I’ve been slowly going through the Ikuta Press books and picking out gems. Below are a few:

From The First Architect (1982). Hubbell would have been in his late seventies–eighties when he wrote these.

Roe

A Salmon lays a thousand eggs,
That one fish may survive.
A poet writes a thousand poems
Hoping that one will live.

*

Waka

I am not a person.
I am a succession of persons
Held together by memory.

When the string breaks,
The beads are scattered.

*

Hartford

The skull found
in Kungwangling Hill
Lantien county
Shensi province

is said to predate
Pithecanthropus
(renamed Sinanthropus)
Pekinensis

by a thousand centuries
being thought to be
five or six hundred thousand
years old

in the meantime
Pekinensis has disappeared
having been last heard of
in America

and when I was in Hartford
they showed it at the
Museum of Natural History
in New York

and I went down to see it
and everybody roared with laughter
and said,
He’s going to New York to look at a bone!

*

Art News

Bringing you recent developments
in the world of art.

Herman Nitsch
in Happenings in Vienna
between 1960 and 1966
masturbated before an audience

Gunter Brus
in Happenings in Berlin
between 1964 and 1968
had another man urinate
and then defecate
into his mouth
thus uniting oralism
copraphilia, masochism,
exhibitionism, and inversion
in one sweeping gesture

and in 1969
Rudolf Schwarzkogler
“carrying the question of self-destruction
to its ultimate consequences”
cut off his penis
and then killed himself.

We have come a long way
from Giotto.

*

At 80

I know many things,
but not what I would most
like to know.

*

From Walking Through Namba (1978)

Summer

On hot summer days
in imperial Rome
the patrician ladies
would hold in their hands,
for its coolness,
balls of rock crystal.

*

Energy

Of the unnumbered forms
That energy assumes
Three have I always loved:
Cats, cacti, and stones.

A cat can live alone
Or gracious at the hearth,
Gregarious at will,
Unmastered to the death.

The cactus grows in soil
Of little nourishment.
It thrives on what would mean
Death to another plant.

As for a stone, smoothed
By the sea, and wind-scoured,
Who would not wish to be
So tempered and so hard?

*

Suzumushi

The suzumushi’s name means “bell insect.”
Now, in September,
They sing in my garden, in a cage,
replenished with tomato and cucumber.

They eat their husbands. Like everything else, they have
Their saturnalia and their hells.
At night I lie and listen to their song
Like little silver bells.

*

Cricket

I found a cricket in my bedroom
but I chose to ignore it.

The next night it was still there,
looking, I thought, rather dejected.

I caught it in a handkerchief
and put it outdoors.

All that night
it sang under my window.

From Climbing to Monfumo (1977)

Reflection

Marcus Aurelius
Must have been bilious.

*

Terza Rima

Run from love and hate
As from the tettered plague.
Take pride from your mate.

Set your heel on the egg
Of passion lest it hatch
A snake, a rat, a pig,

Or some fantastic catch
Worse than the cockatrice.
Be vigilant and watch.

Be vigilant and wise
Before you are undone.
Man should live as he dies,
Defiant and alone.

*

The Road Not Taken

One night I was reading in bed,
In the house of my childhood.
I was about sixteen
And was reading a Buddhist book.
Suddenly I realized what it was all about:
Give up all desires. Renounce everything.
I approached the abyss. I looked into it.
I turned back in terror. The moment passed.
It never came again.
I had missed it, for this life.

*

Non Credo

I do not believe that Ezra Pound wrote a sonnet
every day for a year and then threw them all
away.

I do not believe that Martha Graham never did
anything on the stage until she had done it
perfectly in her studio one thousand times.

I do not believe that Hemingway re-wrote The
Old Man and the Sea two hundred times.

I do not believe that when Walt Whitman was a
child he was kissed by Lafayette.

I do not believe that Mme. Blavatsky was a pupil
of Leschetizky.

*

Abstract

When I left America twenty years ago
Abstract Expressionism was the dernier cri.
Jackson Pollock was comme il faut.
(I use the French so you will see
That I am in the know.)

In Denmark a chimpanzee, bribed with bananas, painted
Similar things, and an orang-outang was prevailed
Upon to do the same in America. Not a review was tainted
With suspicion. A “new and virile talent” was hailed
By the critics, and the public was enchanted.

This modern version of the famous donkey’s tail should invite
Reflection on the meaning of my yarn.
Think it over and you’ll see that I am right:
No chimpanzee could make a Mondrian,
Nor could an orang-outang have painted White on White.

*

Matsue

the bridge at Matsue
in the cool night

the boat lanterns
moving silently

*

San Michele

They sleep now at San Michele,
Diaghilev dreaming of Nijinsky

Stravinsky dreaming of Diaghilev
and the days of gold

Pound…
dreaming of what?

*

Neandertal

The neandertal, more sensitive
Than any ape, not quite a man
Had intimations of art.

He chose, to fashion tools from,
Caught by their beauty,
Rock crystal and Spanish topaz.

Blunted bits of manganese,
Faceted with use, betray
That he painted his body.

