The madness in poetry

,

the madness in poetry An anthology by Geraldine A Refareal

Copyright Q Emily Dickinson © 1988 Allen Ginsberg © 1984 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe © 1795 Nick Joaquin © 1937 James Joyce © 1932 James Joyce © 1939 Ernesto Dalisay Manalo © 1965 Sylvia Plath © 1962 Edgar Allan Poe © 1845 Ezra Pound © 1917 Geraldine Refareal © 2014 Anne Sexton © 1981 Arthur Rimbaud © 1871 Jose Garcia Villa © 1963 Jose Garcia Villa © 1942 Amado Vinuya © 1963 Walt Whitman © 1855

“ I am alone, no one is here with me, Sealed are my doors in granite and in gold.

I’m pure and great as all can see Although alone in misery.”

What are you? “You do not have to ask!

All shall be sure of what I do; A Godly secret is my task and that is why I wear this fearsome mask.”

— Amado Vinuya, “the Madwoman”

Table of Contents Q

Introduction: The Poets’ Occupational Hazard Geraldine Refareal v

Anna Livia Plurabelle James Joyce 31

Ask Any Sage What Death Shall Be Ernesto Manalo 5 Daddy Sylvia Plath 1

Ecce Puer James Joyce 9

The Emperor’s New Sonnet Jose Garcia Villa 30

I Felt A Funeral in my Brain Emily Dickinson 3

I sing the body electric 7 Walt Whitman 23

Kaddish Allen Ginsberg 10

The Drunken Boat (Le Bateau Ivre) Arthur Rimbaud 25

In A Station of the Metro Ezra Pound 29

Poem Written Beneath a Blue Lampshade Jose Garcia Villa 22

The Raven Edgar Allan Poe 6

Roman Elegy V Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 24

Six p.m.

Nick Joaquin 28

The Truth the Dead Know Anne Sexton 4

Introduction: The Poets’ Occupational Hazard Q Geraldine A Refareal

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lthough for years, there has been enough evidence to prove that there is a correlation among poets and some or other mental sickness, mild or severe to the point of suicide—case in point a dissertation on this by Dr. Paolo Manalo has been realized—I do not think that the causality of the relationship will never be found: whether poetry makes one sick, or sickness is a necessary condition to produce poetry. To quote Roddy Lumsden, a contemporary British poet: “a poet confessing to mental illness is like a weight lifter admitting to muscles,” (qtd in Allan). But to say that every poet is innately sick, and only those who are sick can write poetry would be an injustice to those who are mentally balanced—at least by society’s standards. According to Allan, the bipolar-type mood swings—from irrationally depressed to irrationally motivated and excited—are typical of a poet’s creative process.

Although, a characteristic of psychological disorders is psychomotor paralysis, or the inability to function mentally, emotionally if not physically or a total rigidity to thinking. This is a complete contradiction of the poet’s necessary conditions according to I. A. Richard’s good critic of the poem, that is, (1) to be adept at experiencing without eccentricities,—the mental sickness itself an abnormality—(2) to be able to distinguish experiences from another,—impeded by rigidity—(3) to have sound judge of values—unachievable during periods of altered perceptions (114). (Richards clarifies in a later essay about the normality of the artist and that “to be normal is a standard, but not, as things are and are likely to remain, an average; and to inquire into the characteristics of the norm or to ask who is normal is to raise a question as to value,” providing a leeway for the allowable eccentricities or behaviors in poets or other creative writers (194).)

It is then that we may suppose that experience plays a large part in the poet’s creative process.

His selection from his pool of experiences provides the starting point of poetical masterpieces. We may also infer that due to the eccentric poet’s sometimes altered state of consciousness—maybe due to prescribed or un-prescribed drugs, psychosis, or occasional breakdowns—their pool of experiences is a lot different. It may provide them a “vastly increased flexibility, a smudging of the boundary that used to divide ‘the real’ from ‘the imagined’,” especially during these moments of lucidity or lack thereof (Allan). It will be then very hard for the artist to deny these perceptions of the world and that there is no objective reality which we all function in (Allan). Only here can we find the link between madness and genius, in these moments of clarity by the artist, where inspiration or just a surge of poetic experience comes.

As much as madness seems to be so grand in the previous description, it is best not to romanticize it for obvious reasons such as the implication for the artist—suicide, death. It cannot be denied, however, of the existence of poetical masterpieces from famed writers who in fact have a mental sickness, or at least have these tendencies, some of which I have collected in this anthology of the mad and the genius. Sometimes, there are only these non-conformists viewed on by society as eccentric for their ways are different. Provided that these individuals are “endowed with expressive talent, can both see the flaws in the world and make others sufficiently aware of them to want to change either the flaws of the world or their ways of looking at and apprehending the world,” (Ruitenbeek). Because genius is more often than not untraceable—is it because of good upbringing? Education? Genetically inherited?—I wish not to delve in this anymore, but the masterpieces themselves and the way that the authors had come about to writing them.

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The first on the list would be our very own Jose Garcia Villa, who actually has two poems in this anthology, “the Emperor’s New Sonnet,” and “Poem Written Beneath a Blue Lampshade.” Villa had been too much, even for the University of the Philippines which exiled him out of the Philippine academe, into the University of New Mexico where he edited the mimeograph magazine Clay (Gruenberg-Valeros and Gruenberg, 227). While his writing was ahead of its time, and himself considered a genius—bagging a Guggenheim fellowship and National Artist Award for Literature—Villa, albeit undiagnosed was a bit on the eccentric side; he had once gone to a party hosted by Federico Mangahas wearing a cowrope belt, and on another occasion sat outside, Buddha-like, on the Far-Eastern University grounds during his awarding ceremony and explained, “I’m just catching up trying to be immoral,” (Gruenberg-Valeros and Valeros, 226-227).

Next we have Nick Joaquin staggering on to the list, although much like Villa in his genius, this writer has also been awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism and National Artist Award for Literature, among many other prizes for his work, literary and journalistic. He is the opposite of ostentatious Villa who likes to be anonymous—ever present during rallies, celebrations, etc., but ever hidden—although contains maybe the same amount of “Taurean stubbornness, eccentricity, a male chauvinism, being spendthrift, whatever,” (Lanot). Even when he couldn’t be there, he would always provide credible reports through intensive interviews and research (Lanot). Included here is his poem, Six P.M. that clearly describes his work as a “trouvere,” and “grammarian:” Quijano de Manila the poet/fictionist, and Nick Joaquin the journalist.

Traversing some thousand miles perhaps, we have Ezra Pound and his ever famous, “In a Station of the Metro,” and Imagism movement. To add to that his Fascist support and very eccentric ways that scared off James Joyce—found him “mad,” and said he was “genuinely frightened of him” and asked Ernest Hemingway for assistance—and earned Hemingway’s respect, we can probably say that they have reason to (Lawless). Hemingway once wrote about a dinner party where Pound did not want to eat the regular course but instead, ate a whole rose at the centerpiece, whilst talking about his political economic views that greatly enamored Hemingway (Lawless).

Arthur Rimbaud, on the other hand, had produced an even more eccentric imagery in his poem, “Le Bateau Ivre,” or “The Drunken Boat.” George Partridge, in his “Psychopathological Study of Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud,” stated, “we might call him a kind of glorified psychopath,” (421). This was for Rimbaud’s extremely short years as a writer, and had given up after a few rejections, because of mood swings if not the extreme: bipolar disorder. As for his other “eccentricities,” we might take into account his homosexual affair with Paul Verlaine in Paris, and the very dreadful ending to this resulting to attempted murder, evident of his psychopathy (VintageVenus.com).

Another famous writer, who also had this affinity for the same sex is Allen Ginsberg. Although more famous for “Howl,” I have included in this anthology, the elegy for his mother who “suffered from severe paranoia that kept her in and out of mental hospitals,” “Kaddish,” which may provide us with more psychoanalytic exploration with his themes; celebrating homosexual love, and experimenting with mind-altering drugs (Conarroe, 222). Famous for his public readings, which included very ostentatious productions such as music and chanting, he once played a lute in Warsaw street corner wearing a loincloth, there is no doubt that maybe Ginsberg was a bit eccentric (Conarroe, 224). He had Walt Whitman for inspiration in his poems, using “incantatory rhythms, uninhibited self-revelation, and celebration of the brotherhood of man (Conarroe, 222).

