Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, "A Dozen Cocktails--Please"

Note: This poem was first published in The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and
Jane Heap. It caused a good deal of controversy. Letters, both strongly pro- and antiBaroness, poured in. The gist of the anti-Baroness response: Why encourage someone who
is so obviously insane? Why take seriously as art the versified ravings of such an unstable,
narcissistically self-performing person who hardly knows the language in which she writes?
Does this rise to the level even of anti-art?
No spinsterlollypop for me-- yes-- we have
No bananasI got lusting palate-- I
Always eat them-- -- -- -- -- -- -They have dandy celluloid tubes-- all sizes-Tinted diabolically as a baboon's hind-complexion.
A man's a-Piffle!
Will-o'-th'-wisp! What's the dread
Matter with the up-to-date-AmericanHome-comforts? Bum insufficient for the
Should-be wellgroomed upsy!
That's the leading question.
There's the vibrator-- -- -Coy flappertoy! I am adult citizen with
Vote-- I demand my unstinted share
In roofeden-- witchsabbath of our babyLonian obelisk.
What's radio for--if you please?
"Eve's dart pricks snookums upon
Wirefence. "
An apple a day-- -- -It'll come-- -- -- -Ha! When? I'm no tongueswallowing yogi.
Progress is ravishlng-It doesn't me-Nudge it -Kick it-Prod it-Push it-Broadcast-- -- -- -That's the lightning idea!
S.O.S. national shortage of-What ?
How are we going to put it befitting
Lifted upsys?
Psh! Any sissy poet has sufficient freezing
Chemicals in his Freudian icechest to snuff all

Cockiness. We'll hire one.

Hell! Not that! That's the trouble-- -Cock crow silly!
Oh fine!
They're in France-- the air on the line-The Poles-- -- -- -- -- -Have them send waves-- like candy-Valentines-- -- -- -"Say it with-- -- -Bolts !
Oh thunder!
Serpentine aircurrents-- -- -Hhhhhphssssssss! The very word penetrates
I feel whoozy!
I like that. I don't hanker after Billyboys-- but I am entitled
To be deeply shocked.
So are we-- but you fill the hiatus.
Dear-- I ain't queer-- I need it straight -- -A dozen cocktails-- please-- -- -- --

William Carlos Williams on The Baroness

a chapter from Williams's Autobiography partly about
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven
Along with everything else I was still going in to the city Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to
pediatric clinics, first to the Babies', then the Post Graduate Hospitals, for advanced training. It
was tiresome, hot work in summer, and in winter the commuting was hard, but I enjoyed it. On
Fridays, which was my day off, I'd stop over sometimes for a party during the evening. The
group often met on the second floor of a small Fourteenth Street apartment, most often at Lola
Ridge's, that Vestal of the Arts, a devout believer in the humanity of letters; narrow quarters
where anyone might on occasion show up.
I can't remember all the names, but once, Mayakofsky, the Russian poet, appeared with his friend
and manager who was wearing a particolored vest, half green and half white. Mayakofsky read
aloud for us his "Willie the Havana Street Cleaner." A big man, he rested one foot on top of the
studio table as he read. It was the perfect gesture. He had a good voice, and though no one
understood a word he said, we were all impressed by the tumbling sounds and his intense
seriousness. I remember there were two giggling poets of the smarter and younger generation
who, while thinking him wonderful, were more, as far as I could tell, impressed by his size than
by anything else. Two nice little "girls." For myself it sounded as might The Odyssey from the
mouth of some impassioned Greek.
Scofield Thayer, so the rumor ran, had proposed to Marianne Moore who had begged off, though
continuing to work at the Dial office. Kenneth Burke later took over Marianne's Dialjob. Plenty
was happening to me those days. The Little Review had been using some poems by a huge
mountain of a man from Maine, weighing three hundred pounds, according to Marsden Hartley,
and named Wallace Gould. Marsden introduced him to me. Marsden in those years was a kind of
grandpapa to us all, male and female alike. But he had a face that doomed him, the nose of a
Wellington projecting from the edge of his cheeks like a medieval pike's point. But to get back to
Wallace Gould. I was fascinated by the poems' romantic tenor, I suppose, but there was more
than that to them. Gould used the local material in a broad way with loose, undulant lines that I
greatly admired. In fact, it was not the nostalgic glamour of these Victorian passages at all, but
the firmness of the images and a smoothness of diction that I praised to Margaret Anderson and
Jane Heap.
Visiting Margaret Anderson's and Jane Heap's apartment - with its great bed hanging from four
chains from the ceiling - was an experience: Jane Heap looked like a heavy-set Eskimo, but
Margaret, always more than a little upstage, was an avowed beauty in the grand style. In later
years she was a friend of Mary Garden and Georgette Le Blanc.
At their apartment I also saw for the first time, under a glass bell, a piece of sculpture that
appeared to be chicken guts, possibly imitated in wax. It caught my eye. I was told it was the
work of a titled German woman, Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, a fabulous creature, well past

fifty, whom The Little Review was protecting. Would I care to meet her, for she was crazy, it was
said, about my work.
I wrote, fatally, to Margaret or Jane, saying I wanted to meet the woman. They agreed I was
precisely the one who should meet her and defend her. But unfortunately she was at that moment
in the Tombs under arrest for stealing an umbrella.
Briefly: I went to the Tombs on the day of her release, met her, took her to breakfast somewhere
on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street, and promised to see her again soon. She was about fifty at
the time, a woman who had been perhaps beautiful. She spoke with a strong German accent and
at the moment was earning a pittance in the city posing in the nude as an artists' model. She was
quite in demand--a lean, masculine figure.
Yes. I met her, all right! Once later she had an intimate talk with me and advised me that what I
needed to make me great was to contract syphilis from her and so free my mind for serious art.
She was a protege of Marcel Duchamp. She sent me a photo of herself, 8 x 10, nude, a fine
portrait, said to have been taken by him--a picture I kept in my trunk for years, finally handing it
on to Berenice Abbott. I was sick of seeing it lying around. A first-rate piece of photography,
though.
The Baroness pursued me for several years, twice coming to Rutherford, of which more later.
At about this time Wallace Gould arrived in New York from his Maine hide-out and almost
immediately found that it would be impossible to support himself here. Some woman who
admired his work had loaned Wally an apartment. When I found him he had on a black stock, a
black suit with great white cuffs, and if he wasn't trembling with fright, he wasn't far from it.
That day, in fact within the hour, he had been standing at the bottom of the stairs, his hand on the
newel post, when his hostess had come downstairs had pressed her breast upon the back of his
hand, pinning it there, so to speak. He had been too frightened to withdraw the hand, and there
she had him.
The pupils of his eyes must have been half an inch across. "I'm up shit creekl" were his exact
words. He had almost dropped dead of annoyance, or so he told me, and begged me to get him
out of there as fast as I could. "I'm broke," he said in terror. "What am I to do?"
It was around Christmas. "Look," I said, "get your stuff and come out to Rutherford with me. I've
got the car at the door."
He stayed with us all winter, giving little Bill piano lessons for his board, though I hadn't asked
it. But when March arrived the Indian blood in his veins--he was quarter Abnaki Indian on his
mother's side--asserted itself and he packed his kit. I gave him twenty dollars or so to start him
off. He went by train to Washington, D. C., thence to start walking, which he did, to end up after
a few days at Farmville, Virginia, where he spent the remainder of his life.

