Passionate Quest
Essays on the Peripheries, Peter Valente (Punctum Books, 2021)
review by
Peter Bushyeager
Peter Valente’s Essays on the Periphery surveys a wide-screen aesthetic turf that includes film, theater, Ancient Greek and Roman writers, jazz, 20th and 21st century American and Turkish poetry, and other cultural touchstones. Throughout the book’s 41 essays and reviews there’s an ongoing excitement of discovery that makes this collection lively and special. Valente’s observations and opinions are not “received”; they emanate from his relentless explorations and desire to share his findings. There’s genuine passion here.
There are several recurring themes in Valente’s essays, among them “art and reality, the ideal and the real”, which he addresses in detailed explications of seven of the prose poems from New York School poet Barbara Guest’s collection The Confetti Trees (Sun and Moon Press, 1999). Guest’s poems explore the Hollywood zeitgeist. This is fertile ground for Valente, also a filmmaker, who notes that in movies “feeling is exhibited through a physical motion, the subjective by a concrete action”. In Guest’s poem “The Tear”, a camera closeup of an actress’ tearful eye obliterates viewers’ earlier interest in the inherent drama of a hot, parched landscape with a swarm of bees on the horizon. Valente observes that “the camera ‘says’ it is no longer interested in the details of nature”; visual intimations of sadness have appeared and “the director is more interested in the subjective, romantic scenario.” The camera then focuses on the actress’ hesitant gesturing of her arm and “the scene is being revealed through implication and suggestion, a balance between what is seen and what remains unseen, where a ‘tear’ and the ‘hesitation’ of an arm reveal more about a subjective state than language ever could.”
Valente’s explications, in addition to presenting cogent observations about how Guest’s poems work, offer a mini-primer of sorts on the workings of film narrative. They bring to mind Joyce Jesionowski’s book “Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Films” that offers shot-by-shot analyses of the director’s early films, which established many of cinema’s narrative conventions.
The essay “Sound as Thought” discusses the ‘70s–‘90s work of Clark Coolidge, another fairly well-recognized poet. His poetry during this period, which evinces a fascination with the materiality of language, is a keystone for experimental work published by many poets since his arrival on the scene. Coolidge’s work can be difficult, but Valente revels in its complexities and delivers clear-cut exegesis. “The poems achieve this condition of music, abstract and subjective, but not without meaning for the ear and mind,” he concludes. “… there is the sense of an immensity beyond the world of the senses, the edges of the poem drawing close to nothingness, to the rim of the unknowable …”. Interestingly, Valente delineates the difference between Coolidge and some of the poets he inspired, noting that, while Coolidge shares their sacrosanct avoidance of “I”, there is still a strong gnostic component in his work. “The light that weaves through the syllables heats them to a certain temperature which leads to illumination …’”.
In keeping with his book’s title, Valente also discusses some poets who are on the periphery of critical commentary. In “Politics and the Personal”, his essay on Tom Savage’s politically charged book Housing, Preservation, and Development, Valente notes that “discussions of poetry move hesitantly around politics . . . with academics, furthermore, often framing arguments for a privileged perspective and not from the level of the street.” Savage’s book is very much of the street and delineates an ‘80s East Village life lived on the edge – the AIDS crisis and the attendant discrimination and violence against homosexuals; unaffordable, squalid housing; landlords threatening to burn their buildings, clear out tenants, renovate, and charge higher rents. Lines from his poem “News Release” still sear. “Democracy and Capitalism are incompatible”. “The revolution happens in the way you treat one another; not in the sweet by-and-by.” “Professionalism is a pseudo-scientific delusion based on exploitation.”
Barbara Barg, another underappreciated poet, was also part of the fertile ‘80s downtown New York poetry scene. Her 1984 book Obeying the Chemicals, is an intense cri de coeur, a volatile mix of anger and vulnerability that rails against Capitalism, spiritual “truths” that denigrate fleshly pleasure, and the idea of immortality. In the long poem/rant “Fucking Bench”, a simple bench becomes a symbol for the very transitory succor offered in the big city before one must continue to battle for survival. “Oh fucking anxiety infecting my timid plans like ugly water spots on glasses/Shit!/ Will I not cease loving the flesh and being afraid of sufferings?/Thank fucking God I had on my shades or I couldn’t have sat/ On that fucking bench with tears rolling down my cheeks/And memory calling me home …” Valente neatly summarizes Barg’s message: “That’s Capitalism; real love doesn’t have a chance.”
