Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Everything after The Fire Next Time was anticlimax. There were TV interviews and invitations to the White House and a portrait on the cover of TIME, but most of what Jimmy wrote after he became famous lacked the passion of his younger years. That is part of the price of success...
...first scene does little to change this impression. A flock of anachronistically granola-esque maidens meander, lamenting over their unrequited love for the poet Reginald Bunthorne. In the context of a set containing an enormous portrait of Elvis, a malt-shop sign and a jukebox, these sentiments seem better suited to tenth-grade teeny-boppers than seasoned literati. Moreover, the characters' "hip" enunciation of phrases like "they're so square" mix poorly with the original "prithee's." To cap it off, Colonel Calverly's (David Magill) patter song with the dragoons, although extremely well sung, is simply neither tuneful...
...about my feelings and my truth." She has written some fine songs in the past, including (uncredited until 1984) the Stones' Sister Morphine, a jagged bit of Faithfull autobiography, and three cuts on her formidable 1979 album Broken English. But on Strange Weather she has put together a self-portrait from random sketches by such diverse artists as Jerome Kern and Bob Dylan. She makes the Otto Harbach/Jerome Kern Yesterdays into a devastating diary of faded hope and turns Dylan's superb I'll Keep It with Mine into a talisman of redemption...
...pretend its warm outside. And on those truly horrid days you can always go and look at Toulouse-Lautrec's "The Hangover" whereupon you will undoubtedly be much consoled. And if even that doesn't work you may go and empathize with Van Gogh's absolutely terrifying self-portrait...
Meyers' ingenious group portrait shows his subjects linked by a kinship of misery. Colleagues praised Roethke's hectic, incandescent verse and gossiped about his violent breakdowns. He described his electroshock therapy in rhyme: "Swift's servant beat him./ Now they use/ A current flowing/ From a fuse." The jolts were useless. He died of a sudden heart attack at 55. Jarrell was not content to be the best poetry reviewer of his time, says Meyers, "he had to be a great, perhaps the greatest poet -- or he was nothing." It was during one dark time that the writer, 51, fell...