Tributes

by Bradford Morrow

  12.

  Jonathan said: I have a picture for you. And handed me a print of his color photograph of Robert Duncan holding a painting of Robert Duncan.

  The five volumes of The Zohar are, of course, the Soncino Press edition, translated into English by a team of rabbis including Paul Levertoff, father of the poet Duncan admired so much and felt so warmly towards, Denise Levertov. The translators left out the more arcane tractates of operational magic as unsuitable for the enlightened modern audience to which they brought the classic of Qabbalah—those treatises are the strange meat of MacGregor Mathers’s Kabbalah Unveiled—a book not shown on Duncan’s shelves, though important to the Golden Dawn, and thus to Yeats, of whom Duncan was a singular inheritor.

  The books are in the foreground. The work is always in the foreground. The work is what matters. I’m reading Nathalie Blondel’s new Life of Mary Butts— a writer Duncan spoke of highly, and frequently urged upon his readers and friends. It was Duncan who made me first, and most, aware of Butts, and from him directly or through Ken Irby came the earliest precious tattered xeroxes of her remarkable work now at last coming back into print. Today in the Blondel biography I find Stella Bowen saying, as she reminisces about Mary Butts: “I should have known that the way to enjoy any artist is to attend to his work and not allow one’s self to be confused by that lesser thing, his character.”

  13.

  Mary Butts. Gertrude Stein. Hilda Doolittle. Duncan gave us these writers, or restored them to us. His serious Stein Imitations understood Stein not as an influence but a School in which a poet might study and learn the craft. The craft of speaking, of letting writing go on. Stein was a mere celebrity, H. D. a vanished imagist or faded luminary, Butts not even a name, according to the accepted wisdom of the 1950s. Duncan did more than his share in restoring Stein to her rightful, mother-of-us-all status, the Queen of Language, by which all telling is made possible. Duncan aimed us firmly at these women’s work, by whom writing and its various registers and genres could be restored. Robert Duncan was more than generous. He gave us not only himself, he gave us others as well—and that is a rare generosity in a poet. The one time I heard Dylan Thomas read, in the flesh as we so rightly say, he spent the first half of his program reading late Yeats—I had never known “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” till I heard him read it—and only then his own work. An amazing arrogance, an amazing humility conjoined—and to this day I am grateful to Thomas for himself and for opening another door on Yeats. As we are grateful to Duncan not only for his huge symphonies and demanding chamber music, but for his clear bardic eye that caught, sensed and restored the writers who came before him.

  14.

  The poet’s worst enemy is bitterness. Envy and jealousy of other poets are the sickening, blighting hazards of a calling with few obvious rewards. And often those who have, from Muse or Society, won true rewards, rewards like sweetness of life or life companions, do not recognize their own good fortune, do not grasp that they have been rewarded by the same principles to which their work gave voice. Duncan always saw his good fortune, grants or no grants, even though most of his life and most of his work was spent with the smallest presses, the most exiguous—and exigent—audiences. Knowing his good fortune, he had the grace of kindness. While he could be catty, or venomous as a surukuku, when the mood took him, his generosity towards the living and the dead was phenomenal. More a generosity of spirit (like a fan letter he wrote to James Dickey about a poem he’d read and respected—unanswered, tu sais) than of deed, it allowed him to praise, welcome, take delight (and therefore creative energy) from the good work of others. If energy is a product of delight, then all the pleasure we take from the good work of others will surely feed our own.

  15.

  Once when Duncan was staying in my house for a few days, I found him one morning gazing at my stacks of paperback mystery stories arrayed in a great copper-lined cavity meant for firewood. He walked over to the kitchen table and began talking about our affinity, the only time he ever spoke of any such thing, an affinity grounded in the joy of reading. He felt at home in my house, he said, with these piles of thrillers, of sacred trash, since he too read and took pleasure from such things. We discussed them a little while, noting the way certain pieces of our work had been subtly affected by this thriller or that—Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Michael Innes. Then he went on to say how sad he found it to meet so many younger poets, or would-be poets, who took no pleasure in reading, no pleasure in books. How can you write if you don’t read? How can you create a powerful new work if the power of such actual works is closed to you? We read, he said, we like to read. We take pleasure, we know how to take pleasure from reading. We learn how to give pleasure through writing. The important thing is the energetic act of reading, of pleasure welcomed through the engagement with the text.

