Philip Lamantia Day -- 2026

Lamantia signature on frontispiece of Bed of Sphinxes (City Lights Books, 1997)

Let’s celebrate today – and cerebrate on – the (my oh my!) 99th anniversary of the birth of the San Francisco-born poet Philip Lamantia (1927 - 2005).

This blog has fêted Lamantia’s poetry on October 23rd for nearly two decades: seek and ye shall find!  Indeed, the ardor here is reflected in the blog’s name: the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica is a line from a Lamantia’s mid-1980s mini-opus “America in the Age of Gold.” 

(By the way, that poem’s allusion-rich (and often difficult) vision of  “Poetry magic love liberty” remains, forty years after publication  and especially in our current too-often grossly over-gilded times, a compelling alternative to what the poem calls “the unequivocally mediocre.”  The poem as read by Lamantia in 1986 – the tape runs  six and one-half minutes – an be heard by clicking here.)

Today I honor Lamantia the Teacher: teacher of things new-to-me, and of new perspectives on things already known.  

Let’s begin by (re)counting the ways.  First, there are the poems themselves.  They have what is found in all good poems: that which is necessary for a healthy life, to awkwardly paraphrase William Carlos Williams’ beautiful lines towards the end of “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

                                                It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                        yet men die miserably every day
                                                for lack
of what is found there.

More than that, Lamantia’s poetry, especially that written in his last four decades (see The Collected Lamantia, University of California Press, 2013) often includes numerous allusions, many to people and locales not commonly known. For the curious and adventurous, those allusions provide still more to explore and study.  For example, in the above-mentioned “America in the Age of Gold” alone Lamantia references, among other things (I leave out here mentions of a dozen or so different birds): Coit Tower, Manhattan, Sor Juana, John Donne, Arizona, the Penitentes, the massacres at Humboldt Bay, the ruins of Brasilia, Church’s Cotopoxi, the tree monkey of Borneo, Mt. Konocti, Obisidian Man, and Gilak of the Pomo legend,  the Kalmath, Karuk traditions, Voleny, Cole’s Catskill paintings, Quidor, the Rogue River rapids, Meditation By the Sea, Calafian landscapes, Fata Morgana, Shiva, Celtic shores, Bisbee, Frisco, the Huachuca mountains, the collini lombardini, Murrel, the Natchez Trace, and Choctaws.

In addition, Lamantia’s prose essays, collected in Preserving Fire (Wave Books, 2018), contain much that can be studied.  The tippy-top examples here are probably “Radio Voices” (on childhood and old-time serials) and “Poetic Matters” (on the true role of imagination, including incisive comments on 20th Century American poetry).  The latter essay, decades ago, turned me on to the poetry of Mina Loy (for many years I carried when traveling a home-made copy of her “Songs to Joannes”) and Harry Crosby (among much else,  I’m currently re-reading his diary (written from 1922 to 1929), more or less exactly a century after each entry).  

There’s also much to discover in Lamantia’s interviews.  There’s not a large number of these, but they always educate; see for example the 1998 Q+A included in David Meltzer, editor, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights Books, 2001) and “Un Surrealiste En Californie” [interview, in French], in Yves Le Pellec, editor, Entretiens Beat Generation (Paris: Editions Subervie, 1975).   In the latter, for example, Lamantia says that his writing of poetry began at age 13, after he  first read Poe (he particularly liked “Ulalume” and the short poems), remarking (this my translation from the French) “I remember clearly the illumination caused by the reading” of those poems.  I still enjoy re-reading Poe with the young Lamantia in mind.  

There’s also interesting things that can be learned from Lamantia’s letters, written mostly  between about 1945 and 1970 he traveled extensively and lived for extended periods in Mexico and Spain (among other places).  Some of those letters an be read, albeit with considerable effort, at various university or other library special collections.  While he writes mostly about life events and his own work, Lamantia occasionally referenced other matters.  I remember, for example, an enthusiastic mention, in an early 1960s letter, of Ornette Coleman’s then-new Change of the Century – and giving that now-classic and still brilliant jazz LP a deep listen.   

 

Finally, given Lamantia’s polymathic ways, and habit of talking for hours both in-person and on the phone – which I was privileged to experience for three years or so (1998-2001) – conversations with him were often incredibly informative.  I remember, for example, Philip talking about birdsong and Olivier Messiaen; in short order I listened to that composer’s Catalogue d'oiseaux and other works (it seems relevant to include here that Lamantia’s 2005 memorial service included three Messiaen organ works, played live, including the mysterious and powerful L'Apparition de l'Église éternelle).  

 

 

I remember too a phone conversation in which he talked about the Beguines and Marguerite Porete, the 13th Century French mystic – he recited a poem he’d written about her – which caused me to read Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, which includes, “Ah Reason . . . you will always be one-eyed, you and all those who are fed by your doctrine.” 

I recall as well the time he mentioned linguist’s Roman Jakobson’s writings on poetry, causing me to seek those out. 

 

 And I remember too when he mentioned that Lizabeth Scott was his favorite film noir actress, which led me to try to see those movies (try Too Late for Tears (1949)).

 

As the examples above suggest, Lamantia’s poems, essays, interviews, letters, and talks, taken together, became for me a kind of ocean rich with things to check out or, if previously known, to consider in different ways.  Dozens of poets and hundreds of books, chiefly, but also certain art, photography, music and films.  I’ve happily taken multiple deep dives into many of these things, and those adventures continue.  I may not think every day on something learned from Lamantia, but it often seems as if I do.  I consider myself blessed – a lucky, lucky, lucky man – to have all that: may all who enjoy such learning find someone like Lamantia to fuel their trip.  

And now – this just happened just a couple months ago – there’s a marvelous addition to all the above: the syllabi and reading lists Lamantia put together in 1979 and 1982 when he taught classes on poetry / poetics at the San Francisco Art Institute.  These were posted at archive.org last summer by Raymond Foye, the NYC-based  writer, curator, editor and publisher.  While the files can be a bit tricky (the pdf titles don't always match the documents within), they provide a detailed snap-shot of Lamantia’s teaching-points at the time. Today, a diligent student can, somewhat miraculously given that it’s a half-century later, more-or-less audit the courses as Lamantia taught them.  For me, it’s a marvelous miracle.  

For your edification, here are Lamantia’s two-page syllabus and three-page supplementary reading list for his Summer 1979 San Francisco Art Institute “The Poetic Spirit” class: it’s a rich feast; between the two documents, dozens of writers and works are referenced, in addition to more general topics:      

How about that?  A bonanza, I declare, for those with an avocation for informal / individual-directed learning (keep in mind Lamantia was an autodidact himself, for the most part).  Also, while some or many matters included can also be found in Lamantia’s essays, much is not.  

