from Twenty-Four Hokku on a Modern Theme
I
Again the larkspur,
Heavenly blue in my garden.
They, at least, unchanged.
II
How have I hurt you?
You look at me with pale eyes.
But these are my tears.
III
Morning and evening—
Yet for us once long ago
Was no division.
from Cane
“Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.”
********
“If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delight"
********
“Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?”
********
“You are the most sleepiest man I ever see"
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Winhold Reiss. Pastel drawing (1925)
Reapers
Martin Puryear. Woodcut (2000)
Beehive
from Cane
portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (1925)
A Portrait In Georgia
Hair-braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher's rope,
Eyes-fagots,
Lips-old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath-the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.
painting by Fairfield Porter
Archaic Bust of Apollo
The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
“the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me, A manifold honey to smear his face, Clumsy and lumbering here and there, The central ton of every place, The hungry beating brutish one In love with candy, anger, and sleep, Crazy factotum, disheveling all, Climbs the building, kicks the football, Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, That heavy bear who sleeps with me, Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar, A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp, Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Trembles and shows the darkness beneath. —The strutting show-off is terrified, Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants, Trembles to think that his quivering meat Must finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone, Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown, Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near, Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear, Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, Amid the hundred million of his kind, The scrimmage of appetite everywhere. |
from Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift
Orpheus, the son of Greenhorn, turned up in Greenwich Village with his ballads. He loved literature and intellectual conversation and argument, loved the history of thought. A big gentle handsome boy he put together his own combination of symbolism and street language. Into this mixture went Yeats, Apollinaire, Lenin, Freud, Morris R. Cohen, Gertrude Stein, baseball statistics, and Hollywood gossip. He brought Coney Island into the Aegean and united Buffalo Bill with Rasputin. He was going to join together the Art Sacrament and the Industrial USA as equal powers. Born (as he insisted) on a subway platform at Columbus Circle, his mother going into labor on the IRT, he intended to be a divine artist, a man of visionary states and enchantments, Platonic possession. He got a Rationalistic, Naturalistic education at CCNY. This was not easily reconciled with the Orphic. But all his desires were contradictory. He wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate, able to say anything; he wanted also to be wise, philosophical, to find the common ground of poetry and science, to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to free and bless humankind. (p. 120)
O Love, dark animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease the child in her
Because she is alone
Many years ago
Terrified by a look
Which was not meant for her.
Brush your heavy fur
Against her, long and slow
Stare at her like a book,
Her interests being such
No one can look too much.
Tell her how you know
Nothing can be taken
Which has not been given:
For you time is forgiven:
Informed by hell and heaven
You are not mistaken
his copy of Finnegan's Wake
Delmore Schwartz must have spent more time thinking about Finnegans Wake than almost anybody else. Yet it's a shame he wrote very little about the book. I've found just one essay, 'The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World', written in 1951, in which he talks about what the Wake meant to him:
'Joyce had completed his last and probably his best book, the stupendous Finnegans Wake, a book which would itself provide sufficient evidence and illustration of the vocation of the modern poet in modern life. All that has been observed in Eliot's work is all the more true of Finnegans Wake – the attention to colloquial speech, the awareness of the variety of ways that languages can be degraded, and how that degradation can be the base for a new originality and exactitude, the sense of an involvement with theinternational scene and all history. But more than that, the radio and even televisionplay a part in this wonderful book, as indeed they played a part in the writing of it. Joyce had a short wave radio with which he was able to hear London, Moscow, Dublin – and New York! In Finnegans Wake, I was perplexed for a time by echoes of American radio comedy and Yiddish humor until I learned about Joyce's radio and about his daily reading of the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune.' The most important point of all, however, is that Finnegans Wake exhibits in the smallest detail and in the entire scope of the work the internationality of the modern poet, his involvement in all history, and his consciousness of the impingement of any foreign language from Hebrew to Esperanto upon the poet's use of the English language.....'
The beautiful American word, Sure,
Sonnets for Tom Clark
(in recognition of his kindness)
1.
In The Early Morning Rain
To my family & friends “Hello”
And money. With something inside us we float up
On this electric chair each breath nearer the last
Now is spinning
Seven thousand feet over / The American Midwest
Gus walks up under the arb-light as far as the first person
The part that goes over the fence last
And down in a green forest ravine near to “her”
Winds in the stratosphere
Apologize to the malcontents
Downstairs. The black bag & the wise man may be found
in the brain-room.
what sky out there Take it away
& it’s off
one foot
is expressing itself as continuum
the other, sock
2.
Tomorrow. I need to kill
Blank mind part Confusions of the cloth
White snow whirls everywhere. Across the fields
in the sky the
Soft, loose
stars swarm. Nature makes my teeth “to hurt”
shivering now on 32nd street in my face & in my head
does Bobby Dylan ever come around here? listen
it’s alive where exposed nerve jangles
& I looming over Jap’s American flag
In Public, In Private The Sky Pilot In No-Man’s-Land
The World Number 14 is tipsy as pinballs on the ocean
We are bored through......through......through with our professionalism
Outside her
Windows
THE FORCE THAT DRIVES THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
I. DIDO The body’s products become Fatal to it. Our spit Would kill us, but we Die of our heat. Though I say the things I wish to say They are needless, their own flame conceives it. So I am cheated of perfection. II. THE IDIOT O how this sullen, careless world Ignorant of me is! These rocks, those homes Know not the touch of my flesh, now is there one tree Whose shade has known me for a friend. I’ve wandered the wide world over. No man I’ve known, no friendly beast Has come and put its nose into my hands. No maid has welcomed my face with a kiss. Yet once, as I took passage From Gibraltar to Cape Horn I met some friendly mariners on the boat And as we struggled to keep the ship from sinking The very waves seemed friendly, and the sound The pray made as it hit the front of the boat.
Here is a transcription of Ashbery’s remarks:
“The picture on the jacket was supplied by Wesleyan. It seems to be a contemporary print of the event at Versailles. I had hoped they would use drawings from Jacques-Louis David for his vast painting ‘The Tennis Court Oath.’ It was apparently his practice to draw figures without clothes first and add them later. These drawings show naked men leaping joyfully in the air, waving their hats, which creates a bizarre effect.
I had very little input into the production and I suspect the press wasn’t at all happy with it (though it has remained continuously in print since 1962). I had submitted it at the urgent request of John Hollander, who was a longtime supporter of my work and (just guessing here) managed to get it accepted over the objections of the other jurors. I only met John some time later when he was passing through Paris, and would like to take this occasion to mention what a lovely human being he was, totally devoted to poetry.”
In addition to the Ashbery, there are lots of other fascinating books to check out here (although there seem to be only two volumes of poems included, a book by Rita Dove and Ashbery’s).
And, if any of you are in the market for a very special first edition of the Tennis Court Oath or many other wonderful books, be sure to head to Christie’s on December 2, wallet in hand!
