STENDHAL SYNDROME
Ever wanted to make love to a work of art—
die in the obscene smear of paint or a written passage
where the protagonist stands on a Sears Tower diving board
but then climbs down, ever mirrored a manikin and felt
you were falling into its apparel, the fabric swimming you,
sometimes listened to music with the back of your head
or took a moment in the bath to observe the water in opposition
with your hair, had a pop song puncture to nerve by amplifying
something hidden, finding a stranger knew your feelings exactly,
but more so, decided nature is wonderful, but alive, you needed
acrylic, oil, the page, a breathing note, or a warm drink in a white cafe
designed by someone rich from drawing children in animal suits?
It’s not that you cannot go on living without these things,
it’s that without them you have questioned the point.
Allison Campbell is the author of the prose poetry collection Encyclopédie of the Common & Encompassing. Her work has appeared in such places as Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Witness, and Rattle. She lives in New Orleans.
In a museum built into the side of a mountain, I stood before Claude Monet’s Sunset on the Seine in Winter. Until this point, my experience of Impressionism was limited to dentist’s office reproductions and wall calendars. But in this museum, I stared at the orange-red dot-of- a-setting-sun and felt myself falling into the river. I began to cry. I did not know what I was experiencing, but later learned that the syndrome was named in 1989 by an Italian doctor who saw many patients whose physical and mental health were affected by the beauty of Florence. I wrote this poem pointing out overwhelming episodes, instances when I was acutely receptive to human-made beauty.
--Allison Campbell
The New York School Diaspora, Part Three: Allison Campbell
A member of the New York School seminar that participated in the USM Center for Writers’ 2014 Symposium on the New York School of Poetry and the South, Allison Campbell served as The Best American Poetry’s special correspondent, blogging about the event.
“The Stendhal Syndrome” is an affliction named after the 19th-century French author, whose description of his experience in Florence first documented the phenomenon. Of his initial visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo Galilei are buried, Stendhal wrote
I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves'. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.
Allison Campbell’s invocation of art-generated rapture, its head-over-heels multi-part interrogative, suggests Kenneth Koch and his“Fresh Air”; in particular, this line: “Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop?” It also recalls Frank O’Hara’s desire, expressed in “Personism: A Manifesto,” for a poem to exist not between two pages but “between two persons,” “Lucky-Pierre style,” and the melding of art, nature, and identity that Keats enacts in “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die.” We are most ourselves when in transport, when we’ve “had a pop song puncture to nerve by amplifying / something hidden.”
--Angela Ball
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