“I sometimes think of The Cures for Love as the first ‘self-help’ book” Valente wryly notes in his essay on Ovid’s 2,000 year-old classic. The Cures for Love offers severe advice: avoid your lover, spy on him or her in the bathroom, have multiple love interests, and never be jealous. In other words, follow a roadmap designed to make you fall out of love! Throughout the essay, Valente intersperses his own versions, rather than strict translations, of Ovid, which include pitch-perfect anachronisms. The results render Ovid contemporary and immediate – completely appropriate, given the poems’ humorous, ironic, cynical, and satirical tone. Here’s a sampling: “… love is extremely contagious and in many cases the tumor is inoperable/The virus spreads like wildfire./He must avoid her if he wants to forget her:/ If the phone rings and it’s her don’t answer.”
One of the longer pieces in Essays on the Peripheries focuses on Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose art dramatically transitioned from the personal to the overtly political over the course of his 53 years. In his poems, feature films, and public pronouncements, Pasolini attacked what he called a “terrible existential void” that surfaced during the post-war period in Italy, which was marked by quick-pace industrialization, widespread consumerism, and, as he saw it, destruction of culture grounded in a tradition of myth and a sense of the sacred. The day before he died, Pasolini voiced a particularly acerbic opinion: “consumerism is a worse form of fascism than the classic variety”, and concluded that “I keep thinking we are all in danger.” Some believe his high-profile opposition ultimately resulted in his murder on a beach outside Rome on November 1, 1975.
Queer, anti-Church, expelled from the Italian Communist Party, contemptuous of the ruling Christian Democrats, Pasolini engaged the wrath of many sectors of Italian society and predicted the culture we move in today. As Valente puts it, “He exposed a vision that was contrary to the progressive ideals of the revolutionary or of the State . . . In our recent times we have witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center . . .the wars in the Middle East, the increasing sense that there is a wealthy class in league with corporate interests that maintains a false reality . . . It is the kind of world that Pasolini foresaw and warned us about.”
Valente’s Essays on the Peripheries is impressive in its scope, engaging in its observations, and leavened by an ongoing energy of discovery. Whether you go full force and read it cover to cover, or choose specific essays, it will edify and stimulate.
There are several recurring themes in Valente’s essays, among them “art and reality, the ideal and the real”, which he addresses in detailed explications of seven of the prose poems from New York School poet Barbara Guest’s collection The Confetti Trees (Sun and Moon Press, 1999). Guest’s poems explore the Hollywood zeitgeist. This is fertile ground for Valente, also a filmmaker, who notes that in movies “feeling is exhibited through a physical motion, the subjective by a concrete action”. In Guest’s poem “The Tear”, a camera closeup of an actress’ tearful eye obliterates viewers’ earlier interest in the inherent drama of a hot, parched landscape with a swarm of bees on the horizon. Valente observes that “the camera ‘says’ it is no longer interested in the details of nature”; visual intimations of sadness have appeared and “the director is more interested in the subjective, romantic scenario.” The camera then focuses on the actress’ hesitant gesturing of her arm and “the scene is being revealed through implication and suggestion, a balance between what is seen and what remains unseen, where a ‘tear’ and the ‘hesitation’ of an arm reveal more about a subjective state than language ever could.”
Valente’s explications, in addition to presenting cogent observations about how Guest’s poems work, offer a mini-primer of sorts on the workings of film narrative. They bring to mind Joyce Jesionowski’s book “Thinking in Pictures: Dramatic Structure in D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Films” that offers shot-by-shot analyses of the director’s early films, which established many of cinema’s narrative conventions.
The essay “Sound as Thought” discusses the ‘70s–‘90s work of Clark Coolidge, another fairly well-recognized poet. His poetry during this period, which evinces a fascination with the materiality of language, is a keystone for experimental work published by many poets since his arrival on the scene. Coolidge’s work can be difficult, but Valente revels in its complexities and delivers clear-cut exegesis. “The poems achieve this condition of music, abstract and subjective, but not without meaning for the ear and mind,” he concludes. “… there is the sense of an immensity beyond the world of the senses, the edges of the poem drawing close to nothingness, to the rim of the unknowable …”. Interestingly, Valente delineates the difference between Coolidge and some of the poets he inspired, noting that, while Coolidge shares their sacrosanct avoidance of “I”, there is still a strong gnostic component in his work. “The light that weaves through the syllables heats them to a certain temperature which leads to illumination …’”.
