A shoutout at Montevidayo to my translations of Uruguayan poet Eduardo Milán recently published in HOTEL LAUTREAMONT from Shearsman:
http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2481#comments
A beautiful new anthology has found its way to my door. Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined, edited by Madelyn Garner and Andrea L. Watson, from 3: A Taos Press
: poems about hoarding, hiding, saving, buying, clutter, spiritual materialism and material of the spirit. Not a whole lot of big names among the 88 poets: Lyn Lifshin, Denise Duhamel, Gary Young, CB Follett, Jane Hirshfield, Kimiko Hahn; just a lot of really good writing.
My own poem included, “Isla Negra,” is about the frenetic and obsessional collecting activity of Pablo Neruda.
Here’s a mini-anthology of the six Neglected Poets I have profiled so far on this blog.
*
Edward Smith (1939-2003)
d.a. levy (1942-1968)
Donald Schenker (1930-1993)
Rebecca Parfitt (1942)
Charles Potts (1943)
George Hitchcock (1914-2010)
*
Send me your nominations for the next batch. Already in mind: Charles Foster, Joe Gastiger, Mary Norbert Körte, Jack Grapes, Morton Marcus, Flora Arnstein, Sharon Doubiago, and, because Jack said “thee and me, my friend!” Jack Foley and, naturally, myself. Send dates, bio info and poems or URL with your nominations, if you have ‘em.
*
*
Edward Smith (1939-2003) was born to missionary parents in China, and
There is no image among the .jpeg's supplied to me in all good faith by Google for one of America's greatest poets, Edward Smith.
mastered Vietnamese in about five minutes when the CIA sent him in-country in ’63. Ed became fluent enough to startle the eponymous Bea of Bea’s Wok ‘n Roll in DeKalb, Illinois, with his proficiency four decades later. He was spirited out of Saigon overnight on the heels of the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. Ed Smith was the dominant hippie poet in 1967 Seattle in a scene that included Charlie Potts, then underwent an unfortunate conversion conjugal with whiny first wife to childhood Evangelical Christianity which cost him thirty years of poetic work that would have made his name. Smith returned to the craft around the millennium. He approached Potts and began to rev up his axe once more, drove all night to DeKalb in August 2003 to bore Rebecca Parfitt and me to tears ranting against nefarious and irrelevant Roethke while finishing her Bailey’s Irish Cream, appeared at the Walla Walla Poetry Party that fall and wowed ‘em, and got the flu Xmas 2003 and died because he didn’t have health care. Ed Smith is a rapid, submarine didactic poet with great expanse and large male pattern blindness. Smith taught Potts the art of the assonant rant, or maybe they both learned it from Dorn. This is a late poem, from his comeback tour, for his older daughter.
***
Father & Daughter
*
for Lindsay
*
Divina & Heather Ferreira,
her aunt Shani Benesh
& boxes
of mostly naked Barbies
Jim Buerster’s mouth reflected
in a Matthias Grunewald picture
printed from the Internet in black & white—
Lindsay gripped it in her hand
to lay on Mrs. Kuebel
before the bells
even years after the ultrasound
showed us a girl growing
in Sindy’s tummy
###
I’m not a real man
I tell my friends sometimes
just to be funny, I don’t
golf, fish, hunt
I detest action movies
dislike fast cars,
in fact, all cars
adore quiche, salads
yellow cheese, red wine
oboes & romantic comedies
###
and yet I am a man
in the wash of a daughter’s love
frantically clinging to my arms
when the answers don’t come out right
& she cries out, “skip, skip!”
to get me to move on without an answer
evading the unpleasantness of
not knowing everything at six
###
& Lindsay, when you come some-
day to lock horns with the truth
remember the closeness of a man
who pulled you up
through fights, colds, changes
of schools, friends, your
body rounding to all
things full & sweet sixteen
for when a boy will zoom
you outa here, maybe
in a white Mustang
as in Suzy Bogguss’ “Cinderella”
your nighttime fears forgotten
in the prospects of another
young man’s toast
and yet
before you finally go
remember the man
who pushed you high
on swings
& whose curved arm
welcoming yr little
female nature to his heart
was all you knew
Edward Smith
***
***
d.a. levy (1942-1968) was understood among the poets
d.a. levy taking no prisoners: what if he had lived?
of the mid-to-late 60′s underground to be the most American important poet of his, and my generation. A Cleveland boy who graduated high-school entirely without distinction — his one entry in the 1960 Rhodes High School yearbook is the phrase “Hey, You!” — levy took it amiss that Cleveland didn’t have a world-class poetry scene and undertook to create one via mimeograph and coffee house. Not surprisngly, levy was busted by the Repub D.A. for reading obscene poetry to minors (the 16-year-old chick in the second row was bugged, and I do hope she’s had a happy life). Allen Ginsberg came to levy‘s aid in the grand benefit reading. levy was a telepath, a pain freak, chained to Cleveland as a Dog Warrior ties himself to a stake on the battlefield. His most important work is the North American Book of the Dead. The weight of the evidence suggests that levy sat in lotus the day after Thanksgiving and blew his brains out.
***
turn away
i have nothing to say
in all this darkness
everyone runs from
words that carry light
from the closed doors
of the mind
i have nothing to say
why don’t you just sit there
and die
a little
everyday
waiting for some naive
child carrying the
crippled bird of yr love
to say the things you are
afraid to say & perhaps
in a millennium or two
you will begin to understand
that naive child
was you
and you murdered him
in the darkness
d.a. levy
***
***
Donald Schenker (1930-1993) had a poetic career of sorts in the Bay Area, but is now forgotten except by a few deep friends. Don came out West from natal Brooklyn, married blonde artist Alice from Wisconsin, resented Ferlinghetti and Rexroth, started a successful business (the Print Mint) and practiced his chops in recurring jazzy neurotic uncommanding poems until the day in 1985 when he got the diagnosis. Don sold the business and had eight years as a great poet. He spent as much time as possible in a cabin up in Siskiyou County where he wrote all his best work — Up Here, High Time, and The Book of Owl. He got to be a grandpa before the cancer took him away. Don Schenker and I were close the last two years of his life, and I treasure that.
Claim to fame: Don Schenker's the rube standing on the far left in this iconic 1958 portrait of SF Beat poets. Shig is seated, and Lew Welch and Peter Orlofsky; among those standng are David Meltzer, Allen Ginsberg and Richard Brautigan (in the white hat).
Jorge Luján, the músico ambulante, asked me for some poetry to read at bedtime, “algo fresco, lúdico” and I gave him Schenker; Jorge’s deft translation of most of Don has had the same curious unsuccess in getting published in Argentina as Scenker has had posthumously here. Dorianne Laux, happily not a ngelected poet, will tell youhow good Don was. Schenker‘s late poems are his good as Robert Creeley’s early poems, while his early poems are as empty as Creeley’s later work. That’s bad career timing.
***
Noon at Bear Meadow
*
We were on our separate ways
to the meadow, the bear and I.
We were going to meet there.
*
He was going to stand up
and open his arms
and I was going to walk in.
*
In the middle of the meadow,
in the middle of the day,
nobody there but him and me.
We thought we’d try it.
*
But something happened.
He got there early and didn’t wait,
and I came late.
*
He was leaving as I arrived
and never looked back.
I stood and watched him go
and never called out.
*
I went back every day after that
for a long time.
Then every month, then every year.
*
In the center of the meadow at noon
I’d sink down into the grass,
close my eyes in the bright sun
and think about how close we came,
the bear and I.
Donald Schenker
***
Here’s my own elegy for Donald Schenker, written after we went out for Vietrnamese in downtown Oakland and first published inPoetry Flash.
After all I’m neglected too (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?/ Are you Nobody too?”) In her lifetime, Emily was neglected. Now she isn’t.
*
ALL OVER THE PLACE
*
—for Donald Schenker (1930-1993)
*
Don says there’s poems all over the place,
it’s practically embarrassing, and I nod
without enthusiasm, driving into downtown
Oakland thinking yeah, those two pigeons
squatting on the blue-gray sign HOTEL MORO,
how the part of it that’s a poem could fall out
between the word and the bird, or the word Moro
all the way back to the reconquest of Spain
and all the bloody hemisphere ending up
on this block I don’t care if I see again.
