LETTERS: 1981 : 22 – 28

22.

                                                                                                                        February 1981

Dear R.K. Singh,

I am delighted to have your gift of a copy of INDO-ENGLISH POETRY, printing 10 of your lyrics.

The poems are deft and readable, with clean insights. I think  that they are from a craft that has been improving over the past few years.  A poem like the one on page 154 with its winter/spring antithesis means something different to me from what it would have meant forty years ago when I believed 70 is so old that there can be no passion enduring so long.  I am not sure that I get from the poem what you wanted me to get.  Are the lovers happy in their passion or are they “jinxed” by it?  “Rains” throws me off, because “rain” is passion, as are “jungles” and “warmth” and “vigor” – all of them seeming affirmative to me, where “calamity” “nemesis” “jinx” “empaled” & “end we detest” must be negative.  I wonder a bit if I’m thrown off because, like Whitman, I am hedonistic and physical, whereas the poem baffles me with a hint that I ought to be looking for pure spirit. You see how you stirred me.

My problem is different from what I imagine yours to be.  Your poems seem always internalized, while mine have a tendency to grow from externals, so that I wonder if I make a transition from reporting on an experience to living an experience. How to get there inside where the real life of the psyche goes on?

I spent the last part of October, all of November, and early  December as visiting professor at Sana’a University in Yemen Arab Republic, where S.M. Pandeya has been visitor for two years.  It was a great pleasure to be near him for occasional talks, though we did not meet as often as I would have liked.  He came to some of my classes.  I think that he plans to return to Banaras next year.  I don’t know whether or not I will ever visit Sana’a again. I am invited.

We have had a hard time because of my wife’s arthritis, and last year she had four operations for cataract.  Her vision is better with new glasses, otherwise I’d not have been able to leave her for two months.

I am enclosing the lyrics on Sana’a  I am working on now.  I find it very hard to create an impression to share with a reader.  It is necessary to believe that he has no signposts except the ones you give him, and yet he carries all sorts of taboos and faiths that can lead him away from where you want him to go.

Please write to me again, and please give my good wishes to your  wife.     

                                                                                                   Yrs.,

                                                                                            Lyle Glazier

                        Sana’a

When night abruptly stabs

into the crater

of this extinct volcano

windows of ancient houses

shudder with primary lesions

blue, green, yellow

clotted red

A visitor from the West

plots the lie of the land, explores

thoroughfares two days perhaps, then dares

strike into dust-deep alleys

across from Sam City Hotel, enters

a lane trusting it leads to souks

Standing in shadow encounters

crazy layers of housefrounts

handcrafted, four/six/eight storied

Babylonian skyscrapers corniced

off plumb, a  rattled cubism designed

by whim just right for the eye

Eyes accustomed to dark

in a streetlevel  well

he makes outdoorknobs handforged

and latches handhammered, above

him warpjointed windows embroidered

fantastically in mortar over blocks

of handtooled granite or brick

The stranger imagines entering

a ground floor, windowslitted

for storage and stalls—

donkeys, a camel? goats—

imagines climbing stairs

to a dark door opening

on stained glass

prisoning light

to splash on a tiled floor

23.

                                                                                                            March 12  ‘81

My dear R.K. Singh,

Your generous and detailed letter has many passages to fascinate me.

I am glad to know that I didn’t completely misinterpret your “complex of emotions,” in the “anti-romantic” poem on page 154. What you say about the origin of the emotion in one of those universal downsinkings of communication when a wife and a husband fall out of tune—for a trifle, maybe—sharpens the edge of my understanding and rings true to my own married experience.  The ironic tear of emotions is particularly shattering when the attempt to communicate is sexual.  How small an incident can throw one or the other partner out of tune.  Maybe the baby cries for a change of diaper. Or the husband remembers an unhappy experience with a student. How rare and wonderful—almost a miracle—when both partners are perfectly in tune.  During the honeymoon joy is possible, for then every discovery is new, but after sex becomes a familiar routine, how can the miracle be sustained?  Not every time, perhaps, but again and again, the wonder will be revived.  But your poem, I think you are telling me, is about one of those unhappy occasions in between the crests.

May I comment about #875.  I like the first stanza very much for its simple naturalness.  Would I like it better if in the second line “by” were changed to “in”?  Autumn, a season, cannot, perhaps be personified now, as it once was personified by Keats.  In the second stanza, I think you stray far from poetic voice when you use the word “Jupiter.”  Jupiter is not your god nor mine, and we do an injustice to our deepest inspiration when we become allusive to a tradition that is not ours. Perhaps if there were a cutting edge of intellectual comment, the allusion would have power, but here aren’t you simply drawing on a cliché that has no force in your world?  For a similar reason, I cannot use Christian symbolism, except with an intellectual comment, because I am not a Christian, but an agnostic.

