Michael Axtell
David Castleman, Selected Poems, The Mandrake
Press, Box 792, Larkspur, CA 94977-0792; ISBN 83-904541-2-2, 64 pp, $8.
"A man found a single flower
at the top of a mountain,
and he plucked it..."
It is delightful for me to praise the height at which the
poet's style is able to move with ease. He has not despised the course of
apprenticeship, and he put his talent to school that it might graduate as
artistry. He has not treated flippantly, as have the Americans Laing and
Brooks among many others, the Ancient Sicilian peasantry's line, which formed
itself into quatrain and couplet variously, which became the sonnet some time
in the thirteenth century in Italy—the iambic pentameter line. To go beyond
something, one must have really stood in its place, not just glanced at it
from a distance. To stand in the place of any metrical line, one must be
able to hear its counter-point of two lines blended into one; and there is
the line as emphasized in natural speech, and there is the line as emphasized
in metrical. Where they are always identical, the effect becomes tedious;
where they diverge and return in numerous fashions, a deep and sweet music
is the result. If you add the counterpoint of the sound-values and that of
the meaning-values, to the words of the naturally spoken and the metrically
spoken line, it all begins to be a bit like the woodwinds and horns, the strings,
a piano, and the percussive instruments, that go to make up a concerto or
something. Fortunately, one does not have to be able to hear or to know much
or all to be able to hear or know some, or I would have nothing to say. But
listen to the initial tercet of an unrhymed sonnet, bone wrath.
"Our song bird is neglected but for jeers
and yet sings out these holy songs all night,
and when by day the weight of duty shifts."
The conductor's wand is no metronome, and he lifts it gently
for the "is"; in the first line, to raise it from the relative oblivion it
has in natural speech; and he lifts it also and a little icily for the "but",
as opposed to an "except", because the former distances the speaker from
those that jeer, a mob. Without pause into the second line, and the "yet"
is slightly whispered, as if to reflect the mystery of why it should "sing
out" under the circumstances, echoing the "neglected" and "but"; and "out"
is somewhat lowered from how I would naturally speak it, to be more of a
piece with the "yet". And the "holy" is softly and firmly raised to equality
with the first two beats. While with "songs" the wand motions to dwell some
on the word rather than just blatantly beat its emphasis out; and the "all"
is treated as the "songs", except the pause of silence after should be allowed
to sparkle momentarily, as if something new were to follow. The temporal
meaning of the first beat as a word should come through in the third line,
for we are leaving what was like a fairyland in the first two, save for those
strange jeers (whence from and why?); we are come into the daily round we
all occupy each day, and the "day" and the "weight" and the "duty" should
be brought just slightly under the naturally lesser emphasis on "shifts".
I would love to go on—for there is a mirrored altering of
the metric in the sixth and seventh lines, whereby two de-emphasised contiguous
syllables in each line are placed in the midst of each line; and the sixth
line's "songs all night", in their "sealed ears."—but touring a mountain
with a microscope takes too much time.
Having gained artistry in this ancient line, Mister Castleman
is not indifferent to all else; and he embarks into other constellations
of style, both as he simply chooses and as is the burden of his particular
endeavour's meaning seems to require. And it is where the poet's over-all
burden of meaning is considered, that he begins to leave me behind. Although
his metaphysical vision of all things does not always tend to be pronounced
with that stridency which can overwhelm the beauty of any style; this is perhaps
where he prefers to cultivate the modern quality, that likes to see an ugly
truth in a lovely style, as if the latter were really just a bauble in hell;
as if it were a plucked flower dropped before the gates of a death camp.
This is understandable, yet neither is it necessarily due to cowardice or
self-deception if we hold on to the flower more tightly still, and even water
it. And I do not see that Mister Castleman really wants to let go of his flower.
Was it Anaxagoras who remarked, "If horses had gods, they
would look like horses; if monkeys, like monkeys?"
"No hopes of a Human soul lack a favorite
picturesque absolute to be honored,
with gods abhorred, and gods of cleanest light
whose eyes awakened worlds and wept and bled."
Our customary lights are shadows, "picturesque absolutes".
The poet would gladly go in the steps of Faust, if at all were not a mere
dream, a cobweb of the brain, an objectless projection of a yearning human
subjectivity.
"Such is the endlessness,
yea, the intolerableness
of all earthly effort,
that sane men would consort
willingly with Beelzebub
(damned by the promised rub)..."
