Hovig Tchalian
“Between Decadence and the Alien:” Two New Publications by Peter Balakian
The phrase “between decadence and the alien” comes from “WARHOL/MAO ’72,” a poem by Armenian-American poet, critic and memoirist Peter Balakian. The 2015 poem appears in Ozone Journal, one of two new Balakian collections published by The University of Chicago Press. The other, entitled Vise and Shadow, gathers together essays on literature and culture Balakian wrote between 1988 and 2012.
The phrase nicely encapsulates the full range of preoccupations in Balakian’s work. As a memoirist fundamentally concerned with national and personal histories, Balakian has long been attuned to their “decadence” – the descent into war and factionalism, the loss of personal and moral ties, and the fracturing of modern consciousness that is a feeble witness to both. (It is hardly accidental that the titles of many of the poems in Ozone Journal, like “WARHOL/MAO ’72,” explicitly invoke a time or place, often both: “Pueblo, Christmas Dance;” “Hart Crane in LA, 1927;” “Leaving Aleppo.”) As a poet and critic deeply engaged with writing and language, Balakian has likewise been aware of their own peculiar “alienness” – the enormities of experience, the inadequacies of language, and the often quixotic search for authenticity that yokes them together.
In its most characteristic moments, Balakian’s poetry in Ozone Journal powerfully embodies what it is trying to represent. The poem “WARHOL/MAO ’72” acts, in effect, as an extended meditation on the vagaries of the “real” in modernity, fusing disparate fragments of consciousness together into an energetic, uneasy whole. It begins in New York, “at a party in a parlor looking out at the Hudson,” quickly flashing back to “some grainy footage / of Dien Bien Phu* in a hot black room, / where the scratched print showed the hills undulating, / bodies and parachutes disappearing in jungle grass,” then across to the image quoted here – “Between decadence and the alien / Mao was propped in yellow and rouge / with lipstick and eye shadow, / a real queen – part décor, part radical something / the American lexicon hadn’t filled in yet.”
The filmic shifts in perspective conjure the act of viewing the war footage while coming to rest on the visual spectacle of Mao. In doing so, the poem’s nervous energy propels it across time, space and consciousness – panning from the hills to the image, from 1954 (and 1972) to the present, and from Communist China to its absence in the American consciousness. In between, Balakian inserts the haunting image of grassy hills seemingly “undulating,” swallowing the soldiers descending from unseen skies. Later in the poem, when an American student puzzles over the whereabouts of Hanoi, a teacher responds stoically, “Every snake of land is someone’s history.” The image of the snake returns to the historical landscape, the biblical reference collapsing the spatial and temporal into personal experience, now tinged with moral import.
The sinuous landscape in “WARHOL/MAO ‘72” recalls images in Balakian’s earlier poetry, most notably the 2010 volume, Ziggurat. Ruminations in that earlier volume on the 9/11 attacks and their ancient origins also unearthed several snakes and serpents in the physical, historical and moral landscape. The volume’s sequel appears as the titular poem at the center of Ozone Journal. The poem takes an equally moral-historical perspective, weaving together the AIDS epidemic, Miles Davis and the jazz age, and the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century into extended reflections on personal and collective memory.
Here, the central trope of the hole in the ozone layer is introduced only briefly, almost midway through the poem – “’…a one-hour exposure to light that is similar / to the sun under the ozone hole is enough to completely stop all / photosynthetic activity of the plankton’;” and just below – “irascible, hardtacked, scarred, and varnished, / ozone: major factor making life on earth possible; / O3—allotropic, oxidizing, disinfectant, poisonous; / pale blue gas, sharp, irritating—ignited by UV rays.” The trope is then extended through various permutations of personal and collective loss. An early scene depicts the speaker visiting his AIDS-stricken cousin, presumably somewhere in Armenia:
Light comes diffuse out of itself over the Euphrates
From the hotel room veranda—irrigated farmland/yellow tint/
Veins running through furrows/snaking green patches--
and I see David’s eyes flat and glassy;
his voice through Xanax
was a silk kerchief through a ring--
memory was focus, detail, the thing--
The brief passage distills sensory experience into fleeting fragments of consciousness, a “detail” hidden here and there in “memory.” Balakian’s filmic sensibility is once again on display. The description starts with diffuse light from the window, shines it on another serpentine image in a furrowed field (now made emblematically human), reflects it grimly off of David’s pupils, somehow buries in in the aural image of the silk trough a napkin ring, finally allowing it to melt back into the haze of memory itself. The very next lines carry the reader to another memory still, of New York in the 1970s.
