Xx, p.1
XX, page 1
Dedication
For the twentieth century
Acknowledgments
Poems from this collection have previously appeared in the following publications, whose editors I would like to thank: 5 a.m., American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Catalyst (NZ), Fogged Clarity, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Hinchas de Poesia, Iowa Review, Jai-Alai Magazine, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, MiPOesias, New Ohio Review, Plume, Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), Poetry Daily, Salmagundi, Terminus Magazine, White Review (UK), Yale Review.
Several of these poems appeared in the chapbook Picasso/Mao, as part of the Floodgate Poetry Series, Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2014.
“The Style for Dylan (1965)” appeared in How to Write About Music, edited by Ally-Jane Grossan and Marc Woodworth, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
A letterpress edition of “Andy Warhol: Image, Print, Negative” appeared in the exhibition Vanishing Points: Paint and Paintings from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection at the Bass Museum of Art, 2011.
“Orson Welles: The Stage (1935)” was produced as a limited-edition broadside by Amanda Keeley, for the SWEAT II Broadside Collective, Miami, FL, 2014.
Epigraph
Of my century, in which, and not in any other, I was ordered to be born, to work, and to leave a trace.
—CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ
Century o century of clouds
—GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand technologies of ecstasy
boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water rises without boundaries
I push the PLAY button:--
—FRANK BIDART, “FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY”
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Epilogue: 2016
BOOK ONE
1900 Picasso
1901 Hearts of Darkness: Freud and Conrad
1902 Picasso
1903 Anna Akhmatova
1904 Henry Ford
1905 Einstein’s Clock
1906 Matisse: Paris
1907 Picasso & Fernande Olivier
1908 Apollinaire
1909 Gertrude Stein
1910 Virginia Woolf: Three Fragments
1911 Picasso & Georges Braque
1912 Mao: On Childhood
1913 Martha
1914 Ernest Swinton: “Mother”
1915 Picasso & Juan Gris
1916 Easter, 1916
1917 Mao: On Education
1918 Apollinaire: Two Calligrammes
1919 Wittgenstein: Letter to Bertrand Russell
BOOK TWO
1920 Mao: On Conflict
1921 Picasso & Olga Khokhlova
1922 August Sander: Citizens of the Twentieth Century
1923 Matisse: Nice
1924 Kafka
1925 Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait Pierced by a Silver Rail
1926 Rilke: Les Saltimbanques
1927 Fiber 66: Meet the Latest Miracle Product from DuPont
1928 Edward L. Bernays
1929 Woody Guthrie: Rusty Bedspring Blues
1930 Matisse: Tahiti
1931 Mao: On Patience
1932 Zora Neale Hurston: Farmyard Hymns
1933 Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Hand-Mirror and Retablo of Leon Trotsky
1934 Picasso
1935 Orson Welles: The Stage
1936 Woody Guthrie: Come to Nothing Blues
1937 Guernica
1938 Mao: On the Long March and Protracted War
1939 The Atomic Clock
BOOK THREE
1940 Virginia Woolf: Four Fragments
1941 Woody Guthrie: Twentieth-Century Blues
1942 Guadalcanal
1943 Picasso & Dora Maar
1944 Joseph Goebbels
1945 Hiroshima
1946 Matisse: Nice
1947 Wittgenstein: Letter to Karl Popper
1948 Simone de Beauvoir
1949 Mao: On History
1950 Charlie Parker
1951 Matisse: Vence
1952 Mike: Hydrogen Bomb Test
1953 Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Death Mask and Amputated Limb
1954 Akira Kurosawa: Seven Samurai
1955 Picasso & Françoise Gilot
1956 Mao: On Freedom
1957 Elvis Presley
1958 Mao: On the Great Leap Forward
1959 Willem de Kooning
BOOK FOUR
1960 Zora Neale Hurston: Enigmatic Atlas
1961 Jane Goodall
1962 The Pulse of the Planet
1963 Sylvia and Ted
1964 The Coltrane Changes
1965 The Style for Dylan
1966 Andy Warhol: Image, Print, Negative
1967 The Death of Edward Hopper
1968 Picasso & Jacqueline Roque
1969 Apollo
1970 Jacques Derrida
1971 The Ticking Clock
1972 Mao: On the Future
1973 Picasso
1974 The Raspberries
1975 Orson Welles: Television
1976 John Ashbery
1977 Voyager I & II
1978 Fernand Braudel: Civilization and Capitalism
1979 The Nation’s Capital
BOOK FIVE
1980 Two Poems for Czesław Miłosz
1981 Elegy for Eugenio Montale
1982 To Héctor Viel Temperley
1983 Georgia O’Keeffe
1984 George Orwell
1985 Orson Welles: The Life
1986 The Hudson
1987 Andy Warhol: Waterfall of Dollar Signs
1988 Joseph Brodsky in Venice
1989 The Berlin Wall
1990 Hubble Space Telescope: The Galaxies
1991 Lee Atwater’s Apocalyptic Dream
1992 Digital Clocks
1993 Roberto Bolaño
1994 Nelson Mandela
1995 Seamus Heaney
1996 Dolly
1997 Jobs v. Gates: The Mind-Body Debate
1998 The Word for Dylan
1999 Pentatina for Five Artists
2000 Prologue
Also by Campbell McGrath
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epilogue: 2016
Like prose does the term of our days extend
to the margin of the page
but it does not return, with a slap and a clang,
in the manner of an old typewriter carriage,
elementary mechanism
of spring-bearing levers and bird-claw glyphs.
