poetry notebook

Exploited in many devious ways, the traditional progressions assumed fantastic shapes between 1450 and 1500.
~Richard L. Crocker, A History of Musical Styles

The old prudes pursed their lips and clucked

at these composers who used their own tunes

as cantus firmus for the mass

or took it out of the tenor and maybe even

used a tune most may have heard

with a song by D’Orleans or Villon.

Did you know them? Ockeghem? Busnois? Des Prés?

Did your eyes see around you

what their ears heard in the music?

To most of us now these early music masters

seem tame, though their changes to music

were as radical as your Temptation of St. Anthony.

Is it because your means of departure

was a rendition of the flesh itself,

which we’ve been taught is itself evil?

Both seem to allow lush indulgence

but the content of your Garden, for example,

is nakedness and fucking

while those who ripped the blouse

off musical normality had for content

the words of the High Mass.

Many can’t believe orthodoxy

could be shown dynamically,

fresh, having no destination.

Seeing no distinction between nakedness and lust,

we allow the one in public (lust) while nakedness must

remain behind doors for the kids’ sake.

Since nakedness is a large part of your paintings it can’t

be a painting about what is good without being

a painting that says that nakedness is bad.

So that nakedness doesn’t lead us

astray, we create for you a wild cult

of hedonistic mystic monks.

But yours is corporeal because it’s your medium —

luxury visuals for the rulers of Burgandy, your patrons,

that quietly warn the Dukes against luxury.

So, tell me, please, great master artist:

you liked painting all that wild and naked

indulgence, didn’t you? It really is beautiful.