Whitman also has a psychoanalytic review entitled “Walt Whitman: Lover and Comrade,” included in Hendrik Ruitenbeek’s Literary Imagination on his perfectionist tendencies, women adoration, and homosexual love. In his childhood he had an attachment to his mother that developed in him this concept of the idealized woman “as Madonnas, pure and wise beyond the ken of men,” (“Walt Whitman: Lover and Comrade,” 349). This is very evident in his poem, “I Sing the Body Electric,” that talks of the human body of both male and female whereas Whitman had maintained “such an impossible standard [of women],” (“Walt Whitman: Lover and Comrade,” 353).

Another similar persona can be found in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had a loving mothvi

er but then “identified” with his father, Kaspar Goethe, who was the genius for the younger Goethe and took it upon himself to teach his children. Goethe then set, “himself on equal terms with his father, [incorporated] him into his personality, and [made] the father’s ideals his own,” an unconscious process also applicable to his mother (Hitshmann, 122). In his lifetime he had gone from the young and worldly Goethe who devoted his loved to the much undeserving, and older Frau von Stein, to the wise older Goethe who wrote thesis on science as well as his novel, Faust and other elegies and erotica; “he grew from genius to sage and self-contained Olympian, (Hitschman, 135).

And perhaps if fathers were to be taken into account, who according to Freud are half of the influential unit on the child, I have included James Joyce, although more celebrated as the author of Ulysses and the linguistic enigma, Finnegans Wake, he had first published a collection of poems entitled Chamber Music. The poems I have included here are, “Ecce Puer,” telling of his lamentation for a lost father and at the same time rejoicing a birth of a grandson, and a passage from “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” of Finnegans Wake. Joyce had a daughter, Lucia, who had gone in and out of sanatoriums for her schizophrenia and she may have inherited this temperament from her father. “Joyce was quite similar to Lucia in being vulnerable to mental illness, but he could always find refuge in the life and humor of his literary creations,” (Foster, 58-59). Joyce had been aware of his own mental state since Lucia, and was prone to hypochondria, insomnia and fainting spells (Foster, 64).

Another writer who had problems in his genetic make-up is Edgar Allan Poe, who suffered deaths in his family since childhood and coupled with “an expressive talent,” translated this disposition to literary creations such as “The Raven,” (Pruette, 393). Although inherited an “inferior brain” and “a decided organic inferiority,” he had been compensated with genius and the indulgence and pocket-money from foster parents which could never have replaced the love and sympathy Poe must have been craving for (Pruette, 394). Poe was obsessed with death, beauty, and love, manifested in a lot of his chilling poems, but had been a reality for him on his nightly excursions to the tomb of his beloved friend, Mrs. Helen Stannard (Pruette, 34).

Ernesto Dalisay Manalo, who had committed suicide at the age of 26, believed that, “poems are always products of neurosis,” and it is manifest in his collection of poems, published before he died.

There is always an air of melancholy in his poems—with a few exceptions—that revealed the undercurrent of death and fighting for life (Manalo, 7). He had used his melancholy as a form of “concentration” to complete or synthesize the violence he cannot express. Poetry had been a form of treatment for him as he prepared to commit the last act of strength (Manalo, 8).

Emily Dickinson, author of “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain,” according to Theodora Ward had beena therapy for her and had produced great poems which she did not want published—only after she had died that they have come to light, as well as her struggles with her illness. The experiences she had that contributed to her poetry is divided into two eras, that when she had been horrified at the thought that her “last hold on reality had given way,” and before. This goes to show Allan’s theory that writers become changed after experiences such as these, for revelations cannot be un-realized (Ward, 54).

A similar author, one of the confessional movement taught by Robert Lowell, was Anne Sexton, who much like Dickinson, used her poetry to relieve her of the burdens of reality. Sexton was addicted to alcohol, tranquilizers and the likes, while being a “walking anthology of mental disorders,” (Conarroe, 160). Despite all of this, she had been most productive and showed so little signs of the woman dependent on anti-depressants to maintain her biochemical balance. But she, too, had taken her life at 46 years old.

Sylvia Plath, Pulitzer Prize winner for the Bell Jar, acclaimed poet who produced some of the best volumes of poetry in English, even until now, cannot be forgotten for this category (Conarroe, 193). She had been published at a young age and had been shepherded off into the literary world, where she had met Ted Hughes, another big name in the literary world. Together they had conquered if not monopolized acclaim in two continents (Plath was American while Hughes was European), and referring to herself as a genius she had written to her mother, “I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name,” (Conarroe, 194). This had been until she found out that Hughes was cheating on her vii

in the six years they were married, and started the series of triggers for her depression. She had written some of her best works in the crucial hours of her life when, “after having sealed off the room where her children slept, the poet turned on the gas oven and took her life,” (Conarroe, 194). And thus, after years of female poets following the same path, there emerged the “Sylvia Plath Effect,” coined by Dr. James Kaufman of the California State University (Bailey, 42).

In the pieces I have included here, there seems to be no unifying theme that encompasses writers under these conditions. For Plath, Sexton, Dickinson, and Manalo we find confessional poetry, while a variety of elegies, erotic poetry, free verse, and even lyric dispersed throughout the collection. This supports my theory that genius is not only contained in the sad depressed poetry of these masters, but also can be found exquisitely written and hand-picked from the artist’s pool of experiences and poetic memory.

What I found remarkable about the poem “Daddy” is that it is so open to interpretation that a lot of criticism has been written about it by so many authors. It can be interpreted as an exorcism, as manifestation of an electra complex, feminist et cetera. But in “Daddy,” the elements such as the “nursery rhyme” type of rhymes, the reference to the Nazi party she uses to flower her father with, all contribute to this theme of a complex father-daughter relationship. The poem talks about the breaking away of the speaker from the father, where the speaker first makes use of baby-talk sounding verses until the turning point of the poem:

“But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you.”

Thereafter there begins the gloomy vocabulary that is used to spite the father and the speakers bitterness, while the speaker attempts to rebuild herself in the process of “re-modeling,” (Nance, and Jones). There is also an intermix of English and German words that add to the venom of the poem, making it a full turn from the whining baby.

Dickinson also makes use of the confessional poetry type, even before its manifestation as a movement to express her ever growing sickness in “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain.” The poem goes on to literally describe the ritual of funerals going on inside the speaker’s head, but also literally tries to convey a psychomotor retardation, or the very deterioration of the brain physically and psychologically. The poem makes use of the classic ballad meter to add to the effect of the funeral rituals of the poem, typical of Emily Dickinson juxtaposed to the slant rhymes and rhyme schemes used in the poems that somehow depicts a marching beat.

Anne Sexton, however, has dubbed herself the “only confessional poet,” because of her tendency to be not as allegorical as Dickinson, but provide in her poetry “raw” and more intimate experiences, (Conarroe, 163). “The Truth that the Dead Know,” is also a poem going through the rituals of mourning if not a funeral, an elegy for her parents.

Manalo’s take on the villanelle, “Ask Any Sage What Death Shall Be,” is somewhat more hopeful than our previous poetry on death. A villanelle depicts a sort of obsession in poetry with its repeating refrain, but Manalo had desperately changed up the sequence, providing a variety in rhythm and maybe as a sign of breaking through the obsession, only to have it come back again near the end of the poem.

In “The Raven,” Poe and his talk of death, love and beauty materializes in this trochaic octameter narrative. The symbols present—the talking raven—and the signals of night contribute to the chilling effect of the rhythm and rhymes used, streamlining themselves into a song of death.

Joyce’s “Ecce Puer” has quite the similar effect, albeit there is a consolation to the sudden death of Joyce’s father—the sudden grandfatherhood or the birth of Stephen James Joyce. Ecce Puer in English may be roughly translated into, “Look, a boy!” which is probably the paradox of the poem’s mourning in the first two stanzas. The title is the key to understanding the rest of the poem’s sudden outbursts like viii

“Unclose his yes!” or “Forgive your son!” for the epiphany typical of Joyce’s fiction can be found: the gift of life and the realization of death.

Ginsberg however was not provided with the consolation of a child upon his mother’s death, and so thus the elegy, “Kaddish” was born. From the Hebrew Kaddish, that is a sort of elegy or a lamentation, “Kaddish” is Ginsberg’s attempt to reconcile the realities of life, death and love, and his mother’s life. The parts are separated by theme: death, Naomi’s life in part II and III, and the last part an attempt to realize what’s left for Ginsberg after this mourning has passed.

