Sketch of Margaret Fishback, from the Pittsburgh Press Sun, 14 February 1932.
Margaret Fishback was among the most commercially successful poets of the 1930s, a prolific writer of comic verse who probably sold more books and had more poems published in more magazines than the better-known Ogden Nash. I doing some research on Fishback recently, I was startled to see the byline on a short portrait that appeared in several newspapers in February 1932: Joseph Mitchell. Yes, Joseph Mitchell, the author of Joe Gould’s Secret and legendary New Yorker writer who came to work daily for decades after publishing his last article for the magazine.
This piece was written in 1932, six years before Mitchell joined The New Yorker. At the time, Mitchell was just 24, a few weeks short of getting married, and working for the New York Herald Tribune. He’d begun to get a name for his color pieces, usually sketches of odd characters in the city — from bartenders to circus owners. A portrait of an author with a new book out would have been a pretty mundane assignment compared to what would become his signature, a soft piece to help sell Fishback’s first collection, I Feel Better Now.
Ad for I Feel Better Now, Margaret Fishback’s first collection of poems.
Not that the book needed much help. Published the same week that Mitchell’s article appeared, by the end of March, I Feel Better Now had gone through six printings.
NEW YORK. Feb. 13—Margaret Fishback. a young woman who likes to sit on summer nights in the somber beer houses which line the Hoboken waterfront and talk to the reminiscent sailors, said she wrote the casual verses in her book, I Feel Better Now, while riding to work on a Fifth Avenue bus and while eating lunch in a restaurant in Pennsylvania Station.
“And I wrote them on the backs of speakeasy cards,” she said, “and I wrote them while dressing to go out to dinner with some gent or other. And I wrote them while walking over the Brooklyn Bridge to see our absurd skyline. And on the Staten Island ferry. And on the bench. You know, everywhere.”
Miss Fishback has had long hair since she was a child. It is the color of corn shucks. She always has a good time. She likes elevator operators and bartenders. She gave the first autographed copy of her book to a conductor on a Fifth Avenue bus.
She lives in an old-fashioned house at 222 E. Sixty-first Street with Elizabeth Osgood, who is head of the proofroom at Appleton’s. There are 19 poplar trees on the block. There are also two churches but she does not known much about them.
“No, I don’t know what kind of poplars they are,” she said. “Lombardy poplars, maybe. I don’t know anything about nature. Do you like beer? I don’t care for it. The foam chokes me. All the people I know like beer. Over in Hoboken they live on it. You know. I have a lot of fun washing my hair. I like shower baths.
“The reason I started running around is because there are a lot of cats in the back yard of my home. And there’s a lady who always turns the radio on when they play ‘When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.’ I never went around to speakeasies until they began playing that. One night last summer I heard that song over and over. I got out of the house and went to the Palace, and the first thing I knew a woman named Kate Smith was singing it all over the place. Then I went to a speakeasy.”
Miss Fishback is an advertising copy writer for Macy’s. She is called “the highest paid advertising woman in the world,” but she laughs heartily whenever she hears that she is. She came to New York eight years ago, found a job in a ballet, danced in various opera companies at $1 a night and $1 for each rehearsal, wrote poems for F. P. A.’s [Franklin P. Adams] column in the World under the name of Marne and always had a good time. She is a graduate of Goucher College. There she was a friend of Sara Haardt, who is the wife of H. L. Mencken.
“Mencken is the most attractive man I ever met,” she said. “I like men. I never was married, but I have had my troubles. You can be sure I have had my moments. Hell, I’m not a lady poet. I’m not literary. I like to get around. The reason I’m not a married woman is because I don’t have time. I work from 9:15 to 6:30. I’m always in a hurry. It wouldn’t be fair to marry. I’m too interested in my work.”
Miss Fishback is a very lovely young woman. She does not like to play tennis, cook, sew, or play bridge. She does not like parrots. She is entranced by the commonplace. She buys chestnuts on a windy corner, finds a worm and writes “a triolet on an enviable existence.” Walking around New York she reaches the Garlic Belt and decides that “on Bleeker Street the babies’ noses aren’t pampered by the scent of roses.” and under the “L” she decides that “on Second Avenue the babies howl as if they had the rabies.”
The titles of her poems are indicative of her personality — “A tomato is all right in its place,” or “Capitulation within the city limits, preferably the East Fifties.” or “No duels, drama, or bloodshed to speak of,” or “Lines on watching a mother at her crooning,” or “Orange juice and a quick swallow.” She wears bracelets made from the hoofs of elephants. She likes to wear sweaters. She writes triolets in Maine bathtubs, and she swims with a great deal of pleasure, and she has two favorite drinks.
“I like an old fashioned,” she said, “if it’s made with a great deal of care. But I can care violently for sidecars.”
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1904, Margaret Fishback attended Goucher College outside Baltimore, where she became friends with Sara Haardt, who later married H. L. Mencken. She then headed to New York City. She took whatever work she could, including dancing in the chorus at the Metropolitan opera, until, on the strength of a few poems she’d sold to F. P. A., she walked into Macy’s department store and proposed to go to work in their advertising office.
They accepted, and she would remain with the store over ten years. Many newspaper stories suggested she was at one time the highest-paid woman in advertising, though she always dismissed this as unsubstantiated nonsense. (Though, given the pay inequality that prevailed at the time, it probably wouldn’t have takem much to claim the title.)
Her copy for Macy’s was, in some ways, more absurd and edgy than her poetry. An early item claimed that cows were positively thrilled to be giving up their lives for Macy’s latest line of purses. Fishback used to roam the store in search of odd items to boost, once proclaiming that a two-foot long cake tester she found in the kitchen department was just the thing when it came time to bake a two-foot tall cake. (The store ended up selling thousands.) And she was unapologetically on the side of women as the wiser of the two sexes, as demonstrated by this ad cartoon from 1938:
Fishback once said she started writing poetry as a reaction to seeing other people hold up writers as demigods. “I’m not literary,” she would demur. “I do things by ear.” And she never got too sophisticated in her poesy: indeed, as it sticks to simple meters and always rhymes, it might be more accurately called verse than poetry. But her early poems could be subtle and flirt with complex effects:
View From a Fifth-Floor Fire Escape
An underfed ailanthus tree Contributes animatedly One bright, intrepid splotch of green. And here and there through the ravine
An enterprising ray of sun Contrives to have a little fun By wriggling through a window just To call attention to the dust.
And though it’s messy in the street, The sky above is large and neat. And from this fire escape of mine The cloud effects are very fine.
Along about this time of day Despite the roof across the way That harbors shirts hung out to dry Against the valiant Gotham sky.
The poems in I Feel Better Now draw directly from Fishback’s own experiences: working, commuting, living in a fifth-floor walkup with no view except from the fire escape:
It may be just as well that I Can’t have a penthouse in the sky. Perchance it’s just as well to be Whete it’s impossible to see The rivers and the boats unless I wash my face and change my dress And hop a crosstown trolley car.
This was something new in 1932 and working women responded with enthusiasm. “Reading Miss Fishback is contagious business,” wrote a woman reviewer. “You stop strangers in the trolley car or in the subway and begin to read to them aloud.” Fishback’s poems could be found almost every week in one or another magazine: from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to Ladie’s Home Journal and the women’s sections of newspapers all over. Enough to collect for a second book, Out of My Head (1933).
With few points of reference, Margaret Fishback was often compared to Dorothy Parker, though Parker’s poetry was far more acidic and her fiction far more serious than the lightly comic stories she began to write. On the other hand, her work was positively biting compared to the warmer verse of Phyllis McGinley.
Her life and her voice took on a new tone in 1935 when she married Alberto Antolini, a buyer at Macy’s. She was undoubtedly the only poet whose engagement was announced in the pages of Sales Management magazine.
Her third book, published the same year, I Take It Back, was a little sunnier. The title was chosen by her husband and reviewers noted that it had “far more of sentiment and less of wit than I Feel Better Now. “The mighty Amazon has washed the poison off her darts and her winged shafts of poesy no longer sting.” Antolini convinced Fishback to move to the suburbs (Camden, New Jersey) — even though she had early written a poem about her own “Suburbaphobia”:
What meagre charm I had before Expires the moment that the door Of any suburb-going train Clangs shut. And I do not regain My normal joie de vivre until I leave each flagrant daffodil And buttercup behind, hell-bent On getting back to God’s cement.
Her life and writing changed again in 1941, when she gave birth to their son, Anthony. She left Macy’s days before the delivery, and became a stay-at-home mom. She continued to write and publish poems — dozens and dozens about Tony — and slowly took on freelance copywriting work.
She remained at home, taking an active part in Tony’s life (one interviewer found her assembling five hundred gift bags for a school fest) until he went away to college in 1958. Then she returned to advertising, but moved from Herald Square up to Madison Avenue, joining Young & Rubicam and then Doyle Dane Bernbach a year later. Fishback was there to witness the change in culture depicted in the TV series Mad Men, as print and radio ads began to take a distant backseat to television and “branding.” And she continued to publish: as late as 1966, her poems and comic anecdotes could be found in Look magazine’s “Look on the Light Side” section. One of her last contributions to Look was a declaration of her failure to be that thing an advertising professional most wanted to encourage: a competitive consumer.
Underprivileged Our living standard is so low, We’ve but a single radio.
No wonder that our children fret With just one television set.
No doubt our solitary phone Feels unendurably alone.
But most traumatic of all scars — We haven’t ever got two cars!
Margaret Fishback died in 1985. Kathleen Rooney made Fishback the protagonist of her 2018 novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (though I wonder what Fishback would think of her fictional transformation into Boxfish). Fishback’s poetry books are long out of print and somewhat scarce, though One to a Customer (1938), which collects her first four collections, can be found on the Internet Archive (link).
Note: Margaret Fishback the comic versifier should not be confused with Margaret Fishback Powers the Christian poet.
Regular readers of this site know that I am slightly obsessed with bringing the work of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan back to light (and back to print via the Recovered Books series at Boiler House Press). Though I thought I had exhausted the resources of the Internet and numerous archives in search of information about Trevelyan, I recently stumbled across four poems that were published in Nineteenth Century and Beyond in 1927 following her graduation from Oxford and her winning the Newdigate Prize for her poem “Julia, Daughter of Claudius.” Not only are these the only works by Trevelyan published between her Newdigate poem and her first novel Appius and Virginia (1932), but the poems are credited to G. Eileen Trevelyan, suggesting this was how she preferred to be known — at least in print.
In the interest of making Trevelyan’s work more accessible, I reprint here the four poems. The poems appeared in the September 1927 issue of Nineteenth Century and Beyond and were prefaced by the following note from the editors: “Miss G. Eileen Trevelyan of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, was the authoress of the Newdigate Prize poem of this year. It is the first award of this prize to a woman.”
Vale Atque Ave I shall not hear the wailing and the chants, I shall not see the smoke’s thin, acrid spire, Nor hear the long, low throbbing of the drums, Nor cast one blossom on your funeral pyre.
My feet will not read out the ancient dust That stirs about Benares’ mystic shrine, Nor, when your ashes flutter to their rest, May there attend them any prayer of mine:
Yet shall I hail you in the setting sun, In every changing glory of the air, And find you ever in each blade and bloom That grows on earth. Beauty is everywhere.
The Prisoner “Do your chains clash loud on floor and wall, Do you gnaw the bars of some dark den Deep in the earth, where reptiles crawl, Where day is harsh with frenzied brawl And night with the shrieks of men?”
“My cell is clean and white and bar, It echoes to no warder’s tread; The hushed foot-falls of memory Die slowly on the stagnant air, And a sigh not born of misery, A long-drawn, passionless despair, The breath of the living dead.”
The Jewel They brought the radiance from the violet wings Of exquisite moments; myriad-plumaged hours Of light and green-blue evening, starred with thought; Dove-grey silences and emerald showers Of song; and burned ecstacies of gold, Crimson, amethyst and jade to mould A jewel of limpid fire.
The brought the brazier Of molten dreams; entwined curved filigrees, Tortuous soul-threads, anguish-bright, drawn fine By poignant fingers. Intricately now Each facet blazed with subtle artistries Of pain, a glory pendant in Life’s brow, A flaming lamp in His eternal shrine.
Portrait Broad white cliffs that face the sea, Feathered spray and glistening loam: Broad white brow that bends to me, Bright as the foam.
Elfin smile that, dimpling, plays At hide and seek with her lips and eyes: Thistle-down the light wind sprays Among hovering butterflies,
While far below where sea-birds sweep, Where the blue sea takes the sky to mate, The surge is hushed and the smooth sands sleep And the still depths wait.
Raymond Souster was born in Toronto and, aside from four years he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War Two, lived there for over ninety years. And almost every day of his adult life, even when he worked full time in the Bank of Commerce, he wrote poetry about the city, its people, its nature, and its history. The fifty-some collections of poems that he published represent a unique record of one city’s life, almost an impressionistic diary of Toronto in the 20th Century.
Souster’s life was almost exceptionally unexceptional. After finishing high school in 1939, he went to work for the Imperial Bank on the word of his father — who, as a good banker, didn’t think it proper for his son to join the Standard Bank where he worked. He enlisted in the RCAF in 1941, trained as a mechanic, served in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before spending six months in England as a ground crew member in a Lancaster squadron. After mustering out in 1945, he returned to the bank, married in 1947, and stuck to a predictable routine until he retired in 1984. He and his wife lived in the same house on Baby Point Road most of their married life, and other than the death of his parents, the biggest event in his life may have been the arrival of major league baseball in 1969.
His routine allowed Souster to channel tremendous energy into poetry. His as-yet not fully collected oeuvre amounts to thousands of poems, and his pace of production didn’t slow down until his very last days. He sometimes referred to his writing time as his graveyard shift. As he wrote in a poem of this title,
Five o’clock and still sleepless, with eyelids half-shuttered, I am still commanded to remain here at my desk,
awaiting the late arrival of the last two lines of what’s turning out to be a reluctant, foot-dragging little bitch of a poem.
He and his wife Rosalia had no children. In a poem he dedicated to her after twenty-some years of marriage, he proposed,
Let us call these poems if you like the children we never had,
a thousand-voiced family, some born hard, some born easily,
all bearing, I hope, some marks of our love, our sweat and our care.
He did not, however, overestimate the significance of his work. As he wrote self-mockingly in “Epitaph for a Poet” from the early 1990s,
I wrote too much, said too little.
Perhaps being silent now my greatest accomplishment.
And as much as he devoted his time and energy to his own poetry, Souster contributed as much or more to supporting his fellow Canadian poets. With Louis Dudek and Irving Layton, he founded the Contact Press and Contact magazine in the early 1950s and was responsible for publishing the work of dozens of young poets, including George Bowering, Frank Davey, and Margaret Atwood. He helped organized countless readings in Toronto and arranged for visits by much better-known American poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
Coming across the work of William Carlos Williams probably had the most profound influence on his own poetry. “The Six Quart Basket” from Crepehanger’s Carnival (1958) is perhaps Souster’s most obvious imitation of Williams’ minimalist style:
The six-quart basket, one side gone, half the handle torn off,
sits in the centre of the lawn and slowly fills up with the white fruits of the snow.
In some ways, however, it was Williams’ life, rather than his poetry, that may have had the greatest significance for Souster. Williams’ ability to fit the duties of busy doctor and the hours required to remain an active writer and poet into the space of a single day inspired him to find the time and energy for those many graveyard shifts at his typewriter.
