Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette E-Book

A. Robert Lee

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette' seeks to give expression in poem and metaphor to the United States as a personally lived and engaged with culture. The span, accordingly, involves both site and journey, a roster of art, people, different authorships, film, music, photography, cities, society. Prose sketches both serious and antic as well as verse. American Studies with a difference.

Leseprobe

AMERICAS

SELECTED VERSE AND VIGNETTE

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans http://www.uv.es/bibjcoy

DirectoraCarme Manuel

AMERICAS

SELECTED VERSE AND VIGNETTE

A. Robert Lee

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette

© A. Robert Lee

1ª edición de 2015

Reservados todos los derechos

Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-167-3

Imagen de la cubierta: Sophia de Vera Höltz

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

http://puv.uv.es

[email protected]

For My Fellow Ticket-Holders

Anne WaldmanRex BurnsKim BlaeserJohn G. CaweltiAndrew Hook

Preface

A career as a university Americanist in my native UK, in the US, in Europe, and in Japan, and with a specialization in literature, has long meant academic writing: books, articles, reviews, the journals. Not the least of which is an earlier volume in Biblioteca Javier Coy d’Estudis Nord-Americans, United States: Re-Viewing American Multicultural Literature (2009). But it has also meant venturing into creative tracks. In this case, precisely, verse and vignette. Not only have I had the opportunity of much American travel, to include Canada and Mexico, but also the privilege of frequent writer encounters and friendships. These, for which I will always be grateful, have been an inspiration.

All of the collections (and journals) from which this poetry and prose is taken met with the good fortune to find publishers. I owe a debt of acknowledgement to each, especially Printed Matter Press, 2 Leaf Press, Renaissance Books, Konch Magazine and Phati’tude.

Each different composition, I hope, above all gives recognition to America, the Americas, as personally lived time and space. Site, journey, people, art, film, music, culture, society. They are meant as forms of close encounter. Serious and in some cases antic. Less myself than persona.

This is also the place to thank Carme Manuel as editor of the Javier Coy series. She was good enough to accept Americas: Verse and Vignette as a different kind of American Studies. I owe her greatly. So do the writings at hand.

Contents

ARS GEOGRAPHICA: MAPS AND COMPASSES (2012)

Going Galápagos

American Visa

New York Magic Mountain

Yes Philadelphia

Chicago L

Charlottesville Juleps

Mississippi Headwaters

Rocky Flatirons

Five Senses of California

Hawai‘i Delegation

Nominating Vancouver

Mexican Compass

PORTRAIT AND LANDSCAPE (2013)

Double Melville

Correspondence With Himes

Suited Words with Leon Forrest a

Multiplying Ishmael Reed

Duffs up Frank Chin

Fast forward with Anne Waldman

¡Hola! Carmen Tafolla

Konnichiwa Karen Yamashita

Zeke Call

George Bartholomew

Harold Goodsky

Ling-chi Wang

New York Cab

Battle of Trenton

Boston Oysters

Louisville Lip

Iowa Skunks

Albuquerque Adobe

Mississippi Catfish

LA Ancient and Modern

Tijuana Vocabulary

Canada Plurals

Costa Rican Coffee

IMAGINARIUM: SIGHTINGS, GALLERIES, SIGHTLINES (2013)

American Photo-Call

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks

Romare Bearsden, Southern Recall

Jackson Pollock, Silver Over Black

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

Niagara Mist

South Side

Beale Street Reprise

Minnesota Lake Sight

Black Hills/Páha Sápa

Moab River Wall

Texas Crossings

Sonoma and Napa Wine Tasting

Barrio Vistas

Washingtonia

San Diego Whale Pod

Stage Sight: Three Musics

OFF COURSE: ROUNDABOUTS AND DEVIATIONS (2014)

The Great Rhode Island Worm War

Porcine Love

French Chicago

Chicken Delight

Ice Water Across the Borders

Oranges Are The Only Fruit

Night Shift: A Transatlantic Quartet

The Eel File

WRITTEN EYE: VISUALS, VERSE (2014)

Silent Eruption: Metropolis

Inside Space: Forbidden Planet

Shadow of Life: Touch of Evil

Frontier Score: Once Upon a Time in the West

Civilization and Its Discontents: Queimada

Back to Back: Man Ray and Horst P. Horst

Robert Mapplethorpe: Body Culture

Goddam: Nina Simone’s Montreux

Rufus Over Your Head: Duck Soup

ARS GEOGRAPHICA: MAPS AND COMPASSES

Going Galápagos

i

Three

Quito

sea-lions

stretched

like

Ecuadorean

pashas

along

the

dockside bench.

Equator

gate-keepers

of

Pacific

ease

and

loll.

Whiskered

docents

of

fin, beak, claw and shell

carapace and wing

sea and island

Beagle and Acushnet

sight and word

and

all of them

yawning.

Quito

via

runway Guayaquil.

