Heinrich Böll’s writing at times been referred to as “Trümmerliteratur”, literature of the rubble, as his focus was upon the material and psychological rebuilding of West Germany after World War II. His main characters typically are everyday men and women while the ‘villains’ are those that sit in self-satisfied positions of power, as what can be found in Government or the Roman Catholic Church; people that don’t have to bother much with the life struggles the general population of West Germany had to face and overcome after the war.

In And Never Said A Word, Böll gives his readers a heartbreaking story about a couple with strong love between one another but their marriage deteriorating as result of the physical and social stresses that are connected to poverty. Each chapter alternates the narration between the husband and wife and in doing so, a metaphor is established. In the fourth chapter, the reader learns that the title of the book is in reference to a black spiritual and makes a connection between the wife and the Christ story, the intimate connection between love and the graceful acceptance of life’s suffering. In contrast, the husband continues to rebel against his conditions and proceeds with increasingly self destructive behaviors that only further the distance from his wife and the ideals which she symbolizes.

While the book plays out interestingly at this level, the raw drama is even more compelling, painfully so. Böll’s sense of realism with the character’s behaviors is genuinely believable, so much so that each moment of tenderness becomes increasingly compressed into poignancy as a result of what you learn of the couple’s past and the near hopelessness of their situation. And to even further the drama, Böll’s physical description of the tattered, shell-shocked city not only provides a desolate backdrop for the marital breakdown, but becomes a real life reminder of the senseless destruction war leaves in its wake.

When You Chose Me (62)--Pedro Salinas*

When you chose me—
love chose—
I came out of the great anonymity
from everyone, from nothing.
Till then
I was never taller than
the sierras of the world.
I never sank deeper
than the maximum
depths marked out
on maritime charts.
And my gladness was
sad, as small watches are
without a wrist to fasten to,
without a winding crown, stopped.
But when you said: you,
to me, yes, to me singled out,
I was higher than stars,
deeper than coral.
And my joy
began to spin, caught
in your being, in your pulse.
You gave me possession of myself
when you gave your self to me.
I lived. I live. How long?
I know you will back out.
When you go
I will go back to a deaf
world that does not distinguish
gram or drop
in weight or water.
I'll be one more—like the rest—
when you are lost.
I'll lose my name,
my age, my gestures, all
lost in me, from me.
Gone back to the immense bone heap
of those who have not died
and now have nothing
to die for in life.

*translated from the Spanish by Willis Barnstone

not too fast and not too slow

Well, its Memorial Day Weekend, the official kickoff for summer. For me it also means pulling out the Grateful Dead shows from the winter vault, the psychedelic blend of americana-bluegrass-reggae-blues-rock that will be floating out from my weekend living room windows for the next three months. This diddy here is from '91 Summer Tour, back when I was a fresh lil' pup out from High School and first started going to their shows. What a long strange trip its been......

In a Stolen Boat,

push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock,
pitch pines, children glazed to sheen
by ruthless summers. Past

the jetty, past the past, to open sea--
all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck--
Put your back into it, and row.

--April Bernard

[detail from the mural, Recreation; Charles Sprague Pearce, 1896]

Flute
--April Bernard

Some say Here,
it goes here, in a tin
on the shelf.
But others carry feeling
in the blood,
they say Here,
put your mouth
here, offering
the opulence
of a honeyed ear,
peppery mouths,
all the days
of a life. If
I weary of gorgeous
kashmiri airs
fluting through me,
nonetheless
these are invitations
I am powerless
to hush. I was born
an open
reed
and not at all
the sad lessons
so freely given--
today it was
the hurt, again--
can stop it.

From April Bernard's essay, Notes on the First Person (in which she goes into the traditional history of lyrical poetry and the effects the confessional poets has upon the reading public):

And here is an interesting feature: When a rock star, an actual rock star, sings about this love or that fight or this child, his audience usually allows for that same mix of real-and-unreal that the lyric poem traditionally has been granted. Do we think Bruce Springsteen has just fallen in love with his “Jersey Girl?” (He didn’t even write the song; Tom Waits did.) Think how many defenders of Eminen explained that he was singing from a “persona,” and so we mustn’t take his sexist, racist, homophobic ranting at face value.

Well and good, say I, but what about poetry? When I read a poem, what am I to make of a well-meaning member of the audience who comes up to me afterward, wanting reassurance that I am “all right,” because the speaker in one of my poems was evidently not “all right”? In my newest book, Romanticism, I thought I had taken every possible precaution to alert the reader that I am writing about a particular period and mode, that I am writing about a particular period and mode, that there are many voices at work here, and that many of the poems are, as the notes make explicit, fictional. And yet one reviewer presumes that these are all personal, moreover, about my personal life, and that my tone can be discerned as “embittered.”