                                The season confers

                                through soft grey clouds

                                a growing freshness on naked trees 

Not good, but perhaps I make my point.

I like your including the paragraph about the fourth year of your marriage, and your wife’s inquiry about me, and the gentle naughtiness of your one and a half year old son.  You draw me close.  If I could afford it and had the power, and it weren’t so hard on my wife, I would always like to have a child in the house, and indeed   to discover the joy of having a son.  I may have told you that our three are all daughters, three beautiful girls living away from home.  My wife suffers pain from arthritis, but after four operations for cataract last year, she can now read again, and after an operation on her hip, she can walk, but not easily nor far.  She no longer moves       with the speed of light “right out straight” as she used to say. 

Thank you for informing me about your having completed your dissertation six months ago.  I had no idea, and I am very happy for you, and wish you a favorable verdict.  I recall my own waiting from September till January in 1949-50, and how glad I was to have it over after my oral examination in May.  Please tell me whether you submitted it at Banaras Hindu University, and who was your advisor.  In Sana’a I renewed my friendship with Dr. S.M.Pandeya, whom I regard as one of my best friends anywhere.  We seem to share a common critical spirit.  I remember from 1971, when I was traveling around India lecturing for USIS, Pandeya reported to me that somebody, some Indian scholar,had spoken witheringly about my pairing Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Melville’s Billy Budd in one of my proposals for a lecture, but, Pandeya said, “I knew at once you had in mind how both Daisy and Billy are victims of a corrupt Establishment.”

You speak of spirit of “dissatisfaction” in my series of Sana’a poems, and of course you are right, but there was also vicarious joy in my envy of their pleasure in the beauty of stained glass.

I do hope that your Ph.D. degree will lead to a happier location for you.  I don’t know how old you are. I am sure that financially and intellectually  my situation in Buffalo was probably better than yours—in the U.S. a Ph.D. is the terminal degree and therefore used to reward the successful candidate, though now there are so many that doctors have trouble finding positions. In my case, I had the good position,  but I was psychically profoundly unsettled, and my professional life became ruined—not wrecked because I was on tenure. I began writing fiction and poetry (as well as literary criticism) to vent my need to rebel. It is only now, recently, that I have the satisfaction near the end of my life to feel that I begin to fulfill my visions.

For the past three years I’ve been writing short fiction that has sometimes appeared in gay magazines, and a major work of non fiction, a sexual autobiography, telling how married gays are not uncommon but legion.  The title of my new book comes from my recent discovery that my family springs from the very first English settlers in New England, the ones who came on the Mayflower to New Plimoth.  WESTWARD FROM PLIMOTH  has been at one of the great publishing houses, being read by the vice president of Holt, Rinehart & Winston.  When I phoned the office last week, his secretary said, “Dick is reading your book now.  He likes it very much, but he is very busy and may not get to write to you at once.”  Then she added, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said so much.  I hope I haven’t been indiscreet.”  I submitted the book the day before I left for Sana’a – October 22—and still I wait. The same editor has had the MS of STILLS FROM A MOVING PICTURE (my novel that you looked at) since 1976, holding it, hoping the time will come ripe for a novel about a married homosexual.  I trust that your wife will not be revolted to learn this fact about me.  I only begin to realize that I have been a good husband and father and have nothing to be ashamed of.  I begin to be more comfortable with myself.  I was not a threat to someone who did not seek me out. 

Affectionate greetings to you both,

Lyle Glazier

24.

                                                                                                            April 14   ‘81

My dear R.K. Singh,

It is hard to advise anybody, but I sympathize with your predicament there in Dhanbad.  When I  was 30, at the outbreak of World War II (i.e. World War according to the Western view), I lost my job at a small college in Maine,  after being there 5 years.  It was a blow, but turned out to be good.  I went from thereto Boston to teach at Tufts College, about 5 miles from Harvard University. At Tufts I was a teacher of freshman English only. This meant that I had four classes, each with 30 students, each of whom had  to write at least one 500 word composition every week. This meant that every week I read and corrected 60,000 words of student writing.  I taught summers as well as winters.  At the end of two and a half years I got sick to my stomach when I would pick up another pile of those papers.

Then I was offered as much money to be an assistant in the Harvard Shakespeare course, so I left my job at Tufts, and went on to get my Ph.D. in 1950 when I was 39, and by then the father of three daughters, and by then teaching in Buffalo, where my load was one class in American literature, one in British poetry, and 7 more students preparing for comprehensive examinations, and each of them meeting me once a week for a half hour.  I thought I had landed in heaven.

