On Poetry
A short talk given at Laurel Books, Oakland, 4/18/08
For National Poetry Month
Thank you for coming. We'd like this evening to be a celebration of poetry and a presentation of the kind of poetry Adelle and I write. Since 1996, April has been designated as National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets announced that their goal was to "increase the visibility, presence, and accessibility of poetry in our culture." That word "accessibility" is problematical when applied to poetry. Many people find poetry "inaccessible"—difficult to understand, at times perhaps infuriatingly "obscure," full of things which some people may understand but which are opaque to many. Why can't poets just say what's on their mind? Gertrude Stein—no paragon of "accessibility"—gave this as an answer. She was lecturing at the University of Chicago and she was asked about her notorious line, "rose is a rose is a rose." She replied,
Now listen. Can't you see that when the language was new—as itwas with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thingand the thing was really there. He could say 'O moon,' 'O sea,' 'O love,' and themoon and the sea and love were really there. And can't you see that after of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it's hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. Now it's not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That's why it'sdoubly hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about 'I have a garden! oh, what a garden!'Now I don't want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it's just one linein a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but youknow it. Now listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go aroundsaying '...is a...is a...is a...'. Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.
Now, there's another problem we need to deal with as well. If we're going to celebrate poetry, wouldn't it be a good idea to tell people what poetry is? Surely everyone knows at least more or less what poetry is—but what is it exactly? What is its essence—what are those qualities we absolutely need to see if we're going to call something a poem? There are "poetry sections" in book stores. What is in them? I have been writing poetry in one form or another since 1955, and I have written many articles and even books about poetry. You'd think I'd have at least a glimmer of what poetry is. But, to tell you the truth, I don't. If we ask exactly what an automobile is, we can come up with some elements which might apply to any automobile—and without which you would have something other than an automobile. It has to move, for example. But poetry? The problem is that there have been a number of activities over the centuries and they have all been called "poetry." But very often they are quite distant from one another. Does poetry have to rhyme? In some periods, yes, but in others no. Classical poetry didn't rhyme. Can poetry be its diametrical opposite—prose? Yes. There exists a creature called the "prose poem." Does a poem have to have some sort of "form" which can be reproduced by other people? —the form of a sonnet, for example. Yes, but not always. And people have produced 14-line poems which they have called "sonnets" but which have no regular meter and no rhyme —usually defining characteristics of sonnets. The fact is that poetry has no essence. It can be—almost— anything. But if it has no essence, it does have a history. It is a name that has been given to a number of highly disparate activities which are in some ways related but in others not. Rhyme can be one aspect of poetry—but it doesn't apply to all forms of the art. Further: poetry is created for different reasons and purposes. There are poems which are self-expressive —this is what I feel—but there are also poems which have very little to do with self-expression. (For years people have been trying to figure out exactly who Shakespeare was by reading his poems and plays. Their efforts haven't been particularly successful. It may be that Shakespeare's poems and plays aren't especially "self-expressive.") Poetry can be used for idealistic purposes; it can be the conveyer of uplifting thoughts: "Life is real, life is earnest, / And the grave is not its goal," wrote Longfellow. But it can also be immensely cynical, satirical, like the work of Alexander Pope or certain lines by T.S. Eliot. There have been critics who believed that poetry was essentially irony—saying something like the opposite of what you mean.
So what are we celebrating? An ancient art form with an immensely complicated history which cannot be reduced to any particular definition. The minute you define poetry, poetry slips away from the definition and tells you, "I'm not that because I'm this." But to say this about poetry is also to say that poetry is free—not only free-floating but free. Any individual poem is a momentary definition of poetry, but the definition belongs only to that moment. The next moment, poetry will be something else. We poets are always trying to catch at the reins of Pegasus, which has its own kind of horse sense and will go wherever it wishes.
honor
the fire
which holds us—
sweet
talk,
light
that
flashes—
in the east,
mind
in the west,
mind:
nowhere
is
home
A Typo in Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems
There is a typo in Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems. (It is possible but less likely that it is a variant reading.) The late poem, "In Country Sleep" has these lines:
Oh he
Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking
Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair,
But her faith....
In the recording Thomas made of the poem he is clearly saying "nor her riding thigh," which would seem to make more sense than "riding high" since he is naming parts of his heroine's body (her "wound"—her sex—her "eyes," her "hair").
People listen to Dylan Thomas; they also read his poems. It is perhaps rare to do both at the same time. Are more typos—or variant readings—lurking if Thomas fans begin to look for connections (or disconnections) between the recited poems and the printed ones?
