John Wieners | Ace of Pentacles and Selected Poems

between visions

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Wieners Ace of Pentacles (New York: James F. Carr and Robert A. Wilson, 1964)

John Wieners Selected Poems (New York: Grossman, 1972)

 

From the beginning of his career John Wieners has been a poet who experimented with poetic forms that we have come more recently to describe as Postmodern. As a student at Black Mountain College, Wieners, like other writing students, was inspired by Charles Olson’s influential Projectivist theories. In Wieners’ own poetry, however, Olson’s influence seems negligible. Rather, Wieners turned for moderns to the literary forbearers of Postmodernist poetic writing: Rimbaud, Stein, Apollinaire, Pound, and, to a lesser degree, Williams. In short, we can observe in both Wieners’ poetry and his few theoretical statements that he discovered a personal mode which grew out of a process of trial and error based on conscious imitation. In fact, Wieners’ early poetic attempts are fascinating, not only because they tell us something of the development of his own theory and art, but because they parallel much of the poetic development in the twentieth century which only in the past few decades have we come to see as a poetics which stands at odds and often in opposition to the theories and work of such men as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens, all dominant writers of the first half of that century.

      Wieners’ earliest poetry, for example, especially The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), was written from a perspective akin to Rimbaud’s. In his 1965 “Address to the Watchman of the Night,” Wieners explains that the creative energy behind this early poetry had its genesis in a need

 

                       To explore those dark eternals of the nightworld: the prostitute, the

                       dope addict, thief and pervert. These were the imagined heroes of my

                       world: and the orders of my life. What they stood for, how they lived,

                       what they did in the daytime were the fancies of my imagination. And I

                       had to become one of them until I knew.

 

We perceive from the beginning that Wieners’ desire for a life ordered according to what he recognizes as an inverted world, owes much to Rimbaud’s “raissonné de tous les sens.” In this early poetry Wieners consciously sought out a world that would allow him to explore exactly that which Rimbaud asserts that the voyant must: “Toutes les forms d’amour, de souffrance, de foile.” The Wentley poems present a world of tortured homosexual love and drugged insanity that one cannot help but compare with Une Saison. We can hardly be surprised, therefore, that as recently as his 1972 preface to Selected Poems Wieners advocates a poetry “dependent of question, producing revelatory postures for men, animals and stars,” or, that he asserts that “the poet is one pastor of [a] distribution between two visions,” that he defines one of poetry’s forms as a “transformation by fire.”

     All of these can be traced back to Rimbaud’s theory as expressed in his well-known letter to Demeny of 1871:

 

                       …the poet is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity,

                       even for animals; he will have to have his inventions smelt, felt and

                       and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives

                       form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness.

 

     However, in Wieners’ own poetry this comparison does not appear to be sustained. Whereas Rimbaud’s Saison creates a world so completely disorienting that the reader is forced to drop all previous notions of value, Wieners’ poetry relies for its effect upon the values the reader brings to the poem.

     A poem such as “To H,” for example, depends upon the reader’s traditional expectations.

 

                       I like Sunday evenings after you’re here.

                       I use your perfume to pretend you’re near

                       in the night. My eyes are bright, why

                       can’t I have a man of my own?

 

                       Your wife’s necklace’s around my neck

                       and even though I do shave I pretend

                       I’m a woman for you

                       You make love to me like a man.

 

                       Even though I hear you say why man

                       he doesn’t even have any teeth

                       ……………………………………

                       I make it up to you in other ways.

 

                       I will write this poem.

 

     As critic Marjorie Perloff has noted of this work, “After the opening tum-ti-tum stanza, it comes as something of shock to learn that the person who wants a ‘man of my own’ is himself a man, that his lover is married, that the poet tries to impersonate a woman so as to attract her husband….”  In fact, it is this “shock” effect which gives the poem its power. Through his use of hackneyed rhymes (“here,” “near,” “night,” "bright"), the sing-song rhythms of the first two lines and the lament of the fourth line, Wieners encourages us to expect that the rest of the poem will fulfill the requirements of a popular love song. Even when the “shock” occurs, we are not made to question our own values. Indeed, the poet asks us to remain within our own value systems as voyeurs of sorts, for it is only as somewhat disparaging observers that we can see the humor of the situation, and it is upon that humor which the poignancy of the last line and the poem as a whole relies. As Perloff perceives, “…any such impersonation is doomed to failure…” Thus we find the situation somewhat ludicrous, and as we do we are made to see the inevitable loneliness and sadness of the figure at the center of this work; and it is only through this perception that we come to sympathize.

     “To H,” accordingly, has little of Rimbaud’s transformative power. In Wieners we are not made to participate in a deranged world; we are merely asked to listen to the self-disparaging cries and open our hearts to the figure caught in such a world. Wieners himself has since rejected the “là-bas” of which Rimbaud would have the poet write: “I know now that ‘the dark eternals of the nightworld’ are only deprivations of the self, not further extensions of its being: manifestations of want, denial and betrayal” (in Donald M. Allen and Warren Tallman, eds., The Poetics of the New American Poetry). Such a statement shows us that, as Gilbert Sorrentino recently suggested, Wieners is at heart much closer to Baudelaire than to Rimbaud. Nevertheless, Rimbaud’s influence should not be underestimated, particularly since Wieners’ mature work owes much to Rimbaud’s ability to transform objects and landscapes into an almost surrealistic world infused by process.

