At the War Office, London

                          I
Last year I called this world of gaingivings
The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly
If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,
So charged it seemed with circumstance that brings
                    The tragedy of things

                        II
Yet at that censured time no heart was rent
Or feature blanched of parent, wife or daughter
By hourly posted sheets of scheduled slaughter;
Death waited Nature’s wont, Peace smiled unshent
                        From Ind to Occident.

GILBERT:

“I think serious poems should make something happen that’s not correct or entertaining or clever. I want something that matters to my heart, and I don’t mean “Linda left me.” I don’t want that. I’ll write that poem, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being in danger—as we all are—of dying. How can you spend your life on games or intricately accomplished things? And politics? Politics is fine. There’s a place to care for the injustice of the world, but that’s not what the poem is about. The poem is about the heart. Not the heart as in “I’m in love” or “my girl cheated on me”—I mean the conscious heart, the fact that we are the only things in the entire universe that know true consciousness. We’re the only things—leaving religion out of it—we’re the only things in the world that know spring is coming.”

A while back New Jersey poet Lisa Borinsky tracked me down in my office to ask if I had any Alfred Starr Hamilton material. Why would a totally unknown poet and novelist living in Ithaca have any archival material relating to an obscure poet who at first appears to be a lunatic? Because Hamilton managed to get published in Cornell’s literary journal Epoch. And I work at Cornell, in a library. I was able to help her, a very little bit. Hamilton had been what I thought of as a secret pleasure. Like all poetic treasure his work is to be found in a spur off a side tunnel of an obscure branch of the subterranean labyrinth known as American Poetry. In this case I randomly read an essay about Hamilton by Jonathan Williams, in his collection Blackbird Dust. It mentioned Epoch and its one-time editor, Geof Hewitt. And it happened that Cornell owns The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by Williams’ Jargon Society, and introduced by Geof Hewitt. And so I read this very strange poet not knowing what to make of him but attracted like most others to his eccentricitie and obscuritie. It turns out there was another Hamiltonian at the library, Daurade, of the Laws of Silence blog in my links. Years later Daurade was in touch with Lisa too. And it was an exchange with Daurade in the comments section of this blogh that led her to me. And so it is that I am in possession of her SEND THIS TO THE IMMUNE OFFICER, a collection of letters written by Hamilton to the Montclair Police Department from 1959-1985. It is a special issue of WEIRD NEW JERSEY. I am a rabid fan of New Jersey poet Joel Lewis. I grew up in Westchester. I will ask the rhetorical question, is there any other kind of New Jersey?

It is hard to tell what Lisa’s stance is towards Hamilton. In our phone conversation she vacillated between thinking him a schizophrenic and an outsider artist. Not a naive or primitive artist. He is not sophisticated, and his verse is odd and repetitive, made up of bits of common language twisted around to mean, or point to something different. These are not poems he just cooked up in his rooming house. So the term ‘outsider artist’ is apt, and it is a venerable tradition in the nation that made blue jeans and rock’n’roll more than fads.

Dec. 17, 1982:
“Dear Editors;
This poem is a pin cushion, and so is any of my poetry. The poem, Criss Cross, Winter, 1981-1982. You made several spelling corrections here, or these corrections didn’t amount to anything one way or another.
But I am making sure these are not honorable spelling corrections. I do not accept any honors at all.
Sending a copy of this to the immune police.
I am immune,”

She prints his poems between the letters, so it is possible for readers new to Hamilton (which would have to be just about everyone) to judge the difference between his art, which is this side of nutty, and his interactions with the world, which are certainly paranoid. He even reports typos in his published poems to the cops. In 1961 the police arrest him for refusing to obey a civil defense air-drill. This of course forces me to consider who is more paranoid here. But the cops were generally amused by him, judging by their marginalia.

“I wish to report my whereabouts to this police station.
I was in the Episcopalian hoosegow for a night’s stay during the depression down in Florida. I am familiar with the golden mosquitoe. I am familiar with scooters. I am familiar with the green course gnats that breed in the cots. I wasn’t in the hoosegow quite that long. But this leaves me familiar with the Episcopalian bishop’s high tea. I am familiar with the after effects. I am familiar with the itches a day or two afterwards.”