 

Among the many matters in the syllabus / reading list that interested me was the mention of Claude McKay, included in Part V (“The Twentieth Century), right after Mina Loy and Harry Crosby.  I don’t recall reading of McKay in Lamantia’s poetry, essays, or interviews. McKay’s self-edited (tho posthumously published) Selected Poems (1953) – a beautifully designed book – is included in Lamantia’s “Supplementary Reading” list

 

 

 My best guess is that McKay was included in Lamantia’s course as a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and because his poetry, at its core, can be read as stemming from an insurgent / outsider imagination (which is the way Lamantia thought of Mina Loy and Harry Crosby).  

 

In that regard, consider McKay’s “If We Must Die” (1919), a sonnet of militant resistance to racial hate, and his similarly defiant “Outcast,” with its declaration, in the final couplet, that he “was born [ . . . ] out of time.”  I think also of  “The Desolate City,” with its extended metaphor in which a ruined, “pestilential” city stands for McKay’s internal physical and emotional state.  The latter poem includes this striking and strange image:

. . . green-eyed moths of curious design,
With gold-black wings and rarely silver-dotted,
On nests of flowers among those rocks recline
Bold, burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted,
But breathing deadly poison at the lips.

I wonder too if Lamantia dug Mackay’s “North and South,” given that that poem extolls “waking dreams” and the “breath of idleness in the air / that casts a subtle spell upon all things” – ideas that seem close to matters that Lamantia embraced.       

There are many other McKay poems I imagine Lamantia might have liked, including maybe most especially “Thirst,” a compelling and fervent expression of desire for fundamental change from a parched status quo:

THIRST

My spirit wails for water, water now!
My tongue is aching dry, my throat is hot
For water, fresh rain shaken from a bough,
Or dawn dews heavy in some leafy spot.
My hungry body’s burning for a swim
In sunlit water where the air is cool,
As in Trout Valley where upon a limb
The golden finch sings sweetly to the pool.
Oh water, water, when the night is done,
When day steals gray-white through the window-pane,
Clear silver water when I wake, alone,
All impotent of parts, of fevered brain;
Pure water from a forest fountain first,
To wash me, cleanse me, and to quench my thirst!

The image of “[t]he golden finch” in McKay’s poem reminded me that Lamantia wrote and published several poems in the 1980s that mentioned  finches: “America in the Age of Gold”, “Unachieved”, “Poetics by Pluto”, “Diana Green”, and “Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga”.  It’s a  coincidence, I think, though an example of how close study, including (and maybe especially) of all- things-Lamantia, can result in discovery of marvelous matters. 

¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!  

Philip Lamantia at Beyond Baroque Los Angeles February 1999

(Photo by Michael Hacker) 

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Salvatore Quasimodo Day -- 2026 !

 “i sonnecchianti ciclamini . . . a schiudere i loro corallini petali”
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[“the slumbering cyclamen . . . unfold their small coral-hued petals”]

Today’s the 125th anniversary of the birth – on August 20, 1901, in Modica, Sicily – of the Nobel-honored poet Salvatore Quasimodo.  Let’s commemorate – and celebrate!  I’ll do so here by printing, then cerebrating on and luxuriating in, “L’Aurora” [“The Dawn”] – Quasimodo’s self-described “primo lavoro poetico”[“first poetic work”].

Written probably in 1915 – so at age thirteen or fourteen – and first published in the journal Humanitis (Bari, 13 May 1917), “L’Aurora” does not have the era-defining pure language of Quasimodo’s 1930s hermetic verse or compelling gravitas of his more civilly and socially engaged post-WWII poems.    

That said, “L’Aurora” charms.  As with most of Quasimodo’s youthful poetry, there’s “verbal exuberance” and “entrancing energy,” in the words of Marco Sonzogni, one of the translators (along with Gerald Dawe) of The Night Fountain (Arc Publications, 2008), a bilingual selection of Quasimodo’s early work and the book in which I first read the poem.  

In addition, “L’Aurora” has lots of Sicily in it!  The island’s atmospherics, birds, colors, and flora – you’ll see! – anchor and enliven the poem.  That there’s lots of such detail is not surprising given that Quasimodo wrote the poem while attending secondary school (similar to American high school) in Messina, having to that point always lived in Sicily, including, as a young child, the Ionian coastal town of Roccalumera.  

In addition, “L’Aurora” thrills with plenty more, including an allusion to Dante and – oh how au courant this summer – a Homeric epithet!  

In short, while “not yet mature poetry” – those the words of Quasimodo’s son Alessandro, in his foreword to The Night Fountain,“L’Aurora” shows more than enough lexical skill and poetic instinct to justify multiple readings – and a place in your heart.  Here’s the 14-line (thus a kind of sonnet) poem, first in Quasimodo’s Italian and then an English translation [modified from Sonzogni and Dawes]:

L’AURORA

Bianca, fugace, la nebbia svapora 
nell’aria pura.  S’indora l’oriente, 
s’effonde la luce: ecco l’aurora. 
L’ultimo grido il gufo alla fuggente 
tenebra getta e nel silente ombroso 
bosco dispare.  Incomincia l’amore 
allegri trillano fra l’odoroso 
aere dei giovani arbusti in fiore 
gli uccelli.  Si drizzan sullo stelo superbi 
i sonnecchianti ciclamini, 
aspettando impazienti che nel cielo 
turchino, luminoso l’astro d’oro 
sorga a schiudere i loro corallini 
petali.  È la rosea aurora: al lavoro!

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THE DAWN

White, fleeting, the mist evaporates 
in the clear air.  The east turns gold, 
the light pours out: here’s the dawn. 
The owl casts its final cry into the fleeing
darkness and vanishes into the silent,
shadowy woods.  Love begins
birds sing joyously amidst the fragrant 
air of the young flowering shrubs. 
Proudly, the slumbering cyclamen
straighten on their stems, waiting 
impatiently for the luminous
golden star to rise in the deep blue sky
and unfold their coral
petals.  It’s the rosy dawn: to work!

I love this poem!  May I share a few thoughts about it?

