Salmagundi Reader

To Forget Venice is the improbable challenge and the title of Peg Boyerss newest collection of poems. The site of several unforgettable years of her adolescence, the place she has returned to more frequently than any other, the city of Venice is both adored and reviled by the speakers in this varied and unconventionally polyphonic work. The voices we hear in these poems belong not only to characters like the mother of Tadzio (think Death in Venice), or the companion of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, or the Victorian prophet John Ruskin and his wife, Effie, but also to wall moss, and sand, and—most especially—an authorial speaker who in 1965, at age thirteen, landed in Venice and never quite recovered from the formative experiences that shaped her there. Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, the book insistently addresses the authors desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness.

“To Forget Venice is a tour de force of ventriloquism. Elegant, contemporary, and wry, the voice at its center is also capable of disarming flights of imagination as it enters and inhabits other lives across time and gender. The glittering, fetid city emerges as a complex metaphor for the human hearts simultaneous tenderness and capacity for cruelty, its ‘silver glow / a local specialty: filth / disguised as ornament. This Venice is unforgettable.”

"Boyers invokes the atmospheric city of Venice, addressing both its dream-like ephemerality and its Shakespearean underbelly of duplicity, sexuality, and debris. . . . Boyers adapts the voices of famous Venetians to tell the story of her enchantment with this place: 'Dearest Mama: Eel! I am to eat eel,' Effie Gray Ruskin exclaims, 'the heads of eel after eel, flinging// the wretched beasts, still/ twitching, into shopping bags/ of eager, festive customers.' In 'Wall Moss' Boyers appropriates an altogether different kind of speaker, offering this advice: 'Grow resourceful./ Become like me completely Venetian:/ cling to debris, favor ruin.' The emphasis on fragments and remains appears elsewhere in the collection, 'the lives—the lies—we lived/ on both sides of the canal,// invisible the water's stench at low tide... a local specialty: filth/ disguised as ornament.' Boyers debunks the idea of a scenic, postcard-worthy Venice in favor of a more complex attachment—one no less enchanting for its human influences, its 'Silence, then the boatman's cry.'"

Peg Boyers is a lecturer in the English Department at Skidmore College and the executive editor of Salmagundi. She is also on the poetry faculty of the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

Acknowledgments

 

ONE

 

Scirocco: Otello in Venice

The Ruskins in Venice

    1. John Ruskin Confronts the Female Nude (April 10, 1847)

    2. Effie Gray Ruskin Writes to Her Mother on Christmas Eve, 1850

Tadzios Mother

Mrs. Casanova

Titians Magdalena Speaks from Lazzaretto Nuovo, 1576

To Lenin from Venice

Wall Moss

 

TWO

 

Crossing

Arrivata

Rialto

Rooftop: Aerial View

Pact, 1968

Moon Walk

Canzoncino: Air for My Father

Urn

 

THREE

 

Ambition of Sand

At the Guggenheim Museum, Venice

Lido

Tramonto

At Sea

Callas in Venice

La Tempesta

Aubade

What I Meant To Say: In Memory of Michael Mazur, 1935–29

Dream of the Chalice

Fondamente Nove

The Jewish Cemetery, Lido

Brodsky at San Michele, 1996

To Forget Venice

 

Notes