# Spring and All/Section two

​So long as the sky is recognised as an association
is recognised in its function of accessory to vague words whose meaning it is impossible to rediscover
its value can be nothing but mathematical certain limits of gravity and density of air
The farmer and the fisherman who read their own lives there have a practical corrective for —
they rediscover or replace demoded meanings to the religious terms
Among them, without expansion of imagination, there is the residual contact between life and the imagination which is essential to freedom
The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through layers of demoded words and shapes. Demoded, not because the essential vitality which begot them is laid waste — this cannot be so, a young man feels, since he feels it in himself ​ — but because meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the form of existance which have let words empty.
Hare handed the man contends with the sky, without experience of existence seeking to invent and design.
Crude symbolism is to associate emotions with natural phenomena such as anger with lightning, flowers with love it goes further and associates certain textures with
Such work is empty. It is very typical of almost all that is done by the writers who fill the pages even- month of such a paper as. Everything that I have done in the past — except those parts which may be called excellent — by chance, have that quality about them.
It is typified by use of the word « like » or that « evocation » of the « image » which served us for a time. Its abuse is apparent. The insignificant « image » may be « evoked » never so ably and still mean nothing.
With all his faults Alfred Kreymborg never did this. That is why his work — escaping a common ​ fault — still has value and will tomorrow have more.
Sandburg, when uninspired by intimacies of the eye and ear, runs into this empty symbolism. Such poets of promise as ruin themselves with it, though many have major sentimental faults besides.
Marianne Moore escapes. The incomprehensibility of her poems is witness to at what cost (she cleaves herself away) as it is also to the distance which the most are from a comprehension of the purpose of composition.
The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
It is no different from the aristocratic compositions of the earlier times, The Homeric inventions
but
these occured in different times, to this extent, that life had not yed sieved through its own multiformity. That aside, the work the two-thousand-year-old poet did and that we do are one piece. That is the vitality of the classics.
So then — Nothing is put down in the present book — except through weakness of the imagination — which is not intended as of a piece with the « nature » which Shakespeare mentions and which Hartley ​ speaks of so completely in his « Adventures » : it is the common tiling which is annonymously about us.
Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligeable to the point of insignificance. Whatever « life » the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind ; Scheherazade, who lived under threat — Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are as actual, as sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot.
What I put down of value will have this value : an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from « reality » — such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.
But this smacks too much of the nature of — This is all negative and appears to be boastful. It is not intended to be so. Rather the opposite.
V
Blacks wind from the north
enter black hearts. Barred from
seclusion in lilys they strike
to destroy—
Beastly humanity
where the wind breaks it—
strident voices, heat
quickened, built of waves
Drunk with goats or pavements
Hate his of the night and the day
of flowers and rocks. Nothing
is gained by saying the night breeds
murder—It is the classical mistake
The day
All that enters in another person
all grass, all blackbirds flying
all azalia trees in flower
salt winds— ​ Sold to them men knock blindly together
splitting their heads open
That is why boxing matches and
Chinese poems are the same—That is why
Hartley praises Miss Wirt
There is nothing in the twist
of the wind but—dashes of cold rain
It is one with submarine vistas
purple and black fish turning
among undulant seaweed—
Black wind, I have poured my heart out
to you until I am sick of it—
Now I run my hand over you feeling
the play of your body—the quiver
of its strength—
The grief of the bowmen of Shu
moves nearer—There is
an approach with difficulty from
the dead—the winter casing of grief
How easy to slip
into the old mode, how hard to
VI
No that is not it
nothing that I have done
nothing
I have done
is made up of
nothing
and the dipthong
ae
together with
the first person
singular
indicative
of the auxilliary
verb
to have
everything
I have done
is the same
if to do ​ is capable
of an
infinity of
combinations
involving the
moral
physical
and religious
codes
for everything
and nothing
are synonymous
when
energy in vacuuo
has the power
of confusion
which only to
have done nothing
can make
perfect
The inevitable flux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result ​ in himself crushing humiliation unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination. Only through the agency of this force can a man feel himself moved largely with sympathetic pulses at work—
A work of the imagination which fails to release the senses in accordance with this major requisite—the sympathies, the intelligence in its selective world, fails at the elucidation, the alleviation which is—
In the composition, the artist does exactly what every eye must do with life, fix the particular with the universality of his own personality—Taught by the largeness of his imagination to feel every form which he sees moving within himself, he must prove the truth of this by expression.
The contraction which is felt.
All this being anterior to technique, that can have only a sequent value; but since all that appears to the senses on a work of art does so through
fixation by the imagination of the external as well internal means of expression the essential nature of technique or transcription.