For "...delusions and/illusions heft our minds and everyone's
a coward/from the truth..."
"...that
dying men roll their eyes like dice, and
as the greasy skivvies of dead men
cool and go cold the trenchmeat of lice, fleas,
and crabs absquatulates for riper, bloodier pastures..."
Or as it is put with a full and a fine lyrical intensity,
that there is no absolute "out there" to hear us and that our moral determinations
are indifferently performed,
"Our voices float the universe
like whisperings in a dream
and arbitrarily they seem
sometimes to bless, sometimes to curse."
Of a casually mythic and economic grandeur is his expression
of the prophetess, Cassandra, "Our fabled lady eludes the dragons."
Of course, Cassandra refused the preferred favours of Apollo, and she "courted"
not "the animal desire", which the poet has an arbitrarily seemingly malign
part of her psyche accuse her of. Yet myths are somewhat made to be remade,
at least real myths and nothing more; and the superlative mockery of the arbitrarily
seemingly malign spirit's last word to her,
"O the water emits
an immaculate wizardry,"
lends a contemporary credibility to this version of her story,
as though some twinkly-eyed Freud with just incipient little horns were to
utter it. Yes, this new prophetess is a thoroughly "material girl"
in a thoroughly material world. She may try to deceive herself, that she
has some transcendently sweet purity about her, to which
"Every breathing sound may seem a prison
and a poison for a moment..."
but "really" she is only a pretty beast, a cute fortuity
of immanence. In such a world, where
"Memory shrugs on...
as if an old toad
uneaten by carnivores
who are not mad yet.",
where
"...all flowers melt forgotten."
and
"Promiscuously the bald summer
delivers its buds to death.";
and only the Winter's
"...reigning shadows dissemble nothing.";
"Of what interest the earth's beached rubble
and heart-pounding mother-of-blood brute wave
and proud whales bounding by a cold gored cave...";
except
"when our human psyche ponders..."
and "wonder" is "provoked by the world's wonders."
Frankly, giving back to the sceptic his old tone and turn
of phrase, I confess I would like to believe in such a metaphysical vision
of all things, their ultimate meaninglessness, their end in simple death:
sometimes it seems, it would be a lot easier. Alas, I lack the faith, and
I cannot make the leap over my heart's clear evidence and my mind's distinct
perception.
I find, rather, I am stimulated by this wan vision to suppose
that, were it true, I would be really disinterested though, in any wonder
in the world's wonders; as if I would be a child just come to the age of
understanding, and my mother would tell me she gave me birth in order that
I might be ere long devoured by mere circumstance and unrecollected at last
by anyone; and as if she would then smile, give me a piece of candy, and
I would read inscribed on it small, beautiful letter the words,
"Emulating DEITY, the artist
emerged through his own canvas, and his brush
portrays himself, just. Holy was the hush
surrounded the selecting like a mist.";
and as if my mother would at last benignly lean near and
murmur softly in my hear, "Of course, there is no deity at all."
The sage, Silenus, was dogged by a man, who would give him
no rest until he should tell him the summum bonum. At last, exasperated,
Silenus turned and fiercely responded, "The best is never to have be born;
the second best, to die soon."
Mister Castelman has the courage to be recurrently accessible
to the reader. Moreover, there are spots of beauty both in conception and
in speech, which rise from the page as Hawaii rises from the floor of the
sea; as when in the meaningless tenebrity, he lights a candle of fellow feeling,
and says,
"Bless me then if you
felt full of strong desire once:
remember not all."
Such spots, and more than that, have moved one reader to
the maybe unreasonable hope, that his dark vision of all things might fade;
that his plucked flower not be merely fucked or withered; and that the man's
great poetic gift live in the blue air of an older, a higher faith, such
as he surely knew before he suffered disenchantment with it.
"Those yesteryear dreams wouldn't fail
until the bridge of heavens cracked:
ah, silly as a lover's tale,
we hoped the saints held ours intact."
For they may just do that.
Roy Harrison, Selected Poetry of Roy Harrison,
Multicultural Books, 1737 Larson Road, North Vancouver BC V7M 2Z4 Canada;
ISBN 0-9694933-6-3, $12.
