the whole Marie

Barbara Maloutas

An author’s statement

 

Admittedly autobiography is a source for texts in poetry but the challenge is to bring elements of experience into “a present.” This is most possible through happenstance and details collected contiguously, and so in “last Tuesday” happenstance sounds “chancey.”

of anything a sublimation ouch

asking for the sake of dwelling in chance

tin and copper chancey

I understand Marjorie Perloff pointing to Lyn Hejinian’s thinking—how “context is the chance that time takes.” It takes time to subvert likenesses. Forgetting is a blessing. I remember some of what I overhear. I delay with spaces and make visual units that have little white walls of nothing around them. Living has made me pragmatic. I’m not in an English department. I think I like puns, the nuns did—we did. Etymology has always been of keen interest. I was seduced with roots. I am usually hesitant and would rather be that than authoritative. My mother was nervous except when she was herself. Parody comes from the Greek for sing and beside. I think I can sing. I use too many parentheses. It’s not exactly digression, more like getting it right after the fact, or more right and more unfamiliar. I too own and have read Victor Shklovsky in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays for his theory of perception and defamiliarization:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

I am interested as well in writing on craft such as Aldren A. Watson’s in Hand Bookbinding: A Manual of Instruction, copyright MCMLXIII. Anyway there are not just two roads. How things work interest me. In Athens there is a street for plumbers and one for light bulbs and each store has their little specialty. I always go back to figure/ground. Hejinian thinks writing is the site of such thinking. A green and shimmery spider is walking across my windshield—in Los Angeles. Up to this moment I have used only Volume One (from A to pocket veto) of The New Century Dictionary of the English Language, copyright 1946. Now with shimmery, I go to Volume Two (from pock-mark to zymurgy) where New Century defines shimmery as shining with soft, faint gleams of light, an adverb. At my age, intuition counts. Ethos means characteristic spirit and ethó (with the accent on the second syllable and the th more like a d) means here in Greek. The two words in two languages echo each other in “on Porto.”

2
I can hear his quick decision ethó cut it—and ethó—here— ethó he says again; neighbor—this neighbor-man takes no prisoners; we are strangers to Porto and a town below—we barely throw anything out—nothing is too low below; this second house in a second country is full of old pots old dishes old towels—old and below; I climb hills—alight on a terrace—stir ashes and take a record specimen; I make a photo of his work; I am thieving in the neighbor’s grove—mapping evidence; the formal demands of clearing slopes—keeping height from taking over—and over each year; am I tempted to be here

This shining with soft, faint gleams of light also reminds me of lines in “direction 2.”

and darkness leads back towards (belongs)

to walls (of) clear neon now

the sky goes and seeps small bonfires

(I’m) afraid a sports car dips the red (shimmy)

Everyone knows that a little red sports car is a target of cops, perhaps rightly so if associated with a sky that seeps small bonfires in this fire prone region and it’s not shimmery but almost.

“Abiding Delacroix” alludes to the older phrase—I can’t abide him. Reading the diary of Delacroix and seeking out his paintings in museums became a focused interest during this series. I remembered the challenges of life-drawing classes in art school—how to put it all together, covered as it is with skin. The title the whole Marie was taken from the poem “last Tuesday.” Delacroix worried about sexually transmitted diseases and took chances with one of his favorite models, “the whole Marie.” Conflating Marie and the Virgin Mary (the metal figure of an heroic young woman mounted on the walls of the Los Angeles cathedral, Our Lady of the Angels) I also referenced my own mother whose name was Mary.

surprisingly enough other months have ides
beware the French valise
and does the god of war of (all things) deserve a month
then imagine when Tuesday is 13
a bag and rhymes with not wanting to
perhaps trash falls more equivalent like walking right hand
left foot the energy to take a big chance
and her and paint her carrying disease to be sure
like painting a painting our Marie is ancient
she may be gone for years haven’t seen her body on walls
bronze could be a first metal mined the whole Marie
of anything a sublimation ouch
asking for the sake of dwelling in chance
tin and copper chancey

“Paris Tuesday April 15,” on the other hand, ends with a joke and answers the question—what did the donkey say to the zebra?

stable this google question of equines
also asses to a zebra take off those pajamas
git in here