Against the literary persecution of corvids

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Kelly Moore: King Crow

I engaged last week in an email exchange with Lew Ellingham upon the unjust representation of blackbirds in European folk-traditions. Upon his suggestion that discriminatory attitudes of this nature are due to the color and not the intelligence of the birds concerned, I wrote:


Hi Lew,

I can only agree that the demonization of the corvid family in the European tradition is due to the associations made with their (so-to-speak) skin color rather than their species behavior, which in the view of many naturalists, as I understand, is quite exceptional.

The traditional antipathy towards wolves seems more intelligible, since they were certainly a menace in the early middle ages (see for example the ninth-century Annals of Fulda). But if blackbirds are to be judged only by their feather color, then we have obviously and prejudicially fallen victim to yet another silly cultural meme, probably on the same intellectual level that assigns purity to white and evil to black.

How arbitrary these correspondences are is shown by the Japanese, who see white as the color of death—because of its alleged ghastliness, I suppose, since their ghosts are also pale like ours—or by the Chinese, who used to build moon-viewing platforms to observe the full-moon because it facilitates Supreme Good Fortune, instead of inspiring lunacy as here in the West.

A broader issue is what good can be found in the forest to begin with, since of course before Petrarch such environs were known to be full of creatures of menace, living and dead, as well as all kinds of potentially lethal botanica: ("This is the forest's prime evil, the murdering pines and the hemlocks....")

My favorite bad-crow poem nonetheless is the popular Scots ballad:

The twa corbies

As I was walkin' all alane
I heard twa corbies makin' mane
The 'tain unto the tither did say,
where sall we gang to din th' nicht?

It's in ahint yon auld fell dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawke and his hound and his lady faire.

His hound is tae the hunting gane
His hawke tae fetch the wild fowle hame
His lady's ta'en anither mate,
So we can mak oor dinner swete.

Ye'll sit on his white hoose-bane*
And I'll pick oot his bonny blue e'en
Wi' mony a lock o' his golden hair
We'll theek oor nest when it grows bare.

There's many a mon for him maks mane
But nane shall ken whaur he has gane.
O'er his white banes when they are bare
The wind shall blaw forever mair.


I know the traditional melody for this, but have never heard anyone sing it successfully—it really works very much better as a poem, and few folk-singers can resist applying an unwanted measure of pathos.

I don't know how many wives kill off their husbands in the Scots ballads repertory, more often than not with poison. Mariticide (the liquidation of one's husband, a looming double-hazard of gay male marriages) must have been something of a problem, and in this case it is clearly what the poem is all about. As Liza Carthy famously observed, "There's nowt so queer as folk."

Kelly Moore: A Boy and His Crow

In fact this poem isn't about the crows at all, which anyway are unpardonably confused with vultures, nastily engaged in ocular extirpation. Bonny blue eyes may have accordingly been seen as a special gourmet delight for them. These are however very polite crows, conducting a thoughtful dialogue and assigning each other places at the dinner table to forestall any arguments.

But I proceed now to the Safeway with my own dining list, where I shall cheerfully hum to myself: Heigh-ho the carrion-crow as I inspect some dead animal tissues in the meat department.


James


The crow pictures are from Kelly Moore's website: a murder of crows.

* skeleton

Lew Ellingham's new poem: Sha'ar Zahav

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Copyright 2012 by Lewis Ellingham.

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Peter Reading, poet, died 17 November 2011.

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Photo: Bernard Mitchell

 

 

Then we waded at low tide to Hilbre Island;
and we marvelled at scores of thousands of waders:
Sanderling, Knot, Oystercatcher, Redshank, Curlew and Dunlin;
and the giant gull of the north, the hyperborean Glaucous,
glided snow-mantled above the remains of the old lifeboat station;
and there suddenly stooped from a cloud the colour of Blanenau Ffestiniog slate
a Peregrine into a blizzard of wheeling Calidris Alba
and the falcon hit and we heard the thud and a handful of silven feathers
whorled in the wind and the great dark raptor rose with the dead meat locked in its talons;
and I said to my friend: 'We will mind this as long as we live.' (He is dead now.)

From Laertidean, by Peter Reading

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Now Blue October

Now blue October, smoky in the sun,
Must end the long, sweet summer of the heart.
The last brief visit of the birds is done;
They sing the autumn songs before they part.
Listen, how lovely--there’s the thrush we heard
When June was small with roses, and the bending
Blossom of branches covered nest and bird,
Singing the summer in, summer unending.
Give me your hand once more before the night;
See how the meadows darken with the frost,
How fades the green that was the summer’s light.
Beauty is altered, never lost,
And love, before the cold November rain,
Will make its summer in the heart again.

