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FROM
CAUGHT IN THE NET - FEATURED POET - WILLIAM HEYEN
(Part 2)
Guest Editor - Dan Masterson
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Introduction by Jim Bennett
Hello. Welcome to CITN 29. In this edition we present a
further selection from the work of William Heyen.
We are privileged to be given permission to
publish William Heyen’s epic poem “To William Merwin”.
This is a first publication for what we consider to be a very
important poem.
Dan Masterson is currently sitting in as
guest editor. In addition to his academic work Dan runs a
professional critiquing service which many poets both new and
established have benefited from over the years. I have no
reservations in recommending it. Details can be found at
Dan's website - http://www.poetrymaster.com
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You find a selection of books by Willam Heyen
on-line through Amazon at Poetry Kit's Bookshop - http://www.poetrykit.org/howto.htm
i. William
it’s winter here below as the schoolkids call them forming from aerials to wheels every thaw
& freeze rereading The River Sound & The Rain in the Trees letters from you pressed in their leaves remembering first meeting you 1968
your reading at my Brockport before the MFA production line before everything that got drafted got rushed into publication you read
a single revelation I’d returned after the “terminal degree” your intoning in that voice-to-be as I’ve come to know it over years
I sensed indwelling power there a long poem about your being son of many fathers I’ve looked for again how many palm strophes written spoken
once & then forgotten light in the rain friends preceding into revivifying presence or nothingness Bill Ewert fighting cancer three years
long enough for light to bless two posing almost manic with them his last production a sumptuous boxed quarter leather
John Updike’s Bech: His Oeuvre
& twenty years of poetry holiday cards for me could letterpress no further than you under Pacific starlight can fathom
Pennsylvania Princeton Majorca your life
on as you’ve translated it to be we stood in Time in line for coffee
in this continuum you told me your poems lately sought the mystics I’d mentioned my dissertation on Roethke who
studied seminal
poem of union “The Abyss” your voice the last time I heard you Buffalo winter years ago reprised the vowel sound that lamented
the makers of song you’d needed skipping the Creeley party afterward driving home through driving snow I had books you’d inscribed for me wondering
our sudden mortality “You, sir, are trivial” caustic Berryman wrote of Creeley— “relentlessly mediocre” a critic
wounds our memory of MacLeish his decades devoted to responsibility his classics amber in our anthology I hear Bill Ewert’s last words to me fervently he told me
Promise me keep writing poems,
we’ve little else against the abyss Time which no one
should pronounce by name warned who kept
writing though few poets into old age noted Snodgrass most aspirants interrupted deadened
by comfort politics booze &/or family morass RPW when I was young wrote me
praise from the empyrean about my poems in Poetry I kept his card in my shirt-pocket
over my heart where I
have the last section of his Audubon after passages of violence & beauty Red
remembers himself a boy in
a dirt road at dusk unable to see the great geese overheading northward there being no moon he hears them their sound
thrilling him beyond the dark
wood the word
as when William Meredith stayed up with me burning soft birch & hard oak in our fire his home
above the when I was
thirty he told me stories of Frost whom he once served as apprentice-secretary himself like Robert he said kept secrets
from even his personae beyond us under stairs in the flickering hallway file cabinets of letters maybe some from
you since
some from Archie as the famous man insisted I call him who wrote for my Guggenheim who believed in & befriended me
who once said he’d awaited me that Yale doughboy in the artillery lost his brother Ken to WWI then son Ken to cancer
beyond any ars poetica I reached the boulder with his name
in bronze at a steeped
in
I’ve maybe sixty maple-missives from him including how one season I’d awaken into yearned-for sound heard as my own but not found sooner I hadn’t listened
he’d chosen Meredith’s first book news that reached that Navy flyer in the Pacific my copy is inscribed by both
whose truth still warms me from William’s hearth where we drank scotch & then went out into his rimed yard to piss on leaves & see stars
over the valley until back inside to the fire again John Berryman in our minds hurtling from us during days of addicted incandescence
who wrote me in his loneliest lyric he could think of his “Old Man Goes South Again Alone” decades later on his bridge with Mariani & Levine
we consoled we didn’t we Mr Bones I’d dream-walked December Belsen dazed among crows & erika mounds where Anne Frank died was maybe bulldozed
iniquity’s victim thousands I once listened near David Ignatow a student found his reading so good but dark, dark, she said, & he asked her Feel better now?
