Gunnar Harding: A Clear View of the Mist
In an early poem Gunnar Harding wrote:
the
adventure
begins
right here. poetry
wasn’t born in Uppsala. it
exists
wherever
someone
runs across the street
against
a red light
The poem concludes:
I
hop off at St. Eriksplan
and my mustache is burning
like
a Bengal light
in
the sleet
Even before those lines appeared in The Eagle Has Landed (1970), Harding was working on (or playing at) an exuberant book of prose poems, The Fabulous Life of Guillaume Apollinaire (1971), which aroused controversy because of the liberties it took with historical fact. Apparently certain critics were manning a red light. Happily, that didn’t slow Harding down in the least. The Apollinaire book “kept writing itself,” and the result was The Mysterious Smile of Guillaume Apollinaire: An Endless Biography (1989).
The challenge in writing any book directly inspired by and explicitly referring to earlier work is to avoid being merely derivative. We can all think of books of poems, and novels as well, that seem “worked up” from earlier books — that give off the wan flicker of the “project.” Avoiding this trap requires talent and nerve. Gunnar Harding has an abundance of these.
If Apollinaire and Shelley (the inspiration for another early set of prose poems by Harding) both “stood for more than they accomplished,” as Sydney Bernard Smith has remarked, at least what they stood for had considerable power, and some of their work is still important to today’s readers. The English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) would seem a much less promising starting point for poetry of the early 21st century. Yet his life (more than his work) serves as the basis for an entire book of poems by Harding, Parlor Music (2001).
Harding comments in an afterword: “Only one episode in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s life — an utterly pathetic one — has been etched into common memory: how his wife Elizabeth Siddal takes her life with laudanum and how in despair he puts the manuscript containing the poems he’s written to her into her coffin. Some years later, when he wants to include them in a book, he is forced to have her grave opened. Aside from this event, most of his life is as forgotten as his work. Few people show any interest now in the poems that once saw the light of day in such a dramatic fashion. Nor is Rossetti’s painting any longer held in high esteem. His paintings of women with cascades of black or golden hair are probably better known as illustrations on greeting cards than as trailblazing works of art.”
Parlor Music has three sections. The first, “Beata Beatrix,” the source of the four poems presented here, focuses on Rossetti’s relationship with Elizabeth Siddal, whom he lived with for many years before marrying her in 1860. She worked at first as a model for Rossetti’s friend, the painter John Everett Millais, who in order to paint her as Ophelia made her lie, covered in flowers, in a poorly heated bath (she almost died as a result). In 1862 she bore Rossetti a stillborn child. Harding: “In despair over this and over her husband’s lack of interest, she took her life. After her death Rossetti painted her as Beatrice.”
The second section, “Museum,” presents Rossetti’s life. The third section, “In the Garden of Proserpine,” takes up Rossetti’s liaison with Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris.
As Harding points out, only one of the poems in Parlor
Music (“Rossetti Sleepless in the Park”)
quotes Rossetti’s poetry, and only a few are
based on his works of art. “Elsewhere my imagery
has drawn more inspiration from those who were literally
pre-Raphaelites, such as Piero della Francesca and
Andrea Mantegna.”
Harding started his own artistic career as a jazz musician, then studied painting. He has written many poems about works of visual art, and several musical genres make frequent appearances in his work. But more pervasive than the roles these art forms play as subjects is their influence on Harding’s mode of writing. The vividness of his visual imagery is widely appreciated; his “jazziness” is evident in his sometimes whimsical use of sound and in his way of developing long poems by interweaving repeated and varied motifs.
Even in the four short poems here, one can follow song and silence, light and dark — the visual in this case so firmly black and white that even blood seems to take on the blackness of a dried crust rather than the red of life. And even in such short pieces, the relation of the elements becomes dense and paradoxical: Rossetti’s house casts silence like a shadow; marble becomes a sort of cold fire that cannot be quenched by “silent buckets” of darkness; the stillborn baby’s cry consists of “an eternal silence.”
It is bold of Harding to try to make first-rate poetry on the life of a second-rate (or worse) poet and painter, and perhaps bolder still to call his book Parlor Music, a phrase that conjures up mainly low- and middle-brow works, often of a sentimental cast, that were performed at home by amateurs in the era before phonographs. In effect he is making art songs on the theme of popular music, writing clear-eyed contemplations of a life misty with sentiment and self-conscious gesture.
The result is a tone for which it is hard to find a precise term. When Harding calls the memorable episode from Rossetti’s life “utterly pathetic,” he seems to intend several senses of the word: sad, of course, but also arousing both compassionate and contemptuous pity. In Harding’s hands, the pathos is revealed as one that cannot rise to the level of tragedy yet cannot fall away from our sympathies either. We are left on a middle ground whose troubling familiarity suggests it is one of the main subjects Harding seeks to confront us with. In the opening poem of the book, Rossetti is left in the thickening English fog, wondering, “Is that all there is? Nothing else at all?”
Perhaps only poetry itself can describe the way Harding’s meta-music here evokes mixed, precariously balanced states of feeling. The conclusion of Harding’s poem “Evergreen” (from My Winterland [1990]), referring to the well-known piece of parlor music known to Americans as “Auld Lang Syne,” offers this account, which may be as close as we can get to the mystery:
Quiet. Now they’re playing again. It’s
the Good Night Waltz,
the evening’s last chance for deeper contact.
Even before sunrise it will fall to the floor
like a wrinkled ballroom gown,
and this gives banality, too,
meaning and wordless melancholy.
Roger Greenwald
March, 2009
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 
