Tributes

by Bradford Morrow

  I don’t know to what extent he accepted, reached for or even understood this Latino element or if he even cared about it at all—but it was just there by nature. He lived in an age when this ethnic insistence would not have been popular and had friends such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound who were full of phobias and racism. Pound discouraged Williams’s pursuit of his mother’s world: “ … William Williams, and may we say his Mediterranean equipment, have an importance in relation to his temporal intellectual circumstance.” Notice how here Pound leaves out Williams’s middle name, Carlos.

  When I first started reading Williams in the midsixties I had no idea that he was part Puerto Rican. The information might have taken ten years to get to me. I read him because of the way he sat on an image, the momentum of his pictures, a sure and pure unrestrained language. Williams was like a literary hydrogen bomb—he wrote over forty books and worked all the forms and the new ones he was inventing as he went along, working as a doctor delivering poems and babies. There is much to learn in Williams’s books and much energy which can give us strength to continue stretching out the language to fit all of our Americano needs. Thank you, Dr. Williams. And to his mother, Helena, merci-gracias.

  Sylvia Plath. 1959. Photograph by Rollie McKenna.

  Sylvia’s Honey

  Catherine Bowman

  THE YEAR I FIRST tasted Sylvia’s honey. Dipped my fingers deep into the page, into what was raw and unfiltered. Queer alchemy, zoo yowl, heel-hung pigs, nerve curlers, smashed blue hills, exploding seas, bald-eyed Apollos, freakish Atlantic, midget’s coffin. That year and forever after. Honey feast of berries, surf creaming, polish of carbon, ku klux klan gauze, pockets of wishes, cracked heirloom, soul-shift, baby crap. Cave of calcium icicles. The golden bough that tricked me into the underworld. Acid kisses, blood-caul, a briefcase of tangerines.

  That was the year we dubbed ourselves Dumb Bitches. D. B.s. Joy and I sitting in Pancho’s All You Can Eat Mexican Buffet on the west side of San Antonio, just down the road from Randy’s Rodeo, where a mob of Texas shit-kicker teens had made headlines for hurling Lone Star Longnecks at Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. A man just two red greasy booths away raging.

  —Shut the fuck up, you worthless dumb bitch cunt.

  —Hey Dumb Bitch, I said to Joy,—pass the salsa.

  Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

  I have a ticket for that.

  Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

  Well, what do you think of that?

  Naked as paper to start

  But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,

  In fifty, gold.

  A living doll, everywhere you look.

  It can sew, it can cook,

  It can talk, talk, talk.

  D. B., engraved with ancient glittering sharks’ teeth on our mis-titled upside-down Texas crowns. And Sylvia Plath, our martyred honey goddess, our Queen D. B. In a town where you could find with ease the Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed across a man’s back, Our Lady of Sylvia was emblazoned into our souls’ tongues. Bald and Wild. Not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. Her Ariel poems, and especially “Daddy,” our sacred text full of high jinks and masks, rage and rebellion, a mirror to behold our self-loathing, our complicity in male authority, our ambivalence about promiscuity and virginity, and our fear.

  Plath was teaching us a new way to sing. Besides, we couldn’t help but love our Sylvia all dolled up in her achoo giddy-up, red leather saddle, riding English style, her Smith girl voice—Daddy, daddy you bastard I’m through. Calling each other D. B. was our way of being smart and satirical, just like Plath. We were taking the way that men looked at us and making fun of it, taking it on, reversing it. Plath was acutely aware of how she was seen. Ted is a genius. I his wife. She understood the game and she played for keeps—each round a kind of metaphysical kamikaze mission. No matter how hard she tried to conceal her brilliance and genius it kept coming up to the surface.

