Harry Crosby Day!

Harry and Caresse Crosby at desk in library, 19 Rue de Lille, Paris 

Harry Crosby – hey now heads up people today marks the 127th anniversary of his birth, on June 4, 1898 – Harry Crosby fascinates with his:

    * poetry (at first traditional and not particularly original, then ultra-modern, revealing, in the riveting words of Philip Lamantia, “a true dandy of explosively Promethean desire”), 

    * marvelous diary (Shadows of the Sun, originally published in the late 1920s and 1930, and in a definitive version in 1977), 

    * exceptional publishing work (the legendary Black Sun Press, done with his wife Caresse), 

    * all-encompassing Sun-worship, 

    * life as a World War I ambulance-driver then an expatriate in wild 1920s Paris, with travel, alcohol, opium and an open marriage, and

    * disturbing embrace-of-death (even if psychologically explainable), culminating in the tragic 1929 double-suicide (or possibly murder-suicide) of him and his mistress.                                   

 That’s a lot.  But yes, please wait, there’s more.  In addition to all the above, there was Crosby’s resolute self-education through reading, including particularly poetry.  It may not sound like much, but may be the most impressive and inspiring of all. 

Crosby read a lot (he ultimately amassed a library of thousands of books) and, more than that, from age nine (!) to his death (at age 31) cataloged by hand each book he read, in order, year-by-year.  That handwritten notebook with its list of books read is still extant in his widow Caresse’s library-ed papers.  It shows approximately 1,050 books read (including repeats) between 1907 and 1929.  That’s a healthy average of about 45 per year, though the actual annual count ranged from about 30 to more than 100 (the latter in both 1926 and 1927).  Crosby’s books-read list offers unique insight into his wide-ranging and evolving mind and passions. It’s a kind of  detailed map of his interests and noetic spirit.     

It’s particularly apt to celebrate Crosby’s reading today because, as it happens, among the books he read exactly 100 years ago – during the first few months of 1925 – were a novel, a poetry collection, and a poet’s collected works that turbo-charged major changes in his literary imagination, views, and poetry.   In other words, it’s the centenary of the reading that to a great degree made Crosby the poet he became. 

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Crosby’s Foundational Poetry Reading

Crosby’s remarkable early 1925 run of reading – discussed in detail below – was built on a strong foundation of previous years’ reading, including poetry in particular.  In 1917 and 1918, for example, Crosby, while an ambulance driver in World War I France, read (and thought highly of) The Rubáiyát and Robert Service’s Rhymes of a Red Cross Man. 

Edward Fitzgerald and Edmund J. Sullivan, The Rubáiyát (1913)

Crosby also during the war – including after November 22, 1917, when a shell burst vaporized his ambulance (miraculously, he was not physically hurt though shrapnel tore open his good friend’s chest) – read in the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250 - 1900.  

 

 

According to his biographer, this was Crosby’s “first systematic self-education in good poetry.”  Geoffrey Wolff,  Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, 1976, at 68.

 

Further, in 1922, after having earned a solider’s degree from Harvard and moved to Paris, Crosby declared  “poetry is religion (for me)” (Shadows of the Sun, July 28, 1922).  That same year, and  continuing through early 1923, he systemically read (or re-read) all of Shakespeare, cataloging each play and work in his books read list.   

Perhaps most tellingly, Crosby in 1923 assembled his favorite poems, titling the collection Anthology; in 1924, he  privately published a small edition of the book, using his full true given name:  

   

 

Anthology includes approximately 200 poems or excerpts, those that Crosby considered, as he wrote in the book’s introduction, the “loveliest and best.”  The book’s approximately 275 pages are organized into eight parts.  It opens with poems to recite aloud.  In addition to much Rudyard Kipling, John Maesfield, and Robert Service, that section includes Edgar Lee Master’s relatively little known “Oh You Sabbatarians” (1919), worthy of special note because its “dynamic vehemence” and “uncompromising avowals” (the quotes are  from a contemporary review) foreshadow Crosby’s similar approach in his late 1920's “Target For Disgust” and “Scorn”).

Anthology next has sections on, respectively, war (all written during or about World War I, including a dozen by Siegfried Sassoon), and love (all essentially contemporary except for several poems by the late 19th Century’s Laurence Hope), poetic prose (starting with selections from the Bible and ending with six extracts from Franz Toussaint’s Le Jardin des caresses – a combination that neatly points to the reverent erotic tone in some of  Crosby’s later poems),  French poetry (en français, but including only one poem by Charles Baudelaire and none by Arthur Rimbaud or any 20th century poet), Shakespeare (extracts from the plays, plus six sonnets), English poetry (starting with Chaucer and Milton, then jumping to the romantics and those that followed, ending with Oscar Wilde), and concluded with a section that excerpts from three “lyrical poems”: Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” John Keats’ “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” and Edward Fitzgerald’s “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” (Crosby at the time considered the latter “the summum bonum of all masterpieces,” as he wrote in Anthology’s introduction).   