Quito

of

La Plaza Grande

La Catedral

El Mercado de Otavalo

Quito

of

Hidalgo Gothic

be-hatted mestizaje

a hundred shoeshine boys

Quito

of

thin oxygen

and

Andean volcano hills

Quito

of

Earth’s closeness

to the sun

Quito

of

street pobreza

and

JW Marriott Five-Star Hotel

Avenida Orellana y Avenida Amazonas

ii

Quito to La Mitad del Mundo

actually

250 meters

off centre

Pyramid

of

latitude and longitude

GPS-confirmed Museo Inti-Nan

actually

the centre

of

earth’s

curvature

earth’s

hemispheres

earth’s

lobes

Near, though

iii

Thank you

Incas

everywhere

Thank you

Ecuador’s

mestizos

criollos

quechuas

Chirrera, Jama Coaque, Tolita, Machalilla, Valdivia

Thank you

Lago Titicaca

Manco Capac

Machu Picchu

memory quipus

Merci

Charles Marie de Condamine

rubber, quinine, metrics, circumference

Gracias

Juan Montalvo’s Las Cantilinarias

thoughts, views, language

Gracias

Jorge Icaza Coronel’s Huasipungo

novel, history, memory

iv

Quito zodiac

to cruise ship

isle for isle

turtle-journey

to

Las Galápagos

Islas de Colón

Archipiélago de Colón

Islas de las Galápagos

vertical arrow diving frigates

at home blue-footed boobies

herons on one foot watching

at home huge gulping pelicans

swallow tailed gulls on sentinel duty

Darwin’s finches

(one upon my shoe)

neck coupled albatrosses

un-flighted cormorants among the crabs

sedate breaststroke lagoon turtles

night time spectral prowler sharks

rock-hopping diver penguins

clambering, clod

heroic monument tortoises

iguanas land and marine

in their thermometer bodies

of mottle-leather skin

and

un-dinner table sneezing salt

and amid these origins of species,

across ranger white-marked trails

across silver forests

across black roped lava

across 500-species of shrub and plant

across volcano pools

ascend

rock formations

serrated cliff-faces

weather and wind chiseled ledges

whorls, folds, wrinkles

high cathedral vaults of Nature

playfields of pottered cinder

stilled spurts of fire-stream

messaged pebble, boulder, stone

live thesaurus petrification

vocabularies of Spain fade –

San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz, Baltran, Isabela

and other Encantadas

vocabularies of England fade –

buccaneer Ambrose Cowley

Darwin Research Station

Lonesome George

vocabularies of Melville and Vonnegut fade

page and paragraph

vocabularies of cruise and tour fade

guide and guidebook

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s evolutionary design

earth’s sea-risen island

epic

of

magma, basalt, crust, littoral?

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s delivery room?

American Visa

Are you now, have you ever been, a nudist?

Hardly the question I had in mind

at 1965 Grosvenor Square London

visa-seeking for The New Republic.

Self-fantasy had me the trouble-maker,

the commie, the un-American,

youth politico CIA/FBI target.

Why, surely, those

debutant Tribune reviews in the shadow of

Orwell and Foot?

Why, surely, those slivers of student Left-ism,

a war-march or two,

a smidgeon of Marx or Trotsky?

But a nudist?

For all my dubious Ban the Bomb shouts

or half-believed Clause 4 English politics

or America the Bad clatter

or Vietnam as chancre attitude

or VOTE LABOUR, Holy Loch, and End The War placards

or just as equally

my secret sharer

attraction to

the America of

Kennedy Camelot hope

Ginsberg and Dylan lyric

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane

Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch

Manhattan and San Francisco

King Civil Rights and Malcolm Black Power

LBJ and Voter bills,

did it all just come down to

nakedness?

OK, you’re all set

in all-American

signature phrase

said the wholly pleasant

case officer.

Set to go, stamped passport visa, enjoy your stay.

Scholar resident

like a hundred arriving others.

Euston Square to Times Square

for sure.

This new Londoner’s theatre-curtain of importance

duly lowered,

on and into high Atlantic

treading the

Queen Elizabeth

Southampton

to New York time

and Fulbright America.

Was my best banner

simply to have kept my clothes on,

kept my pink-Brit flesh wrapped?

Had I saved America

or myself,

or the both of us

from exposure?

New York Magic Mountain

Sailing into New York Harbor

past verdigris-statued Liberty

was I not latest Columbus,

if lower deck passenger

then still

the Drake or Raleigh?

Hardly, had my stomach been first to say.

Anxious to match the Atlantic

my reading was

Mann’s Mountain

but where Castorp and Joachim fevered towards death

I had just turned merely pale,

billow queasy.

