Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
(Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

ZOI VRENTZOU

The Poetics of Beauty: Visions and Revisions of Cavafy and Stein

He seems to me more beautiful / now when my soul recalls him from the years
—Constantine Cavafy, “The Ship” (1919)

I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find
aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases — a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw — is, in itself, replication — the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last.
—Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (2019)

A rose is a rose is a rose
—Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily” (1913)
 

Art has had a unique and tumultuous relationship with beauty. Discussions have fluctuated from Aestheticism’s view that “successful aesthetic work of art, [aestheticians] argue, must, in virtue of its very achievement of the artistic intention, necessarily be beautiful” (Garvin 404) to the adjoining tendency to “characterize [ugliness] either as formlessness, failure to achieve expression, or as a contributory phase of the beautiful, repelling in isolation, but not unredeemable, since it is only ‘difficult beauty’ which we may some day unravel and accept” (405) or altogether correlate lack of beauty with lack of morality, in accordance to the ancient Greek concept of the “beautiful and virtuous” (“kalos kagathos”). At the same time, queerness is often met with the polar opposite reactions of fetishization on the one hand, objectified into a commodified aesthetic and demonization on the other hand, as same-sex relationships are shunned as anti-aesthetic, jarring, disgusting, distinctly non-beautiful, as well as unethical and immoral. Bearing these in mind, depictions of queerness in art have been the source of much controversy, raising questions of explicitness, often being criticized, censored, or banned. Reading Constantine Cavafy in this context – and much more, in the context of his own time – is balm for the soul. His poems repeatedly portray and highlight the beauty of homoeroticism, sexual encounters enjoyed framed as something beautifully experienced, recalled and retold. His poems “Body, Remember” (1916), “Their Beginning” (unpublished, 1915), “On Board Ship” (1919), and “To Remain” (as translated by Dimitris Papanikolaou) capture beauty found in the face of a lover, the surroundings, or simply the sense the memory leaves behind, and crucially the poem itself.

Cavafy’s poetry meets with other creative works in an attempt to weave a network of texts with a common axis, resulting in the creation of my project titled “Double Vision”. Reading Papanikolaou’s paper “Days of those made like me: Retrospective pleasure, sexual knowledge, and C. P. Cavafy’s homiobiographics”, the reference to the unnamed Italian “inverti” is striking. The use of the term “invert” for queer bodies was apparently not uncommon: someone inverted, someone that, looking for a partner, turned their gaze inwards, searching for a piece of themselves in the outside world, and others. The need to be represented, expressed by the nameless “invert” is also of great significance. Mary Shelley’s Creature in Frankenstein immediately comes to mind; another nameless body, non-conforming to what was deemed “natural” or “normal”, shunned by society, trying and failing to find someone to relate to, either in literature or in the actual world. The Creature, too, was dubbed as “Monster,” repeatedly wailing over his deformed appearance.

In this process of self-recognition, practices of reduplication and repetition appear crucial: the capturing of memories through poems, conduits through which the beautiful element is preserved, carried through time, proliferated and augmented, as the temporal distortion seems to enhance beauty rather than diminish it (“he seems to me more beautiful / now when my soul recalls him from the years”, Cavafy writes in “On Board Ship”). In this discourse of preservation of beauty, specifically in relation to queerness, in his novel titled On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong introduces the idea that the simple act of looking is another kind of momentary reduplication, as the eye, observing, inverts the image of the favored object inside of itself. With that in mind, in the gay relationship, the gaze returned transforms into an array of infinite mirrors. This infinity is what Cavafy encapsulates in his poems.

While the poem itself acts as a time-capsule, Gertrude Stein’s poetic form tied beautifully with these poetics of repetition. In If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, Stein muses: “If I told him would he like it, would he like it, if I told him would he like it, would Napoleon, would Napoleon, would, would he like it?” (190). Her spiraling motifs and recursive patterns wind and unwind, creating a hypnotic rhythm that embodies repetition itself. Stein’s writing is further embellished with asyndeton and alliteration, as seen in lines like: “Can curls rob, can curls quote, quotable?” (192). These stylistic choices generate a sense of circularity and accumulation, reinforcing the idea that language, like identity, is constantly reconfigured through its own reiteration. The goal of this project was to create a mélange of these two sensibilities: Cavafy’s meditations on beauty and Stein’s recursive poetic form. By drawing from her techniques, the project seeks to evoke a sense of reduplication—offering a tangible manifestation of repetition, a space where this idea is both reflected and made concrete.

And finally, translation is the ultimate repetition. Intersemiotic translation resulted in a video version of Double Vision, while interlingual translation is what makes Greeks capable of reading Stein, Americans capable of reading Cavafy. After all, Vuong’s voice echoes, we do tend to make more of what we deem beautiful.

WORKS CITED

Cavafy, Constantine. “Body, Remember.” C.P Cavafy: Collected Poems, edited by George Savvidis. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton UP, 1992, p. 84.
---. “On Board Ship.” C.P Cavafy: Collected Poems, edited by George Savvidis. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton UP, 1992, p.100.
---. “Their Beginning.” C.P Cavafy: Collected Poems, edited by George Savvidis. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton UP, 1992, p. 111.
Garvin, Lucius. “The Problem of Ugliness in Art.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 57, no. 4, 1948, pp. 404–409. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2181373. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
Papanikolaou, Dimitris. “Days of Those Made Like Me: Retrospective Pleasure, Sexual Knowledge, and C.P. Cavafy’s Homobiographics.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 2013, pp. 261-277. https://doi.org/10.1179/0307013113Z.00000000031. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Collins Classics, 2010.
Stein, Gertrude. “Sacred Emily.” Geography and Plays, The Four Seas Company, 1922, pp. 178-188. Internet Archive, https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/geographyplays00steirich/geography plays00steirich.pdf.
Stein, Gertrude. “If I Told Him, A Complete Protrait of Picasso.” Selections: Gertrude Stein, University of California Press, 2008, pp. 190-193, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55215/if-i-told-him-a-completed-portrait-of-picasso.
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Random House, 2020.

Zoi Vrentzou was born in Herakleion, Crete. She is an undergraduate student in the School of English at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her interests include literary translation, particularly theatre and poetry translation, as well as creative writing, volunteer work and photography. In her free time, she experiments with translation and volunteers as an English language teacher in IRIDA Women’s Centre.    

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