Poem of the week: The Snow-Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson
This time, an American Romantic who deserves to be much better-known
This week's poem, "The Snow-Storm" by the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, aspires not only to rugged grandeur but to irony. Emerson knew the English Romantic poets, and I think quite possibly "The Snow-Storm" is a response to Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight". "Tumultuous privacy of storm" and "the frolic architecture of the snow" carry an almost parodic echo of Coleridge's "secret ministry of frost."
Emerson's poem, for all the sturdy authority of its blank verse, relishes the snow-storm's gothic abandon, its subversive, "savage" disregard for "number or proportion". Nineteenth-century American poets were determined to create a body of literature distinct from that of Europe, and there's a suggestion that the primitive snow-storm could invent shapes at least as interesting as the "slow structures" of deliberate artistry. Conversely, the human architect might, in terms of geological time, amount to no more than a snow-flurry.
The first stanza is stately, smooth-flowing and picturesque, the faintly Biblical touches reminding us that, before rebelling against organised religion, Emerson had been a minister. The snow has an apocalyptic quality in that it blurs the usual life-or-death distinctions. Movement is halted. Boundaries are blotted out – even the boundary between earth and heaven. The scene then shifts to a friendlier indoors, where that unexpected word "radiance" emphasises the vivid contrast with the lightless landscape. Again, a scriptural note is struck, and the old-fashioned fire, or glowing stove, seems to burn with an almost sacred incandescence.
And then, it's as if, in the white space between stanzas, the speaker had ventured outside. The shortened opening line of the second stanza increases the dramatic effect, the immediacy, of the summons, "Come see …" And the subsequent description convinces us there is something worth seeing.
The "fierce artificer", the snow-storm, has carried out an entire building-project, from the quarrying of the tiles to the decorative marble drapes of the "Parian wreaths". It's only when he comes to the end of this extended conceit that Emerson seems to struggle. "Retiring" must be the subject of "leaves" but it's hardly obvious. The qualification, "as he were not", is confusing, to say the least. Clearly, the poet is still talking about the snow-storm. Perhaps he wants to convey that winter is far from over, and the snow's retirement merely apparent, and temporary.
But I still like the poem, and have no objection to a little puzzlement. Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance is partially carried over into his poetic technique. His diction here is mainly down-to-earth, with a dash of medieval ("steed", "maugre"). The syntax, like his treatment of conventional forms and meters, dimly aspires to a more organic shape, although he stops short of real innovation. He recognised it when he saw it, though, and when Walt Whitman sent him a copy of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Emerson wrote back an exalted fan-letter: "I give you joy of your free and brave thought …"
Emerson and Thoreau, though important thinkers and writers, were not great poets, but it's a pity that their work is not better known in Britain. They have as much claim as the Romantics to be the ancestors of today's eco-poets and nature writers. The current obsession with rivers, rain and water among British poets, for instance, surely has a source in Emersonian metaphor.
And it's not only the poets who echo the Transcendentalists. For many people, the natural world has become the focus of morality. We sense our obligation to nature also in terms of an obligation to ourselves to become more "natural". Emerson was prophetic when he said, "Civilised man has invented the coach, but lost the use of his feet" and, less cheerily, "The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation."
The Snow-Storm
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The steed and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
As with so much else—England, foreign countries, children, grownup people, a great deal of literature, and a great deal of life—Philip Larkin didn’t care for poetry readings. Listening to poetry read aloud, complained Larkin, one never knows how far away the ending is; all sense of stanzaic form disappears; and this is to say nothing of all the tiny misunderstandings that chip away at our ability to concentrate, the “theirs” being taken for “there’s.” I don’t much like poetry readings either, and I would add to Larkin’s list of grievances the fact that most people aren’t very good at reading poetry aloud.