These letters are disturbing. It seems almost voyeuristic to publish them, as they don’t reveal a talented but eccentric man but a lonely and paranoid man. I don’t think they were his public, ironic, conceptual art project. Borinsky’s purpose in publishing them is to make an unknown poet more known, to start to establish the biography of a poet she has fallen in love with and believes to be important. She makes this clear throughout, in her introduction, afterword and notes. But the presentation, the comic book drawings etc., could be construed to be laughing at him.

I’m not sure he is an important poet. Only the poems can establish that and up to now anyway what has attracted most readers to him is how unconventional for a poet his life was. In defense of poet advocates, they always promote the work. (I’m thinking of Williams, but also of Ron Silliman, who has a generous and comprehensive post about him on Silliman’s Blog). His circumstances make him unusual, and because he writes out of those circumstances his poetry is unique. Had he employed the same style and sensibility to a college town or the woods he would not be the poet he is.

American poetry is so dominated by its massive middle that very few voices from outside it ever make it in. Wherever a poet lands on the spectrum from Avant-Garde to ‘Quietist’, from Oulipo to Rod McKuen, chances are they have a college degree, probably an MFA and/or PhD, and work at a regular job, likely in Academia. Hamilton was a self-taught poet who was unable to work for a living and lived in a rooming house in suburban New Jersey. He was published because he bombarded editors with thousands of poems and a few of them had soul enough to take the work. He is a Kilgore Trout figure.

People are so driven by definitions. Starr was an ‘outsider’ poet. Not an outlaw poet, not an underground poet, not an avant garde poet. The most famous of our outsider poets is Emily Dickenson. And perhaps he resembles her most, though he lacks the frightening and profound apprehension of the divine that drives her every syllable into the heart. Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan are both outsider poets and very successful ones. Success doesn’t define outside and inside. Manners do.

Send This To The Immune Officer is a labour of love and as such should be read. If Hamilton is a poet worth taking seriously, then this is the work that needs to be done to establish him as such. Especially now when the internet provides an outlet for every outsider artist, even while the gates that used to be open just a crack in the arts industrial complex are slamming shut so tight you can’t fit a micron-thick chip into it.

SHOE

How little do you know
Of the old woman
Who lived in a shoe
Who had so many progeny
She didn’t know what else to do
For there were as many fingers as there were toes
For there are the sidewalks from here to the shoemaker
For there is the dusty road from here to the market
For there are the roads from here to starvation or salvation
For there is the wilderness everywhere
For there is weather proofing
For the storm of our lives is never over with

A few of my favourite autodidactical poets and writers:

Robert Graves is a mass of eccentricities and resentments. He erects an entire anthropology on personal grievance. I have loved few books more than The White Goddess. I came to it on the wings of I, Claudius and Claudius the God. The cover promised an historical grammar of poetic myth. Immersed as I was in Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Jung, this seemed like an amazing treasure trove. I didn’t know I would be reading an exceedingly difficult book, a book that was in fact a poem in prose with footnotes. Graves wrote the book based largely on his Irish grandfather’s library. (These titles can also be ferreted out of Finnegans Wake, where much of the same lore, particularly tree alphabets, has been found by Guy Davenport, another prodigious projector of dreams). Graves was pained by criticisms of his scholarship; he wished to be beyond the reproach of the professors he felt were destroying culture. (Pound always reserved his greatest vitriol for professors, while Joyce laid in wait for them, fangs bared and dripping, at the umbilicus of a labyrinthine joke). Graves’ thesis is that the myths of Europe record the systematic destruction of Paleo-Matriarchy by Aryan, trinitarian patriarchs from the steppes of Russia. Like Soviet apparatchiks these horse riding Patriarchs were airbrushing out all references to the Great Goddess and her rituals. The ritual was out of another amazing anthropological myth maker with a great library, Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough (where on earth did Frazer find the time to write it?) Graves felt didn’t go far enough. The myth was the ritual murder, later wounding, of the god-king consort of the goddess. There is nowhere in the storehouse of myth and lore from Europe, Western Asia and North Africa that Graves doesn’t find this pattern, and any syllable that deviates from it is an interpolation by devious Aryans. Thus there is a second order of myths, that of the dispute or war between devotees of the goddess and the Apollonian quislings of patriarchal priest-kings. Had his thinking remained in the bewitching yellow cover of The White Goddess it might have slept undisturbed except for the occasional curious and vulnerable poet. But it found its way into his novels (King Jesus, Hercules, My Shipmate, Watch the North Wind Rise) and then, Graves wrote The Greek Myths 1&2. This book was so encyclopaedic and well written it was duly assigned to generations of college students, with the proviso that they totally ignore his interpretations! I love Robert Graves. He taught me everything I needed to know about being a poet, except for how to write poetry. That task fell to another autodidact, Ezra Pound.

