Number 283
October November 1999

Mercury
ANDY BRUMER
Copyright © 1999 Poetry Flash

THE RADIANCE OF PIGS, poems by Stan Rice, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999, 90 pages, $22.00 cloth.
PAINTINGS, paintings by Stan Rice, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1997, 113 color plates, unpaginated, $35.00 cloth.

The first thing I did when I arrived in Berkeley early in the Fall of 1975 was call Geoff Young and Laura Chester, poets and publishers of The Figures Press, and sister and brother-in-law of a friend of mine from Wisconsin. They knew of my interest in poetry and invited me to a reading and a party for a book their press was publishing. All they were willing to tell me about the poet they were publishing, Stan Rice, was that he was "one of the most talented and exciting young poets in the country." The book they were celebrating was called Some Lamb.

I can still remember the packed room at Intersection in a church in North Beach and the charismatic figure of Stan Rice reading at the podium. Rice's poems addressed the loss of his and his wife Anne's six-year-old daughter, Michele, from leukemia. His voice filled the church with a kind of spiritualized mourning that kept the crowd transfixed in awe. Indeed, if, as Emily Dickinson says, a good poem should make you feel like the top of your head is coming off, the very roof of the Intersection Church exploded and gave way that night to the "terrible beauty" of Rice's work. I was twenty-three years old and came away from that reading changed forever.

It seems very possible that some of the younger poets and artists in the Bay Area today may not know of Stan Rice's work or just how much he meant and gave to poetry in the Bay Area during that era loosely defined as 'the sixties'. Rice was all of thirty-three years old in 1975, but he had already been Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University for nine years. As stimulating, engaging, and challenging as his poems were, they mirrored the enormous commitment he made to his students at S.F. State. I remember sitting in his Creative Writing classes thinking "this teacher is working harder at teaching than I am at learning…." Rice thoroughly inspired me, which meant I could feel myself opening and awakening to poetry and art's inimitable power. Because Stan Rice took us seriously, we as students began to take our own writing more seriously as well. It is hard to imagine a teacher offering his or her students a greater gift than this. In 1988, the Rices left the Bay Area for New Orleans, where they now reside.

In addition to writing poetry, Stan Rice always painted. However, it wasn't until he settled into his home in New Orleans that he dedicated his time equally to painting and writing. Now we have two books that present Rice at his best in both art forms: The Radiance of Pigs, which may be Rice's finest book of poems since Some Lamb, and his beautifully produced book of paintings, simply titled Paintings (both published by Knopf). Paintings was created with, as the book's jacket says, the "overall collaboration" of the seminal photographer and book designer Lew Thomas (who himself lived and worked in San Francisco for many years and now directs the Stan Rice Art Gallery in New Orleans).

Thomas, whose own photographic work and that of others were published by his San Francisco-based NFS Press, created books that operated as works of art in and of themselves. It is not surprising then that Paintings does more than present photographic reproductions of Stan Rice's (mostly) oil paintings; the book acts as a 'bound art gallery', with each page containing a single painting. Not only is the quality of color in each image virtually identical to that of the original canvas, but each picture fits in perfect proportion to the page it occupies. This allows the book's 'readers' to feel more like 'viewers' approaching these paintings on an art gallery's wall. All of Rice's paintings measure forty by forty inches, and the book reproduces them to about a quarter of that size.

It is probably time to say something about the link between Rice's poems and paintings. This isn't easy, because while the intellect's synthesizing instincts want to forge a connection, the brain's 'segregating' function senses that it might derive more pleasure from the poems and paintings by experiencing them separately. While many writers painted or paint (Henry Miller comes to mind), and many painters write poetry as a way of keeping their creative juices flowing, Rice fits into a smaller group who take the writing of poetry and the making of paintings equally seriously. This would include William Blake, the American Modernist Marsden Hartley, the Japanese painter and haiku poet Buson, among others. So while one can safely find in Rice's work an extension of one art form into the other ( in terms of intensity of perception, inventiveness of style and the works' craftsmanly finished patina), each discipline deserves an autonomous and unprejudiced look. All of Stan Rice goes 'into' both his poems and his paintings, and even more of him comes out of them. Stan Rice himself refuses to discuss the relation between his poems and his paintings.

