Word: poeme
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Chausson: Poem of Love and the Sea; Canteloube: Songs of the Auvergne (Soprano Victoria de los Angeles; Lamoureux Concerts Orchestra, Jean-Pierre Jacquillat conductor; Angel, $5.98). A vocal record to cherish, with De los Angeles, now 49, as ear-ravishing as ever. By the standard of the classic Madeline Grey Auvergne recording (1930), this version is a shade operatic, but in its own opulent way nonetheless irresistible. The Chausson, delicately contrasting the ephemera of love with the eternity of the sea, is a pre-Impressionistic gem, hauntingly burnished by De los Angeles, rapturously accompanied by Conductor Jacquillat...
PARADOXICAL, you might say, to begin at the end. But then, Gardner revels in paradox. In fact, his poem is not actually poetry at all. In the deep recesses of the classical unrhymed hexameter narrative lurks the novelist's imagination, concerned more with mechanics than pure, precise wordsway. John Gardner cannot deny his place in the traditional world of Henry James and the Novel of Ideas. Jason and Medeia affirms that fact once more...
...poem also remains a testament to Gardner's virtuoso technique, his deft control of the cumbersome epic. Take, for example, his handling of the narrative point of view, his own relationship as writer to his story. The first person narrator is cast into an epic-dream, brought to Corinth by the gods to record for posterity the sad details of Jason's split from Medeia. While this anonymous poet is only a neutral observer, he tries desperately to alter the course of events by reconciling the couple. Only Medeia can see him, and she thinks he's a devil. Gardner...
...fact, an addition to it. The author is not mirroring the real world, he's creating a new one--a world of language and ideas, where character and plot become subordinated. Jason and Medeia is just such a "conceptual system." It is a truly novel epic poem, "an absolute tissue of rules." But more than that, it is what Gass calls a metafiction, a compound of fictional forms, new built into old, with layer upon layer of meaning...
...obvious prat-falls of the metafiction, and certainly of this poem, is its lack of warmth. Only mathematicians could tolerate a steady diet of these theoretical enterprises. But taken on its own level of the idea, Jason and Medeia is intriguing...