By and large this collection has the clarity of tone which
bespeaks a great heap of miswrought metals behind the forge. By tone I mean
both accessible meaning and a certain felicity of sound, a music. Accessible
meaning is a delicate matter in a successful poetry; for it cannot be mere
facts just trundled out and left, however clear the facts be; and it cannot
be merely vastly suggestive facts, of imitations of factlikeness, left swirling
inconclusively—at least to my own taste. Accessible meaning in poetry, I
think, is a balance of the simply factual and the vastly suggestive; which
is to say nothing more original than that it is a bit of truth and a bit
of metaphor. But there is that music, too, which is more than the sum of
so many alliterations, assonances, dissonances, and the like. The music must
somehow emerge as at once both authoritative and passionate utterance, utterance
that indeed does have so many alliterations, assonances, etc. I think a very
fair number of the poems in this collection have attained to that balance
of fact and suggestiveness which is accessible meaning, and that authoritative
passion which with that certain felicity of sound makes music in poetry.
Sometimes the passion of Roy Harrison is coldly authoritative.
It does not console.
"Never, they say, the bells, the bells have tolled,
The birds can never wake him where he lies
However sweet they sing, nor ever rain
Can wash the sweet clay from his confined eyes.
I am in love with dead men and their words
Fluttering like marble pages in the rain,
That never can be raised by women's tears,
That never with the birds can come again.
Never can Time arrest or pause or cease
Or still the restless grasses where they blow.
Buried below the sky he never wakes
Nor hears the rhyming bells toll to and fro."
There is only one mention of the I in the poem, yet how strongly
does it stand, how deeply reverberate. This mention is preluded by the first
stanza with its bells that speak, its singing birds that leave John Clare
asleep, its sweet clay on his eyes. There is no I here at all, only the distant
dream of one "pathetically failing" in nature. Then out of nowhere it appears,
alone, says its cold say, and is gone. And Time, an impersonal abstraction,
emptily presides over the ending, futile and faceless concept, a breath of
air meant to refer to the changes it can not alter, the changes of those
restless grasses like they were all humankind rising up and dying away. Below
where children look for heaven, below the sky, John Clare is buried, not
hearing the bells nor the poet rhyming. The meter is flawlessly compelling,
unobtrusively blended with natural speech rhythms. The rhyme scheme is spare
and almost silently applied. The epithets are few and powerfully distinctive;
and even the marble pages fluttering in the rain, strangely work, for one
reason because their strangeness is completely singular among all the other
characterizing adjectives which are profoundly natural in their effective
force—grasses are restless, bells rhyme, the clay is sweet with promise of
oblivion to the suffering soul. In the most genuine and unpretentious sense,
this poetry is the work of a folk poet, and the wonder of it is how he can
exist when the folk have fallen apart so.
In "Passing Through", on the other hand, Roy Harrison does
console. This poem which concluded the collection is a mostly very successful
one. He lists the world's ports of call like Homer his ships, conveying the
sense of reality with names ancient and modern, exotic and commonplace. His
theme addresses the modern situation of the world's depersonalization, and
the loss of autochthony, of rootedness, Heidegger remarked upon to such remarkable
lengths—the loss of local cultures even the East succumbs to now; and he
does so succinctly.
"'Ulysses' name is Legion now
And all man's Ithacas are beads on a cat's cradle."
There is an element of sentimentalization of the past in
the notion that before
"each life lay humble and unique."
Byzantium of the chariot racing teams was composed of persons
very often as lacking either humility or uniqueness as any modern mob; and
old Chang-an and Teotijuacan were simply not just places of sweetness and
light. The most glaring fault of the poem is the idea that once cities were
"Each a Jerusalem where laws
Were handed out like toffee-apples..."
The laws of Solon, Hammurabi, Confucius, Moses, etc. can
only infantilely be referred to as toffee-apples; there is no food in the
idea, and it runs counter to the serious tenor of the passage. The poem goes
on however, unfalteringly, to a greatly effective conclusion. Following the
lists of places people may indifferently fly to in the modern world, where
"The lost continents of childhood...
Lie fading...
...in the forecourt of a motel outside Stonehenge',
there is a vision of rather luminous magnificence, having
what the jargoners call a numinous quality, drawn from the poet's childhood
no doubt and unfolding like a blossoming symbol of all that is missing and
needed in this world of ours today.
"There was a great house (I never saw it)
Surrounded by trees surrounded by a wall.
From the road that was all you could see.
And the road flew onward, plunging down the hill
Like a weighted fishing-line.
