Whitmansexual

Walt Whitman

Cold Splinters mentioned the poet Antler today and it reminded me of a poem of his I've been meaning to post for awhile. According to the preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the powers of a great poet to speak the truth have no bounds, can boldly encompass all he or she encounters, and lay bare the hearts of things, the truth of things. Here's an example of the powers of a great poet to capture, not from Whitman, but from Antler writing about Whitman.

Whenever I teach or discuss Walt Whitman, conversation always seems to find it's way back to the poet's sexuality (look, it's happening again...). In once sense, discussing Whitman's homosexuality reaffirms what we should all already know - that our heroes, icons, and leaders of previous generations included gay men and women, even if they weren't able to publicly fulfill their romantic and emotional lives. We should celebrate Whitman's sexuality as an integral part of our understanding of the poet, and, by extension, remember to embrace homosexuality as a creative and generative force in American culture. Of course no one is wholly their sexuality, this is true for Whitman as well. As a teacher and student of literature, I've struggled to meaningfully situate Whitman's sexuality in respect to the totality of his writing and his aura. Luckily, Antler found the words and put them together for us in his poem, "Whitmansexual," reproduced below. Be sure to check out more of Antler poetry here on his website.

Whitmansexual

Whitman was a mansexual,
      a womansexual,
A grasssexual, a treesexual,
      a skysexual, an earthsexual.
Whitman was an oceansexual, a mountainsexual,
      a cloudsexual, a prariesexual,
A birdsongsexual, a lilacsmellsexual,
      a gallopinghorsesexual.
Whitman was a darknesssexual, a sleepersexual,
      a sunrisesexual, a MilkyWaysexual,
A gentlebreezesexual, an openroadsexual,
      a wildernesssexual, a democracysexual,
A drumtapssexual, a crossingbrooklynferrysexual,
      a sands-at-seventy-sexual.
Whitman was a farewell-my-fancy-sexual,
      a luckier-than-was-thought-sexual,
A deathsexual, a corpsewatchsexual,
      a compostsexual, a poets-to-come-sexual,
A miracle-sexual, an immortalitysexual,
      a cosmos-sexual, a waiting-for-you-sexual.

Staggered Landscapes

from Gnomic Verses - Robert Creeley

loop

Down the road Up the hill Into the house
Over the wall Under the bed After the fact
By the way Out of the woods Behind the times
In front of the door Between the lines Along the path

echo

In the way it was in the street

 

Mine Name Poetry

Recently, a friend of mine from Tucson showed me how to use the USGS MRDS (Mineral Resource Data System). This might be old news to some people, but it's new and cool to me. It works in Google Earth and marks out every mine in production, every mine that ever produced and even every occurrence or claim. You can download the MRDS here.You need Google Earth, too. It works with every state.

Now I'm into tracking down old mines. We checked out a great one last weekend and I'll put it up here when I'm done editing the photos. But for now, back to MRDS. All the mines are named and the names of the mines are all very cool. I like to scroll around Arizona in Google Earth, highlighting mines, seeing what each mine produced and what each is named. The namers' creativity is sometimes striking for it's oddity, other times striking for its absence.

I decided to take the names and work them into sort of Haiku-like poems. Each line is the name of a mine, the titles are names of places near the mines featured in the poem. I'm only the editor or anthologist. I don't know who the authors are, but I hope they'd enjoy the poems:

I. Santa Ritas
Silver Spur,
Blue Jay-Good Friday,
Sweet Bye and Bye.

II. Northern Catalinas Part 1
Old Hat,
Dead Bull,
Halloween and Spook.

III. Northern Catalinas Part 2
Sueno Del Oro,
Madre Del Oro,
American Flag.

IV. Superstitions Part 1
Lazy Mule,
Happy Wheels,
Lost Dutchman,
Mystery Mountain.

V. Superstitions Part 2
Indian,
Yankee,
Bulldog.

VI. Tonto
First Chance,
Rainbow,
Devil's Chasm.

VII. Cleator
Golden Turkey,
Grey Goose,
French Lilly,
What-A-Pal.

VIII. Bisbee
Silver Bear,
Irish Mag,
Copper Queen.

IX. Prescott
Mormon Girl,
Hoot Owl,
Pine Grove.

X. Tucson
Little Mary,
Isabel,
Pure Gold,
Owl.

Charles Bukowski's House

I spent last weekend in the L.A. area attending the Charles Brockden Brown Society Conference and visiting friends. The conference was held at The Huntington Library in San Marino. Founded by railroad man Henry E. Huntington in 1919, the library is one of the country's most impressive private collections. Interestingly, they house the papers and works of L.A. poet, Charles Bukowski and while I was there, an exhibit highlighting his work was on display.

Not to get into an aesthetics debate, but the contrast of The Huntington's high-brow image and Bukowski's often crass, decidedly blue-collar writing struck me. A sign for the Bukowski exhibit stated that it contained material not suitable for all audiences. The irony was further driven home when my friend Katie took me to see the house Bukowski lived in from 1963-1972 and the liquor store he frequented when he lived there. The house is still occupied, so it's not really a tourist site. It's not in the best L.A. neighborhood - it's located at 5124 W. De Longpre Ave. Los Angeles. Bukowski's favorite liquor store, The Pink Elephant, had a surprisingly good selection of beer considering it's rough/gaudy exterior, but it still wasn't in the nicest area of town.