The greatest offense is usually simply that of reading a poem as though it were a poem, in a boomingly uniform incantation that obscures nuance and texture. Fortunately, there were few such performances on display on Tuesday night at the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, where the Poetry Society of America had organized a tribute to Philip Larkin, England’s greatest post-Second World War poet, to coincide with the publication of “Complete Poems,” a clear improvement on the earlier editions, which includes each of Larkin’s collections in their original order, along with a section of uncollected and previously unpublished work, and a staggeringly thorough commentary. Like the clientele of a hyper-exclusive café, the evening’s readers—James Fenton, Saskia Hamilton, Mary Karr, Nick Laird, Katha Pollitt, Paul Simon, and Zadie Smith among them—sat in threes around small tables up on stage and took turns approaching the lectern to read a Larkin poem of choice.
Philip Larkin
Deborah Garrison got some laughs for her brilliantly plain and unobtrusive reading of “Poetry of Departures” (“So to hear it said / He walked out on the whole crowd / Leaves me flushed and stirred, / Like Then she undid her dress / Or Take that you bastard”), while Andrew Sullivan’s rendition of “The Whitsun Weddings” was bracingly alive to the poem’s atmosphere of gathering mystery and power.
To mix things up—and Larkin was all for variety (he said he always put a lot of thought into the order of poems in a collection: “I treat them like a music-hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls”)—the floor was intermittently ceded to the Queens College Louis Armstrong Ensemble, who played several of Larkin’s favorite Sidney Bechet numbers. (The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik did a fine job with Larkin’s poem to Bechet, where he exclaims, “On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous Yes.”)
Many of Larkin’s best poems follow the same structure. First, the poet is arrested by something seemingly mundane—an invitation to a party, the sight of a young couple passing in the street—and begins to turn it over in his mind. As the poem gathers steam, these meditations take on a metaphysical cast and are expressed in an increasingly lavish diction. Then, almost bashfully, Larkin seems to overhear himself and to reject conventional poetic speech and sentiment in favor of a more grounded, clear-eyed vision of the world, one that his experience has verified.
Philip Larkin
“Sad Steps” is probably my favorite Larkin poem, and it is also one of his most characteristic. The poem’s modulations—grogginess (“Groping back to bed after a piss”), quickened thought (“There’s something laughable about this”), a somewhat confected awe (“Lozenge of love!”), self-correction (“No”), and final clarity—were expertly captured by J. D. McClatchy, who spoke the lines as though they were only at that moment occurring to him, and thereby restored to them a welcome freshness and spontaneity:
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
Zadie Smith’s voice, which is at once musical and strangely affectless, was well suited to “The Old Fools,” with its brutal catalogue of uncomprehending questions. Many of the people in the audience looked to be the wrong side of eighty, and there was an almost unbearable tension in the hall as Smith asked, matter-of-factly,
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning?
What saves the poem—and saved the reading—from seeming merely hectoring is the last line, when Larkin, having taken in the grotesque spectacle of old age, as it were, turns the camera on himself (and by extension, all of us who are not yet old). Smith spoke the last five words unimprovably, with just the right tone of grim anticipation:
Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
The audience chuckled and gasped simultaneously. There was no question about it: Larkin had come through.
The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs by Richard Bradford – review
Philip Larkin’s astute pictures make a tantalising companion to his verse Sean O'Hagan Sunday 15 November 2015
I
n October 1947, Philip Larkin wrote to his friend Jim Sutton about a recent “act of madness” – he had spent £7 on a camera. The British-made Purma Special had cost him more than a week’s wages, but it was state of the art compared with his previous model, a box camera that had been given to him by his father in 1937, when Larkin was 15.
“I am so far awaiting my first roll of results,” Larkin told Sutton in the same letter. “If they are bad, I shall feel I have been rather a fool.”
The results were in fact good, despite the fact that the Purma was, as Larkin put it, “a ‘fast’ camera, that is, best suited to swift scenes in bright sun” and: “I like poor light the best and I don’t think it will do any good in that line.” It seems somehow apt that Larkin, who once said “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth”, should be drawn aesthetically to “poor light” – all the better to see some essence of England by, perhaps? Larkin later graduated to the altogether more classic Rolleiflex, on which he made many of his pensive self-portraits. Throughout, his visual style, like his poetic one, tended towards what the literary critic John Bayley called “a glum accuracy about places and emotions”… and people.
