like a perne in a gyre...
News and meetups. Rhina and Dana. Unpinning Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Mispronouncing poetry aloud for your peers.
If social media is useful for anything it is for reminding me that the beginning of the school year brings with it the same stresses that I bear with rather unhealthy (but tasty) coping mechanisms…
This year I managed to have my cookies and alcohol in separate events, but I still acknowledge that maybe I should just go out for an extra run to burn off the stress. However, the alcohol part was a long-planed gathering at the Fresh Pond Beer Garden in Cambridge with a friend I have not seen in years as well as other lovely familiar faces. I highly recommend the Beer Garden if you are looking for an outdoor space for drinking and socializing. That night was sweet diversion from the small fires of this rough month.
This coming week will also be very busy with the following events:
On Thursday, September 28 at 5:30pm there will be a celebration for Rhina Espaillat at Boston College. The event will be held at the O’Neill Library, main floor reading room. Dana Gioia, Julia Alvarez, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nancy Kang, Sarah Aponte, Alfred Nicol, John Tavano, Roger Kimball, Riikka Pietiläinen Caffrey and many more great poets will be there. The event is commemorating the donation of Rhina's letters and documents to the Boston College Archives. Food and drinks will be provided. People are encouraged to wear red shoes in honor of one of her poems.
On Friday, September 29 at 12-1:30pm Dana Gioia will be giving a talk on Poetry and the Catholic Imagination. This should be fantastic. Food will be provided. Please fill out this RSVP link.
On Saturday, September 30 at 3pm, Dana Gioia will be doing a reading at the Newburyport Public Library, 94 State Street in Newburyport, Massachusetts. FYI: There will also be an open mic for those who want to read their poems. Click here for more information.
If you are in the Boston area and like poetry I would love to know if you are interested in attending any of these shindigs. If you know anyone who is local who you think like to know about the events please feel free to share this post with them.
On September 14th I was gifted the opportunity to see a reimagined Madama Butterfly at the Emerson Colonial Theater on opening night. When I told a family member she said, “What? That racist opera?”
I understand her concern.
For those who don’t know, Puccini’s masterpiece has been fraught with we could call… problematic casting choices. The history of actors performing in yellow-face is a long one, but 1915’s Madama Butterfly was the beginning. In 1885 Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado is so over the top with issues that putting Asian actors in the Asian roles doesn’t begin to solve your problems. What are you going to do when your characters have names like Nanki-Poo, Pooh-Bah, and Yum-Yum and there is cringe worthy fake Japanese like, “O ni! bikkuri shakkuri to!” This is not to say that one shouldn’t try to fix things. Some people made a valiant go in 2016 with their revamping of The Mikado in New York.
One of the turning points in the debate about casting Asian actors into Asian roles was the 1991 production of Miss Saigon.1 When I was a teenager I was lucky enough to see this on Broadway when Lea Salonga, a Filipina only a few years older than I was at the time, played the starring role in a show that was loosely based on the story of Madame Butterfly.
Jonathan Pryce had played the Engineer, a French-Vietnamese pimp, and to look the part he wore eye prosthetics and bronzer as part of his costuming. The production seemed unprepared for the controversy of having a white (though acclaimed) British actor play this character. Of this time, Pryce said,
"We were performing with a multinational cast anyway. Everyone in our company wasn't Asian or American, so we had non-Asians playing Asians, non-Americans playing Americans, it was a whole mix and that was the joy of that company in a way. In America, they didn't recognise that. And people were auditioned and they were seen but Cameron very strongly felt, obviously very strongly felt, that it was important it was the right actor, whatever race they were. So he said he wouldn't go ahead unless I played it, which was quite a bold move to take.
"There were still protests on the opening night. People got into the theatre and were in the flies threatening to drop things on us from above the stage. It wasn't pleasant. Anyway, it's over. And it was a good argument to have." So would he do it again, looking back? "Well, I think that if it was right for a non-Asian actor to play that role then, it should still be right for him or her now. If the argument is valid that any actor of any race should be able to play any role, then it is a two-way traffic. But I am all for supporting the fact that more opportunities need to be made for non-white actors." [emphasis mine]
I have very mixed feelings about this quote from him, but to move onward I think the entertainment industry has learned a lot. If black-face is wrong. Yellow-face is too.
In 2023 we have many more highly-trained actors of Asian descent, which is absolutely an issue with casting an opera that has such a high performance standard such as Madama Butterfly. So to that end we have come a long way, and the main Asian roles of Butterfly and Suzuki were well-executed by Karen Chia-Ling Ho and Alice Chung. Both of them have soaring voices with beautiful tone. (Very briefly in college I took opera voice classes. I doubt it made me much of a singer, but it did give me a great respect for and knowledge of the craft.) However, it is hard to believe that it should have taken this long to have a talent pool from which to cast these roles.
There were many issues with the change of Butterfly’s libretto which would be too long to go over now (for example, songs left in the opera that refer to a conversion to Christianity that never takes place in the modern version). I am in the process of writing a much longer essay—if not for print publication then simply for my own satisfaction.
I know I may not have addressed some people’s questions when it comes to such a complicated endeavor. If you want to know more about my specific thoughts on the Boston Lyric Opera’s Madama Butterfly please leave a comment and I will try to address it as best I can. The issues that this production were very thorny, and and this was a sensitive attempt to save this masterpiece from the cancel culture chopping block.
In other news I had my MFA class last week, which many of you know about because this is what this Substack is funding. One of the great delights of The Craft of Poetry (taught by the one and only James Matthew Wilson) is being able to read poems out loud. One of them was Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer” which is one of the most beautiful poems about wishing the best for a child. It tells of a proud father listening at the door of a room while his young daughter is typing away at the a story. When she stops he images the struggle of a fledgling writer and slips into the metaphor of a dazed starling. The last stanza always pierces my mother-poet heart,
It is always a matter, my darling, Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder.
One of the other poems I got to read aloud was “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats, which is beautiful, lyrical and powerful. Oh, those first lines…
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees— Those dying generations—at their song,
Unfortunately, I am haunted by a terrible error in my ways. An error that plagues me… mispronouncing gyre, as in,
O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre...
There seem to be words that are always the bane of my existence in public speaking and somehow gyre —which I know has the soft sound—is one of them. I have no idea why instinctively reach for that hard G. And this poem has one of my other nemesis words: bough. So my next podcast will likely be “Sailing to Byzantium” so that I can—for the record—get my voice to say gyre correctly, for once.
Are there any words you constantly mispronounce or misspeak? If you want to help me feel better and let me know…
And finally thank you again for reading, and a huge thank you to those who are paid subscribers. You keep me going on some very dark days, and I absolutely appreciate you more than you will ever know.
The King and I may also come to mind, since the Yul Brenner, who was of Russian descent, was the actor most associated with the role of the titular King; however, his ancestry is ethnically mixed since they from the Eastern area of Russia. Therefore, his Asian heritage is valid.
I love The Writer. One of my favorite poems. There is an excellent series of interviews with Wilbur on You Tube. I love listening to him read his poems and talking about the craft and teaching of poetry.
The word I ALWAYS mispronounce is brazier. Always say it like brassiere. I know how it is pronounced, but it trips me up every time. And it comes up a surprising amount in reading historical fiction out loud to my kids.