  So many of our friends, all smart even brilliant women, were in trouble. Edna, gang-raped at the age of thirteen, now drugged on Thorazine and locked in at the Santa Rosa Hospital. Margaret, hiding naked on Christmas Eve behind a carwash, her doctor husband searching for her with army-issue flashlight and weapon. Valerie, stabbed to death in broad daylight while jogging with her baby. Even my mother, one summer night, trying to take herself out of life. So much pain. So much silence. A rage suppressed comes soaring and creeping out in ugly ways.

  The tongue stuck in my jaw.

  It stuck in a barb wire snare.

  Ich, ich, ich, ich,

  I could hardly speak.

  That year Joy and I were studying politics and philosophy at St. Mary’s. Doc Crane, an Adlai liberal who loved boys from the border, told us stories about Yahoos and morals, the old dirty days of Texas politics, mystification, how deals were made over margaritas at Ma Crosby’s down in Ciudad Acuña. The different ways a man and a vote could be bought and sold. After class, at my house, Joy delivering a luminous explanation of Marx and Habermas. My twelve-year-old brother looking up from the table.

  —Man, she really laid that out smooth.

  —Go for it like a big dog.

  O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at

  Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.

  Big dogs. Dumb Bitches.

  Dirty girl,

  Thumb stump.

  Joy practicing her Spanish.—Hey D. B. no más cabeza sin dolares? Mujer fuerte. Quit partying down with muchachos with narizes llenas de coke and condos on the coast. Stay away from gas ovens. Write your poems.

  Writing poetry at the time seemed as distant as the moon, as natural as pecan trees and the steering wheel of my blue Nova. I was going to school, waitressing at the Bijou, hanging out, listening hard, Clifford Scott playing bebop at the Sugar Shack, the mariachis at the Esquire after-hours, the Clash. Lessons in poetry. Lessons in swing.

  I had an apartment above two Iranian spinster sisters who thought I was possessed by the devil and brewed smelly comfrey teas for me to clear up my complexion. They gave me an old pair of silver high heels. Ricardo Sanchez asked me to read my poems at his bookstore, Paperbacks y Más. My philosophy professor awarded me honors on my “City Planning and Aristotle” paper, telling me later at a party how good I would look nude on a haystack. That was cool, he was taking me seriously as a poet. I wrote my final in rhymed couplets.

  Oozing with jammy substance, dead egg, lullaby, a saint’s falsetto, body parts swimming with vinegar. The sugar belly. Black keys, wedding rings, nazi lampshades, tiger pants, potato hiss. For honey absorbs the taste of everything growing around the hive. That’s how I came to understand Plath’s poems, as a kind of bitter honey infused with everything going on around her at the time. “Daddy” is not just a poem about her father and her bad marriage; it is a perverse lament for the censoring voices she has killed off, a shrieking assault on our rules for mourning. More than that, the poem is a coup d’état in which, in an effort to find a lineage and a language, Plath dethrones the psyche’s Panzer-man, i.e., the voices of authority that had empowered her but also who have censored and “dumbed” her.

  So I could never tell where you

  Put your foot, your root,

  I never could talk to you.

  The tongue stuck in my jaw …

  So daddy, I’m finally through.

  The black telephone’s off at the root,

  The voices just can’t worm through.

  The poem’s central emotion is rage. A rage born from pain. A rage so stylized that it almost becomes a poetic form in itself.

  You do not do, you do not do

  Any more, black shoe

  In which I have lived like a foot

  For thirty years, poor and white,

  Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

  In 1962 she writes to her mother from England:

  Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff. It is much more h
elp for me, for example, to know that people are divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages. Let the Ladies’ Home Journal blither about those. Now stop trying to get me to write about “decent courageous people” … It’s too bad my poems frighten you. … I believe in going through and facing the worst not hiding from it.

