Read a review today about Dorthea Tanning’s second book of poems – “Coming to That”.
Among the many things that are extraordinary about Tanning is the fact that she is a hundred and one and still writing poetry.
One other extraordinary thing is that she is also a painter and sculptor of considerable repute. This while being as the reviewer points out “a woman of extraordinary personal power and seductiveness (everyone who meets her seems to agree)”.
Tanning’s self-effacing wit is evident in her description of herself as the “oldest living emerging poet”
Much of Tanning’s poetry in ‘Coming to That’ is retrospective; she has a lot of past to cover while living in “the long looked forward to, endlessly delayed future”.
Sample this excerpt from the poem titled “Never Mind”:
Never mind the pins/ And needles I am on./ Let all other instruments/ Of torture have their way./ While air-conditioners/ Freeze my coffee/ I watch the toaster/ Eating my toast./ Did I press the right/ Buttons on all these/ Buttonless surfaces/ Daring me to press them.
The reviewer finds this a happy mix of flustered sexuality (pressing the buttons of buttonless surfaces to turn them on!?) and technological cluelessness of the elderly. Some combination that. There is more. Sample this from the same poem:
Will the fellow I saw pedalling/ Across the bridge live long/ After losing his left leg, / His penis, and his bike/ To fearlessness? / Will his sad wife find/ Consolation with the/ Computer wizard called in/ Last year to deal with the glitches?
The reviewer asserts that this is the first poem he has read that “imagines a rent-a-geek as a potential Don Juan’. The modern day equivalent of the “Postman Rings Twice” imagined by someone from a generation which waited, sometimes eagerly, for the postman’s knocks?
Let me give this final extract that captures Tanning acute awareness of being burdened with too long a past:
Surely this everywhere present is real/ enough and eager, yet unable, to tell me/ what I am waiting for now.
Raymond Kurzweil, the author, inventor and futurist predicts that in the next decade the average life span of the affluent individual, because she could afford all the advances in medical science, would be close to one hundred and fifty years; most people with whom I have discussed this balk at the thought of living that long. Well if you are anything like Tanning that would not be so bad a deal.
However even Tanning knows the joys of mortality. In the late sixties she did a series of soft sculptures, reminding many of the female form, made mostly of tweeds and other fabrics. She said then that she wanted them, unlike sculptors in marble or plaster, to not outlast their makers. Well Tanning certainly seems to be made of sterner stuff than tweeds.
Can’t wait to download “Coming to That”.
(Sketch above is of Tanning as she is today, picture below is of a self-portrait painted when she was young)
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