Already I have journeyed more than a decade
into this pathless new millennium,
weary explorer who will never reach the pole.
Friends travel beside me, traipsing ahead,
falling by the wayside in the obdurate whiteness
from which all things of purpose have been carved away,
all things parsed and compassed by the wind.
Children follow in our tracks, assuming,
each time we look back, the aspect of strangers;
they exceed us as Olympian gods surpassed the Greeks
who fashioned them in their,
and thus our own, entirely mortal image.
And the illustrious, hard-frozen ocean receding
further into memory with each embattled step,
great whales feeding in the darkness,
their souls like wells of fragrant oil,
the exodus-light of icebergs made plastic
and manifest, that index, that sign.
To the margin but no more.
Like dough which rises to fill the baker’s pan
with a scent of yeast and distant wheat fields,
leaving nothing in its aftermath
but a ruin of crusts, a scattering of crumbs,
avenues for the triumphal procession of the ants.
BOOK ONE
Picasso (1900)
Arrived in Paris with Casagemas to discover
Montmartre embodies a dream fulfilled,
a riot of cobblestones, stray dogs and peddlers,
baroque bird kiosks as in Barcelona, windmills
on the butte and all variety of street theater,
sculptors and anarchists and visionary drunks,
hurdy-gurdy music, melancholy saltimbanques,
dance-hall whores we cannot afford
and carefree models amidst oil cans and litter,
everything given license, everything on offer,
everything varnished with tinsel and glitter.
Already I abandon all concern with the past,
with Velázquez and Spanish sombra—
from this moment my painting is recast
in the galvanic mold of the modern era.
Now, at nineteen, I seize my destiny at last.
The die is cast, the Rubicon crossed,
and my only regret is to have lost
eighteen years of my life to a paternity
so parochial and antique. As blood rules the heart
thus electric current will fuel the twentieth century
and so I myself shall figure in its art.
Hearts of Darkness: Freud and Conrad (1901)
Messages from the interior: darkness & illumination,
dreams & blood. Two springs from whence arise
twin rivers coursing from the ego’s murderous dream-empire.
What cargo they carry shall define the coming century
ivory & guns, African blood congealed to profit,
Arbeit macht frei. Out of the heart of Congolese darkness
& into the mind’s diamond mine, psychic darkness
evolving toward, if not light, then, enlightenment?
Century of chains & emancipations, empathy & greed.
Century of wraiths & indeterminacy, century of earth-rise,
o eager, anguished, totalitarian century!
Century of transistor gizmos, century of quantum dreams.
Freud’s first lectures on The Interpretation of Dreams
drew a dozen listeners; proper Vienna would not darken
his door or its good name. Still the ghost of the century
rises from his grave like a genie from its lamp,
as from the burning furnace of the self dreams rise
to the lure of the imago, the masked dance of desire,
sexual dominance sublimated into boardroom money-lust.
What haunted Conrad’s exiled London dreams
was not Belgian savagery but visions of elephants rising
to crash all night through the blind jungle darkness
within him, animals limned in bullion-light,
golden idols sacrificed to a market-driven century.
A century of propaganda & sales pitches, a century
of smoke & mirrors & incorporated gluttony.
The cathexis of Empire begets decolonialism’s firestorm,
one last century held hostage to European dreams—
Rothschild & Marx, Freud & Einstein, Hitler’s dark
parody of power & Picasso’s mirada fuerte. What rises
must fall; what we repress consumes us, starfish at tide-rise.
A century of signs & design & Dasein, a century
of loss, like all the others. A century of children’s small dark
hands severed by machetes as a lesson in productivity
from King Leopold. Kurtz & Conrad are dream-twins,
Id & Ego, Mengele & Freud, darkness & light.
O, century of atomic darkness,
rise
toward the dream-radiance for which you hunger.
Picasso (1902)
Yesterday walked across all of Paris in the snow
with a pastel rolled beneath my arm,
a pastiche of doting bourgeois mothers and children
with a vase of flowers, no less, utter and complete
artistic prostitution, only to find the dealer
is broke and cannot part with even ten francs.