  16.

  I thought of Duncan’s drawing of the Ideal Reader—he’d drawn it I think for that limited edition of Letters. It showed what seems to be a woman of middle years, comfy of disposition, seated in her garden, a great sunhat shielding her features, her whole posture “bent to her book.” That picture is one of the most shocking avant-garde proclamations of its day. A book is to read.

  This was 1963. I was starting to understand the way writing spilled out of reading. But that sounds bookish and mandarin—not the worst things in the world, but I wanted more. In Duncan I grasped the balance, a balance I tried to specify in a book title of my own a few years later: flesh, dream, book—all the sources of our poetry: experience, vision and reverie, and reading. How could we ever write a poem if we did not know that there was such a thing to be written? And yet we always, always look for it, the poem that presupposes no previous poetry. That seems the aim of every manifesto, every new school. A child without a mother. A poem that is an absolute. Perhaps a hunger for such a poem predisposes humans to imagine a moment of creation ex nihilo, a word spoken out of nowhere.

  17.

  The right time. Duncan knew what it was. Punning on the French word bonheur, he called happiness the good hour. And what made it good? It was the hour that called us to work, the hour that issued through the instrumentality of the poet an articulation of all that was going on in the world. In the mind. A scientist of the Whole, is what I’d called the poet, back in some ravings in the sixties. Duncan explained the exact instrumentality of that science—the poet writing is itself speaking to itself, while we listen. So of course (he was clear) there could be no traffic in greatness, in calling so-and-so a Great Poet—there was only one great poet, the poet of whom we are all variously, crazily, fingerprint individually, metabolically, literally, tunefully instrumentalities. So our goodness lay not in what, but in the fact that we were able to declaim. And that sweet doctrina rescued poetry, for me, from the clashing teeth of the confessional and the propagandaic, the two molochs of the time I was growing up, when Duncan was the sudden clear voice of poetry I heard speaking in our idiom.

  18.

  The right time. In the Pindar poem, after telling of Psyche’s hard tasks, and all the creatures that had come to help her out, Duncan turns to himself, the deed or task it is to write a poem, this very poem, a word the hour calls out to be written:

  … So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listend to a tower that said Listen to me!

  So Jonathan Williams wrote a book that fell into my hands, and jabbed a little chink in my armor, and I began to take notice. Forty years later he comes by, when I need a push, and slips me this photograph he took of Robert Duncan holding the painting of Robert Duncan by Jess.

  The photo was taken probably in 1968 or 1969, which is about when I visited Duncan and Jess for the first time at their house in San Francisco. I saw the painting then, and studied it, and my memories of it then aid my seeing of it now. I saw the whole of it, but memory has ruined the picture even more than the cropping of it by the
photograph. I am left with what I feel. And a little bit by what I see. So I am looking at Duncan—he wears a striped shirt, clean and neat over a white T-shirt. His sideburns are full, even bushy, and his almost-smiling face is a little plumper than I remember it, content seeming, well-fed, but with some haunting under the eyes. His arm comes up and crosses over his head to support and balance the top edge of the painting. In doing so, it happens that the hand shields his eyes. The painting reveals a world of art and artifact elaborately indoors (John Muir said to Emerson, Mr. Emerson, yours is an indoor philosophy), but the photo is otherwise—from the weathered gray wood behind Duncan and his painting, we see we’re in the back yard, not yet a garden, of the house on Twentieth Street.

  He needs to shade his eyes from the California sun. His damaged eyes, the great eagle wandering eyes of him, so disconcerting, so penetrating. Is it the left one, is it the right one, that is the wanderer? I look at the photograph, and can’t tell—because the second thing one notices when you look at the photo is that it has been printed backwards: the titles of the books are mirror-style, left is right and Duncan’s slightly unfamiliar plumpness is the inversion of nature, the “accidental” contra naturam that is so close to the essence of art. And no doubt my own memories have polarized, magnetized, trivialized, kellyized, many fine specifics of what I see. Of what I saw.