*
Don says he could just stop anyone
and look at them, they’re all so deep
and beautiful, and I say what’s interesting
is the stories they all carry around
stranger than fiction, stronger than truth
all these gente waiting to cross the street
each one forgetting their great-grandparents
each one forgetting to tell their children
and I’m no novelist, I can’t move a
character across the room, much less two guys
to lunch at a Vietnamese place on Webster.
*
Over bowls of translucent noodles and odd meat
Don says he always felt like the other poets
were the big boys, and I see how the grand
famous names of his peers, now pushing sixty
have turned into the padded artifacts
of their own careers, while Don’s obscurity
has kept him fresh and sweet, and Don says
he loves his tumors, the big one that hurts
in his left hip, the one that’s hammering out
among sparse hairs inside his baseball cap,
and though it’s his own death that gives him truth
I’m stuck in my heart without any words
while poems in Vietnamese are fluttering up
from all the restaurant tables around us
and escaping into so much empty light.
John Oliver Simon
*
Rebecca Parfitt sharing the word with my granddaughter, Tesa Rose.
Rebecca Parfitt (b. 1942) is my girlfriend, which raises the nepotism factor. It occurred to me there were no women on my list. Most of the best student poets, aged now about 3 – 52, I have worked with, are women. Maybe women don’t typically follow the Smith-levy-Schenker trajectory of the ambitious but truncated career. Becky‘s path is more typical of women: she never made a serious effort to establish a poetic reputation, has written a few gleaming poems in a life devoted to service to battered women, participates in a terrific writing group in DeKalb (whose dominant poet — she will hate that formulation — is Joe Gastiger), publishes occasionally, and is basically fine with that. Unfortunately, WordPress’s debvotion to the left margin won’t allow me to reproduce the elegance of how this poem, written upon seeing her first image of the being who became her granddaugher Lila, spreads pleasingly across the page.
***
After the Ultrasound
*
for my grandchild
*
All night it rained softly
all night the seals pop their shiny heads
up out of the water and look softly
at me
We lean over the boat railing
Look, seals! The children swimming!
Look!
*
I will bring you to the water
I will sing you songs of nonsense & longing
We will walk the cliffs
naming the flowers as we go
*
darling minnow
deep sea explorer
jutting knee of you
tiny throbbing heart of you
pebble knobs of spine of you
fingers fluttering toward your mouth
(just wait until you taste peaches)
pinpoint toes oh my little seal
the wonder of it!
Rebecca Parfitt
***
***
Charles Potts (b. 1943) is a force of nature. His dad was a fur trapper in Idaho; Charlie was a high-school basketball star who met Ed Dorn in Pocatello, Ed Smith in Seattle, and me and Richard Krech in Berkeley. In the apocalyptic Bay Area spring of 1968, Charlie wrote and read and promoted at white heat on caffeine, nicotine, drugs, and no sleep or food until he flipped over the line into Napa State Hospital, a painful transition he eidetically chronicled in his memoir Valga Krusa.
Charles Potts, Berkeley, 1968,about the time he wrote "Fu Hexagram 24: No Hangups"
For many years Charlie has maintained an alternative Pacific Northwest poetry tradition through The Temple bookstore and magazine in Walla Walla, Washington. Hed rushed to the scene to be of support and assure the safety of manuscripts when Ed Smith died. There is a rock band named after him: the Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band. Charlie sometimes tours with them. Ron Silliman is one of Charlie‘s fans. It is entirely strange to me that there is an entire huge poetic universe that wouldn’t naturally name Charles Potts as one of America’s five most important poets. Go figure.
*
Fu Hexagram 24 No Hangups
*
Charlie Potts is dead
And I wonder if I should
Be opening his mail
Just as though it had
Been addressed to me
By all his friends
*
And for him as well as me
I tell you I have gone
All the way with Charlie
Back to nothing
And the cycle is complet
Ed
By the highest sound
I every heard
Going around in circ les
My name is Laffing Water
And whatever form it takes
I have plenty of
*
Changes to go through
Before I outwrite
All my errors
In longhand Legge’s English
10 year trip
With the further suggestive note
10 may be a round
Number
Signifying
*
Or
It
Long time
No see
The waiter laid on Crash
in North Vancouver
When we went in to have us
Front us a meal
Chinese English
Keeps my head up
The farthest north
I’ve been
*
Though sometimes I feel trapped
With so many other
Ugly Americans
Locked in English
Long time — no see
The blind embrace the blind
The deaf the dumb
The dead the living
Let go of me
*
I may not be one
with everything
But I am one with me
And you are 2
And we are 3
And 4 is cool
And 5 is plenty
Let’s get higher
Let’s get higher
One times nothing
Is nothing
Is me
Times it
For it is nothing
And I am it
And everything’s nothing
Belongs to you
Are part of it
Doesn’t make any difference
Whether or not I’m one
With the phone book
Dial a thought
Psycho somatic music
*
I’m completely inside
Your head now
But you can relax
For I won’t be long
And I’m not dangerous
Nor habit forming
But in case you’d dig to know
Why the sound is coming
Out of your mouth
And into your ears
Ventriloquy
Subtitled
Throwing my voice
*
You can relax completely now
I’m back in my corner
And it came with me
On the 7th day
it all returns
We got very close io it
Before it got away
But it’ll be back
The Sabbath started
With life one and is going
To last ’til dark
Today
As always
‘Cause it is
A band of invisible
4 space astral light
We find ourselves
In paradise
*
Are you ready for this
Have we been here before
But how did it end
It never ends
Mind expansion
The verb for all corrections
Think
About
The petering out of Pleistocene
The sun whips
Guided by
The magnificent completion
Of the next galactic cycle
And the final
Ice age
We passed through
With rudimentary tales
Down the Kelvin scale
Into ground
Zero
Which is the round number of
The largest perfect circle
How the genes knpw
What you all did
Greedy motherfuckers
I can be happy with nothing
Remember
Every step you take
Is in the right direction
And it’s not recorded anywhere
If everything is true
This match will sparkle
***
***
I didn’t really know the Santa Cruz Surrealist poet George Hitchcock (1914-2010) very well. Our paths crossed briefly in his active great age when I published our mutial friend the Baja California poet Raúl Antonio Cota (Hitchcock wintered in later years in La Paz). Hitchcock — a former longshoreman and labopr activist — publihed the influential and incorruptible little surrealist magazine Kayak for many years, and his famous collating parties are affectingly remembered by the late Morton Marcus. It is typical of my modus operandi that the only time I ever even submitted to Kayak was just after George had ceased publishing the ‘zine, and he returned my poems with a kind note. His was a life dedicated to poetry at the highest level, and if he had lived in New York, he woulda been John Ashbery.
*
AFTERNOON IN THE CANYON
*
The river sings in its alcoves of stone.
I cross its milky water on an old log—
beneath me waterskaters
dance in the mesh of roots.
Tatters of spume cling
to the bare twigs of willows.*
The wind goes down.
Bluejays scream in the pines.
The drunken sun enters a dark mountainside,
its hair full of butterflies.
Old men gutting trout
huddle about a smoky fire.*
I must fill my pockets with bright stones.
Syntactical language was invented 70,000 years ago by a little girl on the far southern coast of Africa.
There are several claims in the above statement that fly in the face of generations of standard linguistic hypotheses.
I have no doctorate in paleolinguistics. I’m only a poet and translator — what do you know about language? — but I keep up with the research, and in the last 44 months I’ve spent a large amount of quality time with an avid language developer, my granddaughter Tesla Rose.
Let’s start with date and place, 70K pre-present in South Africa, about both of which we can be quite precise.
69-77K back, a funny thing happened to us on our way to the internet. Geology and genetic analysis concur that our ancestral line almost went extinct.
A mega-volcano — Toba on the island of Sumatra— super-erupted, creating a ten-year nuclear winter, a thousand-year cooling trend, and arguably extincting straggling hominid bands outside of far southern Africa. Our cousins the Neanderthals, in Europe and the Middle East, and their cousins the Denisovians in Siberia, were less affected, but they, with measurable exceptions, are not ancestral to us.
The remnant bottleneck population of our ancestors, living on seafood in caves on the South African coast, minused out somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 folks. This community was small enough for a wildfire inno0vation like syntactic language — and brain mutations to support it — to spread evenly throughout.
I draw the analogy to thermal equilibrium before the inflation phase of the Big Bang.
All present-day cultures, no matter how technologically simple or “primitive”, use complex, fluid language, with cases, tenses, moods and clauses expressing hypothesis, probability and relationship in deep and immediate past, present and future depending on who is speaking, to whom speech is addressed, and various degrees of doubt, emphasis and status. All human cultures have poetry.