All the above – and it’s just the highlights of his reading – demonstrates a remarkable dedication to, and diligence in, the study of poetry.  This all resulted in a solid – though not particularly adventurous – foundation for what came next, including his (1) declaration, in August 1924 that he was a poet, and (2) reading, in the first months of 1925, of three particular books or authors that revolutionized  Crosby’s imagination and literary approach.  

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Early 1925 reading: James Joyce’s Ulysses

Preliminarily, and to better set the stage, Crosby began 1925 year by re-reading Gustave Flaubert’s historical novel Salammbô.  Then, over the next few weeks he read Theordore’s Gautier’s still compelling 1830s Mademoiselle de Maupin, four books related to World War I – The Love of An Unknown Solider, Sassoon’s War Poems (for the second time), Henri Barbuse’s Le Feu (Under Fire), and Roland Dorgelès’ Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses; this latter book caused him to observe (see Shadows of the Sun, February 1, 1925), “above all else we who have known war must never forget war”), and – and this the first of 1925’s revolutionizing reads – James Joyce’s Ulysses.  

Per Crosby’s library inventory (also library-ed in a special collection) and his diary, he read a later, 1924 Shakespeare and Company edition of the book, issued with a white cover: 

Crosby’s reading of Ulysses came several years after the novel was serialized in The Little Review and three years after it was first published as a book.  

While Crosby was a few years late to the Bloomsday appreciation party, he was obviously deeply impressed.  After his early 1925 reading of Ulysses Crosby began using Joycean neologisms, portmanteaus, or unusual words in his poems.  His first collection, Sonnets for Caresse, published in October 1925 (then reprinted with some variations in 1926 and 1927), is largely conventional but includes plenty of lexical play a la Ulysses.  In the first few poems, for example, are “sunnygolden,” “rustcorroded.” “luisant,” and “slowpulsing,” and, similarly, in the last several poems, “fairfragrant,” “awayaway” and “neverwavering.”  Other poems include other examples, such as “phantomfevered” and “monstrousmarching.”  

While Crosby’s soon enough moved away from such emulation, Joyce’s wordplay plainly liberated his imagination and stuck with him.  For example, well over a year after he’d first read the book, he diary-ed (see Shadows of the Sun, June 9, 1926), that “before going to bed” he “studied Joyce words in Ulysses,” listing “ungirdled, smoke-plume, upwardcuruving, sandflats, chalkscrawled, harping, crunching, trekking, winedark, redbaked, miscreant, firedrake, orifice, lesbic, cartload, [and] turfbarge.”  Ten days later, he called Joyce “the greatest of them all” (see Shadows of the Sun, June 19, 1926).  This opinion never changed.  

In 1928 – on Bloomsday itself yes indeed, my friends – Crosby went “to the Rue Richelieu to buy for a hundred dollars a magnificent copy of the first edition of Ulysses signed by Joyce and bound in a magnificent blue binding . . .” (Shadows of the Sun, June 16, 1926):  
 

In 1929, in an essay titled “Observation Post”, Crosby again declared his allegiance to the genius of Joyce, calling him “the Great Alchemist of the Word, the Paracelsus of Prose, the Transmuter of metal words into words of gold” (and that same year, he and Caresse, via their Black Sun Press, published Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, three fragments from Joyce’s Work in Progress, which eventually became Finnegans Wake).    

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Early 1925 reading: Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal

After reading his wife Caresse’s verse collection, Crosses of Gold, Crosby in early 1925 read Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil).  He’d read at least some of the poems therein previously, having quoted one in a 1922 and another in a 1924 diary entries, and included a third poem from the book in his 1924 Anthology.  But, per his library inventory, Crosby in early 1925 appears to have acquired then read a new edition of the book that had just been released by a Paris publisher:

Les Fleurs du Mal (Libraire Alphonse Lemerre, Paris, 1925)

Crosby clearly was deeply impressed with this poetry.  On April 9, 1925, Crosby wrote in his diary, “Baudelaire’s birthday and wrote in his honor a Sonnet . . . .”  The poem, included in Crosby’s first book of poetry, Sonnets for Caresse (first  published in October 1925), is not only named for the French poet but name-checks Les Fleurs in its final line:

Crosby’s biographer Geoffrey Wolff (see Black Sun at 139-140) suggests this poem follows from  Les Fleurs du Mal’s “Spleen” and that definitely seems right for many reasons, including Crosby’s reference to “your blackest flag” in the first line of the second stanza, a clear echo of the phrase “son drapeau noir” that ends Baudelaire’s poem.  