Like fiction writers, poets have traditionally been liars. One might hear an authentic voice speaking through the poems, but the voice could be anyone’s. The reader’s. The poet’s. A fictional character. Whomever. And it wasn’t until the confessional poets of the 1950's popped up when it began to be widely thought that poetry is to contain instances of direct autobiographical moments or emotional positions that reflect the life of the poet. How awful. Maybe a product from the birthing of post World War II consumer culture, where ‘I’ becomes central? All about me and let me tell you about me? No thanks.

Luckily this has changed in the poetry world. When there is a ‘voice’ in modern poetry, it tends to be either the poem itself, only disguised as a speaker, or an ‘I’ that is so fragmented and elliptical, trying to pin down the speaker of the poems only results in frustration. April Bernard chooses the latter and in her 2009 collection, Romanticism, she returns to the mode of the Romantic Era to dwell in lush and boundless (and brave) sentiments, but through employing the modern technique of the decentralized ‘I’, a cool-headed distancing balances the effusive expressions. What results is a collection where each poem presents poignantly contained emotions. As capsules, if you will. For you to do what you would like with-- outside of psychoanalyzing the poet.

The collection is divided up into three sections and in each section there are various characters behind the individual poems. But while the characters vary, commonalities in the content and expressions unify each section. I would even go so far to say that there is a narrative backdrop of a woman that has gone through a divorce. With the first section, a reader finds jaded questioning towards emotions, desire, love, needs, etc. In the second section, a much harder voice emerges. One that tallies up the difficulties found in the emotions, but chooses to press forward in the romantic spirit anyway, with courageous strength to overcome the conflicts that often result when personal subjectivity must face the reality of a situation (where the fun begins). And this section has some of the best lines in the collection, such as the these which, amongst other things, pin down the rebellious spirit of the Romantic Era against the Age of Enlightenment:

enlightenment, clear sight, the civilized pleasures
......for garb and more garb.

Such as they, who inhabit an age of reason,
may do just as well with an automated fuck;

but Oh not I.

Wonderful wit going on there. The final selection then presents poems that are not nearly as voice driven. Instead, they reflect the themes and topics of poetry from the romantic period. The poems are heavily stylized to create both celebratory and ironic intent, this duality as a resolution after the questioning and defiant positions set forth in the previous sections. In this, Bernard has a lot of fun, doing such things as making up operas and fake composers from which the poems are claimed to be taken, or adding a touch of the exotic with German or Italian titles for the poems. Sort of funny in the same way the bombastic pomposity of Frasier Crane is funny. Sounds a bit like Roberto Bolaño as well.

If there is a problem with this collection, it is that the poetry is not the sort that you would want to return to again and again. It does richen nicely on the second and third readings, and there is humor-wizened stance to be garnered from the poems, but its rewards begin to taper out from there.

[The Sea from the Heights of Dieppe; Eugène Delacroix]

A couple of weeks ago at the brewery I frequent I met a phlebotomist from Iceland. Naturally, I had to bring up Sigur Rós, at which point he put his hand on my heart and said, "Sigur Rós is not music. It is feeling." Here's an acoustic version of Njosnavelin.

Address Direct
--Bin Ramke

That cacophony of breath and blood you hear
is not code for any comfort it is blood
and air moving within you, you

Stimmen, stemming the tide of fluids
your little frightened faces inner only linger
then anger then it ends then this thinly

for my crimes I know
and my offense is before me always (Psalm 51:5)

stammer your salvation--
to say is to succumb, would be-- who
cannot say-- for the impediment

the course of conditionals bleeding
into themselves like internal injury
and yet the day declares a truce

with you, your friendship intact
your body at your bidding
a lithe loveliness still there and

fertile, furtive and funny.

In referene to Monday's post, here is an example of what I would consider 'beautiful thought', and is indicative of the writing style for which Ramke will probably be most known. The section is from a longer poem entitled, ECHO:


Accidental Childhood

I call it luck when a bird's shadow touches me.

It is hard to know things. "Hard" as in the turtle's
shell, the feel of pebbles in the mouth or pocket.

"Every touch is a modified blow"
............................--Ernest Crawley

People believe birds carry danger, disease;
the feel of feathers unlike any other.