Like Williams, Souster had a keen eye for the signs of natural life that could be found even in the midst of a major city like Toronto. Indeed, one of the wonderful things about reading one of Souster’s books is how often poems about weather and street people and city buses and jazz, he seems to grab us by the elbow and whisper, “Stop. Look over there.” Of “Queen Anne Lace,” he writes,
It’s a kind of flower that if you didn’t know it you’d pass by the rest of your life.
But once it’s been pointed out you’ll look for it always, even in places where you know it can’t possibly be.
Souster notices the ants in his driveway, the butterfly on a bus, the periodic return of cicadas (he certainly heard plenty of them), a raccoon patrolling at night, the stench that tells him a skunk has marked his cellar door. If anything, he seems apologetic for not paying close enough attention to nature:
Looking up to see the birds I notice first shy traces of buds, the tiny green fronds on all the willows,
and feel as I go down this street almost ashamed of my sorrow.
Souster saw not only that nature came before man but that it intended to stick around long after man has gone. In “Seven Days of Looking at a Rubber Plant,” in which he records the changes in a sorry rubber plant in a downtown hotel window, he imagines the plant planning its escape:
The rubber plant in the plain front window of the Peacock Hotel has become two legs,
one trying to escape through the back door, the other hoping somehow to make it out the front.
Alongside the natural life in Toronto, Souster’s poems are full of the homeless, the poor, the druggies and drunks, the mad, the sad, and the lonely. He was fully aware that he shared the streets with people who couldn’t enjoy the comforts of his routines. As he once told an interviewer,
This isn’t an easy city or an easy time. And I suppose I write so many poems about poor people because frankly they’re the most interesting, the only ones who seem to have really come up against life; their scars are almost like medals from the engagement.
And so, as with the signs of nature, Souster is constantly reminding us to look at these people, not to avoid them. “You can’t keep walking around/the same block day after day,” he write in “Bad Luck,”
just because you don’t want to meet the heavy woman with the limp, the woman with the crazy look, old winter hat pulled over her face.
If anything, it’s the tendency of advertisers, city planners, and boosters to gloss over or pretend that there are uglier sides to human life that angers him most:
today’s smart drinkers are shown as handsome, well dressed, always surrounded by many young and beautiful women glasses held just so:
the bastards never show them crowded into drunk-tanks hardly able to breathe, still retching a little, or clawing at the walls in an effort to escape the oncoming slimy crawling, multiplying beetles.
It’s not enough just to notice, however. Souster wants to know how to share their pain and suffering as literally as possible. “The Problem,” as he poses it:
How to share the aching feet of the already limping deliverer of handbills.
In “County Courtroom,” he wonders if his responses — his empathy and his poetry — are both futile:
either because I don’t believe this evil can be changed, this system I’ve helped create, help perpetuate, and so I don’t ever let it really get to me,
or it may be I don’t mind too much the way it works the way it fiendishly destroys….
Besides, I still hope to buy off my conscience by writing a page or two of angry verse.
At times, the simplicity of Souster’s style threatens to verge into the territory of Edgar Guest, into the superficiality and pat satisfaction of newspaper poetry of the mid-20th Century. As Bruce Whiteman wrote in Raymond Souster and His Work (1985), one of the few dedicated studies, Souster wrote no reviews or criticism, abstained from postulating or advocating any theories. Instead,
His poetics is correspondingly practical. Though there is certainly a good deal to be said about the influences upon his work, the poems as a whole do not emerge from a poetics any more complicated than that of a man talking about his experiences in words recognizably his own, but not directed by any elaborate theory of poetic voice or procedure.
Whiteman also points out that Souster produced no single great work comparable to The Waste Land or Paterson. Souster himself admitted this. In “Confession” he wrote,
I’m not sure I’m ready for epics — there are far too many little songs the rest have left unsung.
I’m not sure I entirely agree, though. The issue is not that Souster has no single great work: it’s that he published his epics in bits and pieces over the course of decades.
In the nearly thirty years between Whiteman’s book and Souster’s death, for example, he wrote several dozen poems sharing the title “Pictures from a Long-Lost World” which were 6-10 page-long accounts of historical events such as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Taken together, these represent a substantial work. It is not, however, a very good one. As much as I hope the bulk of Souster’s work will be long-remembered, these poems, I think, are best quickly forgotten. Historical poetry is even harder to write well than historical fiction, and whenever Souster ventured beyond the territory of first-hand knowledge, the immediacy and simplicity of his writing suffered.
There are others, and good ones, however. In Riding the Long Black Horse (1993) and Close to Home (1996), he published a series of poems about his father and mother’s last days and deaths. Souster’s mother and father, also Toronto natives, lived to the age of 96 and 98, respectively. He was in his seventies when each failed, suddenly and seriously, and entered into downward spirals of ambulances, hospitalization, and care homes. Souster recorded their last weeks in poems that read like journal entries: never too philosophical, never too sentimental, simply noticing. In “A Matter of Dentures,” he describes how his father, with weak and shaking hands and nearly blind, attempts to fit his dentures into place. After many attempts, near exhaustion with the effort and frustration, he asks a nurse for help.
… she smiled, took the dentures from me, said “Open wide” to my father, then deftly pushed them in with an expert’s sure touch, finishing with a “Try that for size,” and Dad closed his mouth, and I knew right away his old grinders were back in place again.
We were still both thanking that nurse when she left to answer a buzzer, then, in the sudden silence of your room, both of us must have known, almost at the very same moment, that you’d just finished suffering another in a string of defeats you’d never bounce back from. And from that day on, never once did you put your teeth back in on your own.
Taken with other poems he wrote around this same time, recollections of moments with his mother and father over their many years together — “All the Long Way Home,” for example, about how Souster and his father walked for miles from a downtown Toronto bar on Christmas Eve 1940, supposedly because his father wanted to “take the air” but really because he needed to sober up before facing his wife — these points constitute a single and remarkable work, perhaps the longest extant record of the relationship between a child and his parents.
And then, there are Souster’s many poems about Toronto. Some were published in Queen City (1984) and Of Time and Toronto (2000), but most are scattered across dozens of books. Were these to be collected and curated, the resulting work would represent a unique portrait of a major city over the course of seven decades. Souster’s history with Toronto allowed him to mark the passage of time and the city’s evolution. He knew, for example, that where the H & R Block office stand on the corner of Jane Street and Harshaw Avenue, “the sign CAIRD’S CONFECTIONERY/Candies, Soda Fountain, Light Lunches/no longer swings with the breeze.”
There is relatively little nostalgia in Souster’s early Toronto poems. “When I look across today at this,/the first school I ever attended,” he writes in the early 1950s, “I think of how little/of anything really useful/it gave me to take/to the big world outside.” By the late 1960s, however, looking around his old neighborhood, “it’s only ghosts I see around these houses.” He was willing to admit that he was “well hooked on the past,/and a sucker for memories.”
But the best of the Toronto poems put you into the middle of the city’s life. If Souster had a favorite place in the city, it was undoubtedly on the sidewalk at rush hour: “Where Yonge Street meets Queen/the flood of human faces quickens,/seethes in its quicksand run”; “People out in droves,/spilling out over the sidewalks.” In “St. Catherine Street East,” he imagines the cityscape as a palimpsest on which all the lives ever lived there are written:
Every face in every window of these buildings watching as we go down the steaming pavement, on and out of this jungle where the dead are never buried by the living, but crowd onto buses, sit late at bar-stools, or wait in the darkness of always-airless rooms.
For Souster, the city had a life of its own, a power greater than that of any (or all) of its inhabitants. He knows that even he will ultimately be defeated by it:
Strange city, cold, hateful city, that I still celebrate and love while out there somewhere you are carefully working at my death…
Souster died in 2012. Between 1980 and 2000, Oberon Press published ten volumes of Souster’s collected poems, covering the bulk of his published poetry between 1940 and 2000. Unfortunately, these are now out of print and a few of the volumes almost impossible to find. Volumes 1 through 5 and Volume 8 are available, along with at least two dozen of Souster’s books, on the Internet Archive. You can also hear him read a selection of his poems there, from a Folkways record titled Six Toronto Poets.
Life could not keep up with Souster, however, so it’s understandable that Contact Press, the successor to his home-run publication venture of the 1950s and 1960s, came out with Come Rain, Come Shine: The Last Poems of Raymond Souster two years after his death. Probably the best place to start discovering Souster’s work is with his 1964 collection The Colour of the Times, which won the Governor General’s Award for poetry that year.
L to R: Pete Morgan; Philip Callow; Harold Massingham; Anne Cluysenaar; Agneta Falk.
This is a guest post by Ian McMillan
Let’s face it, most poets are neglected (or they think they are) and, oddly, even when poets published by small independent presses are out of print, they’re still somehow in print because the publisher has got loads of copies of unsold books under the bed and in the wardrobe in the spare room.
Here, though, are five poets who seem to be out of print; two of them are so out of print that I almost lost their books. I found them under the bed, of course.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Secker and Warburg had a fantastic poetry list, including poets like James Fenton, Jon Hollander and writers known in other fields like Erica Jong. For me, Pete Morgan was one of the best; his poetry is lyrical, beautifully constructed and written for performance. Pete was one of the poets I took as a model for the freelance life when I was a young poet starting to make my way in the literary world: he did workshops and gigs and school visits and wrote copy for advertising firms; anything to keep the wolf from the door. The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed was his first collection and it brims with work that begs to be performed, like ‘My Enemies Have Sweet Voices,’ which Al Stewart later turned into a song. His other Secker books A Winter Visitor and The Spring Collection are well worth hunting out.
Philip Callow was a marvellous novelist as well as a poet; his novels like The Hosanna Man and The Story of my Desire are well worth reading. The wonderful Bradford-based Rivelin Press, run by another neglected poet, David Tipton, published a number of Callow’s collections, including this one, full of beautifully observed poems of love and the natural world: ‘After you hear the rustle in a denim shirt/of a pocketful of apple leaves/Gathered by your pocket under eyes of apples.’
Massingham always suffered from being a couple of years below Ted Hughes at Mexborough Grammar School, so his work seems to be endlessly in Hughes’s long shadow. I’ve always enjoyed Massingham’s imagistic, Anglo-Saxon influenced, word-drunk work. In later life he made a living as a crossword complier under the name Mass, and that makes sense to me because his poems can often feel like crossword clues, as in the poem ‘Cow’: ‘Tub-sided galleon-/But O, her walk, stalwart, a wonder of hundredweights/Borne by sure bone.’ Marvellous!
• Anne Cluysenaar: Double Helix, Carcanet Press (1982)
Anne Cluysenaar was born in Belgium in 1936 and I knew her when I was writer-in-residence at Sheffield Poly in the mid-1980’s; she taught English and Creative Writing and had an evangelical zeal for the power of poetry to change lives. Double Helix was published by Carcanet Press in 1982; it’s a remarkable example of hybrid writing, being a combination of Cluysenaar’s poem and her mother’s prose memoirs and letters; the writing bridges the generations and invites us to examine our own pasts. Tragically, Anne was killed by her son in 2014.
Agneta Falk is a Swedish poet who was born in 1946. She lived in the endlessly creative enclave of Hebden Bridge for many years until she moved in the late 1990’s to the equally creative enclave of San Francisco, where she’s still very active on the literary scene. Here By Choice is her first pamphlet and I’ve always enjoyed her striking and unsettling lines like ‘A car goes by/rocking the floor boards/the wood creaks/like petals of red roses/hitting the tarmac.’ Or, from her poem ‘Hanna’: ‘She knew nothing of fear or hope/laying her bare bones in the/arms of soft lichen.’
I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from the scene. He was no longer a regular on television variety shows — in part because television variety shows had themselves faded from the scene by the end of the Seventies. He was still performing live, but much of his audience were people who’d been going to his shows for years. After pumping out a steady stream of books of poetry and lyrics for over two decades, his output — having made him the biggest selling poet in the world for much of that time — fizzled out. After Intervals and Valentines in 1986, there would only be two more books, published in the early 2000s.
But there was a time — from 1967 to around the mid-1970s — when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or record store or turn on a TV or radio without bumping into Rod McKuen. If he wasn’t as big as the Beatles, he was as big as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or Jacqueline Susann and certainly more prolific.
That was when, as a profile that appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 put it, “every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen.” “His mellow poetry was on the end table (Listen to the Warm), his lovestruck music and spoken-word recordings were on the hi-fi and his kindly face was on the set, on The Tonight Show and Dinah Shore’s variety hour.” (In our house, it was The Sea, one of his collaborations with Anita Kerr.) In Frank Sinatra’s long career, Rod McKuen was the only songwriter he ever devoted an entire album to. Guys bought his books to show their girlfriends how sensitive they were and women bought them for their boyfriends to show them what sensitive was. “The cult of Rod McKuen grows by leaps and bounds,” proclaimed a 1967 profile in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The same year, The Chicago Tribune’s entertainment editor gushed, “Rod McKuen is great, great, absolutely great! His is a poet, and he sings and reads practically nothing but his own songs and poems. Doesn’t sound like a night club act? Well, he doesn’t just read and sing them — he lives them and makes you breathe and feel them. He drags you through the gamut of emotions, putting a lump in your throat one minute and making you chortle the next.”1
Bear in mind: this was a guy who wrote poetry and then read it in a quiet, gravelly voice (he used to joke that “It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser” and rock critic Greil Marcus once said it had “the force of a squirrel’s”) over a soft musical accompaniment. That was it. He didn’t dance and you couldn’t dance to him. He didn’t act, or at least hadn’t acted since his last B-movie in early 1960s. He didn’t tell jokes, or at least not many and not well enough. He wasn’t a sex symbol: although there were plenty of women (and undoubtedly some men) who fell in love with him, he made it clear he was a loner. And yet, he’s the only poet with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, as late as 1974, he was being billed as “the greatest entertainer in the world!”2
Ad for Rod McKuen’s 1974 appearance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica
He did, however, infuriate many people who took poetry seriously. The English poet David Harsent described McKuen’s poetry variously as “scraps of maudlin meditation masquerading as emotion deeply felt,” “ersatz anguish, carefully sifted to pablum for easy consumption,” and “lumpish impressions of places and people, flashes of cheap surrealism and clumsy gropings at the numinous.” “No one has done more to degrade language and human sensibility,” D. Keith Mano wrote at the end of a full-page skewering in the National Review.
Josh Greenfeld, writing in Mademoiselle, lumped McKuen with Kahlil Gibran and the now-forgotten Walter Benton as “the Marshmallow Poets.” “The main thing I have against McKuen is his oversimplification of everything,” Greenfeld says. “I mean, if your pussy cat comes home, your life problems aren’t solved. And the words, the phrases McKuen uses! They all lack that precise particularization that is poetry.” Professor Robert W. Hill of Clemson University argued that McKuen “touched the anti-intellectual, the escapist, the superficial, the blindly sentimental capacities of the American public.” McKuen’s books, he wrote, belonged in “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetry section.”
This was similar to the view expressed by Margot Hentoff in The New York Review of Books in its one and only review of his poetry: “McKuen is so devitalized a singer, so bad a poet, so without wit or tune—as well as so out of touch with the contemporary pop sensibility—that one can only consider his monumental nationwide popularity as a kind of counter-counter-cultural phenomenon.” Karl Shapiro said it was irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet. Shapiro conflated McKuen with Bob Dylan into a creation he called Dylan MacGoon. Asked about his creative regime, Shapiro wrote, “MacGoon tried to answer as best he could (language is not his strong point).” One reviewer refused to do anything more than include the title of McKuen’s latest in a round-up of recent poetry books. Reviewing McKuen, he complained, was “a bit like using a jack-hammer to clear cobwebs.”
