The Sacerdotal Clowns

The Sacerdotal Clowns

 

Surrealism is too massive a topic for a blogh entry, but I would like to mention three American poets whose work I’ve always loved and who are in one way or another surrealists. Surrealism is more than an aesthetic movement, it is an entire orientation towards reality and art, and is one of the prime circulatory systems of the American body electric. Unlike its sibling Dada, surrealism is an expressive, mimetic, figurative art which abolishes the line between ‘rationality’ and ‘irrationality’ simply because it doesn’t exist. Surrealism is not the unique possession of anarchists and communists, though it accommodates them as easily as anyone else. Surrealism doesn’t judge its symbols, it trawls the unconscious and the outerworld indifferently in search of energetic, organic symbols and objects, to embody the dream and etherealize the body. Surrealism is a logic and to swim its currents is to move between the known and unknown by feel. It is intensely visual and in poetry lends itself to auditory eloquence without formalism. It rejects abstraction in the deductive, rational sense. It is not a science of signs and symbols. Its procedure is alchemical from beginning to end. It accommodates multifarious forms of gnosis. It seizes the razor’s edge with the inner eye, the wire in the blood and the poison in the machine, the radical organic forms of iterative and reiterative creation and destruction, the synthesis of barnacle and matheme.

 

I want to start with the obscure: Mary Low. A poet friend and librarian, Peter McDonald, gave me Mary Low’s Where the Wolf Sings many years ago and I have been reading it ever since. It is short, published by Black Swan Press, and includes her collages as well as an Afterword by Franklin Rosemont, a surreal name. Mary Low, who died in 2007, was born in 1913 to Australian parents living in England. She has a marvelous, cosmopolitan biography. She was an anarchist, a classicist, an artist and a poet.

 

Encounter

 

Since first we met

I have known

the intimate joy of scissors,

sleek cats and nutmeg,

the tears of blind music at night,

and the whisper of fire among cinders.

 

Since first we met

all stairs and flowers

grow spurs for me;

and palm-trees whip me with their hair

in sundry mirrors.

The small hours open their wounds for me

to the sound of flutes

that shake my heart.

 

Since first we met

I feel like omega:

full of warm silk,

endless and groundless.

 

Tulips Standing in Line

 

Perishable crowns;

hierarchic emblems in a theory of from Byzance,

or fresh, selected scepters

for the Knave of Spades;

a scale of muted bells

rung in a garden closed with walls;

cups for the wine of contemplation

poured upon thorns;

an elegant, a leisurely parade

sustained by ancient certitudes:

beauty of blood in the morning—

slow, prideful discipline—

 

and, later, the repose of folded hands

obedient to the dark.

 

The Summer Visitors

 

Do they still read poems under the big trees?

They used to come slowly,

in summer, in white dresses,

trailing a kaleidoscope of parasols.

 

When they strolled smiling over the lawn

their slender snake-feet

left little trails of silver

along the hushed grass.

 

They laughed so gently!

The summer breeze, like a harp,

caught up the falling sound

and made a slight bouquet of trills

follow them sweetly.

 

Their forgotten faces were mild under straw hats.

They had hair like braided cascades,

and downward-glancing eyes,

slow and black and cool as ripe olives.

 

When they read poems under the big tree,

they sat on a maze of cushions,

and their soft pink mouths

released a flood of petals on the air.

 

It was a long time ago.

Do they still come?

