Monday, December 19, 2005

Robinson Jeffers. Cawdor and Other Poems.
New York, Horace Liveright, 1928.

“If ever a man and the Sprit of Place conspired for a mystical union it is here. That portion of California---its hills, sea, blue lupine, golden poppies, sea-gulls, dirt roads, pines, firs, hawks, herons and lighthouses. . belongs as absolutely to Robinson Jeffers . . . as Wessex belong to Thomas Hardy.”
Benjamin de Casseres in The Bookman November 1927


Robinson Jeffers published three books of poetry during the twenties, all of which consolidated his reputation as a poet of the natural universe and even more, of the cosmos. He had bought land in Carmel in 1919 on a hill facing Point Lobos. On August 15 Jeffers began work on his Tor House and later the forty foot high Hawk Tower, both monuments to independence and self-reliance. He became the poet of the Pacific shore, and of the sublime beauties of Northern California. Jeffers reacted sharply to what he felt was the disaster of the American dream, prizing a “detachment from the insane desire for power, wealth and permanence, in a measured indifference to pain, joy or success and in turning outward d to God who is all things.” He was a poet of unusual conscience and similar integrity.

Jeffers poetry was controversial. In his narrative and tragic poems he proposed to “uncenter the human mind from itself,” and produced work influenced by and equal to the Ancient Greek dramatists. He was incredibly well educated, the son of a biblical scholar and a musician, educated in private schools abroad and at the University of Southern California and Occidental College. He was an intimate of the beauties of many languages, including Hebrew, Latin, Greek, German and French. He would read to his family from the works of Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Scott and Doestoevsky.

Many, like Dwight MacDonald, could not stomach what they felt was the glorification of violence and dark psychology of his work: “Not since the later Elizabethans has there been such a witches’ dance of incest, suicide, madness, adultery and Lesbianism. “Edgar Lee Masters however, characterized him as “alive of health and of sanest vision,” and Babette Deutsch in the New Republic “felt somewhat as Keats professed to feel, on looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Friday, December 16, 2005

Thomas Urquhart and the Invective
Against Presbyterians

Learn hi-top techniques
for a purported washing, the bing
has piped up as an urn. The real word
was Urquhart. A mysterious author of
the 17th century. Another case of relics left
behind by a space invasion? Not likely
but instead a hideout for Lancelot. The
ravens are abtract, the formidable density
of particle. At last the echolalian dominion.
Oh nowhere and the past of it. The poplars
will cover up the rest. Unless it is Urquhart,
not given to the concise. Logo rhythm and
the scene of pandering. Nest maker, fire
the pantopticon at the beach. The scenery
is back, the secondary level of royal its
particularly pistol like in deshaibille. Or
the cause of such ech, For Goethe was
a cinema of vast conclusions. Find the best
pistachios there, under the diamontane
spectacle of Missionary work for the
Papuans have been tricked into a false
epic, not fastened to the soil, anachron
and mulchy, sassy little tree--whatever.
Everything is too even, the quake is
apposite the aporia, not so my Dogface
the last of certain demons, guardians
of the spaken. Now, we are talking.
The secret and exact manner of resolving
triangles. Oh what disappointment
in literal.Jasmine, tokay and luncheon
candelabra, prospects.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Alphabet Follies

Ague, Agincourt belies the ascenscionary angle our

Bobcat, polar bear singing, Blue booby tries poblano

Feline compass of, a cookoo cookout, ay Caramba!
or
“Pigtusk, Catclaw, Cramper, and Crazyred”

Dread elevator, disputed team leader. Doo Wop singer.

Elate and exasperate, For sale Especially Especially

Fine Feathers, tattered flag aux.

Boats on bottoms, funiculars, burning Guest

Hat and House, Hierarchy Harp on Hettie

Incinerator, Iron, power beam, pillar, ixion, fire in the hold!

Jasper as in Wyoming, crook upside down, fishhook slide, Joop!

Charlemagne, Ethelred, William and Mary and their kind

Lisp, light angle, right angle, Lope Oleander

Two mountains, two houses, two ravens flying
all flying together, as in a crown

Nether, no barring the way, door, not ever, nix, nine ninc nah

Opal osculate in oh perfection oracular oval

Green and globe, flag and tongue, groove Piss-ant Piquant pies.

Some quinine, decorative ribbons for Queer quest

The Robot walking on decisively determinate, rampant pants

So Sweet curve, so swash buckle, hush whisper Sequoias

Tea Iron, truculent a telephone pole triumphant

Universe expanding in a cup

Fluvial alluvial volcanic victory after all, Vincegetorix!

The mountains flying upside down again, the double sink empty

A Ray, gun, ecstasy zipper

A Yellow yarrow, tail lost in space, yak yak yak

A Zebra playing a zinc zylophone of course, or Zorro.