This attitude was a dramatic contrast to the gushing admiration with which Margaret MacDonald, a reporter for the Oakland Times reviewed McKuen’s first book of poetry And Autumn Came in 1954. She praised the book’s “powerful impact of sincere emotions, expressed in clear language with original figures of speech and a sensitive approach.” “Like all true poetry,” she felt, it could “stand the test of re-reading” and was “one which all who really love poetry will keep in an easily accessible place for frequent perusal.”
There was a long gap between that review and the next. As Barry Alfonso writes in his fine biography of McKuen, A Voice of the Warm, McKuen self-published his next collection, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrow, and sold it at his concerts and other appearances while his long-time partner, Edward Habib, drove up and down California, placing it with bookstores. “I’d go through the telephone book and get addresses of bookstores,” Habib told Alfonso. “I’d go to the stores and say, ‘Can you handle five books? If they don’t sell by next week I’ll come and pick them up.’” In a matter of a year or so, this approach stacked up over sales of over 50,000 copies.
It was McKuen’s lyrics that sold the books — lyrics he wrote first for Glenn Yarbrough, one of the most successful of the school of well-scrubbed folksingers so popular in the early 1960s, and later for himself after signing with RCA. McKuen was a prolific lyricist, heavily influenced by Jacques Brel, whom he came to know during a spell in France and with whom he collaborated, performing some of Brel’s songs and writing others than Brel performed in translation. Indeed, the label chansonnier was perhaps more appropriate for McKuen than poet. And his performances drew inspiration from Brel, as McKuen usually sat on a stool on a bare stage, dressed in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sneakers, and sang/spoke his songs.
In 1966, RCA released a Yarbrough album titled The Lonely Things: The Love Songs of Rod McKuen. The next year, having signed with RCA as well, McKuen recorded Listen to the Warm, which was also the title of his third book. Having heard about the grassroots success of Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows, Bennett Cerf of Random House had approached him to join its list and the two men agreed to an initial release of 30,000 copies of Listen to the Warm.
Gene Shalit broke the news in the Los Angeles Times, commenting, “Insiders versed [funny, Gene] in publishing history can’t remember another volume of poems by a national unknown which got such a send-off.” McKuen cagily negotiated a partnership arrangement that allowed him to continue publishing the books with his own Stanyan Press imprint, which gave him the advantage of Random House’s nationwide marketing while preserving the independence to put out other titles (which ultimately included God’s Greatest Hits, a collection of Bible quotes illustrated by the folk artist Sister Gertrude Morgan).
Listen to the Warm was as much a phenomenon of 1967 as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band. The book sold over one million copies in hardback within a year of its publication. Although the record’s success was less spectacular, it became the first of nine albums McKuen placed in Billboard’s Top 200 charts over the next four years.
Both the book and the record opened with a poem that became a favorite for many McKuen fans. “A Cat Named Sloopy” remembered a cat McKuen had owned when he was living in New York City in the early 1960s.
For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was in her sandbox. Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street were her domain.
In the poem, Sloopy wait while the poet goes off in search of love, or at least one-night stands, until one day when he runs away.
Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing that ever gave back love to me. prologue
Some of its fame could be attributed to association (or confusion) with a popular tune from two years before, “Hang On, Sloopy” by the McCoys. But it was a heartstring-tugger sure-fired to bring out the hankies. I suspect more than a few of his fans wanted to take Rod home like a stray kitten.
After years of hanging around the margins, McKuen quickly found himself in the warm embrace of the book, record, television, and stage business. He did hundreds of live shows each year, dozens of television appearances, and continued to release new books of poetry and new records at a steady rate. Ads for his books and LPs ran in mainstream magazines like the Saturday Review of Literature, Playboy, Life, and Time. In a 1980 book titled Shrinklits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size, Maurice Sagoff parodied Listen to the Warm:
Are you sentimental? Dote on plastic charm? Rod’s massage is gentle, Does no lasting harm:
No deep thoughts to rile you, Blandness to beguile you, Pare your toenails while you Listen to the smarm.
McKuen’s only record to break into Billboard’s Top 100, however, came years before Listen to the Warm. It was a novelty tune titled “Oliver Twist” that mocked the rage launched by Chubby Checker’s hit, “Let’s Do the Twist.” He later blamed his scratchy voice on too many nights of trying to sing the tune at bowling alley lounges.
An ad for a 1961 McKuen appearance performing his hit, “Oliver Twist”
“Oliver Twist” was only one of the many milestones along McKuen’s career path to bestselling poet (or chansonnier). After dropping out of high school, he started working as a disc jockey for an Oakland, California radio station. Within a year, he had attracted the attention of Bay Area entertainment columnist Dwight Newton, who included him among his “1952 Prospects”: “A young man with much promise. Writes interesting, colorful scripts for his disc jockey show. Good individual voice.” After a spell in the Army, he returned to the Bay Area, took an apartment on Stanyan Street in San Francisco, and began appearing as a singer in nightclubs such as the Purple Onion.
He also dipped his toe in the water of Hollywood, picking up a few parts but eventually earning lobby card billing, if only as a supporting player, on such movies as Rock, Pretty Baby. One of McKuen’s friends later joked that, “If Rod weren’t a poet, he’d make a tremendous marketing analyst,” and the proof can be found early on. In 1956, the United Press syndicate ran a feature titled, “Rod McKuen Has Too Many Talents.” “McKuen is a young man in a very pleasant quandary,” wrote the anonymous author — most likely a press agent paid by McKuen. “He does so many things well that he has trouble sometimes deciding which talent to emphasize.”
The article also reported that McKuen had “appeared in five Japanese films” while serving with the Army. This was just one of many accomplishments that McKuen would claim over the years. Others included singing with Lionel Hampton’s band, writing a column for the San Francisco Examiner, and performing for a state dinner at the Kennedy White House. He told one interviewer, “I write novels under other names. I wrote a medical book. I’ve had a couple of books of history that have done very well. I’m in the middle of doing a history now that will be about 12 or 13 volumes by the time it’s finished.” He also claimed that every day he ate one meal, read two books, wrote ten poems, and worked 16 hours straight.
Three and a half years of research has led me to believe that Rod told many white lies and some real whoppers about his life and career. A constant need to legitimize himself and prove his worth drove him to exaggerate his actual accomplishments, which were truly formidable. His deceptions were mostly benign; he probably came to believe many of them were true. In the end, they invoke more sympathy than outrage. No amount of recognition could still the nagging inner voice that he just wasn’t quite good enough.
Even after achieving commercial success as America’s chansonnier, culminating in his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1969 (which was recorded and released as an album), McKuen continued to pad his resume. Perhaps his most dubious claim was of having taught himself musical composition. As early as the late 1950s, when he recorded several albums that would today be labeled “beatnik jazz,” he was taking credit for not only the lyrics but the music to his chansons. In 1960, he collaborated with veteran studio arranger Dick Jacobs on an instrumental album titled Written in the Stars, also known as The Zodiac Suite, with each track based on a different astrological sign. McKuen was listed as composer, but this needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
There was a lot of musical ghosting going on in the 1950s and 1960s. As is almost common knowledge today, most of the music heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and other LA-based pop groups was actually played by a handful of ace session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. TV comedian Jackie Gleason claimed arranger credits on several dozen easy listening albums that were the work of trumpeter Bobby Hackett working at union scale.
McKuen acknowledged some of his collaborators, such as Stan Freeman, another veteran faceless studio musician, but in reality Freeman probably did most of the work. As Michael Feinstein told Barry Alfonso, Freeman recalled that McKuen would say something like, “I want to write a concerto for oboe and this and that instrument” and then hum a couple of melodies that Freeman would then work into a completed piece. And Freeman was certainly not McKuen’s only “collaborator”: others included John Scott Trotter, Vince Guaraldi, and Arthur Greenslade.
McKuen’s musical credits began to pile up quickly in the late 1960s. He was credited with a number of soundtracks, most notably for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Song in 1969 and which became a #1 pop hit for the English singer Oliver. His “classical” compositions began to compete with, and eventually overtake, his chanson albums. He took to listing them along with the titles of his books on the frontispiece.
Rod McKuen’s credits, from Intervals (1980)
As Alfonso writes, McKuen’s compositions “sound like an amalgam of Aaron Copland–like Western elements, stage musical melodies, and film soundtrack excerpts” — in other words, the sort of pleasant but somehow generic stuff often sold as library music. He gave Newsday reporter Leslie Hanscom a recording of his opera The Black Eagle when she interviewed him in 1979. “On later sampling,” she wrote, it turned out to be a work of truly masterful monotony with a plot and theme that might have made Jonathan Livingston Eagle a more appropriate title.” Hanscom found that McKuen “projects a sense of self that could dwarf Wagner.” That might have been an understatement: in 1983, he told Bill Thomas of the Baltimore Sun that he’d rewritten Wagner’s entire Ring cycle and reduced it down to 5½ minutes. Though McKuen often award-dropped the fact that one of his pieces was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music for 1974,3 for his composition The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra, the other fact that composers such as Patric Standford openly admitted to ghostwriting for him tends to diminish just how impressive that accomplishment sounds.
The more one looks into the details of McKuen’s life and work, the more McKuen comes off as a Jack of all trades and master of none. His poetry and lyrics, in particular, were written at a furious rate. He published nearly 30 collections of poems, the vast majority new, in the space of 20 years. By the end of 1968, three of the alone had sold over one million copies. By 1972, it was 12 books and over 4 million copies; by 1974, 15 and 9 million; by 1979, 24 and 16 million. McKuen’s modesty about the success of his poetry tended to ring false. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” he told one interviewer, “but who’s counting?” Or, on another occasion, “I didn’t even know I was a millionaire until I read about it in the newspapers.”4
The enormous popularity of McKuen’s poetry could be one of the reasons so many critics attacked it. As critic Gary Morris has written, “There aren’t many art forms where commercial success is relentlessly equated with aesthetic worth.” The National Lampoon made an obvious joke of it in their McKuen parody: “The lone$ome choo choo of my mind/i$ warm like drippy treacle/on the wind$wept beach.” Even the New York Times felt free to publish their own parody: “I met your press kit first/Box of mimeographed attributes and achievements.”
A few tried to look beyond the sales figures. Robert Kirsch, the LA Times book editor, declared in late 1968, “I don’t believe that Rod McKuen can be ignored as a poet simply because he is the best-selling troubadour in America today.” But even Kirsch found it hard to be unqualified in his praise. Although he found that McKuen “more than occasionally … is capable of rendering awareness into perceptions of small but haunting truths,” he also acknowledged that “He is less effective on the printed page than on his records, where, assisted by music and the nuance of the spoken voice, he evokes recognition and fantasy.” Too many of McKuen’s poems — such as “Manhattan Beach,” from Lonesome Cities — read less like poetry and more like, well, notes:
I’ve taken a house at Manhattan Beach working the summer into a book.
Eddie came last weekend and brought two girls and some books. The girls were pretty but the books stayed longer and now they menace me stacked up on the floor staring back in unread smugness.
Otherwise I’ve had no visitors.
In a survey of American poetry of the 1960s written a few years later, Louis Simpson quoted from Listen to the Warm:
But yesterday you touched me and we drove to the toll beach and ran in the sand. Sorry no one could see how beautifully happy we were.
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Simpson asked. “It’s simple, it makes lots of people happy. Only an effete intellectual snob would find fault with it…. The world is like a sand-pile with lots of nice gooey wet blobs to play with. It’s a soda pop, a weenie-roast, a sticky, marshmallow kiss.” McKuen’s world, he wrote, “is the province of Youth.” But Simpson warned that, “Youth sooner or later will want to have poetry. Not this slop.”
McKuen claimed he started writing poetry because he couldn’t find ones he liked. “I wanted to say something different or write about what everyone else was saying but say it in a different way.” But in truth, what tends to distinguish McKuen’s language from that of other poets is its lack of individuality. His poetry, like his music, is not so much different as generic.
“Forever is not far enough/to throw a smile/that never was” McKuen writes in one of his later collections, The Sound of Solitude. Which seems at first glance like a koan, something a guru or Yoda might say. Except … look closer, read it over a few times, and you realize it’s nothing. We know what each word means, but put together it’s nonsense. Everywhere is close enough/to lose a memory/you never had. Would you buy a book filled of 80 pages with that?
Saturday Night Live used to run a cartoon feature about two superheroes known as the Ambiguously Gay Duo. McKuen might be crowned the Ambiguously Poetic Poet. “I’m not a poet, I’m a stringer of words,” he sometimes demurred. Yet when the Los Angeles Times invited McKuen to submit a short reflection “On What Poets Are … and Aren’t,” he wrote with patent self-importance, “A poet is a keeper of the language.” The job of the poet was to “shed light on the darkness.” A poet “must repair but never rape the words that form his native tongue,” adding rather disingenuously, “nor should he be an advertisement for himself.” The LA Times piece sparked some sharp reactions. One reader wrote in to say that “Having McKuen comment on the nature of poetry is somewhat akin to having a kindergarten fingerpainter comment on the art of Picasso.”
McKuen often resorted to a rhetorical trick when asked to defend his poetry:
Actually, I really don’t think it’s fair to criticize poetry. A novel, sure. But not poetry. See a poet is his poem. He lives his poem. So if you just give a poem a quick reading and call it something like sappy, then you’re really calling the poet sappy. It just isn’t fair. Not really.
Attack my poems and you attack me, McKuen was saying — a cheap way of warding off any interviewer with good manners. “I lived that poem,” he liked to declare. “I defy you to catch me and say that I wrote about the experience badly. How do you know what the experience was? You didn’t live it!” Some who profiled McKuen pointed out, however, his penchant for assuming a martyr-like pose. Like the old joke, he seemed to say, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now, you can suffer, too!”
Rod McKuen signing books at a Phoenix mall, 1977.
Another tactic was to compare his fame to that of his critics. “Name one critic who’s downed me,” he challenged Bill Thomas, “and ask five total strangers if they know who he is. I bet none do. Then ask them if they’ve heard of me. They may have a good opinion or a bad opinion — but they sure as hell know who I am.”
On other occasions, McKuen would defend his poetry by trotting out its achievements. “I mean — if I wasn’t a damn good poet,” he told Rick Soll from The Chicago Tribune in 1975, “why would I be in the Oxford Book of Verse, why would I be in all the famous quotation books, why would my poems be used in hundreds of college courses?”
The trouble is: none of that was true. There is no Oxford Book of Verse. There are Oxford books of English Verse and American Verse and Comic Verse, and McKuen is in none of them. I also checked more than a dozen different quotation books published between 1968 and 1978, and the only one I found McKuen’s name in was What They Said in 1971: the Yearbook of Spoken Opinion. McKuen’s quote is worth repeating in the context of this discussion, however:
Critics attack my poetry because it’s understandable. I always think everything should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A while ago it was announced that I would come out with a paperback of new poetry. I got bad reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Book World and a rave from Coronet, and I still have not written one word of the book.
Which, of course, was also untrue.
