Introduction
 ross-media
works of art rarely succeed. Poets who write about paintings or pieces of
music invariably start with a description of the work they are contemplating,
yet no matter how elaborate or clever their description may be, it is bound
to pale before the original. And so their poems are pale too--removed, secondary,
no more than feeble semblances or echoes.
Allen Hoey, in his
poems dealing with Van Gogh, avoids this failing. Granted, the poems contain
a few descriptions of famous paintings, but only slantingly--as metaphors
of spiritual aspiration and agony.
Vincent Van Gogh was
a man, and we have his letters and other biographical data to certify his
historical existence. He was also a painter, and we have his canvasses,
probably the most famous in the Western world, to attest to his artist's
sensibility. But in our present culture Van Gogh is primarily neither man
nor painter; he is a myth. The myth is attached, of course, to the life
and to the paintings, as a spider's web is attached to the branches of a
hazel bush at the edge of the forest. But the myth itself, the complex web
of madness and genius, as if dewy and shining in the sunlight, is what catches
and holds our attention.
Hoey's suite of poems--arising
in part from a visit to France, to the scenes of Van Gogh's torture--explores
the myth in the most dramatic way possible, i.e., through the stream of
the painter's consciousness. What a remarkable achievement! Even in our
age of great biographical exploits, I know nothing to surpass this recounting
of the genius, the inceptive mastermind, of modern art, done in beautifully
written poems, which I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone's attention.
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