Little animals cross frequently the backyard.
Sometimes they die-- sparrows, a squirrel; once,
a cat. Good children would bury them
in appropriate boxes. The shimmer of its throat, as if cut--
the hollyhocks are a mess, but if there's another
bud which might open, let's leave them.

"Man stands erect, he alone, yet he lays him down, stretch out
quietly for sleep, for love, for death--"
...............................--Herman Broch, The Death of Virgil

And what child does not suffer silent and alone? That's
what it means, "child"-- a problem and a pathos. Like
Latin the words ran, like chocolate in summer. "How do you
suppose the Romans spoke?" the teacher said, her eyes
unfocused, having said it all already: (Eye, a room--ease at east.)

Below is an earlier Ramke poem that reminded me of Larkin. Specifically, the duality composed from sadness and an ambivalent hardness. What's the Flaubert quote, oh yeah, "Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility". This tone carries over into Ramke's later work, but more the sadness, to ground the poems, while tempered with thought, the material nature of the world, of science, language.

Pleasures of the Flesh

I watch her in the morning look
at three birds brooding on a wire
like suicides on a ledge.
She knows its uselessness
how she would only spread wings
to save herself at the last moment.

Sadness is neither virtue nor vice
though it has caused music,
and flowers and pathetic smiles
to line the long highways of our state.

Thought can be beautiful. Beautiful: “having qualities that delight the senses”. What constitute the mind’s senses in order to arrive at thought that is beautiful? The liberative flow acquired through a full recognition of each particular rather than dwelling upon a particular; assimilating discordant juxtapositions through the means of an emotional core, a philosophical framework or within the inquiries which extend from our unanswerable questions; the recognition of the myriad spectacular which always exists in the thoroughly mundane. And beautiful thought, as compared to banal thought, requires a vehicle-- if you will-- within which it can exist; a medium inherent to its creation and then capable of being transmitted from one mind to another mind. Beauty that is not illusion but is elusive, present but uncontainable, arising and receding in balanced simultaneity. And beautiful thought is what Ben Ramke’s poetry is.

Comparisons can be made to the metaphysical poets. With subject matter, there is the shared wonderment as what it means to ‘be’, to exist, to grasp how human existence is both interminably alone while at the same time sharing equally with the continuum of physical reality. With this, its good to point our that Ramke has at times been called a ‘scientific poet’, schools of scientific thought merging into his poetry for their lingual properties as well as other examples of our natural attempts to grasp this sentient world and one’s placement within it. And I would suggest that Ramke’s attention to the sonorous qualities of language also relates him to the metaphysical poets. He is thoroughly modern in his later assemblage techniques, a poem often going on for several pages and being interfused with whatever texts Ramke might have been contemplating at the time, but always the language remains crafted to the ear. While not relying upon standard forms in order to create this aesthetic, there is a lyrical focus to drive his poems into the reader’s awareness.

Theory of Mind: New and Selected Poems has been my first experience with Ramke and it was a good place to start as there are notable movements in his development as a poet, with each phase having something unique to offer over the other’s. The poems at the beginning of his career tend to be more contained within lyrical aspects and at times, with a slightly dour humor. Phillip Larkin came to mind a bit. Then his later poetry is generally what I described above, composed through their integration of other areas of study, but then grounded with the dramatic, even slightly maudlin, tones of his earliest poems. The poetry never feels cathartic though. There is too much of the scientific inquiry within these poems, where what is emotional could maybe be better understood as the factorial function or the abstraction within observable phenomena. From 'The Last Days of Gödel':

Making a science of my own bad mind
I learned to know a world, any world, again;
not as it could or should be but as a thing
of parts rewarding the one to piece a theory
but not back, not again, always fresh–

to be a big boy among little teams
and learn a means to quantify lack.

As proof they offer to learn a kind
of kindness, a drifting calculus
to interpret stones; among the numbers
only trust the average, all types of time

summarized and simulated, the appalling
will to know emergent, the felt recalling.

From Reading in a Digital Age:

Metaphor, the poet, imagination. The whole deeper part of the subject comes into view. What is, for me, behind this sputtering, is my longstanding conviction that imagination—not just the faculty, but what might be called the whole party of the imagination—is endangered........ Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum...............

....the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well..........

But we have been ignoring the deeper nature of fiction. That it is inwardly experiential, intransitive, a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different, where mind and imagination can freely combine, where memory and sensation can be deployed, intensified through the specific constraints that any imagined situation allows.........

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position.

One of my favorites from B & FT.