As for his poetry being used in hundreds of college courses, this was also improbable. A few, such as Brian Curtis in a 1972 article in The English Journal, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English titled, “The Necessity of the ‘Rod McKuens'”, argued for McKuen as, if you will, a gateway drug for serious poetry. However, this argument tended to produce the response reported by Ross Talarico in his book Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America: “As a matter of fact, I brought sneers to the faces of poets and critics when, during a couple of panel discussions over the past few years, I’ve made the observation that if poetry survives at all in America, perhaps more credit will go to Rod McKuen than to any of a few high-powered poetry critics.”
And both Curtis and Talarico were careful to point out that while McKuen’s poetry had utility, it lacked quality:
Do I say these things because I am a fan of Rod McKuen’s? No, not really. I’d be the first to say his poetry is filled with overused, often trite phrases, sentimentalism, predictability, and a naive, terribly romantic view of the world. [Talarico]
I do not suggest that “trash” compose the curriculum, although it fits the nation’s bias and fills drugstore shelves. We all leave our McKuens behind, and, if lucky, we suffer “growth.” [Curtis]
Part of the problem was McKuen’s own understanding of poetry. “The problem is that a lot of people who write poetry think the more obscure they can be, the more intelligent their poetry is,” he once told an interviewer. “To me, intelligence and obscurity never went together.” He sometimes compared his poetry to that of Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, but mostly in self-defense: “Their poetry was very uncomplicated, very straightforward.” “I write in the language of my day and try to make it effortless for the reader,” he said on another occasion, which only supports Dick Cavett’s quip that McKuen was “the most understood poet in America.”
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with poems written in simple, uncomplicated language that reads effortlessly. Millions of American schoolchildren have had their first exposure to modernist poetry through Williams’s red wheelbarrow:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
But I think it’s illuminating to compare McKuen’s simplicity with that of another poet known for creating poetry from simple, clear words: Mary Oliver. For the same of illustration, let’s look at how they each treat the subject of dogs. Here are two selections from McKuen:
From Caught in the Quiet (1970): My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too. Like me, he goes where the smiles go and I’d as soon lie down with sleeping bears as track the does by moonlight
Don’t trouble me with your conventions, mine would bore you too.
Straight lines are sometimes difficult to walk and good for little more than proving we’re sober on the highway.
I’ve never heard the singing of the loon but I’m told he sings as pretty as the nightingale.
My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too.
And from Listen to the Warm: See the dog he doesn’t move—a voyeur. Never mind. What we’ve done is beautiful. For gods and animals to see, for us to stand aside in awe and look ourselves up and down.
And Mary Oliver:
From Devotions Now through the white orchard my little dog romps, breaking the new snow with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited, hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins until the white snow is written upon in large, exuberant letters, a long sentence, expressing the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better myself.
Neither poet tells us much about the dog they’re writing about. In both McKuen poems, however, the dog is merely an object. It, like the “gods and animals,” is there merely to be a silent witness. In Oliver’s poem, on the other hand, the dog’s the star. We’re sure that McKuen has seen dogs; but we know that Oliver has owned dogs and has watched them delight in hopping about in drifts of new snow. And while McKuen’s dogs are there to gaze upon his sensitive pensiveness in wonder, Oliver is the one observing and taking joy from her dog’s exuberance.
In his later years, McKuen was candid about his less-than-ideal childhood. He was born in a Salvation Army hospital, his father having vanished soon after sleeping with his mother, who was working as a taxi dancer. He was sexually abused by an aunt and uncle, physically abused by his stepfather, and probably both as a teenager at the Nevada School of Industry. He dropped out of school and went on the road at a young age and spent time as an in-house male prostitute at logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. A background of this sort of abuse is now known to be associated with an “impaired capacity to develop proper definitions of the self,” as the psychologists Bessel van der Kolk and Rita Fisler have written.
One suspects, therefore, that part of what was missing from McKuen’s poetry was himself. For all the supposed confessional honesty of his poetry, McKuen concealed and distorted much about himself, including his sexuality. Ambiguity was not a trick he used to avoid being pinned down: it was at the heart of his being. He was careful, for example, not to openly declare himself as gay. Though he lived with Edward Habib for decades, he always referred to Habib as “my brother.” After the success of Listen to the Warm, McKuen would refer to having a son and daughter he’d fathered during a stay in France in the early 1960s, but as Alfonso writes:
There is no information that confirms Rod McKuen ever had children. To the author’s knowledge, no one else has ever mentioned meeting or communicating with them. At least four of his closest friends either doubt or flat-out deny that Jean-Marc and Marie-France ever existed. After Rod’s death, no son or daughter came forward to claim anything from his estate.
Yet clues slip out here and there in his poetry, if only unconsciously. In “A Cat Named Sloopy,” for example, he writes:
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then. Riding my imaginary horse down Forty-second Street, going off with strangers to live an hour-long cowboy’s life, but always coming home to Sloopy, who loved me best…
While “midnight cowboy” might have been an obscure reference when Listen to the Warm was published, it became impossible to miss after the release of the Oscar-winning film two years later. And some of the lines in the title poem are positively creepy: “Follow women after dark/they can only yell for help or whisper yes”; “I’m grateful then for your upbringing/it led you like an arrow here uncomplicated and mine.”
Though many of McKuen’s poems are about love, they are almost never a celebration of love or the loved. Instead, McKuen most often looks at love in the rearview mirror. Even when he’s in a relationship, he’s thinking about its end, as in the lyric of one of his most popular songs, “If you go away”: “If you go away/as I know you will….” One woman who posted about Listen to the Warm on Goodreads wrote tellingly, “My husband gave me [McKuen’s] three small poetry books, early in our marriage. I think I probably related some of his feelings in poems. Now I just see a man having affairs with various women, and then breaking up with them.” In fact, the one constant in McKuen’s views on love is himself: “If I’m still alone by now it’s by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine.”
His political views were as ambiguous as his sexuality. Though hundreds of thousands of young people bought his books, he was never comfortable being associated with hippies, Flower Power, or other aspects of the youth movement. “Flower power is fine but what they really need is shower power,” he used to joke, and he had little patience for hippies: “I got my success on my own terms, worked for it, suffered for it. Hippies are fine, but I like to be clean myself,” he told the New York Times in 1969. In one of McKuen’s earliest profiles, Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times wrote that his careful choice of material and his own presentation made him “a hip square or a square hip, depending on which way you look at it.” Flower children may have bought his books, but they didn’t go to his concerts. One account of a McKuen performance described his audience as “white, female, middle class, scrubbed and respectable.” “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be. People don’t want to keep getting hit in the head with social commentary all the time.”
When the Saturday Review invited McKuen to review a collection of Mao Tse-tung’s poems, he made sure to stipulate that “Being neither far right, left, nor extreme middle (though having antagonized in my brief span each faction in turn), I am more concerned with poetry than with politics.” Even McKuen’s religious views were elusive. He told one interviewer that he’d been “a Roman Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Mormon, and a Quaker” and that he was planning to give Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy a try.
In some ways, it was as if McKuen was trying to be both the most famous poet in the world and invisible. When his book The Power Bright and Shining: Images of My Country was published in 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, he claimed that he had started out wanting to write “a kind of Studs Terkel book” featuring the words of working men and women.5 “Unfortunately — or fortunately, I suppose — it’s not easy for me to be invisible….”
It’s the ambiguity of McKuen’s identity that ultimately undermines his poetry. One reviewer on Goodreads wrote, “These poems are like the antithesis of Bukowski.” Well, exactly. Like him or not, Charles Bukowski was unapologetically himself. Rod McKuen, on the other hand, seems never to have been entirely satisfied with whatever self he devised.
And that lack of a strong sense of self may have been the secret to both his commercial success and his artistic failure. There was just enough content in McKuen’s poems to give his readers the sensation of reading poetry without any of the individuality or obscurity that make good poems both challenging and memorable. McKuen dedicated Come to Me in Silence by saying, “This book is for nobody/everybody.” “I think he should make up his mind,” quipped the Daily Mail’s book editor, Peter Lewis.
“If there’s a message in my work,” McKuen would often tell interviewers, “it’s about man’s inability to communicate.” Which cannot but remind one of Tom Lehrer’s joke: “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.” Even McKuen occasionally allowed readers to see the emptiness at the center of his poetry. As he wrote in “October 3,” from In Someone’s Shadow:
If you had listened hard enough you might have heard what I meant to say. Nothing.
I was going to end this piece here, dagger neatly inserted into the poet’s corpse. But I realized this would leave an incomplete picture of McKuen’s work. One of my favorite adages is that if a pile of horseshit is big enough, there might be a pony in there. I went through more than a dozen of McKuen’s books across his career as part of my research. And yes, there are a LOT of poems about beaches and sunsets and loneliness, but there are also oddities.
Fans of pop music have long known that some of the most interesting tunes in an artist’s repertoire are the stray tracks thrown in to pad out one side of an LP, songs where the constraints of what should or shouldn’t go into a hit were tossed aside and caution shelved in favor of unfiltered creation. Sometimes, the result is awful; and sometimes the result is — well, if not genius, at least intriguing.
And the same is true of McKuen’s oeuvre. It may be that McKuen sheltered a big hole of hurt at the center of his being. And while a big hole of hurt may be a handicap as a poet, it can often be a source of great energy for a satirist. Listen to the Warm, for example, which is easy to dismiss entirely from its drippy dedication alone — “For E.: If you cry when we leave Paris/I’ll buy you a teddy bear all soft and gold” — includes a poem with the title “First and Last Visit to an Annex in Burbank.” “Time was you couldn’t see the Forest Lawn for the trees.” Forest Lawn, just to fill in possible gaps in cultural history, is a huge cemetery in Glendale, California where hundreds of celebrities from L. Frank Baum to Elizabeth Taylor are buried. It’s also one of the inspirations for Whispering Glades in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One And because it’s the cemetery that set the standard for the grandiose American style, it’s also largely swathes of headstone-dotted grass.
The fact that I had to explain McKuen’s joke drained what meager comic value it may retain, but it serves to illustrate the vein of ironic observation that runs quietly underneath much of the teddy bear dreck of his poetry. One of the best examples is his 1959 album Beatsville. It was marketed to tap into the Beatnik craze, the fascination with beret-wearing, goatee-bearded, finger-poppin’, jazz-loving coffee house-haunting poets and musicians who ranged from serious (Allen Ginsburg) to silly (Maynard G. Krebs). Its cover shows an angst-ridden McKuen brooding over a glass of cheap wine as he sits next to a wild abstract painting with a mysterious and beautiful woman and would lead the buyer to believe this is a sincere sample of Beat art.
Instead, it’s a pastiche. Though he’d spent plenty of nights strumming his guitar and singing folk songs and published his own book of poetry, McKuen wasn’t buying the shtick. On Beatsville, he mocked the beats as poseurs — such as “Raffia the poet, who is not only an angry young man but a dirty old man as well” — and riffed on their lingo (“I was mixed up with this Gemini cat who, well, she didn’t like to be liked, like”). As Alfonso puts it, McKuen “came across more as an observer (or infiltrator)” than a card-carrying Beat. He went on to demonstrate his disdain for the Beats even more obviously in the single “The Beat Generation” he released with Bob McFadden soon after: “Some people say I’m lazy/They say that I’m a wreck/But that stuff doesn’t faze me/I get unemployment checks.”
He went through years, or volumes, rather, without indulging his appetite for caustic commentary, but sometimes it came out despite himself. One of the tracks on his first album with Anita Kerr, The Sea, included a short number titled “Body Surfing with the Jet Set” that was full of parodies of surfer talk along the lines of Beatsville: “Madame Marie Ouspenskaya went through her whole life never learning to surf/But she sure had some bitchin’ garlic leis.” Years later, in his collection Beyond the Boardwalk, he reused that title for something whose humor is almost too black to bear:
My father’s uncle’s brother married his cousin. Twice he beat her up and twice the police came and twice they carried her away. Does that make her his cousin twice removed? Surf’s up.
I keep a loaded pistol just beneath my bed, it’s nice to have a gun that works in case I lose my head. Hang ten.
Edward Habib and Rod McKuen at McKuen’s Hollywood mansion.
In his later books, the sunshine fades and more often gives way to unvarnished sarcasm. The Beautiful Strangers (1980) includes a multi-part poem titled “A Field Guide to Cruising” that is nothing less than a summation of decades of cruising experience — by both McKuen and his “brother” Edward:
Do not dress up or down but as you would for an occasion. With some luck and some premeditation it will be one.
Avoid church socials or the Bake-off. Those who gather at such gatherings have paired off long ago. They are in the middle of what they perceive as the act of living life, who are we to interrupt them?
In its way, this is every bit as uncomfortable as anything in Bukowski. If nothing else, McKuen here ventures into territory few other American poets (well, perhaps aside from William Dickey in The Rainbow Grocery). In the same book, “Designer Genes” veers into Ogden Nash territory with its perhaps too-ephemeral satire on a 1980s fad:
With laissez-faire each derriere with nom or nom de plume is held in place with little space to wiggle or sha-boom.
In one of his last books, Intervals (1986), McKuen not only displays a more good-natured sort of humor but also includes his most extensive use of social observation in a long poem titled, “Is There Life After Tower Records?” The poem, dedicated to Tower Records founder Russ Solomon, will tug at the nostalgia strings of anyone who spent a long night browsing through the aisles of this legendary West Coast record store.6 (And for those under 40, I won’t try to explain what a record store was except to say that it was the social and cultural heart of many towns in America.)
See them move between the aisles, pathways so narrow that passing past another is bold adventure, thrilling drawing-in of breath and stomach. And in between the aisles, the islands back to back that hide the million dreams inside bright jackets, well-turned sleeves plastic fused so fast it must be cut apart to reach the shiny metal hopes, the deep dark vinyl of delight whose inner grooves can only be decoded by the diamond needle, narrow beam of laser light.
This is just the kind of ecstasy you would experience flipping through the shrink-wrapped albums that filled Tower Records’ trays.
Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.
Occasionally, just occasionally, McKuen shared moments too candid to be faked. Nothing like the trinkets about sun and sand and cats that cluttered many of his pages, with details that quickly burrow themselves uncomfortably into the reader’s mind:
One day coming home I saw a farmer pissing by the road. His balls hung down below his hand and looked so heavy that I began to run for no apparent reason. I didn’t stop until I reached the safety of my room.
Home again, I pulled the shade and got down from the bureau my Sunday School coloring book. Having chewed my brown Crayola just the day before, I had no choice but to color Jesus Christ’s hair yellow.
Ten pages before this in And to Each Season …, McKuen tells a ridiculous and unbelievable story about a friendship he made with a mountain lion he spotted in the woods behind his family’s house when they lived in rural Washington state. A few pages on, we’re back in the land of sun and lovers left behind.
Had McKuen held himself to the same standard of intimacy displayed in poems like this, he might truly have earned a place in one of the Oxford books of verse. And his poems might still be taught today.
But perhaps poet is not really the right label for Rod McKuen. Remember what he often said: “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be.” Perhaps we should heed Maya Angelou’s advice and believe him.
Reviewing that 1974 performance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica, Dennis Hunt of the L.A. Times wrote, “His performance was awash with flagrant melodrama. He used a lot of old, obvious tricks to put his songs across. On his closing number, ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ he was even gesticulating in the flamboyant manner of Al Jolson.”
There was a time when Al Jolson was considered the greatest entertainer in America. Today, it’s hard for anyone to see Jolson’s blackfaced rendition of “Mammy” in the original The Jazz Singer and cringe. As it might be hard for anyone to listen to one of Rod McKuen’s albums or read one of his books now and wonder how they managed to sell in astronomical numbers. Perhaps entertainment is not quite so timeless as poetry.
