on the outside looking in: a reconsideration of marsden hartley’s poetry
Marsden Hartley The Collected Poems of Marsden Hartley, ed. by Gail R. Scott (Santa
Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1987)
Although, in his youth he was known as one of the staunchest of the
Greenwich Village bohemians, befriending a wide range of artists from Alfred
Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes (who wrote a couple of articles about Hartley), Hart
Crane, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, he spent
most of his years in his native Maine, far away from city life. At times both
his art and poetry could be radically experimental, but both also display a
great deal of romantic-inspired mysticism and Christian faith.
As a gay male he was wary of social norms, while at the same time being
attracted to militarism and even toying with some aspects of fascism. As a
poet, despite his call for what he described as abandonment of “Swinburnian
encrustations,” at times his writing verges on the verbose narrative stylings
of the fin de siècle writers:
……….
Had gone to watch the pale blue ivy
climb above steel graves
of those who perished for the then
so unrestricted huge idea—
And THERE—the master of the house
was seen—ALONE—
making notes, with whispers on the
side, of all the spoons his far
respected guests with gentleness
had lifted in their moments
of ineffable simplicity, with
jasmine hands to keep swift hounds
from tracking royal bijoux to those
shadows where deep pansies
take another purple for their
thought.
……….
(“This lady rides a languid
dromedary toward her dear-God,” 1923)
The same year, however, Hartley
created one of his most adventurous works, “Diabolo,” wherein the great Mexican
volcanos comically interact with other volcanos of the world:
……..
Madame POPOcataPETL
will
pour tea this aft –
from her own hospitable
fujiyama tooth –
ring around a rosy
on a craters lip –
POPOcataPETL is pouring –
with lava syrup in it –
to sweeten
it –
dynastic tea –
INFORMALLY –
We’ve been lying, climbing, juggling,
throwing the javelin,
bending, twisting,
receding–
GRINNING
moist grin s–
In an African apricot
jungle–
While the white
epidermis of
POPOcataPETL
Melts with livid afternoon fervor
DRIPPING
new driplets for
Cousin
marmo—cousin goril –
Cousin ouran-outan –
……..
In a work such as “From a Paris Window–High (first published in 1931),”
using simple language to speak of the silent scene he is witnessing below,
Hartley sounds a great deal like his friend Williams:
In this city
of the generous,
all are chivalrous.
It is a scene
where all are kind
unless the wind
be unkind
in blowing chivalrous release
over the unsuspecting mind.
It is a country
where the lip reveals
no bitterness
no irrelevant distress
unless
to be so secular
instills a sharp remorse;
it is a place
where no one ever sees
a face,
and yet strange bodies
meet
and speak an alien
sanskrit
in which specific
comprehension
eternally resides,
and no grammatical despairs
are theirs.
Sunday is the day
when motley
sways
their way,
who come to speak a word
that never shall be
heard
unless
it be, that silence
covers all necessity.
Yet throughout his long career as a
poet, Hartley continued to use end, internal, and slant rhyme, to employ some
regular rhythms, and to imbue his writing with aphoristic and even moralistic
intent:
The eagle wants no friends,
employs his thoughts to other
ends–
he has his circles to
inscribe
twelve thousand feet from
where
the fishes comb the sea,
he finds his solace in
unscathed
immensity,
where eagles think, there is
no need
of being lonesome–
In isolation
is a deep revealing sense
of home.
(written 1923-1929)
At other times, as in his City Scenes sequence of poems from
1930-35, he appears to be interested more in a kind of “Ash Can School” verism:
Before the greenish
door she stood,
wild with insidious
motherhood.
Her eyes and breasts
were singularly small,
the rest of her was
monumental.
“I cannot come on
Friday sir – I’m jew,
will Sunday do!”
There was a beastlike
strength in what she said,
the temple in her soul
was hallowed
with an ancient,
patriarchal pride;
……………..
Hartley often argued that his poetry
did not refer to and should generally not be published in conjunction with his
art, but he clearly occasionally based poems on his artworks and created
artworks that came from poetic efforts, as in “Fishermen’s Last Supper” of the
1940s:
For wine, they drank the ocean –
for bread, they ate their own despairs,
counsel from the moon was theirs
for the foolish contention.
Murder is not a pretty thing
yet seas do raucous everything
to make it pretty –
for the foolish or the brave,
a way seas have.
Hartley’s poetry is varied stylistically and functions in so many
different ways that I might almost be tempted to simply describe him as an
occasional poet if one didn’t know how serious he was about his craft. As he
writes in his essay, “The Business of Poetry,” “Poets must, it seems to me,
learn how to use a great many words before they can know how to use a few
skillfully. Journalistic verbiage is not
fluency.” Soon after, he adds: “Poets cannot, as aspiring poets, depend, it
seems to me, ever upon the natural ‘flow’ that exists in themselves. Poets have
to work to do for the precision of simplicity, and for the gift of volume in
simplicity.”
