Robert Duncan - Poet

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740 Minneapolis Institute of Arts

 

The Wampum Snake by Mark Catesby circa 1740

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I never know when Ella will make herself known to me  - whisper in my ear or take my hand and lead me toward a new discovery. Today was an Ella day. While at work at the college library I decided to take a moment and look at the new book shelf. My eye immediately went to matching volumes by the California poet Robert Duncan who was born in Oakland in 1919.  I knew immediately that there would be an Ella connection.  He was raised by theosophical Hermeticists who undoubtedly knew Ella. Duncan mentions Ella when he is describing his Bakersfield high school English teacher, Edna Keogh - an Irishwoman who knew Ella. This is what Duncan says of Ella:

"She [Keogh] had had a link among her friends [in Berkeley] in a gaunt, beautiful, touched, old woman, Ella Young, whom I in turn as a student in Berkeley once heard tell of those Irish circles, of poets who practiced magic, of women who saw into what was beyond the common sense, of that folk who dwelt upon the margins of fairy."

Duncan discusses his life as a poet and his words remind me of Ella's own words. Kindred spirits, indeed.

"In my conversion to Poetry I was to find anew the world of Romance that I had known in earliest childhood in fairy tale and daydream."

Here is an excerpt from Duncan's poem Ode for Dick Brown...

III

Restore, restore the mystery to the land

and to the hearts of men restore

the mystery. In memory, bright Mnemosyne's

rich tapestry of voices, revelations,

and persisting scenes, the luminous

reasonable and mysterious oak thrives.

The source of our lives makes each man sacred…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Wampum Snake, above, I came across while helping a student. Days like today, thanks to Ella, I remember why I am here. 

Robert Duncan:  The Collected Early Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain.

Robert Duncan: The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman.

The Blessings of Spring

Joyous as Spring she came,

Anemonies like flame

Broidered the way:

Gauze flylets on the wing

Were there for cherishing,

And little birds to sing

Aubade and roundelay.

Excerpt from The Shadowed Wood 

Smoke of Myrrh (1950) by Ella Young


Photograph © Denise Sallee 2011

Sara Bard Field

Ella Young's close circle of friends, or as she would say "comrades," in California were as eclectic and as interesting as her circle had been in Ireland. They shared a vision, often expressed in poetry or in paintings, of a world deeply connected to the power, the beauty, the creation and the destruction of nature. They called each other by secret, magical names. They honored the turning of the great wheel with rituals on the wind-swept sands of the beach and in the leaf-shadowed twilight of the redwood forests.

Sara Bard Field (1882-1974) was one such comrade - a courageous and passionate woman whose home in Los Gatos she shared not only with her husband, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, but with the cultural "movers and shakers" of the San Francisco and Monterey areas. The great photographer, Ansel Adams, sought Sara out for questions of spiritual importance even as he sought out Ella's advice in his quest to be a poet.

Palo Corona 

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013

So here is a poem by Sara Bard Field written after the tragic death of her son, Albert.

The Windy Hour

I walked a little while alone
Upon a wind-wrapped hill
And suddenly, as by command,
My soul grew listening-still.

Listening like the deaf and dumb
Who hear with haunted eyes
Fearful of learning life, half-true
And learning life, half-lies.

And this is what was softly said
Upon a wind-wrapped hill:
"Tomorrow shall you, like your soul,
Lie motionless and still.

Lie motionless and old and numb - 
Closed your ears and eyes
For death shall make an end of truth
For you - and end of lies. 

"For death shall make an end of truth
Save the one truth of sleep;
No ear need hear that silencing
No eye need watch it creep."

The Jumping Off Point

I've been thinking about a life of risk taking, of starting over, of wanting so badly the new, the different…


Have I been jumping forward all these years only to have landed where I began so long ago?

Ella Young and Romance

Jaufre Rudel dies in the arms of Hodierna of Tripoli (MS of troubadour songs, 13C North Italian, Bib. Nat. Française)

Somehow I missed Valentine' Day…but endeavor to carry on the theme of love and romantic gestures. I came across a poem by Ella from her volume of poems The Rose of Heaven - published in Dublin in 1920. As with many of her poems I find myself on an adventure as I research the names and places she mentions.  First, here is the poem - my gift, from Ella.

Rudel takes leave of the Countess of Tripoli

You are so beautiful, and yet the light
Ebbs fast and faster as I lie:
Outside 'tis noonday burning white
In that long-wished-for Southern sky.

I have no words now - I that made
So many songs for you.  All's done.
I have reached to you: my life essayed.
Naught further, Lady of the Sun.