We have next not an elegy but a love poem by Jose Garcia Villa, but upon close inspection may talk also of the ending of one such love as it is written in the past tense, still the loss to something that has died. It is also maybe a form of goodbye to the speaker’s beloved albeit holding on greatly to the purity of their love. This poem was written well before Villa had become the “supremo for the sakists” or the “art for art’s sake” movement, filled with emotion and traditional poetry (Gruenerg-Valeros and Gruenberg, 227).

Whitman on the other hand talks of the more primitive needs before love, which is sex and the government of the body as men and women. “Always a central element in Whitman’s ecstatic imagination, the body is here both ostensible and central subject of the poem,” (Huck).

Another author who has written extensively on erotic poetry is Goethe with his Römische Elegien or Erotica Romana, the Roman Elegies. In the fifth elegy, the speaker talks about how the daytime must be consumed with enriching an artist’s mind, and at nighttime must be bent on enriching the other parts of the artist that contribute to his pool of experience: a kind of hedonistic pleasure derived from the sensual instead of the intellectual.

Nick Joaquin’s “Six p.m.” is a kind of reversal from the Elegy V. It still relates the double life of an artist but now as a person. The person comes out at day—a grammarian, or simply a writer (in Joaquin’s sense a journalist)—and the trouvere or the poet comes out at night. Joaquin makes use of the suggestive imagery of the bus, the turning point of the transformation as one comes home from the work of the person to the solitary endeavors of the artist.

Much eccentric imagery is used in Rimbaud’s 100-line pome, “The Drunken Boat,” as the title suggests. It is a kind of allegory for most writers—myself included—of the process of inebriation (or more appropriately for writers, again, the creative processs) and how the boat, becomes a vehicle for life, and the waters a symbol of the obstacles of life, where drunkenness serves to free the boat from all of these as it progresses through the narrative poem. It hints at a sort of tragedy that the boat also symbolizes a drunkard in the end, believing that what intoxication he has is a form of self-expression as well as a release.

Much eccentric imagery is used in Rimbaud’s 100-line poem, “The Drunken Boat,” as the title suggests. It is a kind of allegory for most writers—myself included—of the process of inebriation (or more appropriately for writers, again, the creative process) and how the boat, becomes a vehicle for life, and the waters a symbol of the obstacles of life, where drunkenness serves to free the boat from all of these as it progresses through the narrative poem. It hints at a sort of tragedy that the boat also symbolizes a drunkard in the end, believing that what intoxication he has is a form of self-expression as well as a release.

At the topic of imagery we cannot very well forget the Ezra Pound’s contribution to imagism, “In A Station of the Metro.” We see Pound’s use of the image in his poems best here, with the use of the words precisely for their visual aspect apart from the latent content of the poem: a metro station.

“The blank spaces also mimic the situation of a traveler in the metro. Whether one arrives at the metro station while aboard the train, or one is on the platform watching arriving and departing trains, there is a break between the stillness as a train arrives; it stops; passengers disembark and board, and then the train speeds off. (McDougall).

“The Emperor’s New Sonnet,” by Villa, again exemplifies the use of white space in poetry as it is only that: white space. Undoubtedly, white space is used to connote meanings, pace reading, or outline poetry; it is an active part of poetry and not just blank spaces (Lehmann). But here we have the very ix

suggestive image of white space, what does it stand for? What does it suggest? Is it still poetry?

And if we can have white space for poetry, I have included a passage from the “novel” Finnegans Wake

by James Joyce, “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” It is in the blurring lines of poetry and prose can we find the true genius that is Joyce where Wake is actually the “unique, sole member of its class,” because “the misconception that it is a novel,” is widely acknowledged to be true (Higginson, 5). This novel of “semantically dense and sometimes syntactically difficult,” language has earned it the right to be dubbed a linguistic enigma for its “verbal refinement and complication,” Higginson, 12, 4). If one can continue reading the whole chapter—if not the whole novel, best of luck to you—one may find the dispersion of symbols and puns on the rivers of Dublin, where Anna is the Liffey, contributing to the story about Anna being the most beautiful of all, using the rivers as structural device to achieve this end, (Higginson, 12).

This anthology holds some of the great poems of genius writers who are more often than not defeated by life and society. If we only take the time to query into the lives of these authors we may be able to find what many poets strive to find: that is the craft and skill that they have used to create masterpieces from their pool of experiences, as well as prevent these tendencies to bottle up into severe illnesses, or worse.

Works Cited Allan, Clare. “Is Mental Illness an occupational hazard of poets?” The Guardian.com, 23 March 2009.

Web. n.pag. 1 April 2014 Bailey, Deborah Smith. “The Sylvia Plath Effect.” American Psychology Association Vol 34 No 10.

November 2003. Web. 1 April 2014. 42.

Conarroe, Joel, “Allen Ginsberg.” Eight American Poets Random House: New York, 1994. Print. 221 225 ----------. “Anne Sexton.” Eight American Poets Random House: New York, 1994. Print. 159-163 ----------. “Sylvia Plath.” Eight American Poets Random House: New York, 1994. Print. 193-197 Foster, Brett. “Biography of James Joyce.” Bloom’s Biocritiques: James Joyce Ed. Harold Bloom Chelsea

House Publishing: Philadelphia, 2003. Print. 3-72.

Gruenberg-Valeros, Estrelita and Florentino B. Valeros. “Ernesto Dalisay Manalo.” Filipino Writers

in English New Day Publishers: Quezon City, 1987. Print. 144 Gruenberg-Valeros, Estrelita and Florentino B. Valeros. “Jose Garcia Villa.” Filipino Writers in English

New Day Publishers: Quezon City, 1987. Print. 226-227 Nance, Guinevara and Judith Jones. Concerning Poetry. 11:1 1978. Web. 1 April 2014. n.pag Higginson, Fred H. Introduction. Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Making of a Chapter By Higginson

University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1960. Print. 3-15.

Hitschman, Edward. “Psychoanalytic Comments on the Personality of Goethe.” The Literary Imagination Ed. Hendrik Ruitenbeek. Quadrangle Books: Chicago, 1965. Print. 115-141.

Huck, Gutman. “I Sing the Body Electric’ [1855]”. Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia Eds. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, Garland Publishing: New York, 1998. Web. n.pag Lanot, Marra PL. “The Trouble with Nick.” The Trouble with Nick & Other Profiles University of the

Philippines, University Press: Quezon City 1999. Web. n.pag 1 April 2014.

Lawless, Gregory F. “Ezra Pound: the Poet and the Fascist.” Harvard Crimson 14 June 1976. Web.

n.pag 1 April 2014.

Lehmann, Gary. “White Space.” Sunoasis.com. Web. 1 April 2014. n.pag.

Manalo, Ernesto Dalisay. Preface. Ernesto Manalo: Selected Poems. By Manalo. Filonia Zalamea-Manalo: Quezon City, 1965. Print.

McDougall, James. “Pound’s Poetry as IMAGE TEXT.” . ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. x

2.1 (2005). Dept of English, University of Florida. 1 Apr 2014. Partridge, G. E. “Psychopathological study of Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud,” Psychoanalytic Review,

XVII 1930. Print. 421.

Pruette, Lorine. “A Psychoanalytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe.” The Literary Imagination Ed. Hendrik Ruitenbeek. Quadrangle Books: Chicago, 1965. Print. 391-432.

Richards, Ivor Armstrong. “The Analysis of the Poem.” Principles of Literary Criticism. Harcourt,

Brace, and World Inc: New York, 1925. Print. 114-133.

----------. “The Availability of the Poet’s Experience .” Principles of Literary Criticism. Harcourt, Brace,

and World Inc: New York, 1925. Print. 180-185.

----------. “The Normality of the Artist.” Principles of Literary Criticism. Harcourt, Brace, and World

Inc: New York, 1925. Print. 190-198.

Ruitenbeek, Hendrik M. Introduction. The Literary Imagination by Ruitenbeek Quadrangle Books: Chicago, 1965.

Print. 15-21.

“Arthur Rimbaud: the cult of the modern.” VintageVenus.com Web. n.pag 1 April 2014.

“Walt Whitman: Lover and Comrade.” The Literary Imagination Ed. Hendrik Ruitenbeek. Quadrangle

Books: Chicago, 1965. Print. 349, 353.

Ward, Theodora. The Capsule of the Mind: Chapters in the Life of Emily Dickinson Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1961. Print. 54.