I don’t know what there is in this for you, except that sometimes no one can foresee a better outcome.  Not that I was ever a great success in the university.  I rebelled too much against the administration, never attended social functions, never became administratively ambitious. 

My new book WESTWARD FROM PLIMOTH is an autobiography.  I have tried to make it as frank as my poems and my novel.  I am afraid I may have been over optimistic when I last wrote you. I have had no further word from the publisher, and begin to think I was hoodwinked, and that my book isn’t being seriously considered. I called the office again, and  this time got no news at all.  In June, if not before, I will travel to New York and bring my manuscript home, and try also to bring STILLS FROM A MOVING PICTURE  which the same editor has been holding now for five years.

To return once more to your poem # 154, which I consider a most interesting poem, what you say about “fear of sexual failure”—“self-generated”—takes me back to the words of my psychiatrist when I was trying to come out candid about being gay: he said, “Sex is symbolic.”  For somebody like you it doesn’t help much, however, to be told that success or failure is a product of your own illusions.  Sensitive people become hypersensitive when they try to comprehend themselves.  Poetry helps—writing poetry—because no matter what the trauma, there is some help in comprehending what it means to be human—and mortal, and your Greeks believed, for to them only the gods were immortal.

When I saw Dr. Pandeya in Sana’a last October, we talked about you and about Savitri. I trust  his judgment so much that he strengthened my own somewhat guilty conscience over having taken such a dislike to a poem to which you devoted so much time.  But then, soon after writing my thesis,  I lost my devotion to Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. 

I will gladly give you the address of the editor of Origin but I hardly encourage you to submit.  The man is extremely rigorous, and I never expected that he would print some of my poems.  I knew him frist in Boston in 1945, when I was teaching at Tufts from which he had just graduated.  He went on to the Black Mountain College, and then traveled in Italy and spent many years in Kyoto and married a Japanese wife.  Now he is back in Boston. His masthead informs poets desiring to submit:  “Unsolicited manuscripts will not be returned.  The sender must assume all risks.  Response will occur within 24 hours may nof receipt or not at all.”

Cid was not in the least encouraging about my first submissions.  As he says, he never sends poems back, but he will let you know if he likes what he reads, and sometimes may accept something.

If he doesn’t like what he reads, he  may never reply, very hard on the poet.  And right now is a particularly bad time, because Cid and his Japanese wife have just opened an ice cream shop in Boston, and after great effort and expense are working hard to make the shop a success.

I am sure that if I hadn’t befriended Cid when he was a young man, I would never have persevered to the point where he accepted my twelve poems.  Nobody could have been more surprised than I.

                                                Origin

                                                Cid Corman, Editor

                                                87 Dartmouth Street     

                                                Boston, Massachusetts

                                                USA  02116

I have started a new novel  O MY SON, imagining a married homosexual who has a son who is homosexual.  I begin with an account of my experience in Madras with a massageman who commercialized sensuality, nearly managing to sublimate sex even when merchandizing it.  There was no personal involvement with his client, only his marvelous hands.  You no  doubt know about this, may have read about it in The Kama Sutra. Very curious, very different from hustlers in parks in Istanbul, New Delhi, London, New York—all over the world, where the hustler justifies his sexuality because he never engages in it without pay.  The massageman also is paid, but he is an artist, whose artistry justifies the payment.

What you  say about your youngest brother makes me think of young artists all over the world, who seem to know what they are doing, and when they are young succeed beyond the hopes of older people looking on.  How do they do it?  What is their intuition?

O MY SON:  “He was a solid young man, not massive, but with a solid trunk nearly hipless, where the cloth of his dhoti hugged.  Above the hips he was bare, having flung off his upper garment. He was bare but not naked, for there was no sensual invitation in his having partly disrobed.  His manner was disengaged except for the skill of his hands.  The trick was to seduce the client into yielding to pure sensuality.  To have offered his own body, to have  thrust, to have erected, to have pushed his own cock into play would have been to cheapen professionalism with the currency of commitment. Only by being absolute for merchandize could Ganga sublimate commerce into spiritual consent.  A ten-rupee note lay on the table, but  money was only symbolic….”

                                                                                                Cordially yours,

                                                                                                Lyle Glazier

25.

                                                                                                            June  13  ‘81

Dear R.K. Singh,

I did get your letter of March 30 and recall replying to it, responding particularly to your unhappiness there in your position and your anxiety over your thesis and desire for a new post, as well as remarking on how remarkable it is that your brother has been able to launch himself successfully so young.