"Broughton Fountain": on James Broughton
From The Potted Psalm in 1946 to Erogeny in 1976 I could not have created anything without sharing love with my collaborators. This is a weakness I take delight in. "Relations are real, not substances," said the Buddha. And the more intense the love, the livelier the work.
—James Broughton, Seeing the Light
I would like to profile Joel, Stephen (who is working on a bio) and Jack in relation to your projects and your lives with James and since his death.
—Franklin Abbott
I was interviewing Michael Lerner, a politically active rabbi, on my radio show. When I asked him about death, he answered, "Death?" His answer made me think of my dear friend James Broughton (1913-1999).
James—not easy to write about. Where to begin? There are so many incidents, so many feelings. Scarcely a day passes when I don't have some kind of thought of him. His image, his poems are on the walls of my house—more are in my memory. Dear James, a lovely, deeply funny, deeply deep man:
I am
a center of gravity
a thermal spring
a magnetic field
a mercurial planet
We met in the mid 80s, probably 1985. I was running a poetry series at Larry Blake's restaurant on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The series was quite successful and featured a very wide range of poets. One of these was Robert Peters—in full drag as Elizabeth Bathory, his "blood countess." Peters asked me whether I'd like to be introduced to James Broughton. I said, "Sure," though I was only vaguely aware of his work. I had heard of his films and had read the excellent early poems published in Donald Allen's 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry. I also knew that he was a gay man—but I don't think I knew much more than that. Wonders awaited. James read for my series many times—including one memorable occasion when the series day fell on November 10, 1987, James's 74th birthday.
My first experience of him was a lunch: he invited me over for one of those incredibly delicious gourmet feasts regularly prepared by his lover, Joel Singer. Though at that time I was a very little-known poet—and straight!—both men made me feel not only at ease but extremely comfortable in their presence. James spoke to me as if I were an old friend. One of the interesting things about him was the fact that, though he was a deep and lifelong believer in "love," he was never sentimental or treacly. His wit and intellect cut through the false faces of love and went directly to its deep heart. By this time I had read—and adored—his Androgyne Journal. I knew he was in some ways a "Jungian." I remarked to James, "I like Jung but the problem with Jungians is that they often seem to skip over the body in their zeal to arrive at the archetypal." James smiled and answered with his ironic drawl, "Tell me about it." Then James and Joel set me in a little room with a film projector in it. They started Testament(1974) and left me to see it. I emerged starry-eyed. I had seen something stunningly beautiful and incredibly rich. What a movie! At once personal—even self-deprecatory—and magical, alive with transformation. I loved film and had published articles about it, but this was the vita nuova. James wrote of Testament,
I spun what I thought would be my final film: a self-portrait bouncing me from my babyhood to my imagined death. To summarize the quest for erotic transcendence that animated all my cinema I mixed film clips, still photos and staged scenes. I was assisted at the camera by an ingratiating redhead named H. Edgar Jenkin...At the film's beginning I am seen rocking in a chair by the Pacific Ocean, questioning my life:
I asked the Sea how deep things are.
O, said She, that depends upon
how far you want to go.
I mentioned to him once that the word "testament" was connected by etymology to the word "testicle." "Is it!" he said.
Over the years I knew James, I wrote many articles about him and interviewed him often. He was a regular guest on my KPFA radio show. I loved his work and was very pleased to discover that he enjoyed mine. One of the features of my poetry readings is the presentation of choral pieces read by my wife Adelle and me. James—unlike some of my other friends—immediately understood the significance of these pieces and dubbed them "androgynous," a very important word in his cosmos. I introduced James at many of his events. For one I wrote something particularly special. James knew that Adelle and I had been singing a slightly parodic version of the old waltz, "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." Adelle ended the song with a little tap dance—a bit of waltz clog. James asked me to rewrite the words of the song to introduce him on the stage of the Castro Theater in San Francisco. I tried to catch a bit of the feeling of Cole Porter—whom we both admired:
SWEET JAMIE O'BROUGHTON
Sweet Jamie O'Broughton
Our bountiful James
It's he
that we're toutin'
He's water and flames
We'll go to his movies
(We're taking the bus!)
We love sweet Jamie O'Broughton
And Jamie O'Broughton loves...(worried) somebody else?
(emphatic) No!
Jamie O'Broughton loves us!
Adelle did her tap dance and James came onto the stage to thunderous applause!
