I 'met' Gerard Malanga through an interview he did for the magazine Rain Taxi where he mentions Gene Derwood as one of the neglected poets from the 20th Century. I was quite moved by Gerard's expression of feeling for poets as well as their poetry.

One thing I feel to keep in mind is that you don't have to be a poet to read and enjoy poetry. Yet you can choose for poetry to be part of your life, just as your food selections that you eat are part of your life. Why do this? Living part time in the world of poetry is simply another fine reality besides the everyday world you live in.

The experience of a poem is a thing in itself. A poem often refers to the Outer World Of Everyday Reality. But you don't always have to live there. Probably you already spend considerable time in another world, like the World of Television, a world simplified to represent Everyday Reality.

The World Of Poetry is also another reality that you can choose to visit and live in as a regular part of your life. If you choose to do so you will be rewarded with a richer perspective than maybe you get from Telivision Reality, or at least another perspective to contrast Poetry Reality with Television Reality.

The poets here grew up without television. Nevertheless they had access to the wider world around them through movie newsreals and newspapers, and radio. When we read and absorb their poetry we can let ourselves experience the quality of the time they lived in. Let the experience just be a stream of consciousness for you, is my suggestion. Feel for a moment the presence of these poets living then. Enlarge your own consciousness and ability to feel in life.

I thank Gerard Malaga for sharing his poem on my mother with us, and for sharing these poets also. They each come alive for me through their poems. Here are three 'Neglected Poets' from the 20th Century selected by Gerard Malanga:

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Willard Maas (1906-1970)
DARK PASSAGE

Submarines move in black water
Out where the islands end in darkness

And your lips parting the silence

The desire of the starved mouth
And the lonely in a poor country

The sleeping man in the subway train
The last bird in the frozen snow

Eyes look through the sorrowing dark
Seeing the shadows stirred by leaves

Shudder beholding the angry mask
And rise kindled by a tower of light

Making of all desolate things a song

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Ben Maddow (1909-1992)
WHILE WE SLEPT

At four in the morning the smoke of the forded river,
a screen of leaves, and the best of a nervous generation
cleverly trained and bombed and dying forever.

While we slept in the tangled womb, we were armed and counted;
later as a child among people more sad and powerful,
we delighted in stars while graves were being planted.

Growing up, swimming, feeling the mind grow harder
beside the brilliant lakes, the sunlight between wars,--
our innocent names were figured in plans of murder.

Cool statesmen flying above our fears, protracted
crisis on crisis, till we cried to fire,--
unknown which way their promise of death was directed.

Autumn maneuvers and the praised betrayal,
September when we loved as in a burning house,
while ranks of metal were rolling to their empty trial.

Feeding us nitrate, but keeping the useful reflex,
our lungs on file and our probable loss discounted,
they will call us to lie awake in their deathly barracks.

Say no to the heroine, to the guilty sense of outrage
no, to the priest of immaculate nails, say no, no
to the name-brands massed, and the wet thrills of public courage.

Refuse their glory and their indignation,
their empire and their monument of exploding plane
defending the free routes of the profitable ocean!

Our freedom is simpler: white hills, and weather uncertain,
our presence unmarked on official maps, and naked
embracing in the afternoon room with the rainy curtain.

If this be treason now, and our poems imprisoned,
our nerves and weapons given triggers of despair,
then, let our thoughts be deadly, our deaths be reasoned:

Defending not what we have, the kindly fortune,
the research of years in diseases of poverty,
the islands, the gold at Fort Know, and the English porcelain,

But fighting for what we have not, and equal to suffer
wounds consciously in desire of life, of sun
universal, and the abolition of the poor.

