Reading Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss

We understand an ekphrastic poem as a literary response to a work of art that initially existed in another form, be it visual, musical, or other embodiment. The work of art may be something we can see or hear in our own time, or it can be imaginary. Some notable ekphrastic poems are the Romantic classics, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley and “Ode to A Grecian Urn” by John Keats. Well-known modernist and contemporary examples are William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and Elizabeth Jennings’ “Rembrandt’s Late Self-Portraits.” In an ekphrastic poem, the original work presents a vision to which the poet variously responds, e.g., by expanding on its putative purpose and meaning, especially as it applies to the time and society for which the poet writes (as W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”), or by dramatizing its subject matter or its characters (as Robert Browning’s “My Favorite Duchess” and May Swenson’s “The Tall Figures of Giacometti”), or by combining a riveting description of the primary work with its emotional impact upon the poet (as Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”).

In Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018), each underlying work of art is infused with an imaginative subtext that gives way to a discourse on contemporary life, concerning, inter alia, romantic relationships, the male gaze, domestic abuse, class privilege, art, and death. For example, the volume’s second poem is based on Rembrandt’s painting, “The Girl in a Picture Frame” (1641), also known as “The Jewish Bride.” The painting is a trompe l’oeil in a faux frame (only visible on its right and bottom sides), with the girl’s hands resting on the outside of the frame, her right hand somewhat retracted as if she might lean through it and escape at any moment. She is dressed in dark red velvet, accessorized with a black hat and pearl earrings, which the experts tell us was not the fashion of the day, but resembled garb of an earlier time, lending mythical or biblical significance to her presence. Her long, loose hair is reflective of the fashion that Jewish women wore when signing the Ketubah. Unlike the subject of Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” whose innocence and sexual allure has received various literary treatments, the rendering of Rembrandt’s “Girl” lacks either of those qualities, for this is not a portrait of anyone in particular, but rather a tronie, a stock figure from whose face we try in vain to nurse some expressive emotion.

Seuss’s portrayal in “Girl in a Picture Frame,” however, suggests someone more akin to a Nabokovian-like Lolita:

She’s fourteen. Her hair is long, and soft and reddish
as a mink. Her eyes unlined and unimpressed, one brow
raised slightly higher than the other. Gaze away;
her gaze will always win. Her interest on the verge

of disinterest, her self-exposure an act of masquerade.

Though she appears to be in command (“Gaze away; her gaze will always win”), the frame represents captivity, even if placed around her for “safe-keeping”; and though the speaker insists the frame could never be “barbed wire for a girl like her,” the specter of the Holocaust is invoked by Seuss in the feminist spirit of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” Thus, Seuss composes an allegory of cultural deception, paternalism, and the male gaze, a vision from which we are meant to recoil when the girl escapes “the little white lie of the false black frame” revealing “something / grand, her spindly naked legs or a deformity of the foot / or nothing at all below the hips, a double-amputee:/ she moves around on a cart with bright red wheels.” Only such “grand” escapes by these recalcitrant subjects break the spell of the illicit frame. It is not by accident that the title of Seuss’s poem emphasizes the more universal “Girl” who lacks the limitation of a definite article (“The”) used by Rembrandt.

We need not agonize over the fact that the poet consciously manipulates the subject matter of the original work for her own purposes, a creative act of destruction (or deconstruction). “Girl in a Picture Frame” and the other ekphrastic poems in this volume are inherently deliberative performances, as much as the original artworks upon which they are based are performances themselves, even when made to seem spontaneous and unpremeditated. Seuss tells us as much in “The Hand Has Dropped the Fruit and It’s Painted Where It Falls”:

such is the theater of painting for every painting is a perfor-
mance some complete with curtains pulled away for the spectator
to see the fruit as if casually dropped and painted where it falls or
the hare strung up or the turkey hanged from one gnarly foot as
if the painter had no design on reality but only painted it haphaz-
ardly an improvisation of objects in space but actually a perfor-
mance of haphazardness as if to say art is not artifice it meets you
where you shrug off your robe or pile your strawberries in a basket
with no eye for composition but even the haphazard is arranged by
the eye was it Rimbaud who said a derangement of arrangements