For all of its smile-producing whimsy, Rice's title for his collection of poems, The Radiance of Pigs, captures in a brush stroke the essence of both his poems and paintings. The dialectic between spirit embodied, perhaps entrapped in matter, and matter burning and glowing with spirit has occupied the center of Rice's writing since Some Lamb; Rice explores the 'big mysteries' of life and death, of sex and love, of pleasure and pain, of excess and emptiness. His work reveals the magnitude of revelation and the depth of wisdom available to a single human consciousness engaged in transforming its life through making art. If you think the Internet makes connections quickly, read Stan Rice's poetry and look at his paintings. Consider "When I Grow Up," from The Radiance of Pigs:

Wm Yeats claimed when he was old
He wanted to be hammered gold.
Even if you throw in Gift Of Prophecy
That's a dumb fate; even for artifice,
Which is eternal and all.
Not that I want to be a salmon
Turning hook-nosed and scarlet
As I rot in fertilized roe. Nor would
I want to be a roasted golden brown turkey.
I want to be mercury.
(page 7)

Mercury certainly stands for Rice's element, as well as for his totem god. Both Rice's poems and paintings move swiftly, metamorphize before our very eyes, 'steal' a little of life's fire and energy and recompose it into works of highly wrought and finely finished art. If Rice were a jazz musician, he would combine Charlie Parker's impeccably crafted compositions with John Coltrane's protean bursts of energy. As Bay Area sculptor Joe Slusky says, "Stan's a blend of Fred Astaire's stylized and smooth delivery and Harpo Mark's lightening quick improvisations." The Radiance of Pigs contains many other pithy peeks into Rice's ever ingesting mind, such as:

Gnat 

I blew a gnat from the page of my book
And now I cant look
At my black pillow
For fear I will see it twisted and silver.
(page 56)

The long end poem titled, "Doing Being," (page 79) is a ten-and-a-half page symphony in a single stanza. The poem starts out with the poet kissing his son goodbye at Brown University and thinking about Ezra Pound's "ear" and his timing. Indeed, a Pound-like capacity to contain and balance as divergent an array of sensory input imaginable informs the progress of "Doing Being." The poem leaps through hoops of flashing and fiery perceptions of both the inner and outer worlds. It's a hybrid of a hallucinogenic narrative trip, ontological manifesto, aesthetic treatise and lyric tone poem. At one point, Rice himself simply 'states' his intention: 

…I am writing a long poem which I hope
Deals with the structure of experience. It's
Some kind of excessivist theory about the
Psychological states you can be in over a given
Period and still maintain dynamic balance
In a system that otherwise seems about to resolve
Into equilibrium, which is death….
(page 86) 

Holding together such a promiscuous array of images and their potentially rending affects within a single personality finds equal expression in another other long poem titled "Song," (page 57):

Ginko tree sex-enhancer
From china where
Ravines shed black mists
Nightly in daylight
Widows wed long hair in
Grass huts and hermits
Emit scrolls on loneliness and its powers.
Mushrooms, sudden, soft.
The tree sways as one ink
Brushstroke in brain.
Vine-flowers quicken
Like wakened chihuahuas.
He shaves, she shaves.
Ginko tree leafmush cures
Impotence. Good
For making woman think
He loves me….
(from "Song," page 57)

Rice divides The Radiance of Pigs into three sections: "Childhood," "Hades," and "Resurrection," and this gives the book an epic quality, as the poet reviews and regathers the memories that, in part, have made up his life. Many of the poems in the first section deal with his father's death, and they express something archetypal about the tough-to-bridge gulf between all fathers and their sons. In the section titled "Hades," Rice presents the cauldron of erotic experience and fantasy as a trial, and, ultimately, as a refining and deepening process of personality development and change. In "Resurrection," Rice steps back and gains some serenity by detachment that, perhaps ironically, allows him to authentically immerse himself not only in his own life's experience, but in existence's larger dance. The book's three-part journey maps a progression through original wholeness, spiritual disintegration, then reintegration and rebirth. The Radiance of Pigs appropriately culminates with "Doing Being," a charged cornucopia of psychological moments , which Rice orchestrates, restrains and resolves with the control of a true master.

Back to that Autumn evening in 1975 at Rice's reading of Some Lamb at Intersection in San Francisco, I remember feeling Rice's words coming at me at a merciless clip. But I also remember the feeling of 'getting' the poems all at once. So I'll end my look into The Radiance of Pigs by offering one of my favorite poems in the book, and just let its music waft itself into this present air.