What Balakian manages so well in tense, intimate passages such as this one is slowly, imperceptibly condensing the panorama of history into a series of personal moments, no matter how fleeting – as the poem puts it, in one of its intermittent returns to the speaker’s search for his ancestral, post-genocidal home in the outskirts of Aleppo, “memory was someone’s history.” What the reader perceives in the process, gradually but unmistakably, is the cumulatively catastrophic impact of history on that memory, fracturing it into “images filtered through cracked glass,” reassembled by a consciousness perched uneasily between “decadence and the alien.”
While the poems in Ozone Journal speak for themselves, if enigmatically, the collection of essays, Vise and Shadow, tries to render those messages more explicit and intelligible. The best essays in the collection – “Poetry and Civilization: Primo Levi and Dante at Auschwitz,” the first in the collection; “Hart Crane’s Broken Tower;” and, to a lesser extent, “Writing Horizontal: Notes Toward the Poem as Space,” the concluding piece – are direct and forthright, less enigmatic but no less visceral than the poems in Ozone Journal. The concluding essay, in fact, ends by quoting extended passages from several of Balakian’s published poems.
The condensed, aphoristic expression in the poems find its expository equivalent in the opening essay’s frank, direct discussions of Primo Levi’s search for freedom in a Nazi concentration camp. The struggle to discover, assess and explore authenticity in the poems finds a satisfying parallel in questions regarding the significance and authenticity of Levi’s own encounters: Did he perhaps romanticize the episode of his brief, intense discussion of Dante with a camp clerk, Jean Samuel? (Answer: unlikely, according to Samuel’s corroborating recollection); could the ‘pre-modern’ Dante have envisioned the historical phenomenon of holocaust? (Answer: likely, if we read Levi, and Dante, carefully); What significance does Levi’s moment of “liberation” hold for the rest of us? (Answer: his “gymnastic paradox of seeming impossibility” is a fitting metaphor for the modernist entanglements probed in the poems).
Balakian makes a similarly strong case for the importance of Hart Crane’s experiments in the poetic form in “Hart Crane’s Broken Tower.” Mixing vivid biographical storytelling with searching commentary on several of Crane’s most important works, Balakian argues convincingly (if not uniquely) for Crane’s critical place in the canon of modern American poetry. Along the way, Balakian deftly weaves together episodes from Crane’s tragic life and untimely death into a powerful exploration of the antecedents of poetic creation. The essay is perhaps the most well-paced, controlled, eloquent piece in the collection.
Other essays in the collection can be less satisfying, more uneven. The unevenness in some may be due to the fact that they were written a decade or two ago, in different social and historical circumstances. “Ingesting Violence: The Poetry of Witness Problem,” for instance, argues for a modernist aesthetic that reflects the persistence of the “real,” beyond language. While now widely accepted, at least in psychoanalytic circles, the argument leads Balakian toward a privileging of modernism (Tennyson is embarrassingly pre-modern, Milosz reassuringly modern) that is now itself questionable. Other essays, like “Arshile Gorky: From the Armenian Genocide to the Avant-Garde” and “The Anatolian Embrace: Greeks and Armenians in Elia Kazan’s America, America,” while arguing convincingly and committedly against the silencing of historical references to the Genocide in well-known cultural productions, sometimes also protest a bit too much. Finally, Vise and Shadow succumbs on occasion to the risks of all such collections – discordant notes overwhelming constructive parallels across various essays. The powerful arguments about poetry’s fruitful efforts at self-transcendence in “Poetry as Civilization,” for instance, devolve in the following essay, “The Poem as History,” into sometimes conflicting definitions of poetry (a privileged medium? a victim of modernity?) and discordant arguments about its unique position (all poetry? only the modernist variety?) in history and culture, yielding sometimes simplistic oppositions like the ones in “Ingesting Violence” (Shelley’s “bald diatribe” contrasted with Yeats’s “ambitious poems”).
Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Vise and Shadow stands as an important contribution to the ongoing dialog about culture, modernity, and memory. As Balakian explains in his preface, the “vise” and “shadow” in the title refer to what he sees as two aspects of the “lyric (literary and visual) imagination.” “Vise” suggests the ability of the imagination to extract meaning from history by condensing it, “as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond.” “Shadow” suggests the imagination’s ability to comment on historical reality, to capture “the aftermath of history, and when its shadow-light expands” on the ground in late day (in a suggestive reversal of a Platonic image), the light lessens but the insight deepens.” Like the poems in Ozone Journal, then, the essays in Vise and Shadow are framed by questions of language, memory and collective loss. As a whole, Vise and Shadow is also entirely in line with Balakian’s admirable mission, to render history a witness to itself, to infuse both “decadence and the alien” with something more recognizably human.
