Paterson (Revised Edition)
Page 17
through the thicket .
One warm day in April, G.B. had the inspiration to go in swimming naked with the boys, among whom, of course, was her brother, a satyr if there ever was one, to beat anybody up who presumed to molest her. It was at Sandy Bottom, near Willow Point where in later years we used to have picnics. That was before she turned whore and got syphilis. L.M. about that time, a young sailor, went to Rio unafraid of “children’s diseases” as the French (and others) called them—but it was no joke as Gauguin found out when his brains began to rot away
. the times today
are safer for the fornicators
the moral’s
as you choose but the brain
need not putrefy
or petrify
for fear of venereal disease
unless you wish it
“Loose your love to flow”
while you are yet young
male and female
(if it is worth it to you)
’n cha cha cha
you’d think the brain
’d be grafted
on a better root
II.
“ . I am no authority on Sappho and do not read her poetry particularly well. She wrote for a clear gentle tinkling voice. She avoided all roughness. ‘The silence that is in the starry sky,’ gives something of her tone, . ”
A.P.
Peer of the gods is that man, who
face to face, sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
laughter.
It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.
Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.
Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow paler
than dry grass and lack little
of dying.
13 Nv Oke Hay my BilBill The Bull Bull, ameer.
Is there anything in Ac Bul 2/ vide enc that seems cloudy to you, or INComprehensible/
or that having comprehended you disagree with?
The hardest thing to discover is WHY someone else, apparently not an ape or a Roosevelt cannot understand something as simple as 2 plus 2 makes four.
McNair Wilson has just writ me, that Soddy got interested and started to study “economics” and found out what they offered him wasn’t economics but banditry
Wars are made to make debt, and the late one started by the ambulating dunghill FDR has been amply successful.
and the stink that elevated
him still emits a smell.
Also the ten vols/treasury reports sent me to Rapallo show that in the years from departure of Wiggin till the mail stopped you suckers had paid ten billion for gold that cd/have been bought for SIX billion.
Is this clear or do you still want DEEtails?
That sovereignty inheres in the POWER to issue money, whether you have the right to do it or not.
don’t let me crowd you.
If there is anything here that is OBskewer , say so.
don’t worry re Beum,
He didnt say you told him to send me the book, merely that he had metChu. let the young educ the young.
Only naive remark I found in Voltaire wuz when he found two good books on econ/ and wrote : “Now people will understand it.” end quote.
But if the buzzards on yr( and Del M’s) list had been CLEAR I wdn’t have spent so much time clarifying their indistinctnesses.
You agree that the offering da shittahd aaabull instead of history is
undesirable ??????
There is a woman in our town
walks rapidly, flat bellied
in worn slacks upon the street
where I saw her.
Neither short
nor tall, nor old nor young
her
face would attract no
adolescent. Grey eyes looked
straight before her.
Her
hair
was gathered simply behind the
ears under a shapeless hat.
Her
hips were narrow, her
legs
thin and straight. She stopped
me in my tracks — until I saw
her
disappear in the crowd.
An inconspicuous decoration
made of sombre cloth, meant
I think to be a flower, was
pinned flat to her
right
breast — any woman might have
done the same to
say she was a woman and warn
us of her mood. Otherwise
she was dressed in male attire,
as much as to say to hell
with you. Her
expression was
serious, her
feet were small.
And she was gone!
. if ever I see you again
as I have sought you
daily without success
I’ll speak to you, alas
too late! ask,
What are you doing on the
streets of Paterson? a
thousand questions:
Are you married? Have you any
children? And, most important,
your NAME! which
of course she may not
give me — though
I cannot conceive it
in such a lonely and
intelligent woman
. have you read anything that I have written?
It is all for you
or the birds .
or Mezz Mezzrow
who wrote .
Knocking around with Rapp and the Rhythm Kings put the finishing touches on me and straightened me out. To be with those guys made me know that any white man, if he thought straight and studied hard, could sing and dance and play with the Negro. You didn’t have to take the finest and most original and honest music in America and mess it up because you were a white man; you could dig the colored man’s real message and get in there with him, like Rapp. I felt good all over after a session with the Rhythm Kings, and I began to miss that tenor sax.
