Storyville:  Poems 2010
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  January 2017.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
112 pages, with a gatefold color cover reproducing a painting by George Hildrew, 48 original drawings created for the book by George Hildrew, a black and white photograph of the artist’s studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2016, on the frontispiece, and 2 original drawings of the artist and of the author by the artist.
9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN:  1-893207-37-4.
ISBN:  978-1-893207-37-0.
Published by Tsukuda Island Press, Hayama and Tokyo, Japan,  2017.

RETAIL PRICE: $24.00 (includes postage and handling)

About Storyville:  Poems 2010, Richard Milazzo writes:  “Apart from our usual visit to North Florida in the Fall, it was the BP oil spill of April 2010 that brought us to the Gulf of Mexico that summer.  This event seemed categorically reckless to us, ontologically and grossly (globally) negligent in a most criminal way, if not downright apocalyptic in its immediate and long-term ramifications.  The Gulf had always been a small (personal) but significant part of our lives and we, like so many others, were in a state of disbelief about what had happened.  Like the Biblical St. Thomas channeled by Leonard Cohen, we wanted to put an evidential finger into the wound, knowing, however, that the proverbial crack in this world – more like a deep-structural topological stain – would not yield any light but rather the never-ending overwhelming darkness of corporate greed and deleterious self-interest.”

The author stopped in Mobile and Bayou Le Batre in Alabama; Jackson, Natchez and Biloxi, Mississippi; Baton Rouge and New Orleans, tracking the levees and excavating the cultural residues of Storyville, the legendary red light district of N.O.  Along the way, he brings us face to face with Faulkner, Goya, De Kooning, Degas.  There are extended stays in Niagara Falls, Paris, Modena, Rome, where we encounter Pasolini, the Venus of Willendorf, Rilke’s Balzac, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Hockney, each figure yielding a story of some kind, both of a historical and figurative nature.  But it is not so much the stories that shape the poems, which have been described unflatteringly as “history poems” and “template poetry,” not that he has found anything objectionable with this approach; rather, it is the underlying reality, often ungraspable, that configures the syntax of the poems and generates a level of abstraction wholly unexpected.  What is lyrical in this poetry is in no way antithetical to the narrative extension of the poems, which are everywhere unabashedly desirous to communicate with the reader and in no way infatuated with the intellectualism of writing that is difficult for difficulty’s sake.  Whatever is Brechtian or distanced or self-distancing in these poems is dedicated to the lowest reaches of human desire and humanity, no matter the motive or the result.

About the artist George Hildrew, whose works parallel the poems in this volume in a non-didactic manner, the author explains:  “it is the quirky aspect of his work that has always intrigued me.  I have known George since the late 1980s.  His paintings are psychologically de-centered and de-centering, abstract yet lyrical, erotic yet detached, deflecting narrative pigeonholing but discursive in the most minute and unsuspected ways.  And he is simply not afraid to tell stories, in and out of school.  Stories about our inhumanity, as well as our humanity.  His is an incisive intellect and sensibility, utterly deracinated from any conventional sense of good taste, not to say down and dirty, that is, if only we could grasp the subject of his eternally quixotic visual ‘sentences’ and the object of their hidden desires.  Japanese anime and manga have nothing on Hildrew’s figures swirling and writhing in his dark comic book world or perversely odalisquing on a couch in Freud’s Vienna,” now reduced absurdly to nothing more than a boudoir inside a fortune cookie.

“I love it that drawing is the primary mover of Hildrew’s aesthetic, not that his esoteric use of color does not complement his strange vision of the world.  The 50 original drawings – black ink on 12 x 9 in. Strathmore Bristol paper – created for this book were executed in five months, from May to August 2015, and are reproduced here actual size.  If they are illustrative in any way, they are also illuminating, but, in the end, unruly and unyielding, no matter how much they want us to read into them.  Their parallel life with the poems in no way cripples them as autonomous creatures in a threshold world.  He has the ability to plumb the most obscure and simultaneously universal corners of the psyche, always however letting his psychological adventures determine or frame the formal parameters of his pictures.  And his works always exploit the absurd and humor in behalf of no higher moral or ethical authority other than that of his extremely reserved but eccentric soul.”

Together, the poems and drawings in Storyville tell the larger story of contemporary culture having entered and seemingly not returned from the worm hole of a robotic technological cartoon world of one-dimensional values, neither really condemning nor validating it.  At some level, it is as if the author and artist were walking down the same street, but going in opposite directions, and then crashing into each other like two wired techno-zombies (such creatures are ubiquitous today) reading their so-called ‘Smart’ phones, although in reality there is probably not (there actually isn’t) one Smart phone between them!  Or it is like they are taking a selfie together, but the image turns out quite preposterously sorrowful and forlorn.