Only when this position is reached can life proper ​ be said to begin since only then can a value be affixed to the forms and activities of which it consists.
Only then can the sense of frustration which ends. All composition defeated.
Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding.
Complete lack of imagination would be the same at the cost of intelligence, complete.
Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow—that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide.
That or the imagination which in this case takes the form of humor, is known in that form—the release from physical necessity. Having eaten to the full we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food nor even the quantity of a good sized steer. However we have annihilated all eating: quite plainly we have no more appetite. This is to say that the imagination has removed us from the banal necessity of bursting ourselves—by ​ acknowledging a new situation. We must acknowledge that the ocean we would drink is too vast—but at the same time we realize that extension in our case is not confined to the intestine only. The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same qua- lity of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind.
THIS catalogue might be increased to larger proportions without stimulating the sense.
In works of the imagination I hat which is taken for great good sense, so that it seems as if an accurate precept were discovered, is in reality not so, but vigor and accuracy of the imagination alone. In work such as Shakespeares—
This leads to the discovery that has been made today—old catalogues aside—full of meat—
"the divine illusion has about it that inaccuracy which reveals that which I mean".
There is only „illusion" in art where ignorance of the bystander confuses imagination and its works with cruder processes. Truly men feel an enlargement before great or good work, an expansion but this is not, as so many believe today a „lie", a stupefaction, a kind of mesmerism, a thing to block ​ out "life", bitter to the individual, by a "vision of beauty". It is a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstrating the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depressed before it, that his life is valuable—when completed by the imagination. And then only. Such work elucidates—
Such a realization shows us the falseness of attempting to "copy" nature. The thing is equally silly when we try to "make" pictures—
But such a picture as that of Juan Gris, though I have not seen it in color, is important as marking more clearly than any I have seen what the modern trend is : the attempt is being made to separate things of the imagination from life, and obviously, by using the forms common to experience so as not to frighten the onlooker away but to invite him,
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air—The edge
cuts without cutting ​ meets—nothing—renews
itself in metal or porcelain—
whither? It ends—
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry—
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica—
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses—
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end—of roses
If is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness—fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching ​What
The place between the petal's
edge and the
From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact—lifting
from it—neither hanging
nor pushing—
The fragility of the flower
imbruised
VIII
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor
is full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressure ​ at the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of the air
pulling at the
anemonies in
Persephone's cow pasture
When from among
the steel rocks leaps
J. P. M.
who enjoyed
extraordinary privileges
among virginity
to solve the core
of whirling flywheels
by cutting
the Gordian knot
with a Veronese or
perhaps a Rubens—
whose cars are about
the finest on
the market today—
And so it comes ​ to motor cars—
which is the son
leaving off the g
of sunlight and grass—
Impossible
to say, impossible
to underestimate—
wind, earthquakes in
Manchuria, a
partridge
things with which he is familiar, simple things—at the same time to detach them from ordinary experience to the imagination. Thus they are still "real" they are the same things they would be it photographed or painted by Monet, they are recognizable as the things touched by the hands during the day, but in this painting they are seen to be in some peculiar way—detached
Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains (particularly fine) which the onlooker is not for a moment permitted to witness as an "illusion". One thing laps over on the other, the cloud laps over on the shutter, ​ the bunch of grapes is part of the handle of the guitar, the mountain and sea are obviously not "the mountain and sea", but a picture of the mountain and the sea. All drawn with admirable simplicity and excellent design—all a unity—
This was not necessary where the subject of art was not "reality" but related to the "gods"—by force or otherwise. There was no need of the "illusion" in such a case since there was none possible where a picture or a work represented simply the imaginative reality which existed in the mind of the onlooker. No special effort was necessary to cleave where the cleavage already existed.
I don't know what the Spanish see in their Velasquez and Goya but
Today where everything is being brought into sight the realism of art has bewildered us, confused us and forced us to re-invent in order to retain that which the older generations had without that effort.
Cezanne—
​ Invention of new forms to embody this reality of art, the one thing which art is, must occupy all serious minds concerned.
From the time of Poe in the U. S.—the first American poet had to be a man of great separation—with close identity with life. Poe could not have written a word without the violence of expulsive emotion combined with the in-driving force of a crudely repressive environment. Between the two his imagination was forced into being to keep him to that reality, completeness, sense of escape which is felt in his work—his topics. Typically American—accurately, even inevitably set in his time.