Complex language, therefore, developed before current humans separated into far-flung tribes. The longest pre-globalization isolation is that of the Australian aborigines, who got to Oz around 40K and ditched their reed boats. They talk as fancy as anybody.
A recent study compares the number of phonemes used in 504 current world languages. Southern African indigenous people like the !Kung use as many as 120 different phonemes (including lots of different clicks). The farther you get from our original homeland of refuge, the more phonemes drop out (while grammar continues to weave equal complexity). English is run of the mill with 42. At the far end of the human diaspora, Hawa’iian gets by with just 13 phonemes, five consonants and eight vowels.
Prior to to our unfortunate-fortunate bottleneck at 70K, cultural change proceeds with more than glacial slowness. Over the millions and hundreds of thousands before that, hand-axes and spear-points evolve very gradually. After that point — energized by true language — we spurt headlong toward modernity in what has been characterized as the Great Leap Forward.
There was certainly a very long pre-syntactic period during which we were just beginning to use words for things. Our distant cousins the bonobo, chimpanzee and gorilla can be taught to do so. Dolphins can successfully learn elements of human syntax. True syntactic language was preceded, historically as well as ontologically, by a very long period of pidgin.
Recapitulating phylogeny, point-and-noun dominates ages one to two of human infancy. At 13 months, Tesla Rose was saying “mama,” “dada,” “ball,” “bye-bye” and “agua.” She supplemented this vocabulary with emphatic squeaks and gestures. There was rarely doubt about what she meant.
Gesture is integral to language. This is ittle discussed. ASL is a very fluid language that goes faster than talking out loud. Everyone talks with their hands, even when they’re walking down the street shouting into cell-phones. My friend Gaby and I rented a rowboat on the Lagunas de Montebello in Chiapas with an Italian girl, Hilaria. When it was her turn to row, Hilaria framed such an interesting sentence with her fingers that she dropped both oars in the lake.
Australopithecus, homo habilis, erectus, heidelbergensis and Neanderthals represent slowly growing repertoires of distinction: colors, numbers, verbs. Probably Lucy, at 4.2M, had a few words, and used them to the point, reinforced with a lot of gesture. I suppose Neanderthals had a few hundred words. Maybe they sang. But something happened down along the coves in Southern Africa that made a dramatic difference. A system of connections evolved. If… then. When. Probably. Always. Never. I wish. Although. Because. Despite. It became possible to measure verbal scenarios against time-frames of agency and draw up contingency plans, to lie, to pray, and to make up poems.
Whodunit?
Default thought, that of adult male thinkers, has attributed the innovation of language to alpha-male hunters arguing about which flank to spear the mastodon. This scenario is offhandedly accepted and is obviously wrong.
There is no population more averse to language than adult males. Us guys are the strong, silent type, and we ain’t asking for directions. The hunt, like warfare, functions best in silence, with hand-signals. Girls are more verbal than boys, women than men; language came from the women’s side of the fire. Thus sprach Seinfeld:
*
ALLISON: (sitting) George. We need to talk.
GEORGE: What?
ALLISON: I really think we need to talk.
GEORGE: (pause) Uh-oh.
*
From the women, yes. At what age?
There is a language window in human development. Language acquisition starts at birth. By six months babies are babbling only their home-language phonemes. Before a year, they start using simple, isolated words and we’re in Neanderthal territory. At 26 months, Tesla Rose uttered her first complete sentence: I want the ball. That gets a ball faster than pointing and yelling ball! Most kids are talking fluently at three. If they don’t learn language by five or seven, viz. very rare Wolf-girl situations, they never learn it, they are permanently cognitively crippled. Syntactic language was invented in the childhood window.
I say “a girl” but it had to be a cohort of girls, chattering, gossipping, making up their own secret code, turning pidgin into creole. Tt was Greek to the guys, and the grownups had no idea what they were talking about. In the next generation, syntactical mammas talked to their kids, including boys. Syntactical girls wanted to mate with guys who could talk to them. The new fad, the new slang, would have spread through the small human community is very few generations.
Shortly after the 70K bottleneck, humanity leapt from our southern African refuge with lightning speed. By 60K we were in Israel and the neighborhood, where we interbed minimally with Neanderthals while otherwise consigning our beetle-browed cousins to the dustbin of history.
African people have no Neanderthal DNA; everybody else has something on the order of 3-6%. Thanks to slaveowners’ droit du seigneur (think Tom Jefferson and Sally Hemings) and Native Americans’ lack of racism, African-Americans have a lot of ancestry from “everybody else” and so largely share the Neanderthal connection. Melanesians and some folks headed for south India interbred with Denisovians in Southeast Asia. The DNA we took on from our pidgin-speaking relatives seems particularly to strengthen our immune system.
Africa, source of multiple waves of human origin, is more diverse than the rest of the world combined. Nor is it any coincidence that 17 of 20 world records in men’s running, from 100 meters to marathon, are held by African descendants.
By 40K syntactical humans got to Australia and were ethnically cleansing Neanderthals from Europe. The last Neanderthals made their final stand at Gibraltar about 30K. Behind the front, Aurignacian shamans were painting marvellous wildlife scenes in caves. Maybe as early as 30K by boat, and certainly in a massive megafauna hunting party around 11K, humans poured into North and South America.
Lion-man figurine, carved from mammoth ivory, 33,000 years old
With global warming after the Younger Dryas, women in five continents started cultivating wheat, barley, rice, corn, beans, and potatoes, making cities, kingdoms, laws, politics, and religion possible. Written language was invented about 6K to deal with transport and exchange of agricultural products. The rest is history.
Language keeps changing. Kids are always inventing slang. The first recorded use of the verb “to google” dates from 1998, but the adjective “cool” goes back to African roots.
Language evolves at a constant rate, separate populations achieving mutual unintelligibility about a thousand years out; language families can be dated like carbon-14. We know the Romance languages separated from Latin, and each other, about 2K. Proto-Indo-European has a well-established vocabulary going back to about 6K (and was probably spread by the whirlwind movement, out of Central Asian steppe, of the first folks to effectively domesticate horses).
That’s less than 10% of the way to the origin of syntactic language; attempts to trace the putative tree farther back are not convincing. Proto-Nostratic, at 10-12K, has been elaborated as a hypothetical ancestor of Indo-European, Semitic and Dravidian, but there’a a lot of noise in the data. A word list for Proto-Human includes who?, what?, finger and vagina, but the suggestion for “water” is akwa, which sounds like special pleading. The rising intonation at the end of a question seems to be universal and was probably present from the beginning.
Language is the central human invention, the hive which we are ceselessly elaboratng, even as I speak. Language sprouts meta-languages, of which music and mathematics are the most salient examples. Cyberspace, where you are reading this, is based on AI languages and includes acronyms and emoticons. LOL. If we wetware people are supplanted by cyborgs at the Singularity, I expect the language enterprise to continue and accelerate.
I suspect humanity will not speciate again until another bottleneck reduces us to a fused community. Speciation is extremely likely to occur in the isolate population of a colony on Mars or Enceladus or Tau Ceti. That is, if we ever manage to stir our ass from the muddy ground of self-induced economic dysfunction and fling ourselves back into space.
Esquina República de Uruguay e Isabel la Católica. Foreground: the former Augustinian convent and Biblioteca Nacional, and statue of Alexander von Humboldt, who slept on this block in 1806; background, the Hotel Monte Carlo.
I fell in love with the Spanish language when I was forty years old.
I took French for six years in high school and college and hated it. Jeanne Case, my French teacher at the Putney School, used to tell me, “Jean, you arre ‘aving mecca-nickel di-fickle-tees.” I memorized endless lists of verb tenses concerning unlikley situations in the past or future (this is stupid!) and with exception of Villon, Rimbaud and Appollinaire I hated the French poets.
Finally, at twenty-four, after I backpacked around Europe and the Middle East for six months, and my gender mistakes (C’est la change, monsieur, c’est feminin) sufficed the French to affect total incomprehension, I decided I was bad at languages. Plus ça change.
I got interested in Spanish around 1980 out of some geopolitical notion of continental solidarity. The Sandinistas had triumphed in Nicaragua, poets were coming back from there with glowing faces talking of workshops, the talleres, that were just like California Poets In The Schools but with adults, most of them recently illiterate. Meanwhile the Republicans were beginning to sponsor the Contra terrorists.
