Ariadne

            The wind was blowing strong as I started out for my final Romantic Literature class on Wednesday. It also began to rain a bit but not enough to weigh the dust down that was blowing into my eyes as I rode.
            There was no class ahead of mine and only one of my fellow students was there and so I had time to calmly set up several tables as desks and to open all the shades and the projector screen before anyone else came in.
            Professor Weisman repeated the format of the exam for us.
            This our final lecture and we finished with one more lecture on Felicia Hemans. The professor said that there is no definitive closure about whether Hemans’s poems are to be taken literally or if she is challenging conventions with ironic reversal or question marks. She said it wasn’t appropriate for her to impose closure and we could make our own arguments.
            Our last poem of the course was “Properzia Rossi”. The poem features a series of displacements. A poet is looking at a painting of Properzia Rossi, which depicts her showing her sculpture of Ariadne to the man she loves. A poem is representing a painting that represents a sculpture. This is a story about a story about a story.
            Rossi is known to have been the only female sculptor to work in marble during the Italian Renaissance. This period, at the end of the 15th Century is famous era for sculpture. She led a short and difficult life. She was educated in the visual arts but it was unusual for a woman to claim artistic authority.
            When Theseus is brought to Crete to kill the Minotaur, Ariadne falls in love with him and gives him a ball of thread to help him find his way out of the maze.
            Rossi is imagined as having made the sculpture of Ariadne to represent the reality of Rossi’s feelings for her lover. Hemans’s representation of this image is another example of ekphrasis.
            Hemans is speaking in the voice of Rossi but who is being addressed?
            I said she seems to be speaking to her inner artistic being or her muse because she asks, “Let me pour my soul away”.
            Rossi, like Ariadne is a victim of unrequited love and displaces her experience into Ariadne to access the authentic experience of historical reality.
            Part two depicts an invocation of Hemans’s own historical reality, whose era had codified women as having limited cultural authority. There is a sublime upwelling f pleasure when she recognizes that her creativity is flowing but laments that her talent has not won her love. Some say it’s a lament of a woman’s inability to sustain both love and art or a critique of norms that relegate women to the hearth and home.
            In part three she addresses the sculpture and laments that not that she doesn’t have her man but that her art has suffered.
            On the surface the final stanza features a lament by Rossi that she has fame but not love. But there is also a claim that if she had love she would be a better artist.
            Hemans is creating art from unrequited love and giving a voice to the female artist. “Yet I leave my name”. This self-elegy brings to mind art in the depths of loss. A sculpture is a very obtrusive and public art form.
            Ronin asked Professor Weisman what she would consider to be the end of the Romantic period. She gave a few possibilities: the passing of the first reform bill in 1832; the death of William Wordsworth; or the ascent of Victoria to the throne.
            She handed us back our essays. She noted in mine that when I quoted Mary Godwin I should have referred to her that way rather than as “Shelley’s mother”. Of her critiques, in one place she warned me to make sure I’m being historically accurate and in another she pointed out that my analogies should be set in the 19th Century. She thought that my equating Frankenstein’s monster with the sublime by calling him a living mountain was a little vague. Her final not was, “The real meat of this essay is the discussion of the sublime vis-à-vis Victor. The ugliness motif is really a support for this thesis. I would have suggested a slight reorganization of the essay to reflect this. Very smart, interesting and deeply pondered.” She also liked my epigraph from Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel”: “We are ugly but we have the music.
            My paper earned 85%, which would have just squeaked me in to a solid A, but because my essay was a day late I lost 2% and ended up with an A minus.
            I told Professor Weisman that I enjoyed her lectures and that she made a lot of things interesting that I hadn’t found so on the first reading. She appreciated that and thanked me for all of my work setting up the class in the morning. She said for me to keep in touch and she told me that she still has to finish reading my poem but that it looks good.
            Andala told the professor that she’s been accepted into the Creative Writing Masters program, which is pretty impressive considering they only accept seven students a year. Professor Weisman asked me if I planned to try for it down the road and I confirmed that.
            After riding home I had almost an hour before I had to leave again to go back downtown for my meeting with Albert Moritz, my creative writing professor.
            This was the 13th day of my 14-day fast. I had a tomato and two avocadoes for lunch and did some quick edits on the poems from my book Paranoiac Utopia. I printed the 39 pages and put two copies of the cover for the book onto a flash drive.
             After I’d locked my bike in front of Northrop Frye Hall it was exactly 14:00. I knocked on Albert’s door but there was no answer and the lights were off so I took a quick trip to the washroom. When I came back Albert’s door was open but he was not there. A minute later he came down the hall and explained that he’d been napping and woke up when he heard me knock. When he opened the door he went looking for me.
            I gave him the manuscript for Paranoiac Utopia and since he has already read some of the poems from that book I wanted some feedback on how I could go about publishing it. He asked if I had any publishers in mind. I said that since the book is inspired by Parkdale I would think that a Toronto publisher might be interested and he said that he thinks so too. I told him that the people that I know don’t seem to like me and I mentioned Luciano Iaccobelli of Quattro Books. Albert urged me not to write Iaccobelli off because Quattro could definitely be an option for me. His strongest suggestion was Exile Editions, which was founded by Barry Callahan. Albert said that when he’d first read my work it reminded him in subject matter of City Poems by Joe Fiorito, which was published by Exile.
            Albert kept my manuscript and said he would look at it over the next few months and we could think of more options down the road.
            I told him that I’m worried that my work might not be politically correct enough and he said that is always a concern. He brought up the “rape” reference in one of my poems and said that it might receive backlash in today’s climate. But he said that I shouldn’t change a thing and paraphrased a quote from Robert E Heinlein to illustrate that. Heinlein said once you’ve finished a book don’t make any changes until someone agrees to publish it. After you’re published listen to your editor.
            Albert told me that one of his ideas for his next three years as poet laureate of Toronto is to have one-off poetry readings in various Toronto neighbourhoods. Parkdale would definitely be one of them and he would invite Joe Fiorito and I to read.
            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought tomatoes, avocadoes, two half pints of blackberries, a few bananas and some orange juice.
            I got caught up on my journal.
            That night I watched The Rifleman. In this story an attractive woman named Julia has bought a boarding house and the meals that she served have gained a fine reputation. But Lucas confronts her because he remembers her from another town as having run a gambling house under the name of Big Anna and having stolen a large sum of money from a friend of his. She confesses that it’s true but says she has changed and wants to lead a different life now. He believes her and she and Lucas become friends. But some old associates of Julia, the knife wielding Sid, his man Frank and his two floozies Liz and Flo show up in town to force Julia to let them turn her boarding house into a casino. Lucas chases them away but their next strategy is to try to ruin Julia’s reputation. But Lucas has let them all know about Julia’s past and they like her anyway. The sheriff runs Sid’s women out of town but Sid has one more card up his sleeve. He and Frank go to Julia’s when Lucas is there and Sid pulls a knife on him when he is unarmed. Lucas gets his arm cut but manages to grab a cleaver and beats Sid. Humiliated, both Sid and Frank leave.
            Julia was played by Katy Jurado who was into Mexican aristocracy until the government took her family’s land away. Her family objected to her acting but she escaped by marrying a Mexican movie star. She became a star in Mexico and when she started getting work in Hollywood in the early 50s she could hardly speak English. She gave a critically acclaimed performance in High Noon and received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for her role in Broken Lance. She was the first Latin American woman to get an Oscar nomination and the first to win a Golden Globe.