Art is always produced during the “meanwhile” that begins Peter Filkins’s poem “Water Lilies.” In one sinuous sentence, its ideas and images suspended like floating flowers, Filkins meditates on the fact that Monet painted his late masterpiece within hearing of the guns of the Somme. Filkins invites us to wonder whether this is only a question of simultaneity, of coincidence, or whether there is an economy of culture whereby the Great War and Monet’s water lilies are linked.
Art and violence come together in Caitriona O’Reilly’s “Netsuke” in a different way. The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by a geisha. The beautiful woman, kept by her lord, is like the precious bone or wood carving—“netsuke”—that is fastened to the obi binding the man’s kimono and holding in place his pipe, purse, and writing tools. At the end of the poem, the courtesan takes her lord’s knife and draws her own blood.
Robert Pinsky’s “Forgetting” is a provocative fantasia on the forget-ability of any mark or monument of culture. Art, we like to think, is dedicated to the preservation of civilization, but perhaps not. Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism, Pinsky implies, is of a piece with his praise for the Emperor who charged “a committee of scholars / To pick the best 450 Noh plays and destroy the rest.” Pinsky takes us to the poetry festival where, in 2002, Amiri Baraka read his 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” Baraka’s claim that “the Jews / Were warned to get out of the Twin Towers before the planes hit” simply passed in and out of the minds of the “applauding and screaming” crowd in—Pinsky marvels—“an ecstasy of forgetting.”
The forgotten are the starting place for Marilyn Nelson’s poem “Nine Times Nine, on Awe.” History is an “architecture of inequity” in which those “whose years were brief and harsh” are lost “while someone the world would remember was inventing an arch.” She knows that the experience of art or culture is like every other form of conspicuous consumption: a way of “counting coup,” of feeling good about ourselves. “But let us not deny the power of awe,” she responds, writing in praise of praise itself.
