The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration Hardcover - 2002

Details

• Title The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration
• Author Edward Hirsch; Liz Darhansoff; Liz Darhansoff (Joint Author)
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 336
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, New York
• Date March 26, 2002
• ISBN 9780151005383 / 0151005389
• Weight 1 lbs (0.45 kg)
• Dimensions 8.54 x 5.77 x 1.12 in (21.69 x 14.66 x 2.84 cm)
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 2001005434
• Dewey Decimal Code 153.35

only mystery

I WISH I HAD BEEN IN Buenos Aires on October 20, 1933, when Federico García Lorca delivered a lecture that he called "Juego y teoría del duende" ("Play and Theory of the Duende"). Lorca was testifying to his own poetic universe, as his biographer Ian Gibson has recognized. It would have been electrifying to hear him, because on that night, addressing the members of the Friends of Art Club, the spirit of artistic mystery entered the room. It moved at the speed of Lorca's voice and burned like incense in the rich air. It was palpable to the audience, as if Lorca had thrown open the windows so that everyone present could hear the primitive wing beats shuddering in the darkness outside. The floor shifted a little under everyone's feet. The lamps trembled. Thinking about it now, sixty-nine years later, I can still see the stammering flames leaping off the typescript of Lorca's talk. I feel the ancient heat.
(One month later, at the Buenos Aires PEN Club, Lorca and Pablo Neruda staged a happening at a luncheon in their honor. The two simpatico poets-one from the Vega of Granada in southern Spain, the other from a small frontier town in rural southern Chile-used a bullfighting tradition to improvise a speech about the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, which they delivered alternately from different sides of the table. "Ladies...," Neruda began, "...and gentlemen," Lorca continued: "In bullfighting there is what is known as 'bullfighting al alimón,' in which two toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the bull together." The virtuoso antiphonal performance at first bewildered and then delighted the audience as the visible spirit of praise started darting back and forth across the room. Darío was the enthralling inventor of Hispanic modernismo (a term he coined) who fused Continental Symbolism with Latin American subjects and themes, effecting a fresh musical synthesis-a "musical miracle"-in Spanish-language poetry. He was therefore a poet both of Spain and of the Americas, the Old and the New Worlds, and Lorca and Neruda were magically linking themselves through him, as if by electrical impulses.)
Whoever speaks or writes about the duende should begin by invoking the crucial aid and spirit of this chthonic figure, as Lorca did whenever he read aloud from the manuscript of Poet in New York. The Dionysian spirit of art needs to be invited into the room. "Only mystery enables us to live," Lorca wrote at the bottom of one of the drawings he did in Buenos Aires: "Only mystery." It behooves any of us who would meditate on the subject of artistic inspiration to open the doors wide into the night and welcome into the house the spirit of inhabitable awe.

invoking the duende

THE AUDIENCE'S SENSE OF expectation as Lorca invoked the duende before a homecoming reading of his New York poems must have been running high. One imagines him sitting at a small table in front of a crowded room in Madrid-confident, charismatic, yet clumsy, vulnerable, "a solitary being for whom solitude was intolerable," as Ernesto Pérez Guerra once put it. (Guerra also observed that Lorca was "social by will and solitary by nature.") He looks serenely at home, but also slightly disheveled, a bit askew. He is secretly preparing to do battle. He shuffles his notes for a talk that is sui generis-part lecture, part memoir, part recital-and then launches in: "Whenever I speak before a large group I always think I must have opened the wrong door," he begins disarmingly-
Some friendly hands have given me a shove, and here I am. Half of us wander around completely lost, among drop curtains, painted trees, and tin fountains, and just when we think we have found our room or our circle of lukewarm sun, we meet an alligator who swallows us alive, or...an audience, as I have. And today the only show I can offer you is some bitter, living poetry. Perhaps I can lash its eyes open for you.
Lorca was a jubilant hunter of joy who sometimes liked to veer sideways into performance. He knew his New York poems were a radical departure from his immensely popular Gypsy Ballads, the style of which he had left behind, and he suspected they could be notoriously difficult. He needed to conquer the audience. At heart he considered a poetry reading not an entertainment but a struggle, hand-to-hand combat with a complacent mass, an exposure of his very flesh. He was bewildered by indifference. He understood his own vulnerability, and wanted badly to communicate to strangers. "Let us agree that one of man's most beautiful postures is that of St. Sebastian," he said:
Well then, before reading poems aloud to so many people, the first thing one must do is to invoke the duende. This is the only way that all of you will succeed at the hard task of understanding metaphors as soon as they arise, without depending on intelligence or a critical apparatus, and be able to capture, as fast as it is read, the rhythmic design of the poem.
("LECTURE," Poet in New York)
The poet invoked the duende in order to foster a deep and necessary intimacy with an audience. It was a connection he secretly craved, but also feared because of its radical exposure. He sometimes began his talks more frontally, with a moment of absolute purity, of concentrated focus; with a plaintive call, a visible posture of openness and vulnerability. Here is how he began one recital of his recent work:
I want to summon up all the good will, all the purity of intention I have, because like all true artists I yearn for my poems to reach your hearts and cause the communication of love among you, forming the marvelous chain of spiritual solidarity that is the chief end of any work of art.
This may introduce a poetry reading, but it has the underlying texture of sacred speech, of the quest for spiritual connection.

Copyright © 2002 by Edward Hirsch

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PRAISE FOR HOW TO READ A POEM

"Laudable . . . The answer Hirsch gives to the question of How to Read a Poem is: Ecstatically."--The Boston Book Review

"A lovely book, full of joy and wisdom."--The Baltimore Sun

"Hirsch takes us forcefully through his love of verse, with welcome technical asides and biographical detours along the way."--Publishers Weekly

"Hirsch, a truly gifted poet and scholar, brings the full heat of his literary passion to this enlightening and deeply moving journey into the heart of poetry."--Booklist

"Hirsch is so steeped in literature, painting, and music, and so voracious in his pursuit of the revelations art delivers, that he's able to articulate the seemingly ineffable through brillant critical analyses and empathic insights into artists' lives....[a] unique, exhilarating, and virtuosic performance." - Booklist