Marmalade

From the perspectives of an accomplished contemporary artist and poet, William Benton’s MARMALADE takes the words of the French poet Mallarme (note pun) into an American idiom that both explodes and tightens poetic mysteries and mischief. Some 50 years from its first publication, complemented with the original watercolors of James McGarrill, this classic of autonomic and visionary translation remains testament to our human and ＂faunean＂ imagination unbridled. As the poet Guy Davenport writes in his introduction, ＂And if one dreamed, and was too feral to sort dream from flesh, and took up a flute and began to see how dream and reality are flower and leaf on the one stem, and a French poet [Mallarme] in a plaid shawl who loved old gardens and mirrors and Greek poetry wrote what he thought the faun thought, and an American poet [Benton] has a bright impulse to speak for Mallarmé speaking for the faun? Turn the page and read on.＂

JAMES MCGARRELL’s paintings are in the permanent collections of many institutions including the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C, and the Art Museums of New Orleans, Saint Louis, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and Hamburg Germany. In 1995 he received the Jimmy Ernst lifetime achievement award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2020. Guy Davenport (1927- 2005) was a writer and painter born in Anderson, South Carolina. He attended Duke, Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, and Harvard (PhD). He taught at Harvard, Haverford, and the University of Kentucky. WILLIAM BENTON received his early training in music and worked as a jazz piano player before becoming a writer. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other magazines. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Birds, Marmalade, and Backlit, as well as Exchanging Hats, a book on the paintings of Elizabeth Bishop, and Madly, a novel. His most recent book is Light on Water, New and Selected Poems, from Marsh Hawk Press. He lives in New York City.