Watching the Spring Festival
Frank Bidart
FSG, 2008
$25.00
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The Snake that Swallows Its Own Tail
Frank Bidart is fond of the term "radical given." As he explains in a poem from his most recent collection, Watching the Spring Festival: "Tragedy begins with a radical given ... [which] - irremediable, inescapable - lays bare the war that is our birthright" (29). In the same poem, "Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle," he elaborates his definition by calling the radical given "the patrimony of the earth," the body you're born into (32). Now with a body of work spread over five books - the last three each featuring one "hour of the night," a long poem and lifetime's opus serially distributed and currently capped by "The Third Hour of the Night" in 2005's Star Dust - Bidart in his new collection shifts his focus from lengthy dramatic monologues to the voice behind the voices he's articulated since Golden State, his 1973 debut. Almost entirely through short lyrics, Watching the Spring Festival examines its radical given, the body of work preceding it, to ask one question: "What should be made of Frank Bidart's poems?" Considering the radical given's irreconcilability, this latest book doesn't bother to offer an answer. Instead, it reaffirms the necessity of unceasing exploration. Watching the Spring Festival counters any doubts one may have about the validity and power of Bidart's poetics and in doing so posits itself not only as an explanatory footnote or companion piece but also as an important exposition of the consciousness behind those poetics. To read Bidart and to get to what he's getting at, this book is invaluable.
As with his previous collections, Watching the Spring Festival develops around a motif. But where Golden State uses as its foundation Bidart's father and The Book of the Body his mother, where Desire looks at its namesake and Star Dust at the act of creation, of making, this latest book finds its center in a symbol embodying self-reflexivity, the ouroboros - the "snake that swallows its own tail," as the poem "Winter Spring Summer Fall" puts it. Alternating single lines and couplets in typical Bidart fashion, that poem states:
You believe not in words but in words in
lines, which disdaining the right margin
Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space
Inside time make the snake made out of
time pulse without cease electric in space
Like the invisible seasons (24-25)
That form builds the poem, and with each appearance the single, italicized lines consistently evade any meaning previously attached to them. The repetitions, when considered with the cyclically-assuming title, suggest the motif of the ouroboros pervades a poem like time, always cutting through "invisible seasons" already named as the single lines break up the couplets. The snake even shows up once before its presence in the lines quoted above. Also, "inside time" that which is "made out of time" can be made to "pulse without cease electric in space." Here the poem splits time and space, a reference both to any poem as a temporal act of speech and any poem as printed on the page: an occupant of space, unspoken, timeless. Finally, "Winter Spring Summer Fall" argues "a poem is the vision of a process," and in this context, states the book's rationale (25). As the ouroboros is unconcerned with anything outside itself and focused instead on a constant self-consumption and rebirth, "ceaseless motion in edgeless space," so too does "Winter Spring Summer Fall," and each poem in Watching the Spring Festival, builds itself out of its radical given.
Fortunately, this book is not content with merely stating its internal logic. The title poem, which appears late in the collection, stands as a revision of "Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake," the book's second poem, indebted to the Chinese poet's "Ballad of Lovely Women." In Bidart's text, Tu Fu reports the movements of the imperial court, "the emperor's mistress, her sisters, the first minister," during the spring festival. He begins, "Intricate to celebrate still-delicate / raw spring, peacocks in passement of gold // thread," and continues through other details: "bandeaux of kingfisher-feather // jewelry," "rhinoceros-horn / chopsticks," "fresh / delicacies from the imperial kitchens." He remarks on how the emperor's mistress, "Empress / now in all but name," is surrounded by her sisters, "Duchesses dignified by imperial // favor with the names of states that once had / power" (4-6). Notably, in the poem's second section, the temporal perspective shifts.