Even the stream of consciousness in this type of discursive expression acts as if to “perform the haphazard,” therefore we should not underestimate the skill required to bring about the magic of these poems, bearing in mind that, where the subject matter concerns Seuss’s own life, its portrayal and commentary is a performance that is intended to expound broader themes, beyond the personal, and not merely exhibited as a confessional poet would.

While reviewers Victoria Chang, Anne Graue, and Laura Donnelly, among others, have discussed different aspects of Seuss’s book, the poet’s exploration of cultural illusions and the self-deception engendered thereby has been largely overlooked or underrated at best. The volume’s first poem, “I Have Lived My Whole Life In A Painting Called Paradise”—which unearths the fantasies in which girls, in particular, are traditionally cultivated—sets the stage for this theme. This “paradise” upsets the binary order of good and evil, effectively hearkening to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and joins positive and negative images where “even the bad parts were beautiful.” There are fields of needles arranged into flowers and a meadow of opium poppies; a cemetery where the trees have granite limbs in which birds nest à rebours, where the dead rise and resume their lives without repentance; and where little gods and devils try out their wings beyond classically divine judgment. Notably, some girls (like the “Girl in a Picture Frame” discussed above) find the edge of the frame of this paradise and “feel the air outside of it,” and some climb out of the frame and “plummet into whatever is beyond it,” seemingly without anyone’s notice or care, though often with dire consequences, like the mythological subject of Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” that inspired this poem. It is no surprise that the concluding poem (“I Climbed Out Of The Painting Called Paradise”) enacts a sort of deliverance from the fantasy.

In “Still Life With Self-Portrait,” Seuss studies Cornelis Norbertus Gijswbrechts’ trompe l’oeil painting as it were a Rorschach inkblot, reading herself through the painting:

I look at Gijsbrechts’ Still Life with Self-Portrait,
and I want to touch him. I suppose he was a bad man.
Weren’t all men bad back then? Weren’t women
bad as well? Or did they only exist within
the confines of the badness of men
and thus come to be known as good? I have
existed within the confines of the badness
of men. Men have existed within the confines
of my own badness. I’m bad enough to admit
I liked it when men existed within my badness
rather than the other way around.

“Badness” as a general phenomenon is non-gender specific, but in this poem the speaker admits to a feminist bias that challenges any pretensions to selflessness, a trap that women were traditionally schooled to walk into. Within the same poem she refers to another painting, The Reverse of a Framed Painting, in which Gijswbrechts painted a trompe l’oeil of the reverse side of the canvas:

He has offered you his backside and called it
his frontside, has offered you nothing and called it
something. You’ve known men like Cornelius Gijsbrechts.

Seuss sees Gijswbrechts’ wit as revealing something more nefarious, viz., a man’s habit of dissembling, a theme that runs throughout literature, most notoriously in Homer’s characterization of Ulysses. We can debate Ulysses’ motives for dissembling, whether these are merely selfish or promote broader interests. Still, one would not deny that too many of our quintessentially masculine heroes have turned out to be frauds, offering nothing and calling it something. When Seuss finally returns to the main subject of Still Life with Self-Portrait, the feminist viewpoint reaches beyond romantic attachments. She writes, noting the tiny cameo self-portrait of the artist “pinned / to the wall as one would pin a dead moth / to a display board”:

                             I think he looks annoyed.
Or he’s creating the illusion of disinterest.
I’ve known that kind of man . . . .
My whole life I’ve wanted to touch men
like Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts,
but they will not let themselves be touched.

