Everyone’s going to bed here at headquarters, but I think I have some time to type in one of my favorite translations from one of my favorite authors. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) was surely the most notorious rake and hell-raiser of the court of Charles II, but he was also one of the most naturally gifted poets of his time.
After death nothing is, and nothing, death:
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hope of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear,
Nor be concerned which way nor where
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring time swallows us whole;
Impartial death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God’s everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more.
Interestingly enough, Rochester made a last-minute death bed conversion that was just as sensational as the life that went before it. (A bit like Rimbaud’s, I guess.) And which was trotted out again and again through the 18th and 19th centuries as a warning against mockers and revilers. Seneca, on the other hand, killed himself when he was implicated in a plot against Nero’s life. Lucan, yet another of my favorite poets and a nephew of Seneca’s, was forced to kill himself because he was too was suspected to be in league with the conspirators.
Having gotten all of this grim business out of the way, time to get some rest.
George Oppen died on July 7th, 1984, as per the New York Times clipping sent to Cid Corman by the critic Sherman Paul, and kept as part of Cid’s bulging and battered copy of Oppen’s Slected Poems from New Directions. Truly George Oppen and Cid Corman shared similar conceptions when it came to the practice of poetry. Both believed in the need for directness, for “sincerity” in writing; for objective truth in the work of poetry. Both relished the use of small words and plain language. Both believed in the moral value of poetry.
Cid clearly admired George as man and poet and vice versa. Among the material Cid archived in Oppen’s book is a late letter from George to Cid at 87 Dartmouth St., Boston, postmarked 26 Nov. 1979, which reads:
Dear Cid:
now over my desk are the lines:
‘wherever you are, you have come to.’
Cid, in his turn, annotated the first page of Oppen’s Discrete Series, as “a remarkable early 1st collection: it must’ve given LZ [Louis Zukovsky] pause–a sense of deep competition (this GO wd. not have felt so).
On the facing page, is unfortunately, a poem that I cannot decipher. Cid’s minute handwriting, especially when he is writing “for himself” is often hard to read. This is an undated poem, which indicates that Cid was not so sure about its finished state. Usually, Cid dates the poems that he feels are finished.
On the outside of yet another letter addressed to his Boston apartment on 16 March, 1981, is this poem, dated 17 Sept. 1984:
The sun haunts us
at night before
we enter sleep
It is the dream.
All we seem to
see within it
is it. It is
the spirit and
soul of death’s
breath.
I won’t attempt to give a complete description of the contents, or of the annotations, or, because of the difficulty of Cid’s handwriting, transcriptions of all of the marginal poems, but I would like to set out the most interesting.
A complete typescript of a poem that Cid wrote in memory of GO is also among the materials in the volume:
Cid wrote at the top, “Shortened To For Oppen,” which he scribbled out, and wrote Open next to it, all in caps. This is dated 30 August 86.
The man dying upon you
isnt [sic] your brother–he is
yourself. No dogtag Hebrew
reads you otherwise. The text–
George–derives from the breath you
and he lost in a foxhole.
I sat up half the night last night looking at Patience Worth’s selected poems Light From Beyond (Patience Worth Publishing, New York, 1932), trying to decide if this ghostly poetess, novelist, and dramatist supposedly from the 16th century, was a good writer. She wasn’t. But what’s interesting about her work (really the “inspired” writing of a woman named Mrs. Pearl Curran) is that it does have flashes of interesting–even startling–language.
Snow tweaked ‘neath thy feet,
And like a wandering painter stalketh Frost,
Daubing leaf and lichen. Where flowed a cataract
And mist-fogged stream, lies silvered sheen,
Stark, dead and motionless. I hearken
But to hear the she-e-e-e of warning wind,
Fearful lest I waken Nature’s sleeping.
Await ye! Like a falcon loosed
Cometh the awakening. Then returneth Spring
To nestle in the curving breast of yonder hill,
And sets to rest like the falcon seeketh
His lady’s outstretched arm.