       The most fascinating aspect of Wieners’ poetry, I would suggest, is not the question of whether or not he has been directly influenced by Rimbaud, but the fact that in this early period he was drawn to such poets and was in his personal life and theory influenced by their work while simultaneously embracing modernist values when it came to his own writing.

       This is particularly apparent in Wieners’ “imitations” of other poets. In “The Windows,” the poet has taken Apollinaire’s “Les Fenêtres” and seemingly translated the French, concretizing the images and a few of the lines (for example, “Abatis de pihis” appears in Wieners as “A bat is pinned to a tree.”), changing some colors, adding an occasional negative (“Nous l’enverrons en message téléphonique” becomes in Wieners “We cannot take calls by telephone), and altering some personal pronouns, adjectives, etc. On the surface, it is exactly the kind of poem that literary historians love to point to as an “apprentice piece,” a work written in the formative years in imitation of a previous “master.” This can be said as well of Wieners’ “The Magic of This Summer June 23, 1963,” wherein a stanza such as

 

                   The sense of continuity entirely destroyed by many

             new senses, continually destroyed by many new

             shapes o continually destroyed, o many new sphere,

             many life entirely destroyed, continued by

             many spheres, entirely lost, o continually destroyed

             many lost by more o continually new generation,

 

with its shifting repetitions, reads like a parody of Gertrude Stein. In poems such as “Times Square” or “A Dawn Cocktail,” we see obvious imitations of Pound’s Imagism, modeled after “In a Station of the Metro.” In each of these cases we can see Wieners’ experimentation with a poetry moving towards and defining something akin to what we now call Postmodernism.

      Wieners’ poetry, accordingly, would seem to be exemplary of the contemporary poetics. In a poem such as “A Poem for Cocksuckers” we can see nearly all the elements by which critics such as Charles Altieri have defined Postmodernism: preference of “the direct, the personal, the local, the anti-formal, and the topical." These are particularly explicit in the poem’s first stanza:

 

                      Well we can go

                      in the queer bars w/

                      our long hair reaching

                      down to the ground and

                      we may sing our songs

                      of love like the black mamma

                      on the juke box, after all

                      what have we got left.

 

     The narrative “we” directly presents us with a specific scene, a gay bar, and that specificity is established by a language which is at once colloquial and topical. Words such as “queer bars,” “black mamma,” “juke box,” and, in the next stanza, “fairies” and “nigger’s world,” and the informality of tone call up this scene. However, the specificity is of a type, not a particular. Indeed, we are given few visual images. Just as in “To H,” “A Poem for Cocksuckers” is a poem that calls for reader participation. We have been warned by the title itself that this poem is a poem “for cocksuckers.” Wieners presumes, obviously, that any reader is thereby included in the type. Indeed, the gay scene which we are now part of is established by stereotypes, by words charged with negative societal values, values which some of the readers, in fact, might bring to the poem. The few visual images with which we are presented only reinforce these stereotypes. “Our long hair reaching to the ground” is, quite obviously, a topical reference to the late 1950s and '60s when societal reaction to long hair was most vocal. Images such as “On our right the fairies / giggle in their lacquered voices & blow / smoke in your eyes….” Phrases such “It is all here between / powdered legs & / painted eyes of the fairy / friends….”  are also emotionally charged in a way that  necessarily brings up negative connotations. As part of this world, therefore, we are also stereotyped: we are “cocksuckers.” While we have been brought into this place, moreover, we are simultaneously alienated from it. We are made to see it truly as a “nigger’s world,” a world which is brought to detest itself.

     Yet that is not at all the feeling we get from the rest of the poem. The second stanza tells us of the “gifts” that “do not desert us, / fountains do not dry / up there are rivers running / mountains / swelling for spring to cascade.” The poem has suddenly shifted to a more lyrical tone which draws us away from the specific scene and makes us think in a symbolic context that is very unlike the beginning. Here “gifts” represent both “our” mental abilities to transform this negative experience into something creative and suggests “our” sexual organs which await release. Even when we are brought back into the specific gay bay world with the lines, "friends who do not fail us / in our hour of despair,” the symbolic associations remain. Although , we are specifically pointed out the phalluses of “our” "fairy friends,” it remains purposely unclear whether it is the sex itself that saves us from despair  or whether it is the experience imaginatively recalled that gives us value—or both. But almost before we can ask this question, we are left alone as suddenly the poet enters the poem in the first person, and lyrically calls upon us to “…Take not / away from me the small fires / I burn in memory of love.”

     The effect of this sudden emotional command is that the “I” which we have felt has been guiding us all along removes himself from the specific scene and leaves us there, almost as a jilted date. Wieners turns on us and calls upon us both as outsiders who would deny him his love through our stereotyped vision of him, and, now, as insiders who would take his “lover” away, imploring us like the “black mamma” of the juke box to let him live his life with the small pleasure he has left intact. This is a brilliant maneuver, but as a tactic it is far more Modernist than Postmodernist. This last outburst leaves the reader behind, while the poet, again in metaphorical language, states his meaning. The reader has been somewhat “manipulated” into participating; he has been “used” to say something rather than asked to share in the poem-making process. The direct presentation, we must feel, has only been a sort of decoy to involve the reader in what is actually a tightly controlled construct.

