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| Delmore Schwartz |
By popular demand, more tragic post war American poets. We dealt briefly with Sexton and Plath, two brilliant suicides, but my favourite male poets didn’t do much better.
Frank O Hara
"I think all of us poets feel so alien inside, so alien from the world, that we want.....to act a little alien, a little crazy, just to confirm what is in the deepest soul of the young poet." - Anne Sexton
Hart Crane, an innovative and startling writer, after a bungled attempt at seduction of a ship’s steward, jumped overboard in the Gulf of Mexico aged 32.
Randall Jarrell, a veteran of World War 2, and early Poet Laureate of the USA, fought for many years against depression but after a bad review attempted suicide, then a few weeks afterwards walked in front of a car aged 51.
Weldon Kees, a contemporary of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (the only poet to die in a taxi as far as I know) was a hugely talented poet, painter and jazz pianist who vanished in 1955 aged 41. It is presumed that he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, though no body was ever found.
All these poets are worth reading but I’m going to focus on two others, Delmore Schwartz and Frank O Hara, if only because their style most directly bleed into the Beat Poets whom, in spite of all good reasons to the contrary, I have always loved.
Schwartz had an unhappy childhood but his brilliance was lauded by the greats of his day, Elliot, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. His style is deeply reflective, deeply meditative. Depression and boozing took its toll however and after the death of Dylan Thomas (of whom more later in the series) Schwartz became for a while the pub clown in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, Thomas’ favourite New York boozer. He lived his last years in almost total seclusion in the Chelsea Hotel (Thomas’ favourite hotel) and when he died aged 52 it was some days before anyone could be found to identify him. His legacy includes rock songs dedicated to him by Bono and Lou Reed, the latter having been a student of Schwartz’s, and an entire novel inspired by him, Humboldt by the brilliant Saul Bellow.
All Night, All night by Delmore Schwartz, read by Chris Lee, click here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLpXC4womA
At a Solemn Musick read by Schwartz himself click here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLpXC4womA
All Night, All Night
by Delmore Schwartz
Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird
Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and
attitudes
The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,
Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced
On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.
Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish
Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights
Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still
As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle,
Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar --
The bored center of this vision and condition looked and
looked
Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking
The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well
Of the great darkness under the slick glitter,
And he was only one among eight million riders and
readers.
And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum
Of the long determined passage passed through him
By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train
Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh--
The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing
The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image
Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light
Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence
Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession.
A bored child went to get a cup of water,
And crushed the cup because the water too was
Boring and merely boredom's struggle.
The child, returning, looked over the shoulder
Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder.
A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops
Drip down the fleece of many dinners.
And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew
The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified,
At regular intervals, post after post
Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees.
And then the bird cried as if to all of us:
0 your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do with your life before death's
knife
Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?
As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:
This is the way that night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable
abyss.
Dying at age of 40, fourteen days after Schwartz, by being run over by a jeep in Fire Island, Frank O Hara was a leading light in the so called ‘New York School’. His style is urgent and immediate and completely different from so called academic verse, taking as his subjects, the street, movie stars, and other preoccupations of the day. His work was accessible and easily communicated. He saw poetry as being between ‘two people rather than two pages’.
Going for a Coke With you read by Frank o Hara, click here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLpXC4womA
Going for a Coke with You
Frank O Hara
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
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