The Baroness, though, didn't leave me so easily. She reminded me of my "gypsy" grandmother,
old Emily, and I was foolish enough to say I loved her. That all but finished me!
November 11, 1918: The war was now really over. Pop had lived it through. England had once
more come through on top. But on Christmas Day, 1918, he died. He never at any time
complained of any pain or made the slightest difficulty for anyone during his illness. But when
he went he carried the secret of his birth with him. I should have liked to have known something
from him of my grandfather.
Certainly that is one thing I shall never know. For, after Irving's death the next year, the old lady
who remained, the sole survivor of her clan, having buried all her children, my father, his two
half-brothers as well as my Aunt Rosita, the epileptic, also remained as silent as he to her death.
I'll never forget Pop's death. Only after the hardest trying did I manage, the day before, finally, to
get the tube into his emaciated body for the enema. I knew I had forced it through only by
unjustifiable pushing--a stiff tube with a loose wire core to give it added rigidity, and I knew I
could never do it again. He had not so much as parted his lips in complaint at the maneuver.
Christmas morning, 1918, he had all his gifts for the family laid out, each in its place, and
labeled. The one for me was a small cubical bronze bell, as a handle for which he had had fitted,
the support welded in, the ivory figure of an old Chinese philosopher. Himself? Mother woke
and they spoke to each other. She fell asleep again. At seven she arose. He remained apparently
sleeping. He was almost finished.
She called me, and I went up from Nine Ridge Road as fast as I could. It must have been a
cerebral accident, perhaps from my efforts to relieve him the day before.
"He's gone," I said. But he shook his head slowly from side to side. It was the last thing I could
ever say in my father's presence and it was disastrous.
The young woman must have been dropped by the Godwins she always said she had never
received her just rights--and after an apparent delay of five years came to America in a sailing
vessel loaded with car rails. The ship was driven by a storm to the Azores and later ran adrift on
Fire Island shoal. Pop once told me that as a child of five he recalled being on deck, in his
mother's arms perhaps, and seeing the bowsprit and prow of another vessel loom above him out
of the fog and strike the side of the ship he was on.
The woman and infant disembarked at Castle Garden, moved to a Brooklyn boarding house and
there met a Mr. Wellcome, up from Saint Thomas to buy photographic supplies. He saw the
young woman, married her and took her, with her son, back to the West Indies. There, the boy
who was to be my father grew up. Grandma had wanted to be an actress; that was her objective
in coming here. She had plenty of sand. All she wanted of it, finally.
We brought Grandma's body from the shore--her fabulous shore where she bathed daily in
summer until she couldn't get up from the pebbles for the weight of her wet old-fashioned

bathing dress. She lay in state in my front room where I did a pencil drawing of her really
impressive features. The old cat slept under her coffin.
But back to the Baroness. All the old gals of Greenwich Village were backing her: coal scuttle on
head on Fifth Avenue, black Mother Hubbard with moons cut out front and back for ready
reference. Her attacks were persistent to a point where it concerned me seriously. But I never
have been particularly concerned with others' ideas or opinions when they controverted mine. I
couldn't be moved.
I called on the woman one day, gave her small amounts of money. Ashes were deep on her
miserable hearth. In the slum room where she lived with her two small dogs, I saw them at it on
her dirty bed. But she herself at that moment was courtesy itself. We talked and that was all. We
talked well and I was moved. But when later she went into her act, I put up a fight.
Wallace Stevens at one time was afraid to come below Fourteenth Street when he was in the city
because of her. And there was a Russian painter who on turning in one night in his small room
had her crawl out naked from under his bed. He ran, ducked in at a neighbor's across the hall.
She refused to leave the premises until he agreed to follow her to her own apartment.
Bob McAlmon was here at supper one night when I received a call to see a sick baby at Union
Avenue. I took my bag and went out to my car which was standing at the curb. But as I went to
get into it a hand grabbed my left wrist. It was she.
"You must come with me," she said in her strong German accent. I was taken aback, as may
easily be imagined, and nonplused besides, because--well, she was a woman.
It ended as she hauled off and hit me alongside the neck with all her strength. She had had some
little squirt of a male accomplice call me from supper for this. I just stood there thinking. But at
that moment a cop happened to walk by. "What's the matter, Doc, this woman annoying you?"
"No," I said, and she lit out down the street. "Let her go."
I bought a small punching bag after that to take it out on in the cellar, and the next time she
attacked me, about six o'clock one evening on Park Avenue a few months later, I flattened her
with a stiff punch to the mouth. I thought she was going to stick a knife in me. I had her arrested,
she shouting, "What are you in this town? Napoleon?"
But she promised from the local jail, sticking her hand out between the bars, never to do it again.
It was funny to see her walking down the street trying to take hold of Officer Campbell's arm and
he pushing her away. I was really crazy about the woman.
Later I gave her two hundred dollars to get out of the country. It was stolen by the go-between. I
gave her more and finally she went, only to be playfully killed by some French jokester, it is
said, who turned the gas jet on in her room while she was sleeping. That's the story.

Critical Introduction
Though unpublished during her lifetime, "A Dozen CocktailsPlease" was published in Sulfur 6 (1983) as one poem in a set
of eleven poems for which editor Eliot Weinberger wrote in the introduction, "with Barnes' death at 90 this year, the
Baroness' work will finally see print" (150). For copyright reasons, this additional version of the poem is not included here.
This poem is playful, making ribald reference to condoms as "dandy celluloid tubes . . . tinted diabolically as a baboon's
hind-complexion" and "the vibrator-- -- -- /Coy flappertoy!" She also includes a section with a thinly-veiled praise for her
heterosexuality:

. . . I don't hanker after Billyboys-- but I am entitled

To be deeply shocked.
So are we-- but you fill the hiatus.
Dear-- I ain't queer-- I need it straight -- -A dozen cocktails-- please-- -- -- -She plays with the reader as she plays with herself: sexual freedom makes sex an arena of play and self-empowerment. The
play here on "deeply shocked" both indicates an offense of social conscience and, especially coupled with the next line "but
you fill the hiatus," a sexual penetration. She used the attention generated by this "obscene" language to make pointed
social commentaries. In "A Dozen CocktailsPlease," for example, she criticizes what she perceives as American social
inferiorities by criticizing its bathroom habits. At a phase in her career when she argues for European artistic and aristocratic
superiority, she denigrates the "uppity" Americans who, while socially barbarous, have advanced and expensive bathroom
amenities:

What's the dread

Matter with the up-to-date-AmericanHome-comforts? Bum insufficient for the
Should-be wellgroomed upsy!
Liberty is restrictive, however; it demands a level of censorship to which the Baroness (in the words of Pound's Cantos) was
"non-acquiescent." It is her non-acquiescence, her inclination to be too obscene, too critical, which left her without a
readership at The Little Review. Especially as a woman, the Baroness's sense of freedom of expression, which makes her
work valuable posthumously helped to situate her on the fringe in her time.

One technique that demanded an active audience was "optophonetic" poetry, which provided a written form for the very
popular "sound poetry" that Dadaists Tzar, Huelsenbeck, Janco and others performed at the Cabaret Voltaire. In his desire
to abstract language, Dadaist Raol Haussman created notations that used typographic variations to signal certain sound
effects, essentially designing a system much like musical notation. Kurt Schwitters followed behind, creating what he called
Merz or a multi-genre, multi-media poem that incorporated optophonetics with pictures, nails, and even sentences, often cut
from the newspaper or a pamphlet. The Baroness, who was much enraged by Schwitters' rising popularity with The Little
Review during the years of her decline from their favor, incorporates optophonetics in her own work, more in the Schwitters
fashion. In her manuscripts, there is evidence that she experimented with using optophonetics as one element among many
that render meaning in a poem. In "A Dozen Cocktails Please," she writes: "Serpentine aircurrents -- -- --/Hhhhhphssssssss!
The very word penetrates." The word, with its low-slung "p" in the middle and its swerving queue of "s" evokes the
penetrating snake that it mimics.

