Writers Friendship, David Alpaugh cheers the soul

My friend David Alpaugh, author of “Counterpoint,” “Heavy Lifting,” and widely read and discussed essays on "The Professionalization of Poetry" and "New Math of Poetry," responds to my new poem, “Legacy: Muse Neglect,” which opens

We’re comin’ up to my birthday./I’m seventy-seven—twenty-three more and I’ll be a hundred!/So what’s it all about, sixty-odd years of writing, scribbling?/Etc.

Hello, Robert:

My apology for taking so long getting back to you on "Legacy: Muse Neglect." Been tidal-waved by late days of summer, gearing up for fall obligations (Coolbrith, Valona, etc.).

"Legacy" is a brave poem. You certainly touch a responsive chord in this poet, as I, too, am starting to wonder if I've lost the muse, have been treading water post-Counterpoint. Didn't old man Wordsworth and young man Byron have similar doubts? ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?").

I love the concrete "eye to eye" confrontation with your "first mutt," that "first published poem." The metaphorical sense here is as sure as it is quiet. The paradoxical reversal of the dog becoming master and wagging the man is richly comic, and most poignant in that manly dogly reproach, "Bad poet, bad poet!" Unpretentiousness that comes from truly having the goods rather than just the flash has always been one of your most appealing qualities.

Cheer up, Bob. "Legacy" is proof that you're poems have not lost their canine magic. Dogliness was and is the metaphor for what you continue to aim for in your work. Falling a bit short much of the time is inevitable. (When Samuel Beckett was asked if he had a favorite work he shook his head and muttered: "Something wrong with all of them.")

The more I look at the history of poetry the more I believe that our mission is (in Frost's words) "to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." You've done that with "Uncle Dog," "God is in the Cracks," "Heavenly Sex" and a dozen others, and now "Legacy" will be in the running (or, as you would say, trotting!).

The only question is the crucial one for our Po-Busy time: will the gatekeepers get out of the way and allow poetry to live not by status and accreditation but by love? Here, I'm afraid that "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Let's hope we can overshoot their papier-mâché palace and land a few good poems on the other side!

With deep respect for your generous, generative humor,

David

Cry to the Muse - A Half-Dozen Poems

A Half-Dozen Poems

Octavio Paz once told an interviewer, “I would like to leave a half-dozen poems that, perhaps, from time to time, would be remembered by a future reader. To be read as I have read some poets. Nothing more.”

Muse [highlights from New Yorker article - date? see below for other sources]

• Throughout history, the changing image of the Muse has reflected changes in sexual behavior and in the status of women, but the process by which the art comes into being is always sublimation. The love that the artist feels for the woman becomes spiritual: a dream of Eros, a vision. On its highest plane, where sublimation results in art that is itself sublime, the visions move historically in cycles.

Two hundred years ago, the early German Romantics infected all Europe with the idea of divine inspiration, which they had revived from the Platonic revival of the Renaissance...

• The argument: Muses are passive, therefore passe. Muses do not choose to be Muses; they are chosen. Who wants to be a symbol anyway? The Muse is only a man speaking through a woman, not the woman herself. What male artists call Woman is a construct designed to keep real women in their place.

• But when a gifted male artist embraces his Muse he... in fact made a woman appear in the art, because he has voluntarily embraced the woman in himself. Joyce's Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois...

• Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" --a case of the painter apprehending the Muse apprehending herself. [It is not the man speaking through the woman, but the woman speaking through the man.]

• It is the being of the woman who has inspired the [gifted male artist]

• The Olympian male imagination will always do more for the woman than he would do for herself, says Arlene Croce ["No woman could have created Balanchine's choreography, yet it was so transparent that his women seemed to materialize individually under their own power."]

• Women's names were numinous: Block's wife was a Liubov (love), Mandelstam's a Nadezhda (hope). Stravinsky and Nabokov both married women named Vera (faith); the same name in Russian, with one consonant added, is Venus (Vera, Venera; Mrs. Nabokov used the French acute "e").

• As for Vera Stravinsky, who was also a painter and had been an actress, the part of Muse came easily, though even she found it necessary to set down some rules:

1. Force the artist to work, even with a stick.
2. Love his work no less than him.
3. Welcome every burst of creative energy. Kindle him with new ideas.
4. Keep the main works and the drawings, sketches, and caricatures in order. Know each work, its scheme and meaning. [Vera S. had been married 4 x, once to Russian painter Sergei Sudeikin].
5. Relate to new works as if they were surprise gifts.
6. Know how to look at a painting for hours on end.
7. Be physically perfect and, therefore, his model forever.

"You are a limitless source of life," Sudeikin wrote her in return. She could cook, too.

• The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova never doubted that she was entitled to worship the same Muse who came to men. And she herself was Muse to many others. Her "doubles" [other women who were Muse to men & to A. herself] seem to have functioned as a necessary distancing mechanism, letting her see herself more clearly.

• Without objectivity, self-study degenerates into narcissism (something Anais Nin never knew).

• Can a woman have a muse? If the Muse is that dream of Eros which inspires art, and if the woman artist is as possessed by worldly ambition as she is by the dream, then there is probably no alternative to bisexuality, writes Arlene Croce.

