reality is so unreal;
it's like an elevator
going no-where...
- Chickee Baby

This short beat poem from Pee-Wee's Playhouse deals, in some senses, with the problem of the nature of reality and human dignity posited by the characters in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the idea that Shakespeare and Camus wrestled with that we may just be taking up space and inventing our own worth.

The quandry of the shifting nature of reality, of change, death, impermanence is not new; it was a favorite subject of Edmund Spenser, who wrote his "Mutability Cantos" hundreds of years ago.

Likewise, Modern poetry may not mean new, but if we're lucky, the three poets we're looking at this week can get us out of the mess that Pirandello left us in a few weeks ago.

Read and compare Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (2292), Akhmatova's prose opening to her "Requiem" (2346), and part IV ("Absent Soul") of Lorca's "Lament" (2431).

Unlike the father in Six Characters... who asserts that a fictional character has more reality than a living human because the character is fixed and changeless while the human follows whims and fancy, thinks this way today and that way tomorrow, ages and dies, the three poets acknowledge history, growth, change as a central fact of the real world. The statue is now limbless and headless, the revolution has changed the very fabric of Russian society, and the proud bullfighter is dead. What the artist does is capture (in words/images) histories, symbols, representations that remind us of collective human experience that transcends single fixed moments; they stand for every instance of the rise and fall of fortunes, loves, lives, etc.

Nobody knows you. NO. But I sing of you.
For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the signal maturity of your understanding.
Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.
Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety. (Lorca 2431-2)

The matador has gone; the memory is kept alive in the poem.

The technical forms used by the three poets are not new. The Petrarchan sonnet, the Russian folk form, Spanish ballad--all are traditional structures. Some of the content, however, is new.

I like to think of Rilke as the Big Bang Poet. His works explode outward. More of a symbolist poet than his predecessor Baudelaire, some of Rilke's "thing poems" derive order from observed fragments. The narrator discovers (or at least imagines) a whole by observing a part; in much the same way an astronomer/physicist observing red and blue shift leads us from the singularity to an expanding universe.

The opening of his "Archaic Torso of Apollo" draws the unseen out of the seen: "We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit" (Rilke 2292). We cannot know it, but Rilke describes it in a rich metaphor. The constant references to light: "brilliance," "lamp," "gleams," "dazzle," "burst like a star" transform dead stone to a sensuous, image that enlivens anyone willing to look closely, with fresh eyes, beyond the surface of the statue fragment. The final admonition: "You must change your life" (Rilke 2293) encourages enlightenment, a change of vision, looking beyond traditional surface reality.

Akhmatova represents the poet as social conscience. Like Rilke, she uses the particular to represent the whole--a single concrete experience represents the cycles of human history.

Following Stalin's rise to power, Russians suspected of disloyalty or of certain political, economic, ethnic backgrounds were routinely rounded up. Some were imprisioned, many killed. The queues of friends families waiting to hear any news of their loved ones were long, and the absence of any information frustrating. Akhmatova's Requiem is a series of short poems which reveal the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance which the individual goes through facing death or other tragedies. Some of the poems are simple impressions of life before, during, after the horrors.

"Prologue" (2), for example, paints a grim scene matter-of-factly against an unfeeling background:

Gently flows the gentle Don,
Yellow moonlight leaps the sill,

Leaps the sill and stops aston-
ished as it sees the shade

Of a woman lying ill,
Of a woman stretched alone,

Son in irons and husband clay.
Pray. Pray. (Akhmatova 2348)

The religious imagery (the Russian Orthodox Church was suppressed by the communist government) piles up, and in "Crucifixion" we look more closely at the grief of those left behind:

Magdalina beat her breast and wept, while
The loved disciple seemed hammered out of stone.
But, for the Mother, where she stood in silence,--
No one as much as dared to look that way. (Akhmatova 2351)

Her concentration on the powerless, the innocent is the mainstay of contemporary protest poetry and folk music. It is simple and elegant poetry of the people, not the highly-artificed, esoteric, academic, "pretty" poetry often considered "serious" poetry.

Lorca is somewhere between naturalist and surrealist. His fascination with death in all its graphic, clinical detail is revealed in his culture's song tradition. The bullfight is the ultimate portrait of ritual struggle between humans and nature. The struggle is heroic, cheered on by the crowd. But death is, inveitably, the last ritual that all must participate in; even the great and powerful are brought to dust. The first section is punctuated by the incantatory "at five in the afternoon" which reminds the reader of a death knell or a dirge. In spots the images are graphic, realistic:

In the distance the gangrene now comes...
Horn of the lily through green groins...
The wounds were burning like suns...
and the crowd was breaking the windows (Lorca 2426-7)
In others they are almost surreal as we imagine the grasses weaving elegantly through the

bones of the dead man or the triumph of the bull:

The cow of the ancient world
passed her sad tongue
over a snout of blood
spilled on the sand
and the bulls of Guisando,
partly death and partly stone,
bellowed like two centuries
sated with treading the earth.
No. (Lorca 2427)

Lorca mixes the raw earthiness of life, the violence of nature, with the nobility of a life lived to the fullest:

It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born
an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure.
I sing of his elegance with words that groan,
and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees. (Lorca 2432)

The mix is complex; the graphic description is modern while the musicality of the piece is steeped in centuries of folk tradition.