In keeping with his book’s title, Valente also discusses some poets who are on the periphery of critical commentary. In “Politics and the Personal”, his essay on Tom Savage’s politically charged book Housing, Preservation, and Development, Valente notes that “discussions of poetry move hesitantly around politics . . . with academics, furthermore, often framing arguments for a privileged perspective and not from the level of the street.” Savage’s book is very much of the street and delineates an ‘80s East Village life lived on the edge – the AIDS crisis and the attendant discrimination and violence against homosexuals; unaffordable, squalid housing; landlords threatening to burn their buildings, clear out tenants, renovate, and charge higher rents. Lines from his poem “News Release” still sear. “Democracy and Capitalism are incompatible”. “The revolution happens in the way you treat one another; not in the sweet by-and-by.” “Professionalism is a pseudo-scientific delusion based on exploitation.”
Barbara Barg, another underappreciated poet, was also part of the fertile ‘80s downtown New York poetry scene. Her 1984 book Obeying the Chemicals, is an intense cri de coeur, a volatile mix of anger and vulnerability that rails against Capitalism, spiritual “truths” that denigrate fleshly pleasure, and the idea of immortality. In the long poem/rant “Fucking Bench”, a simple bench becomes a symbol for the very transitory succor offered in the big city before one must continue to battle for survival. “Oh fucking anxiety infecting my timid plans like ugly water spots on glasses/Shit!/ Will I not cease loving the flesh and being afraid of sufferings?/Thank fucking God I had on my shades or I couldn’t have sat/ On that fucking bench with tears rolling down my cheeks/And memory calling me home …” Valente neatly summarizes Barg’s message: “That’s Capitalism; real love doesn’t have a chance.”
“I sometimes think of The Cures for Love as the first ‘self-help’ book” Valente wryly notes in his essay on Ovid’s 2,000 year-old classic. The Cures for Love offers severe advice: avoid your lover, spy on him or her in the bathroom, have multiple love interests, and never be jealous. In other words, follow a roadmap designed to make you fall out of love! Throughout the essay, Valente intersperses his own versions, rather than strict translations, of Ovid, which include pitch-perfect anachronisms. The results render Ovid contemporary and immediate – completely appropriate, given the poems’ humorous, ironic, cynical, and satirical tone. Here’s a sampling: “… love is extremely contagious and in many cases the tumor is inoperable/The virus spreads like wildfire./He must avoid her if he wants to forget her:/ If the phone rings and it’s her don’t answer.”
One of the longer pieces in Essays on the Peripheries focuses on Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose art dramatically transitioned from the personal to the overtly political over the course of his 53 years. In his poems, feature films, and public pronouncements, Pasolini attacked what he called a “terrible existential void” that surfaced during the post-war period in Italy, which was marked by quick-pace industrialization, widespread consumerism, and, as he saw it, destruction of culture grounded in a tradition of myth and a sense of the sacred. The day before he died, Pasolini voiced a particularly acerbic opinion: “consumerism is a worse form of fascism than the classic variety”, and concluded that “I keep thinking we are all in danger.” Some believe his high-profile opposition ultimately resulted in his murder on a beach outside Rome on November 1, 1975.
Queer, anti-Church, expelled from the Italian Communist Party, contemptuous of the ruling Christian Democrats, Pasolini engaged the wrath of many sectors of Italian society and predicted the culture we move in today. As Valente puts it, “He exposed a vision that was contrary to the progressive ideals of the revolutionary or of the State . . . In our recent times we have witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center . . .the wars in the Middle East, the increasing sense that there is a wealthy class in league with corporate interests that maintains a false reality . . . It is the kind of world that Pasolini foresaw and warned us about.”
Valente’s Essays on the Peripheries is impressive in its scope, engaging in its observations, and leavened by an ongoing energy of discovery. Whether you go full force and read it cover to cover, or choose specific essays, it will edify and stimulate.