The photographs collected chronologically in The Importance of Elsewhere are culled from some 5,000 prints and negatives in the archives of the Hull History Centre. They are not, in the main, groundbreaking. They do, though, trace Larkin’s progress from an amateur enthusiast to a formally astute photographer with a keen eye for composition, whether making portraits of his friends, family, lovers and coterie of literary friends or casting his cold eye over the English countryside. There are moments of peculiar beauty here, mostly to do with his cool observation of English vernacular architecture: an austere Wesleyan chapel in East Yorkshire caught in stark monochrome; tall obelisks casting long shadows in a country graveyard in Oban.
Philip Larkin
The most Larkinesque series, apart from the many studied self-portraits, centres on the names of Yorkshire villages – Laxton, Faxfleet, Kiplin, Yokefleet. The poetry of place names, familiar from his verse, is here rendered in stark black and white, the silhouettes of buildings looming in the background behind these functional, yet lyrical, signs that nestle on well-tended grassy verges.
Of Larkin’s lovers, Ruth Bowman, Monica Jones, Patsy Strang and Maeve Brennan are each given a chapter, but it is Monica who emerges most strongly as a forceful presence in his portraits. Whether staring down the lens while curled up on an armchair, wearing horn-rims, jumper and vertically striped tights, or gazing in profile out of the window of her flat in Leicester in the early 1960s, she seems utterly at ease before Larkin’s camera. In contrast, there is a striking portrait of Maeve Brennan, looking up from a book, melancholy and almost Victorian in a high-necked, long-sleeved dress. It was taken shortly after they had agreed to end their relationship and seems to carry all the weight of that decision in its sombreness.
Philip Larkin
Larkin also photographed the world around him wherever he went: his chum, Kingsley Amis, at Oxford and beyond, portraits of friends who had been conscripted during the second world war, Orange marches in Belfast in the early 50s, shipyard cranes and shopfronts in Hull a few years later. Here and there, the images and the poems seem to chime: a vibrant street scene in Dublin captures a crowd of children and adults watching a passing parade or funeral. Only one young girl stares suspiciously at Larkin’s camera and you can almost see him though her eyes, a nerdish outsider observing. One wonders if the image was echoed in his late poem, Dublinesque, in which he described how “Down stucco sidestreets,/ Where light is pewter/ And afternoon mist/ Brings lights on in shops/ Above race-guides and rosaries,/ A funeral passes”.
A fascinating and tantalising book, then, and one that sheds light on a great poet and tricky human being, who seems to have found, in photography, another altogether less fretful – and perhaps kinder – way of preserving what he experienced.
Monica Jones in Larkin's bedrom in Hull
England, 1957
Philip Larkin’s Life Behind the Camera
By Lev Mendes
January 29, 2016
In the late summer of 1947, Philip Larkin, a few years removed from university and eking out a living as an assistant librarian, bought himself a camera—a British-made Purma Special. In a letter to a friend, he characterized the purchase as an “act of madness”—it had cost him more than a week’s salary—but the camera seemed to open up fresh possibilities. “There are dozens of worthy compositions knocking around,” he wrote. “It’s a question of realizing what is good even in black and white.” Larkin, at this point, had been taking pictures for nearly a decade, starting out with a box camera given to him by his father and honing his skills as an undergraduate at Oxford, during the Second World War, where he would amble around the deserted campus photographing his contemporaries.
It was a hobby that Larkin would maintain for the next three decades. Eventually, he replaced the Purma with an even costlier Rolleiflex Automat, which he used to shoot a series of self-portraits. Several document his morning routine (shaving, breakfasting, dressing), while others show him looking pensive and quietly dignified. To capture a desired expression, Larkin would position a mirror behind the mounted Rolleiflex, taking advantage of its self-timer. After printing the portraits, he would often crop them for compositional effect, as he did with the other images he created over the years: studies of family members, friends, and romantic partners; elegiac depictions of the English countryside; and an urban pastoral of churches, interiors, railway stations, and cemeteries.
A graveyard in Oban, Scotland, late nineteen-sixties.