I agree that it is time for you to publish a book, and I’ll gladly write an introduction, and try to make editorial suggestions, but not quite (if you please) what you had in mind.  I think it an important part of creative expression to arrange the poems in an order, so I think you ought to do that yourself—chronological order of creation, if you will, but you should make the decision. Above all, I would say, don’t arrange the poems by common elements of content. Every poet—Wordsworth, Whitman, to name two—who has tried to do that has failed.  I would suggest chronology from the time of writing. Also, for an 80-page book, I would suggest you curb your sure-to-be greedy desire to crowd a great deal in.  Limit yourself, rather, to only one poem to a page, even if the poem is short.  I haven’t always done that, but in VD I was trying to get in all the poems written over a 4-month period of time.  Your time span will be much broader.  Give each poem room to breathe.

This, I suggest.  Select perhaps one hundred poems.   Arrange them in the order you like.  Then send them to me, and I will select out the number you have room to print.

Find your own title for your book.

It will be a pleasure to read what you send, but don’t expect a miracle of editing like that of Ezra Pound on THE WASTE LAND.  In general, I would want to accept your vocabulary, your imagery, your concepts, and only exercise a critical voice in selecting out the final 80 poems for your collection.

You ask for Dr. Pandeya’s address. By the time my letter reaches you, he will be back in Banaras, and I assume you have that address.

I have no real influence in academia to exert pressure to help you find a new place. I know that Sana’a, like most places in the Middle East requires a doctorate in hand, and in addition, Sana’a specifies that the candidate have taught at least 5 years after having earned the degree. Believe me, I know from my own early experience the drudgery of teaching English report writing.

The only thing I have to enclose is a short commemorative series for my uncle’s and aunt’s 50^th wedding anniversary. 

                        Affectionate greetings to you and your wife,

                                    Lyle Glazier

No word from my book sent 10/22/80          

 

26.

                                                                                                       July  10   ‘81

Dear R.K. Singh,

By now I hope you have my letter of June 13, in which I offer to help what I can to select and arrange poems for a volume. I suggest that you make your own selection and organization of 100 poems and send them to me for my cutting the group to 80.  In order to make your communication easy, you should keep your own carbon list, so that I won’t have to send back the poems but can make short comments that you will be able to refer to your copy.  Somebody did this for me when I was collecting VD, and I found it immensely helpful, even though only a few poems were omitted.

Today I got your letter and bundle of enclosures for June 26.  Everything interested me.  The abstract of your thesis makes much more sense of SAVITRI than I would ever have made by myself, and I can see how hard you worked.  The sociological implications still excite me more than the poetic for that epic.

Before proceeding further, I must congratulate you for having your thesis accepted. The viva voce I am sure     will be a formality, for you will know more about the poem than any of your examiners.  Yet, you will be on your mettle, happily discovering as you go on in the hour, that the climate is in your favor. I recall even now from 1950 how that realization dawned on me somewhere along in the examination on my thesis for Spenser’s imagery.    

 

I wish I could believe I would have success in placing the article on “The Mythical Construction of Death…” but it would be foolish for me to engage to market your chapter, since I never know how to market my own, and wait for the inevitable rejection with a growing intuition of doom.  I will, therefore, as you suggest, keep the copy in your file along with other papers. In my own case, with my thesis, I managed to salvage two articles that appeared in journals, but the thesis has lain on the shelf, quite dead from 1950 to 1971, when it was disinterred from the Harvard library for a brief mention in J.E. Hankin’s SOURCE AND  MEANING IN SPENSER’S ALLEGORY (Oxford).

The three published articles all found my ear receptive.  What you say about teaching poetry mirrors what I have been saying for a long time. At Sana’a last November, at the first class I told the students that we must find some way for them to be active—it was not important what I did unless they were being active.  Your analysis is more systematic and thorough than anything I have tried. Is there a danger in systematization, as if a poem can be exhausted? Is there a virtue in leaving analysis open—tempting the student always to come back to the poem? I like to let the students take the initiative with a comment on one element—a word, an image, a formal construction, an allusion to another poem—just anything that gives evidence that the student’s mind is alert as he reads the poem.  Then I pick up from there with my own comments, usually first enlarging on what the students have said, and trying to reach the heart of the poem without in any sense “finishing it off.”  Do you see what I mean? But I did like your essay, particularly the first paragraphs, which match my own experience both as to students and many academics.

The article on technical institutions carried me back to 1942-45, when part of my teaching load was one class for Engineers at Tufts University—a smitch of literature, and more than a smitch of technical writing: a screw driver is a means of turning (the acting part), a means of applying force to the turner (a handle) and a connector between the other two (a shank).