Bend down and kiss me, let your hair 
Shut out the darkness for a space:
It may be death itself will spare
This Dream in which I see your face. 

So,  who are these people? Are they real? Imaginary?

My research led me to one Jaufre Rudel - a Provincial troubadour of the early mid-twelfth century and a Prince. The legend has it that Jaufre went on a Crusade after hearing about the great beauty and intelligence of the Countess of Tripoli - Hodierna. It is said that Jaufre was deathly ill when he reached Tripoli ( a small duchy north of Palestine) and the Countess came to him - permitting him to die in her arms. Ah, love and death - so painfully entwined. 

Others have written poems in honor of Juafre's quest and his death - but none, I feel, as perfect in its simplicity as Ella's creation.  

Reading about Jaufre Rudel reminded me of a favorite novel - A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay.  Kay's fantasy brings to life this age of romance, courtly love, and troubadours. 

Sometimes the road is rocky...

                                                                                               


I feel that I am slowly emerging from a very rocky beginning to this new year. Nothing traumatic for which I am grateful - but long, dragging, stressful days of finalizing financial affairs for my elder parents so we no longer have to worry about how to afford their remaining years in care. It took its toll on me - body and soul - but it is done now. I am regrouping. Yet again. As always.

I've given myself permission to think once more of the new novel waiting for my return, "pen in hand,"  and even a few visual pieces I long to create.

Then, this evening, I opened a book of Celtic literature to a stanza from AE's The Twilight of Earth. It was the perfect stanza for me to read and I thank you, dear Ella, for bringing these words into my world.

The power is ours to make or mar
        Our fate as on the earliest morn,
The Darkness and the Radiance are
        Creatures within the spirit born.
Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
Forget how we imagined light.


Photograph © Denise Sallee 2012

Gothic Romantic Terror

When I was an undergraduate I wrote a paper about the sexual symbolism of the landscape in the original Gothic novels - the terror evoked in an innocent young woman by the tall peaks and deep valleys of a remote and foreign environment. Recently, I've been thinking about that paper and the novels I was reading for the class because I am exploring the nature of terror, of horror, and the supernatural for the novel I am now writing.  I don't read horror writing - so I am "boning" up. I think what causes me to reflect upon the early Gothics is because the authors allowed our imagination to help create the drama - it is the reader's imagination sparked by the description that makes these books so powerful.

The Mysteries of Udolpho was published in 1794 by an Englishwoman named Ann Radcliffe. It set the standard for what would become the Gothic novel. Radcliffe doesn't need green-eyed, gore spewing demons to creep us out - no, she is far too subtle for all of that nonsense. Here are a few excerpts from this novel, as her heroine, heartbroken, navigates her way through a terrifying world made all the more terrifying because it is a world ruled by human passions.

From this sublime scene the travellers continued to ascend among the pines, till they entered a narrow pass of the mountains, which shut out every feature of the distant country, and, in its stead, exhibited only tremendous crags, impending over the road, where no vestige of humanity, or even of vegetation, appeared, except here and there the trunk and scathed branches of an oak, that hung nearly headlong from the rock, into which its strong roots had fastened. This pass, which led into the heart of the Apennine, at length opened to day, and a scene of mountains stretched in long perspective, as wild as any the travellers had yet passed. Still vast pine-forests hung upon their base, and crowned the ridgy precipice, that rose perpendicularly from the vale, while, above, the rolling mists caught the sun-beams, and touched their cliffs with all the magical colouring of light and shade. The scene seemed perpetually changing, and its features to assume new forms...an abrupt opening presented a perspective of only barren rocks, with a cataract flashing from their summit among broken cliffs, till its waters, reaching the bottom, foamed along with unceasing fury; and sometimes pastoral scenes exhibited their 'green delights' in the narrow vales, smiling amid surrounding horror...Towards the close of day, the road wound into a deep valley. Mountains, whose shaggy steeps appeared to be inaccessible, almost surrounded it. To the east, a vista opened, that exhibited the Apennines in their darkest horrors; and the long perspective of retiring summits, rising over each other, their ridges clothed with pines, exhibited a stronger image of grandeur, than any that Emily had yet seen. The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains she was descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest, that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendour upon the towers and battlements of a castle, that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour of these illumined objects was heightened by the contrasted shade, which involved the valley below. 'There,' said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, 'is Udolpho.'...

I'm pretty sure our Emily won't be having a fun time inside this castle...

Please visit this blog for a great in-depth look at The Mysteries of Udolpho.