One

My Interview with I.A. Richards

For Constance Horton Greenleaf

In Memory of Ivor Richards and Robert Gessner

I

Inversion is a counterfeit experience

there is but one irreversibility.

Chestnuts, rabid squirrels, slosh and sleet,

the sullen, birdstained wisdom of John Harvard.

O Fyffes bananas, obscene planks,

the flexes bared to vision like the sinews

in Vessalius. I grope my way

through the intestines of heuristic house.

II

Last night we heard in Kresge Hall

a lion-vested English poet fulminate

like an under-paid volcano against Science,

applauded by a host of boffins.

Afterwards, a girl called Shirley took my hand

and wished to lead me through the maze

toward the magus posing there as Tannhäuser,

fettered with electric wires in a great maidenform

III

‘I never liked the man.’—‘Grotesque…’

His face (a breakfast fruitjuice of a face

—like Santa’s after years of seven daily shaves)

frowns towards the window. I try

another angle—Oxford, Cambridge, the sad

dignified silence of his friend,

the poise of Perry Miller as a demon.

He floats like Peter Pan towards his country.

IV

Suddenly, the telephone in boredom

jumps from the cluttered table, spelling

its coincidence of quick relief:

the establishing of friends of future

forfeits the nodding present, and we drift

through mists of April with the sleepy

drone of summer knocking at the door.

Time leaves us breathless at its wake.

V

The evenings walk together, and we flee,

convened, rebuffed, solidified and sad.

Memory whistles round that cataleptic hour,

wasted to the world but not to me.

The silent voice behind that black receiver

will speak and ask and read a poem

about the mountaineers of mind (if mind has

mountains) with verses streaming from their rucksacks.

VI

One evening in the future we shall meet

and speak of music, indigestion and delight,

and Connie, lovely Connie, will comply

to show her knickers on request. The night

is full of eyes, and trees, and bushes

bristle with the flat twang of summer.

We finish our drinks and walk away.

My wife and I walk home in silence.

VII

Friend, there is a carrot-farm in heaven

providing food for rabbits, remedies

for nightblindness. In your preferment

of the second-rate, Battersea Park amusements,

walks at night through warm, protective darkness,

tarry awhile, and first consider

those who dwell in darkness through the night

with electronic eyes, blistered by insights.

VIII

Drinking soda pop and smoking

innumerable cheap cigarettes. They

are the Kierkegaards of their own destruction,

breathing hatred on their bellies. Pity them.

But think also of the truly innocent,

the lonely typists in their immaculate rooms

with a small fridge and biscuits on the mantelpiece

where nobody except the caretaker has ever entered.

IX

Friend, poet, the unterminated interview,

unwritten poem, unmade bed, or girl,

call out for completion. Do not

heed them. Learn how to revere

the unfinished, generating moments from its teeth

of happiness, hysteria and love

as useless, beautiful, incongruous and light

as sparks from high-heeled shoes against the flagstones outside

M.I.T.

Generation

I

We children of the thirties got daubed with melancholy.

We were not lucky like the sons and daughters

Of the twenties, christened in jazz fumes

And the colored clothes of their first cries,

Nor free and desperate like the newborn

Of the forties, soothed by blackouts,

Liberated by flak bursts and search lights in the sky.

We became late sleepers, mind readers,

Violent and autocratic statues in

The sea, skin divers in our amniotic juices.

II

The streets were longer in those days,

The trams made noises in the nights.

In the small room a young girl with a child,

Waiting at dawn for darkness to

Be sucked out into the sky,

And the hours of low-paid work

Like scabs you cannot leave alone.

The hours were smaller, the winters

Longer, with more wet snow on the window-sill.

Bananas were coming in, and silver hydroplanes

Descended on the dead wet sea. The pilot

Waved and thought he looked like Charles Lindbergh.

We had our games. The soldiers were

Italians and Abyssinians. It seemed the

Abyssinians always lost their feet and heads.

