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Articulations of Artifice in the Work of Mary Jo Bang
- Wesleyan University Press
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34 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century articulations of artifice in the work of mary jo bang Karla Kelsey Then I went home And wrote a script To follow where I got a free boat ride While taking pictures of pictures And all the pictures came out beautiful.1 A poet of persona, of film and stage metaphor, of persistent eye for visual detail—of insistence that we “look” and “look” once again2 —Mary Jo Bang’s six books turn on articulating the artifice of the lyric. Like the photographs of Cindy Sherman, an artist directly evoked in Bang’s statement of poetics and in her ekphrastic poem “Untitled # 70 (Or, the Question of Remains),” Bang’s work hinges on drawing attention to the dyadic nature of signs, the unpassable separation between signifier and signified that are separate elements, but also two sides of the same coin. Although each of Bang’s books has a specific nature, in every project Bang conjures up surfaces, absorbing readers in vivid tableaux while exposing the constructed nature of imaginative objects. The concept of the dyadic sign becomes particularly relevant when conceptual components are most submerged, as in media such as photography and language where the meaning of the sign is often mistakenly assumed to be a real-world referent. Artists such as Cindy Sherman and Mary Jo Bang problematize the impulse to fix meaning in this way. For example, when we look at any of Sherman’s sixty-nine black-and-white photographs in her Untitled Film Stills series we first think we are looking at publicity pictures of an actress-in-character, taken from films made in the ’60s and ’70s. Here we see a blonde bombshell playing the role of a woman lounging in her bedroom, peignoir thrown open, eyes fluttered up to the ceiling (“Untitled Film Still #6”). In another an actress poses as the quintessential sexy librarian reaching for a book (“Untitled Film Still #13”).3 On first glance, we will assume that what the pictures “mean”—what they are “of”—is an actress caught in the act of posing in character. However, this is not the case. What is true of the photographs is that they all feature the artist herself, dressed up as the different female characters an actress from that era was most often asked to play. Understanding this reveals the extent to which the viewer’s narrative about the blonde bombshell was not in the Mary Jo Bang | 35 pictures themselves—for there was no blonde bombshell, merely an artist pretending to be someone else—but rather in the conceptual context we bring to our viewing. In addition, due to the fact that the photographs feature the artist herself, we are given to wonder who is literally behind the camera. As we look at the photographs we realize that we are assuming the point of view of somebody’s gaze—but whose? Sherman’s work is unique because it draws us into a fantasy, asking us to indulge in the sensuous surface of images while, at the same time, complicating the way that they evoke meaning. Further, even when the method of the series is revealed, and we realize that we are looking at a commentary on the genre of film stills rather than at film stills themselves, their sensuous artifice continues to beckon: The woman in the photos still has wet, pouty lips, a coy glance as she turns to walk away. As we will see, Mary Jo Bang’s work takes us through a very similar trajectory. There is always the lyric and attention to what constructs lyric surface—material language as well as mental image, association, response. Bang’s poems, like Sherman’s photographs, act as frames, embodying both signifier and signified, asking readers not only to engage with what is represented, but also to inspect each representation as something artfully constructed from multiple sources. Such articulation of artifice defines Mary Jo Bang’s position in the landscape of contemporary poetry, for, in many respects, a poet’s relationship to lyric surface places him or her upon an ever-contentious continuum. On one end of the spectrum is the New Critical lyric, which values circumscribed utterance and the absorbent voice of a single, unified speaker overheard in the midst of an emotional moment.4 Such work seeks to create a continuous dream of reading wherein the surface of language falls away and the reader becomes seeped in a moment...