Tuesday, December 13, 2005

William Carlos Williams. Kora in Hell. Boston, Four Seas, 1920.

“ here is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.” William Carlos Williams Prologue to Kora in Hell.

“Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything.
I’ve said it time and time again.” William Carlos Williams. Interview, October 18, 1957.

Discontinuous, paratactic, fragmentary: prose poems, improvisations and commentary, Kora in Hell is a truly unique and exemplary experimental poem. Both the structure and the structuring myth of Kora (Persephone) “the legend of springtime captured” and the return of spring, are owed to Williams conversations with Ezra Pound, but the governing metaphor is one referring to Williams himself and his new poetic spring: “it is the woman in us/That makes us write:/Let us acknowledge it,/Men would be silent.”

The Prologue is a sort of Ars Poetica for Williams and contains what he felt about other poets and friends at the time, including T. S. Eliot who had just published “Prufrock:”

“I had a violent feeling that Eliot had betrayed what I believe in. He was looking backward; I was looking forward. He was a conformist with wit, learning which I did not possess. . . . But I felt that he had rejected American and I refused to be rejected. . .” William Carlos Williams. I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958)

Friday, December 09, 2005

Color

Countee Cullen. Color. New York, George Doran, 1925.

“They have developed new ideas of their own place in the category of races and have evolved new conceptions of their power and destiny. These ideas have quickened their race consciousness and they are making new demands on themselves, on their leaders and on the white people in whose midst they live. These new demands apply to politics, domestic and international, to education and culture, to commerce and industry.”
Herbert Harrison. When Africa Awakes, the inside story of the stirring of the New Negro (1920)

“the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe.”
Countee Cullen. Introduction, Caroling Dusk (1927)

The New Negro. At first Countee Cullen (1903-1946) seems an odd choice as central to the movement. He was shy, appeared diffident and was too friendly perhaps to the white race. He was sometimes accused of being too conservative, and sometimes accused others (Wallace Thurman) of being too radical. Both Thurman and Langston Hughes attacked Cullen in the white press, respectively The New Republic and The Nation. Despite graduating from mostly white schools (DeWitt Clinton High School and Harvard University), in the fullness of time, Cullen’s work presented most fully and carefully, the difficult positions of Black Americans. He was courageous in his difference, and despite his own protestations (“I am going to be a POET and not NEGRO POET”) most of his poetry is fully race conscious. He wrote a literary column for the black magazine Opportunity in which he was involved in the literary and cultural debates of the black community. In April of 1928 he married Yolande, the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois, in the most heavily reported and attended social event of the Harlem Renaissance (the marriage did not last more than two years).

Along with Edna Millay, Countee Cullen was for a time, the most famous of the new poets of the decade, awarded as a young man a plethora of prizes, his work and promise was acclaimed from all sides (he published three volumes of poems and one anthology during the decade). His first book was published when he was a Senior at NYU. Unlike most of his colleagues Cullen was a traditionalist and wrote in forms, including ballads and sonnets Shakespearean and Petrarchan. Cullen also wrote a novel and two children’s books, but after 1930 he devoted most of his energy to his job teaching High School French.

“For me to be the social equal of Mr.. Loeb does not mean that I should care to eat dinner at his table; I am too fond of home cooking for that. Nor does it mean that I would want to marry any of his relative or friends; there are too many beautiful girls of my own race for that, if only the white boys would cease worrying them with their attentions.” Countee Cullen. Letter to the Editor, New York University News, 1926

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Chinese Shadows

Chinese Shadows: American writers and the dream of China

“China is no less stimulating than Greece . . . these new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into the vortex… they cannot help ringing about changes as great as the Renaissance changes, even if we set ourselves blindly against it. As it is, there is life in the fusion.”
Ezra Pound. New Age (January 1915)

“The work is heavy. I see
bare branches laden with snow”
William Carlos Williams. To the Shade of Po-Chu-I,” (1921)

“The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or exploit their markets, but to study and come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. . . . We need their best ideals to supplement our own---ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.”
Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1920)

The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.”
Ezra Pound, Canto XIII

“Let me State at the outset that I know no Chinese.”
Amy Lowell. Fir Flower Tablets (1922)

A fascination with things Chinese percolated through Western consciousness, from the 17th century Jesuit “discoveries” through the idealizations and exploitations of the Nineteenth Century, cresting in the literary pre-occupations of the Twenties. Imitation, translation and appropriation of Chinese culture became central elements in the modernist movement, pictorially, verbally and ethnographically. Most of the writers, who explored China, did so through books and museums, including most notably the British Museum in London and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both of which contained glorious collections of Eastern art. Asian themes were to be found in fiction and theatre from Eugene O’Neill to Pearl Buck (whose novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931). Japanese prints and Chinese ceramics, wallpaper and screens decorated many an American home and the pagoda and other Asian architectural themes became important elements in American buildings.