Their Jesus robes turned into moldy grey.

III

My uncle who came to America

Before I was born,

In the sly and wincing first year of the depression,

Went into a barbershop in Buffalo.

Shaved by a Negro he saw, against the

Grayish palm the later white and jolly

And heard the thick black lips say:

Du e la svensk. The black man was a Swede, too,

From Gothenburg.

My uncle became a carpenter in Quincy, Mass.

But remembered the lather in the hand,

Snow on squatting slagheaps like some unwritten

Dylan Thomas story.

IV

I wake before dawn

With a night’s small poems swarming in my head:

‘Now when I am forty-five and almost dead

I’ll let my hair grow long and wild

And I’ll be stalking flowers in the parks

And by observing learn to pick them.’

Televisiondreamroutines

Galvanizing, I would think, said Peter rabidly.

Their son, called Justin, had invented a new game.

The three men hanging from the chandelier broke the fall of the fourth

clinging

To the flex and ripping the stuccoed ceiling of the Moroccan Room.

Charles fingered his brocaded necktie nervously.

Now we have to face the most unreasonable man on earth, presumably a

hotelier.

Meanwhile at the Zoo, Melchisedec the Cow.

The crew, mostly dressed in rather momentous black, except for Celia who

was un-

Accountably naked, were cheered on by the vicar himself.

There the victuals precede the auditorium.

Meanwhile back at the Zoo, Celia dressed in rather demure black, was naked,

cheering

The cow and the vicar.

Now we have erased from this earth l’homme moyen sensual, presumably an

ostler, Charles

Said, fingering his Moroccan necktie with remorse.

Well, at last, their son invented a new game. They were just in time.

Patronizing, I would think, said Peter Rabbit avidly.

Note: The phrase ‘Well, at last’ is taken from the MGM 1949 version of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.

The Longest-Running Show on Television

The longest-running show on television

Is the one in which the moderator is also the chairman of

The board of your company.

He is half-asleep most of the time, and you can never understand

His jokes. Surely he has gone mad.

Most of the discussion seems to be about the proper way

Of conducting the proceedings, but it is hard to know for sure

As the languages used are Tamil, Basque or Arawak,

But never a language you can understand. Prizes

Are given out, sometimes for the dumbest answers.

People nobody has ever heard of are constantly being invited

To give speeches. References are made

To the fat reports littering the tables, but only to the pages

Which have gone missing. In the lobby

Of the hotel where you are all staying,

The bellhops are unspeakably rude. They always demand

Money of unknown denominations, in particular small

Octagonal coins, almost as fat as they are large.

In the creaking of steel-tubing of stylish rusty armchairs

Sleepers are snoring, hecklers heckling, most people bored…

Nobody knows whether he is spectator or participant. The program

Is entitled ‘Life before Death,’ or sometimes, simply

‘Goings-on.’

The Enormous Comics

I. Superman, or: How to Succeed as a Failure

The simple silent feat is first; the bridge

Collapsing needs a steadying hand;

The masked and hook-nosed robbers, on the average,

Fall to abject poses at his harsh command.

Then the retreat: how cleverly, how smart and smooth

He beats the lightning as a transvestite

In that conveniently empty booth

Before a man has time to whisper kryptonite.

The drag is next (and tiresome it proves to be)

The girl reporter gloating in her mad pursuit

Of her Man of Steel; loved at a distance and myopically

By the owl-like clerk for whom she doesn’t care a hoot.

And history: from noisy quasar, distant star

A dying world expels a fotus-rocket with a roar

To impregnate our helpless planet from afar

With the surreptitious virus of a dedicated bore.

The hidden meaning of this farce no doubt

Will find itself reduced to something cute:

The analyst will see the writing on the wall spelled out:

SUPERMAN LOVES CLARK KENT. He is a fruit!

The moral of the fairy-tale is clear:

We love our failures, fondle our distress

And cling to our coward selves in fervid fear

Lest we shall lose them to the lover dumb success.