My thanks to Barry Alfonso for suggesting I take a look at Rod McKuen’s increasingly — if somewhat justly — neglected poetry.
1 The Tribune article also mentioned that the same bill featured a ventriloquist, Aaron Williams, “and his dusky friend, Freddy.”
2 The ad for McKuen’s appearance at the Troubadour credits the “greatest entertainer in the world” quote to The Times, London. I searched through the archives of The Times and failed to find any such statement. Indeed, the only time The Times saw fit to give McKuen more than advertising space, it was a brief entry in the “Times Diary” for 20 February 1969 about an appearance he made at the Odeon cinema on Leicester Square reading the lyrics to his title song for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Perhaps this, like many other things, was just something he made up.
3 One of McKuen’s favorite claims was that of having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1974. This intrigued me so much that I contacted both the Pulitzer committee and the Pulitzer archives at Columbia to confirm it. What they both stated was that prior to 1980, when the Pulitzer Prize adopted its current nomenclature of winners, finalists, and entrants, the submission process for the Music prize was essentially open. All entrants were considered “nominees” and all nominees (there were 40 in 1974) received a certificate. It is quite possible that McKuen or someone working for him submitted the nomination. That didn’t keep him from frequently mentioning the nomination for years thereafter.
4 After reading dozens of McKuen’s newspaper interviews, I strongly suspect the piece he was referring to was … an interview with Rod McKuen.
5 McKuen said he’d spent months traveling around the country as research. “I took a lot of odd jobs” taxi driver, hot dog seller, ice cream seller, mine worker, garbage man. “I was found out in Florida and it got on the front page of the Miami Herald that I was a Miami garbage collector for a week.” In fact, no such story appeared. Instead, on December 18, 1974, a story appeared on page 2 of the Herald that reported that “Millionaire poet Rod McKuen worked in Miami as a garbageman sometime in the last three months as research for a new book.” He said it was the toughest job he’d ever done. “I was aching everywhere. I don’t know what they put in those cans. It must be cement bricks.” The story also added bartender and soda jerk to the list of his odd jobs. The source for the story? Rod McKuen.
6 I’m told that people shopped at Tower Records during daylight hours, but I have no personal experience of this and have to discount it as myth.
This is not a book: it’s an open wound. In a prefatory note, Ewart Milne calls Time Stopped “the story of the narrator’s life as seen in retrospect after the death of this wife.” The problem is Milne’s life stopped when his wife Thelma died of breast cancer in 1964.
Milne, an Irishman who began writing after a decade working as a merchant seaman, took up residence in England in 1942. He came from Ireland through the help of John Betjeman, whom Milne contacted after being told he had been targeted for assassination by the Nazis for his vocal support of the English cause. He was assigned as a land manager at Assington Hall in Suffolk, where a school for refugee children. There he met and became involved with Thelma Dobson, a married woman whose husband was serving in the Royal Air Force. He writes in the book’s first poem:
That summer of forty-five The war in Europe all over and done And the airmen soldiers from the war returning You going to meet your first husband Then we three speaking together
“And I begged him not to be hurt/We had not deceived him,” Milne continues. To a man who seems to have worn his principles on his chest — couriering medical supplies to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, speaking out against the Nazis in Ireland, encouraging the work of other writers — this proves to be a significant factor in what follows.
Denis Dobson agreed to let Thelma separate, after which — at least as recounted here — she began her affair with Milne. Denis then went along with her application for divorce and Thelma and Milne married in 1947. She came from a family of moderate wealth and supported Milne’s writing, which brought in little money. Never part of any particular school, considered something of an outcast in Ireland and an outsider in England, he never managed to connect himself with either literary establishment: “The English see I am not English/To the Irish I am Anglo” he writes in Time Stopped.
In the early 1950s, Milne got acquainted with the young Irish writer and balladeer Patrick Galvin and encouraged his work. They collaborated on several pieces for literary magazines and spent a great deal of time together. And, as Milne later learned, Galvin spent a great deal of time with Milne’s wife Thelma. In 1962, thinking perhaps that he would be warmly welcomed back by his native country, Milne returned to live in Dublin. Resentment is a long-burning fuel, and Milne’s rejection of Ireland during the war lingered in the minds of some of his old colleagues. Few doors were opened to him.
To make matters worse, Thelma was diagnosed with breast cancer. Milne was slow at first to react to the news: “You reproach me dead that I did not see/The gravity of your illness.” He tries to defend himself posthumously: “Love I laid my palm on your breast twenty years ago/Saying truly I suspected some evil inside there.’
Already devastated by Thelma’s death, Milne was knocked down again with news that he seems to have taken just as hard. He learns that Thelma had been supporting Patrick Galvin financially, even buying half the printing of his 1960 collection, Christ in London, from its publisher, Linden Press. He learns that the two had been carrying on an affair, practically under his nose, for years.
The revelation sent Milne into a fugue from which he emerged, over 18 months later, with Time Stopped. Every poem in the book is untitled, every poem is dated: 28 Nov 1964; 11 March 1965; 15 Jan 1966. This is, in effect, Milne’s journal, but he rearranged the entries, interspersed with short prose “Intermissions,” to show “my growth of understanding.” The result is powerful, painful, and at times almost unreadable. “This is my life since you left me alone/This rack this torture.” It can seem, at times, as if we’re on that rack with Milne. And as with any torture, one only wants it to stop.
This is one of several problems with Time Stopped. Coming from a minor poet and an even smaller press, Time Stopped received few reviews, but those all spotted its core shortcoming. “The subject matter is painful,” wrote C. B. Cox in The Spectator, “and, I think, beyond Milne’s ability to control in language.” Fellow Irishman P. J. Kavanagh gave him partial credit: “The attempt seems to me admirable — it is one of the things verse is for — but, alas, I cannot say it is successful. The pain stays with Mr. Milne and refuses to change into poetry.” I don’t know if Milne did any editing on his poems beyond their sequencing, but this often reads like 160-plus pages of raw material crying out to be rewritten down to a dozen or so good poems. You know what some of the themes are going to be. How do I live without you? I hate you for abandoning me. How do you like your blue-eyed girl Mr Death? Be prepared to see them repeated over and over and over.
But the more subtle problems stem from Milne’s blind spots. In its obituary for Milne, The Times described Time Stopped as a “harrowing elegy … written in the agonized recognition of her infidelity to him, revealed only after her death.” The following week, the paper printed a letter from Douglas Cleverdon, a former BBC producer, who wrote that the comment “deserves a footnote”:
His own lechery was notorious. To my wife’s astonishment, he made a pass at her within 10 minutes of their first meeting; and I vividly recall his indignation and sense of ill-usage when he complained to me that, in his sixties, nubile young women actually rejected his amorous approaches. He attributed this to the selfishness of the younger generation.
The hostility of Cleverdon’s letter and The Times’ decision to print it, stirred up a kerfuffle that was noted by papers on both sides of the Atlantic. T. E. Utley, the obituaries editor, justified printing the letter: “In the obituary we revealed a fact about his wife, which was very damaging; people wrote to say that he was totally awful, and justice seemed to be required.” When Cleverdon was asked to comment, he did clarify that he hadn’t seen Milne in over 20 years, but “I never liked him very much: He was conceited and absolutely shaken that girls wouldn’t lie down in front of him. But then you know what these elderly Irish poets are like.”
Perhaps the relationship between Milne and Thelma Dobson was chaste until they asked for Denis Dobson’s consent, but if it was true what other people said of Milne (and here I am assuming that T. E. Utley didn’t use “people say” in the way Trump does), then his reaction to his wife’s affair with Galvin is melodramatic and unjust to say the least:
Oh women women women Charismatic the womaniser approaches Pretended feminist matey-like says ‘Be emancipated love come to bed What of it what of that husband of yours You are free woman come to bed’ And you fall for it every time bang flat on your backs
So Thelma was just a sucker for a smooth operator — just like all women? Knowing Milne’s history, one has to wonder who was the womanizer he had in mind: Galvin or himself? Milne undermines his own righteous indignation in revealing at times, perhaps thoughtlessly, his own inclinations:
Do you remember • together sawing the fallen branches I joked and said I’d like to make love to your daughter When she grew older We weren’t married then Your daughter was a small child And you answered gaily that we would all go wild When once the war was over And everyone be free to love And no one be hurt at all As you were not by what I said
I confess that I almost stopped reading at this point. Time Stopped has been described as confessional poetry, but usually confessional poets are actually conscious of the things they’re confessing to. I may be guilty of 2020 vision in looking at these lines from 1965, but one cannot deny that there’s a certain hypocrisy at work here — one that becomes even more apparent from the extent to which Milne turns Galvin into his bête noire:
Spawn of monstrous mouth Thief of the world Treachery is his name
Flatters friendlike • takes his friend’s wife Flatters his friend’s wife • takes her purse Take her body from her husband’s bed to his own
“May he burn for his fooling you/May he burn and double burn.” The Times was not alone in describing Time Stopped as Milne’s reaction to his wife’s infidelity, but if one actually reads the book, it’s hard not to see it just as much as his reaction to Galvin’s betrayal of his friendship with Milne. Thelma comes across as a dupe, not a willful adulteress. Galvin, on the other hand, is a snake with two apples: offering love to Thelma, friendship and trust to Milne.
Galvin’s acceptance of Thelma’s financial support is nearly as infuriating to Milne as his seduction:
And for his pseudo-aiding me He got payment of handouts from you Over and over he got paid Till your handouts became a habit to you Became his way of life.
Which begs the question, of course: hadn’t they become a habit to Milne, too? Milne was a strenuous writer of letters to the editor, to numerous editors and on all sorts of topics, and in the years after Thelma’s death, their frequency and pitch both increased. In the same year that the book was published, Milne wrote a letter to The Times dismissing the protest of several young poets who burned a stack of poetry books outside the Arts Council’s offices in St. James Square. “Some of us elder poets,” he intoned, saw the Council’s embrace “as the kiss of death.” He concluded haughtily that “Poetry is its own reward. If it isn’t I suggest they try another trade….” It is, of course, so much easier for poetry to offer its own rewards when aided by a wife’s independent wealth — most of which, by the way, Thelma passed along to Milne.
I came across Time Stopped when engaged in one of my favorite games: browsing in the stacks of a well-stocked library and taking out and flipping through any odd volume that catches my eye. I didn’t know Ewart Milne or his work when I opened the book, but you can’t read more than a poem or two from it without recognizing its extraordinary character. Milne obviously intended Time Stopped to be published and read, but it has much more of the feel of a diary never meant to be shared: it is raw, awkwardly shaped, and both honest and self-deceiving in the way we all are when we try to be candid. It may not be literature — but unforgettable it most certainly is.
[As a footnote, I should say that Milne introduced the • character in these poems as a way of indicating a slight pause, rather like a rest character in written music. In some ways, this might represent the poet’s most useful contribution to literature: it’s a device I would welcome to further use.]
Time Stopped, by Ewart Milne London: Plow Poems, 1967
Flesh binds us, makes us one And yet in each alone I hear the battle of the bone: A thousand ancestors have won.
And we, so joined in flesh Are prisoned yet As soul alone must thresh In body’s net;
And our two souls so left Achieve no unity: We are each one bereft and weeping inwardly.
Widow
No longer any man needs me nor is the dark night of love coupled
But the body is relentless, knows its need must satisfy itself without the seed must shake in dreams, fly up the stairs backwards.
In the open box in the attic a head lies, set sideways.
This head for this body is severed.
The Unquiet Bed
The woman I am is not what you see I’m not just bones and crockery
the woman I am knew love and hate hating the chains that parents make
longing that love might set men free yet hold them fast in loyalty
the woman I am is not what you see move over love make room for me
Dorothy Livesay was attending a seminar in London in early 1959 when her husband Duncan died at their home in Vancouver, Canada. In her memoir, Journey with My Selves, she recalled how she learned of his death:
In the narrow hallway of the club was a rack for letters and a bulletin board. I barely glanced there when I noticed a thin blue envelope with my name on it. Tearing it open, I read, “Father passed away last night, February 12. Love, Peter.”
I stood in the hall, shaking. Instead of going upstairs to my room, I went outside again, stumbling along into the twilight street. The only words that would come to me were, “I’m free … I’m free …”
[After the funeral] … In one week’s time we sold the house on Grand Boulevard. I flew back, into the arms of London. There, at the end of 1959, I was heading for my fiftieth birthday. What lay ahead was a new life in Paris, with UNESCO. Then Lusaka.
I had had four hoods: childhood, girlhood, womanhood and motherhood. Now there were two more waiting: widowhood and selfhood.
“Wedlock” was written before Duncan’s death, “Widow” and “The Unquiet Bed” after.
TWO ‘“Well, happy birthday,” Sally Sayward says, Endowing me invisibly with bays, Each leaf to mark a year. “Now, go away,” She tells me, twenty, but, near-man, I stay To press my case with passive rhetoric Where deeds are needed. Nonetheless, her quick Rejection is retracted. By degrees, I talk my way down to my bony knees And kneel and squat and sit beside her, where My drinkless hand can infiltrate her hair And fathom her resistance. Soon her square Mouth may traverse to meet my mouth, and then, Our crossed stars nodding, we’ll be off again.
FOUR I’m taking Sally Sayward out to lunch. Inside the Union — say, this place has changed Since I last ate here; look at all those wild Magenta murals on the walls — all eyes Lock onto us, the hunter and his prey Brought back alive, if only for a day, A date, a lunch, a showing-up of all The bucks and stags stuffed in that musty hall. We march abreast, my hand dressed on her arm. My eyes right on her onionskin disdain, Toward the serving line, where old colleens Stand and deliver soup, slaw, salad greens, Lamb patties, peas, beets, coffee, brick ice cream. This round room has changed, too; it’s lavender. Sashed with long draperies in jungle green. Look — there’s a blood-red change booth with a brass Wicket enclosing money and a man. We step up to get nickels. The change man Becomes my father. Recognition. Up Goes the gold wicket, bang!, and out he shouts — Face lit with flame, no doubt a trick of the Sensational decor — “No, no, no, no!” Dream ends. Escapement of small hours resumes.
FIVE Doze, wake, and entertain those sawed-off dreams That spring on you at morning, when all things Distort and shiver; men on stilted legs Mutate into short blobs, and blots explode Into thin alphabets of wiry stars; Simples turn double, petals form whole heads Of leaves like cabbages, perspectives go Back to beginnings like a Chirico, And you fall down the fun-house chute of sleep, And land, awake, in trouble, on the street Of dreams, where every door turns you away To face the undeclared but actual day.
Louis Edward Sissman was born in Detroit 91 years ago today. When he was 37, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he spent the next ten years anticipating death. After the first three years, he was well enough acquainted with it to title his first collection of poems Dying: An Introduction. In the title poem from that collection, he recalls walking out of the clinic after first receiving the news:
Outside, although November by the clock. Has a thick smell of spring, And everything — The low clouds lit Fluorescent green by city lights; The molten, hissing stream Of white car lights, cooling To red and vanishing; The leaves. Still running from last summer, chattering Across the pocked concrete; The wind in trees; The ones and twos. The twos and threes Of college girls. Each shining in the dark. Each carrying A book or books. Each laughing to her friend At such a night in fall; The two-and-twos Of boys and girls who lean Together in an A and softly walk Slowly from lamp to lamp, Alternatively lit And nighted; Autumn Street, Astonishingly named, a rivulet Of asphalt twisting up and back To some spring out of sight — and everything Recalls one fall Twenty-one years ago, when I, A freshman, opening A green door just across the river. Found the source Of spring in that warm night. Surprised the force That sent me on my way And set me down Today. Tonight. Through my Invisible new veil Of finity, I see November’s world — Low scud, slick street, three giggling girls — As, oddly, not as sombre As December, But as green As anything: As spring.
