“I Know a Man”

It’s the first Thursday of July, so we’re starting a new two-month run for a featured poet; this time around it’s Robert Creeley, whose work I’ve long admired.

In my mind, Creeley may have been the U.S. “lyric poet” of the later 20th century—a sort of Cold War era Thomas Campion.  As I’ve noted before in writing about Creeley on this blog, his mastery of form (within the lineaments of “free verse”) concentrates his language in a way that makes it sing.  Creeley also had an ear for speech rhythms &  vernacular expressions, & was a master of finding just the right verbal gesture to put forward his emotional content, which typically is complex.

All the poems I’ll be presenting over the next two months come from Creeley’s collection For Love: Poems 1950-1960.  To my mind, this is an essential volume of U.S. poetry.  The poems I’m selecting will appear in roughly chornological order.

I’ll let “I Know a Man” stand on its own terms—it’s a poem I love very much—but I will point out that it’s one of the very few poems that has (indirectly) supplied the title for a motion picture—hence the lead off pic.

I will be away until this evening, so won't be able to keep up with comments today, but hope you enjoy this!

I Know a Man


As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.


Robert Creeley

“Gertrude Stein”

Hi, folks! Having spent the morning booting & re-booting the computer in various attemots to solve performance issues (nothing too major, but all annoying at least), I am finally here with our Final Thursday featured poem.

We’re bringing our two-month look at Mina Loy to a close today with a short poem that Loy wrote in the early 1920s as a tribute to Gertrude Stein. Mina Loy was an active member of Stein’s salon, & was close friends with many of the artists & writers who congregated chez Stein. Gertrude Stein paid Loy a high compliment in her Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, when she wrote, "Mina Loy . . . was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand." There was a great deal of mutual respect between Stein & Loy—interesting, because they are unquestionably two of the most important yet misunderstood writers from the “Modernist” period.

If you’re not familiar with the work of Loy & Stein, please do yourself a favor & check them out. Loy’s poems are fortunately in print, as The Lost Lunar Baedecker, while Stein’s works are readily available. A good introduction to Stein (I think) would be either Three Lives or The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.

Featured poet for July & August? Robert Creeley. But for now, enjoy these lines about Gertrude Stein—& consider in what ways they are about Loy as well!

Gertrude Stein

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
        she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
        to extract
a radium of the word

Mina Loy

"O Hell"

Good morning! Here it is, the first Thursday of the month, & as such, time for a featured poem by this month’s featured poet—who is Mina Loy.

“Wait a moment,” you say, “this is like déjà vu all over again. Wasn’t Mina Loy last month’s featured poet?” Of course you’d be absolutely right. However, I’ve decided that two poems by a featured poet just isn’t enough. On the other hand, I like only having two featured poems per month because it frees up space for unscheduled posts. The solution? Each featured poet will have a two-month run, so those of you who enjoyed Loy’s poems last month (& in her earlier appearances on Robert Frost’s Banjo) will have two more to enjoy in June. Once again, I’d encourage anyone interested in Loy’s work—& to my mind she is one of the truly great 20th century poets—to look into The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger Conover. Loy’s poems were out-of-print for years, & we are very fortunate that this lamentable situation has been rectified.

“O Hell” was first published in William Carlos Williams’ journal Contact in 1920. Loy could be a very sensual poet—in fact, some of her work, including the great poetic sequence Love Songs to Johannes, was considered shockingly graphic in its day. This short but intense poem gives some suggestion of Loy’s focus on the corporeal.

Enjoy! & be sure to come back tomorrow for the kick-off of Homegrown Radio!


O Hell

To clear the drifts of spring
Of our forebears’ excrements
And bury the subconscious archives
Under unaffected flowers

Indeed—

Our person is a covered entrance to infinity
Choked with the tatters of tradition

Goddesses and Young Gods
Caress the sanctity of Adolescence
In the shaft of the sun

Mina Loy

The image is a drawing by Loy titled “Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays”

"On Third Avenue"

This month’s featured poet is Mina Loy—a poet of incandescent talent whose works are not as well known as they should be. Ms Loy’s poetic star was in ascendency in the ‘teens & 1920s, but declined precipitously thereafter. Her works were out of print for many years.

Fortunately, that is no longer true. An excellent volume of her poems is available: The Lost Lunar Baedecker, edited by Roger L. Conover, & I’d give it the very highest recommendation. To my mind, Loy is the one “Modernist” who speaks most urgently to us, however many years removed from that movement's heyday.

“On Third Avenue” dates from 1942, & may have been intended as part of a book-length poetic sequence called “The Compensations of Poverty”—this is Conover’s conjecture. Such a book was never finally assembled, however. At the time, Loy was living in the Bowery in New York, & was an isolated figure whose life was intertwined with the down-&-out street people of that district. Her glamorous life among the literati was a memory, & she kept in contact with only a few of the artistic figures from her earlier life; Marcel Duchamp & Djuna Barnes were two artists with whom Loy maintained contact.

This is a harrowing & beautiful poem—hope you, too, find it moving.

On Third Avenue

1

“You should have disappeared years ago”—

so disappear
on Third Avenue
to share the heedless incognito

of shuffling shadow-bodies
animate with frustration

whose silence’ only potence is
respiration
preceding the eroded bronze contours
of their other aromas

through the monstrous air
of this red-lit thoroughfare.

Here and there
saturnine
neon-signs
set afire
a feature
on their hueless overcast
of down-cast countenances.

For their ornateness
Time, the contortive tailor,
on and off,
clowned with sweat-sculptured cloth
to press
upon those irreparable dummies
an eerie undress
of mummies
half unwound.

