Stealing The Scream and Venice, Unaccompanied, share in common with painter Edward Hopper, an existential view of the individual, and their connection to inanimate objects and dispirit places.
Stealing The Scream
Monica Youn’s poem, Stealing The Scream, about the theft of Edvard Munch’s most famous painting, imagines the crime scene to be a work of art in and of itself:
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.
Monica Youn lovingly composes a snapshot portrait of a space, a room; and the significant character a room can have, especially one that houses works of art, that emanate history, and meaning for so many who pass through:
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything--the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;
Youn imagines the living museum mocks the bumbling policemen; who will be clueless to the reasons or the impact of such a crime; brilliantly correlating the incurious cops to the ignorant tourists, who ask the predictable and tiresome question, What does it all mean?
In a perfectly executed fashion, Monica Youn concludes Stealing The Scream, by shifting the mirror away from the cops and the tourists, to reflect a poignant moment in the theft itself; when the burglar most assuredly would have found himself staring into the face of the melancholic and warped character in the painting, the thief sees himself staring back, as such:
…sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.
Venice, Unaccompanied
In Venice, Unaccompanied, Monica Youn writes about lonely desolation in the most sad and bittersweet manner; writing in nice, simple tercets, an incremental reveal.
chrome-winged birds
hatching from the lagoon.
That first day
the buoys were all
that made the harbor
bearable:
A certain self-consciousness and discomfort is elevated by the monotonous weather; as the alien learns to adapt.
to walk
through the alien city—
a beekeeper’s habit—
with fierce light
clinging to my head and hands.
The climactic verse in Venice, Unaccompanied will surely bring a tear to the eye of anyone who has ever been lost, alone, and broke in a strange city; as beautifully rendered by Ms. Youn’s excellent use of e.e. cummings like tumbling words (like dominoes).
still I sobbed in a glass box
on an unswept street
Monica Youn To Be Continued
Both poems are from Monica Youn's much praised 2003 collection entitled, Barter; published by Graywolf Press; ISBN-10: 1555973817; ISBN-13: 978-1555973810
According to PoetryFoundation.Org, the publication of a second collection of poetry by Monica Youn may be forthcoming; entitled, Ignantz, apparently based on a 1920's and 30's comic strip called Krazy Kat.
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