Thanks to Mike Rothenberg’s latest Big Bridge colossal webzine for including a small snapshot of my life, c. 1971, and its connection to Lew Welch and David Meltzer via the classic The San Francisco Poets (which I still have on my book shelf, by the way.) Thanks also for the great mention of “The Passion of Phineas Gage” in Jonathan Penton’s mini-review of “Golden Handcuffs Review” in the same issue.
More surprises came my way via the experimental composer, writer and film maker Ralph Lichtensteiger who sent me his “4 Videos” DVD (working on a review of this for Eileen Tabios’ popular blog) as well as his CD Le Language de l’espace. The great story about Ralph’s DVD is that in two of the pieces he presents fabulous aural and visual realizations of Ishikawa Jozan’s “Homing Crows” and “Sudden Shower,” using translations of the original kanshi by my friend Burton Watson.
I hope to present copies of this DVD to Burton as well as to Burton’s friend Donald Richie, who writes about all things Japanese in the Japan Times. I’m sure they’ll be pleased. For those who may be interested in obtaining a copy of “4 Videos”–the other two pieces are based on texts by Ned Rorem and Plotinus, by the way–you may contact Ralph at at lichtconlon[at]t-online.de or visit his great website at www.lichtensteiger.de.
My final thank you for the day goes to Katerina Canyon for her chapbook Fly. Her poems “Feet” and “The Haircut” are worth the $10.00 USD admission fee. Canyon has an eye for the telling detail, but more than that–an ear for the nuances of the talk of her community. Canyon’s best poems immediately involve you in that talk and that community. For more information, and to purchase her book, please visit her website at www.poetickat.com. Ms. Canyon has read her work on NPR and has held the title of Poet Laureate of Tujunga. She hosts a reading series in the same city.
You put a pencilled square on a piece of paper,
And then a circle, off center, then two squares
Perfectly balanced, and the public cried out in terror:
We are lost.
At last, having purified the intellect beyond example,
You painted a white square, on a diagonal axis,
In cool white, on a background of warm white,
Calling it White on White.
Those were the morning days, after the great revolution,
When the poet stood on the platform without speaking,
And came down, saying: That was my poem,
Which is silence.
But the going was rough, and Lenin said:
This is a disorder of Leftism, let us have no more nonsense.
Movies are what we need, posters and book jackets,
And sets for the theatre.
Something must have gone wrong: it is the intellectuals
Who reject you now, it is the new smartness to laugh
At your sort of thing. Who better than a simple person
Could understand a square?
Martyr who died in bed, entirely artist,
The circle and the square are impregnable.
They will survive a great deal of talking,
And a good many laughs.
While Dan Sendecki is working to transform this site into a larger, more spacious production, with room for our RADIO AHADADA and more on-line chapbooks, we’re busy reading some exceptional books:
Women of the Beat Generation by Brenda Knight gives us the faces of Helen Adam, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, Eileen Kaufman, and Elise Cowan and for that alone the book is worth the price.
Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems (Carcanet) is a brick of a book that offers us way more than Tottering State, yet I can’t help liking the latter better for its friendlier feel. I recall buying a heavily thumbed and slightly beat-up copy of the latter in an Edinburgh Waterstone’s and feeling as if a silent bomb had gone off in my head every time I opened it up. Perhaps it’s the cheaper paper (now falling apart in Japan’s humidity) that warms my fingers and the book’s portability (just right to toss in a backpack) that does it. Still and all, great stuff.
Trilogy and Hagoromo by Yoko Danno. If Catherine Daley is the new Mina Loy for the 21st century, then surely Yoko Danno is our post-post modern H.D.
Wittengenstein’s Ladder by Marjorie Perloff. Interesting stuff, but I’m sure Wittgenstein would have found it all ridiculous, if not a bit insulting. Imagine trying to find a seat for Stein and her epigones above the salt at the Master’s table! No, better bring in Zane Grey, complete with cowboy hat.
With murder and suicide you ended what Rousseau began.
The break with the classical tradition was complete.
It was not enough to go trading in Abyssinia:
The romantic movement had been a reaffirmation
Of life against art, in the narrow sense, but the revolution
Once started went headlong, it was not enough
To say: l’art est une sottise, the sickness spread
From member to member, until life itself became
Suspect, rejected, the ultimate sottise.
