XIX
This is the time of year
when boys fifteen and seventeen
wear two horned lilac blossoms
in their caps — or over one ear
What is it that does this?
It is a certain sort —
drivers for grocers or taxidrivers
white and colored —
fellows that let their hair grow long
in a curve over one eye —
Horned purple
Dirty satyrs, it is
vulgarity raised to the last power
They have stolen them
broken the bushes apart
with a curse for the owner —
Lilacs —
They stand in the doorways
on the business streets with a sneer
on their faces
adorned with blossoms
Out of their sweet heads
dark kisses — rough faces
XX
The sea that encloses her young body
ula lu la lu
is the sea of many arms —
The blazing secrecy of noon is undone
and and and
the broken sand is the sound of love —
The flesh is firm that turns in the sea
O la la
the sea that is cold with dead mens’ tears —
Deeply the wooing that penetrated
to the edge of the sea
returns in the plash of the waves —
a wink over the shoulder
large as the ocean —
with wave following wave to the edge
coom barrooom —
It is the cold of the sea
broken upon the sand by the force
of the moon —
In the sea the young flesh playing
floats with the cries of far off men
who rise in the sea
with green arms
to homage again the fields over there
where the night is deep —
la lu la lu
but lips too few
assume the new — marrruu
Underneath the sea where it is dark
there is no edge
so two —
XXI
one day in Paradise
a Gipsy
smiled
to see the blandness
of the leaves —
so many
so lascivious
and still
XXII
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
The fixed categories into which life is divided must always hold. These things are normal — essential to every activity. But they exist — but not as dead dissections.
The curriculum of knowledge cannot but be divided into the sciences, the thousand and one groups of data, scientific, philosophic or whatnot — as many as there exist in Shakespeare — things that make him appear the university of all ages.
But this is not the thing. In the galvanic category of — The same things exist, but in a different condition when energized by the imagination.
The whole field of education is affected — There is no end of detail that is without significance.
Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge — in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it.
This would clarify his field at once — He would then see the use of data
But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative.
nothing could be more ridiculous. To data there is no end. There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the use of knowledge —
It is the imagination that —
That is: life is absolutely simple. In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always. There should never be permitted, confusion —
There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible — But it must never be lost — as it is today —
I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture — In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash. Not one. The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge. There is no end —
And what is the fourth dimension? It is the endlessness of knowledge —
It is the imagination on which reality rides — It is the imagination — It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomitization.
It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science — in spite of everything.
Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality — Poetry
The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current — which it has always sought —
In other times — men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense — Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts — broken, bruised
few escape whole — slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity — Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination —
The effect will be to give importance to the subdivisions of experience — which today are absolutely lost — There exists simply nothing.
Prose — When values are important, such — For example there is no use denying that prose and poetry are not by any means the same IN INTENTION. But then what is prose? There is no need for it to approach poetry except to be weakened.
With decent knowledge to hand we can tell what things are for
I except to see values blossom. I expect to see prose be prose. Prose, relieved of extraneous, unrelated values must return to its only purpose: to clarity to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not acurately adjusted to the exposition of facts it does not exist — Its form is that alone. To penetrate everywhere with enlightenment —
Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystalization of the imagination — the perfection of new forms as additions to nature — Prose may follow to enlighten but poetry —
Is what I have written prose? The only answer is that form in prose ends with the end of that which is being communicated — If the power to go on falters in the middle of a sentence — that is the end of the sentence — Or if a new phase enters at that point it is only stupidity to go on.
There is no confusion — only difficulties.
XXIII
The veritable night
of wires and stars
the moon is in
the oak tree’s crotch
and sleepers in
the windows cough
athwart the round
and pointed leaves
and insects sting
while on the grass
the whitish moonlight
tearfully
assumes the attitudes
of afternoon —
But it is real
where peaches hang
recalling death’s
long promised symphony
whose tuneful wood
and stringish undergrowth
are ghosts existing
without being
save to come with juice
and pulp to assuage
the hungers which
the night reveals
so that now at last
the truth’s aglow
with devilish peace
forestalling day
which dawns tomorrow
with dreadful
reds
the heart to predicate
with mists that loved
the ocean and the fields —
Thus moonlight
is the perfect
human touch
XXIV
The leaves embrace
in the trees
it is a wordless
world
without personality
I do not
seek a path
I am still with
Gipsie lips pressed
to my own —
It is the kiss
of leaves
without being
poison ivy
or nettle, the kiss
of oak leaves —
He who has kissed
a leaf
need look no further —
I ascend
through
a canopy of leaves
and at the same time
I descend
for I do nothing
unusual —
I ride in my car
I think about
prehistoric caves
in the Pyrenees —
the cave of
Les Trois Freres
The nature of the difference between what is termed prose on the one hand and verse on the other is not to be discovered by a study of the metrical characteristics of the words as they occur in juxtaposition. It is ridiculous to say that verse grades off into prose as the rythm becomes less and less pronounced, in fact, that verse differs from prose in that the meter is more pronounced, that the movement is more impassioned and that rhythmical prose, so called, occupies a middle place between prose and verse.