Even the proto-neandertal
Of the Russ-Wurm deposit
Cherished the cave bear’s jaw

Bearing the fortuitous look
Of a man’s head, in profile,
Which he wore as a fetish.

Later, to increase the likeness,
He would bore a hole
Where the eye should be.

I first heard the name of this poet in 1992 in a conversation with Edith Shiffert in Kyoto. “Do you know the work of Lindley Williams Hubbell?” she asked me, “He’s really quite a fine writer.” She told me how he was once a professor at Doshisha University and at the time of our conversation, to the best of her knowledge, he was sitting sad and alone in a hospital waiting to die. She indicated that he was very unhappy to be there, though he was visited often by his devoted students. She went on to tell me that he had won the Yale Series of Younger poets award back in 1927, had come to live full time in Japan in 1953, and following the lead of Lafcadio Hearn, had given up his American citizenship and had taken the name of Hayashi Shuseki. I was impressed, but surrounded as I was by all the new things that Japan offered, I’m sad to confess that I forgot about Hubbell and it wasn’t until recently that I began to run into his name again. On the internet I noted that Weldon Kees, one of my all-time favorite poets, was a fan of Hubbell’s work. And more recently, in conversations with Burton Watson I grew more and more interested in Hubbell’s writing. To encourage this, Burton kindly leant me his signed collection of Hubbel’s books–all published by Ikuta Press, which still exists under the guidance of the wonderful Yoko Danno.

From some writings by Hiroki Sato which Burton clipped from the Japan Times, I learned a bit more about Hubbell–He was born in Hartford Connecticut in 1901 and he died at the age of 93. The article, and indeed the poems indicate that he was prodigiously learned, and given to disquisitions on Greek and Roman minor poets and cataloguing the written lightning of the flora and fauna of prehistoric times. He appears to have been able to read Egyptian Hieroglyphics–or at least he had a smattering of Budge under his belt, and all of these items, along with a good cathartic dose of black humor, found their way into his various productions.

Finding Hubbell’s work is a bit like finding a frozen mastadon, complete with the still-to-be-digested last meal–for here was someone who found his not inconsiderable voice during the second great wave of American Modernism. He was a contemporary of Hart Crane and a still fertile William Carlos Williams. Pound–who’s mentioned more than anyone in the poems–was an intellectual force. And, incredibly Hubbell predicts the resurrection of the reputations of Mina Loy and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven! One name is curiously missing from his works, though, and that is Wallace Stevens–also a Hartford resident. You would think that they must have crossed paths at some time. (Maybe that explains the silence!) Hubbell was also quite well versed in Modernism in the arts. He liked Mondrian and Brancusi and could not stand what were actually the beginnings of what is now called performance and conceptual art. More on Hubbell in future notes.

Pablo Capra’s “Life As A Poet” Vol. 8 sits before me as I write this. It features a picture of a gaunt-looking, vatic Robert Kelly. Inside is a poem by Kelly called “Vetch,” a passage of which goes like this:

I miss you so
when the leaves grow alternate
the berries ripen
so far from my lips

That door leads to another thing.
If you go through it
nothing bad.
Only you are not here any more.

But what was the wind called, Daddy?
We called it nothing
it was one more weather

an apple gate
an esplanade

an archaic system of exchane.

If it weren’t for the solids in the world
what would shield us from the look of the sun?
The empty gaze that makes us tremble,
our eyes the feeble answers to that scrutiny.
The house helps us. In its shade
at dawn a structure cherishes the western dew

are you a movie
that you talk that way
language swaying your hips

Interesting stuff!

Capra works in the Beyond Baroque bookstore–an ideal job for a young, aspiring author/publisher. He cast a skeptical (and rightly so) eye at your 51 year old correspondent, and an even more skeptical eye at myself and good friend poet Judith Skillman, veterans of po-biz from at least 1978. “See what you have to look forward to?” I said to Mr. Capra, who chose that moment to begin checking his stock cards. Here’s a Capra poem:

Why do I write “purses,” “tents”?
Tomato the clown screams, “Vertigo!”
in a video his old friend showed me.
Car blasts by my room like a UFO,
already in the future,
throwing out light–
a time-travelling disaster
for the people inside.

Will the pictures turn out right
in my flipbook life?
Or, will they cast long shadows
two different sizes?
How does the world wake again
innocent every morning?
I couldn’t make time stop
so I screamed!

It’s coming from Alaska
to rub it in their faces.
By the gutted gazebo,
a snake like a bracelet
suns its pretty colors
in a glamorous garden.
“Maybe Emily lost it,”
Oly thought. Then it was gone.

Some interesting language. I especially like the “It” coming from Alaska and then leaving the poem. Also liked the abrupt Oly engaged in thinking about Emily. Oh to be young again!

The youngest work in the collection is by the punk poet Ariel Pink, whose punk album “Worn Copy” is available from Paw Track Records. ‘Nuff said, as they say.

For more information about the “Life as a Poet” series–including prices and submission guide, please check out Brass Tacks Press www.geocities.com/brasstackspress, and tell them Ahadada sent you.