For years I had styled myself a poet of place in California, a watershed poet, writing about lichen and coyote-scat, following in the bootprints of John Muir, Gary Snyder and my mountain-climbing grandfather Oliver Kehrlein.
The terrain I was stomping made it increasingly obvious that the Spanishlanguage haunted the political meaning of earth not too far below the Anglo surface of North America.
Sure, the California Indians lived here first, Olema, Petaluma. I already had written more than my share of feather in my snakeskin headband, bearshit in gleaming in the trail poems. Spanish was scattered in names like desert varnish along my highways: Anza-Borrego, Aguas Calientes, Los Angeles, Ventura, San Joaquín, San Rafael, Corte Madera, Santa Rosa.
And this next part feels artistically embarrassing to admit, but I was plotting a science-fiction novel set both in Mexico and an alternate California in a timestream wherein Hernán Cortés took an arrow in the eye on his way out of Tenochtitlán on the Noche Triste and the Americas were never conquered by Europe. I had some good California scenes; San Francisco is Puerto Buenu, a tough harbor town with Ohlone suburbs. I figured I ought to do some research at the scene of the crime.
Later I spent a couple of years taking that meshugganah novel through interminable drafts, increasingly encrusted with local color, language and grudges to settle. All my women characters were smoking cigarillos: mirages of sexual triggers. I tangled myself impossibly in paradoxical time-travel intrigues. A few people bravely read it and liked it. But after all it seems I am not a novelist. I still want to write it just one more time. Sigh.
So I self-studied for a few months out of a book by Charles Berlitz (later spent two full years in the Vista College classroom of the incomparable maestra Carlota Babilón) and flew to Mexico City for the first time in April 1982. I got a room in the Hotel Monte Carlo a couple of blocks from the Zócalo on the Calle República de Uruguay because D.H. Lawrence stayed there in 1924 when he was thinking about writing The Feathered Serpent. That same afternoon I headed out to the Museo Nacional. Here’s my first jetlag-stunned uncomprehending ride on the Metro, emerging into the teeming daylight of Chapultepec:
*
more than I can take in
crush of people
train windows open
rushing through darkness
sweet little girl
clutching her blind mother’s hand
pyramids of chewing-gum
cunningly arranged
Indian woman in blue rebozo
taps rhythmically with a peso
on black iron railing
my Spanish withers
***
Rhapsodic were my inscriptions wandering in through the monumental, comprehensive Museo Nacional de Antropología. Paleoindian, Olmec, Teotihuacán, Toltec, Aztec, Maya, Nayarit and Sonora masks and gods and weapons and trade goods…
*
I can’t sing
my tongue is stone
hombre
limbs bound like reeds of years
snake’s coils disappearing,
spiralled down
*
Mictantecuhtli stole a bone
and then she couldn’t find it
*
That first night in the Monte Carlo I dreamed that I had better cease and desist writing poems to my third ex-wife and tacking them up on the doors of my father’s modest Connecticut summer cottage, because it’s making my girlfriend, or whoever I’m supposed to be in love with, nervous…
Later I lived entire summers in the Monte Carlo. One summer I managed not to speak any English for about six weeks until interviewed about my California Poets In The Schools projects by a reporter from the English-language Mexico City News. After ninety minutes of English my jaw ached…
Years after that I stood in front of the Stone of the Sun to teach a poetry lesson to Mexico City sixth-graders about their experience in the 1985 earthquake, in which maybe 55,000 people died (who’s counting?) and a tumbling shoddily-built parking garage fell and dealt a codazo to the Monte Carlo, once a convent attached to the Augustinian church on the corner, and braced on colonial foundations, remained standing and opened for business again after a year of renovations. I got to peek upstairs at my old room cracked and shaken.
Lonely and desolate in the morning I found my way to the blue-tiled Cafe Tacuba, situated about where Cortés had or had not taken that alternate arrow in the eye. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1696), the greatest Spanish-language poet of her half-century, gazed amiably down as I devoured arroz con dos huevos for 55 pesos. My depression had gone away.
Later, my steady breakfast cafe in the Centro Histórico was the Esla on Bolívar. Mario Ramírez, waiter, friend and teacher, would shout ¡Avena! to the kitchen when he glimpsed me stumbling toward the door and greet me across the formica counter with two copper samovars, one of potent thick coffee, one of steamed milk. “Estamos envenenado al planeta,” Mario confided. “We are posioning the planet.”
Porque la vida no vale nada, wailed a blind singer by the black cathedral fence. Years later, Becky and I stood in there off the Zócalo as the moon, Coyallxauhqui, eclipsed the sun, Tonatiuh. Night fell at noon and Venus glowed around the ghostly coronaat the head of a sequity of stars as patrol-k;lights spun blue and red and the crowd chanted ¡México, México! as if the astronomical portent were a soccer game in the Copa Mundial.
I made my way through sidestreets to a local bus for Tenochtitlán and the pyramids of Moon and Sun 1500 years old. Tramping the ruins, I felt oddly disconnected, probably mostly jet-lag:
*
all this is a surface
clay flutes muy baratos
dry season
I am not close to the heart of the pattern
*
At close of day, with heavy heart, I stood awaiting a bus to return to the megalopolis. One arrived, I swung aboard, but when I offered to pay everybody laughed with comments far too fast and fluid to catch. They took my money anyway and swung down at a corner, returning with armfuls of six-packs. It was the arqueólogos returning from a day of digging for simple implements representing people’s everyday lives in the middle-class barrios below the imposing pirámides of Teotihuacan.
We began to converse in a lively way over cracked-open cervezas, me fearless in then-execrable Spanish, using the present tense for all possibilities. When we got to the Centro the archeaologists invited me out for cena and más cervezas in the Bar Gallo.
The first Spanish joke I ever got (though it probably had to be explained to me) was when I showed them a photo of my then 13-year-old daughter, and Sergio cried out “¡Suegro!” (father-in-law)
There was a certain anti-Americanism in their politics, which I basically agreed with, the current malignant Alzheimer’s Republican president not being exactly, as I would later learn to say, un santo de mi devoción, and the upshot of our cena was that Sergio and Chucho invited me to return with them that very night to Tenochtitlan.
Why not? ¿Por qué no? From the Gallo in el centro we three hurried by Sergio’s parents’ apartment in Los Doctores where our pace slowed for polite and leisurely tasas of chocolate a la olla, then sprinted to the Monte Carlo where I gathered my things, thence at midnight por el Metro out the northern line to Indios Verdes, Green Indians, where we barely caught the very last bus for Tenochtitlan, squeezing painfully aboard. I’ve been packed that closely in since on the Metro or in second-class buses in Guatemala, but in my middle-class gringo existence this was the first time my personal space had been so absolutely stripped away, and I understood that if I died right then I would remain pressed upright by my neighbors.
In Sergio and Chucho’s dorm room we sampled some tasty local harvest of the benevolent herb. Then we wandered out in ancient darkness into the city once the most populous, powerful and beautiful in the Americas.
Quetzalcoatl: stick your arm in up to the shoulder and see if you can tell the truth.
I had hurried past the feathered serpent stairway already in the ashen light of noon, surrounded by tourists from Japan and Pensecola. Now, at 3 am, we three mosqueteros ducked under the ribbons holding back the phantom erstwhile daytime crowds. The mouths of the plumed dragons were black cenotes of darkness. “Si te metes el brazo y dices una menteria, te lo va a comer,” Sergio told me. Whatever inanity I whispered must have been some kind of truth.
We clambered up the forbidden stairway between the bird-dragon heads of Quetzalcóatl into starry night. Sitting there under the overarching clouds of the galaxy, we talked largely, if rather brokenly on my part, about poetry and destiny. Stars fell from the sky. “Estrella errante,” whispered Sergio.
Over the ensuing three decades, my Spanish got a lot better (though there’s always an annoying remnant of that horse-muscled-jaw gringo accent). I’ve travelled largely throughout Latin America. My longest voyage 1995-96 nine months from Mexico to Chile and Argentina culminated in my participation in the Festival Internacioonal de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia and was chronicled in 131 eight-line stanzas in Caminante, which Gary Snyder blurbed “a major poem.”
I’ve published many hundreds of poem-translations from Spanish to English and poets have translated me. Sergio Gómez became perhaps the most respected Mexican archaeologist. Chucho Sánchez became a well-known adviser to Subcomandante Marcos and spokeman for the EZLN, the Zapatistas. Chucho showed up at my book party in San Cristóbal de Las Casas for Son Caminos, my poems translated into Spanish by many of the best poets in Mexico.