The poem’s opening two sentences set the scene, and do so, I think, with a sweet sweet syllabic / sonic rhythm, with a twist at the end.  Follow along, if you please: the first line has three clauses; the first and second contain (in Italian, natch) a single three-syllable word, while the third has two three-syllable units – an article-noun combination followed by a single word.  Further, in all those three-syllable words or word-combos, the second syllable is stressed,  Here is that first line, with pronunciations (using English phonetics) in brackets:   

Bianca, fugace, la nebbia svapora 

[ Bee-AHN-kah, foo-GAH-che, la NEHB-byah zvah-POH-rah ]

This is a nice steady rhythm, and it continues in the second line, with a combined prepositional phrase that’s – you guessed it –  another three syllable lexical unit, with the accent on the second syllable –  

nell’aria

[ nel-LAH-ryah ]

– with the sentence then ending withe something that, lexically and sonically, is completely different:

pura.

[ POO-rah. ]

Coming after five consecutive three-syllable words or word-combos (each with the stress on the second syllable) the final word of the sentence – “pura” [“POO-rah”] – is and sounds more concise (two syllables) and sharp (accent on the first syllable).  The word, to me, rings like a bell, and by its sound reinforces the the word’s meaning of “clear.”  I think Quasimodo purposefully ended the sentence this way, for a good poetic reason. 

The syllabic fun of “L’Aurora” continues in the second sentence.  It begins mid-second line with a pronoun-verb followed by an article-noun, each of which – natch – has three syllables with -- natch again! -- the stress on the second,  and then, in the poem’s third line, continues with yet another pair of – you know it! – three-syllable / second-syllable accented lexical units (a pronoun-verb followed by an article-noun):  

 . . . S’indora l’oriente, 
s’effonde la luce:

 [ . . . Seen-DOH-rah lor-YEN-tah,
sef-FOHN-deh la LOO-cheh: ]

all of which sets up, after the the colon, the culminating:

ecco l’aurora

[ EH-koh low-ROH-rah.]

The“ecco” here is marvelous.  First, the stressed first-syllable and hard “c” of  “ecco”, after all the contrasting three-syllable word combinations that precede it, neatly matches the sonic twist at the end of the first sentence.  

More than that, is there a better word, in Italian or maybe anywhere, than “ecco”?  The word’s formal meaning, perfectly applicable in “L’Aurora”, is “here is”.  But it can also – and does here – serve as a cue to pay attention. Yes, Quasimodo is telling us not only is dawn here, but dawn is the subject of the poem, and we should pay heed.  Ecco! Ecco! Ecco!  

Quasimodo then presents a lovely image: a night owl’s final cry and both how-it-happens but also kind-of-magical retreat into the trees’ quiet shadows.  There may be a symbolic element to the vanishing: in Sicilian folklore, the owl is sometimes considered a bird of ill omen; in the poem, as the day begins, that bird has flown.   

Next comes a sentence that, in the Italian, extends over parts of four lines, and, with its birds singing in the  air made sweet by young flowering shrubs presents yet more naturalistic details – but which begins with, at least on first reading, may seem like a jarring abstraction:

Incomincia l’amore   

[ Love begins ]

While different from the naturalistic particulars that both precede and follow it, the abstraction “Love begins” works because it sincerely reflects, and is a simple declaration of, Quasimodo’s understanding of life’s passion at daybreak.  Hearts swell when day begins; the dawn is ardent.  Thus, this declaration,  unconnected by formal punctuation or grammar to the remainder of the sentence: a poem after all is a poem: the “rules” need not apply.    

Next come the poem’s key lines, which contain its most compelling and complex image.  In these lines, Quasimodo presents a compound-complex sentence of three clauses (both in the original and translation here) across part or all of six lines, including its final one. It’s an eyeful, but oh so great:

 . . .   Si drizzan sullo stelo superbi 
i sonnecchianti ciclamini, 
aspettando impazienti che nel cielo 
turchino, luminoso l’astro d’oro 
sorga a schiudere i loro corallini 
petali.  

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[ Proudly, the slumbering cyclamen
straighten on their stems, waiting 
impatiently for the luminous
golden star to rise in the deep blue sky
and unfold their small coral-hued
petals. ] 

 O I love these lines! There is first, in the beautiful Italian, the alliterative zz’s and ss’s at the start of the sentence, and then, of course, sonnecchianti ciclamini, a word-combination of eight syllables that is oh so wonderful in the layrnx, on the tongue, and in the air.  If you need to, please copy-and-paste those two words into a site that pronounces foreign languages.  Bella, yes? 

I love too the use of l’astro d’oro [the golden star] instead of the more pedestrian – “il sole” [the sun].  Quasimodo’s more lofty term is not only more poetic but also infuses a sun-worshiping vibe that I dig.  The term also, especially with the added ‘luminoso” [luminous], energizes the image.  What with the luminous gold appearing in the oh so sensuous “cielo turchino” [deep blue sky], Quasimodo shocks us with sparkling color.  And to all that Quasimodo then adds the cyclamen’s unfolding coral petals.  Deep blue, luminous gold, and coral.  Oh là là: what a palette of colors!  

Cyclamen is native to Sicily, so its appearance here is another detail of the island’s flora and fauna in the  “L’Aurora”.  But the coral colored petals, I suggest, has important symbolic value too. In Sicily, coral – the sea-dwelling animal / substance, and by extension the color – has a deep traditional / cultural history as a symbol of protection, life, and good luck.  How deep is the tradition?  Consider this: in Antonello da Messina’s San Gregorio Polyptych (1473), Sicily’s early Renaissance painting masterwork, a kind of Mona Lisa for the island –  and which alas in August 2026  was stolen (!) from a Sicilian museum – features in its center panel a baby Jesus wearing around his neck, as protective charm or apotropaic amulet, a small red coral pendant! 

 

I believe that in “L’Aurora”, Quasimodo’s  “Corallini / petalli”, appearing as the day begins, has the same same protective / apotropaic role.   

And there’s still more!  As other have pointed out, Quaismodo’s six lines about the straightening on the stem, petal-unfolding cyclamen were plainly borrowed from a similar image in Dante’s Inferno.  Here are the relevant tercets (lines 127-132) from the Inferno’s second canto, in Italian and English (the latter by John Ciardi):

Quali fioretti dal notturno gelo
chinati e chiusi, poi che ‘l sol li ‘mbianca,
si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,. 

tal mi fec’ io di mia virtude stanca,
e tanto buono ardire al cor mi corse,
ch’i’ cominciai come persona franca . . . 

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As flowerlets drooped and puckered in the night
Turn up to the returning sun and spread
Their petals wide on his new warmth and light –

Just so my wilted spirits rose again
And such a heat of zeal surged through my veins
That I was born anew . . . 