Often Patience Worth offers startling beginnings (see her poem “I made a song of the dead notes of his birds,” for instance), and it’s obvious that Patience/Pearl was familiar with the Metaphysicals like Donne, Vaughn, and Herbert. How far from Herbert’s “The Collar” is the following by what I will call, the Patience Poet:
Ah, God, I have drunk unto the dregs,
And flung the cup at Thee!
the dust of crumbled righteousness
Hath dried and soaked unto itself
E’en the drop I spilled to Bacchus,
Whilst Thou, all-patient,
Sendest purple vintage for a later harvest.
The poem begins with a mini-drama, but seems to founder on Victorian sweet-cake by the end. The question is: how did this woeful writing gain such wide publication in its day? Why did so many men and women of letters take this stuff seriously, and why did the work of the “British” Patience Worth make barely a ripple in her home country?
I think, ironically, Patience Worth was an American phenomenon, because the writer she most resembles, and the writer that paved the way, as it were, for this mysterious female presence to be accepted by the literary establishment, was Emily Dickinson. Literary America in 1916 was still in the grip of the discovery of the truly gifted Emily Dickinson, and many of Patience Worth’s supporters, like the critic William Marion Reedy, had participated in the gradual flowering of Dickinson’s posthumous career. ED, of course, is an American metaphysical, using the energetic tropes of Donne, Herbert and company, in her own incredible way. Her work was also decked out in Victorian titles in their earliest printed embodiments, and her lesser poems in which more standard and hackneyed sentiments are present, were among her most celebrated in the early part of the 20th century. So it’s no surprise that a women (if even the alleged ghost of one) who weilded metaphysical conceits in a cloud of Victorian sugar, would attract attention. In addition, this was the age of free verse. Amy Lowell was writing her exotic “Amygist” poems at that time, so she too must have helped make the climate conducive for a free-verse Ouija board virtuoso. Still, it’s an intriguing subject, as are all considerations surrounding the creation of literary careers, and, of course, the creation of “inspired writing.” (More on that subject later.)
Oh, and like the Patience Worth Poet, Emily Dickinson didn’t make much of a stir, till much, much later, in Britain.
A pdf version of Light From Beyond is available on-line at www.spiritwritings.com/LightFromBeyondWorth.pdf.
Besides a mutual liking for Old Speckled Hen–a brew that drinkers in and around Sheffield, England, can draw from the tap and get in bottled form, David and I agree, generally, on poets. (We disagree about the imporatnce of Weldon Kees (I think he’s great), but no two people can have perfect congruence.) What I can say is that David is a fine poet as evidenced by his book The President of Earth, from Salt Publishing, 2002, $12.95, or 8 pounds. 95 p. in wild and wooly England. Here are two poems from that collection that I particularly like:
Horse Chestnut
A negotiation of securities:
semi-baldness of branch
and the leaves still coming down
from the excitements of air,
adding to the controversy
of browning yellow and dull green
before the year issues
its bland final document.
As the covers come on
all over England,
I’m clearing up the conference of summer;
the butt of green comedy,
raking back to bare earth
as the remainder rattle and splash
-broad smears.
From an old song,
fortune’s song
fighting the wind with a rake.
Suburban For Beginners
Lesson I
This is my house. This is my house.
This is my car. This is my car.
This is my car in front of my house.
No, I cannot move my car.
It is in front of my house.
Lesson 2
This is my house. Be my guest.
We like to drink our tea.
We do not discuss the price
of any of our ornaments.
Lesson 3
I am in front of my house.
I am in front of my house.
I am waiting for my wife
because I have locked myself out.
This is my phone. This is my ansafone
answering my phone. This is my wife
saying she cannot come home
because she has lost the car keys.
David and I also share a love for strange things, as per Charles Hoy Fort, author of Book of the Damned, Lo and Strange Talents. More on that subject in future.
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