By what curious process did revolt against the neo-classic
Begin with Rousseau and with you, Jacques Vaché?
When you killed your friend with much applauded wit,
And yourself with an admired gesture, a sly overdose,
You negated everything once and for all; your disciples,
The dadaists, not wishing to die, were shown up as pikers:
Pierre de Massot said that he went on living
For love of death, which was rhetoric. He went on living,
Having his picture taken with hat on one side,
A cigarette in the corner of his mouth, tough as all hell,
But living and writing and becoming a communist,
Just as if everything were not a sottise, just as if
You had never negated everything, Jacques Vaché.
But perhaps you were right after all, say you ended
Art based on the conscious and the subconscious mind,
Seeing that there was nothing more to be done on those levels.
Below the subliminal mind of the individual,
The world of dream and hypnogogic illusion,
Lies the clear anima mundi without boundaries.
It has no language, none that we can spell,
But nothing less will content us in the end.
Are you laughing, Jacques Vaché, you that now share
The great unconsciousness of the minerals
And the omniscience of the universe?
Reprinted from Contempo, Oct. 25, 1933, Chapel Hill, N.C., Vol. III. Number 12.
The Plain Edition of Gertrude Stein
Lucy Church Amiably, By Gertrude Stein.
Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded. By Gertrude Stein.
How to Write. By Gertrude Stein. 1931.
Operas and Plays. By Gertrude Stein. 1932.
These four books are the first of the Plain Edition which is to publish “all the work not yet printed of Gertrude Stein.” Until this year the public has steadfastly refused to read Miss Stein, preferring to deride her at a safe distance; but during recent months the tide has turned with a vengeance, and it is apparent that the reading public, having thoroughly digested the works of her followers and imitators, are turning their attention, at long last, to the far more impressive original. And so to review these four books of hers, which a year ago would have been a defensive and forensic task, is now, quite simply, a pleasure.
Lucy Church Amiably is a novel without narrative. Those who are distressed by this will do well to consider the description which the author has placed upon the title page. It is, she says, “A novel of romantic beauty and nature and which looks like an engraving.” Now of a painter we ask only that he paint. Some apples on a plate are enough, if he knows his business. We do not ask for implications or connotations; and we turn with relief from the picture of a comely youth receiving his diploma, painted over the auditorium of the City College of New York, to an apple by Ceazanne; not because the animal kingdom is less important or interesting than the vegetable kingdom, but simply because we are interested in good painting. But of a writer we do not ask only that he write. There is thus a curious duality in the art of writing, due to the accident that speech, rather than line or color, is our medium of communication. Because we use language to write to our mothers, to make engagements over the telephone, and to say “Good morning” to the janitor, we are hurt and resentful if a novel does not describe something, does not say “Good morning” to us. “Oh, dear,yes,” says E.M. Forster in his book on the novel, “Oh, dear, yes, the novel has to tell a story.” But such elegaic acceptance is not for Miss Stein. She insists upon being a writer and nothing else, and those who care greatly for writing will sooner or later come to her books and read them for pleasure.
The heroine of this novel is both the church at Lucy, and a woman, Lucy Church. This ambiguous creature changes (somewhat in the manner of Orlando) so impertinently back and forth that her identity is never quite captured; and the other characters are as vague and androgynous as their names; John Mary, for example, and Simon Therese. “Oh, dear,no,” as Mr. Forster would say, “this novel does not tell a story.” But having read it, the sensitive reader will not soon forget the nebulous reprobate who “has three illegitimate children and he had been frequently married as well.” Nor will he forget that “there is a church in Lucy and it has a steeple,” and for a long time he will be hearing the soft vibration of the church bells over the Rhone, where Lucy Church stood, and where “with a nod she bent her head in the direction of the falling water.”
Although Miss Stein has generally devoted herself to prose, Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded is a poem, thirty-three pages in length. The poet, unlike the prose writer, has frequently been allowed to dispense with “meaning;” Kubla Khan is, of course, the routine example. But Miss Stein’s poetry is not meaningless as so much of–for example–Swinburne’s is, where the meaning is obscured under an avalanche of words; it is meaningless only because the words are themselves their own meaning. The bare branches of a tree, between us and the sky, “mean” winter more movingly than the notations in an almanac. And when Miss Stein says,
In the one hundred small places of myself my youth,
And myself in if it is the use of passion,
In this in it and in the nights alone
If in the next to night which is indeed not well
I follow you without it having slept and went,
does she touch us less deeply, is she less explicit than,
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower?