     Altieri has asserted that the philosophical foundation of Postmodernism is the belief that value and meaning are immanent in nature, “that God…manifests himself as energy, as the intense expression of immanent power.” For the Postmodern “…value is not mediated but stems from a direct engagement with the universal forces of being manifest in the particular….” This idea is close to what Pound expressed in his Imagist and Vorticist theories, and what Williams was later to summarize in Patterson as “no ideas but in things.” Having been brought up with these theories, Wieners, as we have seen, seemingly supports them. Ostensibly, it is the process of poem-making, not the finished product, with which Wieners is most concerned. “A poem does not have to be a major thing,” Wieners wrote in Donald M. Allen’s 1960 New American Poetry anthology. “Poetry even tho it does deal with language is not a more holy act / than, say, shitting.” Two lines later, however, comes a question which, I suggest, is at the heart of the contradictions we have thus far observed in Wieners’ work. He begins with the Postmodern assumption that poetry is a “Manifesting of process…,” but he is not sure of what process it is a manifestation: “Is it life? Or action between this and non-action?” He continues, “For to take up arms against the void is attack, and the price of / was / is high.” For a poet and theorist like Pound there would be little question here. Poetry was for Pound a manifesting of the process of life because it was life itself which was in process. But Wieners suspects a void. Wherein then does the immanence lie? From where does the process issue? The Postmodernist necessarily believes in the material reality of the world around him, for it is primarily that reality which gives meaning and/or value. Ideally, the Postmodern poet demonstrates, restates, or clarifies the process that is already active in the world of objects. Wieners seems to be inferring that it is in the poet alone that meaning is imminent, that the process issues not from the world but from the poet. We are getting closer here to a Modernist orientation akin to Wallace Stevens’ in which the poet imposes meaning upon an otherwise dead or meaningless universe.

     This same pattern can be observed in Wieners’ imitations previously described. “The Magic of This Summer,” for example, has all the superficial characteristics of a Stein work. It is, as in most of Stein’s writing, a direct statement wherein what is stated is given a sense of process by the use of present tense, active verbs, and by shifting repetitions. This latter, especially, gives us the sense of a cubistic perspective, for each time an idea is repeated it is slightly altered—either the construction is changed or a word has been added or subtracted—so that it is given a slightly different emphasis. All of this is at work in Wieners’ poem, but, once more, he uses this Postmodern-like technique to present a dialectic between Modernist and Postmodernist issues, to discuss issues of form which eventually contradict the form itself.

     Wieners’ question in this poem is, once again, “Where does meaning or value reside?” The poet begins with a seemingly Postmodern position: “Form to be given / declared at any moment by what lies outside of us, and within us”; “the form declares / shape, given, of any, this moment, everything / declares itself in the moment, hidden in the declaration / of life, this moment, remains entirely given.” Suddenly, however, he remembers an event from the past, and he realizes that “this means, you are to be given, at any moment, / the fragments of past life.” “It seems,” therefore, “there is nothing, entirely given over the any moment,” because the moment can return. This is indeed a troubling concept, for if “The hand of the maker carves everything to be,” then, “For its own being, will come our shape. Form declares / itself. / In the given moment / In every living being.” This means that there is nothing more to be declared “at any given moment.” In being, everything “is given over to the moment.” “…Life is not over,” but “There is not more to be given.” If this is true, Wieners perceives, he must surrender his constructs of value to being; he must give up his “castle in the sand, on the beach, o the castles surrendered, / in my air.” But how can it be that everything is given when “still my life, by back life given many more days?”

     The rest of the poem, accordingly, is a struggle to find continuity between the past and being, between value immanent in nature-in-process and values that we impose on nature or are given to us from the past. By the end of the poem, Wieners has been able to unite them in the “continual reality; expressed in the afternoon window,” and the heat, trees, and sun. Although he has returned to nature here, to the idea of immanence in the object, we realize that in remembering he has brought a “new consciousness” to bear upon the object that certainly contradicts Stein’s admonition against remembering, and brings into question the whole Postmodernist stance. If value is given us from the past, then how can we be free to see without preconceived notions that value is imminent in the object? It is clear that, at least for Wieners, this issue is unresolved. Here, as we saw previously in his experiments with Rimbaud, Wieners is unprepared to deny all previous values. As we have noted of all these poems discussed so far, Wieners brings to the writing his own values based upon previous encounters with nature. The poem itself is a construct of the previous process; it is not a document of his engagement with that process itself. 

     In Wieners’ Apollinaire imitation we can see further traces of Modernist or Symbolist tendencies. Apollinaire and his friends, who reportedly sat at the Paris café calling out lines to each other which would become “Les Fenêtres,” were certainly not attempting to create a poem in which one was encouraged to make connections. In fact, if anything, the connections were totally cut, which is what makes this experiment in poetics so fascinating. As Wieners notes in the short introductory paragraph to his imitation, “each line of his poem” is a poem “entire to itself, a sound and end in itself, without periods.” But then, Wieners adds two sentences that lead the reader to attempt to do just what the original was discouraging him from doing. Wieners writes: “There are no connections. Yet, look how each of us is hooked.” What is implicit in this statement is that Wieners is “hooked,” that it is the poet who has a tendency to make connection, bringing meaning out of discovery and imposing form upon formlessness. In fact, Wieners changes the text to encourage tenuous connections. For example, what in the original appear as completely unrelated phrases,

 

              Beauté pâleur insondables violets

              Nous tenterons en vain de prendre du repos

 

reads in Wieners, 

 

               Beauté paler than manila violets

               We transplant in vain what cannot blossom.

 

We logically associate these two lines in the Wieners version because of the image of flowers in the first line and the words “transplant” and “blossom” in the second. Similarly, the French original

 

               Et l’oie oua-oua trompette au nord

               Où les chasseurs de ratons

               Raclent les pelleteries

               Entincelant diamante

 

appears in Wieners as,

 

                While reeds whine through trumpets up north

                Where strippers offstage

                Sell their skin cheap as ice

                Tinkling like diamonds.