2

Such are the compensations of poverty
to see—

Like an electric fungus
sprung from its own effulgence
of intercircled jewellery
reflected on the pavement

like a reliquary sedan-chair,
out of a legend, dumped there,

before a ten-cent Cinema,

a sugar-coated box-office
enjail a Goddess
aglitter, in her runt of a tower,
with ritual claustrophobia.

Such are the compensations of poverty
to see—

Transient in the dust,
the brilliancy
of a trolley
loaded with luminous busts;

lovely in anonymity
they vanish
with the mirage
of their passage.

Mina Loy

portrait of Loy is by Man Ray

“Mexican Desert”

Happy Thursday! This month’s featured poet will be one of my personal favorites, & a writer who deserves to be more widely read, Mina Loy. Ms Loy was British by birth (1882), but later lived on the continent, both in France, where she was a regular at Gertrude Stein’s salon, & a good friend of both Stein & Djuna Barnes, & later in Italy, where she was connected with the “Futurist” movement thru her lover, Filippo Marinetti. She moved to New York in 1916, & was connected with Others magazine. Loy’s poetic star shone quite brightly for some time—she was both praised & notorious—her great poem, Love Song to Johannes was attacked as pornographic, tho to my mind it’s one of the great 20th century poetic works. Around the time today’s poem was published in The Dial, Ezra Pound (in one of his patented literary “remarks”) asked Marianne Moore, “is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?”

But Loy’s reputation was eclipsed, much to the puzzlement of some writers. In 1957, Henry Miller described her as “an interplanetary voice whose subtle vibrations only faintly pierce our smug-laden atmosphere”; in 1982, critic Hugh Kenner noted, “her utter absence from all canonical lists is one of modern literary history’s most perplexing data.” Her exclusion from the “who’s who” of modernists was also lamented by writers like William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth & Louis Zukofsky. Fortunately, Loy’s work has been revived over the past 20 years, & now it’s possible to purchase her poems without much ado.

Hope you enjoy today’s poem—it captures the condensed language that—in my opinion—Loy had perfected in Love Songs to Johannes. That long poem was published in 1917; “Mexican Desert was published in 1921, & probably written some time between 1919 & 1921.

Mexican Desert

The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive
trailing her rattling wooden tail
into the jazz band sunset

The mountains in a row
set pinnacles of ferocious isolation
under the alien hot heaven

Vegetable cripples of drought
thrust up with parching appeal
cracking open the earth
stump-fingered cacti
amid hunch-back palm trees
belabour the cinders of twilight

Mina Loy

In other news: There won't be any post tomorrow, but I should be back for Sepia Saturday. I also may not have access to respond to comments until later in the day on Friday!

“A Certain Slant of Sunlight”

Good morning, folks, & a happy Friday to you all. As promised way back in early April, here’s the second featured poem by Ted Berrigan.

While the poem posted in early April, “Personal Poem #9,” came from a relatively early point in Berrigan’s career, “A Certain Slant of Sunlight” is a late poem. The title clearly refers to Emily Dickinson’s great poem “There’s A Certain Slant of Light,” & like that poem, explores the emotions surrounding memory & loss—the way these can be triggered by a seemingly small thing—the angle of the light. However, in Berrigan’s poem, we’re completely “unstuck” in both time & space, as he moves between St Mark’s Place & Colorado in 1980 & wherever he finds himself on the day of his first communion, 1941 (Berrigan grew up in Providence, Rhode Island). Where the lyric “I” is located at any given moment becomes ambiguous—as each of our locations become uncertain & fluid when we’re flooded with memory.

In other news: Blues fans among you also might consider navigating over to Just a Song, where I have a post about Robert Johnson’s great “Terraplane Blues.” Next month on Robert Frost's Banjo, poem-wise? Another of my favorite poets—first Thursday & final Friday poems by Mina Loy.

But for now, hope you enjoy this fine poem!

A Certain Slant of Sunlight

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark's Place too, beneath a white moon.
I'll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
        will be too; but
I'll be shattered by then
But now I'm not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
        buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight
        falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion
        Day, 1941—
I'll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.

Ted Berrigan

“Personal Poem #9”

Good morning, folks, & a happy Thursday to you all. Here’s some good news to everyone who was sad to see the Weekly Poem go away—I’ll be featuring poems twice a month, probably on the first Thursday & final Friday of each month.

This month we’ll look at a couple of poems by one of my very favorite poets, Ted Berrigan. “Personal Poem #9” is a relatively early piece, but it shows a number of Berrigan’s characteristics: his delight in the personal, the “mundane” details of everyday life; the conversational tone mixed with a rapid movement thru the lines; his ability to ground a poem in a real sense of place. Of course, the fact that Berrigan mentions the town where I was born (Bellows Falls, VT) particularly endears this poem to me!

Hope you enjoy it too!


Personal Poem #9

It’s 8:54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 26th of July
and it’s probably 8:54 in Manhattan but I’m
in Brooklyn I’m eating English muffins and drinking
Pepsi and I’m thinking of how Brooklyn is New
York City too          how odd          I usually think of it
as something all its own like Bellows Falls like
Little Chute          like Uijongbu
                                                          I never thought
on the Williamsburg Bridge I’d come so much to Brooklyn
just to see lawyers and cops who don’t even carry guns
taking my wife away and bringing her back
                                                                                        No
and I never thought Dick would be back at Gude’s
beard shaved off long hair cut and Carol reading
his books when we were playing cribbage and watching
the sun come up over the Navy Yard a-
cross the river
                            I think I was thinking
when I was ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry Street
erudite dazzling slim and badly-loved
contemplating my new book of poetry
to be printed in simple type on old brown paper
feminine marvelous and tough

Ted Berrigan