The Art of Quotation (Part II)

Helen Vendler (Photo by Janet Reider)

One of the best quoters I’ve ever read is Helen Vendler. She ingeniously spliced quotation with commentary, creating miniature cabinet-of-wonders assemblages. This one, for example – from her brilliant “Notes from the Trepidarium,” a review of Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion:

The poet’s Gothic, so indispensable to her early work, has become “plain” in her flattened menagerie, in her taciturn journeys (“The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain”), in her description of a mummified bird placed in its owner’s purse “circa 1892” and hidden behind the chimney bricks in the Dumas Brothel Museum: “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.”

There are three types of quotation involved here. First, there’s the parenthetical “The train passed slowly through every belt we know: Prayer, Tornado, Bible, Grain.” Second, there’s the use of the tiny detail “circa 1892” to describe the mummified bird in the purse. And, third, following the colon, there’s the “In your glass case now, canary.... // You are beautiful, grotesque.” The combination makes for a delightfully strange sentence that went straight into my personal anthology of great quotation. 

March 26, 2018 Issue

In her wonderful poem “Giraffe,” in this week’s issue, Lucie Brock-Broido, who died earlier this month, muses on reincarnation. In the opening sentence, she says of the giraffe, “In another life, he was Caesar’s pet, perhaps a gift from Cleopatra / When she returned to Rome / Her hair salty and sapphire / From bathing, the winged kohl around her eyes smudged / From heat.” Her next sentence continues the theme: “In another life, he was from Somalia / Where he spent hours watching clouds / In shapes of feral acrobats tipping along their tightropes / Spun of camels’ hair and jute.” Several lines later, she writes, “Once, in another life in the Serengeti, he stretched his neck / To feed on the acacia twigs, mimosa, wild apricot.” Further on, she writes, “If you come back from the other world, to this— / The sky in Denmark, in its reticulated weathers, is inky / On most days in February now.” There are a couple of other lines implying a form of reincarnation, as well: “In the Copenhagen Zoo they only name the animals who grow / Old there, and, in this life, they called him / Marius but he was just a two-year-old,” and “In that moment was he looking at a gray, cobbled / Steeple in the middle distance of a dome / Or thinking of a time when his life was circled by a mane / Of warmth in a bright Numidian sun?” I find these lines ravishing. That “clouds / In shapes of feral acrobats tipping along their tightropes / Spun of camels’ hair and jute” is inspired. The whole poem is brilliant, a perfect illustration of what Dan Chiasson meant when he said, “From her very first poems, collected in A Hunger (1988), Brock-Broido has shown how to bring maximum dazzle to every detail” (“The Ghost Writer,” The New Yorker, October 28, 2013).

On Lucie Brock-Broido: Chiasson and Vendler

Lucie Brock-Broido (Photo by Karen Meyers)

Hannah Aizenman, in her “The Enchanting Poems of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018), From The New Yorker Archive” (newyorker.com, March 8, 2018), refers to two New Yorker reviews of Brock-Broido’s work: Helen Vendler’s “Drawn to Figments and Occasion” (August 7, 1989) and Dan Chiasson’s “The Ghost Writer” (October 28, 2013). It’s interesting to compare them.

Both pieces are admiring. Vendler says of Brock-Broido’s “Elective Mutes,” “The rhythmic momentum of this piece of Americana and the audacity of throwing it into a poem about mad English twins suggest the drivenness of Brock-Broido’s imagination, which at other times can be delicate and lyrical.” Chiasson writes, “Brock-Broido’s poems can be baffling, but because of their stylish spookiness (some combination of Poe and Stevie Nicks) they are never boring.” Note that “stylish spookiness”; Vendler calls Brock-Broido’s “Heartbeat” “spookily lyrical.”

Both pieces are also critical. Vendler writes,

Some of the hazards of Brock-Broido’s enterprise are easily seen: preciousness, exaggeration, a histrionic use of the more sensational edges of the news. Other hazards, less immediately apparent, take an insidious toll in the long run – chiefly the persistent use of a few obsessive words, among them the adjectives “small,” “little,” “tiny,” “frail,”, “fragile”; the nouns “child” and “girl”; the verb “curl.”

Chiasson says Brock-Broido’s poems have a “blurted quality, as though long-roiling tumult finally blew off the stopper.” He continues:

The thrill of improvisation is precisely that it cannot be isolated from the risk of mere looniness or doodling. I don’t like everything in Brock-Broido’s work, but, to steer clear of tour de force, a style like this one has to fail some of the time; it has to find some subject that suits it badly.

I like that “thrill of improvisation.” It gets at the quality in Brock-Broido’s work I most enjoy – its combinational wizardry. Vendler catches this quality when she says of Brock-Broider’s “I Wish You Love,”

A broken heart, death, the exhumed body of Mengele, ecological disaster, commercial slaughter, the humdrum, the extravagant, the technological, the distorted, the lyric all lurch together into an eclectic postmodern elegy.

That “lurch” is inspired. It exactly captures the wayward dream logic of Brock-Broido’s dazzling art.