 

Again, the desire to make connections in the Wieners version is natural. The idea of strippers up north selling their skin as cheaply as ice tinkling like diamond is quite plausible, and is a rather arresting image. However, in the original, except between “Où les chasseurs de rations” and “Raclent les pelleteries,” we would have no reason to make such connections. This is a type of process, but once more these are connections that have already been established in logical discourse. They do not force us in any way to arrive at a new set of associations as a Cubist work might. Even if the original “Les Fenêtres” were not an experiment in dissociation, and instead a Cubist-like collage, Wieners’ version is, accordingly, a completely different kind of work. It is a poem that has as its philosophical foundation the idea that the world is a void upon which man imposes meaning, to which man gives form, an idea antithetical to the Postmodern perspective that underlies much of Wieners’ work.

     In other words, we can say that Wieners is an author who is not really comfortable with some of the values we have come to associate with Postmodernism. For Wieners, in short, nature is not immanent, but is a void or at least a chaos from which man with his imaginative powers must call up meaning. Yet, it would be hard to describe Wieners as a Modernist, for in the vast majority of his poems Wieners uses techniques—direct presentation of the personal, reader participation, etc.—by which critics have come to define Postmodernism. Thus we are faced with a quandary of sorts. In Wieners we have come up against, who uses contemporary techniques that create a tension between the immanence of the thing being presented and the values which the poet and/or reader puts upon the thing. While this may appear to be quandary only from the perspective of our Postmodern lens, it is actually a quandary of which Wieners himself is aware, and an important tension at work in a great many more experimental poets’ works. If believing in the Pound-Williams notion of the immanence of nature requires of the poet that he constantly seek for ways of seeing anew, of “making it new,” that effort simultaneously denies the poet his past. In this post-Bergsonian world of durée the poet is asked to continually surrender his values as soon as he has perceived something. If he stops to reflect, if he remembers, his poetry is deadened, becoming a remnant of some previous process. This, in turn, produces a moral dilemma for the contemporary writer, for he understandably desires to assert value, especially when faced with a phenomenon like the Viet Nam War. Since the Postmodernist is already concerned with process it is, accordingly, tempting to convert the energies of discovering the essence of process in nature to the promotion of process or change through a propagandistic or didactic art. From Pound’s “Usury” Canto to Denise Levertov’s Staying Alive we have seen the precursors of Postmodernism and Postmodern poets themselves turn to a preconceived value-oriented poetry.

     In a recent interview, Robert Van Hallberg brought up just this issue:

 

                   …You seem to have a firm sense of the poem’s commitment to

                   a moment in history. Do you feel that at a particular moment in

                   history, specifically in the last few years, the pressure of political

                   tensions may push the poet, even a lyric poet, toward a more public

                   and rhetorical poetry?

 

    Wieners’ answer follows from his poetry:

 

                   Yes, I do…. Yes. Lyricism is still a quality of a political career.

                   …Until the right moment, I created from past-inhabited experiences,

                   or vice-versa. These topics arise only upon consideration.

 

What Wieners is suggesting here, it seems to me, is that the subject for the contemporary poet does arise at least as much if not more from his past values and the values he has come to in that past as it does from the present. We can surmise that for a poet like Wieners it was from the beginning impossible, caught as he was in the nightworld, to reject past values. Indeed, his desire to know the nightworld was grounded in his awareness of his own past and the societal values which he had known from childhood. Once he had become part of that nightworld, moreover, he must have discovered himself more than ever comparing it with those values. Survival came to depend more and more upon his imaginative powers to convert his suffering into statements of faith. Wieners came to depend upon what he has described as “…other realities / besides those existing before / your eyes.” Despite his playing down of the importance of poetry, it is totally consistent with his work that Wieners should see the poet as “a pastor,” or as a priest of sorts.

     This same tension was potential in Rimbaud’s poems as well. His dérèglement was utterly dependent upon his knowledge of traditional systems of cognition, for only with that knowledge could he give his reader anything “deranged,” could he make nature through language alive in a new way. Eventually, once he had perfected it, Rimbaud would have been forced also to tear down his own system and start all over again. But, of course, he stopped writing before his poetry had become artifact.

     Wieners’ solution, then, is to make use of this tension, for when he writes with it in mind, he is saved from flat didacticism. “Long Nook,” for example, is a poem that could not have been written without the experimentation of Rimbaud and Pound, yet we can immediately see that it is a poem that neither of them would have written. It would not have been “deranged” enough for Rimbaud, and it would have been too controlled, too much of an artifact for Pound’s taste. Yet what an exciting poem it is! As Gilbert Sorrentino has written of it, “There is not a line…not charged with risk.”

 

                 There she took her lover to sea

                 and laid herself in the sand.

                 ………………………………

 

                 He is fast, was down the dune

                 with silk around his waist.

                 Her scarf was small.

 

                 She opened her clothes to the moon.

                 Her underarms were shaved.

                 The wind was a wall between them.

                 Waves break over the tide,

                 hands tied to her side with silk,

                 their mind was lost in the night.

 

                 The green light at Provincetown

                 became an emerald on the beach

                 and like stars fell on Alabama.