-- Robert Nathan (1950)

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Eugene Ruggles

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I’ve made the argument elsewhere on this blog (as for example here or more reasonably here) that there exists an alternate poetry style in California and on the West Coast which, embracing realism and narrative simplicity, derives probably from Kenneth Rexroth and from translations of East Asian poems that started to appear here in the 1930’s.

I think that the work of Eugene Ruggles (d. 2004) with its heightened social polemic backgrounded by nature is directly related, and I wanted to include here a couple examples. I didn’t know Gene personally, but recall him as an affable presence in North Beach 30-40 years ago. He always looked sort of outdoorsy and seemed red in the face from alcohol, as I thought.

The Fire at Midnight

                   — for my son Adam

A mile west the Pacific

pulls at the load of moonlight

lifted overhead.

Inside our potbellied stove

flame is praising a log. At times

like autumn untying a tree.

We live in a small place

miles from anyone in these woods.

You are nine months tonight.

Just half the length of time

when your mother and I held,

for an instant, the force

spinning through us.

That takes our breath away.

And that later

when the walls had returned,

was rubbing your lungs together

like two sticks, until they caught.

Now from the wooden crib

that I built last spring

you are crying and reaching

toward me. And all I know

is the glow from the fire upon you,

that lovely,

you release the light from me.

Outside the great trees

toss and stamp in their stalls

eager with green even at night.

I rise and go toward you

and reaching down, with the wind

bending branches in my back,

lift your beautiful heat upwards.

Walking down an Alley in Detroit

on the Lower East Side

Beneath a lean-to of shadows

four black checker players have drawn

a crowd beside a rusted barrel lifting smoke

around a coffee pot. October

circles easy in the alley, inhales,

is lined with old heavy clothing.

A few blocks down a Chevrolet

factory shifts into its second gear

of human bodies. The bottle of wine

climbing from hand to hand

leaps once more, and refills

as it sinks beneath the ashes.

When an old man reaches out

his dark face packed with scars

and clears the board in one move,

laughter opens against the brick

like a match, like iodine,

burning along the Detroit River.

Both poems are from Roads of Bread: The Collected Poems of Eugene Ruggles. Edited by Delia Moon, Petaluma River Press, 2009.

See also http://www.eugeneruggles.com/about.html and http://eugeneruggles.com/, which has a really good video.

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When black waves covered Middle-Earth

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Aaron Hostetter’s marvelous translation of Genesis A. continues with the Anglo-Saxon retelling of Noah and the Flood:


Noah, the son of Lamech, was six hundred winters old
when he with his sons went down under the deck,
wise with his children, by the order of God, precious to the multitude.
The Lord sent rain from the heavens and allowed likewise
a welling gush to press upon the roomy world from every spring,
dark water-streams rushed. The seas rose up over the sea-cliffs.
Strong and fierce was he who controlled the waters.
The children of the wicked feud, of middle-earth were covered
and concealed by the black waves, the homelands of men.
The house of earth was harried, the Maker avenged
the willful crimes upon mankind. The strong sea grabbed
onto the fated folk for forty days, and forty nights as well.
The hate was ferocious, slaughter-cruel towards men.
The waves of the Glory-King drove out the spirits
of the dishonored from their flesh-homes.
The Flood covered them all, the high mountains stormy
under the heavens throughout the wide earth and heaved up
onto the seas the Ark from the ground and with it the nobles.
Then the Lord himself signified, our Shaper,
when he had closed up that ship. (1367b-91)


More at the Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project.

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Mnemosyne

Horst Janssen: Hölderlin at 17 and 72.

Inspired by the Werner Herzog cave movie described in a recent post, and by my re-reading of Gustaf Sobin's marvelous Luminous Debris and my current study of the 9th-10th Carolingian annales histories, I have been contemplating the role played by imagination in the writing of history. It seems to have peaked at the very outset with Herodotus, the mother of historians, and then run slowly downhill before almost disappearing  in the course of the 18th century, only to be revived in recent decades in the wake of postmodernist influences.