How many planets inside an atom?
How many solar systems in a needle of rain?
I think when I die I may go home,
And home will be like nothing I could ever have imagined."
The sotto voce, parenthetic, I never saw it, is very powerful,
and the whole passage has the same liquid magnitude which the great Tu Fu's
poem has, the one about the mansion where all the poor could lodge.
The sole production which utterly fails for me is "Tristan
Da Cunha", and it comes off very like as if John Clare were to try to sound
like Roy Campbell.
Cornel Adam Lengyel, A Lookout's Letter, The Mandrake
Press, Box 792, Larkspur, CA 94977-0792; ISBN 83-904541-5-7, 32 pps, $5.
"I do perhaps know more about these things than the deaf
do about music. Perhaps as much as a person who has wax in his ears can hear
of a flute being played at a distance: a muted piping." —Albrecht Haushofer,
trans. by M.D. Herter Norton
Like Haushofer's series of sonnets, written in response to
the Nazi catastrophe while awaiting his execution in prison in Berlin, Lengyel's
series of sonnets embody a relation of the entire individual to one objective
event: a technology that can carry about Tamurlane and his hordes in something
around the size of an oil drum—or nowadays in a knapsack, I guess. Both series'
involve poems in which the author confronts loss, instability, and time.
They do it by simply finding they have open eyes that witness the possibility
of complete oblivion, by simply seeing their lives in one way or another
pass before their eyes. George Santayana considered Mister Lengyel to have
invented a new form of poetry, the blank-verse sonnet. In a letter to the
poet he stated further that "from the beginning you made it seem a natural
and powerful instrument." Louis Untermeyer introduced the poet's recording
of his work at the Library of Congress. Readers ought to be able to find
his Selected Works at the local Barnes & Noble, yet developments seem
to have swept him aside; and we know that developments are great and swiftly
moving things. True development comes in small increments of power, not in
sweepingly revolutionary changes that destroy more than they preserve. There
is something about the roughness of a peasant's hand on a noble's instrument
that makes way for a genuinely fresh innovation. The children of the noble
take too much for granted what the peasant cannot help but reverence. His
heart asks, "Have I the right?" And when he takes it up for real the old
and new are wedded, as Eliot knew, and there is development in the field
of art. The noble's child, like Maya Angelou, plays carelessly on the ancient
instrument, thinking mastery a little thing. At some time in his life the
peasant was embarrassed to be caught even reading the expressions made through
it. Yet when he takes it up to express the things that press on him, there
is a calm and a fire and an open place wherein it of itself comes forth to
be—and if the rules be set aside, there is no complacence nor insouciance
in it: for rules are not meant for the oppression of expression. So far even
Maya Angelou is graced.
"All summer long the lookout in his tower
scans the huge green wilderness around him
and if he notes a faint new wisp of smoke
he sends his warning to a distant crew."
The theme of the plain diurnal real is sounded in wide and
quiet simplicity. The man alone is in the forested mountains, and he looks
out for "fires and lightning storm". Solitude can spur on the wryest of humours.
Perhaps the lookout spots a wisp of smoke, tracks it on his alidade, and findsi—it
his him.
"...if he finds that he
has set himself on fire, whom could he call?"
It would be worse than a bus driver running out of gas and
whispering the fact to base, for a lookout to accidentally set afire his
own tower!
"(He'd better write a note to warn himself.)"
The lookout gets punchy in the vast wilderness surrounding
him,
"a thousand valleys running from my feet
towards the groves and canyons of the forest...",
and he looms to himself, much as a tree or a boulder might
loom to a hiker.
"I may address myself in confidence:
'Dear You (who are myself), how shall I start...'"
There is a disposition of spirit to which the classical lyric
poet always returns, with that returning the Chinese used to call, kuei.
It is a return to where one shallowly never has been, though deeply, unknowingly,
one was always there. It is the place where in telling oneself one tells
all things that are, or at least gestures really to that latter telling.
There, great and childlike meanings move in the employ of a difficult maturity.
It distinguishes Dante. Santayana referred to the early Shakespeare when
he thought of Mister Lengyel's words.
"The soul's charade here lacks an audience—
the mask removed we meet our mirrored self."
The ornamentless vernacular of the elder poet comes to mind
here.
"Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within the forest dark,
for the straight-forward pathway had been lost."
