Author: Brian J. Noggle

You know, I wanted to really dislike Frida Kahlo’s work because she’s so celebrated by modern tastemakers because she was a foreign Communist bisexual back in the day. Because that’s what titillates a lot of people who want to be seen as right-thinking more than their response to the art itself, their response to the artist as celebrity. Which Frido Kahlo was and might well still be. I mean, I’ve seen ads for merchandise with her on them even in this twenty-first century.

So I really wanted to dislike her work, and, well, it’s still not my favorite–she’s of the surrealist and brutalist stripe from the early 20th century like Matisse and Madigliani and Picasso, and some of her works are pretty gory. But some of the portraits and the still lifes are not bad.

But that’s not what she’s known for, unfortunately.

So I didn’t hate her work, but it’s probably not for the Nogglestead decor.

Have you heard the name Modigliani? I had not. He lived a brief consumptive life around the turn of the century in France, and his art work is somewhere between the Impressionism or whatever Gauguin did and Picasso; the images are representative but distorted in proportion and brutal in execution. He was only starting to get some recognition when he passed away from tuberculosis, so he’s really only known amongst art people, and perhaps fewer of them as we go along.

It’s probably fitting that if you talk about art that everyone kind of knows and artists who a lot of people have heard of, the names really taper off in the twentieth century.

Perhaps a twenty-first century reboot of the Teenage [sic] Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Generation with turtles named Matisse, O’Keeffe, and, uh, some other lesser know artists would re-inject them into the zeitgeist. Or not.

This book collects four pieces from Milton which do not have Paradise in the title and are not about his blindness. “L’Allegro” presents life as a person with a happy outlook. “Il Penseroso” presents life from a melancholy outlook. “Comus: A Masque” is a brief verse play wherein the sorceror child of Circe and Bacchus tries to tempt a virtuous woman to give up her life of chastity and to enjoy natural, sensual delights. And “Lycidas” is an elegy for a drowned companion that detours into political commentary that diminishes its impact.

It’s less than a 100 pages, these four works sandwiched with a pair of essays about Milton, his time, and his relationship to the Revolution at the time.

To modern readers, even to me a bit, the poems are a bit long-winded and slow without the punchiness that I prefer in shorter modern poems. However, to someone who’s steeped in older poems, though, they read pretty well and have a lot of nice little turns of phrase. Of course, my college poetry professor would point out that I shouldn’t write poems like this–as I did early in college. But I got more punchy.

And these weren’t onerous to read–like some of the wordy, wordy Romantic poet works. So a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

These little hardback editions from around the turn of the century seem to have been fairly common–in addition to this volume, I have a couple of works from Alexander Pope in similar editions from similar series. This series, the Eclectic English Classics, look to have cost twenty cents. I wonder if they were the Walter J. Black books of the day.

And I will probably read one of the Pope books–I since I just bought Essay on Man at the last book sale, it’s right on top–before I finish my complete works of Keats and Shelley. Or the Shakespeare I started years ago. Because these little books are Classics, and they’re not daunting. Which was probably their appeal a hundred plus years ago as well. It’s only the reading public that has changed.

As you might know, gentle reader, I sometimes take my children to the Nature Center here in Springfield, so I’m familiar with some of the locations mentioned in the book. And, in a Springfieldian turn of events, my beautiful wife nows the author: his wife taught algebra and his child played in the band with her. So I’d better not go too hard on the fellow as it might stifle our social life.

The book doesn’t have a date on it, but it’s right about in the 1985-1995 era. It uses a monospace font and lots of clip art which puts it in the early days of PC-based desktop publishing (as opposed to X-acto knives and rubber cement desktop publishing, both of which I participated in with my chapbooks).

At any rate, the first poems in the book made me think I’d picked up another winner. They feature, directly, locations at the Nature Center that I could visualize, probably helping because I’d been there, and the poems throughout the book are shot through with mindfulness/Buddhist themes of stillness and just being with the universe.

However, later poems get more to the modern short line stacks that I don’t like at all. It’s hard to evoke with three syllables–even haiku have five (in their first and last lines and seven in the middle line, I know, gentle reader). But the haiku is trying to make but a moment for contemplation and not a longer poem. I might have to work out a mathematical formula for the minimum number of syllables in a line of poetry before I disapprove. It might be seven. Maybe six. Maybe a more complex algorithm where an average line length over the poem matters more. I dunno. At any rate, the later poems led me to re-read the ones at the beginning and kind of discount them as well.

So it’s okay in spots and thin and tepid in others. Kind of like this blog, come to think of it.

Nancy Erkholm Burkert is a Wisconsin- and maybe even Milwaukee-based illustrator and artist, and I never heard of her before. Which is probably a ding on my knowledge of Wisconsin, but in my defense, I was not browsing art books all that much in my school days. Although I did go to the Milwaukee Art Museum fairly frequently, and surely it must have some of her work, ainna?

Basically, she got her start and cut her teeth in illustrating children’s books, including James and the Giant Peach back in the day, and later (that is, mid-1970s) she got more into oils and sculpture. Most of the work depicted in this volume, though, are the illustrations which are elaborate and realistic–well, as realistic as you can get in a children’s book, anyway.

The intro text is a bit heavy on the criticism–that is, the discussion of the artist in relationship to other art and whatnot and less biographical, although it is not exclusively critical. But, again, as a casual reader/browser, I prefer a shorter more biography-focused introductions. Although perhaps if I were to specialize in one kind of art to view, I would really get dialed into the relationships and influences more than I am.

Wikipedia indicates that she is still alive at 87, but seems to indicate her career highlights end around 1990 as the thin Wikipedia article would indicate and the lack of a personal Web site might attest. Which is a shame. I would rather look at her work than, say, Patrick Woodroffe’s. And were I in Wisconsin, I would be hopeful that I could pick up one of her original illustrations at a garage sale or something. Or at a silent auction at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where in 1994 or 1995 I once bid a week’s pay on a minor illustration by Picasso, true story. Which I did not win, by the way, and I don’t even like Picasso. Nancy Erkholm Burkert? I like her work.