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

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