Paul Celan and the Museum of Bad Art

We went to the Museum of Bad Art this weekend in Dedham, MA. A really fun trip … I recommend it, though you should be cognizant of the fact that you are going to have to drive a good 45 minutes at the least from somewhere to see ... well, BAD art. But the commentaries are what make it .

So, it was a *fun* trip and you shouldn’t think I was moping about this the museum. But, while I was looking at some of the bad art, namely this one, I was thinking about what makes people make precisely this kind of bad art. I mean ... the poor guy obviously just wanted to pain Loneliness. What first year art student doesn't try to paint Loneliness, in some way or another? (Or another Bad Art favorite topic such as People Making Love, or just Love or Passion.) Now, I'm not saying they necessarily set out to paint the noun with the capital letter... but they end up with an image like this, whether in sculpture, painting, or photography. All this abstract art and all this talk about it... and really all that 98% of us want to painting are images of people, happy or sad. And.... in a way, there's nothing really wrong with the topic they've picked; the execution alone sometime does qualify them as bad art . Discussing the execution doesn't explain whether or not the impulse toward these images itself is misplaced.
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I heard an interesting lecture on cliche this summer by poet/classicist Brooks Haxton. Haxton argued essentially that cliches work... that half of Shakespeare's sonnets are cliches. He was being polemical, but his point was that audiences enjoy cliches, or at least the content of them. For one, we like repetition, we like familiar territory. For another, the things of cliches are the things, for the most part, that matter ... life, death, love, loneliness, joy, heartbreak, etc. But it isn't just the content that we want to hear repeated ... we like the form to be similar too. A truly great poem manages to give you all that with some subtle permutation so that you hardly realize it was familiar until you feel the pleasure afterward.

Which brings me to Paul Celan. I have been reading Celan this week, for the first time seriously. I've read single poems and read about him many times -- it's hard to be an continental philosophy program and avoid the name -- but I've never delved into him. I decided it was time to tackle him. I bought two translations with German and English text beside eachother and settled in this morning.

Well, needless to say, this was quite a way to being a Sunday. I was overwhelmed. I tried reading the German out-loud, then reading the English silently and going back to the German so I could fit sound with sense. Many of the images in the early poems particularly, came from this 'cliche' set of topics and even imagery; he speaks of water and flowers and circles and blood and milk ... and of course death. But the presentation is so peculiar that these most familiar images are strange and disconcerting; "poplar" and "poppy" become morbid and threatening instead of pastoral and cheerful.

Tom Sleigh once said to me, “John Ashberry is the greatest living poet. You should read him. But you should never try to write like him.” I would say something similar about Celan, except that he would be German and dead. He’s too good; he’s archetypical. You can read this for years and acquire a taste for its strangeness. But you should never, ever try to write like Celan.

At the same time ... Celan writes about what all poets want to write about. How can we not take him as a mentor, as a guide? How can him be great if he is not a model to follow? Many Kantian phrases about genius and beauty come to mind, but I am dismissing them because they only circumscribe the question rather than answer it... novelty intrigues but repetition pleases. A rose is a rose is a rose. And it is pretty...