Of course, central to both the promotion of China and the rise of modernism, was Ezra Pound, whose book of translations, Cathay was published in 1915 and whom T. S. Eliot called “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Pound was to go on to translate and publish a number of Chinese classics including the four books of Confucius , and developed a line of literary translation which eclipsed the more staid work of Herbert Giles, Arthur Waley and others. Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and many others were drawn to Chinese poetry and art and incorporated Chinese aesthetics into their own work.

Some Examples:

Ezra Pound. Cathay. London, Elkin Matthews, 1915.
Ezra Pound Canto XIII, in Transatlantic review (January, 1924)

Ezra Pound. A Draft of XXX Cantos. Paris, Hours Press, 1930.
Exra Pound. Translation of Confucius .Ta Hio (Seattle, 1928)
Ezra Pound. “The Chinese Written Character” in Instigations (New York, Boni & Liveright, 1920)

Ezra Pound. “Cathay” from Personae. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1926.

Wallace Stevens. Harmonium. “Six Significant Landscapes,” from Harmonium. New York, Knopf, 1923.

Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough. Fir-Flower Tablets. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1921.

Babbette Deutsch. “And Again to Po-Chu-I,” The Dial (1921)

Marianne Moore. “The Fish” in The Egoist 7 (August, 1918)
Marianne Moore. “Bowls” in Secession 5 (July 1923)

Arthur Waley. A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. New York, Knopf, 1919.
Arthur Waley. More Translations from the Chinese. New York, Knopf, 1919.

Harriet Monroe. Review of Waley in Poetry, March 1920

Witter Bynner. The Jade Mountain, A Chinese Anthology of the T’ang Dynasty 618-906
New York, Knopf, 1919

Eunice Tietjens. Poetry of the Orient; an anthology. New York, Knopf, 1928.

Joseph Lewis French
. Lotus and Chrysanthemum, an anthology of Chinese and Japanese Poetry
Boni & Liveright, 1927.

Eugene O’Neill. Marco Millions. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1927.

William Rose Benet. Merchants from Cathay. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920.

Pearl Buck. The Good Earth. New York, The John Day Company, 1931.

Dream of the Red Chamber [by] Tsao Hsueh-chin. Translated and adapted from the Chinese by Chi-chen Wang. With a pref. by Arthur Waley. New York, Doubleday Doran, 1929.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Robert Frost. West Running Brook. New York, Henry Holt, 1928.

“I am my own salesman”

Robert Frost received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, four times, including for the first time in 1924 with New Hampshire, a poem with notes and grace notes (1923). In 1923 and in 1928 Frost published the first of his many composite volumes, these two both Selected Poems. In many ways the twenties were the apogee of Robert Frost, but there was much more to come. In his lifetime over 40 honorary doctorates, and countless awards and medals. He was, and is one of, if not the, best-loved poets of the Twentieth Century, and most notably, was chosen by John F. Kennedy to read at his inauguration. Yet among many, his work is still controversial, and he has been called by a number of often contradictory labels, including both “classical” and “romantic.” He is often counted both an optimist and as a dark soul. The most dramatic of poets and fellows, Frost was his own best publicist and critic and was just as ambitious and “modern” as either Pound or Eliot, shaping his own legend during his lifetime.

Although it does not contain many of his most famous poems, West Running Brook is in its contents, typical of Frost. Within a landscape largely New England, it reflects his core concerns, including a fear of loneliness, the difficulty of intimacy, the nature of overwhelming sorrow, and the role of the individual in society (always one of his primary concerns). Frost most famously and energetically, opposed the theory of evolution at podium and in poems, and was sometimes characterized as anti-intellectual. It is however, more likely that his ambition and troubled personal and family life led him to meditate on contradictions. Frost believed that poems should be conversational and “a revel in the felicities of language'. In fact, much of his work is highly indeterminate, often saying the opposite of what he thinks, for instance. A suave certainty on the surface of his poems reflects on the deeper uncertainty and ambiguity, both hallmarks of the modern.

Marxist critic Granville Hicks in The Great Tradition (New York, Macmillan, 1935) provides a perceptive and telling sketch of Frost:

“Can one believe that it is by accident that he has never written of the factory towns, now so abjectly in decay, or of the exodus to the cities and its failure, now so apparent, to bring deliverance? Has he never heard of the railroads and their influence on the state’s politics, touching the smallest hamlet? Do not auto0mobiles and radios exist in New Hampshire. No, Frost is too shrewd not to be well aware that he is excluding from his poems whatever might destroy their unity. He knows the full value of his self-imporsed limitations, and he is even willing to boast of his good fortune in the parable of the star in the stone boat:

Such as it is, it promises the prize
Of the one world complete in any size
That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

Much of Frost’s experience is close to ours, and we can share his appreciations and his insights. His strong narratives, his clear and unpretentious lyrics, and his thoughtful, sensible allegories are more satisfying than most poetry of our day."

