Norbert Blei's Poetry Dispatch and other Notes from the Underground. “We live to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection,” said Anaїs Nin.
EMMETT JOHNS
WORD & IMAGE,
THE ILLUSTRATED NOTEBOOK
The recent piece on Henry Denander (see archives, Poetry Dispatch #279) brings to mind my friend, Emmett Johns and his life upon the blank page.
I think it was the summer of 1995 that I first saw the sketchbooks / notebooks / journals he religiously keeps. For those who may know Emmett, “religious” is both the right and the wrong word. “Spiritual” is perhaps a little closer. With a deep bow to Zen, meditation, and the great good silence we seek. And for Emmett especially: How to show-&-tell, express all this, simply in a man’s life.
Many artists record what they see in sketchbooks—follow the line, pen or pencil. Emmett’s images sometimes break into words—what he’s seeing and thinking, inside. He is one of those. One of us–those of us who occasionally need to speak two languages simultaneously, word & image.
I remember gathering an armful of Emmett’s black sketchbooks / journals one fall, as he was preparing to leave Door County, for New Mexico. ( A man of two places, two minds.) I remember spending that whole winter going through his work, page after page, in search of a narrative, a greater story, a different book-of-sorts. The kind I like to see and read and write.
I remember the agony and the ecstasy of sifting through everything, looking for a form that would show and tell and in some way also ‘teach’—for readers who wanted to see and know and learn.
I remember finally settling on about 64 pages of drawings/writings from his sketchbooks—plus front and back cover illustrations. Plus inside the front and back covers. That’s how challenging and tempting it was. I couldn’t get enough of his work in a small chapbook—to suit me! And others, I was sure.
The book finally came together in a work called I THOUGHT YOU WERE THE PICTURE. Cross+Roads Press published it in 1996. Only the 6th chapbook to come off the press (presently at work on #32). Staple binding. Eight bucks. (A special signed and numbered edition of just a few more bucks where he did an original drawing in each book.) A total run of 500 copies. All of them—long gone.
I still love this book—cover to cover. Love looking into it. Always finding something new. Always finding the best of my good friend in these pages.
Here’s an introduction to Emmett for some of you: I THOUGHT YOU WERE THE PICTURE. A chapbook, revisited. We need to do this more often, revisit the stacks and shelves of small press publications we own. Honor their very existence. Honor ourselves–those who work for, have published in, or may be small press publishers. We’re a lot better than much of the mainstream out there, work a hell of a lot harder for little profit or exposure, with MUCH to show for our efforts. A whole history of underground literature in fact. Poetry Dispatch, Notes from the Underground, Basho’s Road—all these sites are filled with some astonishing work—by known and mostly unknown writers. With more to come.
Following the excerpts of Emmett’s work is a small poster about a workshop he will be teaching June 22, 23, 24 at the Peninsula Art School in Fish Creek. For details, contact: www.peninsulaartschool.com Those of you in the Midwest (or elsewhere)…I couldn’t recommend a better experience than working (just listening) to Emmett in a teaching atmosphere. You can contact him at: emmetjohnsatabqdotcom or www.emmettjohns.com. —Norbert Blei
Artist Mike McCartney, artist Emmett Johns, writer Norb Blei...on an opening exhibit of Emmett's paintings.
This is the first in a projected series of Dispatches (pieces/writings) dealing with The End of the story…the way too many writers and artists through history have chosen to say goodbye. It’s not a recommendation, an approval, a judgment of any sort. It’s all about the creative act…the words, the thoughts, the feelings, the work…what it all leads to, so sadly for some. Its many manifestations. –Norbert Blei
Old Ladies’ Home
by Sylvia Plath
Sharded in black, like beetles,
Frail as antique earthenware
One breath might shiver to bits,
The old women creep out here
To sun on the rocks or prop
Themselves up against the wall
Whose stones keep a little heat.
Needles knit in a bird-beaked
Counterpoint to their voices:
Sons, daughters, daughters and sons,
Distant and cold as photos,
Grandchildren nobody knows.
Age wears the best black fabric
Rust-red or green as lichens.
At owl-call the old ghosts flock
To hustle them off the lawn.
From beds boxed-in like coffins
The bonneted ladies grin.
And Death, that bald-head buzzard,
Stalls in halls where the lamp wick
Shortens with each breath drawn.
[from SYLVIA PLATH, Collected Poems]
A TORTURED INHERITANCE
by Linda Gray Sexton
PALOMAR PARK, Calif. from: The New York Times, April 3, 2009
I HAVE been crying for Nicholas Hughes. I never met Dr. Hughes, yet I believe I know a great deal about him. He was the second child of the poet Sylvia Plath, who gassed herself in her oven when he was a toddler. I am the elder daughter of the poet Anne Sexton, who gassed herself in her car when I was 21.
Nicholas Hughes hanged himself two weeks ago at the age of 47. And despite my insistence that I would never turn out like my mother, I tried to kill myself, too — three times — and would have succeeded once had it not been for the efforts of a determined police officer, who forced open the window of my car.
Did it surprise me to read about his suicide? Not in the least. As my mother wrote in one of her most famous poems: “I have gone out,…a possessed witch … lonely thing, twelve- fingered, out of mind./A woman like that is not a woman, quite./ I have been her kind.” All of us who follow that depressing family path — from suffering to suicide — have known what it is like to be her kind.
Nicholas Hughes’s mother, and mine, succumbed to the exhaustion of unrelenting depression. They self-destructed. And we grew up in the wreckage of their catastrophe. Their deaths took away from him and his sister, Frieda, and from me and my sister, Joyce, the solace of a mother’s love. And worse, all four of us, I imagine, had to live with the knowledge that our mothers had quite willfully abandoned us.
Understanding and accepting this is heart-wrenching, but it is a necessary part of healing. I have wanted to kill myself, but I survived, and so can attest to what Dr. Hughes, like my mother, probably must have felt — that there was no other alternative.
Studies show that some kinds of depression are hereditary, and suicides tend to run in families. But even if there isn’t an absolute genetic component, there certainly is an emotional one. When I turned 45, the age at which my mother killed herself, I too began to be drawn to suicide as a way to escape pain. This was my inheritance. My guess is that I wasn’t alone: hundreds of thousands die by suicide each year. And hundreds of thou- sands of families are damaged by that loss.
Of course, not everyone reacts in the same way. My sister doesn’t like to speak publicly about our mother, and she doesn’t think she is “her kind.” Perhaps Frieda Hughes is more like Joyce, perhaps her brother once was as well. Or maybe they were more like me, trying to recover by talking about what happened. My mother always said, “Tell it true,” and I believe she thought, as I do, that it is important to share the experience of depression with others, who may be suffering in the same way. Which is why we need to speak about these things, to help families deal with their depressed children, siblings and parents, and to intervene and alter the dark world of suicidal legacies. I continue to worry about myself — but I worry about my children more. Despite the dangerous inheritance my oldest son faces, and the depression he also fights, he urges me to keep writing about it, just as his grandmother did.