Such an inquiry concerns the application of literary values to the historiographic process, but since it gets quite complicated trying to explain what "literature" really means—cf for example Derek Attridge: The Singularity of Literature (2004) —I suggest instead a deficit in creative imagination: why don't we require historians to take courses in writing poetry as an antidote to the hamster-driven, data-parading assaults upon factuality thrust upon us in graduate school? Has the historicism of past generations become so shameful that it precludes any real thinking about historical events?

Going further, which poets have written about writing history? My favorite is Friedrich Hölderlin, and his poem Mnemosyne which I translate as follows:


Mnemosyne
                                   (Third version)


The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled on earth. And there’s a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.
The captured elements and ancient laws of earth
Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning
For all that is unconfined. But much needs
To be retained. And loyalty is required.
Yet we mustn’t look forwards or backwards.
We should let ourselves be cradled
As if on a boat rocking on a lake.


But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?


My Achilles
Died near a fig tree,
And Ajax lies in the caves of the sea
Near the streams of Skamandros —
Great Ajax died abroad
Following Salamis’ inflexible customs,
A rushing sound at his temples —
But Patroclus died in the King’s armor.
Many others died as well.
But Eleutherai, the city
Of Mnemosyne, once stood upon
Mount Kithaeron. Evening
Loosened her hair, after the god
Had removed his coat.
For the gods are displeased
If a person doesn’t compose
And spare himself.
But one has to do it,
And grief is soon gone.



*    *   *

The poem demonstrates Hölderlin’s ability to develop his thoughts in a succession of metaphors and images, which is characteristic of his later writing. This technique of metaphorical thinking surfaced decades later in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke, and more allegorically in the stories of Franz Kafka. It is an agenda imagined by Kant, who famously stated that images without concepts are blind, (a fair description of the current state of affairs in modern poetry).

The question Hölderlin presents is whether it is and how it might be possible to retain historical memory of past events, exemplified by the deaths of the Greek heroes. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She slept with Zeus and gave birth to the nine Muses, whose activities are also by nature historicizing.

Hesiod writes of Mnemosyne:

Them [the Muses] in Pieria did Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Kronos [Zeus], a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. [Theogony 53-63, Penguin Classics.]

And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born. [Theogony 915-917.]

Pindar also writes about Mnemosyne:

If success crowns a man’s venture, sweeter then than honey the libations he pours into the Mousai’s [Muses’] stream. But lacking the songs to praise them, the mightiest feats of valour can but find a sorry grave a deep darkness. But for fine deeds a mirror to establish, one way alone we know if Mnamosyna’s [Memory’s] shining diadem will grant recompense for their labours, in the glory of music on the tongues of men. [Pindar, Nemean 7, ant1.]

In the poem’s first strophe, the “fruits” are simply the deeds or events of history. Their memory disappears from us the same way that snakes crawl away into cracks in the floor, or between rocks. We need to remember things, but our memory is often faulty and can lead us astray like horses on crooked paths. Also there exists a tendency and a willingness to let things slide into oblivion. We should stay nested in the present and not run away to the past or the future.

But what about the experiences of daily life, the common things we treasure, even after we make contact with something that signifies and transcends earthly life? It is like a cross planted in an alpine meadow, an act of generosity by whoever placed it, and a reminder, permitting wayfarers to speculate from a distance about what happened there.

The last strophe places us in the mythic environment of Greece. The heroes at Troy died in various ways, and we owe our knowledge of them to the circumstance that Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on Mt. Kithaeron—“loosening her hair” is a sexual metaphor in older literatures.

Thus historical memory itself is ordained by the gods. When friends or heroes die, we need to pull ourselves together and conquer sorrow by creating a record of what happened. This is perhaps the closest we may approach eternity.

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True confessions

Yesterday I ate a whole
bowl full of fresh strawberries
with whipped cream and Splenda.

Recently I bought some
plastic boxes at Walmart
to store things
underneath my bed, but
now they are covered
with dust and hairballs and
I'm afraid to open them.

My apartment is crowded with
books I don't have the strength
of mind to throw away.
I  seem to have permanently
postponed cleaning out
the refrigerator.

Two weeks ago I woke up
with a hard-on. I am incapable
of getting up without coffee.
I didn't take time to donate
money to the tsunami
victims in Japan.

In February I fell down
and sprained my knee
in the S.F. State parking
facility. I was wearing my
sunglasses indoors, which
was incredibly stupid.

The skin on my legs
is flaky sometimes, and there
is a fungus growing in one of
my toenails. Dogs have growled
when I walked past.

