Variations For Two Pianos

On Donald Justice's Variations For Two Pianos

A villanelle is a poetic form in which the first and third lines of the first stanza are alternately repeated as the third line in each succeeding stanza, and then are repeated together in the last stanza. A villanelle is 19 lines long, five tercets and a concluding quatrain. But augmented villanelle forms use the same principle, and can be just as satisfying. The example below consists of 15 lines; you could call it an abbreviated villanelle. I find it even more powerful for its relative brevity, in relation to its classical antecedent.

Here is Justice's villanelle:

Variation for Two Pianos

for Thomas Higgins, pianist


There is no music now in all Arkansas.
Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Movers dismantled the instruments, away
Sped the vans. The first detour untuned the strings.

There is no music now in all Arkansas.

Up Main Street, past the cold shopfronts of Conway,
The brash, self-important brick of the college,

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.

Warm evenings, the windows open, he would play
Something of Mozart's for his pupils, the birds.

There is no music now in all Arkansas.

How shall the mockingbird mend her trill, the jay
His eccentric attack, lacking a teacher?

Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos.
There is no music now in all Arkansas.

There are several things to talk about with this ingenious poem.  Characteristically, Justice's subject is a real person, not an idealized presence of one, or a personified, mythological being from classical literature.  Justice will often play classical themes against Modern situations, using the irony of high art to throw ordinary phenomena into stark relief, or for humor. 

Another nicety is that there is nothing "outside" the poem which our curiosity requires to make the poem work.  We don't need to know, really, any more about Higgins, than that he is a classical pianist, certainly a professional, as well as an academic (whose appointment may have ended, necessitating his departure from Conway [home to no less than three colleges, including the University of Central Arkansas]), and that he takes his pianos with him.

Why Variations for two pianos?  Perhaps this is a joke.  Pianists have played two pianos before; Liberace used to do it on his television show in the 1950's.  To be more precise, the poem is indeed a verbal "variation" for, since it is "about" Higgins's pianos.  Obviously it's a poem, not a musical composition, though in a very real sense, as a villanelle, the poem is superficially not much more than a set of banal musical phrases.  We are tantalized by the notion of a poem for two pianos, even if it is just a little joke.  Not the kind of "lyrics" one could set to music, though, since their tone is conversational, what Robert Frost often referred to (in his own work) as "the sound of sentences."  By which he meant, I've always assumed, the way people naturally speak, as opposed to the artificial language of "poetry."  And naturalness is very much a part of Justice's approach.  

Is it possible to write highly complex, finished poems, even in classical, traditional forms, in the language of common speech?  Since the early Modernists, in the 1920's, that's been a preoccupation.  William Carlos Williams believed that poetry should not only be about common people, but should, in effect, speak through them.  This tendency, to want to bring poetry down to the level of the everyday, now has a clear history, at least in America. Imagine Frank O'Hara without his "deep gossip."  Think about the Confessionalists, who wanted to work out private, psychological issues, in their lives, as if they were relating directly to a therapist (the reader).  

Justice certainly didn't believe in confessing in his poetry.  His poems often seem like the work of a master tinkerer, perhaps a watch-maker.  The little gears and levers spin and click and mark time, ingenious meters of our mortality.  

Is the poem a joke about Arkansas?  Is Higgins the only man in the state to make real music? Without him, playing Mozart through the open windows on a peaceful Sunday afternoon, as the birds outside chirp in unison, is the whole State an empty wasteland of quiet, or cacaphony?  

Even in going, "the first detour untuned the strings," the pitch, the tone, is distorted.  But what does he mean by detour?   Does the poem take a detour?  If his only real pupils were "the birds" was he not appreciated, for his teaching?  

But nature's music is not perfect, either.  The jay and the mockingbird need instruction too, to mend their trill, their "eccentric attack."  

The first line is repeated four times, the second line, three times.  Between these (musical) refrains, there are four couplets of description.  This is very like a first movement of a Mozart sonata or sonatina, the statement of thematic element introduced, "trifled" with briefly, then repeated primly at the end.  Light, pure, limpid, lapidary, seemingly simple-minded, easy.  

This purity of song is contrasted with the "brash, self-important brick" of the college.  This last reminds me of a snatch of dialogue from John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [1974], where George Smiley is talking to Roddy Martindale who says "just a red brick don...a few bits of sandstone..." to satirize the pretensions of a lower class academic.  Brick being, in the history of English architecture, a decidedly "lower class" building material, perhaps suitable for flats and full service banks, but not nearly sophisticated enough for gentry!

Higgins is probably too good for Conway, and its little pretentious college.  They didn't appreciate him, and now he's leaving, has left.  Does anyone mark his passing, other than the birds?  Justice does.  

We should all be so lucky to have a poet as talented and inspired as Justice write a poem about us.