[Alternatively, and perhaps more directly (if abbreviated), the Hollanders’ translation: “As little flowers, bent and closed / with chill of night, when the sun / lights them, stand all open on their stems, / such, in my failing strength, did I become.”

Of course, Quasimodo in “L’Aurora” does not explicitly use the awakening cyclamen as a simile for his own renewed confidence and energy, as Dante does with his morning flowers.  But doesn’t Quasimodo’s  unspoken but surely recognized-by-many allusion to Dante’s lines and simile here surely make that same connection happen without being obvious about it?  I certainly say it does.  The cyclamen’s straightening and unfolding here corresponds precisely to Quasimodo’s – the poet-speaker’s – renewed creative focus and strength as the day begins.  

There’s then the poem’s final sentence.  It begins with a declaration: 

È la rosea aurora:  

[ It’s the rosy dawn: ]  

That must be an allusion to Homer’s oft-used epithet, right?   In that regard, when Quasimodo decades later published his translations of selections from The Odyssey – Dall’Odissea (Mondadori, 1951) -- 

 

– a half-dozen of the excerpts included, you will not be surprised to learn, “Aurora dalle dita di rose” [“Rosy-fingered dawn”], to quote the words Quasimodo used!  In “L’Aurora”, the use of the Homeric term is both a convincing detail of how it actually was, and a reminder of Quasimodo’s s familial and cultural Siculo-Greco identity: his paternal grandmother was Greek, and of course Sicily was central to Magna Gracea.

 Finally, there comes in the last line the concluding clause, after the colon:

al lavoro!

[ to work! ]

Explication isn’t needed here. Let’s just salute the enthusiastic vigor of youth, and the poet’s embrace of, his dedication to, the task at hand! 

And salute also today, on the anniversary of his birth, Salvatore Quasimodo’s marvelous “primo lavoro poetico” [“first poetic work”].

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Harry Crosby Day

Today’s the 128th anniversary of Harry Crosby’s birth, on June 4, 1898.  And so today I . . . , well, not so much celebrate but commemorate the date, given that the focus here is on . . . death.  

Death, and suicide, were a central focus of Crosby’s life, easily seen by even the most basic review of his biography (he died at age 31, in December 1929, in a murder/ suicide (or double-suicide), of/with his mistress) and writings (see, for example, his prose-poem “Sun-Death”(in 1929’s Mad Queen), originally titled “Hail : Death !” when first published in a variant version).

Crosby’s obsession with death/suicide is, for me, deeply unsettling and uncomfortable, even awful. The obsession contrasts sharply with much that was invigorating and inspiring in his life, including to him, such as his devotion to and championing of poetry, writing, and books (reading, collecting, and publishing), or his deep passion for many people and things of this world, as shown in many passage of his diary (see Shadows of the Sun, Black Sparrow Press, 1977).  He loved many women and men, and his diary recounts many moments of awe and wonder, both grand and intimate, in his years in Paris and associated travel. 

 Crosby’s attraction to / need for death probably arose from, or was super-charged by, from the crucible / psychological scrambling of his World War I service, including at Verdun, particularly the November 22,1917 incident in which a shell obliterated the ambulance he was driving (and seriously wounded his passenger) but somehow left him physically unharmed.  The War clearly impacted him profoundly, and  never left him.  As he wrote in February 1925, after having finished Les Croix de Bois [Wooden Crosses], Roland Dorgelès’ moving novel,  “ . . . above all else we who have known war must never forget war.  And that is why I have the picture of a soldier’s corpse nailed to the door of my library.”

Morris Ekstein, in his Rites of Spring (1989), suggests the war was for Crosby an escape from what he saw as the dreadful dull life of Boston’s elites, and that the war’s “pervasive horror” became “ a stimulus . . . to personal imagination and inwardness an avenue to a new and vital realm of activity.” 

Gregory Wolff, in his seminal biography, suggests that Crosby’s focus on death in part pre-dated the war, and, in the Afterword when the book was republished, describes “the mystery of his suicide” and says Crosby was the “willing prisoner of his announcement that he would control his end, die when and how he chose.”  See Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, 1976 / 2003).   Of course, Crosby, again to judge by his diary, was in the last years of his life also a heavy drinker and regular user of  opium, perhaps resulting from, and/or reflecting, deep psychological depression.  

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Given his obsession with death, it comes as no surprise that Crosby, in his seven or so years in Paris, occasionally visited the city’s famous cemeteries, as documented in his diary.  Once he visited, on the same day (April 4, 1925) both Charles Baudelaire’s grave in Montparnasse and Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise.  He also visited the Catacombs.  

(Side note: for a deep-dive into the continuing vitality of Paris’cemeteries, click-thru for Peter Ross’s well-done article in Smithsonian Magazine, November 2025).  

To me, the most interesting aspect of Crosby and Paris cemeteries involves a little known graveyard he happened upon in late 1923, while walking with his wife Caresse in the Bois de Boulogne (the Boulogne Woods), a large public park on the city’s western edge that also had a well-known horse racetrack that they frequented (both to race their horses and to bet on others).  Known as the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp, it became a favorite place for him, and the “story” here, traced from nearly twenty diary entries spread over the following five years set in or which reference the cemetery, is fascinating.  It shows well Crosby’s sensibilities, particularly (and obviously) his intense obsession / identification with death and place, but also his love of the authentic both in locales and people (here, the Roux, an elderly couple who served as the graveyard’s caretakers).  Best of all, the story, such as it is, can be told in Crosby’s words, and should be – and as such also serves as an exemplar of his observational skills, attention to details, and poetic diary writing.  

Here then are the relevant excerpts from his diary (with bracketed explanatory text added for context, plus a few historic photos of the cemetery, such that I could find):

1923

    December 18.  A long walk in the Bois [de Boulogne] and we came upon a stone house half-hidden by the trees, a house with a garden enclosed by a stone wall and guarded by a great iron gate.  A handful of silver to the old crone and the gate was swung open.  The Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp (had never heard of its existence) and we wandered among the graves, and the grass was tall and unkept and weeds everywhere and moss growing upon the wall and tombstones all leaning awry and by our side the aged crone mumbling and muttering.  With her lean forefinger she indicated the grave of a danseuse du roi [King’s dancer].  Cypress trees grouped in a corner and the place overrun by cyclamen.  A real burying place.  We must be buried there.