*Site of a French defeat that became a precursor to the Vietnam War.
The phrase nicely encapsulates the full range of preoccupations in Balakian’s work. As a memoirist fundamentally concerned with national and personal histories, Balakian has long been attuned to their “decadence” – the descent into war and factionalism, the loss of personal and moral ties, and the fracturing of modern consciousness that is a feeble witness to both. (It is hardly accidental that the titles of many of the poems in Ozone Journal, like “WARHOL/MAO ’72,” explicitly invoke a time or place, often both: “Pueblo, Christmas Dance;” “Hart Crane in LA, 1927;” “Leaving Aleppo.”) As a poet and critic deeply engaged with writing and language, Balakian has likewise been aware of their own peculiar “alienness” – the enormities of experience, the inadequacies of language, and the often quixotic search for authenticity that yokes them together.
In its most characteristic moments, Balakian’s poetry in Ozone Journal powerfully embodies what it is trying to represent. The poem “WARHOL/MAO ’72” acts, in effect, as an extended meditation on the vagaries of the “real” in modernity, fusing disparate fragments of consciousness together into an energetic, uneasy whole. It begins in New York, “at a party in a parlor looking out at the Hudson,” quickly flashing back to “some grainy footage / of Dien Bien Phu* in a hot black room, / where the scratched print showed the hills undulating, / bodies and parachutes disappearing in jungle grass,” then across to the image quoted here – “Between decadence and the alien / Mao was propped in yellow and rouge / with lipstick and eye shadow, / a real queen – part décor, part radical something / the American lexicon hadn’t filled in yet.”
The filmic shifts in perspective conjure the act of viewing the war footage while coming to rest on the visual spectacle of Mao. In doing so, the poem’s nervous energy propels it across time, space and consciousness – panning from the hills to the image, from 1954 (and 1972) to the present, and from Communist China to its absence in the American consciousness. In between, Balakian inserts the haunting image of grassy hills seemingly “undulating,” swallowing the soldiers descending from unseen skies. Later in the poem, when an American student puzzles over the whereabouts of Hanoi, a teacher responds stoically, “Every snake of land is someone’s history.” The image of the snake returns to the historical landscape, the biblical reference collapsing the spatial and temporal into personal experience, now tinged with moral import.
The sinuous landscape in “WARHOL/MAO ‘72” recalls images in Balakian’s earlier poetry, most notably the 2010 volume, Ziggurat. Ruminations in that earlier volume on the 9/11 attacks and their ancient origins also unearthed several snakes and serpents in the physical, historical and moral landscape. The volume’s sequel appears as the titular poem at the center of Ozone Journal. The poem takes an equally moral-historical perspective, weaving together the AIDS epidemic, Miles Davis and the jazz age, and the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century into extended reflections on personal and collective memory.
Here, the central trope of the hole in the ozone layer is introduced only briefly, almost midway through the poem – “’…a one-hour exposure to light that is similar / to the sun under the ozone hole is enough to completely stop all / photosynthetic activity of the plankton’;” and just below – “irascible, hardtacked, scarred, and varnished, / ozone: major factor making life on earth possible; / O3—allotropic, oxidizing, disinfectant, poisonous; / pale blue gas, sharp, irritating—ignited by UV rays.” The trope is then extended through various permutations of personal and collective loss. An early scene depicts the speaker visiting his AIDS-stricken cousin, presumably somewhere in Armenia:
Light comes diffuse out of itself over the Euphrates
From the hotel room veranda—irrigated farmland/yellow tint/
Veins running through furrows/snaking green patches--
and I see David’s eyes flat and glassy;
his voice through Xanax
was a silk kerchief through a ring--
memory was focus, detail, the thing--
The brief passage distills sensory experience into fleeting fragments of consciousness, a “detail” hidden here and there in “memory.” Balakian’s filmic sensibility is once again on display. The description starts with diffuse light from the window, shines it on another serpentine image in a furrowed field (now made emblematically human), reflects it grimly off of David’s pupils, somehow buries in in the aural image of the silk trough a napkin ring, finally allowing it to melt back into the haze of memory itself. The very next lines carry the reader to another memory still, of New York in the 1970s.
