Berlin-born
artist Charlotte Salomon died young. The year before her murder she completed
a unique fictionalized autobiography-in-paint that she described as her
means of conquering death. Charlotte perished at Auschwitz at the age
of twenty-six, but her opus, evocatively titled Life? or Theatre?,
survives and continues to astonish. The sixty poems in Mask weave
homage and history, invention and declaration, discovery and resolution,
in a tight contrapuntal lyric.
Elana Wolff is a
conjuror of words and feelings. She juggles thoughts, flowers, birds,
relationships, doubts, religion and sensuality with a sure touch. Keep
your eye on the ball, because she'll change it into something else in
a way that'll make you wonder.
- John Oughton
With Elana Wolff's
second collection, Mask, she unveils a hauntingly evocative pictorial
of the life and art of Charlotte Salomon. These are poems that speak directly
to the struggles and vicissitudes of the human heart. Impeccably crafted
with startling images, they will take your breath away.
- Laura Lush
Mask is Elana Wolff's second book of poetry. Her first collection, Birdheart, was published by Guernica Editions in 2001.
Elana Wolff
Elana
Wolff was born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised and educated in Vancouver,
Toronto, and Long Island, New York. She holds a BA and MA in Political
Science, and has taught English as a Second Language at York University
in Toronto and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Recently she joined
Guernica Editions as proofreader/copyeditor. Elana Wolff's poems have
appeared in periodicals and anthologies in Canada, the US and the UK,
and her monthly column "How to Approach a Poem" appears in the
local arts newspaper Surface&Symbol. She lives in Thornhill,
Ontario with her husband and two children.
Sample Poems from Elana Wolff's Mask
Author's Foreword
Charlotte Salomon's unique songplay-in-paint- Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?- was on exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario from April 14 to July 9, 2000. The exhibit featured 400 of the artist's gouache-storyboards with textual overlays and musical references- about half the pieces contained in her fictionalized autobiography, completed in 1941-42 in the South of France; in 1943 she perished at Auschwitz. I visited the exhibit during its last week at the AGO, having been intrigued by an article by Blake Gopnik in The Globe and Mail. Before reading the article, I had never heard of the Berlin-born artist. Afterwards, I looked her up in my copy of the Oxford 20th Century Dictionary of Art. I found no entry for Charlotte Salomon in the 1999 edition. The show astonished me. Her paintings, story and vision struck a deep and immediate chord. This collection represents my response.
My intention has been, in part, to create an homage to Charlotte (pronounced Charlotteh, or Lotteh for short.) I also wanted to impart the layered and associative nature of my response, to show how themes and images from Charlotte's life and work resonated and overlapped with motifs and figures in my own. The texture of the individual poems, as well as the collection as a whole, is cinematic. I have juxtaposed and blended fragments of history, story, conjecture and conviction from Charlotte's life and my own. I have used close-ups, long-shots, aerial views, flash-forwards, flashbacks, splices and cuts. As for the title, Mask, it is meant to encompass, not only the stuff of personae and disguise, but the essence of identity- as does, I believe, Charlotte's title.
ORNAMENTAL MAPLE
A few abstemious leaves still cling.
Buds have not yet
burgeoned, March-
metaphor for waiting-
not to say repose.
Going and coming
become a loop,
the figure that keeps us linked.
Last fall this tree
was all blaze and beauty.
Winter has subdued it.
There are always
consolations though-
that is what a relic is.
First, the need to
hurt:
same as the need to grieve.
Then the gripped fist.
ÉTUDE FOR FOUR HANDS
The wicker hen is
in fact ceramic. The anatomically
faithful
small-mouthed
bass is made from a thousand nails, hand-
hammered into oak.
Its tail and fins are copper leaf. Pino, pictured
propped in a sled,
is a female English
bull-terrier
with an Italian masculine name. (Whoops)
Now she's old, but when she was spry,
she dive-
bombed me
from the staircase, took a mouthful out of my glove
and ran; her teeth never touched my hand.
None of the ivy climbing the primary-
coloured walls
of the family room (and hung by hooks to the cornice)
is silk.
And none of the paintings CS painted, prior to '41
in France,
hinted at all at her later radical opus.
The passion-flower opens quickly to stay exquisite
for half a day.
Its coarse and artless hand-like leaves,
on the other hand,
grow rampant.
LOTTE PAINTS THE PROPHET
making a late entrance
to "Toreador"
from Carmen.
You know she loves a puzzle
when the artist
blends a fire-work
with shades of silt
for her seer.
His suits are blue and brown
and he's positioned
like a tome
or tomb,
immobile outside doors - then walking
wounded,
dark head
down,
hands clasped behind his back
(which is where he puts the painter.)
A man who would be Orpheus.
Resplendent in descent.
A man who'd aim
for nothing
less than love
from his singing
students.
In Paula, as Eurydice - read: other
side-of-his-soul -
he sees
redemption.
This is where he's
wrong.
His redeemer is not a singer.
In the beginning
I was driven to poetry by cosmic forces: love and death. Poetry started
as necessity; I needed to harness feeling, contain moments, penetrate
the impenetrable. Poetry gave me a way. It let me capture passion. It
let me handle contradictions- and if not resolve them, at least be temporarily
freed of their emotional hold. So that what I wrote into imagery and rhythm
once existed as the pressing present, or memory. Names and narrative could
be fictitious, but the metaphor and demonstrative content were true. They
must be. For it is in the space of authenticity that the personal meets
the universal, that what is of concern to the individual can also become
of concern to the Other.
The more I write, the more I am aware of the distance that adheres between what one sees, feels and imagines, and what one is able to put into text. Apart from the advancement of one's craft, the most one can hope for is belief in the identity of one's vision. The meaning that comes from it will inevitably divide as it goes beyond the page- there is abyss between language and experience, between self and stranger. But the attraction persists: to bridge consciousness and time; to praise, move, shatter, cry and sometimes even heal.
Home
| News
and Upcoming Launches | Index by Author
| Index by Title | Index
by Series | Awards | About
Guernica | Links | Contact
Us