Walking Into Words

Joan Arnold

I married a poet. Not a full-time poet, but as my first strong impulse was dance, his was poetry. Now he is expressing a longstanding desire to illuminate a great and difficult piece of contemporary poetry – John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Each morning with a cup of strong tea, I read – silently, deeply. But reading aloud brings the body, breath and voice into the words, and reading to others brings writing straight back to its essence: direct communication. In the three readings that Jim has directed at the Ancram Opera House, I had the chance, as one of five voices, to embody and enter timeless stories I had never read before.

No stranger to unlikely challenges, in 2006 Jim staged Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich – a three-hour marathon in the July heat without air conditioning. A dozen hardy souls remained after intermission, streaming with sweat but utterly engaged. “The people who stayed,” he reminds me, “had an unforgettable experience.” The next year we did Chekhov stories – Whitebrow and The Man in a Case – another cheery tale about tragic personal limitation and death (accompanied by the gentle hum of our new air conditioners). It was one of our season’s most popular evenings. We’ve seen how reading aloud still has a vibrant, primal appeal.

You wouldn’t think that John Ashbery’s famously opaque meditation on a Renaissance painting would lend itself to theatrical presentation. Jim set himself the task of unraveling Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poem that has fascinated him for 35 years. His doctorate in medieval literature has well prepared him for penetrating obscure text. This time around, his method of exploration is the use of projections. Diving into his new Mac’s Powerpoint program, he has treated Parmigianino’s painting in a variety of ways –varying its size, zooming in on a detail, accompanying the image with lines of text.

Once Ashbery had given his blessing – though he lives close by in Hudson, he regrets he will not be able to attend our performance – Jim deconstructed the poem, listening for the oppositional strains within it. As he assigned segments to six readers, he brought alive – for himself, for the audience and for us, the readers – this elegant contemplation on the mutability of perception and the poignancy of time’s passage. As audience members hear the ensemble of voices, they can contemplate the painting as the poet did.

To embody Ashbery’s reflection on a reflection, Jim has assembled a cast of six readers – professionals in writing, acting or dance – to enliven this fountain of words. Whether or not the poem continues to resist our efforts to elucidate, we can hear Ashbery’s evocative language like music.

The Ancram Opera House, formerly the Ancram Grange, was constructed in 1919 as a meeting hall for farmers and their families, built to support and amplify the resonance of the human voice. Many rituals, musicales and theatrical productions have graced this intimate hall. Jim’s straightforward productions – few rehearsals, simple staging that offers visual and aural variety – dodge the usual pitfalls of a literary reading.

As this work is new to me, I look forward to walking into these words, hearing how others hear their own lines and bring their unique rhythm and perception to our shared performance.

Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases

Significantly; that is, enough to make the point

That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept

In suspension, unable to advance much farther

Than your look as it intercepts the picture.