More pictures in the site of Djeloul Marbrook at : http://www.djelloulmarbrook.com/gallery/gerard-malanga-receives-first-poet-distinction-award-edna-st-vincent-millay-society
Submitted by Djelloul Marbrook on Sun, 03/02/2014 - 13:09:
For forty minutes last night, as sirens slashed the frigid silence
outside and painted the inside of an art gallery emergency red, the poet
Gerard Malanga read poems about eminent people he has known or studied—among
them Gabriel d’Annunzio, Valerie Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Gore
Vidal.
Malanga, as famous for his photography as his poetry, never gets in the
way of a poem. His readings are singular acts of faith in the work. The actor
Matthew McConaughey recently said in a similar vein that getting out of the way
of a script is crucial to him.
All recent, unpublished and never-before-read, the poems Malanga read at
McDaris Fine Art Gallery in Hudson, New York, are keenly observed encounters
with people, their natures and their intellects.
Malanga’s is a fond eye. Often he is more interested in the companions of the famous than the
famous. He is electrically aware of the circumstances and environs in which he
encounters them.
In one poem the novelist Saul Bellow wants to play softball and tries to
rouse the sleepy young Malanga. The poem, like many others, suggests Malanga's
filmmaker's eye. He remembers not only what people said, what they look like,
but how they moved. He remembers encountering, for example, the photographer
Diane Arbus in the library of The New York Times, and in a few lines
he gives us an Arbus nobody else has described quite so insightfully.
Describing William Burroughs, we get the writer's cranky whisper. It would have
come across in the words even if Malanga hadn't mimicked the sound.
Here are some of the other people we so memorably encountered last
night: Chris Marker, Emile de Antonio, Faith Frankenstein, Dorothea Lange,
Benedetta Barzini, a close friend of the poet, Jasper Johns,
Cornelius Gurlitt, René Gresham, and Jim Jacobs.
More than most poets, Malanga has spent a lifetime among fellow poets,
artists, filmmakers and photographers, and in his poems we encounter them
glowing with Malanga's love for them. That is a rare achievement in any art
form, redolent, say, of Johannes Vermeer's unmistakable feelings for The
Girl With the Pearl Earring.
It is a tribute to Malanga's personal style as well as his work
that the audience's response to his poems often consists of the silence of awe
and the sort of murmuring that denotes profound impact. Rather than break his
spell, the audience reserves its sustained applause for the end of his
readings. People who frequent poetry readings will recognize this as a rare
salute.
"Dad 3," a poem about vacationing with his father in the
Shawangunk Mountains of New York, gives us an early and excruciatingly intimate
glimpse of the astute observer Malanga would always be. But it gives us
something else, something that bends a brilliant spotlight back on his earlier
work. At some point he leaves his father and returns to a barn where he speaks
to the animals in a language he has now forgotten. But Malanga has never
fully forgotten that language, and it both informs and haunts his poems.
The Millay
Colony for the Arts and the Edna St. Vincent Millay
Society, which sponsored last night’s reading, could not have chosen a
more appropriate poet to receive its first Steepletop Poet of Distinction
Award. (Greg Vogler, a Millay trustee, is shown here making the
award). Malanga shares with Millay a clear voice, an undeterred eye,
and, perhaps most of all, a gift for setting up a vibration that rewires the
circuitry of a place and a time.
Steepletop is the name Millay and her husband Charles Frederick Ellis,
an artist and actor, gave their home in Austerlitz, New York, near Chatham. But
what makes the award even more relevant is that Millay Colony and the Edna St.
Vincent Millay Society share with Malanga a profound interest in other creative
people. The gift Millay Colony presented Malanga last night is as appropriate
as the award, a first edition of Millay’s What Quarry, Huntsman, 1933.
Malanga is a book dealer and rare book collector.
Reading from a portfolio on an antique suitcase, an inspiration of gallerist
Wendy McDaris (shown here arranging Malanga broadsheets), Malanga and his
overflow audience were surrounded by Millay
artifacts, photographs, china, Millay’s
typewriter, and first-edition books.
Malanga is the official poet of the Glasgow (UK) International Arts
Festival, April 4.