Ca s facei un poem dadaist

Pentru a face o poezie dadaist
Luai un ziar.
Luai o pereche de foarfeci.
Alegei din ziar un articol care s aib lungimea pe care vrei s o dai poeziei voastre.
Decupai articolul.
Taiai cu grij toate cuvintele care formeaz respectivul articol i punei toate aceste articole ntrun scule.
Agitai-l ncetior.
Scoatei cuvintele unul dup altul, dispunndu-le n ordinea n care le vei extrage.
Copiai-le cuviincios. Poezia v va semna.
i iat-v un scriitor infinit de original i nzestrat, cu o sensibilitate ncnttoare, dei, se
nelege, neneleas de oamenii vulgari.

the sonnet
A lyric poem of fourteen lines, following one or another of several set rhyme-schemes. Critics of
the sonnet have recognized varying classifications, but to all essential purposes two types only
need be discussed ff the student will understand that each of these two, in turn, has undergone
various modifications by experimenters. The two characteristic sonnet types are the Italian
(Petrarchan) and the English (Shakespearean). The first, the Italian form, is distinguished by its
bipartite division into the octave and the sestet: the octave consisting of a first division of eight
lines rhyming
abbaabba
and the sestet, or second division, consisting of six lines rhyming
cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce.
On this twofold division of the Italian sonnet Charles Gayley notes: "The octave bears the
burden; a doubt, a problem, a reflection, a query, an historical statement, a cry of indignation or
desire, a Vision of the ideaL The sestet eases the load, resolves the problem or doubt, answers the
query, solaces the yearning, realizes the vision." Again it might be said that the octave presents
the narrative, states the proposition or raises a question; the sestet drives home the narrative by
making an abstract comment, applies the proposition, or solves the problem. So much for the
strict interpretation of the Italian form; as a matter of fact English poets have varied these items
greatly. The octave and sestet division is not always kept; the rhyme-scheme is often varied, but
within limits--no Italian sonnet properly allowing more than five rhymes. Iambic pentameter is
essentially the meter, but here again certain poets have experimented with hexameter and other
meters.
The English (Shakespearean) sonnet, on the other hand, is so different from the Italian (though it
grew from that form) as to permit of a separate classification. Instead of the octave and sestet
divisions, this sonnet characteristically embodies four divisions: three quatrains (each with a
rhyme-scheme of its own) and a rhymed couplet. Thus the typical rhyme-scheme for the English
sonnet is
abab cdcd efef gg.
The couplet at the end is usually a commentary on the foregoing, an epigrammatic close. The
Spenserian sonnet combines the Italian and the Shakespearean forms, using three quatrains and a
couplet but employing linking rhymes between the quatrains, thus
abab bcbc cdcd ee.
Certain qualities common to the sonnet as a form should be noted. Its definite restrictions make it
a challenge to the artistry of the poet and call for all the technical skill at the poet's command.
The more or less set rhyme patterns occurring regularly within the short space of fourteen lines
afford a pleasant effect on the ear of the reader, and can Create truly musical effects. The rigidity

of the form precludes a too great economy or too great prodigality of words. Emphasis is placed
on exactness and perfection of expression.
The sonnet as a form developed in Italy probably in the thirteenth century. Petrarch, in the
fourteenth century, raised the sonnet to its greatest Italian perfection and so gave it, for English
readers, his own name.
The form was introduced into England by Thomas Wyatt, who translated Petrarchan sonnets and
left over thirty examples of his own in English. Surrey, an associate, shares with Wyatt the credit
for introducing the form to England and is important as an early modifier of the Italian form.
Gradually the Italian sonnet pattern was changed and since Shakespeare attained fame for the
greatest poems of this modified type his name has often been given to the English form.
Among the most famous sonneteers in England have been Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth,
and D. G. Rossetti. Longfellow, Jones Very, G. H. Boker, and E. A. Robinson are generally
credited with writing some of the best sonnets in America. With the interest in this poetic form,
certain poets following the example of Petrarch have written a series of sonnets linked one to the
other and dealing with some unified subject. Such series are called sonnet sequences.
Some of the most famous sonnet sequences in English literature are those by Shakespeare (154
in the group), Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Spenser's Amoretti, Rossetti's House of Life, and
Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. William Ellery Leonard, Elinor Wylie, Edna St.
Vincent Millay, and W. H. Auden have done distinguished work in the sonnet and the sonnet
sequence in this century. The brevity of the form favors concentrated expression of idea or
passion.
Anti-formal or meta-formal sonnets are occasions for irony made possible by implicit reference
to formality itself. In a sonnet called "Forms from the Reich University", William Heyen creates
an irony based on the notion that the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust by and large
participated in a culture that had achieved greatly in aesthetic forms one might call "well-sealed."

William Carlos Williams on the sonnet

Forcing twentieth-century America into a sonnet gosh, how I hate sonnetsis like
putting a crab into a square box. Youve got to cut off his legs to make him fit. When you
get through, you dont have a crab anymore.
--Williams Carlos Williams, in an interview [from Interviews with William Carlos Williams:
Speaking Straight Ahead 1976)]

John Peale Bishop, "A Recollection"

Famously she descended, her red hair
Unbound and bronzed by sea-reflections, caught
Crinkled with sea-pearls. The fine slender taut
Knees that let down her feet upon the air,
Young breasts, slim flanks and golden quarries were
Odder than when the young distraught
Unknown Venetian, painting her portrait, thought
He'd not imagined what he painted there.
And I too commenced with that golden cloud:
Lipped her delicious hands and had my ease
Faring fantastically, perversely proud.
All loveliness demands our courtesies.
Since she was dead I praised her as I could
Silently, among the Barberini bees.

Yet Do I Marvel
Countee Cullen
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I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Ruth Lechlitner, "Lines for an

Abortionist's Office" (c. 1936)
Close here thine eyes, O State:
These are thy guests who bring
To gods with appetites grown great
A votive offering.
Know that they dare defy
The words of law and priest--(Better to let the unborn die
Than starve while others feast.)
The stricken flesh may be
Outraged, and heal; but mind
Pain-sharpened, may yet learn to see
Thee plain, O State. Be blind:
Accept love's fruit: be sleek
Fat and lip-sealed. (Forget
That Life, avenging pain, will speak!)
Thrust deep the long curette!

"Interior"
Genevieve Taggard
(Published in Proletarian Literature in
the United States [1935].)
A middle class fortress in which to hide!
Draw down the curtain as if saying No,
While noon's ablaze, ablaze outside.
And outside people work and sweat
And the day clings by and the hard day
ends.
And after you doze brush out your hair
And walk like a marmoset to and fro
And look in the mirror at middle-age
And sit and regard yourself stare and stare
And hate your life and your tiresome
friends
And last night's bridge where you went in
debt;
While all around you gathers the rage
Of cheated people
Will we hear your fret
In the rising noise of the streets? Oh no!

Countee Cullen, "Incident"

Incident
by Countee Cullen

Once riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

If We Must Die
BY CLAUDE MCKAY

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men well face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Langston Hughes, "Dinner Guest: Me

Langston Hughes, "Dinner Guest: Me"
I know I am
The Negro Problem
Being wined and dined,
Answering the usual questions
That come to white mind
Which seeks demurely
To Probe in polite way
The why and wherewithal
Of darkness U.S.A.
Wondering how things got this way
In current democratic night,
Murmuring gently
Over fraises du bois,
"I'm so ashamed of being white."
The lobster is delicious,
The wine divine,
And center of attention
At the damask table, mine.
To be a Problem on
Park Avenue at eight
Is not so bad.
Solutions to the Problem,
Of course, wait.

