In these four texts from THE ART HOTEL, Wystan Curnow demonstrates a variety of the ways in which poetry can be shaped. The texts also demonstrate a sharp eye for observation & a gift for assemblage, offer up a brief history of the theremin, as well as leaving the reader hungry & desirous of an overseas holiday. There’s a variant acrostic, use of wordplay (Monet / money / Monte), side excursions into hyperspace & its constituent codings, & straight & augmented list poems.  All that in just the four rooms of the hotel that we can s

One of the great myths of poetry is that the poet must display a stylistic consistency, that is, the poet shapes the poem. But that’s not the only way. In an interview 16 years ago I opined that ‘I believe that the poem dictates the form, that it shapes itself, & that you follow the poem’s own direction in regard to form’. & if you’re a flaneur, as Curnow is, then the things that catch your eye, that can be associated with any history of art, present—& are captured —in a variety of forms. Walk down the street in any CBD & the buildings, the shops, are individually different but tend towards a cohesiveness. Same with the passersby. No stylistic consistency, but a cohesive whole nevertheless

Into which art intrudes. No respect for time, style, or nationality. Look at the panini list. Four centuries between Titian & Gauguin, & in confirming that time span, the search engine I look up throws out ‘Goya—Japanese Cafe Gin Bar’. There are corners everywhere, off which thoughts bounce like a pachinko game, & turn into conjunctions. We trace those edges & find things displayed as neon signs, or written there in braille or in invisible ink.

At this point I could insert a quote from Magritte, such as ‘. . . our powers of thought grasp both the visible & the invisible—& I make use of painting to render thoughts visible’. But I’ll refrain from doing that & instead return to the theremin of Lev Sergeyevich Termen. This is probably the only musical instrument that is played without physical contact. Instead, the movement of the hands modifies electromagnetic fields generated by two antennae. One hand controls the volume, the other the pitch.

That movement of the hands is replicated elsewhere. A drummer, a conductor. A painter. A magician. The pianist is perhaps the most often considered—Denise Levertov: ‘Don’t forget the crablike / hands, slithering / among the keys’. Or Wallace Stevens: ‘Just as my fingers on these keys / Make music . . .’—but it’s more the magician that Curnow resembles, using his hands to extract from his surrounds the way that art communicates & combines with poetry, even when the art is tangential to the environment. THE ART HOTEL, like the Hotel California, is somewhere you can’t leave, but unlike the song, on the basis of these four texts, who’d want to?

mark young