In a scene in Mad Men, Don Draper is shown in his den reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. If we’d seen the same scene shot ten years later, Draper would have been reading Dying: An Introduction. Sissman was a copywriter himself, though most of his time was spent in Boston rather than New York. But he is perhaps the ultimate bard of the Mad Men generation, who wrote of dinners at Luchow’s, beautiful young socialites, and men in Dacron-and-worsted suits who found themselves up late at night wondering, “Is that all it is?”:
Men past 40 Get up nights And look out at City lights. Wondering where they Made the wrong Turn, and why life Is so long.
And Draper would appreciate Sissman’s sense of humor, which is summed up by the poem he included in his second collection, Scattered Returns (1969): “Upon Finding Dying: An Introduction, by L. E. Sissman, Remaindered at 1s.”
Happy New Year, everyone.
Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman, edited by Peter Davison Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978
This morning The lure of the street Entangled my feet And I walked … and walked … and walked …
I turned into the narrowest streets, I breathed the smoke of the factories, I smelled the reek and rot of the tenements; I passed by ancient spacious lawns and piles of masonry century-old, the pride of the city fathers; I walked through parks and down the singing boulevards … And I discovered what a cosmic thing a city is.
Dirt…. Congestion… A heap of rubbish…
Blocks and stones and buildings; White granitoid, smoked gray, like second-day collars of respectability; Whistle-topped, grim-eyed factories; The air, heavy with the aroma of coal-tar gas and the packing-house; A network of wires and rails; Bill-boards, the sign of the dollar.
Squares of artificial landscape called parks and gardens; A sea of roofs and chimneys… Houses … and houses … and houses … Time’s driftwood packed together by the force of the tide! And that is the city: A huge mass of Material, Looped and bound by the oily-black ribbon of the boulevards green-selvedged in the spring.
The people Are not the city. They infest the city, as rats and roaches the driftwood left high on the bank — Or they build the city, as a beaver builds its dam, bit by bit. Yet, the people and the city are very much alike. They are like two mirrors, each reflecting the other, For those who do not make the city are made by the city.
At dusk The smoky-bright, Soft-calling night Led me again through streets … and streets … and streets…
I mingled with late-shopping crowds, I rubbed against the clay-crusted garments of laborers, I watched the rush for clinging-space on a Main Street car;
I heard the drone of the beggar in the doorway with his pencils and shoestrings, I met women in brilliant coats — with painted cheeks ghost-white, I caught the innocent laugh of whirling youth from a flashing car;
I noted the unblinking eyes of the hypnotized throng of cinema-worshippers pouring in and out past the shrieking posters flaming red and yellow;
I listened to the incessant colloquy of the city’s victims and creators rising like the shrill hum of a steel-cutting wheel;
I passed into the quieter and poorer streets and saw the ill-clad mothers of children, born and unborn, taking the early spring air of a front doorstep overlooking the pavement, and as I passed they looked at me with eyes unfearing and curious;
I glimpsed half-way down a dim deserted street a figure that slunk, thief-like, into the mouth of an alley;
I walked upon the boulevard and saw through the windows of the rich the luxury of wealth;
I turned into the park — and there was love, twin-souled, ecstatic, gripping with twining fingers the edge of Passion;
And I sat upon a smooth-worn bench and gazed with new understanding at the evening star…. And I thought what a cosmic thing the population of a city is.
Souls…. Souls that harbor ignorance and are cramped in the cage their ignorance has built; Helpless souls, That sit on doorsteps and breathe the smell of refuse; Dust-dwelling souls, Whose wings have atrophied; Striving, struggling, suffering souls, Toiling in the net; Strong, soaring souls, That seek the sunlight in the open ; Souls that murmur, and tired-eyed souls that are mute; Souls of youth, wild-flowered, tossing their wind-tangled hair! And that is the population of a city:
Souls … souls … House-huddled souls … Bound to the earth by soiled pink ropes of clay … Bound by earth to earth … Bound … bound …
From The Fourth Watch: A Book of Poems, by Roy Ivan Johnson Boston: The Cornhill Company, 1920
Darling child, to thee I owe, More than others here will know; Thou hast cheered my weary days, With thy coy and winsome ways. When my heart has been most sad, Smile of thine has made me glad; In return, I wish for thee, Health and sweet felicity. May thy future days be blest, With all things the world deems best. If perchance the day should come, Thou does leave thy childhood’s home; Bound by earth’s most sacred ties, With responsibilities, In another’s life to share, Wedded joys and worldly care; May thy partner worthy prove,– Richest in thy constant love. Strong in faith and honour, just,– With brave heart on which to trust. One, to whom when troubles come, And the days grow burdensome, Thou canst fly, with confidence In his love’s plenipotence. And if when some years have flown, Sons and daughters of your own Bless your union, may they be Wellsprings of pure joy to thee. And when age shall line thy brow, And thy step is weak and slow,– And the end of life draws near May’st thou meet it without fear; Undismayed with earth’s alarms,– Sleeping,–to wake in Jesus’ arms.
From Yorkshire Lyrics, Poems written in the Dialect as Spoken in the West Riding of Yorkshire. To which are added a Selection of Fugitive Verses not in the Dialect, by John Hartley (1898). Available on the Internet Archive (Link).
Stepping out in these streets Is like drifting away in the rivers’ sweep.
In a shop window, pots of paint on display, But my glance strays past them to former days: Tarred old roofs, and fences painted a long time ago And I with paint-stained hands, and tar on my toes, Roamed as I pleased with blissful contentment and ease In a world that was apple-green. My uncle in the Salvation Army Pounded his drums at every rally; I smeared them all over with paint, And when he set out to proclaim the end of the world, he looked pained Since the world and its mischiefs are ever reborn. But I meant no harm — In a world that was green I was green and speckled and happy as happy can be, All the colors blended and fused into light for me.
Stepping out in these streets Is like drifting away in the rivers’ sweep.
From Contemporary Latvian poetry, edited by Inara Cedrins , available on the Open Library (Link).
Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret
Welcome, dear Wanderer, once more! Thrice welcome to thy native Cell! Within this peaceful humble Door Let Thou and I contented dwell!
But say, O whither haft thou rang’d? Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue? Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d: Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.
Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where Didst thou contract this sottish Dye? You kept ill Company, I fear, When distant from your Parent’s Eye.
Was it for This, O graceless Child! Was it for This, you learn’d to spell? Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d: Go drown thyself in yonder Well.
I wonder how thy Time was spent: No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring. Hast thou not climb’d the Monument ? Nor seen the Lions, nor the King ?
But now I’ll keep you here secure : No more you view the smoky Sky : The Court was never made (I’m sure) For Idiots, like Thee and I.
From Poems Upon Several Occasions by the late Mrs. Leapor, of Brackley, in Northamptonshire, in two volumes printed by J. Roberts of Warwick Lane, London, 1751. Available in the Internet Library (Volume 1 and Volume 2).
The daughter of a gardener, Mary Leapor worked as a maid and was entirely self-taught. Yet she took to writing naturally and when she was dying of measles at the age of 24, asked her friend Bridget Freemantle, a rector’s daughter, to undertake a subscription to publish a collection of her poems and other writings with the aim of providing her aging father some money for his last years. It’s thanks to the success of Bridget’s enterprise that we can read Mary’s work today.
As Bridget writes in the introduction to the collection, Mary made no great claim for her poems:
She always call’d it being idle, and indulging her whimsical Humour, when she was employed in writing the humorous Parts of her Poems; and nothing could pique her more than Peoples imagining she took a great deal of Pains, or spent a great deal of Time, in such Composure; or that she set much Value upon them.
She told me, that most of them were wrote when cross Accidents happen’d to disturb her, purely to divert her Thoughts from dwelling upon what was disagreeable; and that it generally had the intended Effect, by putting her in a good Humour.
The play that was returned with the claret stain was the manuscript of her magnum opus, a play set in ancient Rome titled The Unhappy Father. Bridget also informs us that “Mrs. Leapor’s whole Library consisted of about sixteen or seventeen single Volumes, among which were Part of Mr. Pope’s Works, Dryden’s Fables, some Volumes of Plays, etc..”
Mrs. Todd in the garden with the frontispiece from The Country of Pointed Firs
After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs
She was the one who lived up country Half in the woods on a rain-washed road With a well not near and a barn too far And the fields ledgy and full of stones That the crows cawed over and liked to walk in And the hill and the hollow thick with fern And in the swamp the cattails and rushes.
It was next to living in a town of birds But she had hens and a row of bee hives. When her mother died, and her girl, and Joel, She told the bees so they’d not fly away And hung black flags on the doors of the hives Though they’d always go when they could to the woods Or swarm on Sunday when she was at meeting. For each who went she had told the bees.
Change and loss was what the brook cried That she heard in the night — but she kept snug With crow-wood for kindling, and the sun shone good Through the tops of the pines, and her plants Didn’t fail her, and the rosebush always bloomed By the gnawed fencepost — what the horse had done When they had a horse and a cow and a dog.
O there had been many, and now was there none? Lost at sea, they said, her son gone to sea Lost at sea they said. But if he wasn’t And if he’d come back — so she’d stay till he came Or whether or not. Change and loss was what the brook cried That she heard in the night when the clock whirred.
But when the fog from the southbank came through the firs Till the air was like something made of cobwebs, Thin as a cobweb, helpless as shadows Swept here and there as the sea gulls mewed, O then it seemed it was all one day And no one gone and no one crossed over Or when the rain gurgled in the eave spout Or the wind walked on the roof like a boy.
Change and loss was what the brook cried That she heard in the night when the clock whirred Just before it clanged out its twelve heavy strokes In the thick of the stillness, black as a crow, But no scritching now with a scrawny great crackling, And the rain not trickling, nothing to hark to, Not even the tree at the north chamber window.
Till she routed it, horse and foot, Thinking of walking to town through pastures When the wood thrushes wept their notes And the most was thick on the cobbled stones With the heron wading among the hummocks Of the pursy meadow that went down to the sea.
And she had knitting and folks to visit, Preserves to make, and cream tartar biscuit, She knew where was elocamp, coltsfoot, lobelia, And she’d make a good mess up for all as could use it, And go to the well and let down the bucket And see the sky there and herself in it As the wind threw itself about in the bushes and shouted And another day fresh as a cedar started.
This was one of Jean Garrigue’s last poems, published posthumously in her last collection, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s most successful novel. Jewett tells the story of a woman novelist who travels to Maine to find peace and quiet and finish a book. She stays with and becomes fascinated with Mrs. Todd, the woman she boards with, a herbalist and the spiritual heart of her rural community.
Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.
And, like the bear, Mrs. Todd carries with her “a loneliness you noticed in her that you saw in none of the other animals”:
It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.
As Upton writes, in Garrigue’s poem, “The sense of community oscillates with isolation.” The same sense carries through The Animal Hotel and, indeed, seems to have through the later works of Garrigue’s other inspiration, Josephine Herbst.
John Quill was clerk to Robert Shark, a legal man was he, As dull, obscure, and technical as legal man could be; And, perch’d before his legal desk, Quill learnt the legal rules That give high principles to all who sit upon high stools! John Quill with skill could doubt distil where all before was clear, One would suppose that he was born with a pen behind his ear! Though merely clerk to Robert Shark, so great was his address, That many really thought J. Q. as knowing as R. S.
John Quill, however small the job, huge drafts of deeds could draw, A puzzle quite to common sense, according to the law; With vulgar, vile tautology to indicate his skill, He did “enlarge, prolong, extend, and add unto” the bill And thus he did “possess, obtain, get, have, hold, and enjoy” The confidence of Robert Shark, who called him worthy Boy. Birds of a feather were the pair, the aim of both their breasts To pluck all others, plume themselves, and feather their own nests.
But ’tis a theme too dark for jest; oh! let him who embarks Upon the troubled waters of the Law—beware of Sharks; And such my dread of legal Quills, I readily confess That Quills of “fretful porcupine” would terrify me less. When poor men seek a legal Friend, the truth the Fable tells, The Lawyer eats the oyster up, the Client has the shells; And could the shells be pounded to a palatable dinner, The legal Friend would swallow that, and Clients might grow thinner.
From Weeds of Witchery, by Thomas Haynes Bayly London: Ackerman and Co., 1837
The helmet now an hive for bees becomes, And hilts of swords may serve for spiders’ looms; Sharp pikes may make Teeth for a rake; And the keen blade, th’ arch enemy of life. Shall be degraded to a pruning knife. The rustic spade Which first was made For honest agriculture, shall retake Its primitive employment, and forsake The rampires steep And trenches deep. Tame conies1 in our brazen guns shall breed. Or gentle doves their young ones there shall feed. In musket barrels Mice shall raise quarrels For their quarters. The ventriloquious drum, (Like lawyers in vacations) shall be dumb. Now all recruits. But those of fruits. Shall be forgot; and th’ unarmed soldier Shall only boast of what he did whilere. In chimneys’ ends Among his friends.
1conies: rabbits
Ralph Knevet (160O-1671) was an follower of George Herbert who took orders during the English Civil War, which clearly forms the background of this poem. It appears in Another World Than This, which is something of a commonplace book compiled by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson from decades of their reading. In their introduction, they wrote,
The compilers of this anthology have tried not to cheat. They have, on the whole, adhered honourably to the underlinings they found they had already made in their own books on the shelves of their separate rooms. They had both been in the habit for many years of marking passages which particularly pleased them, and of scribbling an index for reference at the end of each book–as every true reader of books should train himself to do. The residue, as embodied in the following pages, thus represents the lifetime literary taste of two persons with somewhat different occupations in life; a taste pursued in each case from adolescence to middle age; yet so curiously homogeneous in its ultimate result, that in a sudden spirit of amused comparison they decided to pool their book-markings into one printed volume.
The short poems and brief prose excerpts collected in Another World Than This are laid out across the twelve months, providing not quite a year’s worth of daily readings. Their selections are, like Knevet’s poem, mostly obscure and mostly from centuries before theirs, and on the whole, vivid and memorable. An excellent bedside companion, you can find it in electronic format on the Internet Archive: Link.
Zigzagzip Cat o’nine tails whip The tender night To splintering applause.
I never see a stone
I never see a stone Without an inward groan And feel again the impact of my race. For should I chance to peer beneath Its smooth and granite face I see no other Than a brother Come crawling out with looping squirm, Wet, white and eyeless, fellow worm.
Confession
I know so well what I want to say, I even know some of the words And the rhymes that wait to translate it. And then I begin–and begin–and prevaricate– I hedge my course with blinded byways I tunnel under lighted highways I cannot say “this is how it is On the flood lit road” And thrust my pen ping into a reality; I buck or shy left, I suggest A graveyard fixed in night Rather than look an honest hour In the face, by broad daylight.