  I read how Plath’s father, a specialist in bees, would begin his college lectures by killing, skinning, cooking and eating a rat in front of the class. Plath shared her father’s tastes for breaking taboos and exhibitionism. She has taken a lot of flack from critics and readers for appropriating the imagery of the Holocaust to describe her own pain, but I don’t think she is comparing the two, it’s more complex. She is not stoking up and sensationalizing her own domestic pain with the news and horrors of the day, but rather searching for a language to understand the censoring powers that controlled her world. She shows how our most private fantasies and obsessions cannot be separated from history and public life. In Plath, I learned to hear a new kind of tune, harsh and sarcastic, a ghastly fugue, that interweaves the nursery rhyme, marriage vows, love cry, goose step and train engine dirge.

  I made a model of you,

  A man in black with a Meinkampf look

  And a love of the rack and the screw,

  And I said I do, I do.

  Joy and I loved to quote the famous lines to each other:

  Every woman adores a Fascist,

  The boot in the face, the brute

  Brute heart of a brute like you.

  We knew that the boot in the poem did not belong to our lovers or fathers but rather it was our own boot that we smacked ourselves hard in the face with doing dazzling high kicks. We were learning all kinds of contortions, and not just in bed.

  One night at the Broadway 50/50 we played Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” and Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” on the jukebox. Joy grabbed my arm.

  —Come on, D. B., let’s dance.

  We knew that at this longitude and latitude and under this light, we were both supremely D. B. And we danced and laughed. They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear. The way that bees can smell fear. Her words became us. Ghost column, teacup, silk grits, Hiroshima, babies’ bedding, thalidomide, rubber breasts and rubber crotch, bits of burnt paper, balled hedgehog, plato’s afterbirth. A honey that hurt. Mouth plugs, morning glory pool, earwig biscuits, dead bells, desert prophet, owl cry, some hard stars. That healed. Yew tree and moon, wormed rose, Jesus hair, hot salt, eel, widow frizz, blue volt. That we couldn’t stop wanting. That would bear us out. An earthen womb, the deep throats of night flower. Sylvia’s clove orange honey. Six jars of it. Six cats’ eyes in the wine cellar. The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

  Edward Dahlberg. New York City, 1960. Photograph by Jonathan Williams.

  Broaching Difficult Dahlberg

  Lydia Davis

  BETWEEN TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST (by Richard Henry Dana, written while still an undergraduate at Harvard, after interrupting his studies for health reasons to spend, in fact, something over two years intermittently before the mast as a common seaman sailing from Boston to California and back) and Robert Creeley’s The Collected Prose (containing a piece called “Three Fate Tales” that includes a description of a mouse and its shadow moving across the snow under full moon into the storyteller’s shadow and thence onto the storyteller’s arm as a cat and its shadow wait), on the shelf there are three books together: Bottom Dogs (City Lights Books, 1930, 1961), The Edward Dahlberg Reader (New Directions, 1967) and The Leafless American (McPherson and Co., 1986). Another I thought I had (once I am reminded of it) is missing—where, where, where is it? (Because I Was Flesh.) Another shelf in the house? Upstairs? No. Another life, another apartment? See the spine clear as day—somewhere.

  I am looking, because of a conversation last night over dinner in a restaurant sitting on a long side of the table across from Ursule Molinaro (whose entire novel Positions with White Roses is narrated by a woman who is sitting on a long side of the dinner table with her parents—this is the “normal daughter,” the “visiting daughter”), and U. M.’s publisher Bruce McPherson, and next to Matthew Stadler. Also present, but presently out of earshot at the far end of the long table full of people, is Lynne Tillman (Cast in Doubt, The Madame Realism Complex, The Broad Picture), who had invited Molinaro out from the city.

  L. D. asks U. M. what she thinks of Dahlberg. But that is after she has asked about: Jane Bowles. U. M.: “I hate her.” (L. D. intensely surprised.) “I hate her work because I love Paul Bowles so much.” (L. D. wonders: is this necessary? obviously missing something here.) Well, what authors does she feel close to, has she felt close to? Buzzati, Giorgio Manganelli. But what Americans? (L. D. is persistent.) Well, Paul Bowles is American. Well, besides him? Stadler! (The Sex Offender, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, Allan Stein in progress.) And Jaimy Gordon. She loves Jaimy Gordon. Gordon is also on McPherson & Co.’s list, and that is how Molinaro first met him, some twenty years ago: they both loved Jaimy Gordon and found themselves talking about her somewhere. (L. D. may not be remembering that quite right.)