Elizabeth Bishop speaks thus without an insignificant flair,
when she says,
I saw what frightened me most of all...
Having taken "an inventory of the town, its blazing
shops and streets...", weary in body and spirit; a body of compulsions and
vulnerabilities; a spirit
"ever in search of a mothering womb
and tremulous with fear of a second birth..."
he
"...said goodbye to all the ghosts I met."
These were those back from the great war of our century,
"all yesterday's poor masterless young heroes," "the lean and the lame who
yearn for soul-warmed beds...;" Perhaps those that come from war do sometimes
long for a certain fullness that could be called a soul. Are there other
ways to come to see ghosts in the street? The poet does not confess too much,
and there are no leaping dolphins of the psyche here. Yet gone to his exile,
his tower, it does occur to him as a question,
"To step with an adieu out of the tower
and fix the fatal accident of birth?
Wingless, to fly for one ecstatic moment,
and then rejoin an indifferent earth?"
Anomalously he rhymes it there, as though to say yes, really,
there he would be, due to the ghosts behind and to the ghosts before.
Three phrases evoke the melieu of a lack of reasons for not
stepping out wingless. Each phrase is rhythmically poised at perilously emphatic
rest upon a mere article, a "the" and two "a's"—phrases like the brass reliefs
on three doors to some baptistery of despair. I score it here.
"Were that no wiser than to watch all night
the far bright sparks of a blind world machine..."
"My eyes are glazed by the cold glittering riddle..."
"...high signs from a lost fortune-teller's book
whose meaning no one knows and none may learn."
The reader is left at the high rail, leaning under riddling
stars without decryption, in silence like a wondering formula scrawled on
"the mute blackboard of space and time."
In context of what has preceded, the sixth poem explodes
under the reader's eye. The low-keyed boat of bemused or poignant soliloquy
suddenly bears a most unexpected freight. Rhythmically seen it is reflected
in the second and third lines which gallop like Byron's old anapests, "...and
his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." And afterwards, although there
is a return to the basic five-beat iambic line, it seems sprung, tensilely
loose, as if a seed of chaos had been introduced.
"I saw the flash from the first secret test
from my perch on Bald Mountain on a midsummer night
when the black sky around me was suddenly splintered
by dazzling rays that crisscrossed in all directions
as if the dome of heavens had cracked and a hand
furiously scribbled letters of fire in the sky."
"Lo, I have become Death, destroyer of worlds," The chief tester at Yucca
Flat quoted the Vedas...
Not like a Nietzchean chamois leaping from down-looking
crag of insight to down-looking crag of insight, the poet remembers his
"...glass house trembles in an autumn gale."
He has the sensitive puissance of Aeschylus or Pindar when
he speaks of man as one with
"Feet tangled in weeds, yet fleeter than wings:
clay-rooted though conceived by the stars..."
The drop to the four-beat line here and there rivets more
than annoys. One senses the voice come into its own and no more cares too
much for rules which anyway have already been sufficiently obeyed to establish
the beautiful music of the chosen instrument or form.
The last poem in the collection is redundant and ought to
have been dropped.
I think Mister Lengyel has reason to be glad he is not feted
by the world, for the world has leapt too far ahead of itself to be developmentally
sound in its progress. This is the ailment called "the modern" in fact. I
know there is much of value here and there in the new world. Dickey's bombing
of Dresden is as immemorial as Frost's pale spider sonnet; yet we need to
bear in heart where we come from more than we do.
Joe Ruggier, Regrets Hopes Regards & Prayers
, Multicultural Books, 1737 Larson Road, North Vancouver BC V7M 2Z4 Canada,
npl.
"I ain't speaking through the flowers
Nor trying to explain,
But there ain't a living sorrow
Comes wrapped cellophane."
—Shepherd's
Carol
These lines of Auden's seem to me appropriate ones with which
to begin my thinking of the poetry of Mister Ruggier. It is an "old sorrow"
or two that is sounded in this poetry; that which has searched for the heart's
desire and failed to find it, at least some real time, anywhere under the
sun. It is as impossible that it should glisten as from a cool and witty
distance, as that it should at all be able to much depend on anything remotely
resembling
"A red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water..."