What Balakian manages so well in tense, intimate passages such as this one is slowly, imperceptibly condensing the panorama of history into a series of personal moments, no matter how fleeting – as the poem puts it, in one of its intermittent returns to the speaker’s search for his ancestral, post-genocidal home in the outskirts of Aleppo, “memory was someone’s history.” What the reader perceives in the process, gradually but unmistakably, is the cumulatively catastrophic impact of history on that memory, fracturing it into “images filtered through cracked glass,” reassembled by a consciousness perched uneasily between “decadence and the alien.”
While the poems in Ozone Journal speak for themselves, if enigmatically, the collection of essays, Vise and Shadow, tries to render those messages more explicit and intelligible. The best essays in the collection – “Poetry and Civilization: Primo Levi and Dante at Auschwitz,” the first in the collection; “Hart Crane’s Broken Tower;” and, to a lesser extent, “Writing Horizontal: Notes Toward the Poem as Space,” the concluding piece – are direct and forthright, less enigmatic but no less visceral than the poems in Ozone Journal. The concluding essay, in fact, ends by quoting extended passages from several of Balakian’s published poems.
The condensed, aphoristic expression in the poems find its expository equivalent in the opening essay’s frank, direct discussions of Primo Levi’s search for freedom in a Nazi concentration camp. The struggle to discover, assess and explore authenticity in the poems finds a satisfying parallel in questions regarding the significance and authenticity of Levi’s own encounters: Did he perhaps romanticize the episode of his brief, intense discussion of Dante with a camp clerk, Jean Samuel? (Answer: unlikely, according to Samuel’s corroborating recollection); could the ‘pre-modern’ Dante have envisioned the historical phenomenon of holocaust? (Answer: likely, if we read Levi, and Dante, carefully); What significance does Levi’s moment of “liberation” hold for the rest of us? (Answer: his “gymnastic paradox of seeming impossibility” is a fitting metaphor for the modernist entanglements probed in the poems).
Balakian makes a similarly strong case for the importance of Hart Crane’s experiments in the poetic form in “Hart Crane’s Broken Tower.” Mixing vivid biographical storytelling with searching commentary on several of Crane’s most important works, Balakian argues convincingly (if not uniquely) for Crane’s critical place in the canon of modern American poetry. Along the way, Balakian deftly weaves together episodes from Crane’s tragic life and untimely death into a powerful exploration of the antecedents of poetic creation. The essay is perhaps the most well-paced, controlled, eloquent piece in the collection.
Other essays in the collection can be less satisfying, more uneven. The unevenness in some may be due to the fact that they were written a decade or two ago, in different social and historical circumstances. “Ingesting Violence: The Poetry of Witness Problem,” for instance, argues for a modernist aesthetic that reflects the persistence of the “real,” beyond language. While now widely accepted, at least in psychoanalytic circles, the argument leads Balakian toward a privileging of modernism (Tennyson is embarrassingly pre-modern, Milosz reassuringly modern) that is now itself questionable. Other essays, like “Arshile Gorky: From the Armenian Genocide to the Avant-Garde” and “The Anatolian Embrace: Greeks and Armenians in Elia Kazan’s America, America,” while arguing convincingly and committedly against the silencing of historical references to the Genocide in well-known cultural productions, sometimes also protest a bit too much. Finally, Vise and Shadow succumbs on occasion to the risks of all such collections – discordant notes overwhelming constructive parallels across various essays. The powerful arguments about poetry’s fruitful efforts at self-transcendence in “Poetry as Civilization,” for instance, devolve in the following essay, “The Poem as History,” into sometimes conflicting definitions of poetry (a privileged medium? a victim of modernity?) and discordant arguments about its unique position (all poetry? only the modernist variety?) in history and culture, yielding sometimes simplistic oppositions like the ones in “Ingesting Violence” (Shelley’s “bald diatribe” contrasted with Yeats’s “ambitious poems”).
Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Vise and Shadow stands as an important contribution to the ongoing dialog about culture, modernity, and memory. As Balakian explains in his preface, the “vise” and “shadow” in the title refer to what he sees as two aspects of the “lyric (literary and visual) imagination.” “Vise” suggests the ability of the imagination to extract meaning from history by condensing it, “as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond.” “Shadow” suggests the imagination’s ability to comment on historical reality, to capture “the aftermath of history, and when its shadow-light expands” on the ground in late day (in a suggestive reversal of a Platonic image), the light lessens but the insight deepens.” Like the poems in Ozone Journal, then, the essays in Vise and Shadow are framed by questions of language, memory and collective loss. As a whole, Vise and Shadow is also entirely in line with Balakian’s admirable mission, to render history a witness to itself, to infuse both “decadence and the alien” with something more recognizably human.
*Site of a French defeat that became a precursor to the Vietnam War.