I should have
been nicer to my Mom
before she died. I didn't
feel badly when Dylan
went electric.

I think Paul Krugman is
right about practically everything,
but I am only faking because
my understanding of Keynes
is not really adequate.

I have repeatedly profaned
the Sabbath. I don't regret
being a hippie in the 60's.
Sometimes I only pretend
to listen to people.

I like Lady Gaga.

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Ars poetica

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Two great poetry readings occurred in April where the crush of business prevented my immediate commentation. On the 29th flarf meisters Kasey Mohammad and Rodney Koeneke plus Lindsey Boldt held forth at Calif Arts & Crafts in Oakland. K.C. and Rodney Koeneke are two very bright guys, and I can't think of either  without remembering Roland Barthes' assertion that a text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism makes the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

There's a good Wiki entitled "flarf" which mentions both poets. I blogged an unserious flarf experiment of my own here.

On April 27th Rich Tagett read from his new collection of poems entitled Demodulating Angel, published by Ithuriel's Spear. The launch was held at Modern Times bookstore on Valencia, possibly the last such event before the closing of the store and its removal elsewhere. For us this was indeed the end of an era, as I think we've now done a half-dozen book openings at Modern Times.

Rich's delivery was superb as always, and I had the great pleasure of introducing him. We've known each other since 1969 when we were both, along with Paul Mariah, starting up as small press publishers. I was also delighted to discover no less than six Ithurielite authors attending the reading.

Rich Tagett

Moi with Rich

Rich with Lew Ellingham

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The Swinburne Stomp

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THE FUGS SWINBURNE STOMP LYRICS

Before the beginning of years

There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran;

Pleasure, with pain for leaven;

Summer, with flowers that fell;

Remembrance fallen from heaven,

And madness risen from hell;

Strength without hands to smite;

Love that endures for a breath:

Night the shadow of light,

And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand

Fire, and the falling of tears,

And a measure of sliding sand

From under the feet of the years;

And froth and drift of the sea;

And dust of the labouring earth;

And bodies of things to be

In the houses of death and of birth;

And wrought with weeping and laughter,

And fashioned with loathing and love,

With life before and after

And death beneath and above,

For a day and a night and a morrow,

That his strength might endure for a span

With travail and heavy sorrow,

The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south

They gathered as unto strife;

They breathed upon his mouth,

They filled his body with life;

Eyesight and speech they wrought

For the veils of the soul therein,

A time for labour and thought,

A time to serve and to sin;

They gave him light in his ways,

And love, and a space for delight,

And beauty and length of days,

And night, and sleep in the night.

His speech is a burning fire;

With his lips he travaileth;

In his heart is a blind desire,

In his eyes foreknowledge of death;

He weaves, and is clothed with derision;

Sows, and he shall not reap;

His life is a watch or a vision

Between a sleep and a sleep.

(Before the Beginning of Years, by A. C. Swinburne)

thanks patrick and john mellor

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Baptized in the waters of flumpff

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FOURTEEN WAYS TO DESCRIBE THE RAIN

                                                               -- after Hans Eissler

dripping
hydrological
spam

inadvertently
randomized
leaves
mashed
into
a gory
pulp
on the
sidewalk

in the
clouds
of failure
we are
purified

then
Alice
dusted
the gunpowder
off her
petticoats

these
little fingers
are speaking
my
language

they
are
gay
hooligans

je te
dirai
vous

o
the
wild
wind

God bless
our dead
Marines

crinkled
teardrops
serenade
my wild
& foolish
heart

do thou
nothing
till angels
lie with
earthworms

the harps
of ancient
temples
are heard
by psychotic
einzelkinder

or: kill
your
television

covering
the screams
of dying
electrons

desert
rains
fall upon
the blue
anthers
of the
polemonium

if I could
be rain
I'd wash
down
to the
Bay of
San Francisco

but still
I surf
upon the
twattish
waves
of ungovernable
indifference

last year
Maurice
moved to
San Luis Obispo
and opened
a thriving
dental
practice

weather
report:
ein gottverdammtes
saumäßiges
dreckwetter
ist das!

but
that
night
at tahoe...

silver
dollars,
bullets,
rockets

sugarbaby
i baptize
thee with
the waters
of flumpff!

this
world
is lousy
with
strange
ideas

for example
current
symphonies
of abusive
meterology

now
feed me
with
your kisses

and the black
planets
of your
eyes

naked,
stoned
& soaked

take my
breath away,
no better
not

defibrillate!

bring me
bags of
sunshine,
heliocentricity,
bring me
no more
pain

few can
recall
what they
dream
at night

eelish
delvings
(Sylvia
Plath)

do not seek
to ignite
the deeply
concealed
munitions
of my
love

pretty swell
explode


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Sebastian Quill -- Fall, 1970

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During my convalescence the past several weeks I've managed to finish scanning and posting the first issue of Sebastian Quill, San Francisco's first explicity gay-male literary magazine which I edited 1970-73. I've added an intro which explains how the publication originated in the underground spirit of the late Sixties and early Seventies.

