[New York Review Books; 2024]
Everyone’s heard of the Louvre. Last year alone, nearly nine million people crammed its halls. Many more than that number have never been and never will, but no matter: There are other ways to acquire a sense of the place. You can spend an afternoon poring over an exhibition catalog. You can peruse the place’s Wikipedia page. Or—why not?—you can take a dip in a new anthology, appropriately titled At the Louvre: Poems by 100 Contemporary World Poets.
Founded in 1793, famous today for housing the Mona Lisa (among some half million other works), the Louvre’s reputation precedes itself. Yet “world-class art museum” tells only one part of the story. Since the very beginning, the Louvre and its holdings have served as artistic subject matter in their own right—both as focal point and backdrop—for artists of every stripe. But it’s through the prism of poetry in particular, writes current Louvre Director Laurence des Cars in the volume’s foreword, that “we can see the Louvre’s multiple identities”:
It is a palace with hundreds of rooms, each of which may give rise to some personal revelation, and it is a museum, retracing humanity’s adventures from the eighth millennium BC down to the present day, where visitors daily bring their contemporary experiences and sensibilities. Deep dives into the immemorial and manifestations of the present are fundamental to the Louvre. As they are to poetry.
Des Cars’s designation of the place as both museum and palace is telling: One question At the Louvre persistently explores is that of definition: what to make of such a sprawl? The answer—and Proteus himself has rarely received as ample a reckoning—arrives on the wings of the poems themselves. As a collection of such considerations (poets having always specialized in just this kind of alchemy), one of the book’s more immediate joys arises in the simple process of clocking their metaphors. In one poem, the Louvre is “a subterranean flame” (Jean D’Amérique). In others, variously, it’s a “country” (Tahar Ben Jelloun), a “city within a city” (Vénus Khoury-Ghata), a “craft of memory” (Michael Edwards), even a “kind of / car wash for the soul” (Ann Cotten). Such a list is, of course, suggestive only. We’ve yet to step inside.
Inside, Serge Pey writes a poem about “The Staircases of the Louvre,” and Kim Gordon takes on the institution’s very walls. But for most, it’s the collections themselves that inspire. In “Hercules at Rest,” an early watershed for the collection, Simon Armitage doesn’t describe so much as inhabit the eponymous hero of Greek myth. The poem is too long to quote in full, though it ought to be (“I look miles older than I feel: / the ebbing hairline and rutted brow, / the pudgy belly folded inwards like a toothless smile”). It’s a delightfully rhythmic account (this demigod puffs himself up, among other things, on the strength of his muscled legs, “but not the love handles / and not the sorry excuse of a breast, / like a poached egg”) that does its best to revise our received imagery of the hero. Here stands, instead, a Hercules gone to seed. This is how the poem ends:
As a babe in arms I bit my mother’s nipple so hard
the firmament streamed with spilt milk.
As a dying man I felled trees
for my own pyre, lay down on the logs
of sweet cypress and scented olive,
gave myself up to the flames.
People, what you witness here are my years,
but I am an age.
Cocksureness and self-deprecation make the poem memorable, but they belie certain linguistic subtleties that make the poem work (see how the nearness of “spilt” to “split” rhymes with the act of lumberjacking in the next line). But does the statue the poem describes actually exist? Easy to miss, a note at the top of the poem reads: “never exhibited, artist unknown.”
Which gets, in a way, at the heart of this book. One of its big draws is the privilege to witness such a wide variety of minds going at it, appreciating, remembering, confronting, excoriating an entire universe of art, from the canvases of Degas and Watteau to the Akkadian-carved basalt stele of Hammurabi. On one page it’s possible to find Wayne Koestenbaum attesting to a vision of love: his first encounter with Hippolyte Flandrin’s Young Male Nude Seated Beside the Sea (“I first saw you in frigid December 1986 / I was wearing blue gloves / your curls matched mine”). On another, it’s the poet Nimrod, scratching out a confession (“You’re going back to the Louvre, you’re going back to your / best years, you’re going back there to write a poem. And you’re thinking about the Raft of the Medusa . . . You owe it / a debt”). There are poems that are painstakingly simple (Jon Fosse), poems that are overtly prose-y (Fanny Howe), and poems that are intensely sensory (Ryoko Sekiguchi). There is a poem by Kenneth Goldsmith that will have you connecting the conceptual dots between typography, and transposition, and t-shirt design.
Such a diversity of voices and styles, translated from the French, Dutch, German, Chinese, and more, surprises and entices in turn. And it’s this air of unpredictability which, rather than scattering the mind, goes a long way toward upping the anthology’s readability. (Most gatherings of poetry can’t even pretend to possess this elusive quality of propulsion.) But for the more ekphrastic poems in particular, the ones that ask you to stop and consider something tangible (in oils, iron, marble, glass), it’s just a tad frustrating that the book fails to offer a single photographic reproduction of the art in question. It’s a bit like lacking the facing-page French in a volume of Englished Rimbaud. At the Louvre is not and does not try to be a guidebook, but it wouldn’t have hurt for its design, here and there, to have approximated the pictorial function of one. Color plates be damned, the publisher could have sprung, at least, for QR codes pointing to the appropriate pages in the Louvre’s digital collections.
The book, in any case, offers its own spin on the experience of museum-navigation. In physical space, you can usually count on certain pieces to capture your attention more readily than others. Just as a Kandinsky in a room, on a wall, under lights assails with madcap color, so a poem, equally interested in arresting the eye, might try on a nonpoetic shape. Take John Keene’s “L(’)OUVRE,” which sculpts sentiment and sound into a pyramid, and reads a bit like falling down one:
O
pen
your arc-
hives O muses
those bones beneath
the stones the blood the
flesh and air of wars and after-
math of conquest that powder the walls
[etc.]
Other poems contend with the hairier side of the institution, its history, its politics. Consider Pauline Delabroy-Allard’s “The Shadow in the Painting,” which identifies just “twenty-five women painters / painters priestesses / out of three thousand six hundred artists” on display. This is poetry, on one hand, that highlights injustice: no bludgeon, thankfully, but striking for its deadpan delivery. Beyond this item, what assumes the stature of a theme—and the Louvre’s own hand in the making of this volume has done nothing to restrain this impulse—is the damning issue of provenance. Several poems pose and plumb the disturbing questions of acquisition, empire, dirty dealing, and straight-up plundering. It makes for a tense, tightrope-ish conversation, stretched at times between poet and institution, poet and reader, reader and institution, and occasionally all three.
At the end of the day, At the Louvre is as finely curated as the museum it attempts to express (and stands as a testament to the powers of translation, not only from one language to another, but from objects in space to verse on the page). Had the museum’s curators and patrons never pursued such underhanded methods of acquisition, the Louvre would be a much emptier, much less impressive place. The book offers a model for understanding this fundamental basis in conflict, which doesn’t merely permit juxtapositions of selfless appreciation and self-conscious uncertainty, but encourages such wrangling. As Vivek Narayan so memorably puts it (in a poem which, naturally, is robbed of a title), “The museum is the most beautiful thief.”
Eric Bies is a high school English teacher. His writing has appeared in Rain Taxi, North American Review, Open Letters Review, Barrelhouse, and 3 Quarks Daily.
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