So, after this tedious diversion—whatever of dull you find among my work, put it down to criticism, not to poetry. You will not be mistaken—Who am I but my own critic? Surely in isolation one becomes a god—At least one becomes something of everything, which is not wholly godlike, yet a little so—in many things.
It is not necessary to count every flake of the truth that falls; it is necessary to dwell in the imagination if the truth is to be numbered. It is necessary to speak from the imagination—
The great furor about perspective in Holbein's ​ day had as a consequence much fine drawing, it made coins defy gravity, standing on the table as if in the act of falling. To say this was lifelike must have been satisfying to the master, it gave depth, pungency.
But all the while the picture escaped notice—partly because of the perspective. Or if noticed it was for the most part because one could see "the birds pecking at the grapes" in it.
Meanwhile the birds were pecking at the grapes outside the window and in the next street Bauermeister Kummel was letting a gold coin slip from his fingers to the counting table.
The representation was perfect, it "said something one was used to hearing" but with verve, cleverly.
Thus perspective and clever drawing kept the picture continually under cover of the "beautiful illusion" until today, when even Anatole France trips, saying: "Art—all lies!"—today when we are beginning to discover the truth that in great works of the imagination A CREATIVE FORCE IS SHOWN AT WORK MAKING OBJECTS WHICH ALONE COMPLETE SCIENCE AND ALLOW INTELLIGENCE TO SURVIVE—his picture ​ lives anew. It lives as pictures only can: by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky—their reality in such work, say, as that of Juan Gris
No man could suffer the fragmentary nature of his understanding of his own life—
Whitman's proposals are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative understanding of life. The largeness which he interprets as his identity with the least and the greatest about him, his "democracy" represents the "vigor of his imaginative life."
IX
What about all this writing?
O "Kiki"
O Miss Margaret Jarvis
The backhandspring
I: clean
clean
clean: yes. New-York ​ Wrigley's, appendecitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup—
Either that or a bullet!
Once
anything might have happened
You lay relaxed on my knees—
the starry night
spread out warm and blind
above the hospital—
Pah!
It is unclean
which is not straight to the mark—
In my life the furniture cats me
the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion—
they which alone know everything
and snitched on us in the morning—
What to want? ​ Drunk we go forward surely
Not I
beds, beds, beds
elevators, fruit, night-tables
breasts to see, white and blue—
to hold in the hand, to nozzle
It is not onion soup
Your sobs soaked through the walls
breaking the hospital to pieces
Everything
—windows, chairs
obscenely drunk, spinning—
while blue, orange
—hot with our passion
wild tears, desperate rejoinders
my legs, turning slowly
end over end in the air I
But what would you have?
All I said was:
there, you see, it is broken
stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, I wrapped myself round you— ​ I watched.
You sobbed, you beat your pillow
you tore your hair
you dug your nails into your sides
I was your nightgown
I watched!
Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city—
flying apart at his approaches
but I merely
caress you curiously
fifteen years ago and you still
go about the city, they say
patching up sick school children
Understood in a practical way, without calling upon mystic agencies, of this or that order, it is that life becomes actual only when it is identified with ourselves. When we name it, life exists. To repeat physical experiences has no—
The only means he has to give value to life is to recognise it with the imagination and name it; this is ​ so. To repeat and repeat the thing without naming it is only to dull the sense and results in frustration.
this make the artist the prey of life. He is easy of attack.
I think often of my earlier work and what it has cost me not to have been clear. I acknowledge I have moved chaotically about refusing or rejecting most things, seldom accepting values or acknowledging anything.
because I early recognised the futility of acquisitive understanding and at the same time rejected religious dogmatism. My whole life has been spent (so far) in seeking to place a value upon experience and the objects of experience that would satisfy my sense of inclusiveness without redundancy—completeness, lack of frustration with the liberty of choice; the tilings which the pursuit of «art» offers—
​ So most of my life has been lived in hell—a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear
What would have happened in a world similarly lit by the imagination
Oh yes, you are a writter! a phrase that has often damned me, to myself. I rejected it with heat but the stigma remained. Not a man, not an understanding but a WRITER. I was unable to recognize. I do not forget with what heat too I condemned some poems of some contemporary praised because of their loveliness—
I find that I was somewhat mistaken—ungenerous
Life's processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetitious.
The Improvisations—coming at a time when I was trying to remain firm at great cost—I had recourse to the expedient of letting life go completely in order to live in the world of my choice.
I let the imagination have its own way to see if it could save itself. Something very definite came of it. I found myself alleviated but ​ most important I began there and then to revalue experience, to understand what I was at—
The virtue of the improvisations is their placement in a world of new values—
their fault is their dislocation of sense, often complete. But it is the best I could do under the circumstances. It was the best I could do and retain and value to experience at all.