Boy Breaking Glass

BY GW ENDOLYN BROOKS

To Marc Crawford
from whom the commission
Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed premire.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.
I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.
Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.
Dont go down the plank
if you see theres no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no
longer there.
The only sanity is a cup of tea.
The music is in minors.
Each one other
is having different weather.
It was you, it was you who threw away my
name!
And this is everything I have for me.

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,

the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.
truth
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?
Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?
Shall we not shudder?
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?
Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily

Over the eyes.

Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a
stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of
hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I
mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them
made,
But at spring mending-time we find them
there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to
each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly
balls
We have to use a spell to make them
balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are
turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling
them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good
neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to
him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage
armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good
neighbors."

Richard Wilbur, "The Death of a Toad" (1950)

THE DEATH OF A TOAD
A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.
The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,
Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.

Nude Descending a Staircase

BY X J KENNEDY

Toe after toe, a snowing flesh,

a gold of lemon, root and rind,
she sifts in sunlight down the stairs
with nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
a constant thresh of thigh on thigh;
her lips imprint the swinging air
that parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
her slow descent like a long cape
and pausing on the final stair,
collects her motions into shape.

transcript of audio introduction to chapter 7

Chapter 7. It's time for chapter 7 and this is about the Beats, the Beat poets and for me
personally, it's an exciting chapter. It's an important intermediate point between the doubts and
concerns about Modernist formal experiment that we encounter for various reasons in chapters
3, 4, 5 & 6 - it's an intermediary point between that and the post-modernism that emerges
starting in chapter 8. What I want to do in this audio introduction to the week is run through the
reading list and make just a few comments, poem by poem, poet by poet, and then, rather
quickly I hope, I want to move to a couple up of other ancillary points about the Beats.
So we'll be starting with "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's great poem, certainly the poem he's known for
beyond the couple of anthologized chestnuts such as "America" or the Whitman poem
"Supermarket in California." "Howl" is an epic or almost an epic. It has a kind of epic reach. It's
very Whitmanian and what we're going to be doing is focusing on something that might be
counter-intuitive, which is to say, we're going to think about Ginsberg as a consummate prosetist
- a prosetist: someone who really cares about the sounds of words. So while the poem looks like
it is spontaneous, it certainly looks that way on the page when you look at it with your eyes, and
it looks and sounds like it's just pouring out, it looks and sounds like a howl or the yelp that it is
(and it is all these things), at the same time, it's carefully wrought. It's absolutely the product of
poetic thinking and the poetic use of language.
And then we move to Jack Kerouac and Jack Kerouac is a poet but he's not primarily a poet and
he's known primarily as a novelist. And we're looking at his concept of prose, particularly his
idea of spontaneous prose, which is to say he's interested in the poetic aspects of prose. I'll say
more about this a little later in this introduction but Kerouac's influence on poetry after the 1950s
and mid 1960s is not through the novels. The novels are important. They are important to the
culture generally, to be sure. There are some people who have taken ModPo simply because
they saw Kerouac on the list - that's how international a reach he has, mostly through his novels,
through his fiction. Our focus here in ModPo is on the poetic principles underlying the
spontaneous prose. And we'll be looking for one thing at the opening paragraphs of a
remarkably quasi-spontaneous or faux-spontaneous piece of poetic prose called "October in the
Railroad Earth" and this is a piece that I, personally, completely revere and I'm amazed by every
time I listen to it. And we have a rare recording of Kerouac reciting the opening of it and it's quite
remarkable and we're just gonna have to stipulate, because we really can't document it, we don't
have time to do that - we're gonna have to stipulate that the influence of pieces like "October in
the Railroad Earth" on subsequent poets is huge. And we do have one comment here by Ted
Berrigan, a poet associated with the New York School, the second generation New York School,

on "October in the Railroad Earth" and that'll give you a sense of how important Kerouac's prose
is to the later poets. And another example is the response to what people call - and maybe
Kerouac called it too, I'm not sure ,I'm not enough of a Kerouac specialist know that - what
people call babble flow. Babble flow. Babble flow is another term used to describe spontaneous
prose and one might think of babble flow as following from Whitman's blab of the pave and I
don't think that would be too inaccurate. Kerouac pushes the spontaneous quality, therefore the
grammar breaks down and even the sound sense of the words break down when you get to
Kerouac - though, that's not so much true in Whitman as in Kerouac.
And then we look at Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man" which is a famous poem, probably
Creeley's most famous poem. Now, Creeley is associated with the New American poetry, and
with the Black Mountain School of poetry in particular. And it's generally okay - generally
appropriate, I think - to deem Creeley as part of the general New American poet - we capitalize
New and American, the New American poet - the breakout of the New American poets from the
somewhat cautious immediate post war poetry of the sort that you get in Richard Wilbur, for
instance, who is a student of Modernism, but someone who embraced some aspects of
Modernism, yet wanted to return to traditional poetic forms and to a traditional poetic stance, a
stance of difference, of irony. And in doing so, created (Wilbur did) that kind of different flow out
of Modernism. Creeley follows more or less directly from Modernism, particularly from Williams.
When you read Creeley, you'll see some Williams in there. The poem "I Know a Man" is not a
Beat poem per se, but happens to be, happens to be a Creeley poem that somewhat, we could
say, comments on the Beats and we wanted Creeley in the course somehow responding to the
Beats and fitting in somewhere so that's why we put Creeley in even though it's a bit of a
digression from Beats.
And then we look at Anne Waldman who is very personally and closely associated with
Ginsberg in particular and with the Beats, but who is thought of as a New York School poet
along with Ted Berrigan and the others of that second generation so-called New York poets. But
Waldman, Anne Waldman, has something say that's bardic and antic and crazy and political in
the Ginsbergian mode. So we're going to look at her performance of "Rogue State," which, by
the way, is a bardic ballad, so... so it's a ballad and Ginsberg liked ballads, too, even though he
also loved the long lines. He loved William Blake who wrote ballads. He sang Blake. He sang
Blake! We have a recording in PennSound of Allen Ginsberg singing many of Blake's Songs of
Innocence and Experience. So here is a non-Whitmanian (in this instance of Waldman, "Rogue
State"), a non-Whitmanian (formally speaking), a non-Whitmanian line, in the Beats that harkens
back to the Blakean sense of the ballad. So there's Waldman connected to the Beats in this way.
Then we will be reading eight of the short sections of poems that constitute Bob Kaufman's "Jail
Poems." You could say that Bob Kaufman was imprisoned for the differences that he is, or was.
Black, Beat, Afro-surrealist, itinerant, Creole, German, Jewish, socially as well as poetically
improvisational. You could say, I'm trying to say, that Bob Kaufman was imprisoned for those
differences - the differences that he IS rather than the differences that he had done, which would