Per his diary, in late April 1925 Crosby honored  Baudelaire by visiting his grave in Paris.  More than that, later that same year (see Shadows of the Sun, November 19, 1925), he “[b]ought a first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal for twelve hundred francs . . . .”  His library inventory does indeed include a copy of that 1857 edition.  

Les Fleurs du Mal, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, Paris, 1857

Crosby’s purchase of first edition, I submit, is a no-doubt sign of his love for the poetry (and his bibliomania as well!).  (FYI, the least-expensive copy of this book today is priced at approximately US $28,000.)

Crosby continued to re-read Les Fleurs du Mal, quoting it twice in February and twice again in July 1926 diary entries.  Even more tellingly, he wrote a series of poems that in early 1927 he  published in his second collection, Red Skeletons, which Wolff (see Black Sun at 187) calls “a decadent imitation of Baudelaire.”

Imitation or not, the Baudelarean influence in Red Skeletons is clear, starting with one of the book’s epigraphs, taken from Les Fleurs’ “Causerie” [“Conversation”]: 
    
        Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les bêtes l'ont mangé.
        
        (Do not search for my heart anymore; the wild beasts have eaten it.)

More generally, the book’s poems are full of Baudelarean decadence, introspection, and morbidness.  True, Crosby’s language and the sonnet form used are sometimes forced or clunky.  Still, there’s an appealing sincerity and earnestness to the poems, including I submit, in “Noir,” reproduced below.  The image that ends the poem’s first stanza – the pink (presumably blossoming) almond trees against the silver of a far-off sea – is both memorable and outré enough to effectively set up the pivot to the death and dark of the concluding lines: 

The plot twist here is that Crosby almost immediately after Red Skeletons was published disavowed its literary approach (see Black Sun at 193), and never embraced it again.  In the last year of his life, he burned eighty copies of the book in a bonfire, and shot bullet holes through four other copies (see Shadows of the Sun, March 9, 1929). 

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Early 1925 reading: the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud

Per a Crosby diary entry, on April 19, 1925, his cousin Walter Van Rensselaer Berry –  an international lawyer, man of letters, friend of Proust and Henry James, and fellow Paris resident – suggested he read Rimbaud.  

Voila!  Crosby got right on it.  On April 23, just a few days after his cousin’s suggestion, he quoted  Rimbaud’s schoolboy essay valorizing the strange life of poets (“let them live . . . Let the world bless the poets”)  in his diary.  

Crosby’s Books Read list shows he consecutively read three Rimbaud volumes: Premier Vers, Les Illuminations, and  Une Saison En Enfer which had been published as a set in Paris in 1922:

Premier Vers, Les Illuminations, Une Saison En Enfer : Éditions de La banderole, Paris, 1922.

Those three books look sweet, yes?  His copies of these books,  are at the Ransom Center in Texas;  he signed and dated the first volume April 1925.
 
Per his diary,  Crosby finished the three books by May 1, 1925, when he reported he had begun Jane Austen, quoting the man-saves-the-injured-woman scene from early in Sense and Sensibility and remarking, “how quaint after Rimbaud.” Indeed!  To emphasize the contrast, Crosby quotes (in French, natch) the visionary declaration found in the “Adieu” section of A Season in Hell:

Un grand vaisseau d’or, au-dessus de moi, agite ses pavillons multicolores sous les brises du matin.  J’ai créé toutes les fêtes, tous les triomphes, tous les drames.  J’ai essayé d’inventer de nouvelles fleurs, de nouveaux astres, de nouvelles chairs, de nouvelles langues. 

[A great golden vessel, above me, waves its multi-coloured flags in the morning breeze.  I’ve created all the feasts, all the triumphs, all the dramas.  I’ve tried to invent new flowers; new stars, new flesh, new languages.]

Rimbaud’s influence on Crosby work was profound but did not result in the immediate  emulations and imitations as did the reading of Joyce and Baudelaire.  That said, Crosby later in  the year  – see Shadows of the Sun, November 15, 1925 – acted on his love of Rimbaud in a most astonishing way: “Went out to buy silk pyjamas but came back with a first edition of Les Illuminations very rare as there were only two hundred copies edited by Verlaine and the price was five hundred francs.”  

Les Illuminations. Notice Par Paul Verlaine. La Vogue, Paris,1886

 Incroyable!  Today, that book would cost between approximately $29,000 and $44,000. 