It is true that verse is likely to be more strongly stressed than what is termed prose, but to say that this is in any way indicative of the difference in nature of the two is surely to make the mistake of arguing from the particular to the general, to the effect that since an object has a certain character that therefore the force which gave it form will always reveal itself in that character.
Of course there is nothing to do but to differentiate prose from verse by the only effective means at hand, the external, surface appearance. But a counter proposal may be made, to wit: that verse is of such a nature that it may appear without metrical stress of any sort and that prose may be strongly stressed — in short that meter has nothing to do with the question whatever.
Of course it may be said that if the difference is felt and is not discoverable to the eye and ear then what about it anyway? Or it may be argued, that since there is according to my proposal no discoverable difference between prose and verse that in all probability none exists and that both are phases of the same thing.
Yet, quite plainly, there is a very marked difference between the two which may arise in the fact of a separate origin for each, each using similar modes for dis-similar purposes; verse falling most commonly into meter but not always, and prose going forward most often without meter but not always.
This at least serves to explain some of the best work I see today and explains some of the most noteworthy failures which I discover. I search for “something” in the writing which moves me in a certain way — It offers a suggestion as to why some work of Whitman’s is bad poetry and some, in the same meter is prose.
The practical point would be to discover when a work is to be taken as coming from this source and when from that. When discovering a work it would be — If it is poetry it means this and only this — and if it is prose it means that and only that. Anything else is a confusion, silly and bad practice.
I believe this is possible as I believe in the main that Marianne Moore is of all American writers most constantly a poet — not because her lines are invariably full of imagery they are not, they are often diagramatically informative, and not because she clips her work into certain shapes — her pieces are without meter most often — but I believe she is most constantly a poet in her work because the purpose of her work is invariably from the source from which poetry starts — that it is constantly from the purpose of poetry. And that it actually possesses this characteristic, as of that origin, to a more distinguishable degree when it eschews verse rhythms than when it does not. It has the purpose of poetry written into and therefore it is poetry.
I believe it possible, even essential, that when poetry fails it does not become prose but bad poetry. The test of Mariane Moore would be that she writes sometimes good and sometimes bad poetry but always — with a single purpose out of a single fountain which is of the sort —
The practical point would be to discover —
I can go no further than to say that poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions, poetry liberates the words from their emotional implications, prose confirms them in it. Both move centrifugally or centripetally toward the intelligence.
Of course it must be understood that writing deals with words and words only and that all discussions of it deal with single words and their association in groups.
As far as I can discover there is no way but the one I have marked out which will satisfactorily deal with certain lines such as occur in some play of Shakespeare or in a poem of Marianne Moore’s, let us say: Tomorrow will be the first of April —
Certainly there is an emotional content in this for anyone living in the northern temperate zone, but whether it is prose or poetry — taken by itself — who is going to say unless some mark is put on it by the intent conveyed by the words which surround it —
Either to write or to comprehend poetry the words must be recognized to be moving in a direction separate from the jostling or lack of it which occurs within the piece.
Marianne’s words remain separate, each unwilling to group with the others except as they move in the one direction. This is even an important — or amusing — character of Miss Moore’s work.
Her work puzzles me. It is not easy to quote convincingly.
XXV
Somebody dies every four minutes
in New York State —
To hell with you and your poetry —
You will rot and be blown
through the next solar system
with the rest of the gases —
What the hell do you know about it?
AXIOMS
Do not get killed
Careful Crossing Campaign
Cross Crossings Cautiously
THE HORSES
&
white
What’s the use of sweating over
this sort of thing, Carl; here
it is all set up —
Outings in New York City
Ho for the open country
Dont’t stay shut up in hot rooms
Go to one of the Great Parks
Pelham Bay for example
It’s on Long Island Sound
with bathing, boating
tennis, baseball, golf, etc.
Acres and acres of green grass
wonderful shade trees, rippling brooks
Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch
of the Lexington Ave. (East Side)
Line and you are there in a few
minutes
Interborough Rapid Transit Co.
XXVI
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —
all to no end save beauty
the eternal —
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied —
It is alive, venemous
it smiles grimly
its words cut —
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —
The Jew gets
it straight — it
is deadly, terrifying —
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly —
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought
The imagination uses the phraseology of science. It attacks, stirs, animates, is radio-active in all that can be touched by action. Words occur in liberation by virtue of its processes.
In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.
But the imagination is wrongly understood when it is supposed to be a removal from reality in the sense of John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard the Second: to imagine possession of that which is lost. It is rightly understood when John of Gaunt’s words are related not to their sense as objects adherent to his son’s welfare or otherwise but as a dance over the body of his condition accurately accompanying it. By this means of the understanding, the play written to be understood as a play, the author and reader are liberated to pirouette with the words which have sprung from the old facts of history, reunited in present passion.
To understand the words as so liberated is to understand poetry. That they move independantly when set free is the mark of their value
Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it — It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but —
As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight
Writing is likened to music. The object would be it seems to make poetry a pure art, like music. Painting too. Writing, as with certain of the modern Russians whose work I have seen, would use unoriented sounds in place of conventional words. The poem then would be completely liberated when there is identity of sound with something — perhaps the emotion.
I do not believe that writing is music. I do not believe writing would gain in quality or force by seeking to attain to the conditions of music.