Now I have come to a different condition. I find that the values there discovered can be extended. I find myself extending the understanding to the work of others and to other things—
I find that there is work to be done in the creation of new forms, new names for experience
and that «beauty» is related not to «loveliness» but to a state in which reality playes a part
Such painting as that of Juan Gris, coming after the impressionists, the expressionists, Cezanne—and dealing severe strokes as well to the expression its as to the impressionists group—points forward to what will prove the greatest painting yet produced.
—the illusion once dispensed with, painting has ​this problem before it: to replace not the forms but the reality of experience with its own—
up to now shapes and meanings but always the illusion relying on composition to give likeness to «nature»
now works of art cannot be left in this category of France's «lie», they must be real, not «realism» but reality itself—
they must give not the sense of frustration but a sense "of completion, of actuality—It is not a matter of «representation»—much may be represented actually, but of separate existence.
enlargement—revivification of values,
X
The universality of tilings
draws me toward the candy
with melon flowers that open
about the edge of refuse
proclaiming without accent
the quality of the farmer's ​ shoulders and his daughter's
accidental skin, so sweet
with clover and the small
yellow cinquefoil in the
parched places. It is
this that engages the favorable
distortion of eyeglasses
that see everything and remain
related to mathematics—
in the most practical frame of
brown celluloid made to
represent tortoiseshell—
A letter from the man who
wants to start a new magazine
made of linen
and he owns a typewriter—
July 1, 1922
All this is for eyeglasses
to discover. But
they lie there with the gold
earpieces folded down
XI
In passing with my mind
on nothing in the world
but the right of way
I enjoy on the road by
virtue of the law—
I saw
an elderly man who
smiled and looked away
to the north past a house—
a woman in blue
who was laughing and
leaning forward to look up
into the man's half
averted face
and a boy of eight who was
looking at the middle of
the man's belly
at a watchchain— ​ The supreme importance
of this nameless spectacle
sped me by them
without a word—
Why bother where I went?
for I went spinning on the
four wheels of my car
along the wet road until
I saw a girl with one leg
over the rail of a balcony
When in the condition of imaginative suspense only will the writting have reality, as explained partially in what preceeds—Not to attempt, at that time, to set values on the word being used, according to presupposed measures, but to write down that which happens at that time—
​ It is the presence of a
This is not "fit" but a unification of experience
That is, the imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam, it is not a plaything but a power that has been used from the first to raise the understanding of—it is, not necessary to resort to mystecisism—In fact it is this which has kept back the knowledge I seek—
The value of the imagination Lo the writer consists in its ability to make words. Its unique power is to give created forms reality, actual existence
This separates
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences "freshly and with the appearance of reality"—This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a—It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world,—
The writer of imagination would find himself ​ released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he,
A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independant—moving at will from one thing to another—as he pleases, unbound—complete
and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not "like" anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth—at least one small part of them.
Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency—but because it possesses the quality of independant existance, of reality which we feel in ourselves. It is not opposed to art but apposed to it.
I suppose Shakespeare's familiar aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done more ​ harm in stabilizing the copyist tendency of the arts among us than—
the mistake in it (though we forget that it is not S. speaking but an imaginative character of his) is to have believed that the reflection of nature is nature. It is not. It is only a sham nature, a "lie".
Of course S. is the most conspicuous example desirable of the falseness of this very thing.
He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature's composition with his own.
He himself become "nature"—continuing "its" marvels—if you will
I am often diverted with a recital which I have made for myself concerning Shakespeare: he was a comparatively uninformed man, quite according to the orthodox tradition, who lived from first to last a life of amusing regularity and simplicity, a house and wife in the suburbs, delightful children, a girl at court (whom he really never confused with his writing) and a cafe life which gave him with the freshness of discovery, the information upon which his imagination fed. London was full of the concentrates of science and adventure. He saw at "The ​ Mermaid" everything he knew. He was not conspicuous there except for his spirits.
His form was presented to him by Marlow, his stories were the common talk of his associates or else some compiler set them before him. His types were particularly quickened with life about him.
Feeling the force of life, in his peculiar intelligence, the great dome of his head, he had no need of anything but writing material to relieve himself of his thoughts. His very lack of scientific training loosened his power. He was unencumbered.
For S. to pretend to knowledge would have been ridiculous—no escape there—but that he possessed knowledge, and extraordinary knowledge, of the affairs which concerned him, as they concerned the others about him, was self-apparent to him. It was not apparent to the others.