It does not reflect that well mainstream phenomenological
philosophy's cry of, "Back to the things themselves!" The play of lights
upon waters, however hard it be to believe it with any sincerity, simply
cannot answer the call it has heard. It's desire is to walk with God in reconcilement,
to heal the divorce, return home, though it is not so easy even as that difficult
matter of walking out one evening down Bristol Street to hear Time prophesy
that
"You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart,"
as mister Auden learned and, glistening like Housman, expressed
it.
In the second of the "Three Sonnets of Desolation", the poet
suggests with a foremost touch the elusive nature of what he knows, nonetheless,
is as real as a red wheel barrow.
"I often longed to catch him at his call,
The lover whom my soul loved face to face,
But there was no one, unless a Mystical
Stranger was there, my soul in his embrace..."
The sound is strong, having much meaning in a small space.
It is unafraid of telling the truth with an ancient, great, and simple music,
all complexities inherent in the case being suggested by the facts. "At his
call" means "calls" were made, some relation there. Of what sort? "His" call—for,
the I that lives it. Of what sort? One to be caught, not always waiting where
one would have it wait, but able to be caught—the willingness to be so emerging
afterwards—and this is one line. "But there was no one"—whoever cannot feel
that has never loved, calls lovers fools. This the world we live in, real
as any red wheel barrow. And yet its object is unreal, to most of us, which
is strange. Our crooked neighbour, yes; our crooked heart, of course—the
perfect God...go on.
"I am so weary being tried by Faith,
Feeling like to the salt which lost its savour..."
Who that has lived here, where we try our lovers and they
try us, fails to remember how it feels when it seems you are not worth anything,
when they try us to the bone? We hesitate, however, because of the capital
letter in "Faith", perhaps.
At its less successful, his work seems to fear it will be
weak, and he turns much too strong and it grows obscure—to paraphrase an
eighteenth century man I read of.
"Believe, but it's like this!" vain thoughts relate.
"Hope on, hope on—your Faith's a dying Favour!"
Why is faith a dying favour? One that dies daily to have?
One that was dyingly given? Surely not one that itself dies? And the general
exchange is hard to unravel. I don't doubt much is here. Yet ever and again
the poet recovers me and brings me beside him in his dilemma, as in his moments
of mysterious refreshment.
"I feel a pang of love, I know not why,
And hope He'll chase the night wherein He cast me."
"A pang of love"...it puts us off at first. For a "pang"
cannot be real, yes? And yet love hurts; we all know that, because it feels
for, bears, winces even where the other winces. And "pang" of love is nearly
incredibly to me, onomatopoeic, like something between "hand" and "sang",
die and celebrate, chill and burn. I do not mention this arbitrarily eruditely,
for Mister Ruggier's sense of our tongue is deep and old and sensitive.
In some of the poems I seem to hear an undertone of that
sublime and sinewy vigour Elizabeth Bishop admired in the work of George
Herbert, as in "A Poem At Midnight", which begins,
'Upon a windless night
The desert sands performed a windless eddying
As on them soft and bright
There swung a dancing light
From which the soul reeled like eyes from fire steadying"
It concludes in a reference to Moses striking the rock in
the desert to bring out water for the thirsty despairing Israelites:
"And when I make of poetry a rod
With which to stroke out waters
That slake with Peace our parched wickedness,
May words become Truth's psalters,
And to all God's sons and daughters
Sweet Poetry be the maid of Holiness."
Then there is the beautiful, the lovingly expansive Cressida,
My Cressida, with its quaint touch of the anachronistically absurd mention
of a typewriter, like Jean Anouilh giving his Antigone her morning cup of
coffee.
"I am in a formal mood, Chriseyde, I am too serious, you
said;
So I will type, Chriseyde, I will type a love letter of
formal proposal.
Will you remember, my dear, o will you remember?
The streets so dirty, unlovely, the lights, so noisy the
crowds,
So vulgar and petty? Will you, oh will you remember...?"
Where Mister Ruggier succeeds most is where he retains control
over the passion which inspires his work; and it is also where the reins
may have dropped from his hands, yet somehow the horse even galloping knows
the way; as in the prose poems, "Three Interior Monologues: A Sequence",
to quote from which would be like lifting sections of interlocking tiles
out of their mosaic whole. Read them, and you will see what I mean. Where
he succeeds least, I feel, is either where he comes down from the mountain
and the wind blows his words from my ear, or I just cannot understand his
language; or, as mentioned, the fear of a too weak verse leads to the making
of one too strong, which is obscure.
