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METAPHYSICS AND UNDERGROUND AESTHETICS
“There is enough light there for those who definitely want to see and enough darkness for those who don’t want it”.
—Blaise Pascal
By Dr. Milutin Đuričković
Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
Before us is an unusual, intriguing and in many respects authentic poetry book by Stanley H. Barkan, a contemporary American writer, which as a bilingual edition represents a real publishing and translation venture. What characterizes this poetry, and therefore poetics, at first glance is its metaphysical dimension, general biblical connotation, and especially the underground atmosphere, which makes the lyrical expression much more complex and rich.
If we read this unique and above all original lyric more carefully, we can also sense certain points of contact with Baudelaire’s “aesthetics of the ugly,” and this is properly illustrated by numerous poems from the book Face of Time, which hint at precisely this contempt for the ordinary and the everyday, as rebellion against the established order of things in the world and the poet’s environment.
The poet’s visions and experience of life’s reality do not only possess extremely decadent attitudes, as much as it is actually a form of resistance and unrest with the existing state of his spiritual mood. Many of these poems show exactly that “hell of the human heart in the modern city,” as they once said and defined Baudelaire’s poetics and his cult book Flowers of Evil, Hence, in these poems, beauty and ugliness are like two opposite and indicative symbols, which interactively oppose each other and interpenetrate each other, thus revealing a completely new and different existential space in which everything is “On the Brink of Fall.” This dynamic of contrast is present in almost the entire book, and due to its complexity and figurative richness, it requires close and careful reading.
Poetizing the so-called unusual themes, the poet directly confronts and clashes with harsh reality, with disharmony and fear of death, and finally with the jaws of life and its consequences, which he symbolically defines as the “Face of Time.” Hence, it is understandable that the motifs of death, nothingness, destruction and biblical suffering appear repeatedly in many songs. Although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as Hegel would say, the poet Stanley H. Barkan nevertheless sees and experiences it in a completely different and unique way, where he suggests certain solutions, visions or leaves the readers with the possibility for an open artistic upgrade and associativity. The aesthetics of the ugly (“crne crte” – the black lines, “Kuća demona” – A House of Demons) is not so much dominant as it is symptomatic in the sense that it is artistically successfully poeticized and presented as a kind of philosophy of life, which despite all the differences, indignation and pessimism experiences the triumph of goodness and beauty.
The poet’s visions and experience of life’s reality do not only possess extremely decadent attitudes, as much as it is actually a form of resistance and unrest with the existing state of his spiritual mood. Many of these poems show exactly that “hell of the human heart in the modern city”, as they once said and defined Baudelaire’s poetics and his cult book “Flowers of Evil”. Hence, in these poems, beauty and ugliness are like two opposite and indicative symbols, which interactively oppose each other and interpenetrate each other, thus revealing a completely new and different existential space in which everything is “On the brink of fall”. This dynamic of contrast is present in almost the entire book, and due to its complexity and figurative richness, it requires close and careful reading.
Poetizing the so-called unusual themes, the poet directly confronts and clashes with harsh reality, with disharmony and fear of death, and finally with the jaws of life and its consequences, which he symbolically defines as the “Face of Time”. Hence, it is understandable that the motifs of death, nothingness, destruction and biblical suffering appear repeatedly in many songs. Although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as Hegel would say, the poet Stanley H. Barkan nevertheless sees and experiences it in a completely different and unique way, where he suggests certain solutions, visions or leaves the readers with the possibility for an open artistic upgrade and associativity. The aesthetics of the ugly (“crne crte” – the black lines, “Kuća demona” – A House of Demons) is not so much dominant as it is symptomatic in the sense that it is artistically successfully poeticized and presented as a kind of philosophy of life, which despite all the differences, indignation and pessimism experiences the triumph of goodness and beauty.
In terms of theme and motive, Stanley H. Barkan’s poems are very rich, varied and scattered, but still the relationship of the lyrical world to the inner (psychological) and outer (historical) world dominates, which manifests itself in several ways—both formally and generally.
These are, therefore, poems with clear images and messages, with a series of (un)hidden ideas and thoughts, in whose imagination and retrospection many details and other life contents based on certain ethical principles and spiritual values of a local and universal character come to life. Speaking about the past, about myth and history, the poet simultaneously speaks/describes the present and the future, but not prophetically, but restrained, measured and poetically sensitive. Hence, a certain kind of contextual reading and artistic elaboration of the verses is needed, in order to understand them more fully and correctly.
For Stanley H. Barkan, therefore, a poem is not just an intimate act but something much more, loftier and more complex than that. Rather, it is an attitude to life, an undeniable fact, enthusiasm and defiance, without which it is quite difficult to establish the entire civilizational and ethical context to which the lyrical subject belongs. The poet’s aesthetic and creative articulation of life is not limited solely to the individual but to the collective and its layered and contemporary environment.
Becoming, in a certain way, an ethical explication and explanation of life’s attitude, Stanley H. Barkan’s poem is at the same time a kind of palimpsest, mosaic and catalog, which reviews the past balances and (un)achieved results then and now. His poems shape an unusual ironic-parody context, which tends to establish a unique dialogue, as a way to question and check individual details, knowledge and thoughts from the poet’s world and experience.
One thing is certain: the poet Stanley H. Barkan has and knows what to say. His poems by no means leave us indifferent, because their genre hybridity and symbolism deserve the attention of readers and literary critics.
21 November 2023
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