Still, even his more experimental efforts, he seldom achieves those
goals. And yet in several of his later poems, Hartley accomplishes something
close to the “machine of words” for which Williams argued. In “The Very
Languor” of his unpublished “Miscellaneous Late Poems,” a few simple images,
not unlike Williams’ chicken and wheelbarrow, evoke a kind of terror of space
and an oppressive lack of energy:
The very languor of
the morning
showing August is
preparing
for death because
now sleeping.
The crowing of the
bantam–
the red cheek of a
single dahlia
the fluttering of
the wash on the line
against the vastness
of the
horizontal of the
sea –
how terrifying at
times a flat
line can be –
or the crowing of a
bantam
with a red cheek of
a dahlia.
The very languor of
the morning
is also – so.
The last line with its so easy
repetition not only reiterates the horizontality of the poet’s vision but the
temporary lack of imagination he feels in the face of the real world around him
while implying the notion of a “so-so” universe.
In many of Hartley’s poems, indeed, there is a strong sense of
isolation, a being apart and away from other human beings, whether it be simply
an issue of distance and space as in the poem from a high Paris window, or a
more distinct sense of separation from others through religion and social
position as in the window washer’s poem (despite his gentle declarations in
this work, Hartley has often been described as a strong anti-Semite). Hartley,
it is apparent, lost his deepest love, the German soldier Carl von Freyburg,
early in his life when von Freyburg died in World War I; and although it is
clear Hartley had many dear friends to which he dedicated many of his poems, as
a gay man living down east, he must have suffered, at times, great loneliness, as
becomes apparent in his short poem “There Are No Rocks and Trees,” where he
notes, “There are no rocks and trees that take / the place of people / the
people that are rich and round and large / strong with a nation’s agitation /
deep with a lovingness profound –.”
And yet, particularly in his later poems, people seem to have almost
disappeared or, against rugged cliffs and waves, are represented as puny
things. It often seems in Hartley’s meditative works that the poet is always
somewhat outside the action, very much as he describes one of his painter
heroes, Albert Pinkham Ryder:
I am speaking of Albert
Ryder moonlightist
as I knew him –
“I asked him to Christmas
dinner,” the lady
said to me, who had a long
time known him,
“he said he would come, we
waited two hours
for him–the party eager to
see him–he did
not come”
Next time she saw him – “O
we were so
disappointed you did not
come”–
“I was there,” said Ryder,
“I looked through the
window – saw the lovely
lights – it was very beautiful.”
(unpublished)
In fact, one might almost describe Hartley’s poetry as somewhat
voyeuristic, the work of a man who admits “I was an old man / at twenty-two”
(“Surprise Package”), who goes about the countryside peering at the world
about. This is nowhere more apparent than in his Whitman-esque vision of a
father and his two young daughters taking a naked swim in a country “fresh
water pond”:
The man’s back was turned south, and he
was very like a
certain David, wide shouldered, small
waist, round buttocks,
iron legs, all muscle and sinews, and
the worked look of
his skin told him to be in his first
forties
………
Man faced about breast facing south, and
he magnificent,
with smooth dark hair, coming to a point
on a low fore-
head, a firm mouth, the upper lip a
little short, showing
milkwhite teeth, and the eyes a deepest
dark.
His powerful manhood spoke above all
whispers over him,
hands and face bronzed with burning of
the sun, the legs
eggwhite.
He went over to the bushes to undress
and redress,
……..
(published in Selected Poems, 1945)
Both Hartley’s poetry and his paintings, do, after all, actually represent a kind of outsider art. As
skilled and trained as he was in both endeavors, his vision came perhaps from
someone outside looking in, from a personal vision forever separated from the
worlds he was observing, whether it be the excitement of Berlin in the early
20th century, the originality he observed in the designs of Native Americans,
the simple beauty of the small villages of Provençal, the wondrous mountains of
Mexico and, later, the New Mexico vistas, or even the familiarity of the place
where he had originally grown up.
The contradictoriness of his achievements, in fact, may emanate from
this propensity to observe the world around him and try to make it his own.
Unlike so many artists, who, after some years of experiment, develop their
style to repeat it again and again, Hartley seems to have been always on the
lookout for new possibilities, for a way to find his way into the various
societies in which he temporarily lived. Perhaps it was only in the Maine
landscape that he could truly identify himself. But we are richer for the fact
that he explored so many other ways of seeing and speaking.
Los Angeles, December 22, 2015
Reprinted from Hyperallegic Weekend (January 24, 2016).