be the purported legal standard for jailing someone. And this will make more sense, what I just
said, when you read the "Jail Poems." Kaufman's Afro-Zen Imagism in "Jail Poems" is a counter
to what he deemed neo-fascist brutalization and he was personally brutalized in San Francisco
by the police. I do think it might be helpful to think about Kaufmann's verse as a kind of Imagism
updated to the situation of a Cold War era African American Beat. "Jail Poems" is seriously
funny in the way it mocks the San Francisco police for beating up beatniks and Kaufman
celebrates the beaten up beatniks he meets in jail, some counter-culturalists in San Francisco
and elsewhere who were not in jail admired Kaufman for walking the walk. He led an unusual,
difficult life which included a decade of silence - no writing and really no talking - and his poetry
is worth exploring further if you like the Kaufman we present here in ModPo.
And then we'll look at Amiri Baraka, who when he was known as LeRoi Jones, was closely
associated with the Beats in the late 1950s and the very first part, the first monthss of the 1960s
before he moved away, or some would say broke with that and did, politically, something
different and associated then with political African American poets, the Black Arts Movement.
Poets who were looking at various traditions, including what they had learned from the Beats but
by no means, exclusively that. So Baraka moves in a different direction, in other words, and
especially later in his career. And we will look at a poem that was written by Baraka later, but is,
happens to be, very much in line with the Beat sensibility and this poem is called "Incident" and
it does hearken back to Countee Cullen's poem "Incident" and in fact, many people have argued
that it is in direct dialogue with Cullen's "Incident." It offers, in the broadest sense, a Modernist
rejoinder, a rejoinder learned of Modernism I guess you could say, a rejoinder to the formalities
of Countee Cullen's choice of describing in poetic form the event, the life-changing event of
racist hatred. We have a second piece by Baraka, LeRoi Jones then LeRoi Jones, written in
1959 for the 1960 anthology which was called The New American Poetry, (it's where we get this
phrase, The New Americans) a very famous and very, very important book- an anthology edited by Donald Allen. This book brought together poets from many, and I suppose we could
say most, of the schools or movements roughly associated with continuity from Modernism, the
break from the conformity of the post-war period, the emergence of post-Modernism, the Black
Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York School, etc. And Donald Allen commissioned a prose
statement about the sound of poetry from LeRoi Jones and this is the sort of poetic essay we
are reading and discussing. It has about it some of the big bold statements familiar to us already
because of Jack Kerouac's freedom-loving dicta or grand statements. But this one (Baraka's)
makes the connection between poetic freedom, freedom of form and content, and the way a
poet sounds. How you sound. How you sound is significant - it produces meaning. So if
ModPo's mantra is "How you say what you say is as important as what you say," with this Beat
emphasis on the sound, with the jazzy music of free-writing, we might revise that mantra, and
say "How you sound what you sound, is as important as what you sound." Let me say that
again: "How you sound what you sound is as important as what you sound." Which is to say,
how you sound, Baraka believed, is who you are, which beautifully returns the idea of poetry to
music. So it's avant-garde and it's very traditional at the same time. This sort of idea opened up

many possible influences from the Beats going forward. And in the community of Black poets,
this idea about sound had a very special resonance. And to hear such resonance, we conclude
chapter 7 by watching a performance by Jayne Cortez of "She Got He Got." "She Got He Got" a jazzy, seemingly improvised repetition of variations of getting, being got, being gotten, having,
having things, having someone, being gotten, getting there etc. And that time-honored jazz
topic, and I suppose I mean here a sexual topic, a topic of possessing, of having or of resisting
being possessed, this is her concern. Relationships of sex and/or love and having and holding
and language. So ending with the early Baraka (LeRoi Jones) on sound and the later Jayne
Cortez performing sound suggests (we hope) a link from jazz-influenced Beat to Black Arts to
spoken word.
Okay. So that's what chapter 7 looks like in week 6. And now I want to make a few other points
about the Beats and about how we're dealing with chapter 7. I'm gonna take a little drink here to
pause for this, take a breath. First of all, Beat poetry, let me say, when you think of it, Beat
poetry, you think of beatniks, right? Admit it - it's the black turtleneck, the beret-wearing, fingersnapping types of the 1950s, in the late fifties in particular because at that point in the early 60s,
the Beats finally got into the popular imagination, when it hit Main Street you could say in the US
and elsewhere in that period in the early sixties and these were known to be the counter-cultural
types generally, ok, not just poetically, but generally. They moved from Greenwich Village and
San Francisco and places like Venice in Southern California. They moved onward and outward
and they were "free" (I put that in quotes I suppose, "free") and they were a version of the
flappers and Bohemians of the nineteen teens and twenties in cities like New York and London
and Paris. So it was like a wave of counter-culturalism and that's an image of the Beats that is
relevant to a sociological study of the Beat movement and maybe an historical and maybe even
political study of the Beat movement and, perhaps too, to a study of the fiction of the Beat
moment because of fiction's almost inherent focus on themes. But I'm here to point out, your
predictable ModPo guy - your reliable guide to the aesthetics, to the art of the poetic movements
we encounter - you can count on me to point out that in the world of poetry and poetics, these
sociological social aspects are not quite, for us, for those who care about poetry and poetics
primarily, not quite as important to consider, you could say, the fashion aspects, and I'm sorry to
use that word because it might seem to diminish these other aspects. The way the poets, the
Beat poets, interacted with social movements that became a fashion. And I wanted in this intro
to acknowledge that I do understand that that aspect of the Beat movement is important. I like it.
But it's not finally at the center of concerns of poetry and poetics. And in looking at that
sociological side, that counter-cultural side, of the Beats you do include other kinds of poets who
are not making their appearance in the main ModPo syllabus and I need to acknowledge that.
For instance, you get - looking at things that way, you're gonna more likely get poets like
Lawrence Ferlinghetti who performs these beatnik kinds of things, antic - I like that word, antic.
Antic meaning comic in a traditional way, unconventional, funny. Antic. Performative, political,
acerbic, crazy poems by Ferlinghetti in a kind of schtick, a schticky performance. And Ginsberg,
of course, can do this, too, sometimes. He was famous for schticky performances. But that's

ultimately not the Ginsberg we're looking at here. Now, again, there's Bob Kaufman, so let's
return to him, who was known for his heretical behavior - what he did on the streets, and in the
cafes, and in the bars, and in the police stations - his behavior as well as his remarkable writing.
He, Kaufman, maybe more than any of the others in this brief selection of Beat work, lived the
Beat life and in fact, the term "beatnik" was coined by journalist Herb Cohen, it seems. I think
that's true. Herb Cohen - a pretty well known columnist, I guess he was, journalist in the San
Francisco area, coined the term beatnik to refer to Kaufman. And Kaufman embraced the term
beatnik. We should note, not all Beat poets loved the seemingly diminutive and maybe
condescending term beatnik. But Kaufman embraced it and used it and in his poems, turned it
around - in "Jail Poems." For Kaufman, whose "Jail Poems" we encounter as I pointed out in this
chapter of ModPo, the state of being Beat, of beatitude, of beatitude, creates and invisibility of
not being there that discloses, that lays bare, the brutal conditions imposed by conventional
values in such a way as to form a response. Much like Henry David Thoreau's response to
Ralph Waldo Emerson who, seeing Thoreau in jail said, "What are you doing in there?" to which
Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there, Waldo?" In "Jail Poems," Bob Kaufman writes,
"Someone who I am is no one/Something I have done is nothing." So yes, Bob Kaufman, with
his amazing talent for what Maria Damon, a critic who has spent a lot of effort making the world
aware of Bob Kaufman, she and others, what Maria Damon calls the Afrobeat koan. A kind of
Zen, Imagist, perfect statement, and for free jazz-like improvisation, Damon pointed out, of
Kaufman's work, this tendency to the Afrobeat koan and the free jazz-like improvisation. And
this, these qualities, enable Kaufman to work on the high wire act antic side of the Beat
aesthetic. That's my point here. Although, again, he can be totally sincere and unironic in his
radical rejection of the square, apolitical life. But again, again, again, I thought it would be good
for those who in ModPo's Beat selection will miss the crazy, blissed-out hipster Beat figure with
his or her hyper-parrotic, parrotic style, to give at least in this intro an example of that side, the
side again that interests us less because we're so serious about experiments with language.
Maybe too serious.
A perfect example of this antic side is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's very predictable, in my opinion,
very predictable way of dealing with these things... fun, but predictable and therefore finally not
as interesting (in my view) poetically speaking as the others, but an instance, a sample, of this
kind of Beat poem - this antic side, this schticky side - is a poem called "Baseball Canto" which
is fun. And for those of you who know how to find ModPoPlus, you'll see that we spend some
time talking about Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" there, so go have a look. The poem is about
merging the idea of Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism and reactionary politics with the innovations or
supposed innovations of Modernism brought about by people like Pound and, on the other hand,
baseball, so it's Pound and baseball - which Ferlinghetti feels is a kind of democratic stew. In
those days when baseball tickets were cheap, and they were the cheap seats, the so-called
peanut gallery, baseball was indeed a place where classes could merge. It's a way in which the
multicultural aspirations of all social classes in the US could come together and at least in those
days could do so and Ferlinghetti was out to celebrate that. It is probably too expensive to buy

