Frank Bidart, _Star Dust_

CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED COMICS, published by the Elliot Publishing Company between 1941 and 1962, were not popular among my friends, but I read bundles of them as a boy, because my parents were always willing to buy them for me. My first acquaintance with the Iliad was through Classics Illustrated, ditto Crime and Punishment, and later on I was grateful that, thanks to Classics Illustrated, I was familiar with the plots of several Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper titles without having had to shovel my way through the actual novels.

Thanks to Classics Illustrated, I was also primed for "The Third Hour of the Night," the third installment of a long poem Bidart has been engaged in for a while. The middle and much the longest section of "Third Hour" is in the voice of Benvenuto Cellini, an artist, courtier, and soldier of the Italian Renaissance, who wrote an occasionally truthful and consistently entertaining autobiography that in due course took comic-book form in Classics Illustrated # 38, "Adventures of Cellini." So I was already familiar with Cellini's encounters with patrons and rivals, and with the audacious, touch-and-go, but nearly disastrous but ultimately triumphant casting of his most famous work, a  bronze statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa--an image of which statue is on the cover of Bidart's collected poems, I see.

Gratified as I was to be already informed about the career of the poem's principal subject, I was mystified. Why Cellini? Well... all would have been clear had I started on page one, as a reader is supposed to, and not decided to read "Third Watch" first because I was so keen to see where it would go.

Star Dust has everything to do with making--the erotics of making ("Phenomenology of the Prick"), the political economy of making ("Young Marx"), making and 9/11 ("Curse"), but above all the sheer irresistible impulse and need to make. "Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves," declares the re-purposed Hamlet who speaks in "Advice to the Players," then declares again in italics, "Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves."

Cellini was not the most distinguished maker of the Italian Renaissance--the bar was high indeed in that place at that time--but he left behind the most developed account of how it feels to make things, with more information about what is going on within the maker than we have of any comparably accomplished figure of his time. Bidart's 33-page poetic distillation of that account surpasses even that of Classics Illustrated.