Some two hundred of these photographs, selected from five thousand prints and negatives, have now been assembled for the first time, in a beautifully produced book, “The Importance of Elsewhere,” which was released in the fall by the British imprint Frances Lincoln. Accompanied by commentary from one of Larkin’s biographers, Richard Bradford, the photographs display the full range of his poetic sensibility, from the melancholic to the comical. There is a death-haunted image of his aging mother, silhouetted against the light from a nearby window, and a bitingly funny one of the miserably married Kingsley and Hilly Amis, standing in front of a newspaper headline that reads, in bold lettering, “BIG FIGHT.” There is also a black-and-white shot of the young Monica Jones, Larkin’s lifelong paramour, leaning sensually against his bed (one of many portraits he made of her over the years), and a color image of a country graveyard, the obelisks like giant chessmen casting long shadows.
Monica Jones in Larkin’s room in Belfast, c. 1952.
In their sociability, tenderness, and sweep, the photographs complicate the caricature of Larkin as England’s laureate of despair, squeezing out lines between shifts as a university librarian: “Life is first boredom, then fear”; “Nothing contravenes the coming dark.” Rather than a poet committed to monkish isolation and routine, Larkin the photographer appears as an eager traveller through Britain and Ireland, with Jones often in tow. Bradford makes a point of noting that Larkin kept these travels, and the photographs they inspired, a secret from pen pals like Kingsley Amis, for whom he reserved obscenity-filled reports of his own bitterness and alienation—his wide-eyed curiosity replaced by an ironic sneer.
Hilly and Kingsley Amis, c. 1958.
In underscoring Larkin’s hidden side—kinder, softer, more receptive and intimate—Bradford’s notes in “The Importance of Elsewhere” seem to follow in the footsteps of James Booth, whose 2014 biography, “Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love,” attempted to counter the poet’s posthumous reputation as a bigot and boor. True, Booth argued, Larkin’s correspondence disclosed instances of racism, misogyny, and reactionary shallowness, but this was only one face of the self-contradictory, many-minded poet. Bradford, in his turn, quotes one of Larkin’s unpublished poems, addressed to Amis, in which he distinguishes, in photographic terms, between his own love interests and those of his philandering friend: “Only cameras memorise her face, her clothes would never hang among your interests.”
What drew Larkin to take pictures? Given his investment in the medium, there is curiously little mention of the subject in his published verse, essays, or letters. We’re left, for the most part, to speculate. Perhaps photography offered the poet an escape from the pressures of verbal composition, providing him with a way of taking in reality more directly, via image instead of language. Or perhaps it availed him of a private universe of references, one he didn’t necessarily wish to share with others. Bradford describes how Larkin tried to “build a world of his own, one he kept largely to himself.” Just as he held friends like Amis at a certain remove—presenting a view of himself tailored to their sensibilities—Larkin fashioned his own separate reality, observing and framing it from behind a lens.
Larkin’s 1953 poem “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” supplies another shred of insight. The poem describes a man looking at photographs of his lover, and alternates between tones of artful seduction and distressed accusations against photography itself: “But o, photography! as no art is, / faithful and disappointing!” Photographs, Larkin suggests, by faithfully recording the past, convince us that it was real, like the present. But this feeling in turn provokes heartbreak, as we are forced to confront a reality “no one now can share,” from which we have been tragically cut off. The images in the young woman’s album, Larkin writes, are
In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.
This awareness of loss and separation, of the irrecoverable pastness of the past, is what compelled Larkin to write poetry. As he put it, in a 1958 radio interview with the BBC, poems preserve “a particular kind of experience, a feeling that you are the only one to have noticed something, something especially beautiful or sad or significant.” Photography, like poetry, may have simply provided him a way of noticing and preserving. It seems fitting, then, that in the late nineteen-seventies, when the muse of poetry abandoned Larkin, several years before his death, he ceased taking pictures as well.
Shahrzaad’s Tale is a film about Kobra Amin-Sa‘idi, stage name Shahrzaad, an Iranian dancer and actress well known for her secondary roles as bad girl in some of the 1960s and 1970s blockbuster films, who also wrote blank verses and went on to direct her own film only to fade into oblivion after the 1979 revolution Shahrzaad’s Tale is directed and edited by Shahin Parhami, an Iranian filmmaker based in Montreal who received numerous awards for his previous films.