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Angus MacLise (1938-1979)
FROM YEAR 1

new year day
the white fleets landfall
day of genevieve
the eleventh book
the fifth day
basalt day
holly day
granite day
oak day
quartz day
cedar day
first twelve
first ocean
day of the new world
day of the lefthand
day of dusk
day of the gap
day of the undertone
the long hold
the open book
day of awakening
day of speaking
the last council
second twelve
second ocean
the crescent heart
day of hail
day of drifts
day of frost
wolf day
the lost island

Frost was truly an American poet, because he was, well, American, at least after his ancestors cleared the New England land of the true inhabitants, the Native Americans. So there is always a dark side to the white farmer American. Living in the midwest and in California I have heard some stories of how Christian, white settlers would go out after midnight and kill Indian men, women and children, to clear the land of 'Indians' and gain the land for themselves. Behind the protestant, white American farmer facade is the skeleton in the closet. Not only did someone in the extended family in each generation go crazy, estimates of up to a half of the young women were raped in the sense of sexual incest that was practiced on the farms. But, startling as it seems, the same was found to be true for European farmers as well.

Author's note: After writing the above intuitively I have just researched and found out that Robert Frost had an ancestor, Charles Frost, living in Eliot, Main, who invited some Native Americans over for a feast and when they had stacked their arms he killed a number of them. They ones who escaped took revenge and killed him on his way from church.

Whose woods are these? My thesis confirmed! In Robert Frost by Jeffrey Meyers. Robert Frost apparently waved a gun at his wife in his farmer days.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To see his woods fill up with snow.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

We left out two verses about the horse which make it nice and quaint, and maybe take the sting out of the poem. The truth is that this strikes one as rather sinister. The owner in town owns the woods. Why? How? Stolen from Native Americans of course. These beautiful woods belonged to the people who lived in them not that long ago and did not cut them down or build farms of them, until the whites came.

The threat then of the owner seeing the person stopping to see the woods fill up with snow. This is the really ominous line, and marks this as good poetry because it is a subtle contrast with the peacefulness of the snowy scene in winter. The poet makes the point that someone owns these woods. Thus we realize that the white civilization has come in and taken over natural beauty. The rightful inhabitants before the whites did not proclaim individual ownership. Individual ownership makes possible the exploitation of nature and is in our day the cause of nature's downfall, and maybe our own as a human species.

All is not well in nature even and must be covered over by the white.

Promises to keep? Another ominous sign of the dark side. Modern white man lives by appointments in time. You promise someone ahead of time that you will be with them at a certain hour and so you limit your ability to journey freely enough to be with what is happening in the moment.

Many have seen the "miles to go before I sleep" as eventual death. Thus the traveler stopping by the woods senses the eventual quiet of dead, which happens to everyone, but he is not ready yet. He has purpose yet to want to stay alive. This implies that the owner of the woods is death itself, nature that gives life but also takes it all away. A natural woods has decay all about it while a woods in modern Europe is almost always cleaned up by foresters. There is no past in a typical European woods. They do not even let the trees get old before they cut them down. When they leave a patch, then they revere it as something mysterious from the past, rather than natural and therefore to be preferred.

Apparently Frost wrote this poem spontaneously at the end of a long night trying to write a 'big' poem. This came when his ego intentions were down and a natural flow just happened, the individual replicating history.

We draw parallels because we can see that Frost as poet, even in modern American society, was not safe from evil himself, or in his ancestry. Thus, while rural America was disappearing, Frost tried to go back to the land and farm a farm. Yet his readers were mostly in the city, and so loved his rural poetry. It doesn't matter that city readers have mostly escaped from rural America because they hated the village life they had to grow up in as much to limiting. Ah, the American village! It is also in the poem. The owner of nature lives there. So does death as owner of your body.

The American nightmare is to be truly in nature like the Native American, at one with the land. The transplanted American is really a European immigrant destroyer who had nothing in the old country and so fled to the new to exploit the land, using European values, rather than integrate with the land as modern ecologists would have us do.

It's truly a sinister poem, this one, but you won't hear this in the typical American college, literature class where this poem is highly revered. We may revere our poets for their poetry, but for their personalities? Almost never!