His actual power was PURELY of the imagination. Not permitted to speak as W.S., in fact peculiarly barred from speaking so because of his lack of information, learning, not being able to rival his fellows in scientific training or adventure and at the same time being keen enough, imaginative enough, to know that there is no escape except in perfection, in excellence, in technical excellence—his buoyancy ​ of imagination raised him NOT TO COPY them, not to holding the mirror up to them but to equal, to surpass them as a creator of knowledge, as a vigorous, living force above their heads.
His escape was not simulated but real. Hamlet no doubt was written about at the middle of his life.
He speaks authoritatively through invention, through characters, through design. The objects of his world were real to him because, he could use them and use them with understanding to make his inventions—
The imagination is a—
The vermiculations of modern criticism of S. particularly amuse when the attempt is made to force the role of a Solon upon the creator of Richard 3d.
So I come again to my present day gyrations.
So it is with the other classics: their meaning and worth can only be studied and understood in the imagination—that which begot them only can give them life again, re-enkindle their perfection—
​ Yes, Anatole was a fool when he said: It is a lie.— That is it. IF the actor simulates life it is a lie. But—but why continue without an audience?
The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ's name did he do it?—is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination.
It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical.
XII
The red paper box
hinged with cloth
is lined
inside and out
with imitation
leather
It is the sun
the table
with dinner
on it for
these are the same— ​ Its twoinch trays
have engineers
that convey glue
to airplanes
or for old ladies
that darn socks
paper clips
and red elastics—
What is the end
to insects
that suck gummed
labels?
for this is eternity
through its
dial we discover
transparent tissue
on a spool
But the stars
are round
cardboard
with a tin edge
and a ring
to fasten them
to a trunk
XIII
Crustaccous
wedge
of sweaty kitchens
on rock
overtopping
thrusts of the sea
Waves of steel
from
swarming backstreets
shell
of coral
inventing
electricity—
Lights
speckle
El Greco
lakes
in renaissance
twilight
with triphammers
which pulverize
nitrogen ​ of old pastures
to dodge
motorcars
with arms and legs—
The agregate
is untamed
encapsulating
irritants
but
of agonized spires
knits
peace
where bridge stanchions
rest
certainly
piercing
left ventricles
with long
sunburnt fingers
XIV
Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me ​culling my
life with
sleep to trim
my hair—
It's just
a moment
he said, we die
every night—
And of
the newest
ways to grow
hair on
bald death—
I told him
of the quartz
lamp
and of old men
with third
sets of teeth
to the cue
of an old man
who said
at the door—
Sunshine today! ​ for which
death shaves
him twice
a week
XV
The decay of cathedrals
is efflorescent
through the phenomenal
growth of movie houses
whose catholicity is
progress since
destruction and creation
are simultaneous
without sacrifice
of even the smallest
detail even to the
volcanic organ whose
woe is translatable
to joy if light becomes
darkness and darkness
light, as it will— ​ But seism which seems
adamant is diverted
from the perpendicular
by simply rotating the object
cleaving away the root of
disaster which it
seemed to foster. Thus
the movies are a moral force
Nightly the crowds
with the closeness and
universality of sand
witness the selfspitlle
which used to be drowned
in incense and intoned
over by the supple jointed
imagination of inoffensiveness
backed by biblical
rigidity made into passion plays
upon the altar to
attract the dynamic mob
whose female relative
sweeping grass Tolstoi
saw injected into
the Russian nobility
It is rarely understood how such plays as Shakespeare's were written—or in fact how any work of value has been written, the practical bearing of which is that only as the work was produced, in that way alone can it be understood
Fruitless for the academic tapeworm to hoard its excrementa is books. The cage—
The most of all writing has not even begun in the province from which alone it can draw sustenance.
There is not life in the stuff because it tries to be "like" life.
First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know: the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose.
XVI
O tongue
licking
the sore on
her netherlip
O toppled belly
O passionate cotton
stuck with
matted hair
elysian slobber
from her mouth
upon
the folded handkerchief
I can't die
—moaned the old
jaundiced woman
rolling her
saffron eyeballs
I can't die
XVII
Our orchestra
is the cat's nuts—
Banjo jazz
with a nickelplated
amplifier to
soothe
the savage beast—
Get the rythm
That sheet stuff
's a lot a cheese.