Rimbaud stayed with Crosby, even as he read hundreds of other books in the years that followed.  In July 1927, for example, he packed  Edgell Rickword’s pioneering 1924 study Rimbaud – Boy and Poet when he traveled to Spain.  On July 10, 1927, Crosby wrote, “I believe with Rickword that all the great visionary poets have been more than human in their moral strength and their demoniac fury of self-belief.”  In August 1927, he (in his diary) singled out “Le Bateau ivre” as the best poem written before the mid-1920s.  

In September 1928, Crosby, in a diary entry, said he’d written a poem –  “Assassin” – influenced in part Rimbaud’s “voici le temps des assassins” [“now is the time of the Assassins”], from the very end of “Matinée d'ivresse” [“Morning of Drunkeness”] in Les Illuminations. In fact, Rimbaud’s line serves as the epigraph to “Assassin,” which was first collected in Crosby’s Mad Queen (1929).  The poem’s  an eight page, ten-part combo of prose and free verse.  Importantly, it’s not an imitation of Rimbaud but rather arises from the same kind of riotous almost superhuman and fevered fervency.  Tighten your seat belt and consider, for example, this four-page excerpt from the poem (note: “the Mad Queen” is Crosby’s self-invented Sun-Goddess):

Rimbaud and his poetry are repeatedly invoked in Mad Queen, including in the dardanic poems  “Stud Book” and “Sun-Testament.”  The latter takes the form of a will; Crosby has the Sun bequeath its “firecrackers and cannoncrackers” to Rimbaud.   

Most definitively, Crosby in an April 1, 1929 diary entry  flat-out declared: 

I [re]read Une Saison En Enfer and I believe that Rimbaud is the greatest poet of them all—bow down ye Shelleys ye Keates ye Byrons ye Baudelaires ye Whitmans for you have met your Master . . . .   

A few days later, on April 4, 1929, he diary-ed that he’d agreed to help fund and edit transition, having told founder Eugene Jolas the magazine should be based on the Rimbaudian “policy of revolution of attack, of the beauty of the word for itself . . . .”  Consistent with that, when the “Proclamation” supporting the magazine’s “Revolution of the Word” campaign was published in June 1929,“the hallucination of the word” was a central tenet and Rimbaud was named as the exemplar: 

Crosby in June 1929 celebrated his 31st birthday, which was to be his last.  As he reported in a diary entry the month before – see Shadows of the Sun, May 6, 1929 – he’d bought himself an early birthday present: “the first edition of Rimbaud’s [Une] Saison En Enfer”: 

Once again, incroyable !

Incroyable !

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Are you inspired?  I am.  Here’s a life, a creative journey, revolutionized by words written by others, by poets, bound in printed books.  Books!  The example of Crosby as a reader (and book-buyer) – almost exactly a century after it happened – should impress and inspire.  Especially today, I suggest, amidst all the texts, emojis, Instas, and Tik-Toks.  As Crosby wrote more than once in his diary, “Books Books Books Books . . . [!]”

Bust of Harry Crosby, sculpted by his wife Caresse

Philip Lamantia Day -- 2024

Today’s  the 97th anniversary of the birth of the great poet Philip Lamantia.  

Let’s celebrate, and cerebrate on, his poetry — shall we?  Yes! 

The image above was an early symbol of San Francisco’s Auerhahn Press.  Auerhahn used it at the  top of its 1959 announcement for upcoming publications, which included Lamantia’s Ekstasis and Narcotica, both published later that year.  The image – some sort of headless, bagpiping bird – is unusual and, with its mixed array of elements, seems at least potentially menacing (the image was collaged by the great artist Bruce Conner).

I share the image here because it gave rise to a May 1960 comment by the great poet Lew Welch that I came across earlier this year, which references Lamantia and got me thinking.  Welch, in pertinent part, wrote Auerhahn’s publisher (italics added for emphasis):

. . .  your colophon [ . . .] that headless, bagpiping bird [. . .] has a weird ferocity (like Mickey Mouse and Lamantia) . . . so comes on like your best poets.

(Lew Welch, Letter to Dave Haselwood, May 25, 1960 [in Letters from Lew Welch (Beat Scene Press, 2010].)    

I read “a weird ferocity” as Welch’s take on Lamantia’s poetry, and the characterization fascinates me.  It seems an apt way to describe certain key qualities of Lamantia’s poetry, maybe especially that from the 1940s and 1950s.  At the least, the term offers an interesting concept with which to re-read and think about those poems.