I'll post the subsequent issues, which featured writing by Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Paul Mariah and Richard Tagett, when I find the time. If the text seems a little fuzzy, it's because what you're looking at is essentially a series of low-resolution photographs of the original pages.

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Here we are

Rich Tagett sent me a new poem with a final stanza that stabs like a dagger. Unfortunately it didn't make it into his collection Demodulating Angel published earlier this month.

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How to make a prairie

.

          To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

          One clover, and a bee,

          And revery.

          The revery alone will do,

          If bees are few.

                                   — Emily Dickinson

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THE ORCHARD — Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Paul Gaugin: Orchard Below Bihorel Church

      Almond, apple, and peach, 
      Walnut, cherry, plum, 
      Ash, chestnut, and beech, 
      And lime and sycamore 
      We have planted for days to come; 

      No stony monument 
      But growing, changing things, 
      Leaf, fruit, and honied scent, 
      Bloom that the bees explore, 
      Sprays where the bird sings. 

      In other Junes than ours 
      When the boughs spread and rise 
      Tall into leafy towers 
      To grace and guard this small 
      Corner of paradise; 

      When petals red and white 
      Resign to warming air, 
      Without speech or sight 
      From our hands they will fall 
      On happy voices there.

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Rondeau for a break in the weather

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We’re currently enjoying an outbreak of faux printemps here in NorCal: ten days now of clear skies and summer-like temperatures, with more of the same foreseen into February. What better reason therefore to recall


Charles d'Orléans (1394-1465), Rondeau


Le temps a laissé son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluie
Et s'est vêtu de broderie,
De soleil luisant, clair et beau.
Il n'y a bête ni oiseau
Qu'en son jargon ne chante ou crie:
"Le temps a laissé son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluie."


Rivière, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent, en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent, d'orfèvrerie,
Chacun s'habille de nouveau:
Le temps a laissé son manteau.

*    *    *

Now Time throws off his cloak again
Of ermined frost, and wind, and rain,
And clothes him in the embroidery
Of glittering sun and clear blue sky.
With beast and bird the forest rings,
Each in his jargon cries or sings;
And Time throws off his cloak again.
Of ermined frost, and wind, and rain.


River, and fount, and tinkling brook
Wear in their dainty livery
Drops of silver jewelry;
In new-made suit they merry look;
And Time throws off his cloak again
Of ermined frost, and wind, and rain.

Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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Lewis Ellingham's THE WALL -- Part IV.

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Part IV of The Wall, a work in progress by San Francisco author and poet Lewis Ellingham.

© 2010 by author.

Poetry of Cedar Sigo: Stranger in Town

I was delighted to discover recently a truly  interesting and exceptional book of poems by Cedar Sigo, a young poet currently resident in our town. The poems are consistently intelligent and provocative, and the book also constitutes something of a big departure for City Lights, which has been in the doldrums for many years in terms of publishing work by local poets, unless that work qualified stylistically as museum-type-beatnik or else, let us say, as beatnik-derived.

Either way, the number of San Francisco poets included in the City Lights portfolio have not been numerous, and are far out-numbered by poets from Mexico, Russia, Israel, Morocco and indeed almost anywhere but here. Therefore Stranger in Town is something of a breakthrough for City Lights, and it does seem like they've finally hit upon the mad idea of publishing some local poets. (If one could induce the San Francisco Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic to focus more on locals instead of importing authors from hundreds of mile away, one's joy would be even more complete.)

Cedar's writing is indeed marvelous, and achieves its effect through sequences of apparently unrelated associations, meaning that it is up to the reader to provide the context for the poem. You really have to interact with each poem, if you're going to mount your board and surf with it.

