Balakian - Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture

I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination. Vise (noun): as in grabbing and holding with pressure; as in seizing firmly; as in grasping and having a grip on something; as in having a tight grasp on something, to hold the interest and attention of an audience; to have a firm grasp of and on that which is sought to be understood. Vise as in something that creates something under pressure, as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond. The pressure of the vise-grip of the imagination can yield a unique kind of clarity and knowledge. The vise-grip of lyric language, for example, gives the poem or visual work or song a value and a legacy as a deep mine of knowledge and culture in which human thought and emotion, language, and insight intersect and mingle, and come together as distinctive, memorable aesthetic form.

And shadow (noun): the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective, as partial illumination and partial darkness. Shadow as reflected image, but one that is partially opaque. Shadow as verb: to trail secretly as an inseparable companion, as secret sharer, to play with Conrads trope; to shadow as a force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on somethinga person, an event, an object, a form in nature. Poetry as aesthetic imagination shadows history, shadows human experience, casts its own kind of illumination, often unromantic, sober, and shadow-like in its truths. Imagination as shadow captures the aftermath of history, and when its shadow-light expands as a shadow expands on the ground in late day, the light lessens but the insight deepens. In the shadow-imagination, the poem can embody, among other realities, trauma. Various forms and kinds of aesthetic memory can also witness the event or its aftermath the same way the shadow of the historical event brings to lightamong other thingsthe relationship between language and history, lyric imagination and memory, whether it be personal memory, inherited memory or intellectual memory.

This gathering of essays written between 1988 and 2012 explores, among other things, some of the vise and shadow of poetry, painting, film, collage, memoir, and song lyrics. Some of the essays began as public lectures, talks, or papers, and others were first published in magazines and journals. All the published essays have been slightly revised and expanded, and those that began as lectures or papers also have been revised and expanded. The map of my interests in these essays brings together poets, writers, and artists from disparate cultural zones that move from the Armenian Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire and Anatolia, to Europe, and to the United States. I hope that the reader will find the vise and shadow connections and contiguities between figures as seemingly disparate as W. B. Yeats, Yeghishe Charents, Hart Crane, Adrienne Rich, Primo Levi, Joan Didion, Theodore Roethke, Elia Kazan, Robert Rauschenberg, Arshile Gorky, and Bob Dylan.