Joel
W. Vaughan was good enough to provide the first review of John Barton’s Reframing Paul Cadmus (2016) in Broken Pencil #74. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Printed 7” x 8.5”, John Barton presents, here,
a sizable, not to mention memorable collection
of ekphrastic poetry (ekphrastic is defined as verbal art about other art.)
Each of Barton’s eleven poems printed herein demonstrates not only an intense
familiarity with the visual work of Paul Cadmus, but a unique ability to
transform his paintings into sensual narratives, all of which connect into a
near-seamless collection that demands to be read aloud.
For
a reader generally unfamiliar with Cadmus’s work, I am surprised to feel such a
visceral connection with his subjects through the dancing words of Barton’s
interpretive hand. This speaks to the skill of the writer, and his ability not
only to re-tell Cadmus’s implied narrative, but to develop it into an entity more than its original author conceived.
This is the juice of ekphrastic poetry!
Take,
for example, Barton’s textual sketching-over of Cadmus’s 1935 “Gilding the
Acrobats”: “Untouchable – For the duration, a man among many/Adept at
plummeting down To earth A man up-close So ordinary/A man of ordinary looks”.
Barton’s words, here, not only describe the events of the painting, but they enact them, the poem becoming acrobatic
itself. A similar action marks the conclusion of a description of the 1987 “The
House That Jack Built,” which reads as follows: “Kamikaze-like across his large
stubborn/Shoulders while, unasphyxiated, he carries/On reading, indolent and
immune to fire/Story after news story conflagrating/In flashes about him, the
drifting/Tatters tampted in his damp coiled hair” [22]. The stoic eroticism of
so many of Cadmus’s figures comes alive in Barton’s lexicon, perhaps even
moreso in the latter than it does in the former. What results is a chapbook
which must be consumed.
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