Strephon Kaplan-Williams Books

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

.... continued.....
Now for an honest critique of Randell Jarrell's most recognized poem by the son of Oscar Williams!

Randell Jarrell
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Ball Turret Gunner is a fine piece of poetry in its economical use of its imagery to convey an impression that is at once objective and subjective. Washing out the dead gunner from the turret implies an explosion dismembering the body. This poem has message also. The mother gives birth to the child who is then claimed by the State, by the society one is born into. The poem is also metaphor. Here is described being in a bomber, yet it is the State itself one is caught in, with the implication that the State, just like war, is only interested in that each citizen do a job, and not interested in that the person is also an individual deserving of respect after death, dying for the State.

Don't wash out my remains when I die of too much poetry!

The whole thing of the poem is like a lump of clay. Fashioned after a fashion to be something, but in fact turns out to be nothing. Like fashioned clay, the poem is no more than the words it is made with. The meaning of the poem turns on the wit, the construction of the metaphor. The experience does not lead to meaning.

So what? you say. Why does a poem have to be an experience of meaning? A poem only has to be an experience of something. A poem is an experience of a life event?

No. A poem is an experience of being a poem, whatever that means to anyone. Poetry's Manifesto - Poetry Is The Experience Of Poetry, And Not Life. This is the manifesto: A poem must be an experience of a poem.

That is all that is required now for poetry. And of course this is in itself a high standard. For most scribbling that the poets call their poetry are mostly experiences of surfeit of image and rhetoric, of confusion and chaos. And lastly, most poems that are not really poems are experiences of boredom. They simply don't make sense at any significant level.

At least Randell Jarrell's poem here is not of confusion or surfeit of metaphor and rhetoric. At least it can justify itself as an experience of a poem, whether it offers any meaning or insight to its reader or not. Or whether, even, it evokes a sentiment, which is the word to use for indicating feeling responses, a movement forward of ones whole being, that are only generated by sincere and transparent experiences of reading and listening to real poetry.

You can't write a poem about love, for instance. You can only love, and words will not describe what you feel as you make intimate contact with another. Yet in and with poetry you can experience love as it is experienced through sincere reading and accepting of a poem itself expressing love.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments," says Shakespeare. "Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. Oh No! It is a great bark that on the seas does go . . ." and so on!

The point is that in human love involving bodies, ones love expression does alter when it finds alteration in the love object. We are not talking about human love in Shakespeare's poetry love. In poetry love, Shakespeare make the statement, and it is a noble one, that love does not alter when it alteration finds.

Thus are we propelled then into the experience of "listened poetry," the world of "poetical reality." A true lover of poetry goes into poetical reality because he or she lives well there, loves her or his life there, as moments away from daily, outer life, but maybe closer to the soul's life.

One must realize that, just like with the true mystic, the true poetry writer and lover is not interested in poetry changing the reality of the world. As a poetry writer or lover, one is interested in only one thing. This is the play of words that creates in the listener a true sentiment, a true inner feeling not generated by outer reality events, but by a poetry event.

This magical-like experience is at heart very simple. Poetry does not have to have a carryover into life and life does not have to have a carryover into poetry. These are separate realities. These are separate worlds, and so easy is it to confuse the difference between the two.

Even in war poems from battle, soldiers one would think, as they probably thought, that the horrors of war were producing their poetry. It would be more the other way around in which the poet is already producing poetry, is already developing poetical reality, and then goes to war. Therefore in battle Wilfred Owen can say in a moving poem, "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." and we weep.

Yet we don't weep as soldiers in the battle field over a kill, theirs or one of their own pals. We weep as civilians comfortable somewhere with a bit of solitude on our hands.

We feel the sentiment of war but not the experience of war. The experience of war probably cannot be conveyed by the poetry of war. The poet does not create the war. The poet participates in war and creates poetry. It is natural to the poet to live a reality experience but to also be evoked to write into poetical reality a new sentiment, maybe similar to, but certainly not identical to the experience of a war event.

Wilfred Owen can go on killing, as required to do under war circumstances, but in his spare moments of solitude he can also go on being a poet. His war poems are not created to end war. Poets and poems do not end wars, just as they don't start wars. Wilfred Owen, whether he knew it or not in these words I use, was as a poet creating a poetical reality based on the play of words and what they evoke called poetry.

This is why in reading true war poems we can experience the sentiments evoked by war in real poets. We don't have to have been in hardened battle ourselves, surely to have a strong experience of war in poetical reality. Many soldiers in battle would not come close to reading a poem or understanding it, even if the poem was written by a battle-hardened soldier.

Only those who choose to enter poetical reality and live there part time can understand the sentiments evoked by effective poems that are poems because they allow the experience of poetry in experienced readers.

Certain readers say how much they enjoy reading Oscar Williams' Immortal Poems of the English Language when they go on air flights. If you have ever been on an air flight you know how much of a suspended and limited reality experience that it. The utmost concentration is put into airplanes flying safely, almost to the point of boredom. Driving a car has far more immediate dangers, such as driving inadvertently off the side of the road at high speed, because you fell asleep or something. Every moment in a car is used in staying alert to all the things that can go wrong in each moment of driving.

Yet for the plane passenger, some would rather take those eight to ten hours and basically spend their time in poetical reality, and so they take the best anthology of great poetry they can find and go there to dwell awhile. And why not? They are not flying the plane, are they? What is there to keep them in flying reality where almost everything but your toilet work is done for you?

Have we made the point clear? Such labor as we do here is to try and make very real the differences between everyday experiential reality and poetical reality.

Just remember, love between human beings is a feeling experience that is not the same as love sentiment expressed in poetry. When in poetry be in poetry. When in outer existence be in outer existence. Dare we say more?

Thus we can say that Randell Jarrell's poem, Turret Gunner, is not about war. It is about poetry. Does it work to bring you more into poetical reality, or does it leave you flat? Poetical reality for the experienced is a rather rich reality in itself. It is not easy to get there. But once you have arrived, it is not easy to leave.

I don't think that in my poetical reality I would want much Randell Jarrell poetry experiences there. Once you wash out the gun turret of his poetic waste you want something far more substantial and lasting. Randell Jarrell writes like someone who does not believe that his things will last.

No, like a teenage orgasm, most people's poetical instances are over in a minute, if they are that positive at all. But mostly most of his poems do not reach the status of poetry, having been written with wandering metaphors and misplaced conceits. The poetry lover cannot even find where to start, let alone where to go, on the Randell Jarrell poetry journey. The critic has not turned into poet after all. His promise as poet has been actualized only briefly too soon and too late.

Critics are a waste of time. Get to the poetry itself if you want to enter poetical reality and have fulfilling experiences there. Oscar Williams never acted as any poet's critic. He just loved poetry and spent the best of his life putting out the best of the poetry he loved.

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!