Local Water & The Universal Sea
Brenda Hillman

A molecule steps perpetually

...................................................into the present.


......It will let go to blend;

it rotates a power

.................................................to western willow groves

.....................from marshes or ice quilts quite east,

that not one new drop shall be slighted

............till it is dew,

..............................................till government hopes blue

......................................into the longing system.....of the molecule;

it haunts & is haunted,

..............................brooding & laughing in western yellow groves.

..................................................................Look out, Senator--!

..................................................perilous little word couplings--

[Great Blue Heron at Jewel Lake in Tilden Park; Hillman]

From a September 30, 2009 interview at Studio One Reading Series, with Hillman on gnosticism, water as poetic presence and her defiance to pure art:

PL: On the various impetuses behind Practical Water

BH: .............I’ve been interested for a long time in theosophy, in Gnosticism and in other esoteric traditions. These disciplines fit perfectly well with the more counterculture idea of poetry and with poetic experiment-- the gnostic occult. Practical Water is part of a proposed tetralogy of the elements; if you start something like this in a sense you’re casting yourself a task that has to do with a single word, with an element, with interactions between definitions and materials. But of course this is a time of real environmental and political crisis that I wanted to address--so the word “water” speaks to the crisis of the water in our bodies and in our ecosystems. But basically I work from poem to poem, not with a larger project in mind— I think that can mess you up. The importance of being present in the world and being a poet can occur exactly simultaneously, and in a sense I feel a little bit defiant toward the idea of pure art. We all must be engaged in the task of the artist as the first thing and for me being a poet has got to be a kind of circulating presence of different kinds of action. Poetry matters as we take it out there.

And from an interview at Phoebe Reeves, including how poetry can be an active force against imperialist language and the skepticism she holds towards both Republicans and Democrats:

We’ve seen a lot of political changes in the last year, not the least of which was the election of President Obama. What do you think the social and political role of poetry is going to be in the next year or so?

I have thought a lot about this. Poetry is very important to do and to engage in, especially when trusted officials are misusing language— “meltdowns” as if this deception and greed were an ice cream cake, “stress tests” as if our dear avuncular banks needed bypass surgery. Poets are able to refresh, interrogate and subvert the language of a culture, bringing what is very interior to the outside, making linguistic objects out of states of mind. Poetry makes relationships between a larger society, the public and the individual much more conscious by addressing matters of the heart, the invisible world, the nature that we have in us and outside of us, by making language about impossible states of feeling or about social matters.

As a writer and activist, I feel committed to ecopoetics and environmental concerns. I am sickened by the current wars, and feel protesting them outright is critical no matter who is in office. The language of war and imperialism —“target-rich environments” and that sort of thing—continues whether Republicans or Democrats are in power. I love writing poetry, yet feel it’s important not to confuse writing poetry with other activities. The argument that “all poetry is political” should not become an excuse for doing nothing else. Poets can also be activists; we can work both with our words and with other forms of direct action. It has been very instructive and energizing to go to Sacramento or to D.C. to work with courageous activists who aren’t writers themselves but who, by the way, very much need poetry and art for their work. We can still speak powerfully and sway people with poetry.

The title poem in Hillman's collection is very good and worth sharing. You'll notice how she weaves in her subject matter of nature, politics, language theory, plus (something I forgot the mention in yesterday's post), the call to personal action, to be uncomfortable with our lives in order to discover new ways of living and understanding our relations with the world we live within. Disruption is good for everybody. From Practical Water:

We went down to the creek
The sides were filled
....with tiny watery activities

The mind was split & mended
Each perception divided into more

& there were in the hearts of the water molecules
....little branches perpendicular to thought

Had lobbied the Congress but it was dead
Had written to the Committee of Understanding
Had written to the middle
....middle of the middle
....class but it was drinking
Had voted in cafes with shoplifters &
....beekeepers stirring tea made of water
....hitched to the green arc

An ethics occurs at the edge
of what we know

The creek goes underground about here

The spirits offer us a world of origins
Owl takes its call from the drawer of the sky

[...


...]

Lower frequencies are the mind
What happened to the creek
....is what happened
....to the sentence in the twentieth century
It got social underground

You should make yourself uncomfortable
If not you who

Practical Water is the most recent addition in Brenda Hillman's ongoing volumes of poetry which focus upon a specific material element for establishing a unifying subject matter. Its what has been termed ‘ecopoetics’ and has its focus upon the ways in which creative language can help us to better comprehend the interconnection between man, nature, ideas and lifestyles. It’s a form of poetry that places emphasis upon the process of language rather than language and words as objects (which, if closely adhered to, negates the possibility of didacticism but still with socio-political significance). With water being the guiding element for Practical Water, what enters into the poems are the fluidity of the words, the flow of circuitous thought which connects an individual with the world around them, the inseparability of our personal experiences, the social systems within which we live, and last but never least, the basic material processes that compose life.