Before considering the poetry, how about Welch’s unexpected pairing of Lamantia and Mickey Mouse?  The coupling may puzzle if one knows only the modern anodyne Disney mascot and not the early-cartoon Mickey.  Steamboat Willie (1929), for example, features much slapstick-ish or odd violence, including Mickey throwing a bucket of water on a guffawing parrot’s head and later, as the bird mocks him from a porthole, nailing it square with a hurled half-potato, sending it into the river.  There’s also music made by cranking a goat’s tail like an old phonograph, and playing a duck like a kind of bagpipe and the teeth of a hippo as of they were bars on a xylophone.  This is a weird ferocity, I think, even if, as you may agree, it is relatively mild when considered against Lamantia’s work.

As for Lamantia’s poetry, Welch most likely was responding to the work in Ekstasis and Narcotica, which as indicated above Auerhahn had very recently published.  Ekstasis is full of marvelous, mystical, unusual  poems, many very intense.  Consider for example, the following section from “Fragments From An Aeroplane”, the book’s second poem:

Here, the repeated  “I sing,” while Whitmanesque (the phrase is used more than forty times in Leaves of Grass) — is worlds (or is it universes or dimensions?)  from ol’ Walt:  Lamantia celebrates not “one’s-self” or the “body electric,” etc., but “the far country of beasts window dust,” “the whorl of spaces,” “immensities and flowers entangling in a steel fountain / minerals” as well as “ladders to God / turning the unleveled EYE”. 

 

 

This all is most strange or extraordinary, or, to use Welch’s term, weird.   That is not a pejorative.   Rather,  as with the best stories in the old Weird Tales magazine (such as those of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith), the term denotes an outré work in which the writer’s imagination has had free rein.

This section of “Fragments From An Aeroplane” also has a powerful intensity and wildness.  There is  passion, and undeniable momentum, the letter greatly aided by the thrice-repeated “I sing” and the second appearance, in the fifth line, of  “the far country!” with an added mark of exclamation. There are also “beasts,” “lions,” “houses of blood,” and “graves”  and thus the implied fierceness, violence, and death. There is,  to use Welch’s word, a ferocity to the poem, along with the weird.     
 
Narcotica – with its alternate title “I Demand Extinction Of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs” might be the ne plus ultra of Lamantia’s poetic ferocity.  In the pamphlet’s opening piece, Lamantia declares “fuck yr safety” and grandly and poetically inveighs:

you, turds, fuckedup middleclass liberals and notsoliberal intellectuals DROP DEAD WITH YR ASS HOLE MAMMON MOLOCH MONEY MOTIVATED LAWS ! ! !  It is I WHO AM THE LAW! I DEFY YOU TO SAY IT IS NOT MY HUMAN RIGHT TO USE ANY GOD GIVEN HERB PLANT AND POWER FOR MY PHYSICAL AND PSYCHIC WELL BEING . . .

[. . .]

I DECLARE WAR on your lack of intelligence, socalled lawgivers and arbiters of every man’s pain!  I say ABOLISH THE PROHIBITIONS ON THE SACRED NARCOTICS . . . 

Should you care to read it, the entirety of this ferocious political tract is available in Lamantia’s Collected Poems, published in 2013 by the University of California Press.

There are also a handful of lineated Lamantia poems in Narcotica, and, natch, they include much that is goodly strange or extraordinary (aka weird).  “Memoria,” for example, includes a stanza relating to hashish, which includes an alliterative line that goes and goes and goes: “Flying fingers flail flagons of fabulous flamingos floating flamboyant farewells / on the fabled City’s Gate”.  Further, that poem ends with a touch of ferocity: “Marijuana seeress sibyl sentences silver and cut the throats of time!”

Welch’s “a weird ferocity” descriptor also likely took into account Lamantia’s first poems, written and published in 1943 and 1944, when he was but 15 years old.  Many of those poems, written from what Lamantia, quoting Andre Breton, called “the zone of ‘pure psychic automatism’” (see Preserving Fire: Selected Prose, Wave Books 2018, at 143) feature images of aggression and violence that remain deeply startling to this day, as well as much that is otherwise impressively strange or extraordinary.  

Here, for example, are the final two stanzas of “The Ruins,” one of the poems featured in Lamantia’s first national publication, the June 1943 issue of the New York magazine View:

    Here is a hot wind of knives
    cutting my breath for sport,
    and leaving behind a limpid song
    heard by a million murdered stars.
    
    Balls of arson charge a flood of rats
    going down to pray with the blizzard bone
    and the sound burns through a tower,
    the highest light of forbidden magic.