 

     The poem begins with a direct narrative statement in the past tense, with the vague “There” hinting at a world beyond time, like the “faraway country” of children’s tales. We are immediately made, however, to question these expectations. The construction of “to sea,” because there is no article, makes us think of the infinitive “to see,” which changes the whole tone of the line and urges us to move to the second line to find out what it is that she wants him to see. But we are not told; we are simply described the process of her lying down in the sand. The word “laid” is wrong here, however, and the object of the verb, “herself,” makes no sense. Even as a sexual pun it is, at first thought, ludicrous. Yet, when we think back to the first line, we recall that it was she who “took” to her “to sea,” and thus, we see the connotations of the pun. As the seducer, she encourages her lover to have sexual intercourse by seductively lying down in the sand, a seduction which is reflected by Wieners’ use here of l and s sounds (lover, laid; she, sea, herself, sand). But in that seduction she is also taking on the male role (as we shall see there are reasons for the stereotyping of roles) and, thus, in the sexual slang sense, is “laying herself.”

     Suddenly, in the next line, there is a shift. A command is whispered in the present tense, ostensibly her command: “Go up and undress in the dark.” In its short, clipped iamb with a labial ending followed by two anapests, we are told more about the upward movement of the male than about her. This movement is rhythmically stirring compared to the slower pace of the first two lines, and in the next line, a mirror image of the previous line (an anapest followed by two iambs which gives the sense of downward movement), words like “fast” and “down the dune” give the male’s movements a vital energy. This sense of vitality is reinforced by the use of the present tense. The shift in tense in the first line of the second stanza does two things: first, it begins what I shall call a whistling sensuality of the second line, a sensuality suggested by the short s sounds (was, silk, his, waist) and by the associations we have with the texture of silk; second, this shift in tense creates a balancing effect in which we are given a sense of the male’s wholeness and surety. The correspondence of the last line of the first stanza and the use of the word “around” in the following line with the two iambs on either side of it (“with silk,” “his waist”) all contribute to this sense of balance. With all this detailed attention to the male, moreover, we are asked to take a special interest in his movements. When in the next line we are presented with a direct statement that draws attention to his genitals which are evidently not completely covered by the scarf tied around his waist, accordingly, we become voyeurs in the same way in which the woman is in her waiting position. We come to perceive at least one meaning, thus, of what it was she wanted “to see.”

     “Her scarf was small” subtly suggests that the male is aroused and ready for sex. And by the next line we see, once again, the female’s readiness as she “opens” her clothes to the moon. The next line, “Her underarms were shaved,” repeats this whole idea of preparedness, and there is something slightly sinister in that fact. Compared with the male’s natural vitality and energy these is something almost unnatural in her presentation of herself to the moon, creating an almost surrealist quality here that inexplicably makes us feel that we are observing something connected with ritual, as if she were worshipping the moon. I do not believe that Wieners would have us ignore, moreover, all the more traditional associations that this image calls up. Facing the moon this way, she comes to be connected with it as an archetypal female symbol and as a traditional symbol for the imagination and mutability.

     The next line contributes to this sinister mood. The description of the wind as a wall between them, obviously, is one way of saying that they are embracing each other. But the fact that the wind is suddenly brought in here, and that it metaphorically becomes a “wall,” in addition to the fact that the w sounds (wind, was, wall) recreate the whining sound of the wind, suggest that nature itself is somehow being affected by this coming together of the couple. It is almost as if before the final moment of sexual intercourse, the wind is holding them apart.*

     In the next stanza this idea is repeated. The “waves breaking against the tide” metaphorically represent the orgasm, but again we recognize that there is something violent, disintegrating about this, especially when Wieners uses “tied” homonymically in the next line, and then rhymes it in the same line with “side.” At first, it is not clear whether her hands are tied to her side, but with the connection of “tide” to “tied” we are logically, if a little roundaboutly, led to thank that his hands are those which are tied. For “tide” cannot help but be connected with the moon, and therefore, with the female. We have a parallel construction, then, reinforced by the rhyming of “tied” and “side.” This is less complex than it sounds; it is simply the parallel relationship of male to female, and female to male, but it is important in how it affects the poem, subtly restating her dominance. He is tied to her.

     It soon no longer matters, however, for in the sex act they have now “lost their minds in the night.” Their individuality no longer exists, as they abandon their cognitive faculties. In  love, they have transcended the world in the Romantic sense, have become one with the world. But in so doing they have lost the natural vitality of being in nature that we saw previously in the male. Archetypally we have just witnessed the seduction by an Eve of an Adam. Just as suddenly it becomes quite clear what Wieners has meant by the female’s desire to take her lover “to see.” She has determined to show him a world beyond the everyday material reality.

      In the last stanza we also are made “to see” this transcendent vision. But we see it both in its dangers and ridiculousness. The green light is also Gatsby’s green light in The Great Gatsby and, accordingly, represents the absurdity and dangers of the American dream; in Wieners’ poem that light is transformed into the ridiculous “emerald on the beach,” and, as if that were not absurd enough, the emerald surrealistically falls like stars on Alabama, this last phrase calling up the Brecht-Weill song “Moon over Alabama,” which makes the sex act we have just witnessed slightly tawdry, corny, and sentimental—all of which connects to the pornographic title of the poem itself. In the end we are made to see the silliness and destructiveness of associations. Like the female whose conscious preparedness is witnessed most clearly as she undresses to the moon, we would worship the associations more than the object itself and end up with the tawdry and sentimental instead of the vital being we observed in the man’s race down the dune.

     We cannot come to understand this poem, however, without traditional symbolist values. Wieners may assert the Postmodern approach to poetry, but he requires that we know and use more traditional constructs. And while it is clear that these last lines present a vision which is quite ludicrous, they simultaneously present a fascinating and disorienting transformation the likes of which we have seen in Rimbaud.