,
That night in Apri 1982 is when I set my foot on the Latin American version of the path, which as Antonio Machado tells us, is made by walking:
*
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
My notes on a reading by the late great Santa Cruz poet George Hitchcock (1914-2010), on October 5, 1980.
George Hitchcock
Intensive detective work in my 28th blue notebook does not reveal the venue of the reading, only that I paid a 75-cent toll on that date to cross a bridge. San Francisco, probably. Somebody named Ivan, probably Argüelles, was the M.C. Evidentally it was in a bookstore-cafe. Could it have been the Blue Unicorn?
The first link takes you to a deeply-felt essay by Morton Marcus, who knew Hitchcock for decades and was frequently published in his seminal magazine kayak. Marcus never missed a kayak collating party. I never went.
Marcus narrates Hitchcock’s labor-organizing background in the thirties, when he wrote a sports column signed Lefty for the People’s World. He was famous for a 1957 colloquoy with the counsel for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who got Hitchcock to admit he did underground work. “Of course I do! I’m a gardener!”
Hitchcock was a protegé of Kenneth Rexroth, and kayak published early work by current U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, Charles Simic and Raymond Carver, among others. George and I collaborated a little bit years later; George spent every winter in La Paz, Baja California, where he became good friends with the poet Raúl Antonio Cota, whom I translated.
The Blue Unicorn reading:
Nostalgia for the Infinite
[GH's] first poem [refers to] Conrad Aiken, De Chirico, Black Diamond Bay. Antique clarity with psychological focus. GH sitting in a wicker chair, wearing a white Panama hat, smoking a [Cuban] cigar. Voice shoots out of space with authority. Sharp mixture of vivid and reduced, contexted and not.
*
Each April another government
evaporates at the Finland Station.
*
Unavoidably. The fact is. A little too Mozartean in the quilt poem. Insects restore Italian focus. Detail. Imagistic conviction reminds me of [L.A. standup poet] Jack Grapes, from quite another tradition.
His poems fall into pentameter, catch themselves, painterly. His dedication: attitude weakens “roseate wound” O god.
*
Sleep settles its lion
on top of a distant red tower.
*
Meanwhile, as the reading proceeded, two young Black men went into the attached cafe, robbed the register without a weapon, passed quietly through the rear of the crowd, applauded as Hitchcock finished a poem, and slipped out into the night. A flawless poem of its kind.
I’ll leave you with a George Hitchcock poem that I wish I wrote:
*
AFTERNOON IN THE CANYON
*
The river sings in its alcoves of stone.
I cross its milky water on an old log—
beneath me waterskaters
dance in the mesh of roots.
Tatters of spume cling
to the bare twigs of willows.*
The wind goes down.
Bluejays scream in the pines.
The drunken sun enters a dark mountainside,
its hair full of butterflies.
Old men gutting trout
huddle about a smokey fire.*
I must fill my pockets with bright stones.
One of my more pleasant duties in my three years (1978-81) of herding cats as Statewide Coordinator of California Poets In The Schools was to attend the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) regional conference at Asilomar, on the Pacific shore near Monterey, California, and schmooze with the assembled potential clients seeking niches for poets in classrooms. The Asilomar NCTE’s had a truly distinguished set of presenters. My final year the keynote speaker was the renowned American mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Here are my notes (necessarily framentary, explicated only when possible) on the truly unique take on Homer that Joseph Campbell presented at Asilomar on September 28, 1980. Any flat inaccuracies are undoubtedly mine rather than Campbell’s.
*
The function of religious institutions is to defend yourself against an experience of God.
Odysseus spent twenty years in passage through a violent male world where woman was booty. To return from that experience, to reach home again, he had to pass through a debriefing which included threats and teachers. The threats were monsters: Cyclops, the Laestrygonians. The teachers were nymphs representing three-fold aspects of the Great Goddess: Circe (Aphrodite), Kallypso (Hera) and Nausicaa (Athene). These three ladies were supposedly judged by Paris: a male put-down of the feminine.
The Old Goddess was animal as well as human. Pig, deer and water (in the Odyssey) are the powers of life. When she becomes human, the animal is her associate. Eating and drinking, we partake of the universe. The goal of all living is become transparent to the transcendent. The radiance of the transcendent permeates the world of time-space. Squirrel or saint on the shores of experience.
The function of art, of the poet, is to make things ONE, as opposed to war, this against that: DIVISION. That is the large movement that works in Homer. Male and female versions at work and at loggerheads in the text.
Aphrodite, born on the half-shell, out of the ocean, was the cause of the whole thing. Gaea was born inside the father-womb of Uranus. Uranus was so tight, so uptight, that his children couldn’t get out. Chronos was the eldest child, took a sickle and casbtrated his father, throwing his genitals into the sea. Aphrodite was born from thence: this version is another male put-down.
The Goddess was there first! She is time and space and logic. We are bound in those realms, and she is the binding circle. She is being and act, woman and man, love and war together, the ground of being, always naked. There is a bird in her hair: the Holy Ghost. And a snake too. They are the messengers of Aphrodite. The bird is released spirit, the snake bound to earth. The serpent of the moon shed its skin to be born again. Significance of the snake reversed in Judeo-Christian tradition.
Aphrodite as the mother, the fingers of a baby on her nipple: Eros. Her other male associate is Hermes, with wings in his hair, wearing a white suit at the gate of death, he opens the way. Hermes the dog and the three goddesses. Hermes is Mithra, with a stocking cap. The sun. Christmas is Mithra’s birthday.
Paris is a lounge lizard, an Indo-European latecomer. Accosted by Hermes, he sets up an Atlantic City beauty contest between the goddesses with their three circles of destiny. Another inflexion: the three Eumenides. Hermes tells you: gotta face ‘em. Hermes makes you make up your mind.
In the male tradition, Aphrodite offers Helen as a bribe to Paris. Paris abducts Helen. Menelaus objects: “Helen in my property.” Achilles and Patroclus are draftees. Odysseus, newly married, tries to act crazy for the draft board, hitching incongruous animals to his plow. Agamennon is a tough shrink: he sets Telemachus in the furrow. Odysseus flinches from plowing under his own and only son. “You must be sane,” concludes Agamennon. Catch-22.
There’s no wind for the fleet, so the male priest Calchis declares they must sacrifice Iphigenia. Clytemnestra sees her daughter taken away, with nefarious consequences. Clytemnestra has had bad press. In the female tradition, Artemis recues Iphigenia. Homer didn’t know this.
The Iliad among the Dorians is contemporary with Judges and Joshua among the Hebrews. Jephthah also sacrifices his daughter Iphis. We have both traditions. That’s why we’re in such a mess.
Achilles and Agamemnon in a spat over Briseydis: who gets the blonde? Achilles sulks in his tent. Soldiers in their free time, playing chess. Come on, come on!, coax his friends. And the Iliad begins: I sing the wrath… Patroklus killed, Achilles goes to war for personal revenge, a bad reason if you want to keep your soul clean.
Unlike the Old Testament, there are personal heroes on both sides. Achilles is a sports hero: Joe Namath. Hektor is a real human being. Hektor will be no match for Achilles. Andromache knows it and tells him not to go. Parallel here to Arjuna and Krishna. Astyanax, their son, “little star,” is afraid of his father’s helmet: bad omen for the male side. Achilles drags Hektor three times around the walls of Troy to his death, a magical act, unwinding the walls’ magic. Athene suggests the strategem of the Trojan Horse. The classical tradition survives and is transformed in Europe: the God become heroes. Virgil with Aeneas. Arthur.
Christianity is more Greek than Hebrew. The swan descends to Leda, the dove to Mary.
Helen, taken back by Menelaus, ends up in Egypt. Agamemnon is killed by Clytemnestra, Clytemnestra by Orestes. Is he his mother’s or his father’s son? Two mythologies clash.
Apollo purifies Orestes by pig sacrifice: domestic cult. Tusks of the pig: two crescent moons, blackface between. The blood of the pig puts the Eumenides to sleep. Circe’s animal is the pig. Odysseus meets his son Telemachus in the swineherd’s shelter.
Sword in hand, Odysseus, a wary crazy Vietnam vet, sails his twelve ships first north to Ismarius, where they sack the town, rape and pillage. Boreas, the North Wind, then blows him south to Africa, to the land of the Lotus Eaters. The magical experience, LSD, the shore of dreams. California.