In How to Write we find Miss Stein up to her old trick of elucidating herself by example, rather than by precept. In this collection of essays she summons, as it were for review and parade, her literary resources. “Here,” she might say, “are my crack troops, the participles. See how smartly their uniforms shine, how quickly they step. And here are my auxilliary forces, the prepositions. Did you ever see such discipline? And here is my first aid corps. Watch them resuscitate these wounded sentences, straighten the mangaled limbs, and pump breath into the exhausted lungs,” as she sits, pleased and proud, in the reviewing stand. This is no doubt a civilized diversion; but I am sure that there are more civilized men and women than are at present enjoying Miss Stein.
I have not meant to convey the idea that Miss Stein has nothing to say to us. She has a great deal to say, and she frequently says it with charm and simplicitly. She can laugh at herself and at her readers. She can say, “I think the reason I am important is that I know everything,” and exclaim, with mock despair, “At last I am writing a popular novel. Popular with whom?” But what she has chiefly to give us is a Bergsonian sense of the integrity and intrinsic value of things in themselves. Things, to use a favorite word of hers, are “nice;” they are tender buttons, fastening us to a pleasant and a homely world. Sometimes, she confesses, “it takes courage to buy the kind of clock or handkerchiefs you are loving when everyone thinks it is a silly thing. It is a very difficult thing to have the courage for something no one is thinking is a serious thing.” But Miss Stein always has the courage. “Metaphysics,” said Bergson, “is the science which claims to dispense with symbols,” and Gertrude Stein is as far from a symbolist as it is possible for a writer to be.
It was Carl Van Vechten who said, some ten years ago, that when people get through laughing at Miss Stein they can still laugh with her. This is charmingly illustrated in Operas and Plays, which is perhaps her funniest book. In these little closet-dramas (some of which have been set to music by Virgil Thomson) people, places, and things take part in some of the most delightfully inconsequential dialogue that has been recorded since Theocritus wrote his Fifteenth Idyl. This book gives us Miss Stein in her gustiest mood; and, quite aside from the austerities of literary taste, I am sure that no one who enjoys the drawings in The New Yorker could fail to be amused by it.
After many years of neglect and contumely Miss Stein bids fair to become not only widely-read but smart. Too few people have read her in the past; now it is possible that for a while too many people may read her. But that is really not important. For whether her work is read or not, it remains what it is: the mountain from which two generations have quarried for their lesser structures.
This review appeared side by side with one by Samuel D. Schmalhausen that begins, “If Gertrude Stein is a genius, then I’m a Checko-Slovakian. [sic] But if I’m a genius, then Gertrude Stein is a Schizophrenic….”
From Yoko Danno’s “An Interview At Kunishima Hospital, Kyoto, January 31, 1994″ published in Autumn Stone in the Woods; A Tribute to Lindley Williams Hubbell, edited by Burleigh & Sato. P.S., A PRESS, 1997.
Meeting with Gertrude Stein
That was a year before I went to live in New York. I had begun writing poetry and reading poetry. I discovered her in the autumn or spring issue of The Little Review. The Little Review was the avant-garde magazine at that time, and I read something by Gertrude Stein and I was overwhelmed. I went to bookstores and there was nothing. I went to the New York Public Library and two books were there, Three Lives and Tender Buttons.
First I read Three Lives and then I read Tender Buttons, and that really overwhelmed me. By that time Geography and Plays had been published….And at that time all the writing about her had been ridicule. She was [seen as] just a joke, and I grew more and more angry, so finally I wrote an article about her. I had difficulty in publishing it, but finally it was published. I didn’t send it to her, of course. I was too shy for that, but somebody showed it to her and she wrote to me, thanking me. See, all those years she was so little appreciated. So of course I wrote her answering that and from then on we corresponded. All those letters are in Yale….
So after that, in 1934, [Stein] came to America. One day when I was sitting at my desk in the New York Public Library the telephone rang. I took up the receiverand said, “Map division,” and a voice said, “Hello, Lindley, this is Gertrude Stein.” I was never so astounded in my life! She said “I’m in the Algonquin.” That’s a hotel two blocks from my library. She said, “I’m in the Algomquin. Come up for dinner tonight.” So I went out and had dinner with her. She stayed in that hotel about a year while she was on her lecturing tours. So I saw her many times.
