Night Song of the Cicadas: Poems of South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, 2017
by Richard Milazzo.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
First edition paperback: August 2018.
144 pages, with a gatefold color cover reproducing a photograph of Ap Bac, Vietnam, rephotographed by the author, Ap Bac Museum, Vietnam, Ap Bac, August 1, 2017.
Frontispiece: a black and white photograph by Richard Milazzo,
Self-Portrait, Seoul, South Korea, July 10, 2017.
52 original drawings created for the book by Joel Fisher with an introduction by the author and a note by the artist.
9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Savignano sul Panaro, Italy.
ISBN: 1-893207-43-9.
ISBN: 978-1-893207-43-1.
Published by Galerie Albrecht, Berlin, Germany, 2018.
RETAIL PRICE: $24.00 (includes postage and handling)
Why these drawings with these poems; or, conversely, why these poems with these drawings, are good questions, given that this book of poems by Richard Milazzo, Night Song of the Cicadas: Poems of South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia 2017, is doing double-duty as the catalogue for an exhibition of Joel Fisher’s 52 drawings and several sculptures at Galerie Albrecht in Berlin, from August 31 to October 2018.
What Fisher provides here as illustrations for this book of poems are ink drawings as shadows and as the shadows of shadows – their faint, barely visible doubles in pencil –, based on photographs of stains found in the streets of Paris, which together constitute “an alphabet of silence allowing for a parallel world of experience, where enunciation occurs as a form of pre-articulation, neither skewing interpretation nor interfering with the imagery of the adjacent poems.”
Still we must ask, what is the common ground they share? Much in the same way Fisher arbitrarily photographed the stains left by rain or other sources in Paris, seeing in their shapes the potential for drawings and sculptural forms, the author traveled from place to place in the Asian world – South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia –, encountering and recording various points of interest, making observations, collecting impressions, that might later, back in his hotel room, precipitate something more than spurts of inspiration or single lines, inspiring perhaps the briefest of stories, steeped in the pathos of the human condition.
The fact that the poems find their analogue in Fisher’s Agents, and that some of his drawings look like cicadas, or, at least, creatural, is significant. On the face of nature, do we not leave the stain of human existence? And does not Nature, in its turn, leave its mark on us? Is Nature not the ultimate source of agency and the ultimate agent? Do we not comprise, despite all our pretensions and affectations, a reciprocal orgiastic miasm, with seemingly little rhyme or reason, endowed merely, like an insect, with the winding, groping tentacles and antennae of ever-waning, entropic perceptions? For many, the soul has been supplanted by the exigencies, the agency, of human existence. The poems merely tell the stories of these Agents, whether they are found in the streets of Paris, Seoul, Fukuoka, Saigon, or Phnom Penh. And perhaps they, in turn, reflect reciprocably but inadvertently the creatures or the stories of the creatures encountered in the Night Song[s]. Agents that are, no matter how amorphous or ellusive, no matter how delicate or horrific, always steadily mortal in every instance, in their ever-shifting modalities.
This is, perhaps, what these louche poems and dissolute drawings have in common. On a purely visceral or intuitive level – hardly analytical or diagnostic –, there was the sudden realization that perhaps the creatures populating Fisher’s drawings constitute subliminal embodiments of the “cicadas” in the book, creatures that are most certainly abstract but also undeniably mimetic. When the author asked the artist about this possibility, he said that he had kept the drawings in a file entitled Night Songs. Most of the the Agents do, indeed, feel creatural, not that the subjects of the poems, with a few exceptions, are literally about cicadas. But there were fields outside the author’s hotel windows, no matter how high up, and nights in South Korea, in which the sound of the cicadas “became so loud, it almost became unbearable, even gruesome.”
The author says, “if we allow Fisher’s drawings to enter our souls unceremoniously (i.e., without the benefit or salve of these words) and without compunctions, we might recognize the figures in them as simply the groteque counterparts of grace in the subconscious worlds of the day-to-day. But do we have the courage to embrace these night time creatures, these agents of human existence, as our own? These creatures whose cries we can hear even at night! Creatures that can be compared only to de Kooning’s Clamdiggers in their pathos and enigmatic force. Perhaps this is the only question worth asking, not that all questions do not have burned into them, especially at night, the answers, no matter how disquieting or dissonant.”