MY TRIP TO HADES

I had to go to Hades
Because I wanted a dark beer.
Anne stayed above, drinking
The golden stuff. Once there
I couldnt get enough.
The other inhabitants were going through hell
So they didn't know I was constantly drunk.
I stayed there about ten years
And grew more and more charming.
I was constantly hung-over, of course,
But it was a price I was willing to pay
For being considered such a nice person.
Eventually I got so tired of being sick in the mornings
I quit; and immediately surfaced.
For two years I was ok.
My colleagues even elected me chairman.
Then one day one of them treated me
As if I were Satan; and then another.
They thought I wanted power.
All I wanted was to be desired.
But I was sober, and so moved on.
Being drunk is like being dead,
And a death to fear.
But there's one other thing I'd like to make clear.
In Hades they brew a great dark beer.
(page 29)

"Energy," the poet-painter William Blake wrote, " is eternal delight." Indeed, in Paintings, a fierce and fantasy-full energy drives Rice's paint-laden brush, as it delivers canvas after canvas of colorful eye-feasts. While many painters' works show, over time, a repetition of similarly nuanced shapes, colors and forms, Rice's paintings (like Picasso's) traverse a remarkably broad range of images, ideas and themes. They directly and immediately tap the artist's own, as well as the larger collective unconscious, and in doing so, mirror not only poetry, but also world-mythology and religions and the 'automatic' and autonomous creativity of dreams.

Though all of Rice's paintings share what might superficially be called a primitivist's flat style, they also bracket a remarkably sophisticated spectrum of images and subject matter in a rich, iridescently pasteled palette. "If you don't understand a horse galloping on a tomato," cautioned Salvador Dali, "you don't understand surrealism." However, if a horse does fit on your tomato, you shouldn't have any trouble with Stan Rice's paintings. "A poem," said Dylan Thomas, "is a naked person." We might say that Rice's work implies that "A painting is a 'plastic' poem."

Rice's paintings are often funny, and funnily titled, as they graft a kind of wide-eyed American hunger for experience and goodnaturedness to a darker, more psychoanalytically orthodox European surrealism. "Rooster Mistakenly Sent In As Linebacker" places a forlorn-looking bird among pink bugs and other ominous creatures competing on a football field. "Dog in Lounger" sets a pit-bull-faced 'pet' with a man's torso and a woman's legs into a comfortable rocking chair, surrounded by a living room painted with a Matisseian insouciance.

Many of Rice's paintings concern themselves with mythic or religious themes that render themselves in bold, colorful and tensely structured compositions suggestive of Emil Nolde and other German and European Expressionists. Yet to call Rice a primitive painter is misleading, as many canvases reveal rigorous Cezanne-like structure and volume and Rembrandt-like richness and depth. Other paintings operate more quietly, and evoke the flattened affects and efforts of American masters such as Philip Guston, Milton Avery, the collagist concupiscence of a Robert Rauschenberg and the folksy Southern Americana of another collage maestro, Romare Bearden.

"Adam and Eve," for example, depicts the prototypical couple as two apes painted as if 'pasted' on the canvas. Eve holds a heart-shaped apple, and Adam gazes aimlessly, as if stoned, into the distance. The Lord (who looks like a purple rendition of a Blue Meany) peers down from the upper right hand corner of the canvas over this pair with an expression both of bemused perplexity and earth shattering rage.

Another painting, titled "Death of Agamemnon," depicts the murder of the commander of the Greek forces at Troy by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover. In Rice's painting, Clytemnestra commits the act while Agamemnon sits in the bathtub, with an erect penis and a head reminiscent of a Rouault's painting of Christ. Rice has allowed himself (and us, through the finished paintings) to consider these mythic staples again and to interpret them anew.

The book begins with an "Introduction," in which the artist gathers quotes from his vast and eclectic reading that, one must assume, inform both his writing and his painting. He offers "Some Statements" in paragraph form at the end of the book that provide autobiographical anecdotes, as well as aesthetic and philosophic musings about many of the paintings themselves. In so doing, Rice has turned himself back into a writer and is, in part, 'analyzing' his visual work for our benefit. Here, for example, is his discussion of a painting called "Box."

Two men are boxing. One has knocked the other's head off. The cornermen are two green insects in the lower right. They aren't bad people. It's that cornermen look like insects to me. A different species. Especially compared to the almost naked, sweat-gleaming greek god over whom they lean and minister. Every single person in the crowd is I. Is that a satisfied smile or a blood-thirsty grimace?

These written pieces augment the pleasure of looking at Rice's paintings and also reflect Lew Thomas's ability to make each book he designs a one-of-a-kind work of collaborative art.

One feels almost speechless at the range of Stan Rice's talents. However, speechlessness really is silence, which leads to reflection. And through reflection, we deepen, until our own means and methods of expressing ourselves find their ways further out into the world.

Andy Brumer is a poet and freelance writer who currently lives in Alhambra, California.