Odysseus goes ashore on the Isle of the Cyclops with the solar number of twelve men. Entering the cave, the narrow gate, he confronts Polyphemus the one-eyed, a reduced negative form of power facing within. Asked who are you? he responds “No man,” divesting himself of secular fame as he enters the underworld.
Polyphemus eats six men, three sheep, nine in total, a goddess number. The sharpened beam that blinds him is a convenience from the magical realm described in gory detail. When he cries out and tells his friends No man is killing him, they tell him: “keep it to yourself.”
The central problem in the Odyssey is how to coordinate the adventures of the solar hero and the woman who weaves the world. Odysseus is the Ram, the Sun-God, on his way to the Island of the Sun, to which he is introduced by Circe. Penelope weaves and unweaves like the moon. The lunar and solar calendars mesh in a twenty-year cycle. The moon is life throwing off death, bound to the wheel of the world, reincarnation. The sun casts no shadow, the radiant sign of life disengaged from time, nirvana. Locate the eternal light. Am I consciousness or body? You don’t have to quit life to get to the sun. The full moon, the mid-point in man’s life, the 35th year, Yeats, A Vision, Dante.
Aeolus of the winds, Stromboli, the newspaper office in Joyce’s Ulysses, spirit that has left earthly character behind: the danger of inflation, puff yourself up. The temptation of Jesus, to turn bread into stone, to convert spiritual kingdoms into economics and politics. Alternatively, cast yourself down. Given a wallet full of winds, Odysseus falls asleep, his men open the packet. “We blew it.”
Ugly adventure among the Laestrygonians, manic depression, cannibalism the ultimate depressant. We are all flesh, and that’s all. Throw rocks at them, they sink eleven of twelve shiops, more divestiture.
Circe of the Braided Locks, weaving appearance, weaving Maya. Odysseus, you’re in trouble now: a woman whom you can’t push around. Male brute force against woman’s magic arrow. The Iliad is ruled by Zeus and Apollo, the Odyssey by Hermes.
Odysseus undergoes two initiations: that of the Underworld and that of the Lord of Light, Circe’s father. The underworld is the ancestral world where all bodies are the shadows of spirits.
Tiresias saw two serpents copulating, stuck his staff between them and it made a woman. Zeus and Hera, arguing about who enjoys sex more, man or woman, ask Tiresias, who knows both, and he answers “woman, of course.” Hera took this badly and struck him blind. Angry because she could no longer say, “I’m only doing this for you, dear.”
The power of prophency, the inward eye. Odysseus realizes male and female are one being, one androgyne. Next, please. Circe predicts obstacles. Scylla and Charibdis, the fine craft of bondage.
The Island of the Sun, taboo against killing the oxen: a warning against spiritual materialism. Odysseus again distracted, falls asleep, his men eat the oxen, followed by complete shipwreck disaster, only Odysseus is left. Ishmael after the wreck of the Pequod.
Odysseus fails to pass the sundoor, he is thrown willy-nilly toward Penelope again via Kallypso. The function of women in relation to the Hero: knock him down and put him together again. This is not the Hindu transcendence of the world, but living in the world with knowledge of the light.
Seven years have passed, says Hermes, it’s time. Odysseus is washed ashore in the land of the Phaecians. Nausicaa, the third goddess, is doing laundry, and tossing a ball (goddess roundness activity). She alone has the courage to confvront the phenomenon of a naked gentleman. In her role as Athene, Nausicaa brings him home to Daddy. “Wal, stranger, where ya been?” “I’m Odysseus.” He returns through the threshold, regains his secular identity.
Another mysterious passage: Odysseus falls asleep on shipboard, is left asleep on the shore of Ithaka.
Telemachus is the young man of 21 (three times seven, goddess numbers). Athene tells him : Go find your father. First he visits with Nestor, the old football coach. Then son and father meet in the swinehard shelter in Arcadia. Odysseus arrives as the Tramp. “Don’t mention my name.” Old Nurse is the first to recognize him by the scar on his though from the boar’s crescent goddess horns. Adonis was slain by a boar. Buddha died from eating pork. And the Old Dog.
Bending the bow through the twelve signs. Odysseus is the sun; the suitors, the stars. Final reconciliation with Penelope. Leaving the bearded blind Poet on the shores of experience.
Flora Arnstein (1897-1990)
Craft Lecture
California Poets In The Schools
San Francisco, May 12, 1980
Facilitated by Gail Newman, California Poets In The Schools honored then 83-year-old poet and educator Flora J. Arnstein by inviting her to lead a special seminar of experienced poetk-teachers. Beginning in the 1920′s at Presidio Hill School in San Francisco, an institution which she co-founded, Flora Arnstein became the first American educator to teach free-verse poetry bnased on natural perceptions, emotion and imagination. About the same time, Hughes Mearns went into Hunter College High School in New York City and got terrific poetry from his students. There is a thread of lineage down to Teachers & Writers Collaborative, CPITS and Poetry Inside Out, the translation-based poetry-in-schools program I now direct on behalf of the Center for the Art of Translation. In 1980, I was Statewide Coordinator of California Poets In The Schools; these are my notes on Mrs. Arnstein’s seminar.
Flora Arnstein answers the question: why did she decnide to start teaching poetry to children? “I had young eyes then.” —Joseph Conrad
Of course students [5th through 8th grade] come up with big topics like What is God? What is Death? but what you can teach them is: the scope and depth of thought and the handling of language. Kids are most stimulated by other kids [other kids’ poems and also classmates as they get it — a reason to type up some poems every week) She says she never gave an assignment. Kids indict adn ults for lack ofbm honesty.
Fragment by a kid named Anna:
*
why the world does not listen —?
He would pat me on the head
and say in a superior tone’
‘you’ll understand in due time.’
*
More: “unequal, untamed, unloving” and “O you can shoot me once in a while, it gives variety” Where am I going and what is my purpose in life? Are we really here?
Many of us parents have heard from our offspring, “I hate you!” Look at hate.
Here I am in the midst of all this sickness we call truth. Like walls of hardened steel around me. Poetry, let me know if I am real. Such is the price of consciousness. What would happen if you never told anyone anything?
Student Miriam writes: It all floats, it all floats. Poetry is like silk fllowing from the transcontinebhtal railroad. Diving through the apple, you find the seed. Rage is quick and cleansing through its horreror: a small stab of light. Only once will you be a child. Ah you young children, eager to grow old!
Mrs. Arnstein wrote no death poems during World War II but has written many more recently. Reminiscent of Emily:
*
I met death on a clumsy day
and after that I died
*
how deceitful is God
to fool us with a loveable world
*
When kids say, “I don’t know how to write a poem,” you tell them to dictate their thoughts. Throw your thoughts into space and see if they come back.
CAMINANTE 14
The door to the underworld at Toniná
*
¿ADÓNDE?
*
The mountain has a magnet in her belly.
The earth monster has a ball too heavy to throw.
At dusk, everyone is going somewhere,
on bicycles along the trail, on foot, on horseback.
We don’t know where they’re going, but they do.
They’re flying head downward into Xibalbá
to throw themselves into the graves of the angelitos.
Their innocence will nourish the double standard of the corn.
Toniná, Chiapas
10/23-23/1995
Comentario: the gentle grassy slopes of Toniná remind me of the East Bay hills, but there are stone steps rising out of the meadows, and walls inset with intricate stone mosaic farther up the hillside, where we climb through labyrinths of narrow stairs and dark rooms. On another terrace the Earth Monster squats in her archway hatching a perfect sphere between her legs, a basketball of granite, traded all the way from Guayabo in Costa Rica. From the highest tower, with no time to lose, I descend with Paolito on my shoulders so the others will follow.
Overview: The blowout happened 5 km short of Oxchuc, on our way back from the Mayan ruins of Toniná. Paulo Rico Avendaño would be a full-grown young man by now; I tenderly took him hostage on the summit of the pyramid in ortder to initiate his parents’ prudent hour of return. When we got back to the car, his mother’s girlfriend made a face at me about my over-precise sense of time. “John, ¡eres tan inglés!” We finally got going but it was already falling dark when the tire went out as the Bug was laboring up the bloodthirsty mountain road, and we coasted down to Oxchuc on the rim, your servitor driving. Luckily for us, the vulcanizador was evangelista and therefore, apparently, the only adult male in town who wasn’t roaring drunk.