Pound wasn’t content with a single theory, nor was his autodidacticism confined to traditional poet subjects. Economic theory, a theory of history, a theory of language, a theory of translation, all these and more were duly adumbrated by Pound in angry, sarcastic essays. If Marx introduced the tone of polemic into social theory, and Freud into psychoanalysis, it is Pound who discovered the war-path in all things literary. Remember, Pound had a Masters Degree. His Master’s Thesis is still in print, The Spirit of Romance. The Spirit of Romance contains his translations from Provencal, and it is as a translator that Pound is both controversial, and brilliant. Controversial because he did not do literal translations, or even scholarly ones, but poetic ones. Unfortunately, Pound was always willing to extend his expertise way beyond what the situation warranted. His translations from Latin and Chinese are amazing, but his theory of the Chinese language, which informed so much of his poetic output, from Imagism, through Vorticism, to the Cantos, was wrong. I didn’t know that, being an autodidact, and I came to learn that, when my auto-didactitude led me to read the Chinese language scholar John DeFrancis’s The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1984. If a poet tells you that Chinese is an ideogrammatic language, built on images and single ideas (which fits in nicely with Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism), cry, Nonsense! And cite DiFrances. The Chinese, whatever the historical origins of their characters, read language and think the way all people do, with the characters representing the sounds of words and parts of words. Despite all of this Pound made great use of Fenollosa’s cribs and a comparison of any of his translations with scholarly ones holds up. Does he get words and ideas wrong? Sure. But his translations are great English poetry that wouldn’t have existed had he not carried them over from a language he badly misunderstood. Anyway, I believe Pound’s greatest poems are his mis-translations. I don’t care if they are fidele or not. Which brings me Kenneth Rexroth, another great liar and autodidact who mistranslated the Chinese and Japanese classics. Pound’s theory of translation is now standard for poets, many of whom undertake translations in languages they don’t know. Pound himself said, “I’m no great shakes as a Latinist.” I don’t know if he said it before or after Homage to Sextus Propertius. I don’t care. You don’t have to agree with his theory that you can judge the greatness of a civilisation by the quality of its coinage, or that Jewsevelt was destroying said civilisation to be moved to tears each time you read the final lines of Exile’s Letter. And it is the path beaten by Pound that Rexroth follows, more consistently, brilliantly and accurately. Rexroth is a treasure trove of prejudice and opinion based on an enduring auto-didactical attitude.

From Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel:

“At the Bug Club I met a man who I suppose was then a small determinative influence in my life. His name was Walter Freeman Cooling. He had once been a police magistrate and was always referred to as Judge….He had created singlehanded an all-encompassing system of dissent. With the intelligence of an Aristotle or an Aquinas he disagreed all along the line with all organized thought.

“He had elaborated a system of total eccentricity which encompassed practically every department of thought known to man from ontology to mechanics to cookery. Philosophically he called himself an Aristotelian, but his interpretation of Aristotle was as odd as a cabalist’s interpretation of Genesis. The core of his system was a fantastic cosmology. This involved his own special physics, astronomy and geology and led to a religion which was outlandish beyond belief….He wasn’t just a crackpot who thought these things up out of thin air. For most of his life he had been writing a great book of many volumes—a complete exposition of his system, organized with the rigor of the Summa Theologica. He kept this in about a hundred old-fashioned letter cases and several steel files. They were chock-full of photographs, diagrams, mathematical equations, thousands of quotations in all the civilized languages past and present, most of which he read fluently. It was wonderful to hear him in the twilight, under the trees in the park, get up and attack a Catholic or a Socialist or a Darwinian. He would rattle off a series of hair-raisingly incongruous ideas, all tied together in a sorites of irrefutable syllogisms and end with a long quotation from Homer, the Rig Veda, or the Zend Avesta in the original language and in the sonorous tones of a Welsh revivalist or labor leader. I might mention that he had special dissident theories on the correct pronunciation of Greek, Sanskrit, and ancient Persian, and I must admit that he always sounded better than the professors at the university. One night, to make a point, he quoted a long passage that sounded vaguely like Hiawatha in Japanese. “What is that, Judge?” I asked. “Why,” he said, “I’m surprised you didn’t recognize it. That’s the Kalevala, the great Finnish epic.” I have known a lot of polymaths in my life, but I don’t believe even Carl Jung, who was always talking about the Kalevala, ever bothered to learn Finnish to read it.”