tickets to a baseball game now for that kind of true multicultural mixing, but when he wrote this
poem, Ferlinghetti celebrated baseball in the poem, in "Baseball Canto," and implicitly refers to,
or explicitly refers to, Ezra Pound's Cantos and he has fun with that combination. And so, I'm
gonna include a recording of this poem, part of it, in this introduction in just a moment. It's a
recording of his performing the poem and it's very schticky and, in fact, if you are interested, as I
say, in following the ModPo supplemental syllabus that we call ModPoPlus, you'll see, as I said,
"Baseball Canto" there. So here is a little bit of Lawrence Ferlinghetti performing "Baseball
Canto."
[Recording of Lawrence Ferlinghetti performing "Baseball Canto"]
Okay, so, but. But, but, in the end, our focus is on what might be called a more language-y Beat
poetry. More language-y than that. Poems that are aware of the words as sounds. Poetry that is
focused, as all our poems in ModPo are (most of them, almost all of them), on the importance of
the centrality of linguistic choices and of language, self-conscious deployment of language. So,
poems are not just things that tell stories. They're language and they are about language.
Another point that I want to make here by way of wrapping up on the Beats is about Clark
Coolidge. So he's a poet who is normally associated with the so-called Language poets, the
avant-garde school that emerged in the seventies and eighties which we look at closely and
chapter 9.1. Clark Coolidge wrote an essay on Jack Kerouac's babble flow and it was published
in the American Poetry Review and I'll make sure that it is linked to the supplemental reading
section somewhere of ModPo. You'll be able to find it. Or you can just go to your favorite search
engine and type in "Clark Coolidge Jack Kerouac." That should do it. And you'll find this essay.
It's an important essay and it gives you a sense and really underlines our approach to Kerouac's
prose, thinking of Kerouac's prose as a kind of poetry.
So I want to say two more things. I want to turn to a comment by David Antin. He's a
Postmodern performance poet, who unfortunately does not appear in ModPo except for this
mention in this introduction. Antin is a pretty well-known Postmodern contemporary poet of a
seemingly spontaneous story poem, the talk poem is, that Antin tells as he goes along, quite a
remarkable thing to see him in performance. It's structured in advance, but then largely
improvised in the middle. Anyway, Antin, at one point in the 1970s was considering Ginsberg's
reputation and Antin wrote a piece that was meant to bring a Postmodernism out of Modernism,
expressing the continuity in poetic Modernism to Postmodernism. And the piece he wrote, Antin
did, is called, "Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry."
And I want to quote from a paragraph of it and say a little bit about that. So, Antin in this piece,
has just quoted Ginsberg's poem, "America." You know, "America stop pushing/ I know what I'm
doing...America, the plum blossems are falling./ America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies./
America I used to be a Communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry./ I smoke marijuana every
chance I get." That "America," that Ginsberg. And here's what David Antin said about this style:
"The success of the style can be measured by the degree to which the establishment critics
responded to this poetry (Ginsberg's) as anti-poetry, anti-literature and as mere socio-political

tract. While there may have been contributory factors in the political climate of the Cold War and
Ginsberg's own mania, his personal mania,[I'm still quoting Antin] it is hard to believe now that
this alternately prophetic, rhapsodic, comic and nostalgic style could appear to anyone to be
unliterary. But it did appear unliterary, primarily because the appropriate devices for framing
Modern poetry and literature in general were nowhere in sight at the time. Instead of irony..." and
parenthetically I should add that irony, of course, is the dominant mode of the Neoformalist
poetry of the traditional anti-Modernist poetry of the post-war period. Irony that was the mode
you see in the Wilbur poem about the toad and some of you see in the irony in Kennedy's poem
about the painting. "So instead of irony," Antin says, and now I'm quoting Antin again, "Instead of
irony, this poem had broad parody and sarcasm. Instead of implying, [which again is the mode
of the poets such as Wilbur in the fifties. Back to Antin] Instead of implying, the poem ranted and
bawled and laughed" says Antin, "And it was explicit. [I'm still quoting Antin.] Learned, as it was,
in the strategies of European poetry, it was nonetheless seen as poetry of the gutter."
Well, at this point, not much needs to be said about what Antin is arguing here. I think the
paragraph is clear. Why was Ginsberg thought to be anti poetic? Well, it's very literary indeed.
And in ModPo, we are able to see a poem like Gisberg's "Howl" within the flow of the
development of Modern poetry and within it, as part of it. It isn't an outlier, really. It might be a
big break from the chapter 6 poets and the Frostian mode of chapter 5, but it's no break at all
really from the Whitmanian flow through and past Modernism.
And I want to end by quoting a passage that we listened to in this week. We listened to Ginsberg
doing it, so it's maybe a little superfluous here, but I want to say a few things about this passage
from Ginsberg's "Howl" and the importance of the intense compositional consciousness that's
afoot here. Here at the level of the sound of words, it's following what David Antin says - it is
really poetic. It is really crafted, deployed. It's prosotic, it's consciously prosotic. It's kind of
amazing to think that anybody would ever think that passages like this one could be unpoetic.
So let's listen to Ginsberg perform it and then I'll say a few obvious things about it and then we'll
wrap up this long introduction.
[Ginsberg performing excerpt of "Howl"]
You know, if you just lineated it differently and wiped Whitman out of our consciousness, took
Ginsberg's beard and long hair away, took away the whole socio-political connotation of the
Beats as guys driving with jalopies cross country high on speed - if you took it all away, and
lineated these lines differently, and stuck it in a Modern late 19th century British poetry
anthology, that passage that I just played for you would sound ever-so-much like a poet like
Gerard Manley Hopkins. And ModPo people who don't know Hopkins, Google him, search for
him and find some fantastic poems - Hopkin's poems. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Kind of the
Dickinson of his time in a way, and of his place. "Ashcan rantings" says Ginsberg. "Ashcan
rantings" and "kind king light of mind." "Battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance." You get
the alliteration and you get the internal rhyming. It is carefully wrought. And one need really say
nothing more than that when you think about a passage like this and you think of the freedom