• It is possible to rule out Vita in favor of Vanessa as Virginia's Muse. Vanessa was Virginia's sister, and an artist and a mother.... this may mean that sister as a resource for a woman artist is under-explored. Akhmatova could say, "The Muse, my sister."

[highlights from New Yorker article - date?]

* * *
• It has been said ‘Dreams are pictures of the soul.’ If that is so, what are poems? And what, then, is the relationship between a poet and her/his body of work, and the larger society?

• “Where no vision is, the people perish.”

“That poetry matters to the people who write it,” says Dana Gioia, “has been shown by the ordeal of Soviet poet Irina Ratushinskaya... sentenced to prison for 3-1/2 years, she was given paper and pencil only twice a month to write letters to her husband and her parents and was not allowed to write anything else. Nevertheless, [she] composed more than 200 poems in her cell, engraving them with a burnt match in a bar of soap, then memorizing the lines. ‘I would read the poem and read it,’ she said, ‘until it was committed to memory--then with one washing of my hands, it would be gone.’”

[Poets & Writers Magazine, May/June 1998]

Sources:
New Yorker issue (TBA – date?) “Muse” article...
Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass, ” Penguin Classics, Edited by Malcolm Cowley
Michael Meyer, editor, “Poetry,” 2nd Edition, Bedford Books
Natalie Goldberg, “Wild Mind”
Poets & Writers Magazine, May/June 1998

Muse 2

Writing a novel is like driving along a road at night with only one’s headlights to see by and the headlights illuminate the way... a couple car lengths ahead. So says my friend, novelist Jim Houston. And that’s what I feel now with this current project, Dr. Sward’s Cure for Melancholia.

I’m a fraud unless I can deliver on the promise, A Cure for Melancholia. I’m a fraud unless I can –with the help of the muse—tell a story that will engage the reader, a story that I would have liked to have come across when I was, well, just barely keeping on keeping on. At the same time I’m writing this for myself and maybe one other person. An audience of one, two people... that would make it worthwhile. This Blog, by the way, is going on in the foreground while the “other,” its counterpart, Dr. Sward’s Cure..., is going on somewhere else. But the one complements the other. Truth is, I need the one in order to write the other.

The muse Calliope had two sons, Orpheus and Linus, by Apollo, the god of prophecy, sunlight, music, and healing. Calliope was the oldest and wisest of the Muses. She was also the judge in the argument over Adonis between Aphrodite and Persephone, giving each equal time with him. She was represented by a stylus and wax tablets.

“She is always seen with a writing tablet in her hand. At times she is depicted as carrying a roll of paper or a book or wearing a gold crown.” (Wikipedia).

The muses are typically invoked at or near the beginning of a, well, let’s call it a “project.” Mine: Dr. Sward’s Cure for Melancholia. Muses are sometimes represented as the true speaker of the poem, for whom the poet is only a mouthpiece. So, in that sense, I have Calliope—and my prayer she will favor me—and, as well, my father. I invoke Calliope. I invoke Dr. Sward, my father. [I just read this posting aloud to my love who says, “No, your father is not a muse. It doesn’t work.” Hmm. Well,if he's not a muse, can he at least be an inspiration?]

Meanwhile, a publisher has expressed (tentative, cautious...) interest in one or another of my works in progress. However, the work, whatever it is, would not appear in print until 2011 or 2012. Okay, I can live with that. I count myself lucky.

I read the following aloud to my love, who prefers that to the word “wife.” I’ve been married four times and two of the four objected to the word “wife.” “No, I’m not your wife. You don’t own me,” said one. And my love, my partner for 20 years, says she objects because “wife” is mundane, domestic and unromantic. And, too, I suppose because I’ve been married so many times.

Invoking the muse is not merely a literary device. I’m not so sure we’d even have Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost if they had unsuccessfully invoked the muse. No muse, no poem. These, for me, are classic examples of poets invoking...

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.” (Homer, in Book 1 of The Odyssey, Robert Fagles, translation, 1996).

“O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!” (Dante Alighieri, in Canto II of the Inferno, Anthony Esolen translation, 2002).

“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse...” (John Milton, Opening of Book 1 of Paradise Lost).

The British poet Robert Graves writes, “No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident... A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse...”

I’m not in their league. I’m not even sure why I write. Most of my high school friends became lawyers. They made money. They earned a living. One became hard-living, death-defying adventurer Evel Knievel’s personal lawyer. So I’m told. Do lawyer’s have muses? Do depressed poets have muses? Anyway, I’m not a poet. Not like... “those guys.” Twenty books, twenty-five books, thirty books... scribble scribble scribble. Time I could better have spent with my children. Five children I have. Five grandchildren. Five wives, truth be told. What have I accomplished? Fuck all. Fuck all. Most of my books are out of print. Who reads this shit?

Fuck you. Fuck you!! says Calliope.

Well, not all women object. I invoke my muse, my love, my not wife:

The poem is called 108,000 WAYS OF MAKING LOVE.