     Writing poetry for Wieners means combining both the seductive and imaginative awareness of the female in “Long Nook” and the vital energy in process of the male. And it is between the distribution of these two visions that Wieners sees himself as “pastor” (Selected Poems, p. 5).

 

____

*The original version of “Long Nook” (published in Floating Bear, no. 10 [1961]) makes this even more clear by setting off the line and putting it in quotations: “The wind was a wall between them.”

 

College Park, Maryland, December 1975 | Reprinted from Sun & Moon: A Quarterly of Literature & Art (No. 2, Spring 1976). 

Howard Pollack | The Ballad of John Latouche: An American Lyricist’s Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

slipping again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard Pollack The Ballad of John Latouche: An American Lyricist’s Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

 

Pollack’s wonderful new biography of lyricist/poet John Latouche is, at times, frustratingly academic in its often-overbearing detail of somewhat insignificant facts and is not the most gloriously written book one has read—but it is so utterly fascinating and revealing that one can forgive most of its flaws.

      First of all, a man who was fairly close friends with most of the major composers of the day, including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Vernon Duke, Virgil Thompson, Marc Blitzstein, Duke Ellington, Jerome Moross, Ned Rorem, Harold Arlen, Douglas Moore, John Cage, and so many more; who was a confidante to writers spanning from James Branch Cabell and Tennessee Williams (he introduced the playwright to his to his longtime companion) to Gore Vidal, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Frank O’Hara, Jane and Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden—he even briefly shared the famous Brooklyn house where the Bowles’ and Auden lived—William S. Burroughs, John Ashbery, and E. E. Cummings, artists and gallerists such as Larry Rivers and John Bernard Myers, and who was the companion of poet Kenward Elmslie for the last five years of his life; and who  simultaneously was great friends with numerous New York social figures—all of whom, except for a very few, thought him witty, entertaining, and utterly fascinating, even if— they nearly all agreed—he could be completely demanding and self-centric, is simply someone worth documenting.

     Besides all that, Latouche worked with numerous Europeans, helping or attempting to introduce American audiences to figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Bertolt Brecht, and numerous lesser figures. You might describe him as simply a seminal figure in the brilliant 1950s artistic, very gay New York world. And Pollack’s significant biography reveals aspects of US cultural history, bringing to the forefront what might otherwise have simply been forgotten. If nothing else, Latouche was a connecting link in the American cultural scene between European traditions, a new attempt to interconnect dance, music, and theater, and the so-called underground gay cabaret New York work that infused new life in the US theater scene throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.        

                                                                                                                                                                

     More importantly, however, is the fact that the Richmond, Virginia-born writer also contributed significant lyrics to numerous musicals, operas, and other performative pieces, challenging the notions of Broadway musicals and operatic conventions in a way that was quite often frustrating yet totally liberating to his collaborators. Besides his remarkable literary salons, his lyrical compositions for the underground New York cabaret performers, and his tossed-off poetic contributions, Latouche had a rather remarkable theatrical career, including the lyrics for Vernon Duke’s and Lyn Root’s all-black musical (and later film, directed by Vincente Minelli) Cabin in the Sky (with Ethel Waters, Todd Duncan, Rex Ingram, J. Rosamond Johnson, Katherine Dunham and her dancers); Banjo Eyes, also composed by Vernon Duke, as a vehicle for Eddie Cantor;  The Lady Comes Across, music again by Vernon Duke, with book by Dawn Powell, choreography by George Balanchine, with Misha Auer, Gower Champion, and Eugenia Delarova, among many other notable dancers; a musical celebrating the Polish war efforts, Polonaise, with music by Chopin and directed by Stella Adler; Beggar’s Holiday, yet another version of The Beggar’s Opera, this with music by Duke Ellington, with an interracial cast; the well-received Ballet Ballads, with music by Jerome Moross and choreography by Hanya Holm, including 3 of the 4 verbally composed ballets by Latouche: Willie the Weeper, Riding Hood Revisted, and the notable The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett, all of which the singers both danced and sang; the award-winning The Golden Apple (again with music by Jerome Moross, and starring Kaye Ballard and Stephen Douglas, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best Musical of 1954); The Vamp (with James Mundy and starring Carol Channing); the successful American opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe, composed by Douglas Moore; as, finally, the lyrics to, at least the first act, for Leonard Bernstein’s and Lillian Hellman’s musical Candide—all before he died in 1956 at the young age of 42! These contributions all from a man who himself thought he was perhaps “lazy” and “desultory,” and who was, in fact, an extreme alcoholic, and who most friends would have described as a person who really was more of a raconteur than a creator. Most of these works, accept The Ballad of Baby Doe, alas were also Broadway failures, why most Americans have never even heard of his name!  How do you begin explaining such a remarkable life? Pollack had clearly a large task in undertaking this biography.

       Perhaps the only thing you can do is return to the lyrics, which my friend Kenward Elmslie asked me to do time again. I wish I’d known of Elmslie’s relationship with Latouche—with my love of all things theater, I did, in fact, know a little (very little I now perceive) of Latouche—and, of course, I wish I had then read more about the lyricist: I’d have immediately done a book! We can never truly forgive ourselves for youthful ignorance.