I left it with her for nothing and trudged home
to the attic tenement I share with a verminous
and disreputable sculptor named Agero,
generous fellow to house a destitute countryman
but still a filthy disgrace. Like Van Gogh
I must survive on biscuits and water,
lacking even a candle to work by, making do
with chalk and ink on cheap paper,
scraps of canvas found or stolen on the sly.
I’ve done worse, pocketing change from Rocarol,
hiding stale bread crusts in my overcoat,
jotting pornographic sketches for the vile troop
of degraded Spaniards that roam the Hôtel du Maroc.
Pride forbids me to show my face to those
who envied my success eighteen months ago
and only Max Jacob offers comfort.
He considers my misfortune an epitome of genius
reduced to squalor, and I concur. So far
this third trip to Paris falls little short of disaster
and I lack even the price of a ticket home.
At least I shall survive the week, as Max promises
dinner at a café: omelettes and fried potatoes
may yet rekindle my affection for this frigid city
on which I, owning nothing, have staked everything.
Anna Akhmatova (1903)
Barely fifteen and already men are declaring
their love for her, grown men, and already she knows
she will drag their bodies across the white fire
of her nights as surely as she will sweep
the romance of the past behind her into this, her world.
She will bear the torch of the nineteenth century
into the present as Rilke carried a single iris
before his throat as he walked the streets of the city
to shield him from the monstrosity of mundane reality.
Ten years earlier, the first family photographs
are sepia prints: white gloves, a sailor’s suit,
spring in the Crimea smelling of lilacs.
Ten years later, the first drawing is Modigliani’s
erotic glyph, a sleek nude modernist arc,
the first paintings Cubist, Futurist, Acmeist.
Amid the studied decadence of the Stray Dog Café
she is a pale flower of the demimonde,
disdain for everything earthly and unexalted
scribbled in heroic stanzas across her face.
Ten more years and already she is famous
and already her voice is drowned
beneath the cadence of boots and rifles,
her verse denounced by Trotsky
as frivolously personal, archaically devout.
Another decade and she is reading Dante aloud
as Mandelstam weeps openly at the words—
mere words, mind you—days before the Party
swept him up in its grasp and he was gone.
She, who vowed to subsist on the sublime,
who could barely boil a potato or mend a sock,
living a life of denials and false confessions,
police officers knocking at the door,
the hasty burning of papers, again and again.
Why this portion for your children,
O Lord, terror and suffering and helplessness,
delivered from tyranny to tyranny,
day after day before the unblinking eye
of the prison gate, desperate for any word,
any sign of the vanished—why, O Lord?
Ten years to fame, twenty to famine,
thirty to the Terror, forty to the starving winter
of Leningrad under siege, fifty to the thaw,
sixty to an unanticipated old age
of vodka, ghosts and cabbage soup,
to the grey indeterminacy called,
in the corrupt modern idiom life, real life.
Barely fifteen, smelling of lilacs and April rain,
already the men swearing passionate vows
not one of them intends to keep.
Henry Ford (1904)
From curiosity comes dynamism, from obstinacy drive.
From the drawing board, from tinkering, from the machine shop in the old barn come pistons and cams.
From gasoline comes internal combustion, comes a world of rubber wheels instead of horseshoes, a world powered not by steam or wind but oil refracted into a rainbow of mechanical possibility, smoke and stink of it filling the little house on Bagley Avenue.
From the precision of clockmakers, from the gunworks of Samuel Colt come interchangeable parts.
From the Arsenal of the Doge’s Venice comes standardized production.
From the butchery of hogs hung for slaughter, from Chicago packing houses comes the conveyor belt, comes the assembly line, comes the dismemberment of human toil.
From the builders of every monumental construct back to the Great Pyramid of Cheops comes the mobilization of labor,
comes mass production,
comes the pace of the century and its mode of transport and its consumerist destiny,
comes Highland Park, Hamtramck, River Rouge,
comes the river of ash and coke, river of bitumen, river of liquid capital, river of molten vanadium steel,
comes the thunder of the blast furnace,
comes the glory of industry,
comes the abjection and abandonment of industry,
comes the world’s first billionaire, the titan, the crank,
but not yet, all things in due course,
but not yet.
For now it is a cold afternoon in January,
and Henry Ford has just established a new world speed record
driving a first-of-its-kind Model B roadster at 91 mph
along a four-mile track on the soot-covered ice of Lake Saint Clair,
and afterwards he celebrates with a complimentary muskrat dinner
for himself and his entourage at the Chesterfield Hotel—
the Dodge Brothers are there, drinking heavily,
James Couzens, Harold Wills, the ace mechanic Spider Huff—
and for this moment he is not worried about magneto coils or engine blocks,