Sadly, I’ll never get to know Nicholas Hughes. I know he was a fisheries biologist living in the forests of Alaska. I know he was more than a suicide. In a memorial, a friend wrote that he was the kind of man who “would seek out a larch tree in a forest of spruce.” I hope he’s succeeded in reaching it.
[Linda Gray Sexton is the author of "Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton."]
Her Kind
by Anne Sexton
have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
SYLVIA’S DEATH
by Anne Sexton
for Sylvia Plath
0 Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in the tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia,
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
)’ust how did you lie down into?
Thief!—
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and then the quiet deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
0 Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know at the news of your death,
a terrible taste for it, like salt.
(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,
what is your death
but an old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?
(0 friend,
while the moon’s bad,
and the king’s gone,
and the queen’s at her wit’s end
the bar fly ought to sing!)
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them—
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
[from SYLVIA PLATH, The Collected Poems]
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, children’s author, and short story author. Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright, ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York. The plot parallels Plath’s experience interning at Mademoiselle magazine and subsequent mental breakdown and suicide attempt. Along with Anne Sexton, Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry initiated by Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass.
Plath was born during the Great Depression on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to Aurelia Schober Plath, a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and Otto Emile Plath, an immigrant from Grabow, Germany. Plath’s father was a professor of apiology and German at Boston University and author of a book about bumblebees. Plath’s mother was approximately twenty-one years younger than her husband. She met him while earning her masters degree in teaching. Otto was alienated from his family because he chose not to become a Lutheran minister, as his grandparents wanted him to be. They went as far as taking his name out of the family Bible.
In April 1935, Plath’s brother Warren was born. The family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts in 1936, where Plath spent much of her childhood on Johnson Avenue. Plath was raised a Unitarian Christian and had mixed feelings toward religion throughout her life. Plath’s mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath’s poetry. Plath published her first poem in Winthrop, in the Boston Herald’s children’s section, when she was eight years old.
Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath’s eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend’s symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he too was ill with lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Otto Plath is buried in Winthrop Cemetery, where his gravestone continues to attract readers of Plath’s poem “Daddy.” Aurelia Plath then moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1942. Visiting her father’s grave prompted Plath to write the poem “Electra on Azalea path”.
Plath attended Smith College, where she dated Yale senior Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in The Bell Jar is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium near Saranac Lake; while visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident described in the novel as suicidal, but in her journals she describes it as a legitimate accident (the suicidal aspect was likely fictionalized for the novel, which is not her autobiography).
During the summer after her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not at all what she had hoped it would be, beginning within her a seemingly downward spiral in her outlook on herself and life in general. Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. Following this experience, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt by crawling under her house and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Details of her attempts at suicide are chronicled in her book. After her suicide attempt, Plath was briefly committed to a mental institution where she received electroconvulsive therapy. Her stay at McLean Hospital was paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had also funded the scholarship awarded to Plath to attend Smith. Prouty had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. Plath seemed to make an acceptable recovery and graduated from Smith with honors in June 1955.
She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge where she continued actively writing poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. It was at a party given in Cambridge that she met the English poet Ted Hughes. They were married on June 16, 1956 (Bloomsday) at St George the Martyr Holborn after a short courtship.
Plath and Hughes spent from July 1957 to October 1959 living and working in the United States, where Plath taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The couple then moved to Boston where Plath audited seminars by Robert Lowell that were also attended by Anne Sexton. At this time, Plath and Hughes also met, for the first time, W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend.
Upon learning that Plath was pregnant, the couple moved back to the United Kingdom. Plath and Hughes lived in London for a while on Chalcot Square near the Primrose Hill area of Regent’s Park, and then settled in the small market town of North Tawton in Devon. While there, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. In February 1961 she suffered a miscarriage, and a number of her poems address this event.
Plath’s marriage to Hughes was fraught with difficulties, particularly surrounding his affair with Assia Wevill, and the couple separated in late 1962. She returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas, and rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road (only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat) in a house where W. B. Yeats once lived. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.
Plath took her own life after she completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with “wet towels and cloths.” Plath then placed her head in the oven while the gas was turned on. The next day, an inquiry ruled that her death was a suicide.
It has been suggested that Plath’s suicide attempt was too precise and coincidental, and that she had not intended to succeed in killing herself. Apparently, she had previously asked Mr. Thomas, her downstairs neighbour, what time he would be leaving; and a note had been placed that read “Call Dr. Horder” and listed his phone number. Therefore, it is argued that Plath must have turned the gas on at a time when Mr. Thomas should have been waking and beginning his day. This theory maintains that the gas, for several hours, seeped through the floor and reached Mr. Thomas and another resident of the floor below. Also, an au pair was to arrive at nine o’clock that morning to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, the au pair could not get into the flat, but was eventually let in by painters, who had a key to the front door.
However, in the book Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, her best friend, Jillian Becker says that, “according to Mr. Goodchild—a police officer attached to the coroner’s office . . . she had thrust her head far into the gas oven. ‘She had really meant to die.’”
Plath’s gravestone in Heptonstall churchyard bears the inscription “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.” The gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by some of Plath’s supporters who have chiseled the name “Hughes” off it. This practice intensified following the suicide in 1969 of Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Ted Hughes had left Plath, which led to claims that Hughes had been abusive toward Plath. “Hughes” is now written in bronze in order to prevent future vandalism. On March 16, 2009, Plath’s son, Nicholas Hughes, also committed suicide at the age of 47.
Plath began keeping a diary at age 11, and kept journals until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshman year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath’s remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Plath’s death.
During the last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath’s journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. According to the back cover, roughly two-thirds of the Unabridged Journals is newly released material. The American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a “genuine literary event”.
Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath’s last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, “I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival).”
Plath has been criticized for her controversial allusions to the Holocaust, and is known for her uncanny use of metaphor. Her work has been compared to and associated with Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets. While the few critics who responded to Plath’s first book, The Colossus, did so favorably, it has also been described as somewhat staid and conventional in comparison to the much more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work. The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. It is a possibility that Lowell’s poetry—which is often labeled “confessional”—played a part in this shift. Indeed, in an interview before her death she listed Lowell’s Life Studies as an influence. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as, “Tulips”, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”.
In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems. In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath entitled “Ennui”. The poem, composed during Plath’s early years at Smith College, is published inBlackbird, the online journal.
