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The poems in The Gentle Art move between the life of the painter James McNeill Whistler and a poetic version of the author, William Wenthe, who is at once inspired and disturbed by Whistler. The title comes from the artist's book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, which shows the paradox of Whistler's refined painterly vision and his witty, brawling, litigious, dandyish, vindictive public posture. In the present day, Wenthe admires Whistler's devotion to his art, and the beauty of his paintings, most notably the liminal London riverscapes that he named Nocturnes. Influenced by Whistler from an early age, Wenthe aspires to such dedication and achievement. But there is a cost. In the pursuit of his art, Whistler abandoned lovers, turned friends to enemies and gave up his own children to adoption. In a kind of dual biography, Wenthe grapples with admiration and repulsion toward Whistler, as in his own life he tries to fulfill his roles as parent, partner and poet. While some of the poems are narrative and others use formal rhyme schemes, the overall effect is associative-two lives superimposed in a double exposure, from poem to poem and often within the same poem. In the same way, throughout The Gentle Art, the contrast of two centuries, the nineteenth and the twenty-first-evokes a larger social and political dimension, questioning the relationship of art to money and class and in one longer poem, to race.
Poetry browsing collection : gift of Eleanor Weinbaum family.