It’s my fifth and last day of presenting some of my favorite poems by Joseph Harrison. I can’t represent all of his signature themes or inspirations, but one of them is flight: there’s a satire on the U.S. military called “Runaway Blimp;” another political poem about Afghan kites; a funny poem, “Air Larry,” in which a real-life Larry went up in a lawn chair attached to balloons but didn’t know how to get down. Another theme of Harrison’s is how difficult it is to talk about visual art. He’s rightly suspicious, as he shows in a villanelle called “The Ekphrastic Poet,” of words that aspire to explicate or even supplant wordless images. Nevertheless his response to an early fourteenth-century masterpiece beautifully survives the transition from picture to poem.
GIOTTO IN PADUA
The Arena Chapel
A blue so blue it seems the radiant day
Has entered the room without the glittering
Sunlight, so deep, so soft the flittering
Angels look real as birds as they loop away
Above these curves of rediscovered mass,
Delineated body taking form
Beneath these robes (ground: flatness was the norm),
Fresco by fresco, here. It came to pass:
Clear narrative with spare embellishment,
Space structured to give character its feeling
(Faux marble frieze, faux chamber, vaulted ceiling),
And dazzling emissaries, heaven-sent…
Van Eyck stood right here, Leonardo, too,
Titian and Rubens, Turner, Klee, and Proust
Took tracings for eventual mots justes
Washed in this essence, this original blue.
If you’ve been reading Harrison’s poems this week, you’re not surprised by the apt rhymes, like Proust / mots justes, or the expert use of meter. A departure you may notice from the method of some of his ballads and sonnets is that most of the lines here are enjambed, flowing from one line to another, and one stanza to the next, in a graceful sweeping motion. How appropriate this choice is for a “structured space” (a chapel, or a poem) in which the angels look “real as birds,” so much so that they “loop away.” I love the sonorous list of Harrison’s precursors in the chapel, the great painters (and one great ekphrastic writer, Proust) who also witnessed Giotto’s marvels. And I love the fact that for all its flying from one idea to another, the poem comes down to roost by beginning with “A blue so blue” and ending with “original blue.”
-- Mary Jo Salter
:"Giotto in Padua" is from Sometimes I Dream I Am Not Walt Whitman, Waywiser Press (2020).
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