Cities of Flesh and the Dead

In his foreword to Diann Blakely's first collection, Hurricane Walk (1992), the late poet William Matthews invoked the ghost of the nineteenth-century French Decadent poet Charles Baudelaire: "[P]erhaps the self is, in some Baudelairean fashion, the other," he wrote. And although the poems in that collection centered on young feminine selves in search of identity, Matthews saw with a crystal gazer's clarity that Blakely and Baudelaire were kindred spirits, and that the former poet would be wrestling with the latter's ghost for many years to come.

An obsession with sex, death, and sin. A sensitive young narrator adrift in a squalid modern cityscape. Images of marble, angels, precious metals, mirrors, candles, perfumes, jewels, silk, breasts, furs. The senses of smell and taste jostling with sight and sound for their rightful stations at the doors of perception. Such echoes and affinities between the two poets, which remained latent in Blakely's first two collections, or masked by surfaces borrowed from Hollywood noir films, have broken through to consciousness in her third, Cities of Flesh and the Dead. And in grappling head-on with Baudelaire's great themes—the nature of evil in the modern age, and the desirous self's complicity with that evil—Blakely has produced a collection to challenge Theodor Adorno's claim that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

Cities of Flesh and the Dead announces its homage to Baudelaire on its cover. The title, of course, evokes Baudelaire's "swarming city" of Paris, where (in Richard Howard's translation) "the dying breathe their last, while the debauched, / spent by their exertions, sleep alone" ("Twilight: Daybreak"). Simultaneously, the cover art—a nude woman's body draped only in long strands of crystal beads—nods toward Baudelaire's poem "Jewels": "My darling was naked, or nearly, for knowing my heart / she had left on her jewels, the bangles and chains" (tr. Howard). Behind the nude is the façade of a Roman Catholic basilica with BEHOLD THE BREAD OF ANGELS engraved, in Latin, over its front portico. Baudelaire, the son of a priest who had left his order in old age to marry and father a child, would certainly have appreciated the irony of the juxtaposition.

Blakely goes on to invoke Baudelaire openly in two poems. Her sonnet "After Baudelaire," from the sequence "Home Movies," ends with a rewriting of that poet's most famous line. Baudelaire's "Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable,—mon frère!" ("Hypocritical reader,—my counterpart,—my brother!") becomes Blakely's "Hypocrite voyeur! Ma semblable! Ma soeur!" — the modern "reader" updated to the postmodern "viewer," and the sexist "brother" regendered to the feminist "sister." In "Before the Flood: A Solo from New Orleans," Blakely's speaker notices "[a] woman dusk-skinned / As Jeanne Duval," Baudelaire's biracial mistress, at mass in that city's cathedral, and then spends her lunch hour "skimming a secondhand Baudelaire"; later that evening she will have to navigate past cocaine dealers and prostitutes plying their trades "Before divining the way back to our hotels, blurred copies / Of Baudelaire's poems." The sense is dual: the speaker and the underworld characters she sees are themselves "blurred copies" of the figures in Baudelaire's poems, and the speaker imagines them, like herself, reading "blurred copies" of Baudelaire in their lonely hotel rooms.

Like Baudelaire, whose widowed young mother remarried a wealthy officer and diplomat, Blakely and many of her speakers grew up in households with servants, where "parents drove off to dinners, furred / And tuxedoed" ("Photography Wing / Manhattan Love Stories: From the Millenium"). Yet again like Baudelaire, those speakers choose a bohemian, art-centered lifestyle over one of privilege and wealth they could have inherited. Within that bohemia, music is the art most highly valued by both poets. Elvis Costello, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Ike and Tina Turner, Kitty Wells, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Beatles, and The Grateful Dead are invoked in Blakely's poems; a blues musician's saxophone seems capable of "Offering us another chance at transport...