    Christmas and for me a purple handkerchief (“and all that there is of beauty in me to give”) and the day is very clear and cold and after prayers at the Madeleine [La Madeleine, presumably] and after luncheon at the H’s where everyone drank hot punch from a great wassail bowl, we walked out to the Bois [de Boulogne] to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp where the old woman greeted us.  The Cimetière and the Soul.  Dead leaves and the frost on the ground and the sentinel fir tree watching over the dead.  Over the top of the stonewall a red-gold winter sun had almost set.  The air was cold and damp and in the underbrush we saw a leaning tombstone with an archaic urn carved upon it.  Nearby a simple stone cross enclosed by four low stone pillars these linked together by a rust-corroded chain.  Among the trees a white goat browsed and under the dark wall.  Soul in Eternity dreaming and praying prayers into the departing Sun.  It was dark when we reached Paris . . . . 

 

1924

    October 16.  Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp; entangled foliage, gravestones leaning awry, moss-covered stone walls,   [¶]   Perhaps it is here I shall kill myself.   [¶]   Must live in colors.  A red-gold sun flames westward with my inmost color-prayers (“et leurs cendres reposent dans la même urne” [“and their ashes rest in the same urn” – an unattributed quotation from Ovid, Metamorphoses]

    Christmas and the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and orchids and gardenias on the grave of the danseuse du roi.  The Gate to the Sun.
        
1925

    March 16.  [At the Escorial, in Segovia, Spain] . . . the gloomiest part was the descent into the crypt . . . where lie the buried Kings of Spain, down a long granite staircase, into the small octagonal burial-vault built directly under the high altar of the church . . . . Black sarcophagus and the empty tomb of Alphonse XIII . . . and how many times must he be haunted by this chamber of horrors.  How different this chamber which oppresses, which smothers, from the sunshine and moonlight and chaste disorder of the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.       
        
    October 31.  Gold and red and brown are the leaves on the ground and it is a gray day and our black Dom Luco gallops out to the post (Casaque Grixe, Croix de Malte Rose, Toque Noire) and twenty-two horses ran and we were twenty-second and afterwards to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.     

  
    Christmas.  And C is still away and it is a sombre grey day and out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp—one strong flame into the red-gold Sun.  And a gift to the Roux (they were there before I was born) and a glass of wine with them and there was the dog and the parrot and the white goat. 

1926

    May 24.  The Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.  Chequered sunlight and prayers and I read the Rubaiyat sitting against a tree trunk and there were twin trees upgrowing in oneness from a humble grave and their branches were interlaced and there were the lichened walls and the dense foliage and the moss-covered tombstones lean awry (like love-thoughts leaning in the brain) and there were prayers into the Sun (my soul a fountain playing into the Sun, gushing sunthoughts into the Sun).

    June 29.  [. . .] . . . and to the  Cimetière after supper and we ran Narcisse [the Crosby’s whippet]—a black arrow through the long grass . . . .
    
    July 4.  [In Massachusetts] More of Symons [The Symbolist Movement in Literature (expanded/revised 1919 edition)] – Léon Cladel who (like E.E. Cummings) employs ‘oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very shape of his accents!’ and ‘l’âme de  Léon Cladel était dans un constant et flamboyant automne’ ["Something of the colour and fever of autumn is in all he wrote.”]  This is me and my Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and my red-gold sun. 

    July 11.  [In Massachusetts] The Beach again at noon and I was bored and C. was terribly bored and I thought of the Cimetière . . . .
            
    July 31.  [In Siasconsent, Massachusetts] . . . of all places the most dreary. [ . . . ] After supper C and I and the mother-in-law to the Cinema and it was disgusting, especially the audience, and there was rowdyism among the children . . . for whom this damn country seems to be run and how the place smelt, stank rather, of bananas and cococola and ice-cream.  Resolved to become a Persian.  Thank Christ (if the Sun-God is willing) a month from to-night we should be back in Nineteen Rue de Lille.  [ ¶ ]  Before supper to-night holding an orange-blossom cocktail towards the red sun, the red-gold knowledge of the color of my burning shoe into the remoteness of my soul.  Thank you O Sun and Prayers and Aeolus and Green and Gold and the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.

    November 13.  To the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and the Roux present us with a “canard” (nourished on corpses?) and it was wonderful to see the pleasure they got from giving us this gift and there were Prayers . . . . 

 

1927

    May 11.  To the Montparnasse Cemetery to get our gravestone and in a taxi I took it out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp . . . .

    December 25.  Christmas for the Christians but for Sun-Worshippers the Birthday of the Sun and I walked out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and there were skulls lying in a heap (they are rearranging things) and I moved our gravestone from the chicken yard to a place of security under a fir tree and I gave the Roux a hundred francs and we drank together Benedictine from my flask and I fed an apple to the goat . . . .  

1928

    First Day of the Year.  [. . .] . . . and out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp where we found the frightening queer old Madame Roux wandering among the graves like someone walking in her sleep (c’est-il vrai Monsieur [is it true Sir]) and Narcisse went sniffing into the Invisible Sun and there were strange goings on—graves being rearranged and six tombstones have disappeared and we went away . . . .
        
    May 31.  [returning from Versailles] . . . and it began to rain a rain of stars and on the way home we stopped at the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp to get our gravestone and to say goodbye to the Roux (too disgusting of the park commissioners to destroy the walls and to put all the skulls and skeletons in one common grave—I am furious with them especially as I had offered to pay for the preservation of the walls) . . . . 

 And so the story ends -- the cherished almost forgotten cemetery taken down by the park commissioners, with Crosby -- understandably and even, it seems, justifiably -- furious at the action, with his dreamed-of final resting place vanished.

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the painting in the yard . . .

Well well well

beauty

and the poetic

endure: 

the backyard Bruce Conner

(aka HOMAGE TO JAY DE FEO, by Anonymous) 

nearly 20 years (!) here on-site, 

adjacent fence-post reinforced, 

and

most wonderfully: 

frame still solid (recently adorned with a small sun-mirror at its center) 

and

a few teeny bits of painted canvas 

still holding 

at the vertical edges 

all with 

a marvelous seasonal over-grow

of 

wild nasturtiums and purple cineraria

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For the back-story:

click-thru for the very elegant and informative

2011 essay by poet-editor Garrett Caples,

and see also

the final chapter (“Bruce Conner”) of independent curator and writer Jordan Stein’s 

very rich Rip Tales (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2021), 

and 

Rudolf Frieling, “Bruce Conner’s Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes,”

in

It’s All True (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016)

at pages 325-326.

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Sigurd Olson Day !

 “There is a sense of adventure and aliveness about the hour of dawn.

  Trees are more sharply etched, horizons more distinct, 

sensations more vivid than at any other time of day.”