Well, today almost everyone in the arts has been tamed by college and post-graduate work. Knowledge can be checked instantly. Jonathan Lethem is the only prominent novelist today who didn’t complete college.

On False Naivete

Not long ago i sent my curmudgeonly friend Philip a Kimya Dawson song I like, and he sent back a curmudgeonly reply, to the effect that he loathes Kimya Dawson and all of her ilk because he loathes false naiveté. I do still love the song I sent (Underground) but find his analysis to be indisputable. Kimya Dawson, in The Moldy Peaches and as a solo performer, is responding to the endemic, or epidemic, irony, cynicism, nihilism and faux sophistication of her older contemporaries with raw, earnest, literal, naive expressionism. Taken too far it is sappy, sentimental and as false as the things she’s rebelling against. My friend Philip also bemoans the rapidity with which things in the arts are co-opted and commercialized. He points out that it took many years for the East Village to go from a genuine bohemia to a totally Disney fake bohemia, while the same process occurred in Williamsburg in a relatively brief period of time. Good things die almost before they are born. Kimya Dawson is a typical Williamburg product. Or Portland, Oregon. Or wherever. But this leaves open the question of, where do you go? How do you counter faux cynicism without embracing faux naiveté? How the hell do you even know what to do or think when every road appears to be not just marked off but cut off? If playing until your fingers bleed is a cliché, and so is its opposite, then paralysis sets in and nothing gets done at all.

I am thinking about this both in my own life and when I consider a poet I like quite a bit, Dorothea Lasky. I saw Dorothea read. She was great, invigorating, funny, direct, explosive and in love with words, with the rush of words and feelings. She was in love with emotion, that most despised word in art. Nearly all serious poetry holds emotion in contempt. It equates feeling with cliché and sentimentality. Not Dorothea. But I feel far more analytical when it comes to poets as opposed to pop singers. And what my friend says of Kimya Dawson I sense in Dorothea, and it is alarming. Dorothea it seems to me writes too much, and is too in love with her own sense of emotion. The things i find liberating and beautiful in her poems can easily turn into false naiveté. I have Black Life in my hands, her new book. Dorothea is an east coast poet, from Philadelphia. She has a lot of fans. She is riding the crest of a wave that is opposed to post-lang po and lang po sophistication, with its crossword puzzle word games, minimalism, intellectualism, abstraction and conceptualism. She isn’t going to write poems based on the first three letters of every fifth car she sees. She isn’t out to transform consciousness through ironic self-awareness of ideological linguistic structures. She isn’t out to destabilize anything. She isn’t locked in an agon with a tradition that hasn’t existed for a hundred years. But she is not a boring old ‘School Of Quietude’ bird watcher either. Her birds are nasty pigeons. She writes on the fly, the way Frank O’Hara did, but unlike O’Hara she seems to pretend she doesn’t know things that she does. Frank O’Hara wasn’t naive about anything. He just delighted in being a jaded old queen at night and virgin in the morning.

The Legend of Good John Henry

When my dad got Alzheimer’s all the plants died
In the nursing home there are no plants
There is nothing to live for
Dogs circle the pink painted building
The orderly staff waits with the bleach
Asking me where the diapers are

As I flip through this book I find all of the things I love about her poetry, but I also sense that it has become mannered. I go back to Awe (which is not in my office, as I write, so I can’t quote it) and see how when I first read her, heard her, I felt the flame of Blake running through her work, a wayward, religious light she was unembarrassed of, and which guided her on her hijinks. It is full of humor, self-mocking, to be sure, and unsettling, but still, I knew she wasn’t joking when she talked about God. I am not a religious person, I am an atheist, but I am tired of knee-jerk atheism. It bores me. It renders the world incomplete. It is not sophisticated or intelligent. Lasky seemed to be saying, ‘I’ve read Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and Louis Zukofsky and I understand and I don’t care, this doesn’t speak to me, their world is not my world.’ And I was thrilled, because this is how I feel. And this is how poetry works. You search and search for a poet who thinks and feels as you do. Or I do. Anyway.