If you should die
If you should die I’d give my flesh For purpose of worms And ivory grow my bones And moss my hair
Until I grew desirable To death And you moved over And we shared the earth
I am so tired
I am so tired I do not think Sleep in death can rest me
So line my two eternal yards With softest moss Then lengths of bone won’t splinter As they toss Or pierce their wooden box To winter
Do not let the children Pass my way alone Lest these shaking bones Rattle out their fright At waking in the night
Anne Wilkinson was a Canadian poet whose first book first book wasn’t published until she was forty and only published one more before she died in 1961 at the age of fifty. Raised in a somewhat unconventional family and educated by her mother and in several Montessori-influenced schools, she struggled throughout her life between the pull of poetry and the demands of her life as a wife and mother. If a woman “acquires an interest,” she once wrote, “cultivates a talent outside husband, children and house, she automatically is subject to the qualms of divided loyalties.”
As Ingrid Ruthig writes in The Essential Anne Wilkinson, the only easily available collection of her work, Wilkinson’s poetry is “direct in approach, incisive, and unflinching,” something well illustrated in the above poems. Her lines are almost always short: “She did not dress/Except to wear/A word across her groin”, for example, is the opening to “La belle dame sans dormi.” Most of her poems are a page or so long; none is more than four to five.
And they were usually slow in gestation, as is suggested in “Confession” above. She wrote in one diary entry, “The pattern is irritatingly familiar. The first heaven flowing rush–this is it! A week later the desolation of knowing that this not only is not ‘it,’ but is atrocious, has no relation, except for the odd line, to poetry.” Yet she seems to have always had a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve in her poems–which was to avoid what she saw as the two flaws in much of the modern poetry she read. “Those who attempt the simple are thin to the vanishing point,” while most of the other “… are obscure, tortuous, and torturing.”
W. R. Rodgers at the BBC“In Ireland why a man becomes a poet is a question not to be asked,” writes Darcy O’Brien in W. R. Rodgers (1970), his fine memoir of the poet from the Bucknell University Press Irish Writers Series. Yet unlike the typical Irish poet, Rodgers did not really discover the poetry in himself until he was nearing the age of thirty and busy with his life as a Presbyterian minister in Loughgall, a town outside Belfast in County Armagh in Northern Ireland. Born, raised, and educated in Belfast, Rodgers was familiar with the sectarian conflicts that simmered and surged throughout his lifetime. “Everything in Belfast had two sides,” he wrote in his 1955 radio piece, “The Return Room”: “Even the walls of Belfast took sides.” “In Belfast,” O’Brien quotes Churchill, “they do everything but eat the bodies.”
Rodgers had been inspired when, in his late twenties, he began to read the work of contemporary poets such as W. H. Auden. And in his early poems one can detect certain threads in subject and diction that could be traced back to Auden:
Escape (1940)
The roads of Europe are running away from the war, Running fast over the mined bridge and past the men Waiting there, with watch, ready to maim and arrest them, And strong overhead the long snorings of the planes’ tracks Are stretching like rafters from end to end of their power. Turn back, you who want to escape or want to forget The ruin of all your regards. You will be more free At the thoughtless centre of slaughter than you would be Standing chained to the telephone-end while the world cracks.
Rodgers’ world was not one that celebrated poetry, however. As he once wrote in an unsigned article in the Belfast magazine, The Bell, “[The Ulsterman] would like to have eloquence. But he suspects and hates eloquence that has no bone of logic in it. It seems to him glib, spineless, and insincere.” After he published his first collection, Awake! and Other Poems (1941), Rodgers’ father cautioned him, “I wouldn’t tell anybody. They’ll think you are wasting your time.”
Rodgers had a clear-eyed understanding of his position in the community, which he never fully settled into. As he wrote in a late unpublished essay quoted in O’Brien’s book,
A rural community is a close and intricate wickerwork of human relationships and functions. Each person born into it, or brought into it, is given a pertinent role to fill and is always identified with this role. The role I was called to fill was that of parson and, being young, I found it a formidable one. Old men, full of worldly experience, farmers who never hesitated to advise me on practical matters, would at once defer to me, as sons to a father, when it came to other-worldly matters and spiritual crises. Not that they were impressed by my personal authority; authority for them resided in the role and office which I happened to occupy … I realised that I, as an individual, did not matter, and this in a way was a relief to me as well as an instruction. I do not know how one would carry the problems of a community if one were only oneself. The danger, of course–and this goes for all men who fill a public role and wear a public mask, parson or politician–the danger is that a man may end by confusing the office with himself. If this happens he becomes simply a mask, an empty shell, a private bore in public and a public bore in private.
The pull of poetry was difficult for Rodgers to resist. Unhappy in the constraints of his position in the conservative Protestant community of Loughgall and caught in a difficult marriage to a woman doctor who struggled with schizophrenia, he reached out by letters to other writers in Ireland and England and took long trips to Dublin that were escapes into the world of literature and long conversations over Guinness and whiskey. When his friend and fellow poet Louis MacNeice helped arrange a job with the BBC, Rodgers resigned from his ministry and moved to England.
At the BBC, he worked on a series of portraits of Irish writers, using a sound mosaic technique that was pioneering at the time but is now a staple of many radio documentaries. These were later collected and published after his death in Irish Literary Portraits (1973). Rodgers found his niche among the hard-drinking and ever-talking community of writers such as Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. As O’Brien writes, “Rodgers’s drinking was an extraordinary thing to behold. He was never ostentatious about it. He drank as he did everything else, quietly and sacramentally, glass upon glass in steady unmeasured procession, his talk dilating along with his arteries and filling the room like the smoke from his pipe.” He established a place among his peers so successfully that in 1951, after the death of George Bernard Shaw, they elected him to the empty seat in the Irish Academy of Letters.
Though he generally avoided verse, a strong touch of the lyric shines throughout Rodgers’ poetry. It’s a shame that no recordings of his reading are available online, because one can well imagine how fine his words would sound, as in this opening from “The Net”:
Quick, woman, in your net Catch the silver I fling! O I am deep in your debt, Draw tight, skin-tight, the string, And rake the silver in. No fisher ever yet Drew such a cunning ring.
And he could create images as deft and elegant as a piece by Mozart:
The Fountains
Suddenly all the fountains in the park Opened smoothly their umbrellas of water, Yet there was none but me to miss or mark Their peacock show, and so I moved away Uneasily, like one who at a play Finds himself all along, and will not stay.
Though he never returned to live in Ireland, its memories and spirit never left him. And he maintained a strong sense of connection to the church even after leaving it. He wrote a sequence of poems based on the last days of Jesus, Resurrection, which includes the following:
It is always the women who are the Watchers And keepers of life: they guard our exits And our entrances. They are both tomb and womb, End and beginning. Bitterly they bring forth And bitterly take back the light they gave. The last to leave and still the first to come, They circle us like sleep or like the grave. Earth is their element, and it it lies The seed and silence of the lighted skies, The seasons with their fall and slow uprise, Man with his sight and militant surmise. It is always the women who are the Watchers And Wakeners.
Rodgers was never a prolific poet, and he struggled increasingly with writer’s block as he entered his fifties. In his introduction to Collected Poems (1971), available on the Open Library (link), Dan Davin recalls how Rodgers promised for years to provide a poem, to be titled “Epilogue,” for a collection Davin was editing:
Indeed I have been working at the Epilogue…. But I have been frustrated, distracted, tormented and halted by trouble with landlord and solicitors–and the domestic reverberations of it….
Later
Working on it both excites and depresses me, and I realize that to write about it is like opening an old wound, which is Ireland.
Later
I have not ignored or neglected the Epilogue. I’m writing some good stuff for it, only it takes a lot of architecting…. An incidental, but exacting, bother is that once I get into the Epilogue it starts other hares in my mind and I tend to fly off in pursuit of them and have to remind myself that I haven’t the time and that they’ll run another day.
Still later
I feel like a robin that has got mixed up in a badminton match.
In the end, “Epilogue” was never completed. Davin included the fragments he was able to assemble from Rodgers’ papers as an appendix to Collected Poems. In them, Rodgers offers perhaps a clue to his reticence:
Patient in graveyards, used to thinking long And walking short, remembering what My careful father told me–“If ever, son, You have to go anywhere and have to Run, never go! It’s unlucky.”
Rodger was saved briefly from his predicament when he was offered a temporary position on the faculty of Pitzer College in Claremont, California. There, he relied on recordings of his BBC shows to fill up most of his lectures on Irish writers, enjoyed the California sun, and despised the produce, which he considered “flavorless.” During his second year at Pitzer, he was told that his contract would not be renewed, and while on a trip to England that year, he fell ill and operated on to remove a cancerous tumor from his bowels. When he was well enough to return to California, he was able to get another position at nearby Cal Poly Pomona. In the fall of 1968, however, he found himself unable to eat and he was hospitalized again.
As a part-time employee with no health insurance, he was admitted to the Los Angeles County General Hospital. “He would not, of course, have been in such a place had he been in England or in Northern Ireland, nor even in the Republic of Ireland,” O’Brien writes in his memoir. “He had to be in America to end his life in a ward crowded with the oppressed: blacks, Mexican-Americans, and W. R. Rodgers. … [B]eing the man he was, he would sooner have died among wretches than rich men.” At his funeral service in Claremont, one of his colleagues at Pitzer, Bert Meyers, read a poem in tribute:
I know a candle of a man whose voice, meandering in a flame, could make the shadows on the wall listen to what he said.
He’s done. You’d need a broom to arouse him now. All things burn, writhe, shrink, dissolve, or drift away. Some men are words that warm a room.
In March of 1969, Rodger’s family and a few of his friends returned with his body to Loughgall, where his body was interred in the graveyard of Cloveneden Church.
If poetry didn’t have a bad rap in the eyes of American readers and publishers, the poems of Kenneth Fearing would never go out of print. They’d be shelved alongside the crime novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and read just as often. One of his novels–The Big Clock (1946)–has attained that status. It’s both an NYRB Classic (2006) and included in the Library of America Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s. And another of his novels, less noir than surrealist, Clark Gifford’s Body, is also available as an NYRB Classic.
Not that they’re out of print at the moment. Thanks to the Library of America’s American Poets Project, a fine collection edited by poet and biographer Robert Polito has been available, if somewhat sporadically, since 2004. In fact, you can grab a copy for half price ($10) now, which is partly why I’m deviating today from my usual practice of sticking to books that are out of print: Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems.
If you’re cheap like me, you can also find a number of Fearing’s poetry collections online at the Internet Archive and the Open Library: Poems (1936), with an introduction by the also-sporadically-out-of-print Edward Dahlberg; Afternoon of a Pawnbroker (1943) (which is probably my favorite title of a book of poems); New and Selected Poems (1956), the last collection published before his death; and even the Library of America collection, Selected Poems (2004). The only complete collection, however, Complete Poems (1994), from the Phoenix Living Poet Series, is scarce and goes for over $40 a copy. His other collections, for those interested, are generally available used for less than the Complete Poems: Angel Arms (1929); Dead Reckoning (1938), Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (1940); and Stranger at Coney Island (1948).
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, outside Chicago, Fearing moved to New York City in 1924 and survived by working as a writer and reporter for any place that could pay his rent. His first attempts at fiction were knock-off stories for pulp magazines with names like Paris Nights and Snappy. He also got involved with radical organizations and often wrote movie and book reviews for New Masses. Between 1938 and 1943 he published a book a year. By the end of the 1930s, he’d worked his way into the mainstream of magazine work, spending time on the staff of both Newsweek and Time. The latter furnished much of his inspiration for The Big Clock, which is about the conspiracies and corruptions spun out by an ambitious publisher who might be mistaken for Time’s Henry Luce.
Something about the guy sparked the interest of other writers. At least three different novelists incorporated him into their novels: W. L. Rivers in Death of a Young Man (1927); Margery Latimer for This is My Body (1930); and Albert Halper for Union Square (1933). And in 1935, Joseph Mitchell, still working for the New York World-Telegraph, profiled him in a piece titled, “‘Drunken Poet’ of Greenwich Village is Not the Most Respected of Singers.”
The fact that Fearing was already known as the “Drunken Poet” at the age of 33, with just two books to his name, gives you a clue to one of the reasons his work fell into neglect. Like Delmore Schwartz and too many other fine writers of that hard-drinking time, Fearing tossed his life and talents on the pyre of alcohol, which happily consumed them and went on looking for victims. In his remarkable book, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (which features Fearing on its cover), Alan Wald writes of Fearing: “… his sensational alcohol addition was evident from his college days, records in memoirs and the diary entries of his friends over forty years, a prevailing feature of autobiographical characters in his novels, and confirmed by his autopsy.” The one time he hit the jackpot in a big way, making the equivalent of half a million dollars in today’s terms for the film rights to The Big Clock, he quickly blew it on booze and bad business deals. As Nicholas Christopher writes in his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of The Big Clock, “Eventually he became a fall-down drunk who suffered frequent blackouts and for long stretches might not bathes, wash his hair, brush his teeth, or change his clothes.” When he was dying of lung cancer and melanoma in a hotel room in New York City, he tried to dull the pain with cough syrup laced with codeine, the favorite over the counter narcotic of its day.
This kind of destruction not only takes its toll on the artist but on his family, friends, and fans. People find it easier to tune out than to hang in, particularly when the creative work dwindles and gets replaced by inertia or mania. It’s hard to look past the ranting tone of Fearing’s introduction to New and Selected Poems, titled “Reading, Writing, and the Rackets”:
The revolution that calls itself the Investigation had its rise in the theaters of communication, and now regularly parades its images across them, reiterates its gospel from them, daily and hourly marches through the corridors of every office, files into the livingroom of every home….
The only acts the Investigation does not perform in public are those intimate financial transactions by which each great and little Investigator reaps the just reward due his superior insight, virtue, and the grave responsibility of exercising so much power. There, the reticence is rarely broken, and then only in moments of awkward, but human, misunderstanding. Yet that reserve may stem logically enough from a cardinal tenet in the gospel advanced by every tribunal of the Investigation: The need for secrecy is great, and growing.
Today, however, it’s possible to read this and not necessarily pass it off as ravings. As Polito has noted, Fearing’s work in many ways anticipates the work of Gaddis, Pynchon, and De Lillo in its depiction of “the systems of corporate life, offices, business, technology, work, money, and desire.” In a Poetry in America interview with Polito on YouTube, Elisa New says that Fearing captured “the moment when Americans realized they lived inside of systems, and that makes Fearing the perfect poet. What’s terrible in a way, what’s existentially terrible, as well as being hungry and in fear of losing your house, is that you don’t control your life–the banks do.” Which is another reason why it’s worth taking a look again at Fearing.
But the primary reason to take a look at Fearing’s poetry is that it is like almost no other American poetry I know (not that I am an expert). Fearing’s poetry drew its inspiration not from Keats, Whitman, or Eliot but from talkies, radio, tabloids, comic strips, and street talk. Take what is perhaps his most famous poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” from Angel Arms:
The dramatis personae include a fly-specked Monday evening, A cigar store with stagnant windows, Two crooked streets, Six policemen and Louie Glatz. Bass drums mumble and mutter an ominous portent As Louie Glatz holds up the cigar store and backs out with $14.92. Officer Dolan noticed something suspicious, it is supposed, And ordered him to halt, But dangerous, handsome, cross-eye’d Louie the rat Spoke with his gat, Rat-a-tat-tat— Rat-a-tat-tat And Dolan was buried as quickly as possible. But Louie didn’t give a good god damn, He ran like a crazy shadow on a shadowy street With five policemen off that beat Hot on his trail, going Blam! Blam!-blam!