There is plenty similar in other early poems.  For example, “I Am Coming” features a “valley of beautiful arson” and a sky covered with sparrow blood.  In  “Hermetic Bird” Lamantia declares, “here is a landscape on fire” and “the children will come out to murder.”  There’s also “the boulevard / of crawling veins” – “Don’t be afraid / blood is cheap!”  Lamantia writes – and  knifing clowns (“Automatic World”), floating corpses, “bleeding eyes of murder,” “two girls / raped at sunrise” and “wounded boys” (“The Enormous Window”), “burnt flesh” and a “bracelet of animal entrails” (“Infernal Landscape”), filicide and incestuous  rape while “a clown’s laugh is heard in church” (A Civil World), a hanged girl (“I am a criminal bare upon the universe”), the “hot bite of dogs” (“Awakened from Sleep”), a “goblet of suicide” (“Touch of the Marvelous”), and “the corpse of a dog” along with “a sublime bucket of eyes” (“There are Many Pathways to the Garden”).  This all is truly a weird ferocity.  

Arising from the disinterested play of imaginary thought, these are – to use terms used by Lamantia at the time or later – poems of dreams, vertigo, madness, and rebellion, which reveal that which is concealed (see Preserving Fire at 3, 6-7, and 94-95).  In this regard, recall that physical aggression is well-recognized as normal in dreams.

 

These first poems, products of a preternatural surrealist instincts, also relate to Lamantia’s experience listening to radio serials as a child and young teenager.  As he later wrote, those serials resulted in “audial reception of violence, mayhem, murder and terror” which “were generally salutary for children” because, among other things, they were necessary for psychological development, had a dream-like intensity, and were fantastically poetical and had an imaginary grandeur (see Preserving Fire at 105-120).

I’m also reminded of a poem Lamantia wrote in the 1970s, with a title that also serves as its final line: “Only Creative Violence Reveals the Beauty of the Marvelous.”  While others likely understand this better, I believe Lamantia considered “Creative Violence” essential to break through the crass, mechanistic, stifling, even enslaving pervasive rationality of much of everyday life, metaphorically depicted in the poem as “this corrugated barnyard” and “this nausea of prosaic noise.”

 

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Philip Lamantia -- February 1999

Harry Crosby Day!

“. . . the Sun is a lighthouse on a Sea of Clouds . . .”

Yes, so wrote Harry Crosby in his diary on November 7, 1927, after seeing “a giant revolving phare” at the Salon Nautique, Paris’ annual boat show.

This is but one of many metaphors relating to the Sun that the solar-obsessed Crosby wrote in his diaries, poems, and notebooks.

“Lighthouse on a Sea of Clouds” seems particularly picturesque and poetic, and for those reasons is a favorite. Let’s celebrate it here – 

today – 

the 126th anniversary of Crosby’s birth on June 4, 1898.  

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Philip Lamantia Day -- 2023

 

 

 

“and isn’t it with daydreams that poetry begins to dance?”

 

 

Ah yes!  And aha!  

Today’s the 96th anniversary of the birth of Philip Lamantia, in 1927, in San Francisco!   

Let’s celebrate!  

How about we luxuriate in and cerebrate on the rhetorical question pinned between the photos above?

The question – permit me please to repeat it –

 

“and isn’t it with daydreams that poetry begins to dance?”

 

– is a line near the end of Lamantia’s “Diana Green,” a major poem first published in 1987 and included in Bed of Sphinxes (City Lights, 1997) and Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2013).  It’s a marvelous example of Lamantia directly and evocatively suggesting, in verse, what seems to me to be a key element of his poetics.

Daydreams and creativity – free and wild creativity –  have long been linked.  See, for example, Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Day-Dream (1842)  –

     “. . . I too dream’d . . . And ordered words asunder fly”

– and Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (1908), which ties reveries and creativity back to childhood play.  And there has been – click each of the five words that follow, if you please – plenty similar in recent decades. 

 

In the half-dozen lines that follow, from his “Bile Nature” (first published in 1976), Lamantia seems to present that which came from a daydream and also suggest much about the particular poetic dance of his imaginative reverie, including its wondrous movement, power, evanescence, drama, energy, fire, speed, weirdness, mystery, and magic:

 

the rainbow leaps onto the gorge of daydreaming be it
ever the sandy castles
fleeting as mental blowtorches
into the crashing water
quicker than a chipmunk’s chess game
reverses the coyote’s invisible dart

 

I enjoy here how the first verb in these lines – “leaps” – brings to mind grand jetés and the like, and thus the dance of poetic association-al daydream-y thought.