 --- Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness (1958), page 282 

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Sigurd F. Olson was born on this date in 1899 (the 19th century!) and died in 1982 -- but through his work, particularly his books, lives on and should be -- as is hereby done right here, right now -- celebrated.

Olson was an environmentalist and writer with deep ties to what is now known as the Boundary Waters wilderness area, straddling the northern Minnesota / Canada border.  In his day it was known as the Quetico Superior; Olson first visited and fell love with it in his early 20s, and was an almost constant presence until, about 60 years later, he died there while snowshoeing.  

Olson’s books typically contain short chapters each of which focus on some aspect of the wilderness, blending observations with personal emotion and, often enough, broader perspectives – all shaped by a most admirable sensitivity and way of thinking (see, for example, the quotation at the top of this celebration).  

Every place in this world, or at least every wilderness, should have a Sigurd F. Olson, and I suppose some have (thinking for example of John Muir and the Sierra or, more recently, Edward Abbey and the Utah Canyonlands).   

 

The Singing Wilderness (1958), Olson’s first book (he published eight others in his lifetime), is organized by a series of short chapters tied to the seasons.  Each chapter is a kind of gem, and some astonish. 

In particular, I will never forget the chapter on the Northern Lights, with his description of ice-skating at night on a totally snow-free clear frozen miles-long lake, the windless surface mirroring the sky’s awesome aurora such that, ultimately, he – well, here’s an excerpt:

The lights of the aurora moved and shifted over the horizon.  Sometimes there were shafts of yellow tinged with green, then masses of evanescence which moved from east to west and back again.  Great streamers of bluish white zigzagged like a tremendous trembling curtain from one end of the sky to the other.  Streaks of yellow and orange and red shimmered along the flowing borders.  Never for a moment were they still, fading until they were almost completely gone, only to dance forth again in renewed splendor with infinite combinations and startling patters of design.   

The lake lay like a silver mirror before me . . . .   As far as I could see, the surface was clear and shining . . . . [ . . . ] . . . there had been no wind or snow to interfere, and the ice everywhere was clear—seven miles of perfect skating, something to dream about in years to come.  

Hurriedly I strapped on my skates . . . and in a moment was soaring down the path of shifting light which stretched endlessly before me. [ . . .]  As I sped down the lake, I was conscious of no effort, only of the dancing lights in the sky and a sense of lightness and exaltation.   

Shafts of light shot up into the heavens above me and concentrated there in a final climactic effort in which the shifting colors seemed drained from the horizons to form one gigantic rosette of flame and yellow and greenish purple.  Suddenly I grew conscious of the reflections from the ice itself and that I was skating through a sea of changing color caught between the streamers above and below.  At that moment I was part of the aurora, part of its light and of the great curtain that trembled above me.   

Those moments of experience are rare.  Sometimes I have known them while swimming in the moonlight, again while paddling a canoe when there was no wind and the islands seemed inverted and floating on the surface.  I caught it once when the surf was rolling on an ocean coast and I was carried on the crest of a wave that had begun a thousand miles away.  Here it was once more—freedom of movement and detachment from the earth.  

 Down the lake I went straight into the glistening path, speeding through a maze of changing color – stroke – stroke – stroke – the ringing of steel on ice, the sharp, reverberating rumbles of expansion below.  Clear ice for the first time in years, and the aurora blazing away above it.     

Me o my.  Happy Birthday anniversary, Sigurd F. Olson!

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Philip Lamantia Day -- 2025

 

 

Today’s the 98th anniversary of the birth of Philip Lamantia, born in 1927, on Sanchez Street in San Francisco.  And yes I said yes let’s celebrate!     

This month also marks the 70th anniversary of the epochal poetry reading, held October 7, 1955 at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, at which Lamantia and five others read, including, most famously, Allen Ginsberg – who for the first time read “Howl” in public.

This confluence of anniversaries reminds, natch, that Ginsberg in the fifth (paragraph-like) line of “Howl” referenced an early 1950s visionary experience of Lamantia:

“who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.”

Ginsberg’s line, as explained in “High Poet,” the magnificent essay / introduction to The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (University of California Press, 2013), “took poetic license” with Lamantia’s experience, which Ginsberg had learned about from Jack Kerouac, who had been told of it by Lamantia.  As “High Poet” explains, “the actual incident took place in an apartment on Polk Street in San Francisco.”

Lamantia wrote about this particular visionary experience at least three times: in a poem first published in 1961, in a second poem written that same year (though not published until 2001), and in a prose statement written in 1986 for the annotated edition of Howl.  It’s interesting to read these three versions one after another, to consider the details that recur and those that vary, such that one might have a fuller understanding of the experience.  And that’s how I celebrate the birth-anniversary of Philip Lamantia today!   

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Lamantia’s first version of the experience appeared as part of two-poem suite titled “VISIONS”, the first part of which is an untitled prose poem that begins, “The marvelous unveils its face in front of me.”  It was published in 1961, in the first issue of the little magazine Damascus Road.  Here’s how that part of the poem directly about the vision appeared (and heads-up for the typographic glitches with the word “and” in the second and third lines, and the word “was” a bit more than half-way through): 

Lamantia here presents his experience here as a memory, in an electric sentence-paragraph. For me, it has a  delicious and nutritious you-are-there vividness, and effectively uses both repetition (e.g.,  “. . . I was in bliss further out than any earthly one, great bliss, that I wanted to stay in that place of radiant bliss . . .”) and occasional ALL CAPS for emphasis.  More generally, and without meaning to be reductive, these words’ verve reasonably raise the question of whether they reflect or a kind of mania. In this regard, Kay Redfield Jamison, in her classic Touched with Fire (New York: The Free Press, 1993) -- a book Lamantia knew well and praised in the late 1990s -- observed:

From virtually all perspectives – early Greek philosopher to twentieth-century specialist – there is agreement that artistic creativity and inspiration involve, indeed require, a dipping into pre-rational or irrational sources while maintaining ongoing contact with reality and “life at the surface.” The degree to which individuals can, or desire to, “summon up the depths” is among the more fascinating individual differences. Many highly creative and accomplished writers, composers, and artists function essentially within the rational world, without losing access to their psychic “underground.”  Others . . . are likewise privy to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly irrational sources with more logical processes can be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a “touch of fire,” for what it has been through.

Perhaps Jamison's thinking is applicable here? Or perhaps Lamantia is simply extraordinarily receptive to matters most of us cannot perceive?  Regardless, I love the unbridled energy here. The concluding exclaimed italicized Samadhi! underscores that energy while confirming the profound mysticism of the vision reported.    