Born in a working-class family, Shahrzaad started dancing in her father’s café in south Tehran before moving to more upscale cabarets. She joined a theater company, and eventually performed in commercially successful films of the so called “film Farsi” genre– in Kimyai’s famed Qaysar (1968), she played a sex worker who hides the protagonist on the run. In those same years Shahrzaad published two books of poetry, and wrote for magazines, moving back and forth between artistic avant-garde and popular entertainment, something that happens quite rarely in Iran and elsewhere. At the end of the seventies, she directed a feature length film and a short movie, one of the first women to do so in Iran. The 1979 revolution turned her world upside down and made the contradictions that had channeled her career even more evident: a life of struggle and abuse, but also of self-assertion as woman and author, became one of solitude and drift.
It took many efforts for Shahrzaad’s Tale filmmaker Shahin Parhami to find Kobra Amin-Sa‘idi and convince her to be again in front of a camera. Besides reconstructing her career, Shahrzaad’s Tale is a film about this quest and encounters. The film opens with Parhami and a younger actress driving to a small town near Kerman, where they eventually meet Shahrzaad in her house. She talks about her difficult childhood, her violent father, and her current poverty, but also reminisces about the highlights of her career with a sense of pride and more than a touch of self-irony.
The film continues in Tehran where Shahrzaad revisits her childhood neighborhood, spends time in the museum of cinema where she sees her photo among those of other famous Iranian actors, and meets some of her old friends and fellow artists. The film culminates in Shahrzaad’s conversations with a group of young middle upper class women, artistically ambitious and colorfully clothed, recruited by the filmmaker to interact with the older, successful, and experienced Shahrzaad. The conversations revolve around acting and film-making but also poetry, the hardship of life, the sacrifice of Iranian martyrs, maternal love and national pride. Shahrzaad acts at times as a mentor, at times as interviewee, at times as a director auditioning her cast, and through these different personas the viewer gets a sense of her courage and sadness– by contrast, the women appear economically at ease but embarrassed by or incapable of coming to terms with the figure of Sharzaad.
Shahrzaad’s Tale is also a film about the history of Iranian cinema and its reception in contemporary Iran. Filled with amazing found footage, the film documents Shahrzaad’s career in images, but also conveys the rhythm of “film Farsi” features with larger than life characters, sexual innuendos and over the top vocal intonations. Composed through interviews, the film shows the place this cinema has retained in contemporary Iran, remembered with nostalgia and appreciation, but also inevitably part of a long-lost era that only lives in its fading negatives –often no more than a few fragments– via individual recollections and the politics of remembrance.
Shahrzaad’s Tale can be certainly described to those who have not seen it as a biopic, a road movie or a film about Iranian cinema of the 1970s. Kobra Amin-Sa‘idi has already gathered academic interest, and one can foresee how she can be made to impersonate narratives about forgotten and suddenly rediscovered movie stars, but also to stand for arguments about the status and role of women, and, in more daring interpretations, to exemplify the history of class, generational and political conflict in Iran. After all, this is what one has come to expect from narratives about Iran, especially outside the country: tales that explain what the country and its people are about, and most and foremost, tales that captivate an audience through stories.
While envisioning these narratives, Shahrzaad’s Tale, as it is befitting its title, detours these tales towards a different use of images, sounds, and words. The elements that make up the film are not assembled together to tell a story: they are composed to show a power I would call poetic: they do so not via morality or judgement, but via the concatenation of images, sound, and words themselves.
A still from Shahrzaad’s Tale
A Tale Made of Tales, a Story without a Story
Films tell tales –“what else can a filmmaker do?” says Shahrzaad in the last frame of the film as if reflecting retrospectively on what the viewers just watched, while challenging the filmmaker, questioning his capacity to narrate her tale – but what tale? The tale is many tales, but never quite recomposed as a whole story. The film turns the all too obvious reference to the Thousand and One Nights, embedded in Shahrzaad’s own chosen stage name, into an occasion for showing the impossibility to tell a tale, warranting and deferring expectations even in the title.