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Daddy Q Sylvia Plath You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time-Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

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And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

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I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain Q

Emily Dickinson I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading - treading - till it seemed That Sense was breaking through And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum Kept beating - beating - till I thought My mind was going numb And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space - began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing - then –

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The Truth the Dead Know Q

Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959 Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse

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Ask Any Sage What Death Shall Be Q Ernesto Dalisay Manalo Ask any sage what death shall be, And he will say there is a soul That thrives on nothing foul Escapes the rotten body free.

But as I saw those who dies There is no soul that flies, Ask any sage what death shall be, And you will see he lies.

A rainy night where no rain falls, Ask any dead what death shall be, A windy night where no wind calls, Death is dark anonymity.

Ask any sage what death shall be, When death has beckoned him, And he can say, before his soul, You are not true you fool!

Since death is nothing bad nor good, Ask any sage what death shall be, We know it is his livelihood To favor immortality.

Believe the soul, the sage says he, For it is in all likelihood, Ask any sage what death shall be To believe in the soul is for your good.

But believe the body too, I say, Ask me not about the soul; And do not leave it for decay; Believe that and you’re not a fool.

For surely the soul and body are But a part of life and the age And when the body nears the bar, The soul is dead, ask any sage.

5

The Raven Q

Edgar Allan Poe Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber doorOnly this, and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;- vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow- sorrow for the lost LenoreFor the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name LenoreNameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, “’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber doorSome late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;This it is, and nothing more.”

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”- here I opened wide the door;Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!”

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.

“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice: Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery exploreLet my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;‘Tis the wind and nothing more.”

6

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore; Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber doorPerched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber doorPerched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shoreTell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber doorBird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as “Nevermore.”

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he flutteredTill I scarcely more than muttered, “other friends have flown beforeOn the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”

Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, “Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden boreTill the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore Of ‘Never- nevermore’.”

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yoreWhat this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o’er, But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o’er, She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.

“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee- by these angels he hath sent thee Respite- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!- prophet still, if bird or devil!Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, 7

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchantedOn this home by horror haunted- tell me truly, I imploreIs there- is there balm in Gilead?- tell me- tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil- prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adoreTell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name LenoreClasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,” I shrieked, upstarting“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted- nevermore!

8

Ecce Puer Q

James Joyce Of the dark past A child is born; With joy and grief My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle The living lies.

May love and mercy Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed On the glass; The world that was not Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping: An old man gone.

O, father forsaken, Forgive your son!

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Kaddish Q

Allen Ginsberg © 1984 For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894—1956 I Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer— And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn— Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse, the final moment—the flower burning in the Day—and what comes after, looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed— like a poem in the dark—escaped back to Oblivion— No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance, sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other, worshipping the God included in it all—longing or inevitability?—while it lasts, a Vision—anything more?

It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder, Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant—and the sky above—an old blue place. or down the Avenue to the south, to—as I walk toward the Lower East Side—where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock— then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark— toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards— Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?

Toward the Key in the window—and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk—in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater—and the place of poverty you knew, and I know, but without caring now—Strange to have moved thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again, with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstoops doors and dark boys on the street, fire escapes old as you -Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me— Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe—and I guess that dies with us—enough to cancel all that comes—What came is gone forever every time— That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret—no fear radiators, lacklove, torture even toothache in the end— Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul—and the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change’s fierce hunger—hair and teeth—and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rotskin, braintricked Implacability.

Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it—Done with yourself at last—Pure— Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all—before the world— There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.

10

No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more fear of Louis, and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts, loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands— No more of sister Elanor,.—she gone before you—we kept it secret—you killed her—or she killed herself to bear with you—an arthritic heart—But Death’s killed you both—No matter— Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and weeks—forgetting, aggrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth, or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin’s at the Met, hailing his voice of a weeping Czar—by standing room with Elanor & Max—watching also the Capitalists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds, with the YPSL’s hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920 all girls grown old, or dead, now, and that long hair in the grave—lucky to have husbands later— You made it—I came too—Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer—or kill—later perhaps—soon he will think—) And it’s the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now—tho not you I didn’t foresee what you felt—what more hideous gape of bad mouth came first—to you—and were you prepared?

To go where? In that Dark—that—in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with you?

Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon—Deathshead with Halo? can you believe it?

Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence, than none ever was?

Nothing beyond what we have—what you had—that so pitiful—yet Triumph, to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower—fed to the ground—but mad, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe, shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth wrapped, sore—freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.

No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the knife—lost Cut down by an idiot Snowman’s icy—even in the Spring—strange ghost thought—some Death—Sharp icicle in his hand—crowned with old roses—a dog for his eyes—cock of a sweatshop—heart of electric irons.

All the accumulations of life, that wear us out—clocks, bodies, consciousness, shoes, breasts—begotten sons—your Communism—‘Paranoia’ into hospitals.

You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is Elanor happy?

Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over midnight Accountings, not sure. l His life passes—as he sees—and what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Immortality, Naomi?

I’ll see him soon. Now I’ve got to cut through—to talk to you—as I didn’t when you had a mouth.

Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever—like Emily Dickinson’s horses—headed to the End. They know the way—These Steeds—run faster than we think—it’s our own life they cross—and take with them.

Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed— Ass and face done with murder.

In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.

Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity— Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping—page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!

11

II

Over and over—refrain—of the Hospitals—still haven’t written your history—leave it abstract—a few images run thru the mind—like the saxophone chorus of houses and years—remembrance of electrical shocks.

By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your nervousness—you were fat— your next move— By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you—once and for all—when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my opinion of the cosmos, I was lost— By my later burden—vow to illuminate mankind—this is release of particulars—(mad as you)— (sanity a trick of agreement)— But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and spied a mystical assassin from Newark, So phoned the Doctor—‘OK go way for a rest’—so I put on my coat and walked you downstreet— On the way a grammarschool boy screamed, unaccountably—‘Where you goin Lady to Death’? I shuddered— and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma— And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of the gang? You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on—to New York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound— where we hung around 2 hours fighting invisible bugs and jewish sickness—breeze poisoned by Roosevelt— out to get you—and me tagging along, hoping it would end in a quiet room in a Victorian house by a lake.

Ride 3 hours thru tunnels past all American industry, Bayonne preparing for World War II, tanks, gas fields, soda factories, diners, loco-motive roundhouse fortress—into piney woods New Jersey Indians—calm towns—long roads thru sandy tree fields— Bridges by deerless creeks, old wampum loading the streambeddown there a tomahawk or Pocahontas bone—and a million old ladies voting for Roosevelt in brown small houses, roads off the Madness highway— perhaps a hawk in a tree, or a hermit looking for an owl-filled branch— All the time arguing—afraid of strangers in the forward double seat, snoring regardless—what busride they snore on now?

‘Allen, you don’t understand—it’s—ever since those 3 big sticks up my back—they did something to me in Hospital, they poisoned me, they want to see me dead—3 big sticks, 3 big sticks— ‘The Bitch! Old Grandma! Last week I saw her, dressed in pants like an old man, with a sack on her back, climbing up the brick side of the apartment ‘On the fire escape, with poison germs, to throw on me—at night—maybe Louis is helping her— he’s under her power— ‘I’m your mother, take me to Lakewood’ (near where Graf Zeppelin had crashed before, all Hitler in Explosion) ‘where I can hide.’

We got there—Dr. Whatzis rest home—she hid behind a closet—demanded a blood transfusion.

We were kicked out—tramping with Valise to unknown shady lawn houses—dusk, pine trees after dark—long dead street filled with crickets and poison ivy— I shut her up by now—big house REST HOME ROOMS—gave the landlady her money for the week—carried up the iron valise—sat on bed waiting to escape— Neat room in attic with friendly bedcover—lace curtains—spinning wheel rug—Stained wallpaper old as Naomi. We were home.

I left on the next bus to New York—laid my head back in the last seat, depressed—the worst yet to come?—abandoning her, rode in torpor—I was only 12.

Would she hide in her room and come out cheerful for breakfast? Or lock her door and stare thru the window for sidestreet spies? Listen at keyholes for Hitlerian invisible gas? Dream in a chair—or mock me, by—in front of a mirror, alone?

