An Outory from the Dirt

Midfield Sediments (1936), by H.H.Lewis. Published by B.C.Hagglund
Holt, Minnesota. 25c each.

Taken all in all, I'd rather hear what a man has to say, in
America, when I know his ancestors crossed the Cumberland Gap into
Kentucky with Boone - than to listen to another whose people did not
have that advantage. I won't say the first is a better man.

I'll say, merely that it is my belief he's more likely to know what
he's talking about than the other fellow. Certainly what he's talking
about will nine times out of ten be more interesting to me.

Let the subject be Marxism as it may be applied to our country or
anything else you please. When you've gathered a certain sort of
energy in your bones - through generations of the same thing you are
not likely to get it confused with what it ain't. That's what's so
good about Lewis. He isn't buying what they tell him is good. He's
taking it into his own hands and fitting it into what he knows -
on the site. I like that. It's a growth. It has roots. It stands
solidly on the specific history of the place. It doesn't aim to
destroy anything. It's a righteous, hard-headed, hard-handed talking
hold of things and a courageous matching up the material with the
job. No particular excitement about it, but a lot of furious disgust
- that things haven't worked out - and the truth's beginning to
be known about it.

Why Lewis should have hit onto verse for his protest is perhaps not too hard to discover. Verse is terse, it's succinct. And Lewis' reasons for his beliefs are not abstruse. Verse has a lilt too, a capacity for slogan, for compact statement and for hard

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And the answer to that is, NO! No. No. I don't call Lewis an artist. But I say that he has, by the fervid sincerity that flows in his blood, found a way which many a would-be artist might well seek to imitate. Mostly Lewis goes across poetry as if he were following one of his mules across a clayey pasture he was turning over. But at least he isn't afraid of poetry, he doesn't reverence it for itself or the illustrious examples of its past. He uses his own language for it and he uses it because he has something to say. He has, let me repeat, something to say. He uses American. And he has a feeling for the line. He doesn't often hit it off. It's pretty damned flat at times but - occasionally he makes the drab stuff flare -

He's a descendant of the crowd that followed Boone across the middle-west. And now he rinds himself, among others who inherited the country, stranded. He doesn't have to follow the details of the economic puzzle. He doesn't have to know how or why government has failed him - though he surmises it's those who want to grab off the coin and do nothing for it - he isn't even concerned with the niceties of HOW it should be brought to an end. He simply yells, END it! Now. It's being done in Russia. Then I'm for the same thing here. End it. And, by God, why don't we? WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE. If it must be Communism, very well. It wouldn't need to be. If ten million of us stood up on Tuesday, September 1st, 1936 at ten o'clock in the morning and said, This is the end. It would be the end.

That's all I think Communism means to H.H. Lewis. And in that I agree with him.

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But I'm not going into the brand of Lewis' Communism. He calls himself a Communist and cries toward Russia. Rightly. I merely happen to be interested in his writing.

It won't do anybody any harm to study what Lewis has to say. There's no use splitting hairs over him, because he isn't this or he isn't that. He's what he is where he is. Get what there is. It's a breath of fresh air - and a lesson in prosody - of the simplest sort.

America was destined to be free. It was promised us from the first. We have been lied to. Both parties lie, both are in the hands of those who own our credit. Politics, as Steffens pointed out years ago, uses crime and government uses politics. This sort of thing:

## AMERICAN ETIQUETTE

The "American" Legion, banker-led, Drums through a street in Miami, Belgrano usurer at the head: - Hats ON, the flag is passing by!

Whether to uncover
Depends
Not upon the Flag itself
But upon who shows it.

If that be some Tory-buffaloed group willing to abolish the Bill of Rights for further benefit of plutes, Then keep your hat on -
From respect for what did serve the Jeffersonian majority and what does stand today against complete fascism.

But when the paragraphs are such evolved Jeffersonians that they would remove the red from between the white and the blue and rlaunt it alone, -
Then decisively

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Off with the hat,
Though you be bald as Lenin!

All I say is that that is a good poem. Particularly good
is the second quэтrain. That sort of direct statement - about a
matter of serious importance, thoroughly *meant* - is all too rare in
contemporary verse. It's always rare.

Again, as I did previously, I make the plea for distribution.
Hagglund is willing to undertake the job of printing work of the
Rebel Poets for a ridiculously small sum. But the distribution of
it is the problem. What good to have good verse, trenchant verse,
even if not the most marvellous in the world - but verse to be read
and heard - what good, if we can't get to it?

Instead or fighting among ourselves and spitting in each
others faces - let's try for a united front on that. I for one
haven't an idea. I've tried as I have been able to do but there's
no outlet that I can see. I've always felt that the real difficulty
here is communication between interested parties. It's by keeping
us from getting together into any sort of front, for good verse,
or for bad prose, for good pictures, that the subversive forces who
play on a really assinine public hold sway.

The problem is greater and simpler than we imagine. We all
want to be so right and so profound that we forget the plainest
simplicities. Why did and does France get ahead with its art? No
other reason than that all or it is centered in Paris and that Paris
is a cafe town.

We're all lost in America. The Communist Party should be
bigger than it is. In spirit, I mean. In the just spirit of Lewis.
No use being so narrow, so biggoted. If it could really form a
united front, on common sense, on the general conscience of all the
best, rightingest ideas of America, if there were centers, trading

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posts where men and women, not a lot of patent leather hygienas could get together on a general basis of our common disinheritance and disgust with the obvious inadequacy of our times -

I'd say, for the moment, have a ban on the word Marxian - for ten years, so that we could get under the weight and get to know each other. We'd get somewhere.

This is the sort of feeling Lewis was born to uncover. He's too valuable a man to throw aside because you don't just exactly find that his color of thought doesn't match the latest importation from Moscow. Can't it be seen that nothing will rit America that isn't bred of America? We've got to work it out ourselves, helped as we may be by extrinsic circumstances & ideas.

Anyhow, Lewis is a voice, shouting out or the dirt in no uncertain tones. Here's luck to him.

William Carlos Willians