Along with this form of textualized nature writing, Hillman also relies upon another aspect of language poetry for Practical Water: 'reportorial poetics', which she defines as a form of writing that “can be used to record detail with immediacy while one is doing an action & thinking about something else.” It’s a writing approach that is not intended to be progressive or tricky, but the opposite: meditative, closer to the ancient ritual of trance rather than post-modern technique. In this, it is very similar to her ecopoetics, but reportorial poetics tends to focus upon social issues for source material rather than nature.

And her reportorial poetics is uniquely used within the Practicial Water’s second section ('Of Communal Authority'). Hillman attended various Congressional Hearings about the Iraq War as a member of Code Pink. At first thought, someone who has not read the collection might expect this section to sharply contrast the poems written about nature. However, the writing is quite similar and what results is much more interesting. Rather than writing from the view point of opinions (which are quite strong in Hillman, as she’s a staunch anti-war activist), Hillman summons a voice that might resemble that of a high-priestess with her own secret language for her chosen readers, who observes some of the most powerful people in the world but without acknowledging (and definitely not respecting) their authority. Instead, they are brought back to the world of elements and bring to view the ways in which they conceptualize life and the systems they embody. A senator’s head equal to the glass of water on his table.

By successfully combining two areas of life which are, more often that not, mistakenly understood as having nothing to do with each other, Hillman calls attention to their connected similarities, thereby increasing our awareness with the resulting implications. What we want to make of that heightened awareness is then our own personal choice. I’ve never been comfortable with politics in art because in the past it has always seemed either intrusive or reactionary, even if I was in agreement. But this I have no problem with as it gets to new ways of understanding and conceptualizing problems. The mother of invention for new approaches to mankind's ongoing problems.

***************************

Now, to go off on a personal tangent with this, Hillman does not offer any ideas which can resolve the mass destruction she see’s occurring in the world. There are a few poems which talk about conversations with her ‘anarchist friend’, but the tone is sentimental and dreamy, as though the removal of government is only an Edenic pipe dream. But, has she ever looked into the ways a world based upon a free market economy would obviate the need for a State?

Throughout the collection Hillman consistently reminds us that systems are made from individual elements, molecules of thought, molecules of ideas, molecules of people, molecules of food, molecules of water. The whole is only that which is made up of the particulars. In ecosystems, these balance out into a working, stable entirety, which is the essence behind anarcho-capitalist theory. So here’s the threshold Hillman seems to not want to cross– a truly free market never exists beyond the particulars (fluidity of individualized self interests rather than the violent constraints of group interest), thereby making it impossible for the emergence of mass forms of domineering power to do such things as kill groups of people and destroy ecosystems.

Hillman does provide a few critiques about capitalism in Practical Water, but these are surprisingly limited, which makes me wonder if she’s pondering the extent to which the predatory nature of current capitalism is not inherent but fueled by government (as through fiat money, which can be immediately manipulated because of the currency relying upon government to establish its worth, or the simple fact that corporations are now the fourth arm of the government). This all gets quickly complicated and I only bring it up because Hillman does have the intent of her art being an influential force in the world, as opposed to art for art’s sake, so for that reason, should be up for criticism.

[The Mountain of the Quiet Spirit; William Crump]

From the youtube page: "Pool Films resulted from the creative collaboration of writers Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) and Imagist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Funded by Bryhers inheritance from a vast family fortune, their projects were fueled by the principals interest in film and artistic experimentation. The three were invested in developing a context in which the young medium of film might be viewed as a fine art as well as interact with other verbal and visual art forms. The Pool Films productions, which were directed by Macpherson and often featured H. D. and Bryher as actors, experimented with narrative forms and explored the use of dramatic lighting and effects such as montage to represent emotional and psychological states.

Monkeys Moon, a film featuring two of his and Bryhers pet monkeys, was thought to be lost until the Beinecke Library acquired a copy. in 2008. Some eighty years later, this film has been fully restored and digitized. Learn more at the Beinecke Library: http://bit.ly/xjlqn"

And the point in the spectrum
where all lights become one,

is white and white is not no-colour,
as we were told as children,

but all-colour;
where the flames mingle

and the wings meet, when we gain
the arc of perfection,

we are satisfied, we are happy,
we begin again;

I John saw. I testify
to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven

and walls of colour,
the colonnades of jasper;

but when the jewel
melts in the crucible,

we find not ashes, not ash of rose,
not a tall vase and a staff of lilies,

not vas spirituale,
not rosa mystica even,

but a cluster of garden-pinks
or a face like a Christmas-rose.