That old "living sorrow" of the heart's desire for God, so
well paralleled through that other desire for the mortal beloved, may bring
with it an ill-recommendation to the modern taste, when seriously presented.
The oblique treatment, ironic perhaps, distant, even caricatural, is the
preferred. And if the treatment slightly glisten with a cosmopolitan spire
or two under the painfully present ray of a passing helicopter that carries
potentate or terrorist, or something else indicative of relativity suggested,
the too onerous brunt of the Point, with capital, diffused—then it is more
palatable to the modern taste. I think this saddening—as though the topmost
leaves of the tree were to glance down with a shallow sort of commiseration
for the primitive stature of its own roots. For what is strongest and best
in the modern, grew from the same in the ancient—as surely as Galileo read
God in the book of nature, as science grew out of Christianity's keen self-judgement.
So you see, I cannot help from surfacing here from a little depth, my respect
for the courage it takes to say with heart and music and thought, what is
unpalatable to an age. Mister Ruggier may sometimes violate that thirty inches
before the nose, which a gunless Auden threatened he yet could spit at one
for the violation of; yet he does not do so while being completely incapable
of coming round a ways to one’s side, being telling while afar.
Lastly, on the other hand, the two lines from "All Fule's
Lament",
"Because I do not wish to turn again,"
and
"Because I do not wish to go insane,"
sound somehow to me like oil and vinegar, like two entirely different
worlds of tone violently brought into cohabitation—Eliot's poem is not Mister
Ruggier's, quite as little is it so as the "Little Girl" poem of his Coleridge's,
where are the lines,
"Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone in the big, brown woods!"
The import of great alien material into one's own poetry
is more difficult that this, I think.
I have not done justice to the variety of the poet's work,
which includes parables, sonnets, and other forms, from I believe his Maltese.
Leo Yankevich, The Golem of Gleiwitz, The Mandrake
Press, Box 792 Larkspur, CA 94977-0792; ISBN 83-904541-9X, 24 pp, $5.
"...I rule
Myself no longer; I am not my own."
—Kochanowski,
trans. by Ruth Earl Merrill
"The sister's shadow hovers through the silent grove
To greet the spirits of the heroes, the bleeding heads..."
—from
Trakl's "Grodek", trans. by Lindenberger
"Poets know how difficult that is: to write, as Boris Leonidovich
(Pasternak) says, 'free from poetic mud'..."
—Anna
Akhmatova, from "Chukovskaya's Journals"
What Anna Akhmatova referred to in the last quote above was
a certain poet's practice of writing without a definite rhythm, which her
friend, Lydia Chukovskaya, took exception to. What they did not conceive
of at the time was a poetry whose practitioners never went to school with
the poets of old, who knew their paces well. Too many today leave behind
what they have never been through. Mister Yankevich has the indefinite rhythm
of the story-teller's voice, and I believe he has achieved it through genuinely
leaving behind a lot of "poetic mud".
"The river's waters are grey, sometimes blue.
They flow into a mermaid's dream of the sea—
under clouds either Romanesque or Baroque,
but always indifferent."
The languid strength of the lines draws the interest with
ease. The balance of the polar terms, "a mermaid's dream of the sea" and
"a druid's dream of the beginning", pleases and intrigues; positing an image
of completion as apt and full as "clouds either Romanesque or Baroque". Glowing
aspects of our culture are touched on and left as
"...too heavy and hard to grasp"
because in some way
"...we've forgotten why and for whom."
The poem concludes with a memorably keen conceit which kind
of encapsulates the drift of polar terms the poem as a whole shows forth.
"...the sun's merciful but meat-eating honey."
The intensely compressed image brings to the fore this poet's
metaphysical quality. It is like Herbert's "a ragged noise and mirth", which
Eliot harps well on in his "Turnbull Lectures". Shakespeare's "Honey Summer"
is clearly a merciful dispensation, but that this same honey should be as
though "meat-eating" is a great extreme brought into conjunction with its
opposite. In the desert the sun eats meat, you could say. And of course the
sun's demesne is associateable with the realm of the gods, fate, deity; and
that its honey should seem predatory is telling as respects the whole thrust
of the collection. How well, how deeply, how often does the poetry of Mister
Yankevich reward the inquiring peer. The "indifferent clouds" hang over all
that follows.