            The acting part is made up of

                                                                                A

                                                                                B

                                                                                C

            The handle is made of…

            The shank is made of …

Always accompanied with a diagram/drawing. 

The problem of effective writing is omnipresent in all universities.  The greatest problem is probably that most teachers are not ready to read papers and give detailed comments.

I must not fail to mention how much I like your poem #895.  I think it is nearly perfect.

                        Best wishes to you & your wife,

                                    Lyle Glazier

The boy comes into a clearing

strips and sprawls in the sun

curves fingers

cannot control

the freshening

the leap

the out-thrust

calls his dog

reaches under

both streaming

the dog (hind legs spread) continuing

a long time squirting

on leaves

the boy watching

watched by the eye of the sun

tries to cram into its sheath

the tough nut above the shudder

failing, hides in trees

the dog joins him

they run in a team through the woods

 

27.

                                                                                                     September  28   ‘81

Dear R.K. Singh,

I hope you will not be disturbed if I have cut words from your poems in the same way Cid Corman, a superlative critic, cut words from some of mine.  In fact, I sent him copies of five of these poems to the University of  Iowa, where he is spending six weeks as a critic for Paul Engel’s seminar for poets from the Orient and Africa.

You can put the words back if you choose.  I have especially cut out abstractions and adjectives  that seem to obscure your essential meaning.

My numbering does not conform to yours in the small book you sent me, but it does follow the order of the poems, and I think you will have little trouble following along in your copy.

I am sorry that I don’t like your title, not at all, because it is slackly sentimental, but the poems are tightly realistic like the bits of life you record.

I have decided to carry my copy to the library to make a Xerox in case something happens that my letter does not reach you.  In that case, I will send you another when I hear from you next that you worry over not having heard from me.

My introduction should be very short, not to take attention from the poems. Something like this, I think.

R.K. Singh writes with the directness of an overheard whisper, or a wind through trees, a ripple in a stream,  or a cry in the street after dark.

Yes, I think that that is about what I would like to say about the poems that have moved me powerfully.  Don’t be afraid to give a small poem its full force by publishing it alone on its page.

You can ignore all my notations if you choose.  I am flattered that you invited me. 

                                                                                                Yours,

                                                                                           Lyle Glazier

Would   MY SILENCE   do for a title?

See poem #3 (my numbering)

28.

                                                                                                    November  9   ‘81

Dear R.K. Singh,

I opened your envelope fearfully, afraid I may have offended you with my suggestions for emendation.  Nothing is more private and personal than a poem.

About the title: as I told you, I have no very clear thoughts.  MY SILENCE  was a reaction against  FLAMING ROSES, which seemed florid for your poems.

Cid Corman is not a professor, but a deservedly celebrated poet/editor.  I sent numbers 1, 9, 11, and two others I did not mark.  Corman has not chosen to comment. Don’t feel bad.  He is a very special editor with extremely strong biases about the nature of poetry.

When I came to read the poems, I found many more than 80 that seemed publishable.  Those marked OK are as acceptable to me as those in the first column.  Many of them are longer, and I was trying to save space to save postage.

What you could do, if you choose, is to print the very short poems two on each page, and have room to fit in the longer ones, taking them in turn as they appear in the manuscript. I like some of the ones marked OK  fully as much as the others. In fact, it seemed that as I approached the end of the script, the newer poems became very interesting, yet I didn’t wish to cut out any of the earlier ones.  In spite of my warning not to print too many poems, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have more than 80.

If I were you, I would keep the dates in your private manuscript and not publish them.  Unlike my book VD, yours is not a log of a specific, limited journey, and except for, possibly, chronological order, there’s no need to supply dates.

Like you, I am poor at titles, and believe that many poets would better omit titles.

In 16b, by all means keep “methodically concealed,” as you should keep everything that strikes you as right and important.  Did you consider keeping “hidden” rather than “methodically concealed,” which seems, perhaps, rather heavy?

In #55, my “slant room” was typographical. Sorry. Shd. be “moon”.

I intended the red circles for the word no, then found  on turning the page that my red marker had come through to the back-up page.  P. 21, “messianic” was only for spelling, e not a, as you had it.

From now on, for your book, you should be on your own, and should make decisions without consulting further with me.  Anything you decide on is right. 

As for me, please don’t let me into the book at all except as you wish to acknowledge my foreword if you use it. This must be your book, the final decisions all yours. 

I hope you find a new job more to your liking and ability.

I do like the new poems, clean and crisp. Save them for your second volume.

                                                                                                Cordially,

                                                                                                Lyle Glazier