12 riding the bus at nite thru New Jersey, have left Naomi to Parcae in Lakewood’s haunted house—left to my own fate bus—sunk in a seat—all violins broken—my heart sore in my ribs—mind was empty—Would she were safe her coffin— Or back at Normal School in in Newark, studying up on America in a black skirt—winter on the 12

street without lunch—a penny a pickle—home at night to take care of Elanor in the bedroom— First nervous breakdown was 1919—she stayed home from school and lay in a dark room for three weeks—something bad—never said what—every noise hurt—dreams of the creaks of Wall Street— Before the gray Depression—went upstate New York—recovered—Lou took photo of her sitting crossleg on the grass—her long hair wound with flowers—smiling—playing lullabies on mandolin—poison ivy smoke in left-wing summer camps and me in infancy saw trees— or back teaching school, laughing with idiots, the backward classes—her Russian specialty—morons with dreamy lips, great eyes, thin feet & sicky fingers, swaybacked, rachitic— great heads pendulous over Alice in Wonderland, a blackboard full of C A T. Naomi reading patiently, story out of a Communist fairy book—Tale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator—Forgiveness of Warlocks—Armies Kissing— Deathsheads Around the Green Table—The King & the Workers—Paterson Press printed them up in the ’30s till she went mad, or they folded, both.

O Paterson! I got home late that nite. Louis was worried. How could I be so—didn’t I think? I shouldn’t have left her. Mad in Lakewood. Call the Doctor. Phone the home in the pines. Too late.

Went to bed exhausted, wanting to leave the world (probably that year newly in love with R my high school mind hero, jewish boy who came a doctor later—then silent neat kid— I later laying down life for him, moved to Manhattan—followed him to college—Prayed on ferry to help mankind if admitted—vowed, the day I journeyed to Entrance Exam— by being honest revolutionary labor lawyer—would train for that—inspired by Sacco Vanzetti, Norman Thomas, Debs, Altgeld, Sand-burg, Poe—Little Blue Books. I wanted to be President, or Senator. ignorant woe—later dreams of kneeling by R’s shocked knees declaring my love of 1941—What sweetness he’d have shown me, tho, that I’d wished him & despaired—first love—a crush— Later a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head— meanwhile I walked on Broadway imagining Infinity like a rubber ball without space beyond— what’s outside?—coming home to Graham Avenue still melancholy passing the lone green hedges across the street, dreaming after the movies—) The telephone rang at 2 A.M.—Emergency—she’d gone mad—Naomi hiding under the bed screaming bugs of Mussolini—Help! Louis! Buba! Fascists! Death!—the landlady frightened—old fag attendant screaming back at her— Terror, that woke the neighbors—old ladies on the second floor recovering from menopause—all those rags between thighs, clean sheets, sorry over lost babies—husbands ashen—children sneering at Yale, or putting oil in hair at CCNY—or trembling in Montclair State Teachers College like Eugene— Her big leg crouched to her breast, hand outstretched Keep Away, wool dress on her thighs, fur coat dragged under the bed—she barricaded herself under bedspring with suitcases.

Louis in pajamas listening to phone, frightened—do now?—Who could know?—my fault, delivering her to solitude?—sitting in the dark room on the sofa, trembling, to figure out— He took the morning train to Lakewood, Naomi still under bed—thought he brought poison Cops—Naomi screaming—Louis what happened to your heart then? Have you been killed by Naomi’s ecstasy?

Dragged her out, around the corner, a cab, forced her in with valise, but the driver left them off at drugstore. Bus stop, two hours’ wait.

I lay in bed nervous in the 4-room apartment, the big bed in living room, next to Louis’ desk— shaking—he came home that nite, late, told me what happened.

Naomi at the prescription counter defending herself from the enemy—racks of children’s books, douche bags, aspirins, pots, blood—‘Don’t come near me—murderers! Keep away! Promise not to kill me!’

Louis in horror at the soda fountain—with Lakewood girlscouts—Coke addicts—nurses—busmen hung on schedule—Police from country precinct, dumbed—and a priest dreaming of pigs on an ancient cliff?

Smelling the air—Louis pointing to emptiness?—Customers vomiting their Cokes—or staring— Louis humiliated—Naomi triumphant—The Announcement of the Plot. Bus arrives, the drivers won’t have them on trip to New York.

Phonecalls to Dr. Whatzis, ‘She needs a rest,’ The mental hospital—State Greystone Doctors—‘Bring her here, Mr. Ginsberg.’

13

Naomi, Naomi—sweating, bulge-eyed, fat, the dress unbuttoned at one side—hair over brow, her stocking hanging evilly on her legs—screaming for a blood transfusion—one righteous hand upraised—a shoe in it—barefoot in the Pharmacy— The enemies approach—what poisons? Tape recorders? FBI? Zhdanov hiding behind the counter?

Trotsky mixing rat bacteria in the back of the store? Uncle Sam in Newark, plotting deathly perfumes in the Negro district? Uncle Ephraim, drunk with murder in the politician’s bar, scheming of Hague? Aunt Rose passing water thru the needles of the Spanish Civil War? till the hired $35 ambulance came from Red Bank——Grabbed her arms—strapped her on the stretcher—moaning, poisoned by imaginaries, vomiting chemicals thru Jersey, begging mercy from Essex County to Morristown— And back to Greystone where she lay three years—that was the last breakthrough, delivered her to Madhouse again— On what wards—I walked there later, oft—old catatonic ladies, gray as cloud or ash or walls—sit crooning over floorspace—Chairs—and the wrinkled hags acreep, accusing—begging my 13-year-old mercy— ‘Take me home’—I went alone sometimes looking for the lost Naomi, taking Shock—and I’d say, ‘No, you’re crazy Mama,—Trust the Drs.’— And Eugene, my brother, her elder son, away studying Law in a furnished room in Newark— came Paterson-ward next day—and he sat on the broken-down couch in the living room—‘We had to send her back to Greystone’— —his face perplexed, so young, then eyes with tears—then crept weeping all over his face—‘What for?’ wail vibrating in his cheekbones, eyes closed up, high voice—Eugene’s face of pain.

Him faraway, escaped to an Elevator in the Newark Library, his bottle daily milk on windowsill of $5 week furn room downtown at trolley tracks— He worked 8 hrs. a day for $20/wk—thru Law School years—stayed by himself innocent near negro whorehouses.

Unlaid, poor virgin—writing poems about Ideals and politics letters to the editor Pat Eve News— (we both wrote, denouncing Senator Borah and Isolationists—and felt mysterious toward Paterson City Hall— I sneaked inside it once—local Moloch tower with phallus spire & cap o’ ornament, strange gothic Poetry that stood on Market Street—replica Lyons’ Hotel de Ville— wings, balcony & scrollwork portals, gateway to the giant city clock, secret map room full of Hawthorne—dark Debs in the Board of Tax—Rembrandt smoking in the gloom— Silent polished desks in the great committee room—Aldermen? Bd of Finance? Mosca the hairdresser aplot—Crapp the gangster issuing orders from the john—The madmen struggling over Zone, Fire, Cops & Backroom Metaphysics—we’re all dead—outside by the bus stop Eugene stared thru childhood— where the Evangelist preached madly for 3 decades, hard-haired, cracked & true to his mean Bible—chalked Prepare to Meet Thy God on civic pave— or God is Love on the railroad overpass concrete—he raved like I would rave, the lone Evangelist— Death on City Hall—) But Gene, young,—been Montclair Teachers College 4 years—taught half year & quit to go ahead in life—afraid of Discipline Problems—dark sex Italian students, raw girls getting laid, no English, sonnets disregarded—and he did not know much—just that he lost— so broke his life in two and paid for Law—read huge blue books and rode the ancient elevator 13 miles away in Newark & studied up hard for the future just found the Scream of Naomi on his failure doorstep, for the final time, Naomi gone, us lonely— home—him sitting there— Then have some chicken soup, Eugene. The Man of Evangel wails in front of City Hall. And this year Lou has poetic loves of suburb middle age—in secret—music from his 1937 book—Sincere—he longs for beauty— No love since Naomi screamed—since 1923?—now lost in Greystone ward—new shock for her— Electricity, following the 40 Insulin.

And Metrazol had made her fat.