Land balance

lay in Manhattan’s

grid of everywhere peopled

squares and blocks and heights

the human multi-Broadway

of uptown downtown

Bowery to Yonkers

Village to Central Park

Big Apple city health

Yes Philadelphia

Yes to the Lenape

Yes to Penn and Franklin

Yes to Independence’s cracked bell

Yes to Rittenhouse Square

Yes to Chesnutt Street’s ivied Penn

Yes to Market Street

Yes to the Inquirer

Yes to the Schuylkill, river and expressway

Yes to 30th Street Train Station

Yes to the Art Museum – Duchamp and Rocky

Yes to the Main Line, Welsh Bryn Mawr, Italian Paoli

Yes to Marian Anderson’s contralto

Yes to the pages of David Bradley and Lorene Cary

Yes to W. Wilson Goode’s mayorship

Yes to each middle-Philadelphia Row House

Yes

also

to

the

Germantown

food

sign

I

saw

in 1972

Anglo-Saxon Pizzas (since 1957)

Chicago L

Hog winter Chicago

South Halsted freeze-up

Wind-chill

Lake Michigan

February

Broken L train

high on CTA track-curve

yet

sub-zero’d

into

break-down

Skyline driver-carriage

frozen

into

four-square mirror

ice-block

city

transport

cube

and

cubist

tableau

How not to summon Sandburg winter stockyards?

How not to re-see black Projects, boxed human damp and chill?

How not to re-walk cold Irish, Polish, Bohemian sidewalks?

How not to board at speed Green and Red Lines –

King Drive, Ashland/East 63rd, Halsted, 90th Dan Ryan?

How not to earn spring thaw Chicago?

How not to ride un-iced Chicago, train and carriage?

How not to warm with hot-humid summer Chicago?

How not to un-hog Chicago, South and North Halsted?

How not to outdoor-people Chicago, all Chicago,

the busy tickets of human heat from cold of the L city?

Charlottesville Juleps

Mr. Jefferson’s Virginia

Monticello and University

Serpentine Walls

Pavilion grandeur

Palladio in the Blue Ridge.

The genius of the Declaration

and, well,

Sally Hemings.

Ah those First Families of Virginia

those Lees of Virginia

Frances Lightfoot Lee

Lighthorse Harry Lee

and always Robert E. Lee

The Confederacy’s own

The Glorious Cause

The Lost Cause.

What, then, from an Atlantic away

to almost inherit that name?

What to confess a mother

who knew Robert E.

only as a racehorse name

and so passed my way

quite another kind of

cavalier heritage?

What, then, a twenty years later

the visiting one year post at UVa?

Are you, could you be,

connected to the Virginia Lees?

came that southern-genteel

phone voice.

Would you, could you, speak

of England, The Queen, to

The Daughters of The American Confederacy?

No DAR, No Sir,

No Yankee-Doodle

rather The Queen of the South

on the line, Richmond HQ’d,

Old Dominion.

Juleps it was, mint juleps

whole trays of them

for St. Andrew crossed

ladies and the guest.

And from Madame Chairman

(none of your ms or chairlady)

a toast to England

to Majesty

to Albion’s seed

to its undetected

viande chevaline.

So…it began.

My family, I temporized,

has long sought reconciliation

has long wanted to offer the hand of forgiveness.

Was it not my ailing father,

tears welling, who demanded that if one day

his son should tread Virginia soil

then let amends be made?

For ours were indeed the Lees

who bequeathed the General I lied.

For ours indeed were the Lees

who slave-farmed tobacco and crop.

For ours were indeed the Lees

who opted for rum and empire in the Indies.

For ours were the Lees

who oversaw cane and sugar,

and ours were, indeed, the Lees, came my pause,

who droit de seigneur

knotted, spliced,

with Africa’s Barbados and Jamaica women.

The result, mes chères mesdames,

was, is, er,

a crossblood of Lees

and right here

since Raleigh’s landing,

Smith’s sailing,

not to mention

those obstreperous Powhatan Indians

(and daughter princess, Mrs. Rolfe)

in virgin Virginia.

The silence

shouted

even guffawed.

Mercy, said Madame Chairman

Mercy, said the lady members.

And the black waiter

hand on bow tie

smile hardly concealed

whispered

Man, you’re in some kind of shit.

I was.

I hope.

Mississippi Headwaters

Those trickles

those gurgles

like Nature clearing its throat

and bound for Lake Itasca.

Border water

Canada dry

America wet

10,000 Lakes says every sign

woods of fir and cedar

Minnesota of sky-pond

and brown-green-arboretum.

We’d got there

up from twin-citied Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Dakotas to the west.

Wisconsin to the east.

Manitoba to the north.

Bemidji overnight.

White Earth daytime.

Vizenor family headstones

shadow of the 1862 Dakota War

and link-up with

wholly present-day

Anishinaabe Harold Goodsky

“Sorry can’t stay…

got a golf appointment,”

as he explained

how often he was taken for

the Norwegian Harold Gudski.

But then there was always Longfellow’s Hiawatha

not to say The Hiawatha Line in Minneapolis --

so how do you like your “Indians”?

Like spring water rises

literary memory

Rolvaage’s Earth Giants

Lewis’s Main Streets

Fitzgerald’s James J. Hill

Dylan’s Zimmerman family

Keillor’s Wobegon

Gilliam’s imagination.

Like spring water rises

Anishinaabe big river

Misi-ziibi, gichi-zibi

France’s Messipi

Spain’s Río Misisipí

America’s Mississippi.

Like spring water rises

Melville’s “father of a great multitude of water”

Dickens’s “enormous ditch”

Twain’s “big still river”

Langston Hughes’ “blues river”

Faulkner’s “luminous” Yoknapatawpha river.

Like spring water rises