On June 28, 1990, Adelle and I read at Cody's Books in Berkeley with James. We decided to imitate each other's styles for the reading. James wrote a choral piece—his only one—for him and me to perform together. It begins,
THIS WONDER
A Hymn to Herm
(Duet for Tenor and Baritone)
This wonder this wonder
this prize this surprise
this secret this skyrocket
this wonder your wonder
my wonder our wonder
my steering gear my takeoff
my sword my songbird
my bird in hand my flying carpet
Your wonder O wonder
The entire poem is included in ALL: A James Broughton Reader. For my part, I wrote a fanciful prose piece, "Broughton Fountain," in which I heard his voice clearly. It was full of quotations from James's work and began:
The Master stood on the edge of the cliff. He asked which of his disciples would thrust himself over the side, plunging into the mouth of a horrible and certain death. "I," said one, eager to get a running start."Wait," said the Master. "Do you think I'm some sort of idiot? I was only raising an abstract question. I need all the disciples I can get—and besides, it's a long way down the side of that cliff." "True," said the eager disciple. "But wouldn't you always honor the name of the disciple who died for you?" "Well, I might," said the Master, "but really it all depends on whether I've written it down. My memory's a little shaky these days, and I can't seem to locate my pencil."
"Master," said the disciple, "I would be the one who died for you!" "Well, go ahead if you must," said the Master, fumbling in his pockets for a piece of paper."But I'm not guaranteeing anything. Oh, where is that pencil!" "Thank you, Master. Aieeeee!" said the disciple as he leaped over the edge. "What was his name?" said the Master. "I suppose," said another disciple, "there isn't much left of him now."
It ended,
—My name is James.
There is nothing
But the indestructible sweetness
Of
Everything! Follow your weird.
I knew James in the last years of his life, as he began his witty, deep, courageous meditation on the fact of his own mortality ("I am / a moony old vessel, / I have / garbled many a hanker"). The thought of Death began very early in his work, but the notion of it changed as he grew older. In the end, Death became the greatest lover of all—propelling James into whatever eternity might await him.
James's work stands by itself and stands high and tall. (I'm sure that James would remark to that, "Hermes bird!") To those who were, like me, lucky enough to know him personally, he offered the image of another sort of manhood. He was a gay man, I was a straight man—yet we simply accepted each other and loved each other just as we were. He had his fears and anxieties—explored especially in the early work—but he kept the feeling of child-like wonder alive in his consciousness throughout his long life. He once wrote, "People don't grow up. They just get taller." How do you describe the sun?
*
My life since James's death is not dissimilar to what it was when he was alive. I continue my writing and my performing—both of which are undoubtedly improved because of my knowing James. I feel very strongly still the sense of his multiple selves: "You are your own twin and your own bride and all your gods." I put together ALL: A James Broughton Reader because I felt the need of a book in which the various aspects of James's work could all join together in a chorus and sing to one another. I'm very proud of the result. I am currently writing a long history of poetry in California from 1940 to 2005. It will probably be published next year. James's work is an immensely important element in that history. I feel his presence as I write this, as I re-read his work, as I turn my mind towards the amazing man he was.
The Ern Malley Story
Do you know about Ern Malley? Do you know that story? I'll tell you.
It was in Australia, during the war, the middle 40s. Australia, you know, was always a bit of a backwater. It was never much for the Modernist sort of literature but it had one you know little magazine the kind which prints incomprehensible material and everyone loves it. It was called Angry Penguins. Angrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry Penguinnnnnnnnnnnnns. Its editor was Max Harris, and he was charismatic and indefatigable and argumentative. There were people who loved Max Harris. There were people who hated him. Once a group of these latter got together and tossed him in the river. The river was called The Torrens and it was a sunlit winter's day in 1941. But he was none the worse for it. Max Harris was bringing Modernism to Australia with a vengeance, you know, T.S.E., Dylan Thomas, modernism. And Max Harris was a fearsome Moderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn poet himself. He was a young man, really, in his 20s, and full of energy.
Oh, but there were others who had energy too. They say, when you hated people in those days you really hated them. The war was on and so there was an official enemy to hate. But whom could one hate at home? Two young men in the army, also in their 20s, hated Max Harris and they hated Modernism. Their names were Harold Stewart and James McAuley. It was a Saturday afternoon in early October 1943.
Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart were at their desks in the general office of L Block at the Victoria Barracks. They were the rostered CO and NCO on duty at their outfit, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. The barracks...is a handsome, Georgian-style bluestone building, fronted by lawn, palms and oranamental cannon on St Kilda Road, the leafy boulevard that sweeps from the south-east across the Yarra River into the city--but L Block, a little to the west of the main building, was a scruffy old weatherboard shed with a tin roof.*
Stewart and McAuley decided to play a marvelous joke. They decided they would invent a poet, a modernist poet, and they would call him Ern Malley. They would say that Ern Malley died young, like Keats, but that he had a sister Ethel who had discovered some of his poetry after his death. Ethel of course couldn't pretend to judge her brother's poetry, but she was sending a sample to Max Harris to find out if it had any merit.