So that a few years later she came home again—we’d much advanced and planned—I waited for 14

that day—my Mother again to cook & —play the piano—sing at mandolin—Lung Stew, & Stenka Razin, & the communist line on the war with Finland—and Louis in debt—,uspected to he poisoned money—mysterious capitalisms —& walked down the long front hall & looked at the furniture. She never remembered it all. Some amnesia. Examined the doilies—and the dining room set was sold— the Mahogany table—20 years love—gone to the junk man—we still had the piano—and the book of Poe—and the Mandolin, tho needed some string, dusty— She went to the backroom to lie down in bed and ruminate, or nap, hide—I went in with her, not leave her by herself—lay in bed next to her—shades pulled, dusky, late afternoon—Louis in front room at desk, waiting—perhaps boiling chicken for supper— ‘Don’t be afraid of me because I’m just coming back home from the mental hospital—I’m your mother—’ Poor love, lost—a fear—I lay there—Said, ‘I love you Naomi,’—stiff, next to her arm. I would have cried, was this the comfortless lone union?—Nervous, and she got up soon.

Was she ever satisfied? And—by herself sat on the new couch by the front windows, uneasy—cheek leaning on her hand—narrowing eye—at what fate that day— Picking her tooth with her nail, lips formed an O, suspicion—thought’s old worn vagina—absent sideglance of eye—some evil debt written in the wall, unpaid—& the aged breasts of Newark come near— May have heard radio gossip thru the wires in her head, controlled by 3 big sticks left in her back by gangsters in amnesia, thru the hospital—caused pain between her shoulders— Into her head—Roosevelt should know her case, she told me—Afraid to kill her, now, that the government knew their names—traced back to Hitler—wanted to leave Louis’ house forever.

One night, sudden attack—her noise in the bathroom—like croaking up her soul—convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth—diarrhea water exploding from her behind—on all fours in front of the toilet—urine running between her legs—left retching on the tile floor smeared with her black feces—unfainted— At forty, varicosed, nude, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling Police, yelling for her girlfriend Rose to help— Once locked herself in with razor or iodine—could hear her cough in tears at sink—Lou broke through glass green-painted door, we pulled her out to the bedroom.

Then quiet for months that winter—walks, alone, nearby on Broadway, read Daily Worker—Broke her arm, fell on icy street— Began to scheme escape from cosmic financial murder-plots—later she ran away to the Bronx to her sister Elanor. And there’s another saga of late Naomi in New York.

Or thru Elanor or the Workmen’s Circle, where she worked, ad-dressing envelopes, she made out— went shopping for Campbell’s tomato soup—saved money Louis mailed her— Later she found a boyfriend, and he was a doctor—Dr. Isaac worked for National Maritime Union—now Italian bald and pudgy old doll—who was himself an orphan—but they kicked him out— Old cruelties— Sloppier, sat around on bed or chair, in corset dreaming to herself—‘I’m hot—I’m getting fat—I used to have such a beautiful figure before I went to the hospital—You should have seen me in Woodbine—’ This in a furnished room around the NMU hall, 1943.

Looking at naked baby pictures in the magazine—baby powder advertisements, strained lamb carrots—‘I will think nothing but beautiful thoughts.’

Revolving her head round and round on her neck at window light in summertime, in hypnotize, in doven-dream recall— ‘I touch his cheek, I touch his cheek, he touches my lips with his hand, I think beautiful thoughts, the baby has a beautiful hand.’— Or a No-shake of her body, disgust—some thought of Buchenwald—some insulin passes thru her head—a grimace nerve shudder at Involuntary (as shudder when I piss)—bad chemical in her cortex—‘No don’t think of that. He’s a rat.’

Naomi: ‘And when we die we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, or a squash, a vegetable.’ I come downtown from Columbia and agree. She reads the Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day.

‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man 15

with a white beard.

‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter— miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad.

‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it?

‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.’

Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish—chopped raw cabbage dript with tapwater—smelly tomatoes—week-old health food—grated beets & carrots with leaky juice, warm—more and more disconsolate food—I can’t eat it for nausea sometimes—the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her.

One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu.

And Louis reestablishing himself in Paterson grimy apartment in negro district—living in dark rooms—but found himself a girl he later married, falling in love again—tho sere & shy—hurt with 20 years Naomi’s mad idealism.

Once I came home, after longtime in N.Y., he’s lonely—sitting in the bedroom, he at desk chair turned round to face me—weeps, tears in red eyes under his glasses— That we’d left him—Gene gone strangely into army—she out on her own in N.Y., almost childish in her furnished room. So Louis walked downtown to postoffice to get mail, taught in highschool—stayed at poetry desk, forlorn—ate grief at Bickford’s all these years—are gone.

Eugene got out of the Army, came home changed and lone—cut off his nose in jewish operation— for years stopped girls on Broadway for cups of coffee to get laid—Went to NYU, serious there, to finish Law.— And Gene lived with her, ate naked fishcakes, cheap, while she got crazier—He got thin, or felt helpless, Naomi striking 1920 poses at the moon, half-naked in the next bed. bit his nails and studied—was the weird nurse-son—Next year he moved to a room near Columbia—though she wanted to live with her children— ‘Listen to your mother’s plea, I beg you’—Louis still sending her checks—I was in bughouse that year 8 months—my own visions unmentioned in this here Lament— But then went half mad—Hitler in her room, she saw his mustache in the sink—afraid of Dr. Isaac now, suspecting that he was in on the Newark plot—went up to Bronx to live near Elanor’s Rheumatic Heart— And Uncle Max never got up before noon, tho Naomi at 6 A.M. was listening to the radio for spies—or searching the windowsill, for in the empty lot downstairs, an old man creeps with his bag stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat.

Max’s sister Edie works—17 years bookkeeper at Gimbels—lived downstairs in apartment house, divorced—so Edie took in Naomi on Rochambeau Ave— Woodlawn Cemetery across the street, vast dale of graves where Poe once—Last stop on Bronx subway—lots of communists in that area.

Who enrolled for painting classes at night in Bronx Adult High School—walked alone under Van Cortlandt Elevated line to class—paints Naomiisms— Humans sitting on the grass in some Camp No-Worry summers yore—saints with droopy faces and long-ill-fitting pants, from hospital— Brides in front of Lower East Side with short grooms—lost El trains running over the Babylonian apartment rooftops in the Bronx— Sad paintings—but she expressed herself. Her mandolin gone, all strings broke in her head, she tried. Toward Beauty? or some old life Message?

But started kicking Elanor, and Elanor had heart trouble—came upstairs and asked her about Spy16

dom for hours,—Elanor frazzled. Max away at office, accounting for cigar stores till at night.

‘I am a great woman—am truly a beautiful soul—and because of that they (Hitler, Grandma, Hearst, the Capitalists, Franco, Daily News, the ’20s, Mussolini, the living dead) want to shut me up— Buba’s the head of a spider network—’ Kicking the girls, Edie & Elanor—Woke Edie at midnite to tell her she was a spy and Elanor a rat.

Edie worked all day and couldn’t take it—She was organizing the union.—And Elanor began dying, upstairs in bed.

The relatives call me up, she’s getting worse—I was the only one left—Went on the subway with Eugene to see her, ate stale fish— ‘My sister whispers in the radio—Louis must be in the apartment—his mother tells him what to say—LIARS!—I cooked for my two children—I played the mandolin—’ Last night the nightingale woke me / Last night when all was still / it sang in the golden moonlight / from on the wintry hill. She did.

I pushed her against the door and shouted ‘DON’T KICK ELANOR!’—she stared at me—Contempt—die—disbelief her sons are so naive, so dumb—‘Elanor is the worst spy! She’s taking orders!’

‘—No wires in the room!’—I’m yelling at her—last ditch, Eugene listening on the bed—what can he do to escape that fatal Mama—‘You’ve been away from Louis years already—Grandma’s too old to walk—’ We’re all alive at once then—even me & Gene & Naomi in one mythological Cousinesque room— screaming at each other in the Forever—I in Columbia jacket, she half undressed.

I banging against her head which saw Radios, Sticks, Hitlers—the gamut of Hallucinations—for real—her own universe—no road that goes elsewhere—to my own—No America, not even a world— That you go as all men, as Van Gogh, as mad Hannah, all the same—to the last doom—Thunder, Spirits, lightning!

I’ve seen your grave! O strange Naomi! My own—cracked grave! Shema Y’Israel—I am Svul Avrum—you—in death?