 

After reading these poems and a little about Mary Low it is natural to think of  Mina Loy, another woman who lived to be quite old and didn’t give a damn about convention. I haven’t read any dissertations about her so I’m not sure if she’s considered to be a surrealist or not, but the Lunar Baedeker is a great work of surrealist poetry, and Insel, a modernist prose work, is on my long list of things to read one of these days. She was friends with everybody and had a long life. Rexroth, in a note included in my edition of the Lunar Baedeker, compares her to Marianne Moore, and finds Moore wanting, due to her apparent sexlessness. In the course of this now unacceptable comparison he pens these immortal sentences which leave me breathless: “She writes of the eternal platitude: the presence or absence of sexual satisfaction; and of the results: recreation marriage, procreation; sterility, disorder, disaster, death. Miss Moore is deliberately ‘inaccessible to the more immediate experiencer.’ As one reads of Mina Loy’s babies, one’s sphincters loosen. Her copulators stay copulated. Miss Moore of course, is interested in establishing public privilege for a special and peculiarly impoverished sensibility. One thing has never reared its ugly, funny, loveable little head in the garden of cast iron mignonettes which is her eminent domain. Mina Loy, in her best known work, dipped her pen in the glands of Bartholin, and wrote.”

 

I couldn’t disagree more with this but god bless and blast him, I have always loved Kenneth Rexroth for a reason.

 

Apology Of Genius

 

Ostracized as we are with God—

          The watchers of the civilized wastes

          reverse their signals on our track

         

          Lepers of the moon

          all magically diseased

          we come among you

          innocent

          of our luminous sores

 

          unknowing

          how perturbing lights

          our spirit

          on the passion of Man

          until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces

          like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

 

          We are the sacerdotal clowns

          who feed upon the wind and stars

          and pulverous pastures of poverty

 

          Our wills are formed

          by curious disciples

          beyond your laws

 

          You may give birth to us

          or marry us

          the chances of your flesh

          are not our destiny

 

          And we are unaware

          if you confuse

          such brief

          corrosion with possession

 

          In the raw caverns of the Increate

          we forge the dusk of Chaos

          to that imperious jewelry of the Universe

          –the Beautiful

 

          While to your eyes

          a delicate crop

          of criminal mystic immortelles

          stands to the censor’s scythe.

 

 

Finally there is Will Alexander, a poet I have been reading slowly, with unending delight, ever since Joel Kuszai gave me his 1995 book Asia Haiti. Alexander is an LA poet, an avowed surrealist (continuing the work of Aime Cesaire, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamatia etc) and totally out of the academic mainstream. Sometime after first reading Asia Haiti I came across a review of the The Best American Poetry anthology in Willow Springs, a journal I was trying to publish in. I forget the year, or the name of the eminence gris who is the guiding light of Willow Springs, but in her sifting of the anthology’s contents she dismissed Alexander’s poem as an oddity not worth commenting on. I was stunned, since he was the only poet in the entire thing that interested me. While Googling about for this blogh entry I discovered that as of 2007 Alexander was ill with kidney cancer and no insurance. I can find no further information on his health. Kidney cancer is normally a grim diagnosis. I hope with every particle of my poetic heart that he and his loved ones are well. His poetry is far too long to do more than quote here and there. Anyone who has read this far and doesn’t know about Will Alexander’s work I implore, “Read him!”

 

we

the cataclysmic

the hunchbacked harmonia in fragments

as though we could forage for selvas or ponies

through a tense immigration of storms and chastisements

 

here we are linked

to skilled and unreasoning petrifaction as dice

as pylons of thirst

as haunted frankincense & chasms

devoid of atomics

of levitational timings

to invoke subterfuge

kinesis

creating attested flanks in the moon & its bastions

 

in this untamed refuge

we are argument for the object as fecund subtractive

as folly by ‘inherent existence’

 

summoned from high arroyos & arches

our eyes flow with the fervour of retreating neutrinos

of buried divinings

of suspensions in orbit

it is we who burn as a watch clock

as lifeless angel-worm annealments

brought to deeper post-mortem galvanics

to a fever which strengthens against opaque & landless

increments and patterns

 

we who sought our living in ceaselessness

in explosive argon deliverance

as if our storms were mirrored in smoking phosphorous caves

as benign abnegation

as sigils by protective armasa invasion

 

so the skull is useless

as sundered omnivorous cathedral

as ironic surge of transmuted voltage