As Plath’s widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. This proved to be controversial, as it is uncertain whether Plath had begun divorce proceedings before her death: if she had, Hughes’ inheritance of the Plath estate would have been in dispute. In letters to Aurelia Plath and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she was applying for a divorce. However, Hughes said in a letter to The Guardian that Plath did not seriously consider divorce, and claims they were discussing reconciliation mere days before her death. He consequently oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1965). He claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their last few months together.
Many critics accused Hughes of attempting to control the publications for his own ends, although the money earned from Plath’s poetry was placed into a trust account for their two children Frieda and Nicholas. Examples cited include his censoring of parts of her journals that portrayed him unfavorably, and his editing of Ariel, changing the order of the poems in the book from the sequence she had intended and left at her death, as well as removing several poems. However, the poems were removed and the order changed for several reasons, including the request of the American publishers. Critics argue this prevented what was intended to be a more uplifting beginning and ending of Ariel, and that the poems removed were the ones most readily identified as being about Hughes.
Hughes hired an accountant to keep track of the estate, but the accountant did a poor job. A large and looming tax bill caused Hughes to convince Plath’s mother, Aurelia, to publish The Bell Jar in the United States. Because of this, she later asked Hughes’ permission to publish a volume of Plath’s letters, to which he agreed with strong reservations.
Ironically, Hughes’ sister, Olwyn — who was never close to and often openly hostile toward Plath during her life — eventually took over much of the duties of executor of the Plath estate. Like her brother, Olwyn Hughes was seen as being overly aggressive in limiting permissions if the works cast Hughes in an unfavorable light. In the realms of literary criticism and biographies published after her death, the debate about Plath’s work very often resembles a struggle between readers who side with her and readers who side with Hughes.
Poetry
* The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)
* Ariel (1965), includes the poems “Tulips”, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”
* Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968)
* Crossing the Water (1971)
* Winter Trees (1972)
* The Collected Poems (1981)
* Selected Poems (1985)
* Plath: Poems (1998)
Prose
* The Bell Jar (1963), under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”
* Letters Home (1975)
* Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)
* The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
* The Magic Mirror (1989), Plath’s Smith College senior thesis
* The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)
Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey) (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts—October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an American poet and writer.
Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life near Boston, Massachusetts. She was born to Ralph Gray Harvey and Mary Gray Staples. In 1945, she began attending a boarding school, Rogers Hall, in Lowell, Massachusetts and later spent a year at Garland School, a finishing school in Boston. For a time as a young woman, she modeled for Boston’s Hart Agency. On August 16, 1948, she eloped with Alfred “Kayo” Sexton. They remained married until 1973.
Sexton suffered from complex mental illness. Her first manic episode took place in 1954. After a second breakdown in 1955, she met Dr. Martin Orne, who was to become her longtime therapist, at Glenside Hospital. Sexton believed she was not valuable except in her ability to please men and told Orne in her first interview that her only talent might be for prostitution. He later told her that his evaluation showed that she had a creative side and encouraged her to take up poetry. Though she was very nervous about it and needed a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first workshop, she enrolled in her first poetry workshop with John Holmes as instructor. After the workshop, Sexton experienced remarkably quick success with her poetry, with her poems accepted by The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the Saturday Review. Sexton also studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside distinguished poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.
Sexton’s poetic life was further encouraged by her mentor, W.D. Snodgrass, whom she met at the Antioch Writer’s Conference in 1957. His poem, “Heart’s Needle”, about his separation from his three year old daughter, encouraged her to write “The Double Image,” a poem significant in expressing the multi-generational relationships existing between mother and daughter. “Heart’s Needle” was particularly inspirational to Sexton because at the time she first read it her own young daughter was living with her mother-in-law. Sexton began writing letters to Snodgrass and they soon became friends. While working with Holmes, Sexton encountered Maxine Kumin, with whom she became good friends throughout the rest of her life. Kumin and Sexton rigorously critiqued each other’s work, and wrote four children’s books together. In the late 1960s, the manic elements of Sexton’s illness began to affect her career. She still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She also collaborated with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called “Her Kind” that added music to her poetry. She also wrote “Mercy Street”, a play produced off-Broadway after several years of revisions in 1969.
On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to review Sexton’s most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. Upon returning home, she put on her mother’s old fur coat, locked herself in her garage, started the engine of her car and committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
In an interview over a year before her death she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with “two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.” She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.
Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. She was inspired by the publication of Snodgrass’ Heart’s Needle, and her work encompasses issues specific to women such as menstruation, abortion, and more broadly masturbation and adultery, before such subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse.
Sexton’s work has been criticized as being non-intellectual and non-rigorous by her writing peers. For some people, her work began to deteriorate as her career progressed from her early successes. Her work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as “preening, lazy and flip” by otherwise respectful critics. Some people see her dependence on alcohol as compromising her last work. However other critics see Sexton’s later work favorably in terms of comparing it with her early formal work. “Starting as a relatively conventional writer, she learned to roughen up her line [...] to use as an instrument against the politesse of language, politics, religion [and] sex [...].”
The title for her eighth collection of poetry and one of her last writings, The Awful Rowing Toward God, came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer the last rites, did tell her: “God is in your typewriter,” which gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. Her last writings expressed her strange hunger for death: The Death Notebooks and The Awful Rowing Toward God. Her work started out as being about herself. As her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside of her own life. Poet and critic Alicia Ostriker says, “[S]he was the least reticent personally [out of the confessional poets] to have her poems ‘mean something to someone else.’” Later she reached out of her own life story for themes in her poems. Transformations is one such book that attempts to use Grimm’s fairy tales as the source for her poetry. Later she used Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.
Sexton’s work is extremely difficult to separate from her life. When Sexton died in 1974, many people saw suicide and despair as the inevitable outcome of being a writer. At the time of Sexton’s death, in the context of Sexton, Sylvia Plath who took her life in 1963, and to a certain extent John Berryman and Robert Lowell, poets Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov protested in separate obituaries the confusion between creativity and death that Sexton’s own demise represented. Denise Levertov says, “we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction.” Adrienne Rich wrote about how women’s anger is considered socially acceptable as long as it is turned inward, as Sexton’s addictions to pills, alcohol and finally dying by her own hand, illustrate.
But it also is praised as being honest, with many people admiring the self taught aspects of her life. By the end of her life the woman who had never graduated college had accumulated a Pulitzer Prize, several fellowships and several honorary doctorates. She worked and succeeded in a male dominated field that valued tradition and traditional educations in English literature. In the celebrity obsessed world of the 1960s that continues today, Sexton’s life reverberates with meaning about the implications of celebrity and its effects on the artist’s life.