Yes, yes, she said Berryman in my home saying no one had done the perfect as had Richard Wilbur who wanted more “voltage” from later John who drank to his irreversible loss of power
in a late interview JB said in the future he’d look forward to cancer or some other awful malady
to which he could sacrifice his poetry Saul Bellow answered me his friend died because he prayed to the ruined drunken god of poets
& don’t forget it Etheridge Knight another shade through the bars of his addiction his drum
vibrates
the mud keeps hearing him hears Fred Exley obsess football who wrote A Fan’s Notes as though for me then wrested just two others from alcohol
he inscribed all three soberly for me acceptance & sorrow above those boulders William was sotto voce & Archie in his Brockport interview asked who can say
what killed Hart Crane or the dreamsonger or Sylvia your friend whose blood-jet poems the perfect one described as “free, helpless, and unjust” they razed me
how she had seized them writ with quills of Ted Hughes’ feathers but childhood entwined with ether flowers Robin Morgan said straight out he killed her but verity expires when & where
at the end for about six months as Ted eulogized her Sylvia wrote “with the full power and music
of her extraordinary nature” &
it’s coldflat love fame poetry conjoin speechlessly in Ted’s triple-entendre
“It was her or me” all this a gut- & mind-twister either for goddess of secrets Hecate or Yankee catcher Yogi Berra who says he
never answers anonymous letters Wilbur’s young Sylvia seemed “immensely drowned” after electro-shock therapy
but crow’s eye-pupil cannot be burned who senses his own sufficient inner resources against his soul’s abyss while two wives treble his darkness garland themselves & a daughter in gas
I both drive & garage within me the car you loaned the young couple for wherever they were going
on love’s petrol with despair’s battery with a Vesuvian novelist at dinner a colleague of mine who’d had a few too many said she must have been a clone like the
sheep Dolly to have published so much he’d had a dream explored a Victorian mansion she quilled in every room
ream after blackening ream he said he’d worked ten years on one story to get it right & still didn’t have it he asked if she would read it
she told him to consort with Dolly or something to that effect I told him shit or get off that plot he knocked his whiskey down & lurched out
such dedication to his drinking art the next day he didn’t remember much he chaired our tenure committee apologized for leaving dinner in a rush
said he’d been awfully busy that was decades ago last month soused he ran a stop sign struck & killed a woman friend of mine
who left behind her husband & four children I’ve truncated his story maybe he’ll finish it in jail or write a second one to let his victims
drive a reaper over him
a line in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth
Plantation “a weatherbeaten look lay upon the land”
spring would come but human devastation against humans cannot be undone no lilac can loose the hold of Thanatos when dead drunken years are driven by a widower-maker
a long poem about your being son of many fathers I’ve looked for again how many palm strophes written spoken once & then forgotten
Sylvia lay her head down in her posthumous oven as did Anne Sexton in carbon monoxide
Plath’s I-have-been-her-kind-of-suicide who maybe had lived half so long if poetry hadn’t been Circe for her who binged on transforming song
which for a while she could hear all afternoon in a Brockport bar martinis & straight shots before her reading we got out of there half snockered
she sobered as she read she asked “why can’t we have some fun?” inscribed a book for Al Poulin “Dear Al, this book has been between my legs /
Love, desperate Anne” her friend John Brinnin had known her kind before with Dylan Thomas who in his Laugharne shack copied
hundreds of others’ poems in longhand William you’ve no doubt seen them where I doubt I’ll ever be I’d like to see especially Wordsworth in Dylan’s hand
to feel how nature’s intoning voice chars or greens into sounded meaning Brinnin gave me a book Dylan inscribed to him