Alice Toklas was always with her, except on one funny occasion. Gertrude was giving lectures all around in New York, and one day she called me up at the library and she said, “I have to give a lecture tonight in Brooklyn.” And she said, “Alice can’t come. She has a cold. So will you go with me?” I said, “Yes, of course.” So we went there in a taxi and the head of the Brooklyn Museum welcomed us and she shook hands with him and intoduced me, “This is Alice Toklas.” And he looked at me and said, “How do you do, Miss Toklas.”
Hubbell in his youth had actually seen Duse and fell in love with her acting. Once again, this translation comes from The CD-ROM available from The Iris Press.
TO THE DIVINE ELEANORA DUSE
From the Italian of Gabriele D’Annunzio
In the vault which is filled with fates
like the cave where the Seers rest
beside the fountains of occult life;
in the fixed heavens which Michelangelo
peopled with adverse winds, with the great
breaths of enormous lungs, sitting between
the naked hero who feeds on victory
and, solitary as a beast, the prophet
from whom pours out the future like a river,
the sybil holds her book, shedding light
upon those two beside her, she is most
beautiful because in her deep womb
still sings the greek Apollo.
Thus in my heart I see her and desire
the most benignant one, when at her voice
the better part of me, the untiring soul,
turns into flame, and then I pray the god
that he maintain our arts’ integrity
as measureless as is our human pride,
and great imagination make my pages
worthy of her purest hand that holds them
and lifts them up to the undying light.
This is she that understands our good.
She says: Brother, your fate takes fire from me
when I shine out before the noisy mob,
clothed in your genius.
This is she that strings my clanging bow
with a new string that her own hands have twisted
and rubbed with wax to make it shoot straight.
Into my heart there comes a stubborn courage
and every morning I shoot the golden arrow
until it reaches its predestined mark.
Vainly around me the giggle of the fool
I hear, and the shower of stupid people’s praise
pours down upon me like a tiresome rain.
Well, let it pour. She takes away from me
all my suffering and every ignoble thought.
My will flies onward, winged with my disdain,
until it hits the mark.
Even if the enemy surrenders I give my sword
no truce. It is better that I live in arms,
springing up under redoubled blows.
The heroine is girdled with purple, not the olive.
It is right for her to follow in my steps
through a waving forest of lances and banners.
It is a pleasant thing, hidden in quiet orchards,
to dream in the shadow, looking idly at the soft
feather that trembles in the garrulous nest,
but to the fighter better the surge and the outcry,
the panting of the mob and the flecked red foam
and fury of the great horse with wings
and the Gorgon and Fate’s love without pity.
O proud my song, I stand firm in the field
against savage hate and false love,
and will laugh aloud as I get my revenge.
To her who knows well enough my worth
go and say this: The truth not put in words
burns at my center for your eyes alone.
Your brother asks that in your heart you keep
the torches high, that he may see his way
while he makes ready for a greater task.
This excerpt is from “Popular Songs and Modern Poetry” c. 1967, by Lindley Williams Hubbell and reprinted by the good graces of Makoto Ozaki and the Iris Press from the CD-ROM Collected Works.
***
Gertrude Stein, as all the world knows, was more interested in painting than in music. She did not make much use of popular song in her books, preferring even humbler forms of song: counting-out rhymes like “One two three four five six seven, all good children go to Heaven,” children’s jingles like “star light, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight,” nonsense verses like “Polly wolly doodle,” and of course the album rhyme which became her trademark, “When this you see remember me.”
However, her favorite piece of music was an American popular song of about 1912 called The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. This was the title of a very popular novel by John Fox (what lovely titles those sentimental old novels had: The Shepherd of the Hills, The Girl of the Limberlost, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, etc.) which was published in 1908 and dramatized in 1912 with the famous actress Charlotte Walker in the leading role. In 1916 it was filmed with the same actress. It was natural for someone to cash in on the enormous popularity of this story by writing a song with the same title, and to the end of her life it was Gertrude Stein’s favorite. I have seen somewhere a photograph of the author of Tender Buttons, which is perhaps the most esoteric book in the English language, holding the sheet music out in front of her, and with her mouth wide open, lustily singing her favorite song. Such are the pastimes of Parnassus.
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