Finding Truth's Beauty
BURT, STEPHEN
Finding Truth's Beauty Desire By Frank Bidart Farrar Straus Giroux. 61 pp. $20.00. Reviewed by Stephen Burt Contributor, "Times Literaiy Supplement" Frank Bidart's fifth book of...
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...Myrrha can find no safe space to recognize, be seen by and, above all, trust her object of desire...
...The verb "recoils" is Bidart's signature...
...Inc., 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10001, Shelley Appleton...
...Little else has changed, though, in his basic formula, least of all the initial shock of immersion that his poems occasion...
...Paradoxically, considering the collection's title, he is the least sensual of first-echelon contemporary poets...
...9 Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing éditer Publisher: Amencan Labor Conference on International Affaira, tue, 275 Seventh Avenue...
...If Bidart's strength lies m his dramatic range and powers of self-scrutiny, his limits, as often as not, grow out of his strengths...
...Reviewed by Stephen Burt Contributor, "Times Literaiy Supplement" Frank Bidart's fifth book of poems follows his In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90...
...Adolescence" describes an implicitly sexual assault...
...He uses details and symbols as modern playwrights do, for what they mean, and his formal tools (iteration, echo, varied sentence length, pace, emphasis and volume cued by typography) are perfect for rendering not things but thoughts and actions...
...i. Total (sum of(5g...
...Bidart's poems imagine spaces in which forbidden desires, unlawful kinds of power and submission, can be explored...
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...The repetitions turn the sequence back on itself and its listeners, as the self-devouring characters are turned back on themselves...
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...Bidart's apparent lack of music has at times troubled me...
...In his country it is always noon or midnight (or both at once...
...93 4% Actual no copies of single issue published nearest to filrng date...
...The New Leader, 14 Issue Date for Circulation Data Below· September, 1997 15...
...When Myrrha at last gets to sleep with her father, Bidart generalizes, Sweeter than the journey that constantly surprises is the journey that you will to repeat...
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...It comprises a personal lyric, a story from Berlioz' autobiography, and a wrenching tale of Myrrha's lust for her father, King Cinyras, adapted from Ovid...
...Bidart's vision of our life stories as cycles, traps into which our desires drive us over and over, may be one reason why he uses so many fugue-like forms and choral refrains...
...1. Title of Publication The New Leader 2 Publication No 00286044.3...
...their very line-breaks, as often as not, mark self-opposition, conflict...
...585 Actual no copies of single issue published nearest to filing date...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 mondrs, 12.115...
...The bodies that poetry animates are given life, potency, "seed," because thepoemshavebeen"allowedto submit," have become imaginary versions of submission...
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...His verses embody a versus...
...e. Free Drstributron Outside The Mail iCaniers or Other Means) Average no copres each issue dunng preceding 12 mnnlhs...
...had that look in his eyes that bore right into mine I could sense that he knew I was envious of what he was doing...
...copies of single issue publrshed nearest to tiling date, 11.105 b. Pard and'or Requested Circulation: I. Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Strecr Vendors and Counter Sales (Not Mailedl: Average no copies each issue during preceding 12 monlhs...
...145 Actual no copies of single issue published neatest to filing dale, 140 G Total Free Distnbution (Sum of I5d and I5e...
...In his plots—in Cinyras' bedchamber, in the implicit action of "Adolescence"—pain, subjection, pleasure, and empathy cause one another...
...The book's opener, "As the Eye to the Sun," seems designed to introduce readers to Bidart's universe...
...copies each issue dunng preceding 12 months...
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...As he puts it in a startling lyric, "we are the wheel to which we are bound...
...Leftovers...
...S&M devotees create by formal rules arenas where their desire and guilt, their need to control and be controlled, can be safely acted out...
...Extenland nature of circulaoon...
...I I.07S Actual no...
...In "Borges and I" he writes, "We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed by them...
...Dare of Filing September 30, 1997 4. Frequency of issue...
...He draws here, for instance, on The Merchant of Venice, Dante's Vita Nuova, and the works of Marcus Aurelius, Catullus and Plotinus...
...The assailant...
...Total no copies (Net Press Run) Average no copies each issue during precedrng 12 months...
...94.2...
...Bidart's magpie habits, his translations and centos, show how much our thought depends on the past...
...12.115 Actual no...
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...8.760 c Total Paid andex Requested Crrculatron (Sum of I5b(] I and I5b(2)): Average no copies each issue dunng preceding 12 months, 10,345 Actual no copies of single issue published nemesi to filing date...
...With the poem's conclusion, the metaphor becomes explicit: "infinite the sounds the poems/seeking to be allowed to S U ? MIT—that this/dust become seed...
...Average no...
...This is so even when, as in "A Coin for Joe," he builds whole lyrics around objects...
...10.675 h Copies Not Distributed (1) Office Use...
...To enter a Bidart poem is to enter a world of literal and figurative violence...
...The same complaint, though, if it is a complaint, could be made about the poems of Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins or William Blake...