after the death of Norman Cameron almost forgotten now as almost all will be as the decades devolve into that one necessary anthology
forged from reluctant love to those few we can’t get rid of as Robert said with Archie there to hear that contrary farmer’s
off-the-cuff planned riffs & patter I slept an hour or two in William’s guestroom where I’d opened several Frosts in which the master had holographed poems
how did I not steal those rare editions hide A Boy’s Will & North of Boston in my suitcase get them home & fondle them guilty & in shackles from them
I’d have had to destroy them I’d memorized “Stopping By Woods” “Dust of Snow” “To Earthward” “After Apple-Picking” “Fire and Ice” in awe of him but sensing also
something missing if only as Louis Simpson said Frost had caught fire broken through but the west-running pragmatist knew he hadn’t been invited to
as Louis had when traversing fields
at the festering to clarity in his mind
through bedlam & the zen beyond at my local mall chemically- preserved palm fronds sprout from thirty-foot trunk amalgams
of fiberglass & urethane I sometimes write in my journal there the sparrows nest on I-beams overhead
they seem happy trapped in the same weather Christmas or Easter once one alit on my table my visitor two feet from my eye
chirped its sparrow satori I had some apple fritter crumbs for it could it remember how a boy sent BBs into it so often
I pretend myself forgiven but Emerson says nature remains hidden this has & has not been my experience the sparrow stayed/stays with me
no more no less transparently Yeats passed fifty when alone suddenly
in a crowded his body blazed beyond his empty cup he’d been gazing at the street
in the mall doo-dad voices gleam chrome in the money of time maybe
heaven’s no longer
I try to write refraction down Simpson warns us from separation the poet’s tribe shops here I’ll sip caffeine communion in this mall temple my journal feeds on vacillation
v. in
William’s office that I’d taken down The Walks Near Athens inscribed with praise to William “only whose minimizings
I do not believe” by Hollis Summers my teacher Goedicke’s Plumly’s Piccione’s at Ohio U so humble himself always shy &
helpful but never enough
passion to inspire me he’d leaf through Yeats haphazardly it seemed to me remarking on this & that maybe Cuchulain or swans or Major Robert Gregory
while skewered rhymes drove Jane crazy at my defense he’d asked me characterize rhyme in the “North American Sequence” what did I know except that in Roethke’s ear dissonance
gave way eventually to a wall of sound like Phil Spector’s to josh with you here guffaw I’ve
since slept in Ted’s childhood bed in
heard the same oak clock he heard the same one when the brokedown professor returned from the academy to himself to bathe in the country of the Tittebawasee
where minnows sang on his kitchen shelf I stayed there that one overnight alone prowled from cellar to attic only a pecker-high rail outside his upstairs bedroom could keep
that son from plunging into nightmare “The Abyss” opens “Is the stair here?” even as a lumbering high-schooler
he must have trembled there for girls’ perfume & orchids the way they reached for him bulbs & fingers in his dream
a misstep he’d be dead will the real Roethke please stand up chided Creeley of the Collected should we say like Housman usurp
just one voice of Psyche no matter Creeley has a point I hear more often than not if I’m eclectic among too many stars & raptors
writers can swoon thus Stevens kept reading himself his own harmonium not distracted into Archie’s early Eliot or Roethke’s dominant Yeats
whole decades of formal aphorism “but what has this to do with spring?” asked James Wright quoting E.A. Robinson a singer’s catbird infusion
means to praise not mockingbird the dead Annie & Jim stood overnight with Han & me slept downstairs it was summer milk had soured in their creamer for early crucial coffee he was sorry
to have to wake us his trajectory edged with hysteria his later AA years the four of us picked high-bush blackberries
rain glistened in his beard Bill Ewert published Jim’s This Journey the only Ewert never signed the country boy lost tongue before