The whole experience stood as a strong reminder to me that, whether or not an author or his/her work is inducted into the canon, it's important to remember to read what he or she is trying to tell you. Read at The Huntington, it would be easy to romanticize the hard-scrabble life of dead-end jobs, drinking, prostitutes, and poverty Bukowski describes and to let yourself get caught up in his humor, but ultimately he described a hard life, an unhealthy life, and often a humiliating life. He described poverty and people still live it. So while I'm certainly glad that The Huntington has become the steward of Bukowski's work, I'm equally happy that the city of L.A. was able to preserve where he lived. I don't know if I can adequately describe the contrast, but Bukowski could, so I'll let him...

Bum on the Loose

I climbed off a park bench to engage the giant of
literature battle.
I lived with women madder than the gods
themselves.
I consumed enough booze to get an army drunk.
I lived in shacks without windows, without electricity,
without plumbing, without heat.
I climbed off a park bench to engage the giant of
literature battle.
I was beaten in alleys, robbed.
I searched the cities for sanity.
I read great books and they made me sleepy.
I starved in rooms fat with rats.
my parents were in shame of me.
the beautiful ladies thought me ugly.
I climbed off a park bench to engage the giant of
literature battle.
the world considered me insane.
I slept in deserted graveyards.
I sat in bars through the mornings and into the night
and back into morning.
I engaged the giants of literature.
all my work came back.
one editor wrote, "what is this stuff?"

Gary Snyder

On Thursday night I went with some friends to hear Gary Snyder read at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. There were tons of people there. He talked and read for about an hour. He read new poems and old poems and talked about his time in Japan and on Mt. St. Helen. If you're not familiar with Snyder, he's a naturalist, a Buddhist, an ecologist, an anthropologist, a linguist, and about anything else you can think of. He's a literal and literary factotum. But most of all, he's a wonderful poet and writer.

"Rip Rap" is probably Gary Snyder's most famous poem, so I'll add it here. You can find it in the collection Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems. My buddy likes "Axe Handles," so I'll add that one too.

"Rip Rap"

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
          placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
          in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
          riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
          straying planets,
These poems, people,
          lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
          and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
          four-dimensional
Game of Go.
          ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
          a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
          with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
          all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

"Axe Handles"

One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own
A broken off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with--"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature" -- in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see Pound was an axe
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

Loren Eiseley - Another Kind of Autumn

I cannot remember where I found this copy of Another Kind of Autumn by Loren Eiseley. Eiseley was a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, but perhaps he is best remembered for his essays and poetry. He spent part of his life as a drifter, part as a scholar, and somewhere in there earned the honor of being called the Thoreau of the 20th century. If you have never read The Star Thrower, I highly suggest you put it at the top of your to-read list. Another Kind of Autumn, a book of poems, was published around the time of Eiseley's death in 1977.

The book is beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Walter Ferro. I searched like crazy to find more information on Ferro, but all I could find was information on other books he illustrated. These included another of Eiseley's books, The Invisible Pyramid, some books for children, and an edition of Hemingway's Nick Adams Stories. If anyone has more information on Ferro, please post it in the comments or e-mail me. His woodcuts compliment Eiseley's poetry quite well.

 I don't dare post a poem on here. I couldn't find one full-text Eiseley poem online, so that might mean that the copyright is strictly enforced. Eiseley's works are still in print and easily accessible. If you buy or borrow Another Kind of Autumn, some of my favorites are "Habits Nocturnal," "The Black Snake," and "The Fungus Bed."

Lorine Niedecker

"'The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes,' Lorine Niedecker wrote of the watery, flood-prone Black Hawk Island near the town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life.  Although few people endured for long the seasonal hardships of life on Black Hawk Island, Niedecker's attachments to teh place ran deep. Her life by the water could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made herself a home." - Jenny Penberthy from the her introduction to Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works.  You can read Penberthy's complete introduction here.

Lorine Niedecker was the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets, briefly, a lover of Louis Zukofsky, and she shared Thoreau's taste in real estate. Her poetry often takes folk images as its subject, though to call her a folk poet would have the academic secret police knocking at your door. Stylistically, she wrote in the condensed, direct language of the Objectivists, sharing a poetic ethos with urbanites like Zukofsky and George Oppen. She also borrowed from surrealists and eastern traditions. She wrote most of her poems from the 1940's until her death in 1970.

I'm teaching Niedecker (along with Gary Snyder - also very exciting) tomorrow to the students in my literature class, so I revisited her work today. That's what prompted this post. You can check out some of her work here at the SUNY Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center. However, they don't have a few of my favorite poems at EPC, so I'll reproduce them here. All are from "Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works" which was published by the University of California Press and edited by Jenny Penberthy. They originally appeared in either "New Goose" or the manuscripts for that book. Here goes:

A monster owl
out on the fence
flew away.What
is it the sign
of? The sign of
an owl.

****

O rock my baby on the tree tops
and blow me a little tin horn.
They've got us suckin the hound tit
and that's the way I was born.

O let me rise to the door-knob
and let me buy my way.
I know the owner of the store
and that's the way I was raised.

****

I walked
from Chicago to Big Bull Falls (Wausau),
eighteen-forty-four,
two weeks,
little to eat.
Came night
I wrapped myself in a piece of bark
and slept beside a log.


I just found this great site, too. Check out Susan Ticky's Field Guide to the Birds of Lorine Niedecker's Collected works.