Elizabeth Bartlett (20 July 1911 – 12 August 1994) was an American poet and writer noted for her lyrical and symbolic poetry, creation of the new twelve-tone form of poetry, founder of the international non-profit organization Literary Olympics, Inc., and known as an author of fiction, essays, reviews, translations, and as an editor.
Called "the Emily Dickinson of the 20th Century" by Chad Walsh, distinguished poet and writer, in The Saturday Review, Elizabeth Bartlett's concise lyrics have been praised by Allen Tate, William Stafford, Ted Weiss, Maxine Kumin, Josephine Jacobsen, and Robert M. Hutchins, among others, and commended by musicians and composers. Bartlett is a widely recognized poet, the author of 16 published books of her own poetry and more than 1,000 individually published poems, as well as essays, short stories, collections of poetry edited by her, and poetry translations by her from other languages. She has gained international attention for her many publications, the creation of a new form of poetry, the twelve-tone poem, and as founder of the international non-profit organization, Literary Olympics, Inc., which has sought to reinstate the role of literature in the Olympic Games as originally conceived by the Greeks.
Bartlett's poetry is lyrical, disciplined in structure, expressing a heightened consciousness of word sounds and symbolism, and infused with "delicate nuance, a sort of reticent and abstracted reverie that could nevertheless, at its best, be extremely moving.... [Her poetry] bucked the trend in modern literature toward the precise and realistic description of detail and the confessional flavor...."- Webb, J. F.. "Bartlett's Poetic Legacy Will Be Felt for Decades to Come," The San Diego Union-Tribune, Sept. 6, 1994, p. E-3.
more at
I WOULD REMEMBER
I have walked from river's end to end,
a slow companion to the light seagulls
that circle overhead
and I have stood still above the bend
that separates the foot from distant hulls,
to fill my eyes with flying sails' wings spread.
I have watched them many times repair
the far shore's curve around the sun
and hold it there ensnared
until provoked they drop midair,
instinct with seaward gravitation
and angry claws declared
their mutiny a gold crazed rout
that tears the cargo from its hold
and scatters it about.
I am not old
and yet, when night brings me to town,
I forget their wings and drown.
INSTINCT AND REASON
They would have us believe
that to defy authority
is to punish nature.
I would want to be sure
what they have in mind
and heart and hand, what signs
of body politics they mean,
before I could agree.
Each sense protests the fact:
a bird obedient to cat,
the innocence of thorns,
a night without awe...
And yet I would accept
a world less than perfect,
for the sake of eggs and kittens,
berries, stars, saints, children.
THE SUMMING UP
On the library of my heart they have fed,
the worms of my living,
and now, surfeited, they are dead,
leaving their husks on the pages still unread,
dry, harmless little things
that crumble and shred.
Ambition took the harder crust we dread,
the thick skin on the cover,
and gnawed with slow, relentless tread
the marquee lights for which it craved and glittered,
weaving letter by letter
a shroud embittered.
Love chose the softer, tender part, the bread
of my daily giving,
and made each ritual ahead
a carnage of communion as I bled,
praying for the blessing
I offered, instead.
Knowledge went directly to the core, the thread
that bound my life together,
and bored its way up through my head,
loosening by stages the gold and the red,
until every chapter
I had written, fled.
Now that I have finished with maggots and shed
their dust with some misgiving,
I am glad for the words not said,
for being spared the hungers other men have bred,
in my old age needing
but a tranquil bed.
THE QUESTION IS PROOF
If I ask why
you need not reply
the question is proof
Only my ear
can help me to hear
the rain on the roof
What thoughts I own
are shaped by my bone
and etched on my brain
Nothing more real
than the moods I feel
and what they explain
Warm hands or cold
the world that I hold
is all I can show
The more or less
I measure by guess
is all that I know
All that I see
with my eyes is me
and no other truth
Here with my feet
time walks on the street
in age as in youth
Unless you lie
in asking why
you have the reply
UNDER A THATCHED ROOF
With leaner hands I clutch December's sky
who held the barefist branch through wind and ice
in younger days. The breath of frost is gone,
my eyes no longer sting. Warmed by the sun,
my heart at last has thawed and finds a peace
it never knew before when storms raged free.
Soft the fingering fronds would teach me how
to seed my winter in a tropic ground
and save my years from being cut in two
they sway before the wind with ease, they bow
and yet I can not loose my hold, I blink,
I fear to lie in a hammock and swing.
WORLD OF TOMORROW
Whereless in a sea of space,
how shall we reckon with the dead
whose graves we marked on a shifting land
and left at a distance travelled by light?
What pilot navigates our course
through a finite but expanding void
no almanac explains or chart defines?
Sun, stars, birds, nothing avails
since Phoenician and Viking passed
with cross-staff, astrolabe and compass
to bring us to shores we have left behind.
We are speeding our unborn young
to harbors no heard voice guides us toward,
no radar yet detects, no octant sights.