Dr. Orne diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, but his competence to do so is called into question by his early use of unsound psychotherapeutic techniques. During sessions with Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories, while actually using suggestion to implant false memories of childhood sexual abuse, stated to be untrue from interviews with her mother and other relatives. However this is contradicted by Martin Orne’s obituary in The New York Times. The article states that as early as a Harvard undergraduate, Dr. Orne wrote that hypnosis in an adult frequently does not present accurate memories of childhood, instead “adults under hypnosis are not literally reliving their early childhoods but presenting them through the prisms of adulthood”. According to Dr. Orne, Anne Sexton was extremely suggestible and would mimic the symptoms of the patients around her in the mental hospitals she was committed. Dr. Orne eventually concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria.
The Middlebrook biography also states that Anne Sexton had another personality emerge, named “Elizabeth”, while under hypnosis. Dr. Orne refused to encourage this development. Subsequently this “alternate personality” disappeared. Anne Sexton’s life is rich in implications in the study of the construction of mental illness and what it implies and directly says for women and for humanity.
When Diane Middlebrook published her biography of Anne Sexton with the approval of Sexton’s daughter and literary executor, Linda, it attracted extreme amounts of controversy. Dr. Orne gave Diane Wood Middlebrook the bulk of the tapes made in the therapy sessions between Orne and Sexton for her to use in Middlebrook’s biography of Anne Sexton. These tapes were released to Middlebrook, her biographer, after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton’s biography. The addition of the tapes forced her to start the biography over. Controversy from the posthumous public release of tapes recorded during Sexton’s psychotherapy (and thus subject to doctor-patient confidentiality), revealed Sexton’s inappropriate behavior with her daughter Linda, her physically violent behavior towards her daughters and her physical altercations with her husband. While writing the biography Linda Gray Sexton confirmed to the book’s author, Diane Wood Middlebrook, that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother.
However, for many people the real scandal was not the release of the therapy tapes but the fact that Sexton had an affair with the therapist that replaced Dr. Orne in the sixties. No action was taken to censure or discipline the second therapist. “What if one of the many doctors — Dr. Orne included — who knew about the relationship had blown the whistle on [the second doctor] instead of putting his career ahead of Sexton’s sanity.” Dr. Orne considered the affair with the second therapist (given the pseudonym “Ollie Zweizung” by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Linda Sexton), to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide. These occurrences attracted considerable attention. Sexton’s family expressed strong opinions, both for and against the biography in several editorials and op-ed pieces, mainly in The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.
Awards
* Audience magazine’s annual poetry prize (1959)
* Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize (1962)
* National Book Award nomination for All My Pretty Ones (1963)
* American Academy of Arts and Letters’ traveling fellowship (1963)
* Ford Foundation grant (1963)
* Shelley Memorial Prize for Live or Die (1967)
* Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Live or Die (1967)
* Guggenheim Foundation grant (1969)
* Tufts University’s Doctor of Letters (1970)
* Crashaw Chair in Literature from Colgate University (1972)
Poetry and Prose
* Uncompleted Novel-started in the 1960s
* To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
* All My Pretty Ones (1962)
* Live or Die (1966) – Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1967
* Love Poems (1969)
* Mercy Street, a 2-act play performed at the American Place Theatre (1969)
* Transformations (1971) ISBN 0-618-08343-X
* The Book of Folly (1972)
* The Death Notebooks (1974)
* The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975; posthumous)
* 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous)
* Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977; posthumous)
* Words for Dr. Y. (1978; posthumous)
* No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985; posthumous)
Children’s books
all co-written with Maxine Kumin
* 1963 Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
* 1964 More Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
* 1974 Joey and the Birthday Present (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
* 1975 The Wizard’s Tears (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
Six Found-Poems in the Words and Paintings of Andrew Wyeth
We have all seen and discovered poems before we ever read them or found the words to write them ourselves. For as long as I remember I have ‘rescued’ (found?) poems in my surroundings.
Especially poems in the city: the writ of grit; words on walls; words scratched on homemade window signs; words twisted into colorful tubes lighting up the night skies, morphing into a mix of watercolor puddles at your feet in the glowing, wet streets; cryptic words and images chalked on concrete sidewalks by children, the truly legitimate artists of the world—ah, but for the moment.
For as long as I remember, I have communed with art and artists on every level. Brought things out-into-the-open within myself, outside myself. If ‘going-to-church’ had any meaning and effect upon me as a child, it was the glitter of gold and silver chalices; the sheen of sacred vestments, vigil candles flickering in ruby light; stained glass windows romancing the morning and evening light; the blue of the statuesque Blessed Virgin and blood-red robe of Christ, the Sacred Heart arm and hand outstretched to the multitudes; statues draped in purple during Lent. And the greatest graphic novel in the world which arrested a child’s wandering eyes when candles, chants, bells and incense lifted you toward being/not being there…that life everlasting medieval mural showing the way (for Mexican muralists and New York graffiti artists to come)…the journey, depicted along both walls of church, santuario, and cathedral: The Stations of the Cross. Lost and found. THIS way–>
Among my closest artist-friends in my lifetime, I have always seen ‘the writer’ (the poet), “the word” in the paint. Even when some never saw it, some refused to consider it. Or, in the case of my friend, Emmett Johns, we seemed mutually aware of what we held in hand, which I longed to capture (for his sake, my sake and others) in a book: I THOUGHT YOU WERE THE PICTURE, 1996, limited edition, 500 copies, Cross+Roads Press, #6. (Sold Out). The idea coming together after my seeing/reading stacks of his sketchbooks one winter, delighting in their richness of line, their sense of story, self-analysis, perception … everything down-on-paper as you see it, in the artists own words and images..
I experienced somewhat the same discovery recently going through books about Andrew Wyeth’s life and works. (See previous Poetry Dispatches –Wyeth & Peterson–at www.poetrydispatch.wordpress.com). I saw the simple poetry of Wyeth’s own words whenever he spoke about what he saw, felt. How it all came together in painting. His life as art. His art as life.– Norbert Blei
Toll Rope
Inside the church at Wylie’s Corner, Maine,
I liked going up in the belfry.
The dry quality of that church steeple,
the dried flowers,…and the sea anchor
wrapped in black crepe
from the seamen’s funerals…
totally New England.
Mill in Winter
I’m intrigued by the first moments
of a snowstorm. There’s danger in it.
You never know how it’s going to turn out.
I love the bleakness of winter and snow,
get a thrill out of the chill. God, I’ve frozen
my ass off painting snow scenes!
I’m taken by the bleakness—
not the melancholy feeling of snow.
My winter scenes…they’re not romantic.
No!
They capture that marvelous, lonely bleakness—
the quiet, the chill reality of winter.
