The patron and the snare:
Punk Faun and the constraints of utterance
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If I read the cover copy of Punk Faun correctly, the masque we have
in front of us is a set of instructions. Or at least, if it is not precisely a
set of instructions, it is a form of utterance in which the instruction is
prominent. The work was commissioned, we are told, by Isabella d’Este ‘for the
walls of her studiolo’. What we are also told, however, is that ‘in this
written description (for the first time available here within the text of a
popular edition) she details her request for a masque of grotesque pastoral and
mythic proportions’. ‘She’, if I follow the syntax right – and the twists and
turn of voice through syntax seem to be a central consideration here – is
Isabella d’Este and ‘this written description’ is the text in hand. This is a
striking premise. ‘D’Este’, as the cover copy clarifies, is to be taken as the
work’s patron. What the account also makes clear, however, is that as patron
she plays an unusually active role in the construction of her commission.
Consider, by contrast, Lewis Hyde’s remark on patronage in the context of his
discussion of the gift:
Where an artist
takes a second job, a single person moves in both economies, but with patronage
there is a division of labour – it is the patron who has entered the market and
converted its wealth to gifts.[1]
Hyde doesn’t dwell on
patronage in his consideration of gifts and his remark is therefore something
of a casual aside. What he proposes is a division of labour whereby in a system
of patronage it is the patron who occupies the market economy, freeing the
artist to articulate according to the logic of gifts. What this division
amounts to, as Hyde presents it, is something like a creative firewall, the
patron enabling creative agency to occur.
This is not a view poets have always shared. In ‘An
Epistle to a Patron’, F.T. Prince, like Olsen, presents a dramatic monologue in
which the demands of the patron have to be negotiated and met. The question on
Prince’s mind, or on the mind of the artisan he voices, is how to adjust to the
fact of the patron’s power. The answer is complicated:
Save
me, noble sir, from the agony
Of starved and privy explorations such as those I stumble
From a hot bed to make, to follow lines to which the
night-sky
Holds only faint contingencies. These flights with no end
but failure,
And failure not to end them, these palliate or prevent.
I wish for liberty, let me then be tied[2]
It is difficult to read the
tone of Prince’s artisan’s remarks, and it is certainly by no means clear that
the last phrase here – ‘I wish for liberty, let me then be tied’ – is in any
simple sense an expression of ironic resentment. Prince’s subject, as he
invokes a patron, is the relation of art to power, the degree to which art
reflects the agencies that are the condition of its coming into being. Prince,
in other words, like Olsen, is interested in the way art takes instruction. A
crucial difference is that in Olsen’s text, as the cover sets it up, the patron
figure, the agency of instruction, is more visibly implicated in the act of
expression. Who is talking, we are invited to wonder, the putative artist, or
the person who pays the bill?
The appearance of the patron is only one of a number of
extraordinarily deft anachronisms in Punk Faun – the self cancelling title
being a case in point. Consider also the word ‘snare’, which appears in the
title of two sequences in ‘Punk Faun’. In the first place we are given, as
title, ‘snares for silence in required voice’. The phrase puts one in mind of
Cage, not just because of the mention of silence, but because the ‘required
voice’ – somehow pre-instructed – is something like a prepared piano. The
opening poem of the sequence enacts such constraints:
Snares for silence
Snares for noise
exclude welcome
welcome excludes
against its own
own extreme falls
In this short poem we are
given two rhetorical figures, the parallelism of the opening couplet and the
repeated chiasmus of the second and third couplets. In the context of poetry
these are tangling manoeuvres, forms of expression that compel language back
onto itself. In other words, we are snared, and so the ‘snare’ of the title,
and of the ‘required voice’, is doing active work in the poem.
The second time the word ‘snare’ occurs, it also does
substantial work. The sequence in question is titled ‘ballet snares
industrielle’ and it opens by insisting on the term’s rhyming possibilities:
in lair snare
wares beware
Again, in something like an
exercise in chiasmus, the end of the poem reverses the terms:
wares beware
snare in lair
Between times, between these
iterations of the ‘snare’ rhyme, ‘Punk Faun’ is at its most conspicuously
antique. It is never simply antique, but in this sequence we are in a ‘glade’,
then ‘return to hunt’ and we are told that ‘distance is/ measured by/ horns
sounding/ give tally’. Somewhere amid the snares, then, we are thrown back to
an earlier moment of expression, a moment, without too much forcing (I think)
that we might associate with Thomas Wyatt. Here’s the first verse of Wyatt’s ‘Tangled
I was in Love’s Snare’:
Tangled I was in love’s
snare,
Oppressed with pain,
torment with care,
Of grief right sure, of
joy full bare,
Clean in despair by
cruelty
But ha! ha! ha! full
well is me,
For I am now at
liberty.[3]
Wyatt’s rhyme words are of
interest here: ‘snare’, ‘care’, ‘bare’, ‘cruelty’, ‘well is me’, ‘liberty’. We
are not, it seems, far from ‘ballet snares industrielle’, and not just because
of the vehemence with which the ‘snare’ rhyme is insisted upon, but because of
the irony with which its apparent opposite, liberty, is presented. Or as
Olsen’s poem elsewhere has it:
If unfettered her
voice requires
bodies rendered
needy incomplete
I am not proposing that Olsen alludes to Wyatt here. What
I do want to observe, through the association, is that like Prince in his ‘Epistle’,
Olsen’s subject in Punk Faun is the
relation of art to power. Wyatt is interesting because that relation was,
relatively speaking, transparent. In the courtly condition in which he
operated, he owed a debt of allegiance to his patron, Thomas Cromwell. When
Cromwell died he was free, and therefore vulnerable. That framework of allegiance, with all its
constraints and expectations, is mediated in poetry by a set of restrictive
verse forms.
The
value of glimpsing such a figure amid his operating conditions is that it – the
glimpse – allows us to contextualize the contemporary moment of writing. What
Olsen presents, across the sequences of Punk
Faun, is a poetry no less framed by its relation to power. That power is
less obviously focused, more difficult to bring into view, than in other
settings; it exists in the chains of command that issue in the instruction to
consume. In part, then, by contrast with other moments (one might also mention
the several acts of homage that make up the sequence ‘as performed in our own
person’), what Punk Faun sets out to do is inscribe the conditions (for which
read constraints) of its own utterance. What Olsen gives us is a poetry in
which power is constantly crossing the line, and through whose discourses we can
only be offered the briefest sightings of other modes of life. The word snare,
as a delicate loop, relates back ultimately to the Middle Dutch word ‘harp
string’. What ‘Punk Faun’ presents is a language in which line by line, and to
brilliantly stimulating effect, the two meanings are shown to converge.
David Herd
[1] Lewis Hyde,
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life
of Property (London: Vintage, 1999), p275
[2] F.T Prince,
Collected Poems 1935-1992 (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2012), pp14-15
[3] Thomas
Wyatt, The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd), p262
Occasional
Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Astoria, OR: Clear Cut
Press, 2003)