       But I will take a few of the lyrics to try to redeem myself. Latouche, as Pollack makes quite clear, often with excellent poetic analysis, was truly a brilliant lyricist. Let’s begin with his early lyric from Cabin in the Sky, a song sung by the always remarkable singer/actor Ethel Waters (a song performed by nearly every major singer including Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and numerous others), and which might almost characterize Latouche’s life, who fell in love again and again—a true romantic of the old Southern tradition:

 

Here I go again

I hear those trumpets blow again

All aglow again

Taking a chance on love

Here I slide again

About to take that ride again

Starry eyed again

Taking a chance on love

I thought that cards were a frame-up

I never would try

But Now I'm taking the game up

And the ace of hearts is high

Things are mending now

I see a rainbow blending now

We'll have a happy ending now

Taking a chance on love

 

Here I slip again

About to take that tip again

Got my grip again

Taking a chance on love

Now I prove again

That I can make life move again

In the grove again

Taking a chance on love

I walk around with a horseshoe

In clover I lie

And brother rabbit of course you

Better kiss your foot good-bye

On the ball again

I'm riding for a fall again

I'm gonna give my all again

Taking a chance on love

 

     This combination of Cole Porter and the great American romantic tradition is so remarkable that I think I hardly need delineate the line by line transitions. But it is important to note, that despite the repeat again and again of precisely that word, Latouche uses inner rhyme such as, in the first stanza, “blow”/”aglow”/ “slide”/ “ride”/ “eyed”/ “tired”/ “mending” / “blending,” etc. But it is his metaphors about luck and change that truly stand out in his clever lyrics—the horseshoe, clover, and the rabbit who she even warns ahead of time—that demonstrates her leap into the impossible world of love that is so totally engaging that we share her leap into that new world with joy and pleasure. As many critics have noted, Latouche is a kind of later-day Lorenz Hart, and not just because both were gay, but because of how they used basically gay situations to express heterosexual relationships. One only need compare Latouche’s highly clever lyrics with Hart’s beautiful ballad, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” to recognize their similarities.

 

Seen a lot

I mean I lot

But now I'm like sweet seventeen a lot

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I

 

I'll sing to him

Each spring to him

And worship the trousers that cling to him

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I

 

     It’s clear just from the lyrics that the poet took chances far too often but did finally find love. And it’s painful to comprehend the difficult transition, just as it is for even the breezy renditions sung by Waters and Fitzgerald. But for me, Judy Garland’s and Barbara Streisand’s slower versions really capture the nature of Latouche’s happy/rather frightening possibilities of new love. Isn’t that what love is all about, wonderfully possible but terribly frightening in the same very moment, which is what his lyrics truly express?

     Or, consider his wonderful song “Lazy Afternoon” from The Golden Apple, where, basically that young Helen seduces Paris:

 

It's a lazy afternoon

And the beetle bugs are zooming

And the tulip trees are blooming

And there's not another human in view,

But us two

It's a lazy afternoon

And the farmer leaves his reaping

In the meadow cows are sleeping

And the speckled trout stop leaping up stream

As we dream

A fat pink cloud hangs over the hill

Unfolding like a rose

If you hold my hand and sit real still,

You can hear the grass as it grows

It's a hazy afternoon

And I know a place that's quiet, except for daisies running riot

And there's no one passing by it to see

Come spend this lazy afternoon with me

This is basically Jerome Moross’ song, with its it curling in melody, undulating into completely sleepy rhythms that simultaneously seduce the figures into a sexual drowsiness; but it’s Latouche’s wonderful lyrics that reconfirm that, with the “zooming” / “blooming” end rhymes surprising us with how the “view” suddenly zooms in the “us two,” seducing the couple to sit “real still” to hear the grass grow and the “daisies running riot.” The “reaping”/ “sleeping”/ is suddenly cut by the “leaping” by the interruption of “up stream,” a place distant from this “hazy afternoon.” And even the daisies’ “riot,” is cut short by the fact that “no one passing by it to see.” The central focus of this lovely, falling melody is, finally, the “me,” Helen who is singing it. Song lyrics don’t usually have such marvelous subtlety. But Latouche always gave them his whole, which makes a basically end-rhyme lyric something more important that what it first seems.

      Even more profound, in many respects are Latoche’s lyrics, highly romantic again, and even suggesting fellow Virginian Edgar Allen Poe, for The Ballad of Baby Doe, these from the opening stanzas of the Moore operatic work “The Willow Song.”

 

Ah!

Willow, where we met together

Willow, when our love was new

Willow, if he once

should be returning

Pray tell him I am weeping too.

 

So far from each other

While the days pass

In their emptiness away.

Oh my love, must it be forever

Never once again

To meet as on that day?

And never rediscover

The way of telling

The way of knowing

All our hearts would say.

 

Gone are the ways of pleasure

Gone are the friends I had of yore

Only the recollection fatal

Of the word that was spoken:

Nevermore.

 

     Here Latouche delays the rhymes, “day” / “say,” “yore” / “nevermore,” while even holding other end rhymes into other stanzas such as “together” / “forever” / “Never” and postponing the other off-rhyme “pleasure.” Everything in this lyric is delayed, attenuated as the couple’s love has been, pushed into a realm that neither of them can any longer comprehend. Rhyme itself is used as a strange device of delay, “away” / “day” / “say.” As Moore’s music arches into high soprano arias, Latouche’s language keeps her weeping down to earth, delayed, and, just perhaps, a bit too knowing and rehearsed, subtly suggesting that the loving Baby Doe is just a bit more knowledgeable about her power over the wealthy Horace than we might suspect. Yet, she remains a kind of innocent here, trying to “rediscover” what “All our hearts would say.” In short, Latouche makes this aria one in which Baby Doe is both wise and innocent, a woman on the make who is, nonetheless very much in love. That balance in a single two stanzas is what I might describe as pure genius.