  19.

  Right time? 1919 when he was born, a year after the war. 1988 when he died, at sixty-nine. In the days when he was blocking out Groundwork as the summa of his life work, he had planned out, with some explicitness, the work of his seventies, the work of his eighties—the work of my senility, he said, planned already. Perhaps planning such things is enough. How can one plan for an hour that has not come, when what our best work is really is the voice, tone, tell, tale, told of that hour? It was his jest, a bold jest, with time. It pleased him to plan ahead, as it pleased him to conduct his own performances of his latest poems, using a strange cheironomy, his hand waving like Leonard Bernstein’s conducting his own music, but by no means indicating beat or evident rhythm. Instead the hands were more Picasso’s hands, inscribing the moment of the poem’s out loud onto the visual air. When Duncan was teaching at Bard College in 1982 and 1983, I watched as he read aloud, over several evenings, perhaps twelve hours of his late work—always the hand moved, a bird beside the text, a shadow sometimes taking on solidity.

  20.

  Elsewhere I have written, but that is my story and not his, how twice, in the most literal manner, Duncan saved my life. Save me he did, from wanhope and foolish hauteur and dumb desperation, when I too was “poised to leap.” He was the tower who spoke, and like the tower in Apuleius’s story, there is no life in the question of whether or not the tower “liked” Psyche. I have no idea if Duncan liked me—he said more than once that my constant harping in those days on women, on making love, was tiresome—but maybe that was just a playful gay way of telling me he didn’t like my work, while generously giving me a way of enduring that displeasure without too much pain. What I do know is that his generosity of work and presence enriched that whole generation of poets who wanted to do the hard thing, the salmon-folk of language, who wanted, like Arnaut Daniel our master (Dante’s, Pound’s, Duncan’s, Wieners’, Rattray’s, Lansing’s, Stein’s, Irby’s master) always to swim against the stream, to leap upstream against the falling water so as to release their own starry influence up there, where we come from. Duncan’s pressure still moves in the language poets, in the new romantics, in the neoformalists, in the many contradictory squabbling heirs of his mind and his song. I feel a gratitude to him I can hardly yet begin to speak.

  Encounters with an Americano Poet:

  William Carlos Williams

  Victor Hernández Cruz

  MY FIRST POETIC EFFORTS in the English language were to try to compose coplas and décimas, metric structures from my first language, Spanish. It was very difficult to continuously come up with rhymes in English. Not that it’s impossible—look how Keats swings the sound—but my bilingual head was never solidly in the English; communication and perception for me are always a pendulum between the Latin and Germanic foundations of the two languages which the forces of history have bestowed upon me.

  As I grew and read and heard the sounds of English I began to appropriate its tempo. When I read the English translation of Lorca’s “Poet in New York” and, even more important and penetrating, the poetry of William Carlos Williams, I began to feel how I could bring the rhythms of my language up to an immediate and urban speed. To make things shine in the present moment of our senses, in the language that circulated within the air of the city. I felt the pulse of Free Verse or, more accurately, Open Verse. Free Verse might imply a randomness or an aspect of chance and gamble in the writing, whatever comes up; there are many inner laws and concerns involved, such as cadence and the harmony and blending of words; things must fit within the language of the poem.

  The poetry of WCW was like a gentle opening, things came at you, in the order that they were found, no effort to undo them, as to undo the world with concepts. The conceptual seemingly came at the end within a resonance of the words. The natural order of things in motion—almost like a practical poetics. As if it were a rush for air after being submerged within water to the point of drowning. A poetry of the Emergency Room, a grasp for time—WCW was a doctor and had little leisure time throughout most of his life, so he got glimpses in motion, flashes between labor pains. The black ink of his words flowing down the page like a spring breeze.

  The way you feel streets when you are young, bubbling and constantly changing, coming at you, full of surprises and chances, apparitions which the ordering of the poem orchestrates: a voice comes from a window—music is heard from another—a forest of bricks—blue walls inside—a flower on a table—a pretty girl passes dividing the nocturnal air in half—a scream—sirens—a police car—sudden thirst and hunger—a bodega—coconut soda—plaintain chips—while in the grocery store an old lady comes in dressed in black—she and the grocer hook into a conversation—the contents of which are from a previous encounter—it is more like an ongoing process.