To the extent that the film tells a story, this story is not a biography, it is not the tale of a self, a story of an interiority expressing herself: one cannot even say that the film is the story of a life: at the beginning of the film, reconstructing the facts that are supposed to narrate her life, Shahrzaad asks: is this a life I’m living? Man doram zendegi mikonam? With equal force, she repeatedly denies any continuity of time and place to her story, or to any story, refusing to allow herself, the filmmaker, and the viewers to constitute an experience out of her words. There is no experience to rely on, nothing that can help to think the past and the future: as Shahrzaad declares in a key scene, when she leaves a place, she burns everything behind her, and despises nostalgia and wishes.
The refusal of a linear narrative is less an aesthetic choice than a necessity born out of the events that constitute an existence, Shahrzaad’s but also the film’s (see this interview with the filmmaker). Out of encounters and situations come a multiplicity of intertwining tales and viewpoints that contribute to make sense of both Shahrzaad’s life and the film. What matters however, is not so much the direction of these associations, but the intensities they convey, the power they exhibit. Likewise, sex, class, and politics, the blocs that constitute the points of articulation of these existential associations, are present but are never made into the matrices that generate a full story, or even the thousand tales the film envisages. Not even the violence that these blocs suggest is made to stand as an explanatory trope.
Someone might ask how this multiplicity is held together in the film in such a way as to generate power rather than chaos. The answer is poetry.
A still from Shahrzaad’s Tale
A film made of poetry
Poetry opens and closes Shahrzaad’s Tale, and recurs throughout the film. But it is more than poetry as content, it is poetry as form: the film is made of poetry. The assemblage of images, sounds, and words that make it up articulate that movement between warranted and frustrated expectations that linguist Roman Jakobson considered as the specificity of poetry: the play of repetition and difference.
The film has a marked metonymic rhythm: parts stand for wholes that are never quite accounted for. One does not really get the full picture about Shahrzaad, but perceives aspects of her through a set of ever deferred pleasures: a hand on a dial, an interrupted conversation, an elbow emerging from a bench, a house for a village, a clip for a movie we will never see.
The most eloquent example of this dissociative poetic process is the body of Shahrzaad: hands, eyes, hairs, thighs, but most of all the scars, taking a life of their own. Each body part is endowed with the power to move by itself, sideways or forward, overwhelming the screen in the dance scenes, or piercing it with gazes. In several sequences, the eyes of Shahrzaad look into the film in the process of its making, not to construct herself as an actor, to see herself as a self, but instead to challenge the very possibility of a story—to challenge the possibility of the filmmaker taking over the story from her. While evoking pleasure (sexual or otherwise), Shahrzaad’s body parts weave together the force of desire and the impossibility of a full body.
Deferred pleasures never quite find a linear resolution in Shahrzaad’s Tale. Poetry of suspension: the dots of ellipsis that Shahrzaad often uses in her poems, the wanderings of a leaf across a terrace –the camera follows these suspended movements, as if working against an idea of time (but also of life) as sequence, searching instead to express a sense of existence subtracted, albeit temporarily, from the demands of explanation. It is a suspension that hints at a delicately strong resilience, a dance of movements and counter-movements, what one could name the power of poetry.
When suspension gives way to the next shot, the montage of Shahrzaad’s Tale weaves these metonymic associations via a set of elements that echo Persian poetics: the already mentioned body parts (hands, eyes, hairs), natural elements (water, trees, clouds, sky) and landscapes (garden, desert, village). The film scrambles these poetic materials along a modernist line that not only expands their scope (to body parts the thigh and buttocks are added, to natural elements the car, to landscapes the city) but also marks a disjuncture, most notably in the case of the garden.
Supposed to be the site of fertility for the poet, and the very embodiment of life– as per the poetic tradition and Shahrzaad own verse: shâ‘er boghçe-ye zendegi ash bârvar ast, fruitful is the garden of a poet’s life– the garden instead appears in the film as a garden of stones hanging from dead trees, where Shahrzaad wanders aimlessly and recites verses in the wind that blows through the microphone. The materiality of these colors, sounds and shapes intertwines with virtual references. The garden of stones refers to the history of Iranian cinema, since this is Parviz Kimiavi’s garden, but inevitably also to Fourgh Farrokhzad’s poems. Poetry is always made of poetry, but as with the best verses, one does not need to be a cinephile to grasp the density and the beauty of these images.