“Her lips are full, magenta-red
in color—

“Bare-chested, she wears a yellow silk
loin cloth
I cup my right hand
under her blue chin
and bend to kiss her,
encircling her waist with my left arm...” Etc.

Then there’s KISS BITE AND MOO SOFTLY

“—Muse voice is loved woman mumbling.

“Going shopping with the muse
you come away buying the right things:
rare books and cashmere pullovers for him,
silk dresses, a gold and amethyst necklace for her...” Etc.

And one ON HER 60TH BIRTHDAY...

“'Beautiful, splendid, magnificent,
delightful, charming, appealing,’
says the dictionary.
And that’s how I start... But I hear her say,
‘Make it less glorious and more Gloria.” Etc.

And so it is I (also) call upon my father. In some sense I see him as a celestial parent. He’s dead. He’s willing to communicate with me. I may be crazy, it’s true, but he’s an inspiration, in part, because I need him and he wasn’t much present when he was alive. I’m getting more juice from him now. I’m getting more of what I need from him now. The sonofabitch, selfish selfish, we have that in common, for sure. Anyway, he owes me. He owes me lots of poems, good shit that’ll do me some good and him some good. I think he needs me. I think he’s a little lonely, in heaven, no doubt, still something of an outsider. Celestial, he may be, but still an outsider.

So I idealize him, it serves my purpose. He wasn’t much of a father alive, sad to say, but at least he didn’t leave. He didn’t walk. He just wasn’t there. The man was selfish, totally self-involved. Even as a child. So said his sister, the one relative with whom I connected. So he went on his occult trip. Jewish Rosicrucian bullshit. And it suits me fine. So I went to be with Swami Muktananda. From 1973 to 1982 I did that shit. Who’s to say? It may have done me some good.

Bibble babble. Why are you reading this shit? Don’t you have a life of your own? Dear reader, this is how he appears to me. This is what one reader calls an “idealization.” “Okay, Dad,” I’m thinking, “You owe me. Gimme a poem, okay? Gimme a whole bunch of poems and make ‘em good or when I see you again you’re really gonna hear from me. Jesus. Jesus."

“Masked man in the half light,
Starched white jacket and pants...”
(“God’s Podiatrist”, p. 147, The Collected Poems)

*

“Wears a denim shirt, bola tie,
turquoise and silver tip,
tanned, tennis-playing, macho...”
(“Good News from the Other World”, p. 144)

*

“Greets me in the waiting room,
father with waxed,
five-eyelet shoes;
son, too, with spit-shine, five-eyelet shoes.
This is how I was brought up. I do it
to show respect.
Value your feet.”
"Arch Supports--The Fitting", p. 145)
*

So, what is the cure for melancholia? And if one experiences the “de-materialization” of one’s mind, as I did, no mind, okay? No imagination. No... nothing. Zombie-hood. Fucked to hell empty shell of a poet. A poet? I don’t dare call me that. Fuck. I’m a journalist. A feature writer at best. Scribble Scribble Scribble.

Say, Dr. Sward, say one’s mind de-materializes. Is it possible to get it back again? No imagination. Zilch. Nothing. The best thing that happened to me besides everything else is she stayed with me. That’s “...in sickness and in health.” That’s stayin’ with someone. And she even tells me when to shut up. Enough already!”

Muse 1

Fire lives the death of earth,
And air lives the death of fire;
Water lives the death of air,
Earth that of water.
–Heraclitus

So these days I invoke the muse, Calliope (the “beautiful of speech”, chief of the muses...)

Find I’m unable to write at this time without at least touching a photo of the Simon Vouet painting, “The Muses Urania and Calliope,” in which Calliope is holding a copy of the Odyssey.

I “call upon a greater power or a spirit for help...”

Like my love, a visual artist (it was she, by the way, who drew the image that appears above) I start with a blank canvas. And it doesn’t get easier... not even after 50 years. I first began writing because in a sense I didn’t know any better. Started, really, when I was 18, an enlisted man, a sailor aboard Landing Ship Tank, LST 914, an amphibious ship so insignificant it didn’t have a name.

I was the ship’s librarian. So I read and read, Shakespeare, Whitman, Herman Melville, Carl Sandburg, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, even an account of the coming to be of the Tennessee Valley Authority. I also read and re-read catalogs of the parts we might need to repair our ship, a relic of World War 2. To this day I read and collect catalogs.

The Navy was my muse. And the books. And being away from home (Chicago) for the first time. Poems, scribblings, like letters from a distant land.

I sometimes look up the meanings of all the words in poem. I look up the meaning of the word “the.” The word “poem.” The word “love.” All those things the definitions of which I need to be reminded.

So it is with the word "Muse." “A source of inspiration for an artist, especially a poet... One of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. (This from Encarta World English Dictionary and, in truth, Encarta, Webster, Oxford, New Century, et al, have served as muses. I am thinking of poems of mine like “The Apteryx (1/35) of Webster’s Dictionary"; “For Gloria On Her 60th Birthday”; and a poem titled, simply, “My Muse” –all from the Collected Poems, 1957-2004, Black Moss Press.).

Thanks and credit to Gloria K. Alford for the black and white muse etching which appears at start of this "post." This is one in an edition of ten.