I suppose this will seem difficult, arbitrary, perhaps annoying to some, but the trick here is that there exists an internal and intuitive logic to the chain of verbal events, which you may be able to recreate for yourself by simply reading the poems aloud and not thinking too much about them. It's exactly this unspoken logic which renders them convincing, indeed in this case exceptional.

You can find out more about Stranger in Town and its author here, and you can also read the first five poems in the collection here to see if you agree with my enthusiasm.

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Why to study Antiquity

I thoroughly enjoyed Mary Beard's post yesterday concerning her recent visit to the Colossi of Memnon.   Although I must admit that I would have not taken the trouble to search out these towering 14th c. BC artifacts personally, known to the Romans as statues that could sing, I feel very satisfied that Mary should do  so.

If you have time to examine her report, be sure to follow the indicated links, they are an education in themselves. The sheer oddity of much of what one encounters in classical studies--imagine a woman of Roman nobility, a tourist, having some self-composed Sapphic verses inscribed in Greek on the leg of one of the two statues--is one small yet fascinating part of the wider adventure of attempting to understand civilizations far differently reasoned than our own.

Photo: Wikicommons Media

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Poetry of Jack Sharpless

I was looking this morning at Silliman’s Blog and enjoying Ron’s enthusiastic and thoroughly sensible ejaculations over the DVD release of the new Allen Ginsberg film. Allen’s meteoric rise to fame in San Francisco in the 1950’s —assisted in no small part by Kenneth Rexroth’s impresarial efforts and Ferlinghetti’s caginess as his publisher—is such a remarkable story that it does seem worthy of being memorialized cinematically.

It also seems paradigmatic of a more general scenario in which young poets spend their formative years in this city and then move elsewhere—mainly back East—and then gain national prominence of one kind or another as writers, or land teaching jobs elsewhere.

But for those who toughed it out in San Francisco and basically refused to leave, the situation has often proved less satisfactory. If you’ve lived here for some decades, the city is practically a graveyard full of standing tombstones for fallen poets who spent their best years here and died without having seen a collection of their work published professionally.

I hope that before all memory of our vanished poets is obliterated, someone will take inspiration from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and leap forth to compose a Lives of the Poets for San Francisco.

Certain restorative attempts have met with varying degrees of success, most notably with the recent resuscitation of Jack Spicer’s reputation, thanks largely to the efforts of Kevin Killian and his several collaborators. (After Spicer’s death in 1965, you couldn’t to my recollection find his poems in any bookshop anywhere, until the first Black Sparrow edition initiated the exhumation process in 1975, ending a printing blackout that had gone on for ten years.)

Other San Francisco poets who were published posthumously in book format include Eugene Ruggles, who was published last year by Petaluma River Press under the title: Roads of Bread. I am worried to note at Worldcat.org that not one public or university library has acquired a copy of the book.

Jack Sharpless, an extraordinarily talented San Francisco poet who worked as a waiter and who died of AIDS in 1988, was published in book form in 1989 by Gnomon Press under the title: Presences of Mind. The book is out-of-print, although Small Press Distribution still offers some copies.

The knockout poem in this collection is entitled Inroads, for which Jack won a prestigious prize in the U.K. after it appeared in 1980. The poem describes, hour by hour, the last day in the life of Elizabeth I, which passes in a slow parade of memories, interspersed with erotic longings and random apprehensions of death. Generally it shows the steady descent from royal dignity into the universal meat grinder.

The poem is too long to quote extensively, but perhaps I can give a brief idea of its form from the two opening passages:



Feb 27/28, 1603


6:00 pm


The
wood
round
None
such


cold
gold


hammer
lavender
& argent


in sear
weather


Ears
survive
eyes


Memory
branches


oak
ash


& crow
shadows
clamor
across


the
evening
of my
world


__________________




6:30


In
side


on
oaken
board


a
tabby
cat


sits
beside
a bronze
vase


counting
squirrels
through
the oriel
of leaded


glass




With this poem Jack invented a sort of minimalist lyric narrative technique, which he employs in later poems that reference T.E. Lawrence and aspects of daily life in ancient China.

Because of the sparseness of language and brevity of the lines, individual images—the cat sitting in a wooden cupboard looking out the window—and the sudden interpolation of rhymed monosyllables—cold / gold— lend profile and a sharpened focus to the story and that just wouldn’t happen if you heaped more language onto the situation, as most writers would be inclined.

With Jack Sharpless you get exactly as much as you need to know. It’s a very accomplished and graceful artistry that says much by stating everything just a little short of nothing.

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