It’s hard not to imagine Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney reading that. Just the titles of Fearing’s poems make me want to read them: “Jack Knuckles Falters But Reads Own Statement at His Execution While Wardens Watch”; “Lunch with the Sole Survivor”; “Agent No. 174 Resigns”; “Payday in the Morgue”; “Cracked Record Blues”; “Travelogue in a Shooting-Gallery”; “A Dollar’s Worth of Blood, Please”; “Love, 20¢ the First Quarter Mile”; “Confession Overhead in a Subway”; “The Juke-Box Spoke and the Juke-Box Said.” Open any of Fearing’s books of poetry and you are instantly carried back to a street in mid-century Manhattan, usually in the wee hours of the morning:
4 A. M.
It is early evening, still, in Honolulu, and in London, now, it must be well past dawn; But here, in the Riviera Cafe, on a street that has been lost and forgotten very long ago, as the clock moves steadily toward closing time, The spark of life is very low, if it burns at all—
And here we are, four lost and forgotten customers in this place that surely will never again be found, Sitting, at ten-foot intervals, along this lost and forgotten bar, (Wishing the space were further still, for we are still too close for comfort) Knowing that the bartender, and the elk’s head, and the picture of some forgotten champion (All gazing at something of interest beyond us and behind us, but very far away) Must somehow be aware of us, too, as we stare at the cold interior of our lives, reflected in the mirror beneath and in back of them—
Hear how lonely the radio is, as its voice talks on, and on, unanswered; Notice how futile is the nickel dropped in the juke-box by a customer, How its music proves again that one’s life is either too humdrum or too exciting, too empty or too full, too this, too that; Only the cat that has been sleeping in the window, now yawning and strecthing and trotting to the kitchen to sleep again— Only this living toy knows what we feel, knows what we are, really knows what we only think we know.
And soon, too soon, it will be closing time, and the door will be locked; Leaving each of us will be alone, then, with something too ravaging for a name (Our golden, glorious futures, perhaps)—
Lock the door now and put out the lights, before some terrible stranger enters and gives, to each of us, a a question that must be answered with the truth—
They say the Matterhorn at dawn, and the Northern Lights of the Arctic, are things that should be seen; They say, they say — in time, you will hear them say anything, and everything. What would the elk’s head, or the remote bartender say, if they could speak? The booth where last night’s love affair began, the spot where last year’s homicide occurred, are empty now, and still.
(No wonder that “4 A. M.” is often reprinted below a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s iconographic painting, Nighthawks.)
Fearing’s America has not an ounce of nostalgia in it. It’s a world of sleepless nights, hangovers, relentless capitalism at times indistinguishable from crime, and an unending sense of dread:
First you bite your fingernails. And then you comb your hair again. And then you wait. And wait. (They say, you know, that first you lie. And then you steal, they say. And then, they say, you kill.) from American Rhapsody (4)
And, in response, his Americans turn to their drugs of choice:
A La Carte Some take to liquor, some turn to prayer, Many prefer to dance, others to gamble, and a few resort to gas or the gun. (Some are lucky, and some are not.)
Name your choice, any selection from one to twenty-five: Music from Harlem? A Viennese waltz on the slot- machine phonograph at Jack’s Bard and Grill? Or a Brahm’s Concerto over WXV? (Many like it wild, others sweet.)
Champagne for supper, murder for breakfast, romance for lunch and terror for tea, This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time the world has gone to hell. (Some can take it, and some cannot.)
Though Fearing’s work suffered in his last years, and no new poems were published after the handful that close New and Selected Poems, his anxiety burned brightly to the end. The last poem in that book, “Family Album (4),” subtitled “The Investigators” radiates with suspicion and the sense of a lost self:
Close your eyes tight, turn around three times, reach and pour and stir, (It says in the rules, one wish per man) Whatever it is, this is bound to be something final and big, Open the valve, who’s got a match?—
HOW DO YOU, WHEN DO YOU, WHERE DO YOU WHAT? WHO DO YOU WHO, WHO DO YOU WHO, WHO DO YOU WHO?
Kenneth Fearing died in Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan in 1961. He was 58. Another exhibit in the case for William Carlos Williams’ argument that the pure products of America go crazy (using the Merriam Webster definition (“full of cracks or flaws”)).
“The Poet Abroad in Her Kingdom, the Earth: She Prescribes an Oligarchy of Poets and Painters to Organise the World”
In the April 27, 1946 edition of Picture Post, a U. K. version of Life, an unusual three-page story was devoted to a poet who, even then, was two decades past her brief and limited fame. Anna Wickham struggled throughout her life against the control that men–first her father, then her husband, and finally, the male power structure of her time. Though she wrote quickly and spontaneously (her poems bear the marks far more of improvisation than careful craft) and managed to write hundreds of poems and publish three books (The Contemplative Quarry (1915); The Man With A Hammer (1916); and The Little Old House (1921)) while raising four boys and keeping house, she resented that expectations about how her time and energy should be spent and implicit contest between the domestic and the creative life.
There is no doubt that her poetry might have been more highly regarded now had she put more energy into her writing and less into her fights with the world, but then she wouldn’t have been the woman she was. In this article, Lionel Birch refers to her as a “Great She,” and she once snapped at a man threatening to eject her from an art auction, “You’d better retract, my good man. I may be a minor poet, but I’m a major woman.” One of her most stalwart supporters, Louis Untermeyer, who included some of her poems in most of his anthologies, called her “a magnificent gypsy of a woman, who always entered a room as if she had just stamped across the moors.” Rayner Heppenstall wrote that Wickham was “reputed to bite people’s heads off and try to pull other women’s breasts off.” Even the tough-minded George Orwell, a neighbor in the 1930s, considered her “ferocious looking.” As she grew older, she became known as something of a character in Hampstead, where she ran a rough-and-tumble rooming house. She wrote more intermittently after 1930 and published less, but still did occasional readings (at which she was known to make such candid asides as, “Rubbish, but there it is.” And she tenaciously stuck to her opinions, rights, and routines throughout the war, even as houses a few feet from hers were destroyed in the Blitz, earning the respect of her neighbors and a certain local celebrity that was celebrated in the Picture Post photo essay.
In an autobiographical piece reprinted in The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet (edited by R. D. Smith, Olivia Manning’s husband), Wickham once wrote, “I feel that women of my kind are a profound mistake. There have been few women poets of distinction, and, if we count only the suicides of Sappho, Lawrence Hope and Charlotte Mew, their despair rate has been very high.” Almost exactly a year after the Picture Post piece appeared, her youngest son, George, found her hanging in the kitchen in which she is shown sitting below. She was 63.
And so, to mark the end of two years devoted to the neglected works of women writers, I take the liberty to reprint the text and photos from the Picture Post article, remarkable for its time in its open-hearted recognition of Wickham’s struggles with her world.
Anna Wickham: Poetess and Landlady
Celebrated in America, appreciated in France–Anna Wickham, mistress of words that sing and words that devastate, is still without full honour in her own country.
In the living-room of Anna Wickham’s house in Hampstead hangs one of those landlady’s notices which look so familiar. But this is how it reads: “Tour bourgeoise. Anna Wickham’s Stabling for Poets, Artists, and their Executives. Creative mood respected. Meals at all hours.”
“Creative mood respected.” That is important to Anna Wickham, and you can see why, when you read a verse of one of her own poems, called, “Dedication to a Cook”:
If any ask why there’s no great She-Poet, Let him come live with me, and he will know it. If I’d indite an ode or mend a sonnet, I must go choose a dish or tie a bonnet….
“She Scrutinises Her 62nd Spring”Anna Wickham herself is a Great She, and she is a poet of a flavour which you won’t find anywere else. She wrote that verse more than twenty years ago, when she was in the process of bringing up a family, looking after her husband, running a home, and generally having her creative moods disrespected by the tyranny of the kitchen range, and the dictatorship of the darning needle.
She was born in Wimbledon in 1884, went to Australia when she was six, came back to Paris to study singing with Jean De Reszke, when she was 21, got married shortly afterwards, abandoned her singing career, started writing poetry, and came slap up against the creative total-woman’s conflict between the demands of the Dream and the demands of the Race. There then pursued her a period of frenzied sweeping-up, in her successive Hampstead homes, until her sons at last grew up and went afield.
At that point she was once more in a position to respect her own creative moods–even though it meant that the dishes were left unwashed and stockings undarned. Today, her house remains a memorial of those bud-bursting years when the rabid itch to get lyrics down on to paper would never let her alone,a nd neither would the kitchen range.
For the house–the house in these pictures–was the battlefield on which her dreams fought a war of movement against her domesticity; and there the pots and pans still hang around in gangs, at teh scene of their crime.
“The Poet in Her Kitchen, Where Soufflés Fight with Sonnets”
The poet in her kitchen, where soufflés fight against sonnets for her time and exclusive attention. Anna Wickham, one of England’s rarest, but least-publicised, lyric poets, in the nerve-centre of her Hampstead home. Many of the most fruitful hours of her life have been spent just like this: waiting for the kettle to boil, waiting for a dish to cook, waiting for the unborn poem to start knocking–and hoping they aren’t all going to start happening at once. The prevailing problem, to find time for dreams as well as for domesticity.
“She Eats Her Elevenses on the Kerb”
But as soon as Anna Wickham steps outside her front door, it is a different matter. When you see her walking down the Parliament Hill, with her big Indian shopping basket clanging against her knee like a great bamboo bell, you know that there is at least one free, sovereign, woman abroad on the earth. Free to do what? Free to spend time, or to use time, or to pass time. Free to walk or stop walking. Free to break her quarter-mile journey to the shops half-way, sit down on the kerb and eat a bun. Free to proceed, with or without broomstick, on the pond, or to declaim an old poem to a child operating against the tiddlers. Free, in fact, to deal with the dream when it arrives. Free to do any of the things which may lead to the making of a new poem.
“She Investigates the Mythology of a Kite”
People stare? Of course, people stare. The huge face, corrugated by the astringency of wisdom, the goblin eyes, and the laugh of a naughty little girl–these rightly rattle the giblets of the rolled-umbrella-man in the pub. the gawper in the street, the wondering child on the Heath.
In Hampstead one is used to Free Austrians and Free Hungarians. But it is not every day that you can see a Free Elizabethan reciting a barbed lyric to herself in the middle of East Heath Road. Anna Wickham declares that she does not write poetry: she exudes it. She does not speak of writing to, for, or about, people she meets. She talks of writing it “from” them. “I imagined that poem from So-and-So,” she says.
She has written poems passionate and poems compassionate, Mistress-poetry and Mother-poetry. And, in her conversation, she is master-mistress of the phrase-that-goes-home–either the phrase that kindles, or the phrase that trounes, or the phrase that heals.
One poem explains the ruthlessness:
If I had peace to sit and sing, Then I could make a lovely thing; But I am stung by goads and whips, So I build songs like iron ships. Let it be something for my song If it is sometimes swift and strong.
“She Returns to the Tree About Which She Wrote Her Loveliest Song”Lastly, and because it is a question which is central to her poetry, let’s take the complaint of the Powdered and Pomaded Ones: “But why doesn’t she smarten herself up?” Let Anna Wickham, in an hitherto unpublished poem, answer:
I plant my hope, On my Irish view of water And my Italian attitude to soap. I am my father’s daughter. I bathe by spells, At holy works, And wash them with the Turks. Them without sin, I disregard my skin, And thus I know Old Stratfrd-atte-Bow, The sweats and smuts and anguish of my Loard, All saints, and sluts, before the Water Board. Young Fancy came to wreck, From too much washing of the Heron’s neck.
You tell me that shows that the woman has no standards? I tell you her standards are something more than steeple-high. Listen to this:
God, thou great symmetry, Who put a biting lust in me From whence my sorrows spring, For all the frittered days That I have spent in shapeless ways, Give me one perfect things.
And that poem constitutes one out of about 200 similar reasons why I count Anna Wickham as a blessing, and why I would have you meet her.
Written by Lionel Birch. Published in Picture Post, April 27, 1946
Here the big stars roll down like tears all down your face; darkness that has no walls, the empty night that fingers grope for and are lost, is nightfall in your face.
The big stars roll, the glittering railway-line unwinds into the constellations.
Over and under you the dark, in you the rocking night without a foothold, and no walls, no ceiling,
the parallels that never meet, the pulses winding out to the stars.
Night has no end. Light travelling from the stars is out before you ride along it with the black tears falling, falling,
all fall down.
Passage of an August (1938)
In solitary august, like a story he met grief’s lassie with the quartz-bright hands; and she became his darling, who was young, was sorry there among the grasses blowing over pit and brands.
She walked beside him back the way he came, into the whitening hills, and cut his throat. Although she called him by another name, she was no stranger, love. And none can drive her out.
Barbed Wire (1940)
The silence, with its ragged edge of lost communication, silence at the latter end, is now a spiked north wind.
Last words toss about me in the streets, waste paper or a cigarette butt in some gutter stream that overflows from crumpled darkness. “Look, I am plunged in the midst of them, a dagger in their midst.”
and over the edge the nightmares peer, with their tall stories and the day’s unheard-of cry.
Failure
What can forgive us for the clothes left lying and the rocking journey, flashing poles and pylons standing into fields of air, in flooded fields?
Something flew out of our hands, the cup incomplete, air of invasions and land of defeat. There was the tree felled in another valley, behind the flown carpet and nothing left to remember, all to forgive.
Nothing to remember but the windows slammed against the cold, the helmet crushed down on the eyes.
And who, beside the darkened station lamp, remembering, started back.
These are stark, grim poems, very much in the spirit of their time, when there was little good news and a great deal of bad, and no one knew how far away better days might be. But there is an underlying toughness and realism that reflects the attitude of a survivor, of someone who wasn’t going to give up in the face of loss. I would have included more such poems had discretion not held me back. Sadly, Eithne Wilkins never published a collection of her poems, so one has to root through the pages of long-defunct little magazines to find them.
She attended Oxford in the early 1930s, then moved to London, where she worked as a translator and reader for various publishers. Her poems began to be published in British literary journals around 1937, and in 1949, a selection of them were included in The New British Poets, a collection edited by Kenneth Rexroth and published by James Laughlin’s just-founded New Directions Press. That same year, she married the Austrian writer and translater, Ernst Kaiser. Although she worked on English translations of a number of well-regarded books, including Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, she appears to have stopped submitting her poems for publication sometime after the New Directions collection was published, and her one book, The Rose-Garden Game (1969), was a popular history about the origins of rosary beads as an accessory to Catholic worship.
from The New British Poets, edited by Kenneth Rexroth New London, Connecticut: New Directions Press, 1949
In a scene in 
As Ingrid Ruthig writes in 
Rodgers had a clear-eyed understanding of his position in the community, which he never fully settled into. As he wrote in a late unpublished essay quoted in O’Brien’s book,
The fact that Fearing was already known as the “Drunken Poet” at the age of 33, with just two books to his name, gives you a clue to one of the reasons his work fell into neglect. Like Delmore Schwartz and too many other fine writers of that hard-drinking time, Fearing tossed his life and talents on the pyre of alcohol, which happily consumed them and went on looking for victims. In his remarkable book, 
In the April 27, 1946 edition of Picture Post, a U. K. version of Life, an unusual three-page story was devoted to a poet who, even then, was two decades past her brief and limited fame. 
