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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 12, 2009

CAAF: All exultation is a dangerous thing

March 12, 2009 by cfrye

Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Sylvia Plath, is often maligned, but it has its wonderful points. One of the best sections is on Plath’s residency at Yaddo (which she shared with Ted Hughes) — a period when Plath was reading a lot of Jung and Theodore Roethke and, under the latter’s influence, wrote “Poem for a Birthday” (representative line: I housekeep in Time’s gut-end / Among emmets and mollusks, / Duchess of Nothing, / Hairtusk’s bride.; the poem’s entire seven-part sequence can be read online here. It’s the last poem listed under “1959”).
In her own (excellent) biography of the Plath-Hughes marriage, Her Husband, Diane Middlebrook passes over “Poem for a Birthday” quickly, dismissing it as overly imitative of Roethke. But Stevenson spends a significant amount of time on the sequence, and her interpretation of the poem’s imagery is sensitive and stirring. She writes, “These are poems of nightmarish regression comparable to Roethke’s ‘mad sequences,’ attempting to reproduce in infantile images and language the mute appetites of babies and beasts.”
In college I’d been exposed to a few poems from Roethke’s “mad sequences,” but they never took — other people’s nightmares are sometimes too opaque — and up until recently the only poem of his I knew well was “My Pap’s Waltz.” But lately, I’ve been reading a lot of him. Here’s one of my favorite bits to re-visit. It’s the fourth part of “The Dying Man,” a poem in five sections written in memory of Yeats. This part is called “The Exulting”*:

Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after-image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh; and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face; there was another man
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying by my death.

*Taken from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.

CAAF: Morning coffee

March 12, 2009 by cfrye

• An excerpt from the title story of Mary Gaitskill’s new collection, Don’t Cry, which comes out in a couple weeks. Yay! The story appeared last June in the New Yorker; the magazine’s website is now registration required but if you’re a subscriber, you can read the full story here. (I can’t remember from whom I purloined that first link — if it was you, sorry.)
• Wikicuriosities: Book curses and fakelore. (Via Gwenda & The Millions.)
• The Cinetrix presents a compelling reason to re-watch All About Eve this weekend. As if you needed one.

TT: So you want to see a show?

March 12, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.


Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.


BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through May 17, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CROMER%20OUR%20TOWN.jpg• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Aristocrats (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)

• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

March 12, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into tragedy, and this is the chief difference between the two.”
John Jay Chapman, Learning and Other Essays

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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