Now new dimensions of mind
extend the geometric skull
of Ptolemy and Euclid, of occult
priest and philosopher, to measure time
not by the sun's zenith at noon
or the moon's eclipse, but by spectra
through which we can identify time's white.
Past and present, both are blind
to the future, while the Sphinx waits
for another Oedipus. O waste
of sand and wind, swept by an airborne tide!
Shall we find a snakeless Eden
and with the apples unforbidden
begin our second exodus, from Paradise?
AFTER THE STORM
That morning, after the storm,
everyone gathered about the tree
and marveled at its fall:
the body leaning gently on one arm,
its mighty head now cushioned by deep
branches, seemingly asleep.
"You wouldn't think a storm," one said,
then broke off, staring at the fruit
that never would be eaten red
and sweetened by the sun, or set
in jars and slowly left to cool,
the ripening years ahead gone, too.
"It was the wind." "The rain." Each spoke
a part of truth out of his own mouth
with words that could not make it whole
because the naked roots showed
how much there was to doubt,
the secret in the darkness crying loud.
Even a tree, she thought, biting her tongue
and bringing her childish thoughts down,
remembering the climbs, the stout swing hung
on rafters soaring to the sun,
a tree built like a tower
so you could visit God and talk for hours.
The men sawed logs and timber all that day
until there was nothing left, not
even a shadow where you could wait
and hide to see if it would wake,
then they buried the hole and forgot
what else they might have covered with the sod.
Dead trees tell no tales, she thought,
nor empty nests, nor little girls who see
how helpless all things are when caught
by storm, no matter how big or
strong or secure, and she walked quietly
into the house to help with the next meal.
THE CAGE
Thoughts like an empty cage
receive the morning
through the windowpane
and quietly swing.
No flutter brings my eye
to a meaninged core
for the waking light,
the door transparent.
Held blind by the mirror
and deaf by the bell,
I must search my mind
by taste, smell, and touch.
Bars silhouette a wall
to enclose the noon
where images halt
and the night soon comes.
O bird that set me free
to try my own wings,
how this false spring tree
clings that I perch on!
MENTAL HOEING
Breaking the soil of her mind
was an old habit as she plied
the hoe back and forth over the year
to see its design, the cut and stripped
images of reason stacked in rows
of answered arguments. She swore
at the stones, the matted grass
and stubborn clay that held her back
as though to a winter still unprepared
for spring. Was she never to be spared
from questions rooted in the past?
She attacked the clods with wrath
until there were holes in the ground,
then her thoughts crumpled down,
taking her strength with them.
Aching from remembered resentment,
she turned to the struggle within herself,
but moved lightly now and penitent,
trying to ease the rebellious soil
and soften it, to make it pliable
to the new seeds, the new demands
of the changing season, knowing plants
thrive better in kindness than bitterness.
And suddenly the year stood plain, at rest.
HUNGER
Hunger, I have known your pangs,
the gnawing urge, the ceaseless demand
from beginning to end;
inevitable as air and light,
as rain and seed and soil, as tides
and seasons; the perpetual cause
of all that moves and is moved; the force
that flows through stars and men.
We are born hungry. Begins
the appetite with warmth and tit,
with wombskin quivering yet
from cry replying cry, then another sense
commands another hunger fed
to feed the next and the next, each heir
and progenitor of this past,
that future, and the cycle reset.
Hungry pilgrims, we can not rest.
Distance is but another nearness,
as soon met, then shorelines bend
and we must home again
to other journeys, our Eden
faith a continual repetition
of arks and floods from which none
returns invulnerable, the apple bitten.
Creed, color, race, we have all sworn
allegiance, fought bitter wars,
tasted glory and gall
for insatiable gods deified
by our own hungers; with rites and sacrifice
made bread and wine from flesh and blood
that we might have eternal food
here and hereafter, immortal.
We are fed by desire
and consumed like the fire
on our tongues, in our hearts;
a flame forever unappeased
by our words, symbols, deeds
or monuments; the phoenix, man himself,
recreated from his own ashes
out of hungering dreams and parched.
We live with hunger always,
that fearfilling, painpinching cave
wherein we hide like hunted stags,
lips dry, but tasting heroically
of miracles... Who has not seen
visionary lions fall to dust
and, scornful of the world's ambition,
left the hunters truth in rags ?
Fish, birds, beasts, all are prey
to the same illusion, all wake
to the hunger that stalks and prowls.
Sands thirst for unquenchable seas,
plains thrust toward implacable peaks,
time moves unfulfilled and blind
from plans unrealized to those surprised.
We die hungry even while hyenas howl.
VOLUNTARY, EXILE
The day to day commitment to failure
that judgment daily argues against me
condemns me to despair. I am guilty
of more than silence. At times words fail your
wisest men and then, intentionally.
But my silence, like all my secrecies,
has no defense, none conventionally,
my personal idiosyncrasies
no social crimes. When pride is pain and shame
an agony too keen for reason, I
had no other weapon. Who is to blame?
There was no intent to deceive or lie.
My absence is sufficient evidence,
voluntary exile, not providence.
No comments:
Post a Comment