Clear, passionate, vivid and
unconventional, Frank Bidart’s Watching the
Spring Festival meditates, with muscular intelligence
and formal originality, on worldly powers and their
limitations: the lethal politics of a Chinese emperor’s
court; the distorted life of Marilyn Monroe; the ghosts
of Civil War dead judging contemporary America; an aging
dancer recreating her earlier role for the merciless
film camera; urgent, unfulfillable love; the Shakespearean
theatrical “O” surrounding the ambitions
of art.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank Bidart was born in Bakersfield,
California, in 1939 and educated at the University of
California at Riverside and at Harvard University, where
he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth
Bishop. His recent volumes include Star Dust
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Music Like Dirt
(2002), and Desire (1997), which was nominated
for a Pulitzer Prize, and was a finalist for both the
National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle
Award. He is also the co-editor of Robert Lowell's Collected
Poems (2003). His honors include the Wallace Stevens
Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's
Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the
Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review's
first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of
Vaslav Nijinsky" in 1981. In 2007, he received
the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Bidart was elected
a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003.
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has taught
at Wellesley College since 1972.
ABOUT
THE BOOK(from the publisher)
This is Frank Bidart’s
first book of lyrics—his first book not dominated
by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and
song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively
violent, these new poems have, by conceding time’s
finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike
anything seen before in Bidart’s long career.
Mortality—imminent, not theoretical—forces
the self to question the relation between the actual
life lived and what was once the promise of transformation.
This plays out against a broad landscape. The book opens
with Marilyn Monroe, followed by the glamour of the
eighth-century Chinese imperial court (seen through
the eyes of one of China’s greatest poets, Tu
Fu). At the center of the book is an ambitious meditation
on the Russian ballerina Ulanova, Giselle,
and the nature of tragedy. All this gives new dimension
and poignance to Bidart’s recurring preoccupation
with the human need to leave behind some record or emblem,
a made thing that stands, in the face of death, for
the possibilities of art. Bidart, winner of the 2007
Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, is widely acknowledged
as one of the significant poets of his time. This is
perhaps his most accessible, mysterious, and austerely
beautiful book.
What none knows is when, not
if.
Now that your life nears its end
when you turn back what you see
is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No,
it is a vast resonating chamber in
which each thing you say or do is
new, but the same. What
none knows is
how to change. Each plateau you reach, if
single, limited, only itself, in-
cludes traces of all the others, so that in the end
limitation frees you, there is no
end, if you once see what is there to see.
You cannot see what is there
to see—
not when she whose love you failed is
standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know-
ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if
again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end
achieved by the unappeased is burial within.
Familiar spirit, within
whose care I grew, within
whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see
by what necessity the double-bind is in the end
the figure for human life, why what we love is
precluded always by something else we love, as if
each no we speak is yes, each yes no.
The prospect is mixed but elsewhere
the forecast is no
better. The eyrie where you perch in
exhaustion has food and is out of the wind, if
cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the
sea
for movement, though the promise of sex or food is
the prospect that bewildered you to this end.
Something in you believes that it is not the end.
When you wake, sixth grade
will start. The finite you know
you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love
is
what you should not love, which endless bullies in-
tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot
see
the end. What none knows is when, not if.