Your last night in the darkness of the Bronx—I phonecalled—thru hospital to secret police that came, when you and I were alone, shrieking at Elanor in my ear—who breathed hard in her own bed, got thin— Nor will forget, the doorknock, at your fright of spies,—Law advancing, on my honor—Eternity entering the room—you running to the bathroom undressed, hiding in protest from the last heroic fate— staring at my eyes, betrayed—the final cops of madness rescuing me—from your foot against the broken heart of Elanor, your voice at Edie weary of Gimbels coming home to broken radio—and Louis needing a poor divorce, he wants to get married soon—Eugene dreaming, hiding at 125 St., suing negroes for money on crud furniture, defending black girls— Protests from the bathroom—Said you were sane—dressing in a cotton robe, your shoes, then new, your purse and newspaper clippingsno—your honesty— as you vainly made your lips more real with lipstick, looking in the mirror to see if the Insanity was Me or a earful of police. or Grandma spying at 78—Your vision—Her climbing over the walls of the cemetery with political kidnapper’s bag—or what you saw on the walls of the Bronx, in pink nightgown at midnight, staring out the window on the empty lot— Ah Rochambeau Ave.—Playground of Phantoms—last apartment in the Bronx for spies—last home for Elanor or Naomi, here these communist sisters lost their revolution— ‘All right—put on your coat Mrs.—let’s go—We have the wagon downstairs—you want to come with her to the station?’

The ride then—held Naomi’s hand, and held her head to my breast, I’m taller—kissed her and said I did it for the best—Elanor sick—and Max with heart condition—Needs— To me—‘Why did you do this?’—‘Yes Mrs., your son will have to leave you in an hour’—The Ambulance came in a few hours—drove off at 4 A.M. to some Bellevue in the night downtown—gone to the hospital forever. I saw her led away—she waved, tears in her eyes.

Two years, after a trip to Mexico—bleak in the flat plain near Brentwood, scrub brush and grass 17

around the unused RR train track to the crazyhouse— new brick 20 story central building—lost on the vast lawns of madtown on Long Island—huge cities of the moon.

Asylum spreads out giant wings above the path to a minute black hole—the door—entrance thru crotch— I went in—smelt funny—the halls again—up elevator—to a glass door on a Women’s Ward— to Naomi—Two nurses buxom white—They led her out, Naomi stared—and I gaspt—She’d had a stroke— Too thin, shrunk on her bones—age come to Naomi—now broken into white hair—loose dress on her skeleton—face sunk, old! withered—cheek of crone— One hand stiff—heaviness of forties & menopause reduced by one heart stroke, lame now—wrinkles—a scar on her head, the lobotomy—ruin, the hand dipping downwards to death— O Russian faced, woman on the grass, your long black hair is crowned with flowers, the mandolin is on your knees— Communist beauty, sit here married in the summer among daisies, promised happiness at hand— holy mother, now you smile on your love, your world is born anew, children run naked in the field spotted with dandelions, they eat in the plum tree grove at the end of the meadow and find a cabin where a white-haired negro teaches the mystery of his rainbarrel— blessed daughter come to America, I long to hear your voice again, remembering your mother’s music, in the Song of the Natural Front— O glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck first mystic life & taught me talk and music, from whose pained head I first took Vision— Tortured and beaten in the skull—What mad hallucinations of the damned that drive me out of my own skull to seek Eternity till I find Peace for Thee, O Poetry—and for all humankind call on the Origin Death which is the mother of the universe!—Now wear your nakedness forever, white flowers in your hair, your marriage sealed behind the sky—no revolution might destroy that maidenhood— O beautiful Garbo of my Karma—all photographs from 1920 in Camp Nicht-Gedeiget here unchanged—with all the teachers from Vewark—Nor Elanor be gone, nor Max await his specter—nor Louis retire from this High School— Back! You! Naomi! Skull on you! Gaunt immortality and revolution come—small broken woman—the ashen indoor eyes of hospitals, ward grayness on skin— ‘Are you a spy?’ I sat at the sour table, eyes filling with tears—‘Who are you? Did Louis send you?—The wires—’ in her hair, as she beat on her head—‘I’m not a bad girl—don’t murder me!—I hear the ceiling—I raised two children—’ Two years since I’d been there—I started to cry—She stared—nurse broke up the meeting a moment—I went into the bathroom to hide, against the toilet white walls ‘The Horror’ I weeping—to see her again—‘The Horror’—as if she were dead thru funeral rot in—‘The Horror!’

I came back she yelled more—they led her away—‘You’re not Allen—’ I watched her face—but she passed by me, not looking— Opened the door to the ward,—she went thru without a glance back, quiet suddenly—I stared out—she looked old—the verge of the grave—‘All the Horror!’

Another year, I left N.Y.—on West Coast in Berkeley cottage dreamed of her soul—that, thru life, in what form it stood in that body, ashen or manic, gone beyond joy— near its death—with eyes—was my own love in its form, the Naomi, my mother on earth still—sent her long letter—& wrote hymns to the mad—Work of the merciful Lord of Poetry. that causes the broken grass to be green, or the rock to break in grass—or the Sun to be constant to earth—Sun of all sunflowers and days on bright iron bridges—what shines on old hospitals—as on my yard— Returning from San Francisco one night, Orlovsky in my room—Whalen in his peaceful chair—a telegram from Gene, Naomi dead— Outside I bent my head to the ground under the bushes near the garage—knew she was better— 18

at last—not left to look on Earth alone—2 years of solitude—no one, at age nearing 60—old woman of skulls—once long-tressed Naomi of Bible— or Ruth who wept in America—Rebecca aged in Newark—David remembering his Harp, now lawyer at Yale or Srul Avrum—Israel Abraham—myself—to sing in the wilderness toward God—O Elohim!—so to the end—2 days after her death I got her letter— Strange Prophecies anew! She wrote—‘The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window—I have the key—Get married Allen don’t take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window.

Love, your mother’ which is Naomi— Hymmnn In the world which He has created according to his will Blessed Praised Magnified Lauded Exalted the Name of the Holy One Blessed is He! In the house in Newark Blessed is He! In the madhouse Blessed is He! In the house of Death Blessed is He! Blessed be He in homosexuality! Blessed be He in Paranoia! Blessed be He in the city! Blessed be He in the Book!

Blessed be He who dwells in the shadow! Blessed be He! Blessed be He! Blessed be you Naomi in tears! Blessed be you Naomi in fears! Blessed Blessed Blessed in sickness!

Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you Naomi in solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest be your bars! Blest be your last years’ loneliness!

Blest be your failure! Best be your stroke! Blest be the close of your eye! Blest be the gaunt of your cheek! Blest be your withered thighs!

Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! Blessed be Death! Blessed be Death!

Blessed be He Who leads all sorrow to Heaven! Blessed be He in the end!

Blessed be He who builds Heaven in Darkness! Blessed Blessed Blessed be He! Blessed be He! Blessed be Death on us All! III Only to have not forgotten the beginning in which she drank cheap sodas in the morgues of Newark, only to have seen her weeping on gray tables in long wards of her universe only to have known the weird ideas of Hitler at the door, the wires in her head, the three big sticks rammed down her back, the voices in the ceiling shrieking out her ugly early lays for 30 years, only to have seen the time-jumps, memory lapse, the crash of wars, the roar and silence of a vast electric shock, only to have seen her painting crude pictures of Elevateds running over the rooftops of the Bronx her brothers dead in Riverside or Russia, her lone in Long Island writing a last letter—and her image in the sunlight at the window ‘The key is in the sunlight at the window in the bars the key is in the sunlight,’ only to have come to that dark night on iron bed by stroke when the sun gone down on Long Island and the vast Atlantic roars outside the great call of Being to its own to come back out of the Nightmare—divided creation—with her head lain on a pillow of the hospital to die —in one last glimpse—all Earth one everlasting Light in the familiar black-out—no tears for this vision— But that the key should be left behind—at the window—the key in the sunlight—to the living—that can take that slice of light in hand—and turn the door—and look back see Creation glistening backwards to the same grave, size of universe, size of the tick of the hospital’s clock on the archway over the white door— IV 19