colophons reached his city door his best poems are pipes above the river
in with phrases of song & shit
he had his own Ohioan for it in what passed for a Scots accent Jim often recited William Dunbar’s “Lament” when I am feeble with infirmity
may fear of death not confound me he translated Trakl’s “blind hands against midnight” for him as for Frost Time
neither wrong nor right twenty-five I wrote John Ciardi asking him about death in his poetry I was thinking of my master’s thesis he replied
death was everything & nothing in a love poem he said why bother the flies about me let them buzz & do when I marry you a great door swings shut against fear
I have Ciardi’s own copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel inscribed twice by translator Kimon Friar first
in & filled with Ciardi’s voluminous gists & queries underlinings in four colors a friend found this treasure
for six bucks on a bookstore floor I was nine in fourth grade I remember that classroom our single bookcase for free reading time I found a green-covered book of illustrated stories
out of the olden Time the wooden horse & the wanderer the one-eyed cave-dwelling ogre who ate men but some fooled him
he couldn’t throw rocks accurately to sink them on rainy days I ran home to keep company
with Heidi or Swiss Family Robinson or Black
Beauty I
remember trying to read
The House of the Seven Gables too difficult for me later one book cost me weeks of sleep I was maybe thirteen a paperback I bought no illustrations
my mind filled with blood & semen the Scottsboro boys railroaded they didn’t rape white women terror by graphic description
I could not bike from it day & night an Alzheimer’s poet travels his nursing home’s corridors shines a dead flashlight
raps from door to door Gerald Stern asks us “Does anyone still love Diogenes?” light from that classic lantern these days half-crazy
my staring into Meredith’s fire may rhythm flame as this grows older beyond memory here into the
well of William Stafford’s ear who said the four words five syllables to me that defined him maybe limited him that pestered & beguiled me alternately
“I love feeble poems” who heard what trees hear & stones a dead deer’s unborn fawn plain words sighed breathed spoken
over the past
his mother’s primal influence her voice sustained him in the camps he served in
against conscription Dorothy in his heart & at his side their holiday cards were sprigs of cedar & yew glued to construction paper
photos of family together who told me that as he died he expected he’d be afraid but meanwhile planned to live alive
(son Bret became a suicide) who told me he’d just then understood Frost’s preference for inner weather he wanted both but preferred outdoor as did Robinson Jeffers
who needed to touch things & things & no more thoughts toward which & against the poet
masons granite with every
instinct Jeffers sees a concrete dam far off in the future far off in the mountains when humans are
gone like the dead stars Brinnin called Jeffers “gloomy Gus” who overwhelms with galaxies in compensation for beauty’s
broken wing against the cosmos Czeslaw Milosz writes in blood that the poet must not speak an inhuman thing his Jeffers hangs from this cross
the stars coursing critic Hyatt Waggoner sensed Jeffers’ “desperate effort to teach the heart not to love”
this insight a gift & Frost demanding real grief not just grievances & Philip Young on Bartleby
who had “the courage not-to-be” countered by mourner Jack Gilbert who studies eastern sages who advise us not to love it’s too empty tragic dangerous Jack swears “what a bargain it is”
William so help me years ago a voice in my dream told me not to pine
but to mourn
I heard this audition clearly in western terms on the same theme Dick Hugo called one day to claim nothing was new although he’d had
a lung excised & had gotten married he said that obsession is art’s virtual Ursprung he’d
helped bomb
& later crafted bombers for Boeing I like to
hear him watch old spit on their hands & dig in with the ritualistic ghostly mien
of big-league dreamers they’d once been Dick loved ice cream & fishing for decades Walt Pavlich kept Hugo-trout in his freezer sorrowing
he had to move & throw them out |