"Visiting My Dead Grandmother's Cottage", the second poem, is as concretely
denotative as the first poem is lyrically connotative. One turns one's eye
back and forth between the two poems just as one did between the Romanesque
and Baroque clouds, the merciful and meat-eating honey of the sun. Yet the
Cottage poem, for all its concrete catalogue of the detailed real, also manages
a true lyrical beauty.
"Visiting her cottage I remember ripe ears of corn..."
"A bucket of stagnant water mirrors the cloudy lard
she must have fried eggs and coffee grinds in every morning."
"...while my father speaks to an old peasant in a strange
tongue
about pagan deities carved on trees when he was young."
One thinks perhaps of the bowls of milk Czeslaw Milosz recalls
having been set out for the water snakes; whose bodies when they died, should
they remain unburied, would make the sun cry. It is a powerfully limpid,
a quietly structured flow, neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean nor Miltonic
but rather modern, a sort of cinematic collage—whose tone is not cumulatively
but dispersedly impactful, yet of a piece. Its is exquisite to the ear of
the apprentice of form, that line with its two emphatic indefinite articles,
"...while my father speaks to an old peasant in a strange
tongue..."
It is a beautiful sprung-rhythm, six-beat-line sonnet, rhymed
placidly to perfection for the reminiscent mode of the story-teller's voice.
"The tangerine talk/of blackbirds" in the third poem, "Poem
in October", is once more a metaphysical touch, pungent and thought-provoking,
and very probably pertinent: I confess my ignorance here, having not listened
to blackbirds. Starlings talk in a distinctly screwy manner, like drinking
orange juice after brushing your teeth. The poet does not over-do such touches,
a temptation to the merely clever, and this restraint lets them be as prominent
as set jewels. In the same poem, the "cloud-cursing rooks" is a conception
as classically apposite as Homer's old "wine-dark sea". Here, moreover, the
trouble is broached more piercingly, the ill all the collection tends and
moves toward like a drama from the underground unfolding, as if the gentle
idiot of Dostoevski were to doubt God cared at all. As if he—versified in
his doubt, or began to feel the cold of Ivan Karamazov, say
"And I smell the scent of something burning,
of something smouldering deep within,
fouler than all the hills of Polish dung.
Thirty-five years have transformed my life's leaves
into an outcast's smoke upon the breeze."
The trouble is in the poet himself. Ferried on a pile of
combusted Autumn leaves, one wonders admiringly at the development of the
showing of this trouble as in the author himself.
Georg Trakl composed a tapestry of "a world apart". He readily
without trying surpassed Rimbaud in this, the flamboyant adolescent. In Trakl
there is a seriousness that sustains the interest, even a gravity towards
the "bread and wine" on the table when over the threshold comes the stranger
to partake with one. For Trakl lived the world he wove and died of the cold,
its impingement upon that world’s heart, the Sister's shadow, by "the bleeding
heads". Rimbaud played at it, and then he left it in a facile disgust.
Mister Yankevich's poetry is also a tapestry lived, is also
impinged on by the cold. He integrates the frore stuff into his poetry with
a gathering furor of anguish and distance. His complaint seeks comfort and
finds it not, yet then as in "Eschatology", he distances himself from the
entire business to play like Donne with the very idea of the anguish. The
name of his world may be called the miraculous Czeslaw Milosz has said poets
can voice the longing for; and it is a world that was surely discovered when
young, as in a Lithuanian forest, or as on the Chesapeake Bay by the demolished
Chamberlain Hotel where Poe wrote "Annabel Lee"—but wherever, it is a world
assaulted, and peculiarly so it would seem today. It is still the world of
Dante, where God answers calls on Him, or is silent. There, the Grodek, where
the crisis happens, can be a scarecrow's domain, the field where cars pass
a straw-gutted golem whose
"…hollow eyes would hate the stars…"
Mister Yankevich writes like the almost miraculous anomaly
of a despairing Hans Christian Andersen. His faerie tales are of more and
more hells on earth, hells succinct and tersely put, hells heavened very
strangely and finely here and there, as if
"till the ghost of the man I’d be—crawled out."
"digging amid my ribs for a soul."
The ghost, the wraith, the golem, the scarecrow, the gentle
idiot, the name writ in water so well absorbed as to seem his own, are all
one: the hope of life infused into lifelessness.
It is not easy to leave behind the terms of his trouble.
They follow me through my days. I remember them. The scarecrow in the field.
The golem. The little man in us all that yearns for—the finest thing of all.
