"Blue"

Remarks from the Fray:

When I was a child still, I usurped the word melancholy for my personal use, to describe that feeling you get (as a child) while looking out the window as the heavy rain beats down on an empty street while you sit in your warm home as mom irons the clothes and listens to her 'stories' and the smell of soup further reminds you that you are safe and warm, a blue, a sadness, that is wrapped up inside of comfort.

It is a comfortable sadness, if you will, akin to nostalgia but of the moment.

I think this piece is taking that to an adult level, and taking it through the smoke and haze of drugs and jazz as well. We go from the art and the artistic to the mundane, the empty lot, from the sound of trumpets to the sound of horns ... boats? cars emerging from tunnels? trains? ... from titian to what i believe can be the light through a string of broken bottle shards pieced together, or maybe, more likely, the pipe or other instrument of glass used for intake of narcotic, reefer, opium, whatever.

I think it is a bit arty but it does capture a mood.

--Soccerfreak

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In this poem, Peter Balakian attempts a stream-of-consciousness mood riff on the color blue, an improvisation that mostly succeeds.

He signals his intent in the very first line, with a reference to Bob Dylan's "multi-dimensional" song, "Tangled Up in Blue." From there he goes on to Delft jugs, the blue-and-white glazed pottery made famous in that Netherlandish town. Its "seeping glaze" reminds him of the "liquefaction of the Virgin's silk / as it spread in Titian's cobalt," one of the more startling descriptions in this poem. And then the silk reminds him of a "fleshy embrace and green meadows / in the distance." I like that combination of romance and verdant nature.

Then the mood begins to change. Those romantic green meadows "fade to hammered light," hammered being a perfect word choice to reflect a disintegration.

Balakian repeats the word "light" as something "we pulled into a string of glass." Perhaps this is a reference to inhaled cocaine, which might suggest the next kind of blue, that of Miles Davis' song, Blue in Green.

The mood change is now complete. Instead of blue's beauty in pottery and Titian, we now have blue's melancholy in "the empty lot / after soot and rain and rush" (after the rush of coke?) The Ferry that would take the narrator home is "out of sight," while he is left to deal with coming off a coke high as well as a musical high, still remembering Miles' song, co-authored by jazz pianist Bill Evans, a one-time member of Miles' sextet.

Balakian's poem ends where it began, "tangled up in blue." The poem vividly conveys, for me at least, a delicious urban sadness, one I remember and still yearn for from time to time.

--MaryAnn

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(6/10)

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