Then I read something like this poem, from Black Life:

EVER READ A BOOK CALLED AWE?

Have you ever read a book called Awe?
I have. I wrote it. That’s my book.
I wrote that book. I wrote that one.
Some people read it. they said,
We will makle your book.
I said, Really? I love you.
They said, We love you, too.
I said, Good then
I will love you forever.
They said, Great! And looked scared.

It isn’t right to judge a book by its worst poem, but I think Dr. Johnson said something along the lines that your contemporaries will judge you by your worst work, and posterity by your best. Or something like that. Poems like this are a waste of my time. They remind me of Kimya Dawson’s song about her mother dying. It starts out hauntingly, but by the second chorus she’s talking about Bert and Ernie and Mr. Hooper. She’s writing like a child. It’s not childlike in the sense that Matisse and Picasso were after, a shedding of sophistication a search for spontaneous and simple beauty rooted in design and color. It is childish in the sense of Blake’s Thel, of innocence as a refusal to be adult, to work through to the other side. Dawson confronts her mother’s death and runs to childhood, which is exactly what Thel does in The Book of Thel. Thel runs around essentially asking of all things, ‘Are you my mother?’ as in the child’s book. She gets to a worm, a cloud and a clod of dirt. They all assure her that they will die. Then the tone of the poem changes from innocent pastoral a harrowing invocation of the pit:

The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar:
Thel enter’d in & saw the secrets of the land unknown.
She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:
A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.

It is interesting that in Black Life there is a strong current of sexuality, of sex, of boy friends, ex husbands and men that is not in Awe, and that loss of sexual innocence is also the underlying loss in Thel, that sexual innocence and death are linked, there as here, in this case her father’s illness and (I suppose) death. It is the refusal of knowledge of sex and of death that condemns Thel to an eternal childhood, a senility that is sterile and frightening, the sterility of one who refuses to become conscious and live. A clinging to childishness in the face of cynicism is the same move. To go against artistic sophistication doesn’t mean refusal to BE.

THAT ONE WAS THE ODDEST ONE

That Robbie Wood is so weird
He seriously makes me want to fuckl  his brains out
Oh fuckable man, why do you have to do and say such
Strange things?

I LOVE A MATHEMATICIAN

I love a mathematician
Not a man who lives by himself in a minivan, which one is he?
Masturbating to my picture on the internet, just like the fat one in the basement
Masturbating and masturbating, oh how I love that
And would love to drain the blood from his face too
In person 

O how I would identify with the sickly nature of love
And sweet sticky kisses
That never go away.

I want to travel with Dorothea through all of this. But poem after poem in this book, wherever I turn, there is this false note of childishness.

The Animal

My heart belongs to a lion
I love his pelt and covet his heart
O animal, your heart is wise beyond your years
I cut your paw and tell you in a whisper
To never leave this place

I want Dorothea to write like she writes, in the end. I don’t doubt her sincerity. And it is a struggle to get from art to sincerity without losing the art. She has decided to be herself, a modernist and a romantic who is unafraid of unadorned feeling, and simple statement. But preciosity is as much a problem as the tone deaf minimalist philosophizing of so much serious poetry. I love Oppen but there are times when his ear utterly fails him, as it does Creeley, as it does Delillo in prose, and Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace. Yet time and again i read their ears praised, that they have a great ear for the language. If they do then you have to have a great ear for them.

Lasky isn’t afraid of the old art of poetry. She isn’t afraid of gushing. But I think she writes too much. This is Blake’s The Book of Thel :

The Book of Thel

THEL’S MOTTO
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

I

The daughters of Mne Seraphim led round their sunny flocks,

All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air,

To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day;

Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard,

And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew:

“O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water?

Why fade these children of the spring, born but to smile & fall?

