Jackson Pollock: Memories Arrested in Space
Martin Gray
Review by Alyce Wilson
Martin Gray has written another verse biography of a famous person, this time Jackson Pollock. And like his previous work, Blues for Bird, a verse biography of Charlie Parker, this book demonstrates extensive research into Pollock's life.
Throughout the book, Gray presents a number of anecdotes which illustrate Pollock's personality and his relationship to art.
Jackson Pollock, as many people might know, was a troubled man, an alcoholic who was violent when drunk and had a confused sexual identity due to his mother, who decided that after having four boys, she wanted a girl. Therefore, she made Jackson, her youngest, wear dresses.
Like the tangled tapestries of his paintings, Pollock's life is a web of violent and passionate excess.
Gray seems to have a better feel for Pollock's work than he had for Parker's. He makes Jackson Pollock's art come alive:
In Tondo ('48)
Jackson's canvas is
something circular
too whole to divide
in form a living cell
with looping tracery
which comes back from the side
upon itself to make
an in-turned unity
which at its vortex turns
or else it spins, attains
a field's totality
and has no bounds within,
a cell containing worlds
and an unboundedness,
a small infinity.
As with Blues for Bird, however, this work is hampered by the strict trimeter form Gray imposes. A three-foot line is not only too short to flow naturally, but the language is frequently forced into the meter, with awkward results, as in these lines from Section X:
Masson was extreme
head-wounded in the war
which was supposed to bring
all warfare to an end
Form should be used to complement the subject. For a verse biography of Charlie Parker, taking a cue from the title Blues for Bird, Gray could have opted for a blues form, a la Langston Hughes. Likewise, for Jackson Pollock, free verse seems most appropriate, perhaps using line breaks and internal spacing for visual emphasis.
Martin Gray is a recognized expert on Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose poetry relied on strict metered form. Perhaps this background makes Gray reluctant to depart from strict form.
It's interesting that both Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock exemplify the firey, troubled, passionate artistic genius. Perhaps Gray, an academic scholar and formal poet, admires that capacity for unrestraint.
As with Blues for Bird, I would recommend this book as an entertaining overview of the life of one of modern art's legends. If only the poetry did a better job of leaping off the page in the passionate, colorful streaks of a Pollock painting.
Santa Monica Press; ISBN: 1891661329