In Simon Tedeschi’s Fugitive, nominated for the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in Poetry, the celebrated classical pianist concatenates his influences in a torrent of poetic memoir. Fugitive’s genre-bending procession of segments interlinks the ancestral, philosophical, and psychological drives underpinning Tedeschi’s creativity. We shift between memoir and poetry modes in a startling wash of images, impressions, and facts. Unexpected black-and-white photographs add to the tacked-together, epistolary effect. Tedeschi presents his own psyche as a morass of doubts, fears, and impulses, and his redemption as an innate drive to sublimate pain into a singularly spectacular expression of art.
The book centres on Tedeschi’s study and performance of particular fugues – the Mimolyotnosti, a series of short, challenging pieces composed in the 1900s by Russian pianist Sergei Prokofiev (Tedeschi 19; “Visions Fugitives (Mimolyotnosti) for Piano Op. 22”). Each fugue is said to characterise someone Prokofiev knew, and Tedeschi follows suit with vivid depictions of his own family and teachers, dedicating Fugitive as a tribute to their lives (103). Tedeschi also echoes the 1917 words of poet Konstantin Balmont: “I do not know wisdom—I leave that to others— / I only turn Mimolyotnosti into verse. / In each fugitive vision I see worlds” (48). Tedeschi braids into these two strands his own rationale for structuring Fugitive as a string of fragments:
Mimolyotnosti—the closest equivalent in English is fleeting or fleeing or flitting or even passing moments or pastiches. (But I thought of one more—ephemeralities.) The word has to have a very special, spectral quality that both contains and exiles itself— a shape without edges, a site without sides, a thumb print left by a ghost. (20)
Tedeschi’s writing is most concerned with history, survival, and the quest for excellence. Symbolic words (jaw, wandering, ghost, monster, border, exile, fugue) weave and loop through blocks of text in a dazzling, stream-of-consciousness chain interspersed with quirky photographs and marginalia from the Mimolyotnosti movements. Pairs of annotations such as “presto agitatissimo e molto accentuato […] very agitated and pronounced” (34) flank some verses in superscript, lending an additional tonal layer to Tedeschi’s thought pastiche.
Fugitive’s irregular stanzas and line breaks challenge poetic conventions, but poetic devices are abundant. Enjambment most frequently occurs at the word “border”, which truncates its lines and verses in an insistent visual representation of dissociation and displacement.
There is a type of silence that happens when you are floored by a work of art. I live for this silence. All borders swept away. All borders broken. No words necessary. No words possible. (42-43)
As a narrative strategy, Tedeschi pairs identical words in the last and first lines of consecutive verses, for example, the word “hyphen” connects seemingly disparate ideas across blank space (34). His language and structures are couched in musicality: “Two / words, two worlds, holding hands / […] / over a sonic border” (65). He equates breaks on the page with musical pauses, dramatic silences “suggesting not only a riddle but a / demon” (67). Evocative similes punctuate the stanzas, for instance, “I catch a soprano’s downbeat, / as intricate as the hooking of a tiny necklace” (36).
From the outset, Tedeschi aligns music and poetry, inviting the reader into comparisons:
To play something the same way twice is impossible, and if it were possible it would be an affront against infinity […] But to write is to solidify, to codify, to quantify. (22-23)
Unpredictable associative riffs flow from quotes by philosophers and composers – Arthur Schopenhauer, Franz Kafka, Miguel de Cervantes, Prokofiev, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others (13; 14; 14; 15; 16). Tedeschi’s terse insights relay intense self-awareness: “Art is the ultimate narcissistic wound. / […] / When I play the Mimolyotnosti, I am met by a / wall of faces, a gate of eyes. / […] / I want these twenty pieces to send everyone to hell or heaven” (45).
High ideals combine with deft metaphor and the self-deprecating humour Tedeschi is famous for:
Art is the person too beautiful for us to get a handle on. So we walk up to it like a drunkard and try to take it down a peg. (44)
Irony softens his exacting standards as he laments the fact that music, like poetry, can only ever approximate perfection. “Just before walking on [stage], I’ll / crack a joke (a joke seals a crack, but only gets / you through the next few breaths)” (90). With hyperbolic charm, he asserts that when a pianist fails to play a note well, “One can see, / with a terrifying clarity, the smallness beneath / our clothes, our raging, rotten inadequacy […] / But if the note sounds just the way you want it / […] —then God is in the room” (80).
