D. A. Powell on Edith Sitwell

From Poetry Daily, D. A. Powell's Poetry Month Pick, April 8, 2008:

"Portrait of a Barmaid"
by Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)

Metallic waves of people jar
Through crackling green toward the bar

Where on the tables chattering-white
The sharp drinks quarrel with the light.

Those coloured muslin blinds the smiles,
Shroud wooden faces in their wiles—

Sometimes they splash like water (you
Yourself reflected in their hue).

The conversation loud and bright
Seems spinal bars of shunting light

In firework-spurting greenery.
O complicate machinery

For building Babel, iron crane
Beneath your hair, that blue-ribbed mane

In noise and murder like the sea
Without its mutability!

Outside the bar where jangling heat
Seems out of tune and off the beat—

A concertina's glycerine
Exudes, and mirrors in the green

Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints.

D. A. Powell Comments:

In the wake of World War I’s devastation, its disconcerting rattle and flares, its “complicate machinery,” Modernist poets searched for new rhythms to reflect the jarring, “jangling” world. Working with composer William Walton, Edith Sitwell constructed the lilting, multi-faceted lines of Façade, an experiment in complex sounds and colorful, jagged images. Sitwell gave the first reading of the work in 1922, the same year that saw publication of Wallace Stevens’ strange and dulcet Harmonium, E. E. Cummings’ typographically playful Tulips & Chimneys, and the mythic, monumental mosaic of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Sitwell’s bright, innovative language is an angular aristocratic cousin to each of these seminal works, though she is hardly read with as much critical attention as her American male counterparts.

In a 1923 performance of Façade, Sitwell was accompanied by orchestra and stood concealed by an ornate screen, from behind which she read the poems aloud with her characteristically noble elocution. Her performance intentionally foregrounded the aural pleasures of the poems, the ways in which the work created a “conversation loud and bright.” If Sitwell’s poems at times seemed “out of tune and off the beat,” it was because she wanted to re-invigorate the language of poetry, which she felt had grown stale and complacent in the hands of previous generations of dull versifiers.

The sound of the poems might wake the reader like a splash of cold water. And the images, too, are vivid and new, capturing not only the barmaid—with her wildly “blue-ribbed mane” of hair—but also the lively world around her, the “metallic waves of people” and the conversation that “seems spinal bars of shunting light.” The painterly gestures of the poem are cubist in that they break up the planes and angles of the world into separate bits. Surfaces are given such various textures (glycerine, glucose, muslin and wood) so that the reader feels them as distinct locations, as if the bar in which the barmaid sees herself reflected—perhaps in one of those antique beveled mirrors—is built through collage. But the scene is not fragmented. Rather, the component parts are burnished through Sitwell’s artfully surprising diction into a singular vision. Certainly, the effect is rather playful. But the “noise and murder” that seem to emanate from the mind—that complex space beneath the barmaid’s hair—quarrels with the music of both the bar and the domain outside of it. If this is post-war gaiety, it is also forever altered by the report of guns and the chattering teeth of entrenched young soldiers.

About D. A. Powell:
D. A. Powell's fourth collection of poems will be published by Graywolf in 2009. His recent work appears in Poetry, Subtropics, Cincinnati Review and Kenyon Review. Powell teaches in the English Department at University of San Francisco.

Tags: D. A. Powell, Edith Sitwell, Poetry Daily, Portrait of a Barmaid, modernism, poetry, Façade