Man
gimme the key
and lemme loose—
I make 'em crazy
with my harmonies—
Shoot it Jimmy ​ Nobody
Nobody else
but me—
XVIII
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday ​ to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags—succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and ​ sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard pressed
house in the suburbs—
some doctor's family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in ​ the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
or better: prose has to do with the fact of an emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination.
prose: statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts— technical expositions, jargon, of all sorts—fictional and other—
poetry: new form dealt with as a reality in itself.
The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter-how best to expose the multiform phases of its material
the form of poetry is related to the movements of the imagination revealed in words—or whatever it may be—
the cleavage is complete ​ Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?
The cleavage goes through all the phases of experience. It is the jump from prose to the process of imagination that is the next great leap of the intelligence—from the simulations of present experience to the facts of the imagination—
the greatest characteristic of the present age is that it is stale—stale as literature—
To enter a new world, and have there freedom of movement and newness. I mean that there will always be prose painting, representative work, clever as may be in revealing new phases of emotional research presented on the surface.
But the jump from that to Cezanne or back to certain of the primitives is the impossible.
The primitives are not back in some remote age—they are not BEHIND experience. Work which bridges the gap between the rigidities of vulgar experience and the imagination is rare. It is new, immediate—It is so because it is actual, always real. It is experience dynamized into reality.
​ Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself—sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.
Pio Baroja interested me once—
Baroja leaving the medical profession, some not important inspectors work in the north of Spain, opened a bakery in Madrid.
The isolation he speaks of, as a member of the so called intellectual class, influenced him to abandon his position and engage himself, as far as possible, in the intricacies of the design patterned by the social class—He sees no interest in isolation—
These gestures are the effort for self preservation or the preservation of some quality held in high esteem—
Here it seems to be that a man, starved in imagination, changes his milieu so that his food may be richer—The social class, without the power of expression, lives upon imaginative values.
​ there is a sharp division—the energizing force of imagination on one side—and the acquisitive—PROGRESSIVE force of the lump on the other
The social class with its religion, its faith, sincerity and all the other imaginative values is positive (yes)
the merchant, hibernating, unmagnatized— tends to drop away into the isolate, inactive particles—Religion is continued then as a form, art as a convention—
To the social, energized class—ebullient now in Russia the particles adhere because of the force of the imagination energizing them—
Anyhow the change of Baroja interested me Among artists, or as they are sometimes called "men of imagination" "creators", etc. this force is recognized in a pure state—All this can be used to show the relationships between genius, hand labor, religion—etc. and the lack of feeling between artists and the middle class type—
The jump between fact and the imaginative reality
The study of all human activity is the deliniation of the cresence and ebb of this force, shifting from ​ class to class and location to location—rhythm: the wave rhythm of Shakespeare watching clowns and kings sliding into nothing
XIX
This is the time of year
when boys fifteen and seventeen
wear two horned lilac blossoms
in their caps—or over one ear
What is it that does this?
It is a certain sort—
drivers for grocers or taxidrivers
white and colored—
fellows that let their hair grow long
in a curve over one eye—
Horned purple
Dirty satyrs, it is
vulgarity raised to the last power
They have stolen them
broken the bushes apart
with a curse for the owner— ​Lilacs—
They stand in the doorways
on the business streets with a sneer
on their faces
adorned with blossoms
Out of their sweet heads
dark kisses—rough faces
XX
The sea that encloses her young body
ula lu la lu
is the sea of many arms—
The blazing secrecy of noon is undone
and and and
the broken sand is the sound of love—
The flesh is firm that turns in the sea
O la la
the sea that is cold with dead mens' tears—
Deeply the wooing that penetrated
to the edge of the sea
returns in the plash of the waves— ​ a wink over the shoulder
large as the ocean—
with wave following wave to the edge
coom barrooom—
It is the cold of the sea
broken upon the sand by the force
of the moon—
In the sea the young flesh playing
floats with the cries of far off men
who rise in the sea
with green arms
to homage again the fields over there
where the night is deep—
la lu la lu
but lips too few
assume the new— marrruu
Underneath the sea where it is dark
there is no edge
XXI
one day in Paradise
a Gipsy
smiled
to see the blandness
of the leaves—
so many
so lascivious
and still
XXII
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
The fixed categories into which life is divided must always hold. These things are normal—essential to every activity. But they exist—but not as dead dissections.
The curriculum of knowledge cannot but be divided into the sciences, the thousand and one groups of data, scientific, philosophic or whatnot—as many as there exist in Shakespeare—things that make him appear the university of all ages.
But this is not the thing. In the galvanic category of—The same things exist, but in a different condition when energized by the imagination.
The whole field of education is affected—There is no end of detail that is without significance.
Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge—in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it.