Perú is bigger than it looks from here on a map. It will take me three posts to tell about my encountkers witkh Peruvian poetry and poets: two about Lima, and then one about the Andes, which are their own world.
Casa Rosel in Barranco, Lima, Pehrú
I arrived in Lima for the first time in July 1988 with the phone number of just one Peruvian poet.
¡Caramba!” Carlos Orellana (born 1950) exclaimed, “so you’re really in Lima!” Carlos showed up early on the morning of Peruvian Independence Day, full of enthusiasm to show off his city. We drove south to the Pacific Ocean at Chorillos: gray water under the winter fog Limeños call garúa. As we rounded a bend below the tunnel in the sea-cliff, we saw a body crumpled over the roadcurb. Head and shoulders overed with newspaper. River of blood-soaked asphalt. One police van and a woman photographer, who was about to be sick.
Carlos Orellana was one of the first journalists to take an interest in Alberto Fujimori and would become the later disgraced El Chinito‘s press secretary for his entire two terms as President of Perú. Carlos Orellana’s great poem, La ciudad va estallar, Flora, captures the capital’s terrible heavy rhythms, spewing elephant buses and eternal air of crisis:
*
La ciudad va a estallar, Flora…
*
La ciudad va a estallar, Flora,
en medio de este tráfico infernal: ángeles
incendiando los semáforos, convirtiendo a los autobuses
en paquidermos holgazanes.
Alguien ha colocado bombas de tiempo
en los grandes almacenes.
Han asesinado al Cardenal.
Se ha sublevado la tropa.
La temperatura ha alcanzado los 35 grados.
Han cerrado el Parlamento.
Descubierto al hombre más viejo del mundo.
Los ángeles hacen sonar sus trompetas espantosamente
en la Vía Expresa.
Separaron a los siameses, Flora.
La inflación es otra bomba de tiempo.
Ha renunciado el Primer Ministro.
El tigre de Bengala está prácticamente extinguido.
La ciudad va a estallar, Flora,
cierra los ojos, abrázame, no voltees
la cara por nada del mundo
*
The City Is Going to Explode, Flora
*
The city is going to explode, Flora
in the middle of this infernal traffic
burning uptraffic lights, changing the buses
into lazy elephants.
Somebody put time-bombs
in the big department stores.
They’ve assassinated the Cardinal.
The troops have revolted.
It’s ninety-five if you can find any shade.
They’ve shut down Parliament,
discovered the oldest man in the world.
The angels are sounding their dreadful trumpets
over the Expressway.
They separated the siamese twins, Flora.
Inflation is another time-bomb.
The Prime Minister has resigned.
The Bengal Tiger is practically extinct.
The city is going to explode, Flora.
Close your eyes, hug me, don’t turn back
to look for anything in the world.
*
With sure urban instinct, Carlos insisted, “Un accidente, it’s got to be an accident,” and sped away through the tunnel. As we drove to a nice cafe in the misty artistic suburb of Miraflores, Carlos began to tell me about Peruvian poetry. “The misconception is that Peruvian poetry consists of a shepherd and his flute. Our literary tradition is very sophisticated. Modern Peruvian poetry comes out of the Vanguardistas and Surrealistas of the 1920’s…”
Back at his place, Carlos placed each book carefully into my hands as if revealing treasures. A replica edition of Cinco Metros de Poemas by Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1899–1936), accordions out to sixteen linear feet of poetry, jazzy high-tech performance art of its day. There’s a poem in the shape of a face in which the left eye reads:
*
CONEY ISLAND:
the rain is a razor coin
*
When we get down to the typographic chin, Mary Pickford is climbing up to shimmy on the bar.
Born in Puno, on the remote shores of Lake Titicaca, the same year as Ecuador’s Jorge Carrera Andrade, Oquendo de Amat uses his typewriter, if not as a machine gun, then certainly as a movie camera. Cinema de los Sentidos Puros by Enrique Peña (1905–1991), Movie of the Pure Senses, is prose poems out of Magritte by Buster Keaton. The sentences read like fortunate shuffling of magnet-words on a refrigerator: “Happy cannibal swallowing the countryside, cries a foam of harps across the sky… Now when your name has no letters and the angels translate the far-away word… We open the moon like a pink book between our knees.”
The final great Vanguardista was Martín Adán (1908–1985), who at age twenty, in La Casa de Cartón (House of Cardboard), spieled a hymn to the new technologies that reminds me of what Hart Crane (1899-1932) was doing simultaneously to assimilate twentieth-century technology in The Bridge: “your velocities whose seven colors, raided from Newton’s disk, make morning pale… Slow flight of steel across scary buzzard sun.”
We didn’t mention the “accident” again until that night, back in my hotel, when that same body by the roadside appeared on the eleven o’clock news. The body was identified as that of Martín Febres Flores, a left-wing lawyer who had just successfully defended Osmán Morote Barrionero, the number two Comandante of the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path.
Beginning with mammoth-hunting spearheads twelve thousand years ago, Peruvians soon are living in straw huts by the beach, wearing skullcaps woven out of river-reeds, eating seafood special, burying Grandma in the patio. Even before pottery, monumental ceremonial centers convert excess ocean-protein into mammoth displays of supernatural esteem. Early textiles suggest hallucinogens: distorted spiders sing in spiral caves. A dragon-mother stela in the heart of the labyrinth at Chavín is three thousand years old, contemporary with the Olmecs in southern Mexico.
When Chavín falls apart, everything goes local. This happens every time in the Andes, because American geography does not encourage reintegration. In the Old World, fragments of broken polities are recycled through the vortex of the Middle East, but this continent, as Jared Diamond observes in Guns, Germs and Steel, is just one long linear ladder. North America funnels into Mexico, Central America is a corridor, then a narrow road down the Andes with the ocean on one side and oceanic jungle on the other. Gunpowder and paper moved from China to England through redundancy of intermediaries,; the Mayans invented (or discovered) zero and Perú never heard about it.
For a thousand years, Mochica civilization dominates the northern coast, with adobe pyramids and realistic ceramic portraits. In the superb Mochica pottery, men are playing flutes and banging drums and sleeping. Men carry war–clubs in the shape of stars. There are stern faces, lovely faces, blind faces, idiot faces, faces eaten away by leishmaniasis, bodies covered with syphilitic sores. This is the noble Native American culture, but no one is being politically correct. Naked prisoners are tied with ropes. Men are tied to trees with birds perched on their shoulders, pecking out their eyes.
Women are rarely depicted, and their tasks consist of nursing babies and carrying heavy bundles. Ninety-five percent of the infamous erotic ceramics show men fucking women up the ass, in what the Museo Larco Herrera in Lima coyly calls the posición contra natura. The women don’t seem to enjoy it, there is a rictus of disgust. Sometimes the man sits on a throne to emphasize his power, while the woman kneels.
The many scenes of fellatio are not balanced by those of cunnilingus. Women do it with skeletons, dogs do it. There are trick bowls where you drink chicha from the vulva, and a skeleton figure who makes you drink from the cock, while other openings spill chicha all over your face and everyone is laughing, jajajá!
Meanwhile, in southern Perú, stylized ceramic hummingbirds and whales echo cosmic lines traced on desert varnish at Nazca. Wari conquers extensive topography a thousand years ago, creating the notion of a pan-Andean empire. Another local interregnum follows with cultures such as Tihuanaco, and then Incas improve on Wari, with a network of good roads extending five thousand kilometers from Pasto in Colombia to Santiago de Chile.
Inca pottery is meager, but exalted architecture masters mountain space. Top-down socialism, well administered. Smallpox, racing ahead of the Spanish invaders, took down Inca Huayna Capac, and his sons were fighting a civil war when Pizarro arrived. The gods, the apus, do not step forth distinctly from majestic natural background; nor is there is the Mexican fascination with death, nor the Mayan fascination with time. A quipu hangs on the museum wall. What would we learn, if we could read the indecipherable writing of its knotted strings? Ten thousand llamas needed in the upper pastures? Poems?
They say a local cacique got his revenge on the Spaniards by advising Francisco Pizarro to plant his Euro capital on the sad banks of the river Rímac, where it never rains. The Peruvian coast, the driest desert in the world, is a sterile sculpture of sand where no blade of grass ever grows. Death Valley is a garden in comparison.