 

In the following lines from “Redwood Highway,” first published in 1981, Lamantia exults reverie – the “dream wide awake” – evoking via an image a drummed rhythm (dance again!) and, in this instance, a marvelous harmonic vision:

Chance to dream wide awake
With the antelope-necked tom-toms
Whose sinews of silence project
The perfect Edenic Reunion

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Lamantia’s suggestion that “with daydreams poetry begins to dance” reminds me of a marvelous biographical detail concerning his maternal Sicilian grandmother that he mentioned when talking on February 27, 1999  at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California.  Calling her a “special woman,” Lamantia remembered his Nonna, age 70, tarantella-ing at a huge gathering – hundreds of people – in a forested grove, winning first prize in a dance contest.  

 

 

 

I also remember how Lamantia, in a 1975 essay available in Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (Wave Books, 2018), described the surrealist dance of Alice Farley as “poetry itself moving visibly” (italics in the original) and how, in the notes to his poem “Redwood Highway” in Becoming Visible (1981), he praised “the surpassing poetic beauty of the Kachina dance” which he had seen in the Hopi village of Walpi.

 

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Let’s end with these beautiful lines, from “Pure Automatism” (a late poem, from circa 1999), which as I read them marvelously enact and describe, as they move across and down the page, the daydream dance of poetry – here an enthusiastic dendrologic / arboreal manifestation of that – while rightfully insisting that it don’t, to say the least, come easy:

 

words coalesce: sudden seed
                                      “thought”
                        into
            trunk, branches, then, up a whole
solar splendiferic Tree!
                         (diffusion)
effervescence        A quality of
           subsumed quantum—
           there’s nothing harder to do
                                  like true love
                                  — like automatic
                                                pilot. 

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Philip Lamantia 

at the

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center

Venice, California 

February, 1999

-- photo by Michael Hacker --

 

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¡¡¡ VIVA LAMANTIA !!!

 

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Harry Crosby Day!

 

Yes oh Yes on this day in 1898 Harry Crosby was born and Yes oh Yes we here celebrate the oh Yes quasquicentennial oh Yes of his birth and oh Yes oh Yes please do join the party!

Here is a short poem by Crosby from Transit of Venus, his fourth collection.  First published in 1928 by his and his wife Caresse’s Black Sun Press, the book was republished in 1929 and again in 1931, with a preface by T.S. Eliot, as a part of the posthumous Crosby Collected Poems.  This particular poem -- “All That Is Beautiful” -- is the third in the book.  It most definitely lives up to its title.  It is convincingly positive, a lovely love poem, and, in the end, a supremely Crosby-confident affirmation and celebration of the remarkable power of desire and passion.  So Yes oh Yes here it is for you: 

 

 

Eliot, in the preface mentioned above, asserted that Crosby’s poetry was “consistently . . . the result of an effort to record as exactly as possible to his own satisfaction a particular way of apprehending life”  and that what interested him the most was Crosby’s “search for a personal symbolism of imagery.”  If there is wisdom in these critical judgments -- and I think there is -- then “All That Is Beautiful” is a wonderful example of why that is so, and, more to the point, a most excellent example of Crosby’s wondrous way with words.  May the poem serve you well, especially today, the 125th anniversary of Crosby’s birth!

Harry Crosby, sitting in the Sun

    While deep within our hearts . . . 

Strange fire growing young . . .

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Philip Lamanta Day --- 2022

 

“Touch of the Marvelous” may be the best known of Philip Lamantia’s poems.  It’s certainly one of his earliest.  It was written in 1943, at age 15 (!)  and published—as seen above—in the February 1944 final issue of VVV, the surrealist magazine edited in New York by David Hare with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst.  The issue also included two other Lamantia poems, an ardent letter by him to Breton (“To rebel! That is the immediate objective of poets!”), a striking cover by Matta —  

— writings by such luminaries as Benjamin Peret, Aimé Césaire and Leonora Carrington, and art by, among others, Carrington, Enrico Donati, Duchamp, Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy, and Dorothea Tanning.  

Even among the stellar array of writings and art in VVV no. 4, “Touch of the Marvelous” shone bright, and still does today.  Here again is how the poem looked on the page (go ahead, read it again!):

The energy in this poem is—yes, I will say it—marvelous.  I wrote about it about ten years ago, when it appeared in the lead off spot in Lamantia’s Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2013).  

But I’m compelled to write about the poem again today, on —yes, I said yes — the 95th anniversary of Lamantia’s birth, in 1927, in San Francisco, because I recently finished—

—The Penguin Book of Mermaids (2019), “a treasury of . . . tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies,” as the publisher puts it on the rear cover.  Edited by University of Hawaii professors Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown, the book’s a delight, including the general introduction as well as the head- and endnotes for the sixty tales (some are excerpts), including 20 translated into English for the first time.  These editors know their stuff, and share it extremely well.

