[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: July 14, 2008]
With City of Monsters, City of Ghosts, published this summer, Chicago poet-artist Tony Fitzpatrick completes his trilogy of "old sorrow, written in tears of blood", overlaid with fond remembrance and honor for the dead: The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City.
Scroll down to win a volume from the trilogy.
I wrote about Fitzpatrick's powerful work in May 2007, his urban romanticism entwined with a compassionate version of masculinity. I mentioned The Wonder as giving "a sweep of the cityscape: hookers, sports teams, birds, flowers; and the project is still in progress." Complete it seems to be, in three beautifully produced volumes, a portrait of which Chicago should be mainly proud - although also, often enough, ashamed and embarrassed.
Fitzpatrick has been a boxer, a barfly, a loser, one of the bums of his brilliant collection of drawings, Bumtown. He has re-invented himself as a virtuoso of drawing, etching, collage and - the central thread - poetry. A comparison which would be frivolous as to stature, but which I find enlightening as to scope, would be with the Soho-born poet-artist William Blake. With back-breaking dedication, Blake etched his long prophetic poems, and their entangled illustrations, in mirror-image onto plates; printed them; then added to color to the limited editions of the prints.
Fitzpatrick's struggle is less titanic, but does add collage to the mix. As Bill Savage explains, in his useful introduction to the current volume, the centerpiece of any Fitzpatrick work is usually an original drawing or etching. This is framed, highlighted and bombarded by a brilliant collection of found images - some from magazines, but above all from matchbooks. Fitzpatrick must have been the owner of the greatest urban matchbook collection in the world. Here they come: cocktail lounges, restaurants (again and again the old Berghoff), hotels, nightclubs, steakhouses. Baseball cards too, and musical staves and cigar wrappers and any old scraps of the city.
Finally, in the margins of most pictures, he completes the poem of the work. Words, again clipped from found sources, or painfully lettered by the artist himself (in the earlier volumes, especially, his spelling is not the best; neither was Blake's); words which are at once part of the pictorial effect, a commentary on the picture, and poems of sufficient quality to warrant independent publication.
Kit-Kat girl dancing her way home through the living alleys and enormous puddles of thawing ice. She skips and twirls and shakes like fire-jelly. The passing night's sweet words are her mirrors and they speak to her in whispers that are visible like a lover's sempaphore in the night.
A book could, and will, be written about the poet's personal urban mythology, expressed in a range of repeated images and pictorial themes. He is a master of imagined monsters, compounded of men and dogs and bulls and insects. Anubis, the Egyptian dog-god is a character - junkyard dogs too. And fish; birds of several kinds - especially the starling; ball-players; good-time girls and dancers; aces and flowers.
The ace is his father James, a sport, a worker, a lush, and ultimately an undertaker who called everyone "Ace" and handed out visiting cards with an ace on them. If this work has a unifying theme, it is Fitzpatrick loving and forgiving and admiring his bumtown dad:
On the other side of the lake my dad becomes ashes. Among the death-flowers, he scatters himself on to the autumn winds, above the water and below the birds. Just trying to stay in this world.
The flowers, the white flowers, appear constantly: they are what the stars become. They structure the night sky, the background to many of these pictures. They invoke his father, and always watch over him. Sometimes they seem to become seed too.
I only scratch the surface of this night-time, political, sporting city-world, spread now over more than one hundred fully realized works. I wish I knew Chicago better; anyone who does, and who has long known it, could spend a lifetime remembering the names and images in the collage material. The baseball heroes too: Joe Crede, this city rounding third, going for home.
I also fear I've over-emphasized the sentimental. In his earlier work, Dirty Boulevard, Fitzpatrick created a nightmare world of corruption and sewage, crack whores and crack babies, broken bodies and bottles and roaches getting fat on the leavings. The savagery is never absent, but in the trilogy it's part of the city as a whole. And the city - rightly - is celebrated; as is the father, as is the artist himself, as are we all.
Some glimpses of Fitzpatrick's work are, of course, at his web-site. Volume three of the trilogy is described there as "in progress": don't believe it. It's here, and readily available from the major online book-vendors. And if you have a chance, see the works in a gallery space.
And for all you deadbeats and beloved readers, win a copy of Volume two of the trilogy - The Dream City - by answering this easy question:
For which country-rock artist has Tony Fitzpatrick designed a series of album/CD covers?
The first correct answer, including a mailing address to [email protected] wins the prize (and I, of course, am sole, final and absolute judge of the whole damn thing).
Note: the "old sorrow" quote in the first paragraph is Eugene O'Neill's description of his father/sons tragedy, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