The trompe l’oeil practices a form of artistic trickery that is intended to seduce its viewer into mistaking the illusion for reality. Deception is not the sole province of men, as Seuss well knows, but it mirrors our collective penchant for perfecting forms of illusion that Darwin would have easily recognized as strategies the fittest adapt to survive and that Freud would have determined to be the basis of most modern neuroses. Seuss’s poem addresses the ultimate fallout of such behavior, viz., the widespread dishonesty and suspicion that follow, particularly in romantic transactions. Yet something more nests in the poem’s final line: the thing that makes some men (and women) most desirable also makes them most elusive and untouchable.

*       *      *

Seuss focuses our attention on other types of illusions in the superb sonnet quartet: “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and Girl,” “The Knight’s Dream,” “Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber,” and “The Last Still Life: The Head of the Medusa.” These poems are cloaked as medieval allegories that evoke the frustration of hope in contemporary existence. As with many of the poems in Still Life of Two Dead Peacocks And A Girl, Seuss chooses a form that operates within strict rules. Here, with the sole exception of the first line of the third sonnet, each sonnet contains fourteen unrhymed lines of seventeen syllables each (which, in the volume’s eponymous poem, are composed as Ginsbergian “American Sentences”).

The volume’s title poem is based on Rembrandt’s 1639 painting, a night scene whose perspective is from within a (probably closed) merchant’s shop where, outside the display window, a young peasant girl stares in wonder at two dead peacocks in the foreground. No bread, chicken, cheese, or other common foodstuffs are on display, and thus the painting figuratively contrasts the unmet hunger of the poor with the exotic tastes of the rich in the 17th century Dutch “Golden Age.” [In Rembrandt’s time, peacocks were symbolically and mythologically associated with wealth, power, and eternal life, as well as the hundred-eyed servant of Hera, Argus, a proto-Big Brother, whose eyes were placed upon the peacock’s feathers.] Seuss’s contemporary fantasy of wish-fulfillment expands on its source with a critique of capitalism and class privilege, where the peacock and the rich become interchangeable, and the appeal of their superficial beauty (their “art”) reveals itself at last as “tough, dark meat” and “hollow bones.” In Seuss’s world peacock and meringue pie, as well as other extravagances of the rich, are not what starving children (or common folk for that matter) should desire; in other words, the exotic tastes of the rich will never satisfy the needs of the people. Seuss’s narrator asks rhetorically: “Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?” The irony is, of course, that everyone in America does just that with its obsessive fixations on wealth and fame. Instead, here the birds’ “art” is “useless as tits on a boar” when real needs, those truly nurturing and otherwise, hang in the balance.

In the second sonnet, composed on Antonio de Pereda’s work (alternatively titled “Delusion with the World,” a vanitas painting representing the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death), Seuss describes a knight’s lush dream of adventure and rich rewards, which becomes inverted to a nightmarish reality when he wakes to find he is no knight at all, but a hireling who defends “a couple of acres of blighted field corn.” The knight’s circumstances are not mourned by anyone, not even his putative “guardian angel” who, in a twist of fate, creates the knight in its own dream. Many others have threaded this needle since Descartes described the problem; but Descartes solution — viz., that God’s grace would not permit us to suffer such a damnable illusion — is little help where real folks live lives of grinding poverty and political deprivation, making them ciphers in the eyes of the world. The memento mori aspect of the poem bleeds into the reality of a virtual death in life under capitalism.

Based on Juan Sanchez de Contán’s painting, the third sonnet begins, “Anything can be a marionette,” as four pieces of food are characters in some mysterious play. Each exists independently (as if in its own private orbit) and exerts no calculable influence upon the others, “pure, clean in its loyalty to its own fierce standard.” This poem, as the preceding one, trades on a solipsistic fantasy that wakes to another kind of nightmare: for beyond the frame of this play, one of these marionettes is being secretly devoured by the puppeteer. Obviously, such a system will not survive for long, and yet one’s only recourse seems to be to watch in horror.