Overflow
Look at the feeling of the lips,
the feeling of the sleeping eye,
the light that goes over the body.
Anyone who’s watched a female
form at night in that kind of light
knows that this has a strong female smell to it.
This picture—and most of the Helga pictures—
are too real for some people. You have to feel
deeply to do this kind of thing. You can’t
conjure it up, There’s a penetrating and throbbing
sexual feeling in all of the Helga pictures. I felt
the country, the house, Germany, and the dreamy,
moist, rich female smell—the whole thing.
Wholesome…fresh…really American.
Open House
…a house on a back road in Maine
where horses were rented out to ride.
I took the nurse who was taking care of me,
after I had my hip operation…she loved to ride.
..a foggy day…the house was gray, with all these
horses—one even stuck inside the house,
sticking his head out the window. The owner had a
daughter who kept horses, and he told me,
“She’s got a few boards missing in the attic.”
Love in the Afternoon
I was looking out the window in the Mill…
I go to that window and open it in the morning,
close it in the evening.
I wanted again that tawny feeling of winter
and grasses matted… I was taken by the feeling
of almost falling out of that window.
I didn’t want a frame around it.
I didn’t want a feeling of the inside of the room…
I wanted the feeling of pushing this windowpane out
and letting in the air and that you’re just there
for a second.
Untitled
I
love
white
things.
Oh,
I
love
white.
[SOURCES: ANDREW WYETH Autobiography, introduction by Thomas Hoving, Konecky & Konecky, 1995, $50. ANDREW WYETH, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Introduction by David McCord; Selection by Frederick A. Sweet]
NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 178 | April 4, 2009
READERS RESPOND:
Wyeth & Peterson, THE LOCAL ARTIST
#177 NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Editor’s Note: One of the immediate pleasures in writing to various websites is the work itself. Some of it comes easy. But most of it requires considerable time, thought, reading, research…and finally the act of putting it all together so that it will mean something, register in the hearts and minds of readers. Which is why the writer remains engaged at all in this habit.
Given our present age of communications (the screen you are reading from as I write) some call what I am momentarily caught in the act of doing, “blogging”–a term I intensely dislike. I call it good, old fashioned writing. I have essayed this topic before, (http://norbertblei.com/code/blog.asp?blogId=11) . And I’m sure I haven’t written the last word on the subject.
Those about to test the blogging waters for the first time sometimes ask for tips. I have none. You get into it because you believe you have something to say that matters. Given the shortage of real readers these days, given the publishing predicament for those who know in their bones they are writers who must get their words out—there are not a hell of a lot of options left to practice the trade, pursue the art. And none of this, whatever you want to call it, however you my feel about it, in any way guarantees readership.
The payback for all this (writers and ‘bloggers’) remains an indeterminate factor. Readers’ response. Reaction. (Hello, out there!) I tell you…You tell me.
The disappointments are plenty. You may end up hating what you “blogged” and put out there without thinking through. You may easily lose hours, days, weeks, putting in (up, on the screen) what you consider your very best–and hear nary one damn word from anybody. (Why the hell am I doing this?) Or you may get the most incredible response from a friend, a total stranger, readers in distant parts of the world.
Now, that’s exciting. (For me.) To be ‘in’ all those countries.
There is absolutely no accounting for, no telling how many readers may have seriously taken your words/ideas to heart—but just plain can’t, won’t. don’t respond, for reasons entirely…well, for the same reasons (many of them legitimate) you can’t, won’t, don’t respond when someone rings your bell.
I’ll leave it at that. Except to share some responses to a piece recently put together after reading about the death of American artist, Andrew Wyeth…then remembering my friend, ‘local’ artist, Charles (Chick) Peterson who lives just a few miles from me…juxtaposing these two artists, the idea of ‘local’ artist…my own fascination with ‘the ordinary’—which I “read” in the images of both these painters… and, and…well, I’m just pleased and thankful for these ‘early returns’/responses from a variety of folks I know from a little to nothing about except: three of them are writers (novelist, poet, essayist, newspaper writer—Midwest, Northwest coast); one a photographer (Florida/the Midwest); one a cantor (East Coast); and one a potter/poet, the Southwest. Such a thoughtful gathering of minds and hearts.
Thanks for this, Norb. Peterson is a marvelous artist! I recall your fine piece on him in one of the books?
Best, Aryeh
appreciate this, Norb … damn, the format in which you present things is so utterly rich…jb . [kudos to Monsieur K.]
Norb -
A wonderful piece–on Peterson & Wyeth, on familiar things as medicine, on the bleigeist.
Eric
Norbert,
Interesting thoughts on art. I would be interested in the viewpoint of your good friend Emmett Johns on the relative importance and relationship between traditional representational art and contemporary abstract art. He is, in my estimation, equally facile at both.
My personal view is that they are not mutually exclusive, nor does the recognition of quality in one diminish the validity of the other. As usual, thanks for a piece that inspires consideration.
Bill
Hi Norb,
I really enjoyed your Wyeth and Peterson story. They are two of my favorite artists. I’ve like Wyeth for years. I like so many of his paintings, but my favorite painting is “Distant Thunder.” Not sure what it is about the painting that makes it stand out more than others. I think it’s the peacefulness of the woman lying in the grass with the pine trees nearby and her dog also resting near her. I can remember times when I was picking berries and how peaceful it was to lie down in the grass out in the middle of nature, far from artificial sounds. I can just hear the sound of that distant thunder!
I have a couple books of his paintings, plus the Helga book, and also the books of Peterson’s paintings. We always have at least one of his paintings on our walls.
Hope all goes well on your side of the fence. Hope to get up your way again sometime before or after the majority of tourists descend on you.
Howard
Hi Norb-This one got my motor running.
“What we yearn for are those values that refute our materialism…simple pleasures, country people, solitude, beauty of the commonplace, nature serene…the quietude of the country…Something to comfort our spiritual blight.”
It is pretty hard to separate out the material from life which is both material and immaterial. I keep thinking the material stuff is there to remind us of the things we can’t touch even though we can feel them. Spiritual blight and too much stuff. But, I do not think of country people, solitude, nature as simple. Or maybe it is simple and I don’t know how to be.
Pictographs could communicate such urgencies before the written word evolved; a penetration of the spirit world through a direct appeal to our subconscious, art being more like music than literature (which involves the reading and thinking ).