Reading The Penguin . . . Mermaids, I got to thinking on Lamantia’s mermaids in “Touch of the Marvelous” and how they fit with, extend, or differ from the centuries-old folk and literary traditions about the sea-creatures.  Shall we, er um, swim around in that for a bit?   

Lamantia’s poem fits the folk and literary traditions in its depiction of what Bacchhilega and Brown call “a fleeting interspecies encounter,” which they identify as one of three a common plots in merfolk tales (the others are the taking of a mer(maid)-wife, or the abduction of a human into the water.)    In “Touch of the Marvelous,” the mermaids arrive, they depart, and despite trying to hold on to one, the speaker–who I’ve always considered to be Lamantia—ends up “lost in the search to have,” “looking for,”  “recalling memories of,” and “looking beyond the hour and the day to find” the mermaid.     

However, different from essentially all traditional mer-tales, Lamantia in his poem encounters mermaids not in water or at its edge, but in “the desert.”  A desert with a “camel” and “sands,” details which make it seem genuine, and also of course very dry, with all that such metaphorically evokes in terms of—as I read it—a desiccated creative zone.  This bringing of sea creatures to dry land suggests the kind of resolution of opposites the Surrealists (and others, including Heraclitus) explored and pondered.  It’s  also a compelling visual image, and that it happens in the first line of “Touch of The Marvelous” is a high-power verve-charge.

Lamantia’s mermaids also embody the traditional notion that such creatures’ are able to transform themselves; as Bacchhilega and Brown say, “like water, they are shape-shifters that resist being contained.”  In “Touch of the Marvelous” the ch-ch-changes begin almost right away, with mermaids described with “feet of roses” instead of the typical tails.  But it is with BIANCA, first named in the fourth stanza, that the shape-shifting becomes a tour de force—or is it a chef-d'œuvre? (I say both).  The mermaid first turns into two giant lips and then, in the eyes of the poet who seeks her, “the angelic doll turned black,” “the child of broken elevators,” “the curtain of holes / that you never want to throw away,” and, ultimately, “the first woman and first man” (italics added, to emphasis the shape-shifting).  These transformations reverie-rev the imagination.

“Touch of the Marvelous” also reflects the relationship between mermaids and Sirens.  Professors Bacchhilega and Brown remind that Sirens, in Homer’s Odyssey, and on ancient Greek vases and funerary monuments, were human/bird creatures, with “the power of their song and music— rather than their appearance” their primary trait.  Over time, Sirens morphed into human-piscine beings, the professors teach, based on their power, shared with mermaids, to seduce; thus, as early as the 14th Century, Chaucer, as quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, wrote “[t]hough we call them mermaids here . . . Men call them sirens in France.” But while both seduce—“lead astray, divert, lead elsewhere,” Bachhilega and Brown clarify that the Siren’s lure is not entirely sexual, but “had to do with life and death, or knowing the future . . . .”

Only “mermaids” are explicitly mentioned in Lamantia’s “Touch of the Marvelous,” but I believe “Sirens” are in the poem too.  First, BIANCA is said to turn “with the “charm of a bird;” this invoking of the avian leads me right to the bird-women Sirens of antiquity.  And I hear the seductive song of  Homer’s Sirens when Lamantia writes he is looking for the region where BIANCA’s “eardrums play music . . . .”

In addition to those semi-direct associative references, Sirens are intuitively evoked given that Lamantia’s pursuit of BIANCA is not simply a desire for physical contact, although the references to “boudoir” in the early stanzas do point to a sensual experience, as does the “the mermaid’s nimble fingers” going through the poet’s hair.  He wants “the secrets,” to go to a yet unknown region where there conflagration, ascent (“where the smoke of your hair is thick . . . climbing over the white wall”) and music.  He believes BIANCA might be found out past all time (“beyond the hour and day”).  BIANCA may be a named mermaid in the poem, but she attracts, as do the Sirens, with knowledge and much, much more.  

If I had to give BIANCA’s allure and essence a name, I’d say “creative energy”—but of  a certain kind, one that’s directly related to Lamantia’s poetics: that which brings on or allows access to “the Marvelous.”   In this regard, consider what he wrote in the magazine Arsenal Surrealist Subversion (1976):

I have always dreamed of the ultimate triumph of the Sirens who, it was said, were ‘defeated’ in their poetic combat with the Muses, and who can be deciphered to typify imaginative freedom from the restraints of rationally controlled poetry, whose spokesmen, like all good bourgeoisie, must always recommend that we ‘plug our ears’ against the enchantresses heard by the inspired poet on his voyage to the unknown.

Roman mosaic: Odysseus and the Sirens (Bardo National Museum, Tunis, Tunisia)

¡¡¡ VIVA LAMANTIA !!!

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