The quartet’s final sonnet, based on Peter Paul Rubens’ painting (although there are similar works by Caravaggio, Arnold Böcklin and an unknown Flemish painter), begins:

There are stories we refuse to tell. To tell them would be to set them
loose upon the world. Like the girl (not innocent, no one’s innocent)
whose body was swooped down upon by a larger, meaner, murkier
story like an enormous granite pestle that crushed her own winsome,
soft, unconscious, run-of-the-mill story into something like cornmeal
mush.

This reference pointedly indicts masculine domination via Greek myth, where a lustful Zeus tragically foreshortened the lives of certain nymphs. Moreover, we know, even absent Freudian psychology, the story is not limited to the fiction of mythology. Seuss expands this discourse through another girl who is “winnowed down like a bar of soap,” then cuts her hair off or refuses to wash it. “Beauty’s so dumb, she was known to say, isn’t beauty dumb?” The girl finally rejects her community, and as a result things start to turn to stone (in a reinvention of the myth of Medusa), eventually devolving to a lasting stillness which overtakes all. Here, reflecting the fate of the peacocks in the first sonnet, beauty is the lure that ultimately leads to far-ranging collateral damage and its own undoing. That beauty should be drained from existence is the bitterest and yet the commonest of tragedies, which Seuss signals by this sullen storybook finale: “The End.”

*       *       *

Not all is lost, though, as we see when we move to abstract expressionism in “Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote,” in which Seuss quotes Rothko’s observation, “I express my not-self.” What is more untouchable than the “not-self”? Rothko’s most celebrated works of art are abstracts created with a monomaniacal dedication, superimposing applications of layer upon layer of paint so that the color seems to glow from the inside. Many paintings are organized in two, three, or four vertically-stacked blocks, as to which Rothko would provide no further clue, sometimes merely labeling the painting with numbers or the word, “untitled.” Seuss, however, rows against the tide and chooses to view Rothko through the lens of a pastoral narrative.  Rothko may have felt he was expressing a “not-self,” but nature cannot tolerate a “not-bird” that otherwise acts like a bird dropping into a “baby not-bird’s open beak//some sweet but dangerous morsel.” (If it walks and quacks like a duck . . . .) Whatever “Sadness shapes the landscape,” Seuss has intentionally superimposed it, and if the “Fog steps closer like a perpetrator or a god,” it is a narrative that flows from a projected fantasy. This is one way the neophyte addresses the essentially cerebral affair of Rothko’s paintings and all abstract art for that matter. One too often hears the wrong question (“What is that supposed to mean?”) which evokes misplaced emotion, instead of hearing about the way color and form play on the psyche, which is all but impossible to convey in words. But Seuss doesn’t ask that question. Instead, she takes this epitome of modernism in a contemporary, post-modernistic direction, toward satire and irony. Hence the poet’s declaration [“Oh. I’m weeping.”] becomes an intentionally overly-inflated response (a telling, not showing) that forms the basis of its own illusion. The veil of the “fog,” call it whatever you like, cannot be anything but “self-referential.” Even the “not-self” can perform the equivalent of walking and quacking like a duck. The joy and intelligence in the poem is found in its critique of the artist’s own words and the poet’s abstract of a familiar story and emotion, where silence may be the most accurate response, but not one we expect from our “real self.”

*         *        *

Some of the most delightful ekphrastic poems of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl lie in the section called “Walmart Parking Lot” (the seed from which this book grew), which provide Seuss with a means to merge her poetry with the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keefe, Andy Warhol and Alice Neel, where surreal narratives emerge as a response to artworks that naturally lack subtexts. These poems are not intended to be strictly interpretative, but entertain us with the fantasy of the poet’s response in the same way that we might imagine a narrative to accompany Debussy’s La Mer. While Pollock’s action painting “has no interest in telling you a story,” it nevertheless suggests the nightmarish detritus of a bad night out that ends where its “debauched energies hum like telephone wires after the last caller has been taken off of oxygen.” On the other hand, Rothko’s work causes us “to speak to each other in invented languages,” serving as the benevolent nourishment that colors our clothing and washes over the entire city:

We wore solid yellow shirts and red pants, with a rope belt demarcating
the blocks of color, befuddling the critics. The art, we saw, was good. We swal-
lowed it down hungrily, without filter, like drinking water straight from the
creek, no matter the risk, because it tasted so sweet. We rode the swaying train
home at sunset, the smokestacks of Gary shooting flames into a sky already
clanging orange. The city had been a dream. Home, too, a dream, black above,
silver-gray below, floodlit by buzzing security lights.

All art influences our imagination and irrevocably changes the code for the way we experience the world, which includes the way we ourselves behave within that world, as Seuss cleverly illustrates here with both wit and charm. Rothko required that his large works hang in close quarters, as close to the floor as possible, so that the viewer could experience the painting intimately, as if seeing it from within the painting. Spurning interpretation, he most wanted to produce in the viewer what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has referred to as the “presence effect,” an emotional reaction to the work that is the alternative to a translation. This is what Seuss strives to convey through the vehicle of ekphrasis, to make us feel the dizzy, vomit producing anxiety of Pollack’s debauched energies, as well as the pleasure of making a connection with Rothko infectious dreams.

Some poems in the latter half of the book are not based upon pre-existing works of art, but nevertheless represent other types of “self-portraits” that show the poet reflected in conversations or interactions with family and friends. Many possess that “clear expression of mixed feelings” that Auden thought of as a good definition for poetry: “There’s Some I Just Won’t Let Die,” “Bowl,” “Hindenburg,” “Silence Again,” and the long poem, “Stateline Pastoral.” Of equal quality are meditations that tap into a different level of poet’s existential concerns, like “The Heroic Penetrates the Quotidian” and “Momento Mori.” We are also treated to commentary on poetry and culture in such poems as “Self-Portrait with Emily Dickinson (Rebirth of Mourning),” “Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid,”  “Self-Portrait under Janis’s Shoe When She Sang “Ball and Chain” at Monterey Pop, 1967”  “Self-Portrait with Freddie M (Invention of Thunder),” “Self-Portrait of Amy (Creation Myth),” and “Self-Portrait as Mouthpiece of an Anonymous Benefactor.”

The most bracing of these self-portraits, however, is “I Look at My Face in a Red Mylar Balloon Tied to a Mailbox,”[1] where the fallen world, represented by the ruins of a “cinderblock tabernacle,” is projected into a domestic nightmare whose predominant color is red: a “red dirt floor,” “a stop sign on fire,” a galloping horse with “red foam on its lips,” Rhonda with a “rusty birthmark on her neck,” Rick playing the blues in a “red trailer,” Ellie “pregnant with his baby / her red belly button turned inside out,” and then:

my beet-colored hair blown over my eyes
my mouth, bloody as if recently beaten

and when the wind blows the balloon closer, all I am is wounded mouth

when I open it, I can swallow the town

This is no “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” fashioned in the shifting daylight of contemplative verse, but rather echoes the mood and color scheme of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” in which blood, anger, terror, fear, and rude indifference swirl in Seuss’s lines and where the only recourse of the poet with a “wounded mouth,” is to “swallow the town,” much like the Sylvia Plath’s trash-talking Lady Lazarus who “eats men like air.”

This collection has everything to recommend it to the serious poetry reader. A complexity of thought and feeling subtly winds its way into your subconscious and, like her realization of Rothko’s work, finally infuses itself into the world we see.

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[1]  The poem entitled, “I Look at My Face in a Red Mylar Balloon Tied to a Mailbox,” was originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review (Spring 2015) as “Self-Portrait in a Red Mylar Balloon Tied to A Mailbox.”

© 2020 Steven M. Critelli All rights reserved.