     I have to admit, finally, by the time I finished Howard Pollack’s long (565 pages, with notes) volume, I had too fallen in love with John Latouche. Wish I’d known him, and I also wish my friend Kenward had told me more about him. But even friends don’t always truly communicate their deepest feelings, do they?

 

Los Angeles, February 17, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2018).

Rodrigo de Souza Leäo | Todos os cachorros ão azuis (All Dogs Are Blue)

rimbaud wants to marry me

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rodrigo de Souza Leäo All Dogs Are Blue, translated by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler from Todos os cachorros são azuis) (High Wycombe, Bucks, United Kingdom: And Other Stories, 2013)

 

Let me just begin this review by stating the obvious: Brazilian writer Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs Are Blue is like no other book in the world. That is not to say it is entirely original; one of its charms is its many literary and social references, including the author’s own re-summarization of the commonplaces (if you can describe any such experience has having something in common with anything or anyone else) of living in a lunatic asylum. Although the author may not have read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or seen the Hollywood social-shocker, Anatole Litvak’s 1948 film The Snake Pit, these works, at moments, have a kinship with Souza Leão’s exuberant depiction of his life in hell.

 

    But then again, this young author, who died, at the age of 43, just as this book was published, may have known both of those works. For a man who spent so many years locked away in an asylum, his mind and body interminably altered by drugs, Souza Leão relies on a huge body of international film, Brazilian, South American and European poetry, music, television, and popular events that might put many authors free from any of these strictures to shame. Indeed, two major poets of the 19th century, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, regularly visit him in his cage in the little room to which he has been consigned in the favela-adjacent institution along with not only numerous other mad men and women, but criminals, and the elderly who have nowhere else to go. Although there are evidently beautiful plants and trees surrounding his building, all day long his fellow prisoners cry out, bang their heads against the wall, and listen to loud television, while at night the endless music and screams of the slums washes over his troubled dreams.

 

                 Night came and along with it came the worst thing of all: the soundtrack.

                 Our asylum was next to a favela. Rio funk played all night long and all

                 day too. Go Lacraia, go Lacraia, go Lacraia! Go Serginho, go Serginho.

                 Sleeping with the rubbish playing…blaring!

 

    Our hero’s entire world turns different colors depending upon which drug has just been injected into his veins: Benzetacil, Haldol (blue, like the color of his stuffed dog at home), and numerous other concoctions that force the patients to hallucinate and vegetate through what they have left of their lives. Part of the problem, lucidly argues the author, is that clinics mix up their types of patients, trying to medicate them as if they were all suffering from the same problems.

      It’s little wonder that in such an interruptive world, Souza Leão has created a work that is not only raw in its vocabulary, filled with descriptions of and events that refer to bodily functions—spit, vomit, urine, shit, etc.—but linguistically lurches from association to association, radically moving from passages of description, to narrative events past and present, moving from the external to the internal in mid-sentence. “Real” visits from his mother and father are confused with his magical camaraderie with Rimbaud and his more casual friendship with Baudelaire. A discussion of electroshock therapy quickly grows into a serious consideration of why women are not allowed to cohabit with men, which, in turn, brings up the subject of sex, which the narrator associates with his own loneliness and his ultimate sense of nothingness. The lunatics’ performances on a karaoke machine are quickly interrupted by the appearance of B agents, searching for the killer of the clinic’s former locked-away criminal, Fearsome Madman, who previously killed many people but was afraid of the narrator because he sounded like his father. Some associations function through a sort of psychological undercurrent, while others seem to come out of nowhere. Readers who seek for coherent and an authorially controlled narrative, will certainly be frustrated in reading All Dogs Are Blue. Stylists will find the work rough-going, and logicians will quickly abandon it with despair.

      Yet this short fiction, in its subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle repetitions of names, events, slang and cultural experiences, in the end, makes sense in a way that those whom we might describe as sane might never perceive:

 

                  Finally they gave me some glasses. But with the glasses I could

                  only look inside people.      

     

And there are moments when Souza Leäo and his narrator philosophize in a manner that reaches near profundity:

 

                  Violence is so fascinating, and our lives, so normal. I’m talking

                  about a specific kind of violence. Everything can be violent. Even

                  God.  

 

Clearly the narrator of this sometimes maddening work is mad throughout, but he recognizes that in that madness he can at least say what he wants. And in his recognition of his own madness, our hero recognizes his own condition in a way that few us do. He is aware not only that someday he will die, but just how he might die:

 

                  I take Haldol* to be under no illusions that I’ll die mad one day,

                  somewhere dirty, without any food. It’s the way every madman

                  ends.

 

His friend Rimbaud falls in love with him, contacts AIDS, and even asks the narrator to marry him, but Souza Leão and his persona doesn’t lose sight of his own reality, the fact that he, himself, is not gay. And, in the end, both Rimbaud and Baudelaire disappear, only to be replaced by other hallucinations of a vast supportive society of peace-loving Todogs, who, despite the narrator’s imprisonment, grow to include millions of members, altering the reality of the planet. Aren’t all such dreamers described as mad? Even if one’s dream and the whole of one’s past ends up in the rubbish like the narrator’s blue dog, it can always be restored through the imagination, no matter how troubled and sick it has become.

      All Dogs Are Blue is no book for literary purists, but is a great read for anyone who can embrace the human spirit behind any written text.

 

*Haloperidol, used in the treatment of schizophrenia, acute psychosis, mania, delirium and other serious psychological illnesses.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2014

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Fall 2014) [on-line edition]