...Leading up to the long work are 13 poems varying in length from six pages ("The Return," a narrative derived from the Roman historian Tacitus) to two lines ("Catullus: Excrucior," "Homo Faber...
...Adolescence" is an extreme example: A completely found poem, it has been "carved out of anonymously published prose," a note tells us...
...and other heel...
...15h(ll and 15h(2|l: Average no...
...Here they are third-person narratives, unconfined by a persona's voice...
...New York, New York 10001 Editor Myron Kolatch, 275 Seventh Avenue...
...730 Aclual no copies of single rssuc published nearest to lihng dale...
...1997 issue of diis publication 17 1 certify thai all infunnaUon hrmished on thrs form rs true and complete...
...But once you have seen a hand cut off, ?ra foot, or a head, you have embarked, have begun as the eye to the sun The voyage...
...Such moments may be easier to comprehend if we are willing to respect, at least as a metaphor, the claims and methods of consensual sadomasochistic sex...
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...The Second Hour of the Night" makes up over half of Desire...
...New Yotk, New· York lOOOl, Mnchel Levitas...
...Actual no copies of sulgle issue published nearest to filrng date, 135...
...interrelationship is hard to distinguish from physical interpenetration...
...Previously, most of Bidart's longer efforts were dramatic monologues...
...New York...
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...Valuable insights always hurt...
...6. Annual subscription price S34.00 7 Complete mailing address of known office of publication (not printer): 275 Seventh Avenue, New York...
...Like that assemblage, it is insightful, disturbing, complex, personal, painstaking, and driven...
...Intellectually, Bidart belongs to the generation preceding his own, that of Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Stanley Kunitz, for whom the absence of God, the presence of evil and the family romance were problems central to literature—and for whom dramatic personae and situations were not conventions but necessities...
...and knew that I'd always wish I had known at the time what he was doing was something Id always crave in later life, just as he did...
...His characters are sometimes destroyed because they require these spaces and can't have them...
...A moment of empathy comes, as it often does in Bidart's work, in a moment of violence and through the recognition of personal fate...
...Myrrha, too, becomes aware of desires she has always sensed: The night she coidd no longerNOT tell herself her secret, she knew that there had never been a time she had not known it...
...Grace, by contrast, "is the dream, half-/dream, half-//light," when Bidart's lover borrows his body and enters it, and Bidart thinks "I know that he will return it...
...Yet in this compressed, intense, crafted book, truth is beauty...
...If we do not appreciate the austere poetry of Desire, the failure, I think, may be our own, not Bidart's...
...He has on occasion given the impression of being so intent on serving up existential and psychological truth that he can hardly spare the energy for verbal invention and pleasure...
...Before the sheath clattered to the stonefloor she slipped from the bedclothes...
...Managing Edrtor Nune...
...She heard again the sword descend and descend again, the bedclothes cut and re-cut...
...An essay-like prose poem, "Borges and I," and seven elegies are among the baker's dozen...
...Even Olivier," he says in "Borges and I," "insisted that art is a mirror held up by an artist who himself needs to see something, held up before a nature that recoils before it...
...Found poems can be useful lenses, bringing into sharper focus what a poet thinks poetry ought to be, the themes and forms he considers his own...
...11,105 Percent Paid and or Requested Circlulatron ( Ìidl5g ? 100)- Average no copies each u>suc dunng preceding 12 months...
...Biweekly except for combined issues dated lanuaiy 13-27, June 14-28, August 11-25, and December 29-Ianaury 12 Number of issues published annually 22...
...g Touil Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15Ò Average number of copies each ursue dunng preceding 12 months...
...1.305...
...Actual no of single rssue published neatest to frfrrg date...
...sometimes they are taut, mesmerizing declaratives, as in the "The Second Hour of the Night" when Cinyras recognizes the veiled adolescent in his bed as his daughter Myrrha and tries to kill her: She heard a sword pulled from its sheath...
...Sometimes his sentences are abstract, two-page meditations...
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...750 Actual no copies of single issue published nearest to filing dale: 280...
...9.040...
...But then, the drives his poems explore seek power over bodies, rather than in sensual indulgence...
...you embrace one of the two species of happiness, the sensation of swrender, because at the same instant you embrace the other, the sensation of power...
...Almost no poet in English since Robert Lowell (Bidart's friend and mentor, whose Collected Poems he is now editing) has written verse that so successfully exemplifies these qualities...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 290 Acntal no copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 150 (2) Return horn News Agents Average no copies cash issue during preceding 12 months...
...2. Paid or Requested Mail Subscriptions (Include Advertisers' Proof Copies and exchange Copies) Average no copies each issue during precedulg 12 months...
...275 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10001 II...
...All Bidart's personae, it must also be admitted, are obsessives...
...Shapiro Telephone, 212-807-S24O 8 Complete mailing address of headquanets or general business office of publisher (noi printer): 275 Seventh Avenue...
...As emotionally extreme as their dramatic situations tend to be, Bidart's poems are ascetic when it comes to description—tours de force of doing without...
...This Statement of Ownership will he pnnlcd rn the October 6-20...
Vol. 80 • October 1997 • No. 16