Man, I was gone with it — inspiration’s mammy was with me. And to top it all, I walked down Madison Street one day and what I heard made me think my ears were lying. Bessie Smith was shouting the Downhearted Blues from a record in a music shop. I flew in and bought up every record they had by the mother of the blues — Cemetery Blues, Bleedin’ Hearted, and Midnight Blues — then I ran home and listened to them for hours on the victrola. I was put in a trance by Bessie’s mournful stories and the patterns of true harmony in the piano background, full of little runs that crawled up and down my spine like mice. Every note that woman wailed vibrated on the tight strings of my nervous system; every word she sang answered a question I was asking. You couldn’t drag me away from that victrola, even to eat.
. . or the Satyrs, a
pre-tragic play,
a satyric play!
All plays
were satyric when they were most devout.
Ribald as a Satyr!
Satyrs dance!
all the deformities take wing
Centaurs
leading to the rout of the vocables
in the writings
of Gertrude
Stein — but
you cannot be
an artist
by mere ineptitude
The dream
is in pursuit!
The neat figures of
Paul Klee
fill the canvas
but that
is not the work
of a child .
the cure began, perhaps
with the abstraction
of Arabic art
Dürer
with his Melancholy
was aware
of it—
the shattered masonry. Leonardo
saw it,
the obsession,
and ridiculed it
in La Gioconda.
Bosch’s
congeries of tortured souls and devils
who prey on them
fish
swallowing
their own entrails
Freud
Picasso
Juan Gris.
A letter from a friend
saying:
For the last
three nights
I have slept like a baby
without
liquor or dope of any sort!
we know
that a stasis
from a chrysalis
has stretched its wings .
like a bull
or a Minotaur
or Beethoven
in the scherzo
from the Fifth Symphony
stomped
his heavy feet
I saw love
mounted naked on a horse
on a swan
the tail of a fish
the bloodthirsty conger eel
and laughed
recalling the Jew
in the pit
among his fellows
when the indifferent chap
with the machine gun
was spraying the heap .
he had not yet been hit
but smiled
comforting his companions .
comforting
his companions
Dreams possess me
and the dance
of my thoughts
involving animals
the blameless beasts
(Q. Mr. Williams, can you tell me, simply, what poetry is?
A.Well . . . I would say that poetry is language charged with emotion. It’s words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.
Q.All right, look at this part of a poem by E. E. Cummings, another great American poet:
(im)c-a-t(mo)
b,j;l:e
FallleA
ps.!fl
OattumblI
sh?dr
IftwhirlF
(U1) (1Y)
&&&
Is this poetry?
A.I would reject it as a poem. It may be, to him, a poem. But I would reject it. I can’t understand it. He’s a serious man. So I struggle very hard with it — and I get no meaning at all.
Q.You get no meaning? But here’s part of a poem you yourself have written: “2 partridges/2 mallard ducks/a Dungeness crab/24 hours out/of the Pacific/and 2 live-frozen/trout/from Denmark . . .” Now, that sounds just like a fashionable grocery list!
A.It is a fashionable grocery list.
Q.Well — is it poetry?
A.We poets have to talk in a language which is not English. It is the American idiom. Rhythmically it’s organized as a sample of the American idiom. It has as much originality as jazz. If you say “2 partridges, 2 mallard ducks, a Dungeness crab” — if you treat that rhythmically, ignoring the practical sense it forms a jagged pattern. It is, to my mind, poetry.
Q.But if you don’t “ignore the practical sense” . . . you agree that it is a fashionable grocery list.
A.Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything. I’ve said it time and time again.
Q.Aren’t we supposed to understand it?
A.There is a difference of poetry and the sense. Sometimes modern poets ignore sense completely. That’s what makes some of the difficulty . . . The audience is confused by the shape of the words.
Q.But shouldn’t a word mean something when you see it?
A.In prose, an English word means what it says. In poetry, you’re listening to two things . . . you’re listening to the sense, the common sense of what it says. But it says more. That is the difficulty.
. . . . )
III.
Peter Brueghel, the elder, painted
a Nativity, painted a Baby
new born!
among the words.