  Also on McPherson & Co.’s list: Frederick Ted Castle. How does U. M. feel about him, whose compendious suitcase of a book, the amazing Anticipation, L. D. admires? (U. M.’s answer inconclusive.) Though Castle himself may have been a bit rough-edged when met in a bar and addressed with admiring words by a fan some years ago, Anticipation is inviting in the way a journal or a letter is inviting—open, personal, giving the impression of easiness and flexibility and good humor in the writing—and in addition is vast, wide-ranging, informative, opinionated, humorously self-conscious, formally adventurous, exact and written with crystal clarity. In fact, it answers very well to a description of storytelling Creeley gives in his introduction to his Collected Prose, a description L. D. discovers when poking around in the book in search of the tale she remembers that included the mouse in moonlight: “that intimate, familiar, localizing, detailing, speculative, emotional, unending talking.” As usual, especially in the case of books she admires, L. D. did not finish reading Anticipation. One hundred and fifty pages or so, about twelve years ago. Enough to know, though, as in the case of Dahlberg, that it interested her very much.

  Now, Molinaro herself is another that L. D. admires (e.g.: “A man with many wives and little money, or perhaps it was: a little wife and much money … ”—quoting from memory, may not have it quite right and not sure what story it is from). Does she not have certain things in common with Jane Bowles, in fact, as L. D. cautiously suggests, not saying all she is thinking, afraid of offending? But surely, surely not wrong about that? The dry humor. The ladylike characters—as for instance Molinaro’s Mrs. Feathergill—with hidden and sometimes criminal or potentially criminal depths. The pitiless eye with which she observes customs, behaviors, foibles. The clear style. The device of repeated epithets, as for instance Molinaro’s “the Hispanic-looking boy.” The keen irony. (“Just because she has inherited her mother’s aquiline nose, does this mean she smells the same rat her mother smells?” Quoting from memory again, from a story she heard Molinaro read out loud.)

  “I hate Jane Bowles!” she says, though. “She is sentimental; I am not!” L. D. intends to mull this one over—she has never thought of J. Bowles as sentimental. At a deeper level? Something she has missed? And then more: “She is X … , I am not!” and again: “She is X … , I am not!”—two additional perfectly balanced statements, naming what Bowles is that Molinaro is not. (No one else present can remember what those other two statements were.) Now the two across the table become enthusiastic about Paul Bowles. L. D. has a large place in her heart for Jane Bowles, but agrees with them that P. Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky is quite admirable as a piece of writing, if horrifying, of course, as a tale. McPherson names other P. Bowles titles, among them (as best L. D. can remember) Up Above the World, “A Distant Episode,” A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard—and Molinaro concurs behind her dark glasses:
“My favorite story is ‘He of the Assembly.’” She has called for an ashtray immediately, urgently. She smokes Gauloises before and after her plate of gray sliced steak, perhaps even during. (“The mother returns, carrying a second small bowl of Spanish cream. Which she places between the father & the visiting daughter, equidistant from their elbows on the dinner table.”—Positions with White Roses.) L. D. gives up promoting the case of J. Bowles, but thinks there is more to the story of U. M.’s feelings about J. Bowles: doesn’t one often emphatically deny in public what one secretly has to acknowledge?

  L. D. continues to think of McP.’s list: what about Dahlberg? U. M. hates him. Can’t stand him! Unbearable! Words to that effect, if not exactly those words. McPherson more or less concurs, making exception of certain writings, becoming slightly apologetic—for publishing him?—in the face of her onslaught. (Perhaps merely out of courtesy toward Molinaro.)