This would clarify his field at once—He would then see the use of data
​ nothing could be more ridiculous. To data then? is no end. There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the use of knowledge—
It is the imagination that—
That is: life is absolutely simple. In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always. There should never be permitted, confusion—
There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible—But it must never be lost—as it is today—
I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture—In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash. Not one. The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge. There is no end—
And what is the fourth dimension? It is the endlessness of knowledge—
It is the imagination on which reality rides—It is the imagination—It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and ​therefore can never be discovered by its analomitization.
It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science—in spite of everything.
Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality—Poetry
The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current—which it has always sought—
In other times—men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense—Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts—broken, bruised
few escape whole—slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity—Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination—
The effect will be to give importance to the sub-divisions of experience—which today are absolutely lost—There exists simply nothing.
Prose—When values are important, such—For example there is no use denying that prose and poetry ​ are not by any means the same IN INTENTION. But then what is prose? There is no need for it to approach poetry except to be weakened.
With decent knowledge to hand we can tell what things are for
I except to see values blossom. I expect to see prose be prose. Prose, relieved of extraneous, unrelated values must return to its only purpose: to clarity to enlighten the understanding. There is no form to prose but that which depends on clarity. If prose is not acurately adjusted to the exposition of facts it does not exist—Its form is that alone. To penetrate everywhere with enlightenment—
Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystalization of the imagination—the perfection of new forms as additions to nature—Prose may follow to enlighten but poetry—
Is what I have written prose? The only answer is that form in prose ends with the end of that which is being communicated—If the power to go on falters in the middle of a sentence—that is the end of the sentence—Or if a new phase enters at that point it is only stupidity to go on.
There is no confusion—only difficulties.
XXIII
The veritable night
of wires and stars
the moon is in
the oak tree's crotch
and sleepers in
the windows cough
athwart the round
and pointed leaves
and insects sting
while on the grass
the whitish moonlight
tearfully
assumes the attitudes
of, afternoon—
But it is real
where peaches hang
recalling death's
long promised symphony ​ whose tuneful wood
and stringish undergrowth
are ghosts existing
without being
save to come with juice
and pulp to assuage
the hungers which
the night reveals
so that now at last
the truth's aglow
with devilish peace
forestalling day
which dawns tomorrow
with dreadful reds
the heart to predicate
with mists that loved
the ocean and the fields—
Thus moonlight
is the perfect
XXIV
The leaves embrace
in the trees
it is a wordless
world
without personality
I do not
seek a path
I am still with
Gipsie lips pressed
to my own—
It is the kiss of leaves
without being
poison ivy
or nettle, the kiss
of oak leaves—
He who has kissed
a leaf
need look no further— I ascend
through
a canopy of leaves
and at the same time I descend
for I do nothing
unusual—
I ride in my car I think about
prehistoric caves
in the Pyrenees—
the cave of
Les Trois Freres
The nature of the difference between what is termed prose on the one hand and verse on the other is not to be discovered by a study of the metrical characteristics of the words as they occur in juxtaposition. It is ridiculous to say that verse grades off into prose as the rythm becomes less and less pronounced, in fact, that verse differs from prose in that the meter is more pronounced, that the movement is ​more impassioned and that rhythmical prose, so called, occupies a middle place between prose and verse.
It is true that verse is likely to be more strongly stressed than what is termed prose, but to say that this is in any way indicative of the difference in nature of the two is surely to make the mistake of arguing from the particular to the general, to the effect that since an object has a certain character that therefore the force which gave it form will always reveal itself in that character.
Of course there is nothing to do but to differentiate prose from verse by the only effective means at hand, the external, surface appearance. But a counter proposal may be made, to wit: that verse is of such a nature that it may appear without metrical stress of any sort and that prose may be strongly stressed—in short that meter has nothing to do with the question whatever.
Of course it may be said that if the difference is felt and is not discoverable to the eye and ear then what about it anyway? Or it may be argued, that since there is according to my proposal no discoverable difference between prose and verse that in all probability none exists and that both are phases of the same thing.
​Yet, quite plainly, there is a very marked difference between the two which may arise in the fact of a separate origin for each, each using similar modes for dis-similar purposes; verse falling most commonly into meter but not always, and prose going forward most often without meter but not always.
This at least serves to explain some of the best work I see today and explains some of the most noteworthy failures which I discover. I search for "something" in the writing which moves me in a certain way—It offers a suggestion as to why some work of Whitman's is bad poetry and some, in the same meter is prose.