 

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Lamantia in 1961 also wrote of this visionary experience in the final lines of the long poem “Crystals”, the typescript of which he shortly thereafter gave to the artist Bruce Conner, who eventually donated it to the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, which in 2001 first published the poem in a small hand-set edition.  Here’s how that final section looked there:  

 

 

Compared to the Damascus Road version, this lineated and more detailed telling adds, among other things, “fire”, specifies that the lights were “multicolored,” shares the marvelous double (or is it triple?) synaesthetic “the sound of color the color of sound in a motion of Silence” and the circling flood of perfect unsayable happiness in the standout standalone line:

fire of bliss ekstasis of infinite bliss indescript ekstasis

Lamantia also adds “stellar space,” “planets,” and “lachrymous pearls” and, most impressively, at the poem’s end, after reporting that he shouted “I HAVE SEEN THE TRUTH”, a vision-within-the-vision, in which he reveals that he saw “THE LIGHT BEHIND THE STARS,” declaring “MY EYES WERE FULL OF IT.”  This idea of a power, reality, or state beyond the visible seems very true to Lamantia’s broader poetics.  

All told, this version of the vision takes the top of my head off, to use Emily Dickinson’s idea about how one knows something is poetry.

 

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Finally, here’s the 1986 prose statement, as it appeared in the annotated Howl: 

 

This statement includes details of when and how the vision occurred (e.g., the year and season, Lamantia’s age, reading the Koran), and details about the vision itself (e.g., the contraction of consciousness to a single point, the specific colors of the lights) that frame and add to what was presented in the earlier poems.  In addition to that, I found most interesting the repeating three times of  “suddenly” -- a word that does not appear in the poems -- which neatly conveys the unexpected and mercurial quality of the vision as it unfurled.  All told, the statement – two long compound-complex sentences – is a mighty rich and poetic paragraph.  

 

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While extraordinary, this “was told I could return . . . after I had worked!” / “I must work to return” /  “You can return, after you complete your work” vision is but one of many memorable recountings of or allusions to visionary episodes in Lamantia’s poetry.  As The Collected Poems’ “High Poet” states in its first paragraph, Lamantia “welcomed . . . visions” and that essay thereafter  more than two dozen times references his visions or his (or his poetry’s) visionary characteristics.  Similarly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s foreword to The Collected Poem declares that Lamantia’s voice was “ecstatic and visionary.”  

As such, it’s not surprising that Lamantia has not only a handful of poems that explicitly include “Vision” in their title, such as “Night Vision” in Erotic Poems (1946), his first book, but also, by my rough count, about 50 other poems in which the words “vision”, “visions”, or “visionary” appear.  

 

There are further many other poems that clearly or seemingly arise from a vision, even if that word itself isn’t used.  These include for example, the “see[n] water over” The City and Berkeley in “Last Days of San Francisco”, and, in “Once In A Lifetime Starry Scape,” the “dream[ed] . . . moat between” what I believe is Telegraph Hill and the nearby “buildings of monolithic glass” in San Francisco’s Financial District.  There are in other poems more internal visions, such as the “spell” referenced in “Inside the Journey” and the “butterflies of desire,” “eyes the dahlias of torrential ignition,” “[t]he stone . . . tossed into the air of chance” and much else envisioned in “The Romantic Movement.”  

“High Poet” correctly states Lamantia “sometimes provoked” visions “through such vehicles as meditation, religious ceremony, and psychotropic substances (the editors – Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron, and Nancy Joyce Peters – marshal plenty of supporting facts for all that). “High Poet” also repeatedly references Lamantia’s episodes of manic-depression, as well as his ecstatic flights.  These  psychological and emotional states, as alluded to above in relation to Jamison’s Touched with Fire, may have precipitated some of Lamantia’s visionary episodes and poems, or provided openings for receiving these intense moments. And yet – based on repeated readings of  his work as well as many conversations with him circa 1998 to 2001 – my abiding belief is that Lamantia’s visionary poetry is best considered as arising from his marvelous creative imagination, (preter)natural surrealism, omnivorous curiosity, and devotion to exploratory thought, all harnessed, at least in the best of times, to a deep commitment to lexical expression.    

 

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¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!

 

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Philip Lamantia, in front of a part of his library (1987)

 

 

-- photograph by Rob Lee -- 

 

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Salvatore Quasimodo Day -- 2025 !

 
Salvatore Quasimodo (Kaw-ZEE-mo-do) was born this day in 1901, in Modica, Sicily.  Salute!  

When his first book (Acque e Terre / Waters and Lands)  appeared in 1930, Quasimodo was grouped with the Italian hermetic poets.  His early poems did indeed have their share of difficult and subjective  images, though the work’s strongest points, to me, are its details, often in the form of direct or implied memories, from his childhood in Sicily — for example, the sea, its pebbled shore, the wind, and name-checked locales such as Tindari and the Necropolis of Pantalica -- and its Quasimodo-ian aloneness.

Quaismodo’s insistence on our aloneness can be profound, even when lightened by the occasional ecstastic moment, such as, for example, the declaration in Specchio (“Mirror”)  – spurred by buds on a seemingly dead branch and the reflection of sky in a puddle – that “E tutto mi sa di miracolo” (“And everything seems to me a miracle”).  Here’s Quasimodo’s best-known poem, first published in 1930 as the concluding tercet of Solitudini, then subsequently (and ever since) as a stand-alone work (and a no-doubt classic too):

Ed è subito sera

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera

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And Suddenly It’s Evening

Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening   

Living (and resisting) in Milan during World War II, Quasimodo’s poems took a turn towards what critics call the civic, directly engaging with the brutal realities of life.   This is reflected in the titles of his late 1940s collections: Giorno dopo giorno (Day After Day) and La vita non è sogno (Life Is Not Dream).  The imagery in these war-time poems can sear, as in the opening lines of Alle fronde dei salici (“Under the Willow Branches”):

E come potevamo noi cantare

con il piede straniero sopra il cuore,

fra i morti abbandonati nelle piazze

sull’erba dura di ghiaccio, al lamento

d’agnello dei fanciulli, all’urlo nero

dalla madre che andava incontro al figlio

crocifisso sul palo del telegrafo?

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And how could we sing

with a foreign foot on our hearts,

among the dead abandoned in the squares

on the grass hard with ice, to the lamb-like wail

of the children, to the black scream 

of the mother who went to meet her son

crucified on the telegraph pole?

