’s back. The biography sketched and implied over the course of the book becomes an exemplary life, in whose unique oddness one recognizes one’s own experience. Or rather, it’s not so much the life that becomes exemplary as the ability to speak such a life so directly, spiritedly, and with such apt beauty. The speaker—deadpan, sardonic, fresh, spontaneous, engaged—delivers something that one recognizes immediately as exactly the thing that needs to be said, needs to be said this way, and needs to be said right now.
Anne-Marie Levine writes about her own artistry directly in a poem called POEMS where, trying to find, in a book on rare diseases, the disorder called MAD (myo-adenylate de-aminase de-ficiency), she comes by sheer chance (“coincidence: the visible traces of invisible principles”) across a disease called POEMS. After a careful detailing of the awful pathology, Levine writes:
It is a perfectly terrible disease
and we don’t like terrible diseases,
as Frank O’Hara said when asked by a lady
for a contribution—“we don’t give her one
we don’t like terrible diseases”
But this disease is called POEMS
and I do like it, it seems sort of wonderful
and so literary too—there is even a list of synonyms
for it—or is it the book that is very literary to give
us these synonyms—and they are wonderful too—
PEP syndrome and Shimpo, Takatsuki syndrome
and Crow-Fukase.
Why is this so wonderful, why am I so happy?
“There is joy in acronyms,” POEMS continues, and this joy, as the poet knows, in acronyms, in the sound and texture of language, and in its transformative power, is contagious. The reader gets it right away.
Unpacking: The Boxed Sets of Anne-Marie Levine
by J. F. Rodenbeck for the Lucy Daniels Foundation, 2003
“Nothing highlights the fascination of unpacking more clearly,” mused the critic Walter Benjamin, “than the difficulty of stopping this activity. I had started at noon, and it was midnight before I had worked my way to the last cases. Now I put my hands on two volumes bound in faded boards which, strictly speaking, do not belong in a book case at all…”*
Unpacking his library, Benjamin was moved to consider not simply the boxes containing his precious books but to look more deeply at the accumulation of attachments implicated there. For Benjamin, an inveterate scavenger of rare volumes, cultural trivia, and aphorisms, collecting had a strange dual valence: for if, on the one hand, the collector sought out categorical samples to serve as instances of their particular categories, at the very same time that the specificity of the items sought removed them from their categorical sameness into a uniqueness; the actual collection organized itself around a set of unique exemplars in such a way that it in fact worked to deny the original contextual proliferation of each individual token.
The fetishism of the collector, then, was one in which the significance of each book derived as much from the facts of its acquisition, its condition, and the hands it has passed through—the particularity of its life as a commodity and its material history—as from its contents. Where the content of any given book had purchase on its form was in its detailing of a moment in the history of language-in-use. (Benjamin’s collecting habit was bound up in his semi-nomadic occupation of a now largely bygone position—that of the public intellectual or man of letters—and his resistance to the type of orthodox categorization implied by a steady job. According to Hannah Arendt, owning an interest in a second-hand bookstore was the only serious employment Benjamin ever considered.)
This notion of the collection is, I think, apposite to a consideration of Anne-Marie Levine’s “boxed sets” in at least two ways. The unspoken narrative in Benjamin’s text is one of exile and the partial return allowed in the recovery of his special collection and the memories embedded in it. (The library itself stands as a figure for memory.) Similarly, Levine’s boxes have the feel of spaces deeply inhabited by the memories specific to another and only partially available to us. And the particularity of Levine’s work is that each box presents itself as an instance of language-in-use: from the slightly dimpled chairs to the food left on the stove-top to the piano that plays Romantic art music. The boxes present an instance of the collection unpacking, and without addressing their relation to Levine’s extended poetic practice, one can nevertheless identify these objects as provisional books—not narratives or poems, but books in Benjamin’s special sense, spaces
for reverie.
The miniature fascinates; it rejects vision and solicits touch, pushing sight away even as it makes the fingers itch. And yet it relies for its effect precisely on its resemblance to the real world. But what are we looking at? These miniature interiors—a country house, a hobo’s kitchen, an anodyne but fashionable parlor layed out like an analyst’s office, a concert hall—have a peculiar familiarity; it’s not that we’ve been in those places exactly, but rather that they are so very like places we imagine someone else has been. The Corbu chair, the Noguchi table, the bent-wood rocker; the coal stove and the grand piano; the paintings and carpets; the half-read books. These objects have a cultural iconicity, but this is not the simple arrangement of display one might find in a furniture store, nor is it the still configuration of a scene. Rather, presents itself to us is a depopulated mise-en-scene, a configuration implying action. The backstage door is ajar, and it is not by accident that the piano-playing hobo—nomad and scavenger par excellence, living on memories—is the one human figure to appear (repeated) in Levine’s series.
The boxes share a tonal consistency, the cool arrangements of furniture and objects taking advantage of that urban rarity, extensive floor space and loft. They are decorated in deep and rich hues drawn from the decorative vocabulary of high modernist painters, from Monet to Matisse to Rothko, whose aim with paint was a kind of shimmering intimacy of encounter with each viewer, worked via strong color and large scale. The curious flatness of the images on the walls, their subtle outsize evasion of the otherwise utterly consistent scale of the scenes, recasts this intimacy. In this context the reduction of narrative to pattern in the warm tones of the scattered Persian rugs—here on the floor, there on the wall across from a large abstract canvas—has the effect of heightening the tension between iconicity and design. The rugs first seem incidental, then highly significant.
It is important here to acknowledge that the interiors are assembled by Levine from component parts. The boxes are produced to the artist’s specifications in a small atelier, and Levine herself researches the miniatures, tracking down remote and highly specialized sources for each object. The individual furnishings—artisanally made replicas of industrial-age chairs, tables, ovens, books, clothes, rugs—resonate with the stories of their makers. Although each element exists in potential multiple (and elements repeat from box to box), their evident artisanal fabrication and their fascinating tininess implies the film of a unique fingerprint, their passage through the hand of a particular craftsperson. Yet the actual assemblage into the boxes of these individual objects, often in multiple, yields multiple situations for same piece. Thus to the degree that the boxes serve as assembled totems of their author’s dispersed and highly personal interests (Rothko, classic furniture, art music) they also seem to mourn the sure and declarative simplicity of the modernist moment, too.
One final consideration brings us back to the exiled writer and his precious library. I want, for a moment, to revisit the notion of understanding Levine’s boxes as, in some sense, actual books. Though each box contains its own illumination, each is necessarily equipped with an umbilicus of electricity: neither beholden to nor adequately addressed by gallery lighting, the boxes light themselves: they operate as discrete furnishings. But they are very particular in their demands. First, you must flick the little switch for light. Then you adjust your body to raise or lower your head to the right height for a straight-on view, for a glancing angle will not do: you place yourself in direct address. You note the mobility of the parts (nothing is glued down), the casual evocation of temporality, the stillness. Stepping back, you are jarred a second time by the recursive mise-en-abyme of miniature if not always model interiors quietly inhabiting book space on a shelf or occupying the place where one might have laid down something one was just reading.
* Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library” (1931), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and with an intro. by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 66.
Anne Marie Levine is a poet and artist specializing in box art, miniatures, and digital painting
© 2004 Anne-Marie Levine
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