Elegy for Joseph Cornell

Elegy for Joseph Cornell is at once a monologue; a collection of metafictional microfictions; a series of prose poems; an artist’s quest; the hero’s journey; a filmography, biography, bibliography, and inventory; a travel scrapbook; and a guidebook for creativity. Argentinian writer María Negroni transcends form and genre as she explores, with both luminous and illuminating results, the life of Joseph Cornell, a solitary urban artist whose work also defied conventional classification.

Neither Cornell’s work nor Negroni’s words fit, quite literally, into predictable “boxes.” Both Cornell and Negroni are innovators and inventers in their respective media; sounding the depths of surrealism and romanticism; modernism and the Victoria era; exploring the edges of esotericism, “camp,” sentimentality, and melancholy; while approaching work and creation as play. Negroni uses literary fragments, news clippings, and found poetry to create a uniquely intimate portrait of the New York artist whose work remained largely unrecognized or hidden during his lifetime. In “Homebody,” a prose poem reimagined as a dictionary entry in Elegy for Joseph Cornell, Negroni refers to Cornell as “an unmarked player” and “[s]omeone who transforms the unattainable into his purest passion not because pursuit of the unattainable prevents him from achieving a real emotional life, but precisely because the unattainable is what nourishes it.” Of the children bobbing for apples in “(Cotillion, 1940)” she writes: “Joseph Cornell works here, on that edge,” an edge where a boy lets an apple fall from his mouth “so he can keep playing,” an edge that tests the elastic boundaries between work and play. In other poems from Elegy, Negroni depicts Cornell’s work as a “festival of sad childhood” or perhaps a “celebration of childhood lost.” She describes his early endeavors in experimental filmmaking as “a game, after all, like all works of art” and his collages as a medium that “succeeds in letting the imagination play games, encouraging cracks to form in the world; suspending reason, once again, to the benefit of desire." This is a view that Cornell himself appears to have shared in his lifetime, having written: “Shadow boxes become poetic theater or settings wherein are metamorphosed the elements of a childhood pastime.”

In her homage to an artist who continually explored the edges of art and culture, Negroni, too, examines borders—through form, as well as via a fragmented narrative framed in unexpected ways. As the young girl from Cornell’s Children’s Trilogy (who serves as narrator or chorus throughout the book while “brandishing a transparent secret”) informs the reader: “I have no time to play outside these words.” Through the persona of this “small Amazon,” Negroni is examining another edge—inviting a connection between early vestiges of Western feminism (Godgifu or Godiva as a champion for female sexuality) and the secret world of an omnipotent child performer or child “star” (crossing the sky). In Cornell, Negroni finds an ally in myth revisionism, a source for creating new stories of a matriarchal universe. The child rider steers her own steed through galaxies that span the primordial past, while imagining a spellbinding present (“with one foot in eternity and the other in mud”). She ultimately chooses her own destiny in Negroni’s interpretation of Cornell’s dreamscape fairytale.

“All translation is a kind of illusion,” André Lefevere once said, and these translations bridge the impossible illusion that one language may be rendered through the words of another, providing a point of entry into worlds both real and imaginary. After all, according to Negroni’s tiny Godiva, “borders do not exist, and all acts of fleeing are an illusion.” The presence of ambiguity or perceived “illusion” in art clears a channel for discussion. And in an era when the very basis of reality and fact is increasingly under question, perhaps today more than ever, we need a space for questioning at the margins. We need more uncertainty, more room for interpretation and play, a chance to “discover a form based on an absence of form,” as Negroni suggests, and to create or “make a mortal leap into the impossible.”

Modernist Brooklyn poet Marianne Moore, with whom “magical illusionist” Cornell maintained a correspondence for many years, describes “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In such gardens we may expect to find Cornell’s films, cropped from found footage, or Negroni’s “infinite versions of the world—and above all, of yourself.” Just as the areas of a biome with the most biodiversity are often found on the edges—the space where a meadow meets a forest, or the freshwater river finds the ocean—so here, in the worlds of Negroni and Cornell, we encounter a space where creativity, ideas, and innovative art may flourish.