Quasimodo was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Many suggest the award came on the strength of his unflinching WW-II era poetry.  That may be so, but Quasimodo wrote plenty of great poems both before and after that era.  He was  also an accomplished translator, including a masterful collection of ancient Greek lyrics first published in the early 1940s.  He was clearly a giant of 20th century poetry, for his native Sicily, his homeland of Italy, and the world.

Today – the 124th anniversary of his birth – I celebrate Quaismodo by remembering a love poem  published in 1948.  It’s set in Milan, where Quasimodo lived for much of his adult life.  More specifically, its set in the Cerchia dei Navigli (Circle of the Navigli), a district with interconnected canals that, in the post-WWII years were still used for transport and industry, though many had been filled (today, a few canals remain and the area is known for what the guidebooks call its quirky charm and beauty, including the views along the water at dusk, particularly at the Darsena Basin, where two canals meet and trees line the bank).    

Quasimodo’s poem, two stanzas, each  of twelve lines, is a gem.  The English translation used below draws from versions by Allen Mandelbaum (1960) and Jack Bevan (1983), plus my own interpolations:

 Quasi un madrigal

Il girasole piega a occidente
e già precipita il giorno nel suo
occhio in rovina e l’aria dell’estate
s’addensa e già curva le foglie e il fumo
dei cantieri.  S’allontana con scorrere
secco di nubi e stridere di fulmini
quest’ultimo gioco del cielo.  Ancora,
e da anni, cara, ci ferma il mutarsi
degli alberi stretti dentro la cerchia
dei Navigli.  Ma è sempre il nostro giorno
e sempre quel sole che se ne va
con il filo del suo raggio affettuoso.

Non ho più ricordi, non voglio ricordare;
la memoria risale dalla morte,
la vita è senza fine. Ogni giorno
è nostro. Uno si fermerà per sempre,
e tu con me, quando ci sembri tardi.
Qui sull’argine del canale, i piedi
in altalena, come di fanciulli,
guardiamo l’acqua, i primi rami dentro
il suo colore verde che s’oscura.
E l’uomo che in silenzio s’avvicina
non nasconde un coltello fra le mani,
ma un fiore di geranio.
 
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Almost a Madrigal

The sunflower bends to the west
and already the day falls in its
ruined eye, and the summer air
thickens and already curves the leaves and the smoke
of the construction sites.  This last play of the sky 
fades away with flowing dry clouds
and a screech of lightning.  Still, 
and for years, my dear, we’re stopped by the changing
of the trees crowded within the Circle
of the Navigli.  But it is always our day
and always that sun that goes
with the thread of its affectionate ray.

I’ve no more memories, I do not want to remember;
memory rises from death,
life is without end.  Every day
is ours.  One day will stop forever,
and you with me, when it seems late.
Here on the canal bank, our feet
swinging, like children,
we watch the water, the first branches within
its darkening green color.
And the man who approaches silently
is not hiding a knife in his hands,
but a geranium flower.

Madrigale (madrigal) is an Italian term for a short lyrical poem of amatory character.  Why, per the title, it this “quasi” (“almost”) such a poem?  I think there’s a philosophical element at work here (discussed below) that almost (but not quite) over-tops the love lyric, and there’s also the concern, raised in the final lines, that criminal conduct (not uncommon in post-war Italy, as I understand it), could intrude on the lovers’ scene.  That sociological-type fact does cloud the amatory  mood, if only for a moment.   

As for the poem itself, its first six lines, comprising two sentences, marvelously set the scene.  The first sentence, with its four uses of “and” and two of “already,” neatly conveys the rush of observations at the quickly approach end of day –  its compound structure and length make it  literally almost breathtaking.   I like too how the “ruined eye” of the sunflower, and the active construction sites seem true to – reflects – what the historical record says about post-war Milan (the city had been heavily bombed, and there was a diligent efforts to rebuild).  The second sentence’s “last play of the sky” brings a sense of theatrical drama to the scene, while the described action of the clouds and screech of lightning adds movement and sound.  

In the final lines of the first stanza the poet’s subjective view becomes primary.  I love how  Quasimodo here says change – the transitory day’s end –  is stopped (in the implied minds and hearts of the lovers) by change itself (that which they observe in the trees) itself.  Of course, it’s the  act of noticing that frames the moment and powers this halt of time.  These lines also further anchor the scene by referencing the Naviglia district.  This a very local poem with – as you see from reading it – a most universal subject.   

The declaration that begins the first stanza’s final sentence – “è sempre il nostro giorno” (“it is always our day”) – is an ardent and concise (and thus brilliant) affirmation of the lovers’ togetherness and – think more importantly – ability for a moment to conquer time.  It’s totally convincing, and  – looking ahead – clearly becomes, with its almost repetition in the second stanza -- the poem’s fulcrum principle.  

The first stanza’s final image – a thread of affectionate sun-ray – provides a noteworthy  contrast to the not-entirely-friendly piercing sun-ray in  Ed è subito sera.  I’d love to know whether  anything Quasimodo had in mind this twist on his earlier image.  I’ll bet he did.   As the second stanza begins, Quasimodo asserts  he has no memories, or even desire to remember, suggesting that such arise from death. The abjuring of memory here is remarkable.  In a poem just two pages later than this one, he flatly declared “I poeti non dimenticano” (“Poets do not forget”).  That  Quasimodo posits the exact opposite here suggests that he knew that sometimes there should be or is only the NOW, and that life should be, or is sometimes is, only an endless series of NOWs.  

The sentence the follows – Ogni giorno / è nostro (“Every day / is ours”) echoes the almost identical statement in the first stanza (“è sempre il nostro giorno” / “it is always our day”), which again emphasizes the lovers’ unity.  But the repeated “nostro” here, I suggest, also brings together the poet and the reader.  Yes?  Yes!  In this way, we are now in the poem – in the moment – with Quasimodo and his partner.      

The poem then reminds that one day, the day – the  moment – as well the two now occupying it, will be truly gone.  But the moment persists, gloriously: the image that follows, of the two sitting at the canal’s bank, feet swinging as if children, looking at branches reflected in the water, is marvelous, and the use of commas in that sentence neatly mimics the physical action.   

The final image, of course, with the threat of harm or violence superseded by a flower is sweet, and lovely.  I’ll suggest the geranium bloom could come off as too cloying, but for the implied threat of the knife. It’s a wondrous conclusion to a most memorable poem.   

map: la Cerchia dei Navigli

Darsena Basin, Navigli Canal

 

 

 

un fiore di geranio