Armed men,
savagely armed men
armed with pikes,
halberds and swords
whispering men with averted faces
got to the heart
of the matter
as they talked to the pot bellied
greybeard (center)
the butt of their comments,
looking askance, showing their
amazement at the scene,
features like the more stupid
German soldiers of the late
war
— but the Baby (as from an
illustrated catalogue
in colors) lies naked on his Mother’s
knees
— it is a scene, authentic
enough, to be witnessed frequently
among the poor (I salute
the man Brueghel who painted
what he saw —
many times no doubt
among his own kids but not of course
in this setting
The crowned and mitred heads
of the 3 men, one of them black,
who had come, obviously from afar
(highwaymen?)
by the rich robes
they had on — offered
to propitiate their gods
Their hands were loaded with gifts
— they had eyes for visions
in those days — and saw,
saw with their proper eyes,
these things
to the envy of the vulgar soldiery
He painted
the bustle of the scene,
the unkempt straggling
hair of the old man in the
middle, his sagging lips
—— incredulous
that there was so much fuss
about such a simple thing as a baby
born to an old man
out of a girl and a pretty girl
at that
But the gifts! (works of art,
where could they have picked
them up or more properly
have stolen them?)
— how else to honor
an old man, or a woman?
— the soldiers’ ragged clothes,
mouths open,
their knees and feet
broken from 30 years of
war, hard campaigns, their mouths
watering for the feast which
had been provided
Peter Brueghel the artist saw it
from the two sides: the
imagination must be served —
and he served
dispassionately
It is no mortal sin to be poor — anything but this featureless tribe that has the money now — staring into the atom, completely blind — without grace or pity, as if they were so many shellfish. The artist, Brueghel, saw them . : the suits of his peasants were of better stuff, hand woven, than we can boast.
— we have come in our time to the age of shoddy, the men are shoddy, driven by their bosses, inside and outside the job to be done, at a profit. To whom? But not true of the Portuguese mason, his own boss “in the new country” who is building a wall for me, moved by oldworld knowledge of what is “virtuous” . “that stuff they sell you in the stores now-a-days, no good, break in your hands . that manufactured stuff, from the factory, break in your hands, no care what they turn out”
The Gospel according to St. Matthew, Chapter I, verse 18, — Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Miriam was espoused to Joseph before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
19 Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privately.
20 But while he thought on these things, beho
ld, the angel of the Lord, appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Miriam thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.
Luke . . And Mary kept all these sayings, pondering them in her heart.
. no woman is virtuous
who does not give herself to her lover
— forthwith
Dear Bill:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I am told by a dear friend in Paris, G.D. who is married to Henri Matisse’s daughter, and who is the one vibrant head I have met in Europe, that France today is ruled by the gendarme and the concierge. In socialist Denmark I knew a highly intelligent author, a woman, who had come to America and there had a child by a wretched scribbler. Poor and forsaken she had returned to Copenhagen, where she earned her niggard indigence doing reviews for the Politiken, and giving occasional lectures on Middle English and early Danish. She lived in the slummy part of that beautiful city, trying to support a wonderful boy, sturdy, loving, and very masculine. It was my joy to bring him oranges, chocolate, and those precious morsels which his mother could not afford. She told me that the socialist police had called on her one night, asking why she had not paid her taxes to the government. Poverty was her reply. Do you recall the epitaph on Thomas Churchyard’s tombstone? ‘Poverty and Obscurity doth this tomb enclose.’ A week later they returned, threatening to remove her furniture and have it impounded by the government. When she again pleaded that if she gave what Kroners she had her little boy would starve, the police said: ‘We went to the Vin Handel last evening, and learned from the proprietor that you had bought a bottle of wine; if you can afford to drink wine you certainly can pay your taxes.’ She then said ‘I am so poor, and so driven to despair by it that I had to have a bottle of wine to relieve me of my melancholia.’
I am quite sure too that people only have the kind of government that their bellies crave. Furthermore, I cannot cure one soul in the earth. Plato took three journeys to Dionysius, the Tyrant of Syracuse, and once was almost killed and on another occasion was nearly sold into slavery because he imagined that he influenced a devil to model his tyranny upon The Republic. Seneca was the teacher of Nero, and Aristotle tutored Alexander of Macedon. What did they teach?
We are content here because it is cheap; my wife can eat chateaubriand for seven pesetas, about 15 or 16 cents. Going to the shops in the morning is a ritual; there is the greeting from the woman who runs the Panaderia, and the salutation (courtesy always eases the spirit and relieves the nervous system), from the man or his wife at the lecheria (where you get milk), and an expansive smile from the humble woman who sells you three pesetas worth of helio, ice….
Edward
Paterson has grown older