O mother what have I left out O mother what have I forgotten O mother farewell with a long black shoe farewell with Communist Party and a broken stocking farewell with six dark hairs on the wen of your breast farewell with your old dress and a long black beard around the vagina farewell with your sagging belly with your fear of Hitler with your mouth of bad short stories with your fingers of rotten mandolins with your arms of fat Paterson porches with your belly of strikes and smokestacks with your chin of Trotsky and the Spanish War with your voice singing for the decaying overbroken workers with your nose of bad lay with your nose of the smell of the pickles of Newark with your eyes with your eyes of Russia with your eyes of no money with your eyes of false China with your eyes of Aunt Elanor with your eyes of starving India with your eyes pissing in the park with your eyes of America taking a fall with your eyes of your failure at the piano with your eyes of your relatives in California with your eyes of Ma Rainey dying in an aumbulance with your eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots with your eyes going to painting class at night in the Bronx with your eyes of the killer Grandma you see on the horizon from the Fire-Escape with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall with your eyes being led away by policemen to an aumbulance with your eyes strapped down on the operating table with your eyes with the pancreas removed with your eyes of appendix operation with your eyes of abortion with your eyes of ovaries removed with your eyes of shock with your eyes of lobotomy with your eyes of divorce with your eyes of stroke with your eyes alone with your eyes with your eyes with your Death full of Flowers V Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones in Long Island Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own as hers 20

caw caw my eye be buried in the same Ground where I stand in Angel Lord Lord great Eye that stares on All and moves in a black cloud caw caw strange cry of Beings flung up into sky over the waving trees Lord Lord O Grinder of giant Beyonds my voice in a boundless field in Sheol Caw caw the call of Time rent out of foot and wing an instant in the universe Lord Lord an echo in the sky the wind through ragged leaves the roar of memory caw caw all years my birth a dream caw caw New York the bus the broken shoe the vast highschool caw caw all Visions of the Lord Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Paris, December 1957窶年ew York, 1959

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POEM WRITTEN BENEATH A BLUE LAMPSHADE Q

Jose Garcia Villa I speak this poem tenderly It being for you And For you only – We were not Afraid and we did take love Gorgeously.

We had no fears.

We knew love we knew it and We were dancers for it And also We were rivers, we were moonlight And also we were winds As also We were gods. And all this Is remembrance, and all this Is desire.

But also it is love.

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From I sing the body Electric Q

Walt Whitman

7 A man’s body at auction, (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,) I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

Gentlemen look on this wonder, Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it, For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

In this head the all-baffling brain, In it and below it the makings of heroes.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve, They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood, The same old blood! the same red-running blood!

There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations, (Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)

This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?

(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?)

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From the Erotica Romana V Q

Johann Wolfgang Goethe I feel I’m happily inspired now on Classical soil: The Past and Present speak louder, more charmingly.

Here, as advised, I leaf through the works of the Ancients With busy hands, and, each day, with fresh delight.

But at night Love keeps me busy another way: I become half a scholar but twice as contented.

And am I not learning, studying the shape Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?

Then I know marble more: thinking, comparing, See with a feeling eye: feel with a seeing hand.

If my darling is stealing the day’s hours from me, She gives me hours of night in compensation.

We’re not always kissing: we often talk sense: When she’s asleep, I lie there filled with thought.

Often I’ve even made poetry there in her arms, Counted hexameters gently there on my fingers Over her body. She breathes in sweetest sleep, And her breath burns down to my deepest heart.

Amor trims the lamp then and thinks of the times When he did the same for his three poets of love.

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Six P.M. Q

Nick Joaquin Trouvere at night, grammarian in the morning, ruefully architecting syllables— but in the afternoon my ivory tower falls.

I take a place in the bus among people returning to love (domesticated) and the smell of onions burning and women reaping the washlines as the Angelus tolls.

But I—where am I bound?

My garden, my four walls and you project strange shores upon my yearning: Atlantis? the Caribbeans? Or Cathay?

Conductor, do I get off at Sinai?

Apocalypse awaits me: urgent my sorrow towards the undiscovered world that I roam warm responding flesh for a while shall borrow: conquistador tonight, clockpuncher tomorrow.

25

The Drunken Boat (Le Bateau ivre) Q

Arthur Rimbaud As I floated down on Rivers of no care, I felt myself no longer steered by the haulers: Some gaudy redskins had taken them for targets, Having nailed them naked to the coloured stakes.

I was unconcerned for all the boat crews, Bearers of Flemish wheats or of English cottons.

When with my haulers these uproars ended, The Rivers let me float down where I wanted.

In the furious rippings of the tides, I, last winter, deafer than the brains of children I ran! And the Peninsulas unmoored Never suffered pandemonium more triumphant.

The storm it blessed my seaborne awakenings.

And lighter than a cork I danced upon the waves That they call eternal rollers of victims, Ten nights, not missing the stupid eye of lanterns!

Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children, The green water penetrated my pinewood hull And of the bluish stains of wine and the vomit Washed me, scattering both rudder and anchor.

And from then on, I bathed myself in the Poem Of the Sea, infused of stars, and lactescent, Devouring the azures green; where pallid flotsam And entranced, a drowned man, dreaming, sometimes sinks: Where, go out all at once bluenesses, deliriums And rhythms slow beneath the glimmerings of day, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our songs, The bitter rednesses of Love are seething!

I know the heavens pierced by lightning, the waterspouts And the breaks and the currents: I know the evening, The dawn exalted like a nation-flock of doves, And I have seen sometimes what man has thought to see!

I’ve seen the low sun, stained by mystic horrors, Illuminate long clots of violet, And like the actors of some very ancient plays The waves rolling afar their quivers of Venetian blinds!

I‘ve dreamt the green night with its dazzled snows, Kiss rising to the eyes of the seas so slowly, The circulation of the saps undreamed of, And the blue and yellow waking of the singing phosphors!

26

I’ve followed, for full months, alike the fits Of hysteria, the swell assault the reefs, Never dreaming the luminous feet of the Marys Could force the muzzle of the wheezing Oceans!

I have struck, you should know, incredible Floridas Where blend with blooms the eyes of panthers with the skin Of men! And rainbows stretch out just like bridles Neath the seas horizon, to whole murky herds!

I’ve seen ferment the enormous swamps, nets Where rots in the reeds a whole Leviathan!

Downpours of waters in the midst of the calms, And the far ones fall and crash down the Abysses!

Glaciers, suns of silver, pearly waves, cinder skies!

Hideous shipwrecks on the brown gulf floors Where the giant serpents, by bugs devoured Fall, like twisted trees, with their black odours!

I would’ve liked to show the children these sea breams Of the blue surf, these golden fishes, these singing fishes.

— Foams of flowers have lulled my driftings And celestial winds some moments gave me wings.

Sometimes, martyr weary of poles and zones, The sea by whose sobs my rollings softened Lifted to’ard me its shadow blooms with yellow cups And I stayed, like a woman on her knees…

Almost an island, tossing on my boards the quarrels And the droppings of blond-eyed, clamouring birds.

And I was scudding, when through my cordage strands The drowned sank down to sleep, still staring up!

Now I, lost boat under the hairs of coves, Thrown by the hurricane into the bird-less ether, I, who the monitors and Hansa sail ships Never would fish up, a wreck all drunk with water; Free, smoking, risen from violet mists, I, who pierced the sky reddening like a wall That bears, exquisite jams to the good poets, And Lichens of sun and snots of azure; Who ran, speckled with electric half-moons, A crazy plank, black seahorses for escort, When the Julys were crumbling with their cudgel blows Ultramarine skies into the burning funnels; I who trembled, feeling groan, fifty leagues afar, The rut of the Behemoths and the dense Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of the blue immobilities, How I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!

I’ve seen starry archipelagos, and islands Whose delirious skies are open to who scuds: 27

— Is it in these bottomless nights you sleep and hide, Million golden birds, O future vigour? — But, true, I’ve cried too much! The dawns are heartbreaking.

All moon’s atrocious and all sun’s so bitter: Acrid love has filled me with its heady torpors.

O that my keel split! O that the sea take me!

If I yearn for a water of Europe, it’s the pool, Black and cold, where by the scented twilight A cowering child, full of sadness, lets A frail boat go, like a butterfly of May. I could no longer, bathed in your languors, O swells, Trail in the wake of the carriers of cotton, Nor pass thru the pride of flags and pennants, Nor live under the horrid eyes of the hulks.

28

In A Station of the Metro Q

Ezra Pound

IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition Petals

of these faces

on a wet, black

bough

in the crowd : .

29

The Emperor’s New Sonnet Q

Jose Garcia Villa

30

Anna Livia Plurabelle from finnegans wake Q

James Joyce O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. And don’t butt me hike! when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He’s an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him !

Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it? I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil! Scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public. Wallop it well with your battle and clean it. My wrists are wrusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it! What was it he did a tail at all on Animal Sendai? And how long was he under loch and neagh? It was put in the newses what he did, nicies and priers, the King fierceas Humphrey, with illysus distilling, exploits and all. But toms will till. I know he well. Temp untamed will hist for no man. As you spring so shall you neap.

O, the roughty old rappe! Minxing marrage and making loof.

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