and the ecstasy involved in the long lines and in the rantings and then you begin to realize that
the piling up of nouns and noun phrases or the jamming of adjectives in front of strings of
adjectives in front of strings of nouns: "backyard green tree cemetery dawns." "Backyard green
tree cemetery dawns." So "backyard"'s a noun, it's made here into an adjective. "Green" is an
adjective modifying "tree." But then "tree" is modifying a double noun phrase "cemetery dawns."
"Backyard green tree cemetery dawns." And you get a style, you get a literary style. Somewhat
different style, but a style for sure, nonetheless. And it's a style that jars a little bit, when you're
looking for the small Imagistic, Imagist era propositions that anchor us, that position us. This is a
poetry that is not particularly positioning us, Ginsberg's. It's setting us adrift. It's not particularly
positioning us in any one way, but it is so very much the same kind of linguistic consciousness
and you get phrases like "peyote solidities of halls." "Peyote solidities of halls" with intense
senses of rhythm and then you get the internal rhyming of "ashcan rantings" - one of my favorite
phrases. "Ashcan," a noun that becomes an adjective. "Ashcan rantings" - what kind of
rantings? Ashcan rantings. These are rantings of the ashcan. And then "rantings," of course, if
you look at it quickly, it strikes you as a noun made out to be a verb "to rant." Ranting. These are
rantings of someone who rants. Ashcan rantings. It's exactly what you want a poet to do with the
concept of the ecstatic yawping and bellowing and free, seemingly-not-reigned-in expression,
self-expression. Coming out of the gutter, the ashcan rantings, and yet, of course, as with the
Claude McKay, in a very different approach - it takes on the weight, it takes on the importance,
of our perception. It takes on the valuation, the cache, the value that we place on a sonnet in
McKay's case, and then raises up an argument for something so radical as counter-violence
using a poetic history as a strategy there and also here. Although the analogy to McKay,
between Ginsberg and McKay, is a little bit of a stretch, I think the same strategy is at work in
both ultimately. Ginsberg is winning us over, ModPo people, winning us over, trying to win us
over to a cause of cultural freedom, but he's doing it through what might be called "traditional
methods" of wringing poetry out of speech, wringing verse out of words. The same strategies at
work - which is to say, what is perceived to be poetry of the low, the poetry of the gutter, the
poetry of the insane, the poetry of the marginalized, the poetry of those kicked out of the
universities and jailed like Kaufman, the poetry of the socially disaffected, and to take these
rantings from the garbage and elevate them with great traditions of assonance and alliteration
and metrical consciousness.

I dwell in Possibility (466)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

I dwell in Possibility
A fairer House than Prose
More numerous of Windows
Superior for Doors
Of Chambers as the Cedars
Impregnable of eye
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky
Of Visitors the fairest
For Occupation This
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise

Tell all the truth but tell it slant (1263)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

Tell all the truth but tell it slant

Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind

Emily Dickinson, #556

The Brain, within its Groove

Runs evenly--and true-But let a Splinter swerve-'Twere easier for You-To put a Current back-When Floods have slit the Hills-And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves-And trodden out the Mills--

Le cimetire marin

The Graveyard By The Sea

Paul Valry

Translated by C. Day Lewis

Ce toit tranquille, o marchent des colombes,

Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose de feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencee
O rcompense aprs une pense
Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!

This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,

Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame -That sea forever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!

Quel pur travail de fins clairs consume

Maint diamant d'imperceptible cume,
Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
Quand sur l'abme un soleil se repose,
Ouvrages purs d'une ternelle cause,
Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.

What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form

The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!
When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time's air is sparkling, dream is certainty -Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.

Stable trsor, temple simple Minerve,

Masse de calme, et visible rserve,
Eau sourcilleuse, Oeil qui gardes en toi
Tant de sommeil sous une voile de flamme,
O mon silence! . . . difice dans l'ame,
Mais comble d'or aux mille tuiles, Toit!

Sure treasure, simple shrine to intelligence,

Palpable calm, visible reticence,
Proud-lidded water, Eye wherein there wells
Under a film of fire such depth of sleep -O silence! . . . Mansion in my soul, you slope
Of gold, roof of a myriad golden tiles.

Temple du Temps, qu'un seul soupir rsume,

ce point pur je monte et m'accoutume,

Temple of time, within a brief sigh bounded,

To this rare height inured I climb, surrounded

Tout entour de mon regard marin;

Et comme aux dieux mon offrande suprme,
La scintillation sereine sme
Sur l'altitude un ddain souverain.

By the horizons of a sea-girt eye.

And, like my supreme offering to the gods,
That peaceful coruscation only breeds
A loftier indifference on the sky.

Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance,

Comme en dlice il change son absence
Dans une bouche o sa forme se meurt,
Je hume ici ma future fume,
Et le ciel chante l'me consume
Le changement des rives en rumeur.

Even as a fruit's absorbed in the enjoying,

Even as within the mouth its body dying
Changes into delight through dissolution,
So to my melted soul the heavens declare
All bounds transfigured into a boundless air,
And I breathe now my future's emanation.

Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change!

Aprs tant d'orgueil, aprs tant d'trange
Oisivet, mais pleine de pouvoir,
Je m'abandonne ce brillant espace,
Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe
Qui m'apprivoise son frle mouvoir.

Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!

After such arrogance, after so much strange
Idleness -- strange, yet full of potency -I am all open to these shining spaces;
Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes,
Ghosting along -- a ghost subduing me.

L'me expose aux torches du solstice,

Je te soutiens, admirable justice
De la lumire aux armes sans piti!
Je te tends pure ta place premire,
Regarde-toi! . . . Mais rendre la lumire
Suppose d'ombre une morne moiti.

My soul laid bare to your midsummer fire,

O just, impartial light whom I admire,
Whose arms are merciless, you have I stayed
And give back, pure, to your original place.
Look at yourself . . . But to give light implies
No less a somber moiety of shade.

O pour moi seul, moi seul, en moi-mme,

Auprs d'un coeur, aux sources du pome,
Entre le vide et l'vnement pur,
J'attends l'cho de ma grandeur interne,
Amre, sombre, et sonore citerne,
Sonnant dans l'me un creux toujours futur!

Oh, for myself alone, mine, deep within

At the heart's quick, the poem's fount, between
The void and its pure issue, I beseech
The intimations of my secret power.
O bitter, dark, and echoing reservoir
Speaking of depths always beyond my reach.

Sais-tu, fausse captive des feuillages,

Golfe mangeur de ces maigres grillages,
Sur mes yeux clos, secrets blouissants,
Quel corps me trane sa fin paresseuse,
Quel front l'attire cette terre osseuse?
Une tincelle y pense mes absents.

But know you -- feigning prisoner of the boughs,

Gulf which cats up their slender prison-bars,
Secret which dazzles though mine eyes are closed -What body drags me to its lingering end,
What mind draws it to this bone-peopled ground?
A star broods there on all that I have lost.

Ferm, sacr, plein d'un feu sans matire,

Fragment terrestre offert la lumire,
Ce lieu me plat, domin de flambeaux,
Compos d'or, de pierre et d'arbres sombres,
O tant de marbre est tremblant sur tant d'ombres;
La mer fidle y dort sur mes tombeaux!

Closed, hallowed, full of insubstantial fire,

Morsel of earth to heaven's light given o'er -This plot, ruled by its flambeaux, pleases me -A place all gold, stone, and dark wood, where shudders
So much marble above so many shadows:
And on my tombs, asleep, the faithful sea.

Chienne splendide, carte l'idoltre!

Quand solitaire au sourire de ptre,
Je pais longtemps, moutons mystrieux,
Le blanc troupeau de mes tranquilles tombes,
loignes-en les prudentes colombes,

Keep off the idolaters, bright watch-dog, while -A solitary with the shepherd's smile -I pasture long my sheep, my mysteries,
My snow-white flock of undisturbed graves!
Drive far away from here the careful doves,

Les songes vains, les anges curieux!