“Lima la horrible,” wrote poet Sebastián Salazar Bondy(1926–1965). The legless beggar on the corner raises his thumb at me and yells “Hey Meester!” An old street woman approaches a group of three young middle–class Limeñas on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. She hauls off and spits on them and on the fruit they’re eating. The girls abandon camp in haste, leaving behind a half-eaten mango and a bag of grapes. The viejita happily sits down and devours her booty. The old gal ties a bright frayed fuchsia ribbon into her chopped gray hair, and walks off in a great mood, queen of the hill, clapping her hands and inviting everyone to the party outside the liquor store.
Lima la horrible
Open any poetry anthology, and Lima is Perú, and Perú is a narrow zone centered on Lima. This arrogant metropolitan dominance is nothing new. Ninety-some years ago, the most important literary magazine in Lima was Variedades, edited by Clemente Palma, the son of a famous author, Ricardo Palma (1833–1919), who cast a genial folkloric style across anecdotes of the colonial period in his best-selling multi-volume Tradiciones Peruanas, the source for Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
In 1917, Clemente received a submission, a sonnet signed only with three initials, C. A. V., postmarked from Trujillo in the northern desert. Definitely not publishable, Clemente thought. He enjoyed writing hius little rejection note; Clemente Palma thought he’d show this ignorant rube the error of his uneducated ways, rub his face in it, have a few laughs at his expense. Clemente was so pleased with his own wit that he decided to publish, not the sonnet, but his rejection note, in Variedades.
Señor C.A.V., Trujillo:
You’re one of those chaps who joins the chorus that urges us encourage everyone who tyries to play the lyrical bagpipes, one more young fellow dealing untuned and vulgar poetic idiocies. Writing same refrain gives you the absurd notion that we are given no choice but to publish your frippery. You’ve sent us a sonnet entitled “The Poet to His Beloved,” which is better fitted to the accordion or the ocarina than to poetry:
*
Amada, en esta noche tú me has crucificado
sobre los dos maderos curvados de mi beso;
y tu pena me ha dicho que Jesús ha llorado,
y que hay un viernesanto más dulce que ese beso.
*
Love, tonight you have crucified me
On the two curved planks of your kiss
And your sorrow tells me that Jesus wept
And there’s a Good Friday sweeter than that kiss…
*
The metaphor doesn’t work, continues Clemente, and it’s perverse and blasphemous besides. This airy-fairy nonsense, this mamarracho, is going in the circular file, etcetera and so forth.
Clemente Palma thereby sealed his doom. If he is remembered for anything a century later, it is not as the foremost editor in Lima, not even as the talentless son of Ricardo Palma, but as the editorial buffoon who took public pride in rejecting the first poetic submission of 25-year-old César Vallejo (1892-1938).
Hay golpes en la vida tan fuertes . . . ¡Yo no se!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos;
la resaca de todo lo sufrido se empozara en el alma
¡Yo no se!
There are blows in life, so fierce… I don’t know!
Blows like the hate of God; as if before them
The undertow of all that suffering
Drained down in the well of the soul… I don’t know!
Thus begins Vallejo’s first book, Los Heraldos Negros (The Black Heralds), published in 1918. But the outrageous blows the poet endured went deeper than a rejection slip from Clemente Palma, who, to be fair, once he realized who — what — César Vallejo was, outdid himself in backslappings, apologies, and adulation. But then, all the critics did. Especially after Vallejo left for Paris. Especially after he died.
César Vallejo was already a published poet when he took a break from his legal studies in Trujillo to visit his native village, Santiago de Chuco, at 10,400 feet in the northern Andes, for the festival of the patron saint. There was a generations-old feud in the little town between the Santa María family, which owned the largest store in town, and other prominent local families, including the Vallejos. The provincial subprefect requested a detachment of gendarmes from Huaraz to make sure everything was peaceful. Sunday afternoon, August 1, 1920, the bored and hostile policemen got drunk, refused to obey their corporal, and ended up freeing the prisoners in the local jail. There was a confused altercation in the dusty street. Shots were fired. A bystander fell dead and two cops were wounded. The gendarmes got on their horses and left town. At midnight, a mob burned the Casa Comercial belonging to the Santa María family.
It took three weeks for inspector Elías Iturri to arrive at the remote village. Despite the subprefect’s testimony that César Vallejo had tried desperately to maintain the peace, the Santa María family had the inspector’s ear. Iturri had been a law school classmate of the poet at the University of Trujillo, and biographer José Luis Ayala hints at literary jealousy — who does Vallejo think he is, a halfbreed putting on airs and getting published in Lima? — but in any case, on August 31, Iturri signed an order of detention against twelve individuals, including César Vallejo.
Vallejo returned to Trujillo, hoping the order would be reversed. There is a haunting memory of the fugitive poet taking a moonlight picnic of biscuits, cheese and wine out to the Chimu ruins of Chan Chan, and reciting his poems standing on the ancient walls of mosaic adobe. On November 6, the police raided his lawyer’s office, arrested Vallejo and buck-walked him, handcuffed, publicly humiliated, through the center of town to jail. “¡Soy inocente!” insisted the poet, but he was thrown into a narrow, moist, stinking, dark cell with an iron cot, no blanket, no water and no toilet. The police dossier read:
*
Age: 27 years
Race: Mixed
Face: Hawk–nosed
Complexion: Olive
Civil state: Single
Profession: Literature
Height: 1.70 meters [5’6”]
*
The poet, who had completed three years of law school, undertook his own defense. The authorities were reluctant to enter a formal charge concerning the events of the first night of August, testimony being confused in the extreme; they were equally reluctant to let him go. So César Vallejo sat in the Trujillo city jail for 105 days.
*
Oh the four walls of the cell.
Oh the four whitewashed walls
that inevitably add up to the same number.
Nerve–hatchery, evil breach,
how it roots out from the four corners
the shackled daily extremities.
Loving turnkey of innumerable keys,
if you were only here, if you could see
up until what hour those walls stay four.
*
In that cell, that evil breach, that living death of unjust incarceration, Vallejo hatched the poems of his masterwork, Trilce. Up to what point can the ordinary syntax and vocabulary of everyday speech and/or conventional poetic discourse capture the intimate reality of a man at nightfall in a cage without a toilet?
*
A little more consideration,
since it will be later, sooner,
and one may better scrutinize
the guano, the simple stranded treasure
that offers itself involuntarily
*
The prisoner with the runs contemplates his own urgent pulsing biology: the braided guano, that simple stranded treasure that would like to offer itself,
*
as the insular heart,
salt pelican, to each hyaloid
thuds.
*
The heart, like a salty pelican beating its wings within the frame, pulses glandular secretions down to the cellular level. Weakly, humbly, molecularly, indestructibly, all Vallejo pleads for is “a little more consideration.” That is all, and that is everything.
Our professor-poets love Vallejo’s discontinuous textures. Proclaiming the death of communication, they write software which will disassociate their syntax just enough to achieve such meaningfully meaningless effects as “that offers itself involuntarily/ as the insular heart,/ salt pelican, to each hyaloid/ thuds.”
But they are mistaken about the language of Trilce. which is actually striving for super-communication, so highly charged with the extremes of experience that conventional syntax cannot contain it. Vallejo goes deeper than the playful machine-gun and movie-camera typewriters of the Vanguardia not only because his art was condensed and fired in the alchemical negrido of the lockup, but because his roots went deeper into the Andean earth.
Vallejo’s lawyer managed to get him a typewriter, a toothbrush, and a couple of books -—the Divine Comedy and the Peruvian Judicial Code — while his friends conducted a determined campaign in his behalf among writers and in the newspapers. Finally, on February 26, 1921, they managed to get an order for his release pending trial. They treated him to a dinner in the best restaurant in Trujillo, and applauded their hearts out when the poet stood to recite the poems of Trilce:
*
Mother, I’m going to Santiago in the morning
to moisten myself in your blessing and your tears.
*
The youngest of eleven children, several of whom had died by the time he was grown, César Vallejo returns to the village over and over in his poems, to find the doors locked, not one candle lit in the windows, everyone sleeping forever. Have they all gone and left me alone among the living?
*
The grownups,
what time are they coming home?
Blind old Santiago is ringing six o’clock
and it’s already dark.
Mother said she wouldn’t be late.
*
All during 1922, Vallejo waited for his case to come to trial, while Trilce was being printed. The opportunity presented itself to buy a third-class ticket to France. On June 27, 1923, his case still pending, he sailed away on the boat La Oroya, never to return to Perú.
