CREPUSCULE WITH PAULA
Does realism get your vote? It gets mine.
The plants with their insatiable thirst for appearances,
the heart-stopping 7:00 p.m. air moonlighting as a pressed-
cardboard Korean ashtray
(server, modest coaster) decorated with a single blondish branch
holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit (pear,
plum, ripe peach)
slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind
flecked with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying
size
from pinpricks to ashes, pencil (it looks like) to brush.
The romance of the window panes (I’m squinting a little) has
nothing
to do with the misguided view, the one with the Fates schmoozing
under the maroon awning of the high-rise (schmoos is more like
it)
and the embarrassed-looking sycamores revealing for all they’re
worth
in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way,
which contributes to the overall tone
without detracting from the realistic participation,
a motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst
that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it,
which could be the key signature if not for a free-standing
radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.
-Charles North
(EVERYTHING and Other Poems, 2019)
Charles North’s first, self-published, poetry collection, Lineups, was featured in two New York Post sports columns. He has published 20 books of poems, essays, and collaborations with artists, reviewed for Art in America, and served as Poet-in-Residence at Pace University NYC. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet-painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight (2001) was a finalist for the inaugural Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award, What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and Everything and Other Poems (2020) was a New York Times New and Noteworthy Book. Among his awards are two NEA Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, a Poets Foundation Award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Five): Charles North
Charles North’s lyric of controversy, “Crepuscule with Paula,” explodes the romanticism of its title in its first line: “Does realism get your vote? It gets mine.” The poem is named for—and thus is ekphrastic of—a composition by Thelonious Monk in which the contenders are beauty and cacophony, the off-handed and the sublime.
This poem is out for blood: to let two worlds duke it out via whatever is at hand, which is in this case “the heart-stopping 7:00 p.m. air moonlighting as a pressed- / cardboard Korean ashtray.” Among other things, this statement reminds us that everything we see is a collaboration between materials and the light that hits them. (A curious idiom, that.)
The plants’ “insatiable thirst for appearances” references both their need for water and their need to present to the sun. It’s why wildflowers arrange themselves in bouquets–each flower head gets exposure. The ashtray can be multi-purposed “(server, modest coaster)”—the “modest” slyly humorous—can there be an “immodest” coaster?
North’s description of the object—humorously thorough—takes on the careful, hesitant rhythm of artistic creation:
decorated with a single blondish branch
holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit (pear,
plum, ripe peach)
slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind
flecked with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying
size
from pinpricks to ashes, pencil (it looks like) to brush.
The careful approximation of North’s description, supplying alternative “rose-colored” fruits and including even a suggestion of relief (“slightly raised as if applied”) ; his verb, “flecked,” embodying quick strokes, his color designations both accurate and modest—especially “brown marks of varying / size / from pinpricks to ashes” resemble and reenact the artist’s care with his own ashtray creation. The insertion of the tentative “(it looks like)” reminds us, again modestly, that the poem is guessing. This ‘guessingness’ is essential. It allows the lines to float free of what they describe, giving room for doubt, as in James Schuyler’s masterful “Korean Mums,” which ends with his one certainty, their name—a certainty that will “one day” vanish.
. . . what
is there I have not forgot?
Or one day will forget:
this garden, the breeze
in stillness, even
the words, Korean mums.
Without preamble, North’s poem moves outward—to “the romance of the window panes” undercut by “squinting” and irrelevance: “has // nothing // to do with the misguided view” (is not every city a concatenation of these?).
With an incongruity worthy of Monty Python, the fates appear, comically “smoozing” / under the maroon awning of the high-rise (schmoos is more like // it //) and the poem’s archness, its high-handedness, its Monkian clatter intensifies:
and the embarrassed-looking sycamores revealing for all they’re
worth
in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way,
which contributes to the overall tone
without detracting from the realistic participation,
The orphaned words—the ones that hang like ledges—not only emphasize a tentativeness but also a brittleness that spreads from the depiction to the thing depicted. The poem seems to scramble here, with willed awkwardness, to piece together its romanticism and realism, through a process of digging and filling: “slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate,” “without detracting from the realistic participation” that includes
a motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst
that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it,
which could be the key signature if not for a free-standing
radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.
The poem’s final movement is given over to the chaotic, phenomenal urban world, with the luck of a savvy cat we can hope to emulate as a “key signature”—a locus of meaning, a codification of tone—“if not for a free-standing / radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.” How terrific that “radiance” is not a ledge word, that it washes over the words that follow, that denote closeness and freedom and nuance but are secured in place, tentatively, by the felt accuracy of “hint of plum or Anjou pear.” Charles North’s entrancing and enlivening poem leaves us a in a realm of romantic realism and/or realistic romance. Not only is it unnecessary to choose, but each choice gives way in the face of new ones. We are left in uncertainty, where we belong. It is, after all, the home of luck. – Angela Ball
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Author: Angela Ball