  —Well Soraida wrote to me and she says they’ve thrown a road up into the mountain where she lives, out there in nowhere, in the inferno—imagine what progress.

  —Everything is like that there now, can’t be in peace, not even in Barranquitas by a river—now phones are ringing inside coconuts—Cafe and the olive oil—she says—while I stand with coconut soda, his brown hands find a brown bag to put the items in one at a time.

  Now through the English comes the sound of Spanish as if a spirit was cooking in the beans—not in the vocabulary which is Saxon but in the march—the dance of uneven steps broken sound—the splash of almost right or left diction. Leaving the bodega as the door opens the chime of a bell, glancing up I notice San Miguel slaying a dragon, the old lady dressed in black moves towards the street as the fragrance of Florida water. Into the breeze walking with all the lights—the fires of candles that are now the image of a tropical river.

  That’s how WCW poems were jumping in my head:

  Starting to come down by a new path

  I at once found myself surrounded

  by gypsy women

  —from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

  Williams then sees the Passaic River—reality is just a meltdown linguistically—the metropolis turns into a desert—look at things—up close—like slow motion—amplification—from a philosophic mountain down to a broken bottle strung on a street—from a passing car a woman’s breast inspires—the picture burns the windshield. A new land peeling through the windows of the words; his poetry brought me right to where I was standing with the dictionary inside my sneakers.

  William Carlos Williams. Photograph by Charles Sheeler. Courtesy New Directions Publishing Corporation.

  William Carlos Williams was born in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, to a Puerto Rican woman and a British father—both moms an
d pops were foreigners, immigrants to a new land. Williams’s father was from the English-speaking Caribbean:

  He grew up by the sea

  on a hot island …

  like an Englishman

  to emulate his Spanish friend

  and idol—the weather.

  —from “Adam”

  Raquel Helene Rose Hoheb was a woman of many ancestral weavings as are all Caribbean people. Williams says that she was half French (out of the French island of Martinique); her mother was Basque. Other writings mention that she had Dutch blood and in other places it is hinted that she had some Jewish in her. She was a hodge-podge from the Caribbean mercantile middle or upper classes. She grew up in a big house in the city of Mayaguez on the western side of the island. Her family either had slaves or servants—she grew up around Afro-Puerto Ricans, hearing the songs and the stories.

  The decision to move north to the states made by her and her husband, William Senior, was apparently devastating to her warm spirit, according to Eric Williams in a forward to WCW’s account of his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams:

  … this multinational mongrel gentlewoman transplanted to a north temperate zone suburb of a major metropolis that was infested with WASP entrepreneurs who cared not a centimo for her religious, social, or cultural background.

  Williams felt this struggle of his mother to survive in a strange cold land, he felt her foreignness and otherness and he felt his own odd drama. In so many open and hidden instances he explored this theme in his poetry. Julio Marzan, a Puerto Rican poet and scholar, has written an extensive study of this link of WCW with the Latino world, The Spanish-American Roots of William Carlos Williams. There are also at least two books which explore the intriguing relationship between mother and poet. She had a great influence on her son’s path to poetry, to art. She herself studied painting for three years in Paris in her youth and worked on a couple of translations with her son of Spanish novels. Despite the fact that she was a señora of the upper classes, turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico—she was full of the habits, customs and refrains of the popular peoples of the island. The wonderful thing about this book is that the poet just allows his mother to talk—and it is her voice which takes over most of the book—here is where you truly feel a Latino-Caribbean mental structure. You feel her wit and toughness, even her harsh verbal hurricane. It is full of her ghost stories and her medium spiritist wonderings, her splashes into tongues. Her English was always broken and spiced with Spanish and French words. All of these things sailed into Williams’s poetic lines. He was among the first to use Spanglish as a literary device as in the little experimental book of spontaneous prose, Kora in Hell, and throughout his work there is this bilingual spirit.