I think that letters, words, literature, poems can certainly be as direct an appeal to our subconscious as can art. Especially well chosen words. I sometimes think/feel that there are circumstances when one word can be worth a thousand pictures. The wonderful thing about pictographs and petroglyphs is that, for the most part, we cannot translate directly what the artist may have meant. We create our own meanings, whether its pictures, music or words. We can’t help it. We often assume that the ancients who created the petroglyphs were using a symbol set that their contemporaries understood. But we don’t really know if that is so. If we agree exactly with the artist or the author, and they confirm that is exactly what was meant, the wondrous miracle of cross-referenced experiences and the same understandings has occurred.
the iconic Christina’s World is an amazing portrait of both a woman and a place. When I first saw the painting, I remember thinking of the loneliness of farm landscapes in New England, West Virginia and the Midwest, anywhere really outside the population centers, anywhere that you feel that you are the only person, literally and figuratively. And I thought that the house, a supposed place of nurturing, of family and fellowship, was so far away, symbolically unreachable from the woman’s emotional point of view. I thought that the woman’s perception of her alone-ness had felled her. When I later read about Christina Olson and her physical disability, her crawling across the fields, the painting changed for me and became a symbol of perseverance rather than desolation. The words, the reading and thinking part, changed my mind, appealed to my subconciousness about this life.
Guernica and Goya and Rothko: The abstractions of Guernica and Goya are close enough to our nightmares of war and senseless destruction to translate immediately. Rothko is just as facile at bringing me quickly to a similar sort of fugue state where I’m walking and talking on the outside but grieving about death in my heart. Then, you go back to Lascaux Cave and the drawings: marvelous running horses and oxen and mammoths and then those strange untranslatable abstract shields that make me think of Rothko’s paintings. What? Some say they are clan shields. Are Rothko’s painting not clan shields of a sort? Shadows on the cave wall? Abstract art here in the cave of the ancients too? And they supposedly did all this in the dark? Or have the flashlights disintegrated?
Representational art expressing spiritual aspiration. A sort of contradiction on the surface but then Charles Peterson paints then and now, the quick and the dead, even the ghosts of sounds and music. We are reminded of our past times, past people and places forever changed. Yes, representational art can make it easier to get there. Your thinking is guided carefully to the place of understanding. Words can get you there too. Abstract art can get you there. But you have to admit that it is interesting that we use all these visual surface clues to get us to the invisible, the non corporeal, the subconscious. How did we end up with so many surfaces? Why are we so interested in the one we can’t see at all?
Andy Warhol’s soup cans: So is the medium the message; or how far from reality can you go? Why is it we can trust, feel a level of comfort with the realists, the Wyeths, Charles Peterson, and even the abstractionists, Picasso and Rothko? They paint lifetimes and places we can recognize. On the other hand, Warhol shows you your trained reactions to things out of context. Would the Campbell’s soup can be OK if it was a ghost on a table in an old abandoned Midwestern farmhouse with the ephemeral family smiling, slurping up warm soup next to the long gone woodstove on a cold winter’s day? What if Warhol takes the screaming woman from Guernica and puts her on a soup can and labels it WAR? What if Wyeth paints the windows in the bedroom to match Rothko’s canvases. What if the Dadists write poems by cutting the words out of the newspaper, putting them in a paper bag, shaking them up, throwing them out, and recording the order as poetry? What if it takes a profoundly deaf Beethoven four years to write Missa Solemnis? Me, I’d rather eat the soup, look at the paintings and read the newspaper. But I have to keep making art and writing words.
It takes a consummate artist to bring us into the picture. The crux of the matter-not many of us actually enjoy alienation. Composition, where objects are placed, in or out of context, gives us balance, draws us in or throws us out-whichever the artist might want if good enough. We like the artists that include our lives in our perception of their works.
“They TALK a good painting.” I can remember reaching the point with my writing and my writing education, where I became disgusted with words. Writing became just a snobbish erudite manipulation with no truth in it. I stopped writing and began to make art. I can remember reaching the point with the pots that I decided there were enough objects taking up space in the world and went back to words as more ecologically and materialistically sound. Then I saw that the words take up invisible space in the mind that can become just as cluttered as the attic in that old farmhouse we love to look at with the ghosts paging through the old books in the abandoned library.
Ordinary life: I bought a book of Charles Peterson’s paintings a while back to give to an old friend because we had spent good times in Door County long ago and then after some 30 years had become ghosts in one another’s lives. There is a refrain that runs through Peterson’s paintings and Wyeth’s paintings and Francis Mays’ poems and your books, Norb, that keeps us turning into ourselves. Our ordinary lives-that is all we have and it’s grande. We like to be reminded of this.
“Art or illustration?” This ongoing argument is much like the one for potters, ie is it art or is it craft? The NCECA recently asked the NM Potters and Clay Artists to donate $1,000 to their proposed $100,000 conference in Santa Fe next fall for a symposium “Criticism on Contemporary Ceramics.” to address this problem again. They want to raise the ceramic arts to be the equal of the fine arts like painting. I’ll bet they use a lot of words on this one. We can’t give them $1000 but will probably have a reception and serve them some green chile or something.
Thanks for this piece. I’ve taken a long lunch break from working on a big old pot, played with visions and words, and now I’m ready to go back to moving the clay around with my fingers. I don’t know where art comes from but I’m glad it is here. But you know that.-Kris
NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 175 | March 21, 2009
JAMES PURDY
1914-2009
by Norbert Blei
If I were to ever put together a book of The Literature of Neglected Writers, James Purdy’s entry would occupy a few pages.
Who? James Purdy.
I read a few of his books a long time ago. I can’t say I remember them in any detail, forty years later. But I do recall his first novel MALCOLM which was quirky, funny, different from anything I was reading back in Chicago at that time. He was a far cry from what we considered ‘Chicago writing’, where Algren was the patron saint of grit, Royko honed a street-smart prose, a newsman’s life, on the backs of palooka politicians, and Studs talked to us in the dark with a radio voice as real as the people Sandburg used to sing about. While Purdy (who had a short Chicago history of his own) seemed a little too precious for our neighborhood. If he was one of our tribe (young, striving, wannabe writers) it was only because nobody paid much attention to us either.
As the years passed, Purdy continued to write and publish in a void, though occasionally writers with gravitas–Dorothy Parker, Tennessee William, Gore Vidal, Edith Sitwell, etc….would say or do something in his behalf. Vidal, especially, considered Purdy “ an authentic American genius.” Edward Albee adapted Purdy’s first novel, MALCOLM, for the New York stage—but Purdy hated what Albee did to it
I suspect Purdy feared success. He saw right through it. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” he said. “I’d think that something had gone wrong.” And the more you read his personal feelings concerning neglect and cultural stupidity, the more complicated his place and contribution to American literature becomes.
He falls into that literary class of American gothics …weary but sublime intellects …who shine the light on the darkest underside of the human condition…then put it all down in the purest prose. Capote could do this too. Innocence, separateness, questionable sexuality. Sherwood Anderson’s grotesque Americana, raised to the art of rococo.