II. Bringing up Father, or: The Unending Revolution

When I consider how the monstrous years were spent,

The years that man has called this star his home,

I see enormous heaps of human excrement

In growing piles beneath the starry dome.

We often contemplate our forbears down below

And treasure recollections of the primal horde.

This serves to gratify the impulses to go

Down to the mucky depths we can’t afford.

What could induce our youthful minds to dwell

On the adventures of this hen-pecked immigrant,

A ne’er-do-well who inadvertently did well

And had to pay the price in cultured cant?

Remember how the rolling-pin was swung

By hefty arms; how crockery was hurled

To force the husband to ascend another rung

In the social structure of his conquered world.

The impact of this stubborn downward urge

Which made him real where his wife was not

Gave us excuses in our mind to splurge

All operatic tantrums in a shower of snot.

Think of the tale of the Icelandic priest

Who promised to become a Christian instead,

If seats be promptly booked at the Eternal Feast

For all his relatives who were already dead.

We can forgive our ancestors the mere

Deception of their ruthless living lie

But hardly the brutality to leave us here

And rot away and stink and simply die.

This goes to show that feeling is without pretence,

Construing the unbearable (as our pun gets slyer)

In bringing up our fathers in the awful sense

Of exhumation of a dreaded sire.

III. Recollection of Innocence in Experience, or:
The Katzenjammer Kids, Middle-Aged, Remembering
their Happy Childhood in Africa

Remembering the golden days, the door

That’s shut forever on the toy-shaped scandals,

The pop-art palm-trees and the muffled roar

Of the bright red bombs, like Christmas candles,

We can still feel the paper breeze that tries

To rock the cornflower billows, still

Smell the artificial fragrance of the pies

Forever left to cool upon the window-sill.

The obscene innocence of the childish pranks

Was just a weapon in our constant strife

To give the bug-eyed, absent-minded cranks

Their smarting lessons in the School of Life.

Our childhood was all childhoods, for

In adult tranquillity we let go the grip

Of the secure exposure of the secret core

In the spasmodic movements of the comic strip.

In this two-dimensional Eden of repose

We dwell for ages, weakening by degrees,

Stalking the obscure powers that disclose

The subdued rage of fitful memories.

Poem Unnamed

So, at least, there is one thing we have in common,

The habit of assuaging the country mist:

Because there is one thing you must not allow,

In particular in the autumn when the

Pastures are trivial, leaves playful.

This is how I figure: a disruption

Of any kind of narrative (as I a daughter

Asleep from drinking, left alone)

This is the time I don’t come from

But rather the opposite, like St. Augustine,

Another installment in my debt to you

My darling Janet: Negation NEGATION

At least I can speak now and not

At that omen (I was a poet once and

Then) miraculously (read an old

Acquaintance: is that first-order logic is

Consensually agreed on, or words to that effect.

That is why this poem is called ‘The

Decline of the Supernatural,’ although its

Title is ‘On what was as near to

Happiness,’ but dedicated to Henry Mayhew

and the memory of Clive Jenkins.

I do only countenance arithmetical order

Which is the stark nonsequitur of most

Vengeful fathers.

Forgive me, as vulgar as a poem mentioning Chomsky (incognito

There), or whales, or wage demands.

Botchuana

When I molested your plaits I was

reminded, inadvertently, of Alameda County,

doctrinal. Period. Useful. Insolence.

Substitute solitude. Hitler made sin and me. Quote.

Bristols. As little poetry comes out of

Dialectics as out of South Africa: That is,

Svegdir, a way to cut open.

We gleaned one thing, from G.M.

Hopkins at least: not to waste time on explanantion.

Whatever it may seem like.

He was a big man: eighteen stone.

I never carried the coffin.

I cried when my father’s workmates spoke.

I remember that line

‘Master bridges

Dirty breeches.’

This is a love poem.