Amid great hilarity, and in very little time, McCauley and Stewart produced a sheaf of poems—enough for a small book—and they sent some to Max Harris.
Max Harris fell for it hook line and sinker. Poor Ern, the hoaxers told him through the medium of Ethel, was a garage mechanic. He had never shown his poetry to anyone. Was it any good? Here is one of the poems they sent:
Durer: Innsbruck, 1495
I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters
Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.
Is it good? Max Harris thought it was very good. Here at last was an Australian modernist. The backwater had finally joined the 20th Century. True, the young man had died. But the tragedy of his death was mitigated by the fact that here, preserved, was a slim volume of his work, appropriately titled The Darkening Ecliptic. A special issue of the magazine was prepared and published.
Then the news broke. It was all over the newspapers.
Modernism in Australia has never been the same. Of course it has never been the same anywhere else either.
But the hoaxers were by no means the winners in all this. They had the first, not the last laugh. It has been pointed out that the poetry written by Harold Stewart and James McCauley as Ern Malley was better than anything they published under their own names. Were the deceivers themselves deceived? Is it possible that by parodying the modern idiom they were worked upon by the same forces which produced the modern idiom? Zeitgeist flashes in funny ways and chooseth whom it will.
In the mid-seventies, at Brooklyn College, John Ashbery would, in the exam for the creative writing course he taught, print without attribution one of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns...beside a poem by Ern Malley, and tell his students: "One of the two poems below is by a highly respected contemporary poet; the other is a hoax originally published to spoof the obscurity of much modern poetry. Which do you think is which? Give your reasons."
As Michael Heyward tells us:
The hoax is the most fascinating thing Angry Penguins ever published. In cooking up their poet to a satirical recipe, McAuley and Stewart threw into the brew a seasoning of anarchic intelligence and comic self-laceration. Writing pretentiously, they described a mind so aware of pretension that it debunks itself with aplomb. In the end, Malley is really unlike the sort of grandstanding, romantic surrealism he mocks. It pays to remember that two very different temperaments and personalities were constructing the work without bothering to smooth the edges. Like a medium possessed by a host of spirits, Ern Malley freely exhibits his multiple consciousness. There is not one Ern Malley but several, and they are all mutually exclusive characters. There is Ern Malley, the black swan of trespass, the native modernist talented enough to turn the poetic tradition of his country on its head. There is Ern Malley the jejune and modish experimentalist who does belly-flops in his attempt to look significant. There is the Ern Malley who bravely stares his own death in the face, and the Ern Malley who slyly tells the reader he never was. All these writers were essential to the hoaxers' fiction. Each contradicts the others and helps give the poetry its dizzy, speeded-up quality, as Malley rifles through his composite self.
Ern Malley may never have existed, but, at this point, like the "real" Keats, he is nothing but literature. And literature is notoriously free. It can mean anything. Which do you think is which? Give your reasons.
Ern Malley writes,
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
November, 2009
Essays
Jack Foley
Jack Foley is an innovative, widely-published poet and critic who, with his wife, Adelle, performs his work frequently in the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry books include Letters/Lights—Words for Adelle, Gershwin, Exiles, and Adrift (nominated for a Northern California Book Reviewers Award). Foley's Greatest Hits 1974-2003 (2004) appeared from Pudding House Press, a by-invitation-only series. His books of criticism include O Powerful Western Star (winner of the Artists Embassy Literary/Cultural Award 1998-2000), Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals, and The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions, with introduction by Al Young. A book Foley edited, ALL: A James Broughton Reader, was designated number one gay book of the year by AfterElton.com. Foley's radio show, Cover to Cover, is heard every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. West Coast Time on Berkeley station KPFA and is available at the KPFA web site; his column, "Foley's Books," appeared for many years in the online magazine, The Alsop Review. Foley is currently at work on a fifteen-hundred-page timeline history of California poetry from 1940 to 2005 to be published in 2010. Dana Gioia describes Foley's poetry as "that rare commodity—genuinely avant-garde poetry...experimental poetry with depth and intelligence as well as intensity." Poet/playwright Michael McClure calls Foley "our firebrand experimentalist": "he holds his torch high so the reader can have more light." The Wikipedia entry, "Jack Foley (poet)," gives a sample of Foley's poetry. Foley's play, The Boy, the Girl, and the Piece of Chocolate was filmed by Alabama filmmaker Wayne Sides.