[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: September 28, 2009]
Poet's House did it. They really did open again, right on time - bigger than before in a sparkling new space near Rockefeller Park, overlooking the Hudson.
There's something heart-warming about as unworldly a venture as Poet's House sailing boldly on, seemingly untroubled by recessions, markets and real estate woes. While all around us banks fail, businesses go bankrupt, and everyone seems to sink deeper into debt, Poet's House persists with its ridiculously low membership fee ($40 a year; that's seventy six cents a week), it's superb reading and lecture programs - always replete with hearty wine and cheese buffets - and its random parties to celebrate this or that anniversary or opening or exhibition.
There are rumors of wealthy sponsors, but credit for the institution's new home must surely go largely to the Battery Park City Authority, which designated it a rent-free tenant through 2069 in a fantastic duplex space at 10 River Terrace. No rent to pay for sixty years? Chatterton must be spinning in his garret.
And so to the opening events. I missed the reading last Saturday afternoon featuring a legion of eminent bards, from Charles Bernstein to Billy Collins, and musical support by Natalie Merchant. I did attend a recitation in the morning by the poet Kurt Lamkin, accompanying himself on the kora.
I also made it to the member's only pre-opening a week or so ago, where the usual canal of white or red flowed, and the evening finished - this being Poet's House - with an exclusive preview of Jane Campion's movie Bright Star.
Visually detailed, stately, appropriately slow, Bright Star plunges immediately into the story of John Keats's love for Fanny Brawne. It neglects narrative background, and the uninformed viewer is left to wonder why a penniless, failing poet attracts the financial support of a group of men to whom we are scarcely introduced (one of them is clearly Leigh Hunt) and to puzzle over Keats's unexplained relationship with an evident bounder, Charles Brown.
Back story aside, the romance, examined primarily from Fanny's viewpoint, is passionately engaging, and with Keats's death approaching fast (hardly a spoiler, I trust), deeply moving. Ben Whishaw is fine as Keats, and plays him with an accurate, but not distracting, cockney accent. But Abbie Cornish is heart-breaking as Fanny - she makes her desire and then her grief startlingly real.
Paul Schneider turns Brown into a monster of arrogance and insecurity - which adds great animation to an otherwise wistful project, but seems historically to be entirely unfair to Keats's companion and amanuensis. He also seems to play Brown with a Scottish accent, and I don't know why - Brown was born in Lambeth.
If the movie almost stumbles, it is when Keats and Miss Brawne speak his poetry aloud. It's almost like the moment in a musical where the characters burst improbably into song, and having the two lovers duet on "La Belle Dame" was surely a mistake. But it's important that Keats's words - the reason he is remembered - were somehow brought to the screen.
In fact, one effect of the movie is to make one hurry home and re-read the poetry. And, setting aside the great narratives, the exercise does not make a for a late bed-time. The three odes - to the Grecian urn, the nightingale, and autumn - "La Belle Dame," and the sonnets "Bright star..." and "When I have fears that I may cease to be..." - if these were Keats's sole literary remainders, his reputation would be secure.