The fact that Purdy lived to be 94 is astounding. I’m not alone in thinking he had died a long time ago. Just how he did survive, continue to publish and be ignored through all those years is a story I’m waiting to hear—and trust someone will unravel now that he is gone.
“When you’re writing, at least in my case, you’re so occupied by the story and the characters that you have no interest in what people may think or whether I should write to please anyone,” he said.
I had to smile when I ran across his small obit last week in a Midwest newspaper. I could have overlooked it so easily. About 10 lines on page 22 of the business section, right above the standard columns of general obits—and just over a small advertisement that read: Best Price Caskets—Our Price $995; Retail Price $5000.
JAMES PURDY
(Little-Known but Controversial Author)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — Author James Purdy, a shocking realist and surprising romantic who in underground classics such as “Cabot Wright Begins” and “Eustace Chisholm and the Works” inspired censorious outrage and lasting admiration, has died.
Spokesman Walter Vatter of Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, said Mr. Purdy had been in poor health and died Friday morning at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey. Reports of his age have differed, but his literary agency, Harold Ober Associ-ates, said he was 94.
Mr. Purdy published poetry, drawings, plays, novels and collections. Much of his work fell out of print; several books were reissued in recent years.
Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker were among his fans, but Mr. Purdy won few awards and was little known to the public.
One time during those early Chicago years, I had lunch with the book editor of a major newspaper that I reviewed for on a regular basis. Our conversation inevitably veered to the usual subject: the plight of the writer. I remember him saying: “Did you hear what happened to James Purdy?” I nodded no. “He had a new book scheduled to be released last fall and his publisher forgot to publish it.”
I probably smiled. Maybe laughed out loud. Which seemed appropriate at the moment. But I never forgot the sadness I felt for James Purdy. –Norbert Blei
James Otis Purdy (17 July 1914 – 13 March 2009) was a controversial American novelist, short story-writer, poet, and playwright who, since his debut in 1956, has published over a dozen novels, and several collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. It has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell (an important early advocate), Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as “an authentic American genius”) and A.N. Wilson. Purdy has been the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory’s Course (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation. He worked as an interpreter and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency.
Purdy was born in Hicksville, Ohio in 1914. His family moved to Findlay, Ohio when he was about five years old where he graduated from Findlay High School in 1932. He was further educated at Bowling Green State College (now Bowling Green State University), the University of Chicago and the University of Puebla in Mexico.
From the start, his work had often been at the edge of what was printable: Gollancz could not bring himself to print the word “motherfucker” in the 1957 UK edition of 63: Dream Palace; decades later, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms, but a court threw the case out. Although many readers were scandalized, a solid cadre of distinguished critics and scholars embraced his work from the start, including John Cowper Powys and Susan Sontag, who warmly defended him against prurient critics.
His early novel Malcolm was for decades a staple of the undergraduate American Literature curriculum of most American colleges and universities. Malcolm may have slipped from its place in the canon in recent years due to its irregular publishing history. This is consequent upon the contractual confusion that arose when Purdy agreed to permit Edward Albee to adapt it for the stage. In spite of this ongoing and unresolved problem, Malcolm is currently in print.
Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as a recent appreciation by Gore Vidal in The New York Times Book Review, Purdy’s work is currently enjoying a renaissance. As Edward Albee wrote long ago, there is a Purdy renaissance every ten years, like clockwork. Albee has been proved right every decade since.
Since the 1990s, when great age began to make itself felt, he had worked closely with his companion John Uecker (who was previously the last amanuensis of Tennessee Williams), a partnership that resulted in such late works as the novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (1997) and the collection of stories Moe’s Villa (2003, 2005). He continued to dictate to a small team of devoted friends, and ascribed his continued intellectual vigor to the drinking of green tea and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco. His advice to young writers was to ‘banish shame’.
Purdy wrote anonymous letters since age nine. His first was written to his mother’s landlady who, in young Purdy’s view, was grasping. Countless thousands have been written since, many now owned by persons who have no idea of their provenance or value, although the style is inimitable. One of his very latest, written when he was 92, to a redactor who had displeased him by moving from New York to Montana, can be seen at http://hermeseta.com/purdyanon.html. This features some of Purdy’s drawings, which have attracted some attention.
Purdy continued to dictate and to draw nearly every day until his death at 94. After several years of declining health, he fractured a hip and died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 March 2009.
The American composer Robert Helps (1928-2001), a friend of Purdy’s, used Purdy’s texts in two of his works, The Running Sun and Gossamer Noons, both of which have been recorded by the soprano Bethany Beardslee.
The playwright Edward Albee adapted Malcolm for the stage, but it was a notable flop, perhaps because Albee cut out the black characters in the book. This cuts out the very meat of the book, for the story makes no sense without the final affair between Malcolm and the young jazz singer, which echoed Purdy’s relationship with Billie Holiday.
Bibliography
* 63: Dream Palace (short stories) (1956)
* Malcolm (1959)
* Colour of Darkness (short stories) (1961)
* The Nephew (1961)
* Children is All (1963)
* Cabot Wright Begins (1965)
* Eustace Chisholm And the Works (1967)
* Jeremy’s Version (1970)
* I Am Elijah Thrush (1972)
* Color of Darkness Malcolm (1974)
* In a Shallow Grave (1976)
* Narrow Rooms (1978)
* Lessons And Complaints (1978)
* Dream Palaces: Three Novels (omnibus) (1980)
* Mourners Below (1981)
* On Glory’s Course (1984)
* The House of the Solitary Maggot (1986)
* The Brooklyn Branding Parlors (poems) (1986)
* In the Hollow of His Hand (1986)
* The Candles of Your Eyes (1988)
* Garments the Living Wear (1989)
* Garments (1989)
* Out with the Stars (1992)
* Dream Palace: Selected Stories, 1956-87 (1992)
* Epistles of Care (1995)
* Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (1996)
* Moe’s Villa and Other Stories (short stories) (2000, 2005)
NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 171 | March 2, 2009
: (small press reviews #1)
Small Presses, Small Writers, BIG Voices
With this posting, #171, Notes from the Underground will periodically showcase the reviews of Wisconsin’s own, Charles Ries — one of the small press warriors out there, devoted to spreading the word of writers and works that never get the attention they deserve. We’ve all heard that before.
Writers, readers, reviewers, publishers, lovers of grassroots/real/experimental/lost literature to be found mainly in the ‘underground’—we’re all in this together. For better or worse. Certainly not for profit. But for the good of the soul.
I hope you will read the reviews. I hope you will purchase some of the books…support the cause of new and seasoned writers who need to be read, need to know that somebody out there is listening.