This is the flowering of the rod,
this is the flowering of the burnt-out wood,

where, Zadkiel, we pause to give
thanks that we rise again from death and live.

--from 'Tribute to the Angels'; H. D.

[9]

No poetic phantasy
but a biological reality,

a fact: I am an entity
like a bird, insect, plant

or sea-plant cell;
I live; I am alive;

take care, do not know me,
deny me, do not recognise me,

shun me; for this reality
is infectious-- ecstasy.

--from The Flowering of the Rod; H. D.

So who's tuffer, Henry Miller or Hilda Doolittle? For all of Miller's verbal machismo, I'm not sure he's a match for H. D.'s hard-as-stone verse. From her poem Eurydice (after she's been sent back to Hades because of Orpheus' blunder and no doubt pertaining to H. D.'s divorce):

VI

Against the black
I have more fervour
than you in all the splendour of that place,
against the blackness
and the stark grey
I have more light;

and the flowers,
if I should tell you,
you would turn from your own fit paths
toward hell, turn again and glance back
and I would sink into a place
even more terrible than this.

VII

At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

Its going to be quite the switch here this week from last week, going from the bravado of Henry Miller to the feminist themes of H. D. In some respects, they are similar though in that they both wrote in the early and mid 1900's and both challenged common sexual attitudes– Miller with his literary obscenity and H. D. with her unapologetic bisexuality. On the page however, they are polar opposites, Miller's writing basically awash with the glorious mess of bodily fluids. H. D., on the other hand, with such a highly restrained and clean style, what resulted was anything but naked humanity. Instead, a voice suggesting prophetic utterance, transcendent purity, perfected visions meant to inspire and strengthen our inherent weaknesses. Often this involved continued reference to the Greeks as a mythical model for such perfection.

H. D. is most commonly known as an imagist, the poetry for which relied upon clearly spoken figurative phrases which could substantiate a central ‘thing’, whether it be an object, an idea or a vision. Further explanation can simply rely upon my listing the names of six poems from her first collection: Sea Rose, Sea Lily, Sea Poppies, Sea Violet, Sea Iris, Sea Gods. Its easy to imagine that H. D. had fun with this, as would most burgeoning poets. The possibilities being endless but with enough common elements to unify the poems in both style and concept. And its also why these earlier poems are enjoyable for many repeated readings. As a result of the openness, meaning remains flexible, but the stylistic approach creates an experience that can consistently resonate.

However, H. D.’s imagist poems were primarily written at the beginning of her career. When life changed for H. D. on the account of a faithless soldiering husband and witnessing the traumatic events of World War I, her poetry also changed. The abstract imagist mode grew into a centering feminine voice that could establish self possession and address the challenges of her inner personal life as well as the larger world problems going on about her. And in 1933, H. D. underwent psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, during which time he taught her to trust in a dream she had of a 'Lady in White', which became a reoccurring idea in all of her poetry, the Lady in White as an emblem for all religions, a perfective spirit for mankind which could instill poet and reader with strength and hope. In some respects the continued manifestation of the Lady in White was still an imagist notion, but furthered through a deepening influence upon an increased number of concrete, rather than abstract, subject matters.

Confronting the destruction of World War II made for the final development in H. D.’s poetry. One such work entitled Trilogy was published in three separate parts, The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to Angels and The Flowering of the Rod, and they are all excellent. Probably where I would point first if recommending H. D. to a new reader. The works thereafter then became strongly focused upon what could be identified as a ‘feminist perspective’, including a reworking of Euripides’ play Helen from a female view point rather than a heroic male’s, as is traditionally found in epic poetry, and a work that begins with the idea of being in love with a man 30 years her younger. I guess H. D. was also the original cougar.

If a lion is stalking you, or a shark is out to kill you, you are of course in mortal danger. We have lived with these dangers for millions of years. The straight line is a man-made danger. There are so many lines, millons of lines, but only one of them is deadly and that is the straight line drawn with a ruler. The danger of the straight line cannot be compared with the danger of organic lines described by snakes, for instance. The straight line is completely alien to mankind, to life, to all of creation.

--Friedensreich Hundertwasser