The practical point would be to discover when a work is to be taken as coming from this source and when from that. When discovering a work it would be—If it is poetry it means this and only this—and if it is prose it means that and only that. Anything else is a confusion, silly and bad practice.
I believe this is possible as I believe in the main that Marianne Moore is of all American writers most constantly a poet—not because her lines are invariably full of imagery they are not, they are often diagramatically informative, and not because she ​clips her work into certain shapes—her pieces are without meter most often—but I believe she is most constantly a poet in her work because the purpose of her work is invariably from the source from which poetry starts—that it is constantly from the purpose of poetry. And that it actually possesses this characteristic, as of that origin, to a more distinguishable degree when it eschews verse rhythms than when it does not. It has the purpose of poetry written into and therefore it is poetry.
I believe it possible, even essential, that when poetry fails it does not become prose but bad poetry. The test of Mariane Moore would be that she writes sometimes good and sometimes bad poetry but always—with a single purpose out of a single fountain which is of the sort—
The practical point would be to discover—
I can go no further than to say that poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions, poetry liberates the words from their emotional implications, prose confirms them in it. Both move centrifugally or centripetally toward the intelligence.
Of course it must be understood that writing deals with words and words only and that all discus​sions of it deal with single words and their association in groups.
As far as I can discover there is no way but the one I have marked out which will satisfactorily deal with certain lines such as occur in some play of Shakespeare or in a poem of Marianne Moore's, let us say: Tomorrow will be the first of April—
Certainly there is an emotional content in this for anyone living in the northern temperate zone, but whether it is prose or poetry—taken by itself—who is going to say unless some mark is put on it by the intent conveyed by the words which surround it—
Either to write or to comprehend poetry the words must be recognized to be moving in a direction separate from the jostling or lack of it which occurs within the piece.
Marianne's words remain separate, each unwilling to group with the others except as they move in the one direction. This is even an important—or amusing—character of Miss Moore's work.
Her work puzzles me. It is not easy to quote convincingly.
XXV
Somebody dies every four minutes in New York State—
To hell with you and your poetry—
You will rot and be blown
through the next solar system
with the rest of the gases—
What the hell do you know about it?
AXIOMS
Do not get killed
Careful Crossing Campaign
Cross Crossings Cautiously
THE HORSESblack
THE HORSES&
THE HORSESPRANCEDwhite
What's the use of sweating over
this sort of thing, Carl; here
it is all set up—
Outings in New York City
Ho for the open country
Dont't stay shut up in hot rooms
Go to one of the Great Parks
Pelham Bay for example
It's on Long Island Sound
with bathing, boating
tennis, baseball, golf, etc.
Acres and acres of green grass
wonderful shade trees, rippling brooks
Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch
of the Lexington Ave. (East Side)
Line and you are there in a few
minutes
Interborough Rapid Transit Co.
XXVI
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—
all to no end save beauty
the eternal—
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied— It is alive, venemous
it smiles grimly
its words cut—
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it—
The Jew gets it straight—it
is deadly, terrifying—
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly—
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought
The imagination uses the phraseology of science. It attacks, stirs, animates, is radio-active in all that can be touched by action. Words occur in liberation by virtue of its processes.
In description words adhere to certain objects, and have the effect on the sense of oysters, or barnacles.
But the imagination is wrongly understood when it is supposed to be a removal from reality in the sense of John of Gaunt's speech in Richard the Second: to imagine possession of that which is lost. ​ It is rightly understood when John of Gaunt's words are related not to their sense as objects adherent to his son's welfare or otherwise but as a dance over the body of his condition accurately accompanying it. By this means of the understanding, the play written to be understood as a play, the author and reader are liberated to pirouette with the words which have sprung from the old facts of history, reunited in present passion.
To understand the words as so liberated is to understand poetry. That they move independantly when set free is the mark of their value
Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it—It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but—
As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight
Writing is likened to music. The object would be it seems to make poetry a pure art, like music. ​ Painting too. Writing, as with certain of the modern Russians whose work I have seen, would use unoriented sounds in place of conventional words. The poem then would be completely liberated when there is identity of sound with something—perhaps, the emotion.
I do not believe that writing is music. I do not believe writing would gain in quality or force by seeking to attain to the conditions of music.
I think the conditions of music are objects for the action of the writer's imagination just as a table or—
According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions- of music not when his words are disassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transposition into another medium, the imagination.
​The word is not liberated, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of a word, thus freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time.
XXVII
Black eyed susan
rich orange
round the purple core
the white daisy
is not
enough
Crowds are white
as farmers
who live poorly
But you
are rich
in savagery—
Arab
Indian
dark woman