Ah! Thel is like a watry bow, and like a parting cloud,

Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water,

Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant’s face,

Like the dove’s voice, like transient day, like music in the air.

Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head,

And gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice

Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.”

The Lily of the valley, breathing in the humble grass

Answer’d the lovely maid and said: “I am a watry weed,

And I am very small, and love to dwell in lowly vales;

So weak, the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head;

Yet I am visited from heaven, and he that smiles on all

Walks in the valley and each morn over me spreads his hand,

Saying: ‘Rejoice, thou humble grass, thou new-born lily flower,

Thou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks;

For thou shalt be clothed in light, and fed with morning manna,

Till summer’s heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs

To flourish in eternal vales.’ Then why should Thel complain?

Why should the mistress of the vales of Har utter a sigh?”

She ceasd and smild in tears, then sat down in her silver shrine.

Thel answered: “O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley,

Giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o’ertired;

Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb, he smells thy milky garments,

He crops thy flowers, while thou sittest smiling in his face,

Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.

Thy wine doth purify the golden honey; thy perfume,

Which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass that springs,

Revives the milked cow, & tames the fire-breathing steed.

But Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun:

I vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place?”

“Queen of the vales,” the Lily answered, “ask the tender cloud,

And it shall tell thee why it glitters in the morning sky,

And why it scatters its bright beauty thro’ the humid air.

Descend, O little cloud, & hover before the eyes of Thel.”

The Cloud descended, and the Lily bowd her modest head,

And went to mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass.

II

“O little Cloud,” the virgin said, “I charge thee tell to me,

Why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away:

Then we shall seek thee but not find; ah, Thel is like to Thee.

I pass away, yet I complain, and no one hears my voice.”

The Cloud then shew’d his golden head & his bright form emerg’d,

Hovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel.

“O virgin, know’st thou not our steeds drink of the golden springs

Where Luvah doth renew his horses? Look’st thou on my youth,

And fearest thou because I vanish and am seen no more,

Nothing remains? O maid, I tell thee, when I pass away,

It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace, and raptures holy:

Unseen descending, weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers,

And court the fair eyed dew, to take me to her shining tent:

The weeping virgin trembling kneels before the risen sun,

Till we arise link’d in a golden band, and never part,

But walk united, bearing food to all our tender flowers.”

“Dost thou O little Cloud? I fear that I am not like thee;

For I walk through the vales of Har and smell the sweetest flowers,

But I feed not the little flowers; I hear the warbling birds,

But I feed not the warbling birds; they fly and seek their food;

But Thel delights in these no more, because I fade away,

And all shall say, ‘Without a use this shining woman liv’d,

Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms?’”

The Cloud reclind upon his airy throne and answer’d thus:

“Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies,

How great thy use, how great thy blessing! Every thing that lives

Lives not alone, nor for itself; fear not, and I will call

The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice.

Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen.”

The helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lily’s leaf,

And the bright Cloud saild on, to find his partner in the vale.

III

Then Thel astonish’d view’d the Worm upon its dewy bed.

“Art thou a Worm? Image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?

I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lily’s leaf;

Ah, weep not, little voice, thou can’st not speak, but thou can’st weep.

Is this a Worm? I see thee lay helpless & naked, weeping,

And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother’s smiles.”

The Clod of Clay heard the Worm’s voice, & raisd her pitying head;

She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d

In milky fondness; then on Thel she fix’d her humble eyes.

“O beauty of the vales of Har! we live not for ourselves;

Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed;

My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark,

But he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head,

And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast,

And says: ‘Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee

And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.’

But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know;

I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love.”

The daughter of beauty wip’d her pitying tears with her white veil,

And said: “Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep.

That God would love a Worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot

That, wilful, bruis’d its helpless form; but that he cherish’d it

With milk and oil I never knew; and therefore did I weep,

And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away,

And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot.”

“Queen of the vales,” the matron Clay answered, “I heard thy sighs,

And all thy moans flew o’er my roof, but I have call’d them down.

Wilt thou, O Queen, enter my house? ’tis given thee to enter

And to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet.”

IV

The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar:

Thel enter’d in & saw the secrets of the land unknown.

She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots

Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:

A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.