The vain daydreams, the angels' questioning eyes!

Ici venu, l'avenir est paresse.

L'insecte net gratte la scheresse;
Tout est brl, dfait, reu dans l'air
A je ne sais quelle svre essence . . .
La vie est vaste, tant ivre d'absence,
Et l'amertume est douce, et l'esprit clair.

Now present here, the future takes its time.

The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam;
All is burnt up, used up, drawn up in air
To some ineffably rarefied solution . . .
Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation,
And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.

Les morts cachs sont bien dans cette terre

Qui les rchauffe et sche leur mystre.
Midi l-haut, Midi sans mouvement
En soi se pense et convient soi-mme
Tte complte et parfait diadme,
Je suis en toi le secret changement.

The dead lie easy, hidden in earth where they

Are warmed and have their mysteries burnt away.
Motionless noon, noon aloft in the blue
Broods on itself -- a self-sufficient theme.
O rounded dome and perfect diadem,
I am what's changing secretly in you.

Tu n'as que moi pour contenir tes craintes!

Mes repentirs, mes doutes, mes contraintes
Sont le dfaut de ton grand diamant! . . .
Mais dans leur nuit toute lourde de marbres,
Un peuple vague aux racines des arbres
A pris dj ton parti lentement.

I am the only medium for your fears.

My penitence, my doubts, my baulked desires -These are the flaw within your diamond pride . . .
But in their heavy night, cumbered with marble,
Under the roots of trees a shadow people
Has slowly now come over to your side.

Ils ont fondu dans une absence paisse,

L'argile rouge a bu la blanche espce,
Le don de vivre a pass dans les fleurs!
O sont des morts les phrases familires,
L'art personnel, les mes singulires?
La larve file o se formaient les pleurs.

To an impervious nothingness they're thinned,

For the red clay has swallowed the white kind;
Into the flowers that gift of life has passed.
Where are the dead? -- their homely turns of speech,
The personal grace, the soul informing each?
Grubs thread their way where tears were once composed.

Les cris aigus des filles chatouilles,

Les yeux, les dents, les paupires mouilles,
Le sein charmant qui joue avec le feu,
Le sang qui brille aux lvres qui se rendent,
Les derniers dons, les doigts qui les dfendent,
Tout va sous terre et rentre dans le jeu!

The bird-sharp cries of girls whom love is teasing,

The eyes, the teeth, the eyelids moistly closing,
The pretty breast that gambles with the flame,
The crimson blood shining when lips are yielded,
The last gift, and the fingers that would shield it -All go to earth, go back into the game.

Et vous, grande me, esprez-vous un songe

Qui n'aura plus ces couleurs de mensonge
Qu'aux yeux de chair l'onde et l'or font ici?
Chanterez-vous quand serez vaporeuse?
Allez! Tout fuit! Ma prsence est poreuse,
La sainte impatience meurt aussi!

And you, great soul, is there yet hope in you

To find some dream without the lying hue
That gold or wave offers to fleshly eyes?
Will you be singing still when you're thin air?
All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
Am I. Divine impatience also dies.

Maigre immortalit noire et dore,

Consolatrice affreusement laure,
Qui de la mort fais un sein maternel,
Le beau mensonge et la pieuse ruse!
Qui ne connat, et qui ne les refuse,
Ce crne vide et ce rire ternel!

Lean immortality, all crpe and gold,

Laurelled consoler frightening to behold,
Death is a womb, a mother's breast, you feign
The fine illusion, oh the pious trick!
Who does not know them, and is not made sick
That empty skull, that everlasting grin?

Pres profonds, ttes inhabites,

Ancestors deep down there, O derelict heads

Qui sous le poids de tant de pelletes,

tes la terre et confondez nos pas,
Le vrai rongeur, le ver irrfutable
N'est point pour vous qui dormez sous la table,
Il vit de vie, il ne me quitte pas!

Whom such a weight of spaded earth o'erspreads,

Who are the earth, in whom our steps are lost,
The real flesh-eater, worm unanswerable
Is not for you that sleep under the table:
Life is his meat, and I am still his host.

Amour, peut-tre, ou de moi-mme haine?

Sa dent secrte est de moi si prochaine
Que tous les noms lui peuvent convenir!
Qu'importe! Il voit, il veut, il songe, il touche!
Ma chair lui plat, et jusque sur ma couche,
ce vivant je vis d'appartenir!

'Love,' shall we call him? 'Hatred of self,' maybe?

His secret tooth is so intimate with me
That any name would suit him well enough,
Enough that he can see, will, daydream, touch -My flesh delights him, even upon my couch
I live but as a morsel of his life.

Znon! Cruel Znon! Znon d'le!

M'as-tu perc de cette flche aile
Qui vibre, vole, et qui ne vole pas!
Le son m'enfante et la flche me tue!
Ah! le soleil . . . Quelle ombre de tortue
Pour l'me, Achille immobile grands pas!

Zeno, Zeno, cruel philosopher Zeno,

Have you then pierced me with your feathered arrow
That hums and flies, yet does not fly! The sounding
Shaft gives me life, the arrow kills. Oh, sun! -Oh, what a tortoise-shadow to outrun
My soul, Achilles' giant stride left standing!

Non, non! . . . Debout! Dans l're successive!

Brisez, mon corps, cette forme pensive!
Buvez, mon sein, la naissance du vent!
Une fracheur, de la mer exhale,
Me rend mon me . . . O puissance sale!
Courons l'onde en rejaillir vivant.

No, no! Arise! The future years unfold.

Shatter, O body, meditation's mould!
And, O my breast, drink in the wind's reviving!
A freshness, exhalation of the sea,
Restores my soul . . . Salt-breathing potency!
Let's run at the waves and be hurled back to living!

Oui! grande mer de delires doue,

Peau de panthre et chlamyde troue,
De mille et mille idoles du soleil,
Hydre absolue, ivre de ta chair bleue,
Qui te remords l'tincelante queue
Dans un tumulte au silence pareil

Yes, mighty sea with such wild frenzies gifted

(The panther skin and the rent chlamys), sifted
All over with sun-images that glisten,
Creature supreme, drunk on your own blue flesh,
Who in a tumult like the deepest hush
Bite at your sequin-glittering tail -- yes, listen!

Le vent se lve! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!

L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
Envolez-vous, pages tout blouies!
Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux rejouies
Ce toit tranquille o picoraient des focs!

The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!

The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges
This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.

W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Sylvia Plath - The Moon And The Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky ---Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness ---The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness -- blackness and silence

355. Sunday Morning

By Wallace Stevens
I

COMPLACENCIES of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug, mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

10

15

II

She hears, upon that water without sound,

A voice that cries: The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering;
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or Island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

20

25

30

III

She says: I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?

35

There is not any haunt of prophecy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary South, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heavens hill, that has endured
As Aprils green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallows wings.

40

45

IV

She says, But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss.
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to bring sweet-smelling pears
And plums in ponderous piles. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

50

55

60

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like seraphim, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn
And whence they came and whither they shall go,
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

65

70

The Garden
by Ezra Pound
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

Resume
by Dorothy Parker
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

by E. E. Cummings
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

MCMXIV

(1964)

Phillip Larkin
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

I Remember - Poem by Anne Sexton

By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no colorno more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.
A Pity. We Were Such A Good Invention - Poem by Yehuda Amichai

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.