Most of these writers cannot be found at Amazon. com nor are their books readily available at Barnes and Noble. A few independent, often local bookstores…perhaps. Mail order, most likely. From the trunks of their cars? Possibly. (The personal touch).
Lend them your ear—and a few shekels along the way. –Norbert Blei
BREATHER
By Bruce Dethlefsen
83 pages / 59 poems / $15 – Fire Weed Press
Review by – Charles P. Ries*
Bruce Dethlefsen doesn’t write many books of poetry. It’s been six years since he came out with his second book, Something Near the Dance Floor by Marsh River Editions. And one doesn’t see much of his poetry in and around the small press, but my-oh-my, when he decides to show us his good stuff, he comes out swinging. In this, his third and largest collection of poetry, Dethlefsen does most everything right. He is a master of drawing word pictures that are at once narrative stories, melodies, and free association free-for-alls.
The book is broken into five sections that broadly define the thematic mood of Dethlefsen’s mind: migrant, knots, poet warrior, secrets, and autopsy. There is great kindness here, and a mind with a very wide reach.
Here are two poems from Breather. “Playing the Field”: “you hover / you say I’m not your first flower / your first lover // you lower yourself / how hoverly / how loverly / then leave // oh bee / my honey boy / oh baby mine / come back to me”. And “When Somebody Calls after Ten P.M.”: “when somebody calls after ten p.m. / and you live in wisconsin / and you’re snug in your bed // then all’s I can tell you / somebody better be missing / somebody better had a baby / or somebody better be dead”.
In Breather, Dethlefsen flows from the concrete to ethereal. He orbits around the collective unconscious like a Jungian astronaut – his interior radar big enough to find meaning in both the great moments and the small nuances of life. This is the blessing of the mature poet – one who has lived hundreds of lives and can bring this diversity of experience to us as a numinous pool of images to soak in. Breather is an exceptional collection of poetry.
Editor’s Note: Send Check or Order To: Bruce Dethlefsen, 422 Lawrence Street, Westfield, WI 53964
d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution
Edited by: Larry Smith & Ingrid Swanberg
Review By: Charles P. Ries
A few months ago I asked Chris Harter, Editor/Publisher of Bathtub Gin who were some the pioneers in the independent small press movement. He said without a doubt one of them had to be the late d.a. levy of Cleveland, Ohio – this was the first time I had ever heard of d.a. levy.
Levy was 26 years old when he shot himself. Well regarded small press editor, Len Fulton says that themimeo graph revolution “is almost overwhelming in its reach and passion for its subject. It is sobering to think that one young person could accomplish so much in so short a time, while confronting torment from within – and genuine torments from without.” While I enjoyed reading levy’s poetry and seeing his visual art, what I found most compelling were the numerous interviews with him from this time period. They reminded me how ground breaking the free speech movement of the 1960’s was, and what a wonderful, diverse and passionate group of poets were at the forefront of this effort.
In Karl Young’s essay on levy he says, “levy invented more literary forms then any other young poet working in the U.S. in the 1960’s.” Levy who only graduated from high school devoured books and build an international network of writing friends. He was consumed by language and words. When he was arrested on obscenity charges in 1967 Allen Ginsberg and the infamous Fugs (Ed Sanders rock group) came to Cleveland for benefit concert. He never left Cleveland or, rather never gave up on Cleveland. As Ed Sanders says, “Cleveland was levy’s decision. I think it was an act of Cleveland patriotism. ….he wasn’t going to let anyone drive him out.”
Contributors to this book include: Ed Sanders, T.L. Kryss, Karl Young, Allen Frost, Larry Smith, Russell Salamon, John Jacob, Doug Manson, and Michael Basinski. The book includes a 2006 DVD of Kon Petrochuk’s film documentary titled, if i scratch, if i write. It also includes a chronology of his life and work, biographical essays, photographs, interviews, profiles, statements, letters, art work, collage, poems, critical appreciations of his writing and art, “Cleveland Prints” in full color. This is as comprehensive and riveting a book about an artist, passion, and persecution as I have ever read. It’s all meat, no bullshit. I found it confounding and amazing that such a young, untrained writer could grow himself in to such a remarkable talent in so short a time.
I don’t read many poets whose world I enjoy entering more than Christopher Robin’s. Angelflies In My Idiotsoup is Robin’s third book of poetry and his best work to date. Again, he captivated me with his view from the street as he reflects on his circle of friends, poets, losers, and lovers. His stories are mesmerizing in their own right, but come to life through his significant gift at creating metaphors and word unions that collide street culture with pop culture. I would say, in this case, to be able to write it one must have lived it. I often think “humor” has become poetry’s dirty word or the kiss of death if one has ambitions. But none of this matters to Robin who continues to find something to laugh at while visiting the snake pit. He reports to us from his village, but was there ever a village populated by such an array of nut cases, lost souls and hearts seeking healing? I don’t think so.
Editor’s Note: Platonic 3 Way Press, Post Office Box 844, Warsaw, IN 46581, Price: $5, 27 Pages/ 18 Poems
*Charles P. Rieslives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry. Most recently he was awarded the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association “Jade Ring” Award for humorous poetry. He is the poetry editor forWord Riot. He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore and a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission.
A citizen philosopher, Ries lived in London and North Africa after college where he studied the mystical teachings of Islam called Sufism. In 1989 he worked with the Dalai Lama on a program that brought American religious leaders and psychotherapists together for a weeklong dialogue. It was during this same week that the Dalai Lama was awarded his Nobel Peace Prize. Ries has done extensive work with men’s groups and worked with a Jungian Psychotherapist for over five years during which time he recorded five hundred dreams and learned to find the meanings in small things. He is a third degree Reiki healer, and has received advanced yoga training. He now finds mystical insight while drinking brandy old-fashioned sweets and writing in his basement.
Ries has begun work on a second book entitled, SEEKER, which will follow his path as a mystic in Morocco, and subsequent floundering while living in Los Angeles. All of which has convinced him of the time-honored wisdom, “wherever you go, there you are” and “this isn’t Kansas, Dorothy.” He lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his two daughters, four frogs, two cats, and one salamander on a wooded street along the lazy Menomonee River three doors down from his brother, Joe.
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The recent piece on Henry Denander (see archives, Poetry Dispatch #279) brings to mind my friend, Emmett Johns and his life upon the blank page.
The book finally came together in a work called I THOUGHT YOU WERE THE PICTURE. Cross+Roads Press published it in 1996. Only the 6th chapbook to come off the press (presently at work on #32). Staple binding. Eight bucks. (A special signed and numbered edition of just a few more bucks where he did an original drawing in each book.) A total run of 500 copies. All of them—long gone.
BREATHER
d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution
ANGELFLIES IN MY IDIOTSOUP
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