Shahrzaad’s Tale is a film about the conditions under which poetry can be experienced in contemporary Iran and elsewhere. While the film is made of poetry, poetry in the film does not offer existential redemption and, contrary to many national and international contemporary interpretations, poetry is far from being the universalizing modality that recomposes a fragmented human multiplicity into a higher whole. Poetry is no salvation, no alternative, no safe ground. On the contrary, Shahrzaad’s Tale is an account of the perils that poetry is always exposed to, and foremost of the risk of appearing artificial and superfluous. Nowhere is this more evident than in the encounter between Shahrzaad and the small group of young women summoned to meet and work with her on their poetry and acting.
Nowadays in Iran and elsewhere there is a tendency to take poetry as a sign of the self, as an expressive modality that accounts in intimate, and true ways for the existential dimension of subjectivity. In this configuration, poetry is taken to be both the evidence for these affective states, as well as the cure, or at least the expression, the sign of an experience. As every cure, this combination of poetry and self is also an easily marketable commodity, something that is supposed to offer a quick experience of a true life, a true “Iranian” life.
In Shahrzaad’s Tale the young women, and especially a woman dressed in blue, repeatedly use the term ehsâs (feeling, sensation) to describe emotional states, and relate them to poetry, often to express malaise or suffering—Shahrzaad’s suffering and their own. But instead of capturing this suffering and turning it into a tale, or at least an interpersonal connection, the young women’s acts and words signal the impossibility of experience, the impossibility of making something meaningful, something that lasts beyond a fleeting affective agitation.
There is an expectation to feel, to recognize and be recognized by Shahrzaad, and poetry is seen as the means to this end. But poetry, rather than closeness and intimacy, produces distance and rage, it becomes a sign of the inauthentic. Whatever these women say they do in their lives appears inauthentic: singing, pilates, engineering; none of these efforts and actions seem to transform into meaningful experiences. Their signs of affection for Shahrzaad and their complementary expressions sound hollow. Penned by one of the women on a thank-you card she hands to Shahrzaad along with an embarrassingly exuberant vase of flowers, a quote attributed to Che Guevara –“being happy is the only revenge one can take in life”– rather than revolution, encapsulates the vacuity of a consumer culture that has erased the power of words.
In stark opposition to this poetry as self stands Shahrzaad, who in a scene of confrontation with the young women, denies that poetry is the embodiment of feelings, and with critical acumen foregrounds the opposite idea. Poetry is an act of separation from feelings, she says, adding that feelings in poetry are a sign of failure or a technical issue. Shahrzaad always answers: “no!” to the young women’s suggestions. Her critiques, her sarcasm, and her rage might seem to be signs of her own instability, but also show how impossible it is for these women to feel something, and even react to Shahrzaad’s provocations. As the woman in blue says, she is not offended at all by Shahrzaad’s insults. The young women become a spectacle, material for a film – darin? “Do you have them in the frame?” says Shahrzaad, looking into the camera and taking over the film with a grin.
This revenge of experience, this response of the old against the young, of the working class against the bourgeoisie, of the artist against society, against the state, but also against the filmmaker is grounded in a power to persevere, a resilience that is beyond good and evil and that is both active and reactive. This is, what I would call “poetic wisdom” or “poetic filming.” Shahrzaad’s Tale runs counter to visual narratives that offer stereotypical views of Iran, but also to narratives that, in an opposite but parallel move, pretend to offer “truer” perspectives on what Iran is “really” like by insisting on revealing the hidden side of things, by making sense of Iran and its people through stories. Each film produces its own audience. In countering these two dominant forms of contemporary representation, Shahrzaad’s Tale envisages a viewer that can perceive the power and necessity of poetry for existence, understood here as the power of not needing to make sense of the absence of stories.
In order for the film to reach its audience, these viewers might have to get together with other viewers and organize screenings and conversations. Such is the nature of film distribution in this time and age, but such is also the nature of powerful films (and poems): to assemble images, sounds, words and people.