Monday, December 05, 2005

Flame to the Moths

H. D.
Collected Poems. New York, Liveright, 1925.

“She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it. Then she tried to forget each word, for ‘translations’ enough existed and she was no scholar. She did not want to ‘know’ the Greek in that sense. She was like one blind, reading the texture of incised letters, rejoicing like one blind who knows an inner light, a reality that the outer eye cannot grasp. . . . Anyone can translate the meaning of the word. she wanted the shape, the feel of it, the character of it, as if it had been freshly minted.”
H. D. Bid Me to Live

Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) appropriated Classical myth for her own observant prayers, spells, curses and incantations. Her heterodox strangeness recommended her to the other poets of her time and consorting with Pound, Williams and Moore, her involvement with modernism came early. A sere rhapsodist, she used history and religion for poetic explorations and meditations on the self in the world, and the development of a spiritual life. Her early work, collected in this volume presents: poetry as ancient prayer, poetry as ecstasy, poetry as desire. It is also the obverse of these, fear, coldness and revulsion. Somehow she was, in spareness and directness, the perfect icon of imagism. In reaction to her work, Douglas Bush compared her to Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde and to Isadora Duncan, while John Gould Fletcher imagined her as “half asleep in Greece while the swallows skim through the clear golden air,” Alfred Kreymborg called her “fiery, tempestuous and proud,” and Ezra Pound named her “Nymph, Dryad, Priestess, Goddess.” and “tree born spirit of the wood.” In her reticence, resistance and delicacy, she was as a flame to moths.

H. D. (1886-1961) was raised in the academic atmosphere of the University of Pennsylvania, attended Bryn Mawr College and left the United States for London in 1911 for a summer visit. She returned only once in the next fifty years and died in Switzerland, her home along with London. Before 1925, she published three books of poetry which are all included in Collected Poems: Sea Garden (1917), Hymen (1921) and Heliodora (1924). To a large degree her austere soliloquies and monologues, her prayers, are antidote to the anguish of War as well as the glittering consumerist materialism and triumphal scientific nature of the age. Her classicism was wide ranging and impeccable. She was fascinated by the mind and underwent psycho-analysis with Freud. She believed that art was either sexless or all sex. She stressed the natural and the erotic against the mechanical and belligerent.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

"The bankrupt heart is free"

Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The Harp-Weaver and other poems.
New York, Harper & Brothers, 1928.

“Miss Millay belongs to an age as well as to the ages. She is dated in a good sense. Like Scoot Fitzgerald, H. L Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, prohibition, and midget golf, she belongs to a particular period. No one interested inn that period will fail to be interested in Miss Millay’s poems. . . . Her lyrics were used by the period, and she was made famous by their usefulness; but now they are inseparable from the period, and they will always illuminated the liberated Vassar girl, the jazz age, bohemianism, and the halcyon days of Greenwich Village. “
Delmore Schwartz. The Nation (December 18, 1943)

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, people who never read poetry read hers. She was published in the elegant Vanity Fair and the not so elegant Reedy’s Mirror.
Thomas Hardy was rumored to have classed her with the Empire State Building as icon of modern New York. Her years in Greenwich Village (her house on Bedford Street the skinniest one in town) were years of celebrity. She was the national symbol for the liberated woman, the modern Sappho, her name a household word. Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson, Arthur Davison Ficke, Witter Bynner, John Reed and others were her friends and lovers. Her two sisters and her mother were her friends and supporters as was her husband, who nursed her through her addiction in the last sad decade of her life (‘the bankrupt heart is free’).

Her dramatic poems were surprisingly formal, more radical in their spirit and content than poetic form, women had never written such poems. Anthologist Louis Untermeyer, not always as sympathizer, praised the middle of her three volumes from the Twenties:

“The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1924) wears its author’s heart on its sleeve; often, in fact, that responsive organ is displayed as a shining bauble, a decoration tricked with frayed ribbons. But here miss Millay begins to wear her heart with a difference. Rarely now is she narcissistic or consciously arch; she speaks with a disillusion that contains more than a tinge of bitterness. . . . the twenty-two sonnets which comprise Part Four of this book are not only representatives of Miss Millay’s best, but are among the finest modern examples of the form. . . “at its height, her poetry reflects the paradox of its being: it is immediate and it is immutable.”
Louis Untermeyer. Modern American Poetry (1930)