Carla146;s dead poets society

With the release of her latest album, the first lady of France gets the presidents 8212;and the poets

We can be certain that when Dorothy Parker wrote, 8220;Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,8221; she didn8217;t have in mind women like Carla Bruni, cruising the Pyramids in her Dolce 038; Gabbana sunglasses on the arm of her beau, who moonlights as the president of France.
Nevertheless, Bruni, who married President Nicolas Sarkozy last weekend, drew her inspiration from Parker8212;as well as Emily Dickinson, W.H. Auden, Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare and Yeats8212;in an album that topped the pop charts last year in France and will now be released in the United States. The album, No Promises, features Bruni8217;s smoky French-accented voice half-singing and half-talking the English words of the poets to the accompaniment of her own music.
If certain, when this life was out/That yours and mine should be/
I8217;d toss it yonder like a Rind,/And take Eternity.
That8217;s Emily Dickinson, and you can now listen to Bruni breathe it.

Something is a little off here. Haven8217;t Dickinson and Parker and Yeats, at least, always belonged to the girls who do wear glasses? But it seems unfair that Bruni should compete for the spoils rock stars, philosophers, presidents with brains and beauty, all the while blithely appropriating the secret solace of those who might have considerably less of both. The glasses-wearers might not begrudge her Clapton or Jagger, but leave them their tortured poets.
It doesn8217;t help that in a video promotion for the album she sings Yeats while skipping beside the Seine as if she were singin8217; in the rain instead of cooing:

Come, let me sing into your ear;/Those dancing days are gone,
All that silk and satin gear;/Crouch upon a stone,/Wrapping that foul body up/In as foul a rag:/I carry the sun in a golden cup./The moon in a silver bag.

Puzzled by these discordant notes, I consulted the poet Paul Muldoon, who is also the new poetry editor of The New Yorker. What did he think about Bruni8217;s choices for a start?
8220;My first observation is that she has an exceptionally good taste in poetry,8221; Muldoon wrote in an e-mail message. 8220;Yeats was himself very interested in the song tradition and wrote, partly, within it. In the case of Emily Dickinson, much of her poetry is indistinguishable from the ballad tradition. In general, I welcome the idea of poetry casting its net as widely as possible, including its taking in the song tradition from which it sprang.8221;

It must be said here that Bruni8217;s good taste was influenced by her good friend Marianne Faithfull, or her 8220;dear professor,8221; as Bruni has referred to her more than once.
Bruni thought to combine her lyrics with the words of the poets who inspired her. But then, she told The Times of London: 8220;I realised there was a worrying contrast between the very dense writing of these poems and my lightness. My texts seemed really poor, the whole thing lost its homogeneity and so I just kept the poems.8221;

Muldoon didn8217;t venture to speculate on what an attraction to these poets might say about Bruni, but noted: 8220;Thematically, there does seem to be a wistfulness throughout these choices, a sighing either for what was or what might have been. How that refers to Carla Bruni I really couldn8217;t tell you, except that we tend to prefer sadness to happiness in art, if not in life.8221;
And that is the point. We like to think this sort of loneliness and longing is the domain of the femme far less fatale.

But Madame Sarkozy, like us, is a femme mortal, too, a former supermodel on the wrong side of 40. Mirrors figure in four of the 11 poems she has chosen. In Yeats: 8220;From mirror after mirror, no vanity8217;s displayed.8221; In Dickinson: 8220;I held my spirit to the Glass, To prove it possibler.8221; In Rossetti: 8220;Fades the image from the glass, And the fortune is not told.8221; And finally, in Auden: 8220;Blow the cobwebs from the mirror, see yourself at last.8221;

_MARY JO MURPHY, NYT