Stephane Mallarme

Stephane Mallarme can be considered amongst my most favourite poets. French, living at the end of the 19th century, Mallarme was at the vanguard of an epoch that I believe has not yet been surpassed. Contemporaries such as Paul Verlaine, Paul Valery, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire form for me a rich period of literary creation.

Mallarme for me comes as close to a Shakespearean voice as can be found outside of England. You get a sense that Mallarme's command of the language is in total keeping with the greats of any culture. He was to court controversy in his career, having his career as a school teacher hampered by reactions to his poetic output.

Mallarme held informal literary gatherings at his apartment in Paris called Mardis (meaning Tuesdays, when they were held). There the cream of the literary elite would meet, and mostly listen to Mallarme, but also profess their own views on literature. It is these sorts of meetings that are the lifeblood of a literary culture.

Mallarme can be considered an innovator and experimenter, but also a voice that held true to many of the traditions of the past. In this he found his greatness. His poetry is at times difficult to read, but persistence in the face of these difficulties bares much fruit, as so many have found.

Arnold Schoenberg

The Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg interests me deeply. He was probably the last major composer to shock the public to any great degree. His twelve-tone composing technique would cause audiences to riot in some cases. He wrote a-tonal music when more traditional forms of harmony and contrapuntal music were dominant.

Schoenberg intrigues me because I wonder to myself - where do we go next? We have moved from tonality to a-tonality, and this dichotomy seems to exhaust the possibilities. It interests me as a poet, because using this dichotomy as a metaphor and applying it to poetry, we might say we have moved from the tonal classical structures of meter and rhyme, to the a-tonal structures of experimentation, free verse and effacement of meaning.

Schoenberg in many ways showed us a new way to turn. He employed a sharp auto-didactic knowledge toward constructing theories of composition, which created work that was new and shocking. But it has been a hundred years since some of his major works, and we are still in many respects caught in the tonal/atonal bind. What is outside this duality in terms of creativity? Do we simply move to the past and draw once again from the classical - a movement which has been necessitated at numerous intervals in the history of creativity? Or can we actually create something truly new - and will it be enough to shock the establishment, or will it only be an echo of what the past has given us?

Vaslav Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky was a ballet dancer who danced at the beginning of the 20th century. He rose to fame as the lead in Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The Ballets Russes was to become one the most successful and important dance companies of that epoch. Its fame was brought about largely by the dancing of Nijinsky. He had by all accounts and extra-ordinary leap that could spring him to great heights, even allowing him to 'pause' for a time in the air. The Ballets Russes was to commission scores from Debussy and Stravinsky, and Nijinsky used their work to choreograph his own works, such as 'The Right of Spring' and 'Afternoon of a Faune' (based on the poem by Stephane Mallarme). Some of these works by Nijinsky were to create a number of scandals, and could be considered in many respects the pre-cursor to many modernist trends in dance that were to follow.

What interest me in Nijinsky is that, at the end of his career, Nijinsky was to succumb to schizophrenia. He was diagnosed schizophrenic by Eugene Blueler, the professor who coined the term schizophrenia itself. As he began to descend into schizophrenia he kept a diary. This interests me, as I have had my own diary, 'Diary of a Schizophrenic', published by Chipmunka Publishing (www.chipmunkapublishing.com). Nijinsky's diary is has all the hallmarks of the schizophrenic mind. There are delusions of self-reference (where the sufferer believes ordinary events refer specifically for their benefit). There are characteristic linguistic difficulties such as 'clanging' and 'bizarre associations'. He relates perceptual experiences that may indeed be hallucinations.

After compiling his diary, Nijinsky was to spend the remaining 30 years of his life in and out of institutions. He was unable to care for his own needs, and his wife Romola took care of him.

Nijinsky is considered by many to have been the greatest dancer of the 20th century. His life provides much interesting material for those wishing to understand the cross-over between creativity and schizophrenia.