Three springs from this
spring, the arrogance of the new first minister
will arouse such hatred and fury even the frightened
emperor must accede to his execution. As bitterly to
hers. She will be carried on a palanquin of
plain wood to a Buddhist chapel
deep in a wood and strangled. (5)
The festival in question does not unfold as the poem unfolds. Rather, the festival has already happened. What began, at least for the speaker, as reportage of events as they occur becomes recollection of an event already completed. This sly transition joins the speaker with the reader, both then looking back on something from the past. With that union, the second section makes the poem's final couplet, "Beware: success has made him / incurious, not less dangerous," much more ambiguous (7). Tu Fu's warning could be for the reader as well as for any of the poem's characters. Likewise, the "him" referenced, because the poem is written in the guise of a persona, suddenly becomes tenuous, applicable as much to one of the author's previous personae as to the speaker largely present throughout the current book.
"Watching the Spring Festival" further complicates Tu Fu's warning, by title alone recalling the earlier poem but by rhetorical posture shrugging it off. With the exception of the repeated line "We have been present at a great abundance," the title poem offers little to invoke the Tu Fu version (44). Purely by a spare wink at that earlier poem, "Watching the Spring Festival" suggests the possibility that Tu Fu's warning is groundless, hardly worth acknowledgment; it opens, "In my dream all I need to do is bend / my head, and you well up beneath me" (44). The current speaker's voice - articulated through simple syntax and lack of any distinctly rendered image - abolishes any remembrance of Tu Fu. Only by means of juxtaposition do the two otherwise divergent poems manage any commerce, yet by those means the book is able to exhibit and embody the ouroboros haunting it.
"Until my mouth touched the artful / cunning of glass / I was not poor," the speaker of the title poem says, coiling upon the other poems in the book to reach and attempt to consume the Tu Fu version. What matters here is that a mouth is touching glass, as the voice of this book assumed Tu Fu's voice, one spoken through a layer as through glass, as the majority of Bidart's major poem's take on the voices of others. What also matters here is that the mouth, in trying to reach the other side of the glass, wants to consume what's beyond the glass, as the title poem struggles to eat the Tu Fu version offered earlier to create a new poem, one built out of what preceded it. That said, the speaker of "Watching the Spring Festival" accepts his poverty only after realizing he can't get past the glass, and his poverty is simple: He can see the other side and try to get to it, but he can only make himself out of it, never remake it. With the two poems, this recent collection, with surprising felicity, manifests the action of the very ouroboros touted in "Winter Spring Summer Fall," the title poem taking as its radical given the Tu Fu version.
To the reader familiar with Bidart's previous books, the self-reflexivity in relation to earlier work makes itself known throughout Watching the Spring Festival, though by no means banally. The above-mentioned "Ulanova" poem, a description both of the ballet Giselle and Ulanova's rendering of it for film, clearly recalls "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" from The Sacrifice. In both, ballet and an individual's particular dance serve as subjects, but in contrast to "Nijinsky" the speaker in the verse sections of "Ulanova" witnesses and does not create the dance. Whereas the prose sections serving as counterpoint in "Ulanova" present a speaker in introspection and considerably distant from his subject - "The poem I've never been able to write has a very tentative title: 'Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle'" - the prose in "Nijinsky" uses the voices of Nijinsky, his wife Romola, and other sources (27). A late section of "Ulanova" also invokes Myrtha, a character from Giselle and a "refugee from Ovid," as such perhaps a sonic nod or indirect allusion to Myrrha, referred to in Desire's "The Second Hour of the Night" as "the least known" from Ovid's Metamorphoses (33).
Similarly, the new book's "Catullus: Id Faciam," a two-line poem - "What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds / the nail that now is driven into itself, why." (19) - is a direct reworking of "Catullus: Excrucior," which appeared in Desire: "I hate and - love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails / itself, hanging crucified" (8). But while the old version concentrates on the torment or crucifixion, the new version addresses instead the question Catullus poses, "Quare id faciam," loosely, "Why do I do this?" It's worth noting that Bidart has pursued this translation since his second book, which contained "Catullus: Odi et Amo." His persistence seems to insist that the reader attend to Bidart's attempts to remake the already made.