She wanderd in the land of clouds thro’ valleys dark, listning

Dolours & lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave,

She stood in silence, listning to the voices of the ground,

Till to her own grave plot she came, & there she sat down,

And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit:

“Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?

Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile?

Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn,

Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie?

Or an Eye of gifts & graces, show’ring fruits and coined gold?

Why a Tongue impress’d with honey from every wind?

Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?

Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling, and affright?

Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?

Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?”

The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek

Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har.

A Good Chord on a Bad Piano

The fissures in the studio grow large.
Transplantings from the Rivoli, no doubt.
Such latter-day disfigurements leave out
All mention of those older scars that merge
On any riddled surfaces about.

Disgusting to be sure. On days like these,
A good chord on a bad piano serves
As well as shimmering harp-runs for the nerves.
F minor, with the added sixth. The keys
Are like old yellow teeth; the pedal swerves;

The treble wires vibrate, break, and bend;
The padded mallets fly apart.
Both instrument and room have made a start.
Piano and scene are double to the end,
Like all the smashed-up baggage of the heart.

“I try so hard to be just the way I am
But everybody want’s you to be just like them
They say ‘Sing while you slave,’ but I just get bored
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”

I always hear the line as ’sing while you SING’ not ‘sing while you SLAVE’. I defer to the people who write these things down; my hearing’s not so good and I always hear what I want to hear anyway. Singing and Slaving might go hand in hand, but they aren’t the same thing, despite what many say. The whole point of art is to create something essential and individual. All art requires rule, but the first calling of an artist is to create his or her own rules and defy convention. I am not saying convention plays no part in the game, but its part is subordinate. Convention says Dylan has a bad voice. Dylan has a great voice.

When he wrote this song he was saying a lot of things, as he always does. Mostly he was saying he would write and sing songs he wanted to write and sing. He didn’t write to please any particular crowd or to fulfill others’ expectations. Dylan writes and sings because he feels compelled to and besides, he can’t do anything else. In the Scorsese documentary he is quoted as saying that he got quite lucky. They opened the door a crack and let him in and once he was there they couldn’t get rid of him. They being the ‘individuals’ of the record industry. All but one of whom said he couldn’t sing. John  Hammond’s folly.

Maggie’s Farm

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
Well, I wake in the morning,
Fold my hands and pray for rain.
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane.
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.
Well, he hands you a nickel,
He hands you a dime,
He asks you with a grin
If you’re havin’ a good time,
Then he fines you every time you slam the door.
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more.
Well, he puts his cigar
Out in your face just for kicks.
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks.
The National Guard stands around his door.
Ah, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more.

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more.
Well, she talks to all the servants
About man and God and law.
Everybody says
She’s the brains behind pa.
She’s sixty-eight, but she says she’s fifty-four.
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more.

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

A Stick of Incense

Whence did all that fury come,
From empty tomb or Virgin womb?
St Joseph thought the world would melt
But liked the way his finger smelt.

This is the problem with going to writing school.

Someone along the way suggested that in 2035 avant-garde poets will be making fun of LangPo and its descendents, in fact, it has already started to happen. Has this thought really only dawned on this person now?

If you read enough poetry and are willing to explore your own mind and spirit and commit to working at the craft that ought to be enough. Some people plunge into the unconscious and find inspiration and subject matter there. Others don’t. There is no theory here or basis for aesthetic judgment.

They moved onto the usual ideological arguments, with everyone reminding everyone else that in this regard, bly had the goods on them. Poetry for the ramparts, poetry of the heart, poetry full of clichés. They criticize the trope of darkness. If the language is worn out, the dark will simply be a black piece of construction paper. It isn’t so in Milton yet. Half of Milton’s politics is repugnant to me. Most of his theology. I don’t even like his style. But he was a political poet, engaged, and he certainly earned his images. Boredom with Milton fueled a poetic revolution. But poets would be fools to not to read him.

Blake had 12 readers. Everyone who knew him thought him the sanest man alive. The few outsiders who read him thought he was mad. Yeats and Joyce grew out of the soil of Blake. Blake was a political poet who had strong ideas about the nature of images. Blake never took an MFA class and he dismissed fools easily, whatever the common opinion was.

Art is made by individuals in spite of what they are taught. There is no recipe.