WRITING EDITING
PUBLISHING: A MEMOIR
LETTERS FROM LYLE GLAZIER TO
R.K. SINGH
_______________________________________________________________________________
Lyle Glazier (May 8,
1911 - Oct 21, 2004), who for years
“roamed the literary world from the fringes,” made his home in Bennington,
Vermont and worked and lived abroad in Turkey, North Yemen and India. He had
been in touch with the Indian English poet, Ram Krishna Singh, from 1970s till his death. Singh wrote his M.A.
thesis on Glazier’s poetry and shared his own poems with the American poet
professor for several years. In a way, Glazier’s response from time to time, as
his selected letters would bear out,
shaped Singh’s poetic sensibility.
Lyle Glazier’s books of
poems include Two Continents, The Dervishes,
Orchard Park and Istanbul, You Too, Voices of the Dead, Azuba Nye, Recalls,
Prefatory Lyrics, and Searching for Amy, while Summer
for Joey and Stills from a Moving
Picture are his novels. Great Day
Coming and American Decadence and
Rebirth are his works of criticism.
Besides being Professor of English and Professor Emeritus at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, he was also a social activist, who strongly
believed that the United States’ path toward war in the Middle East was paved with
a tragic lack of understanding of the tribal mentality of the Arab world.
The letters provide a peep into history, politics, literature, society, culture, and of course, personal exchanges -- our families, profession, concerns--, and our growing, and perhaps, ending! These also reveal Lyle Glazier's mind as a bisexual poet and writer just as these help to gauze my own poetic growth from the early 70s to the end of the 20th century. Despite achievements to our credit, we both remain unrecognized by the mainstream media and academia.
The letters provide a peep into history, politics, literature, society, culture, and of course, personal exchanges -- our families, profession, concerns--, and our growing, and perhaps, ending! These also reveal Lyle Glazier's mind as a bisexual poet and writer just as these help to gauze my own poetic growth from the early 70s to the end of the 20th century. Despite achievements to our credit, we both remain unrecognized by the mainstream media and academia.
_______________________________________________________________________________
LETTERS: 1972 : 1 - 3
1.
Dear Mr
Singh,
Like many
writers, I am flattered to think someone is interested enough in my work to
wish to write about it; however, if you believe as I do that poems must speak
for themselves—that what is revealed in a poem should not be manipulated from
outside—then a book of poems must become its own witness. Like a composer of music, a poet is a
creator; like a performer of music, a reader is a re-creator. He may be helped
through knowing biographical and social background—for example, my poems seem
to me to reflect quite clearly the context of experience from a foothold within
the United States. What I have written about my country and the world is
grounded in my life as an American, at home & abroad. Furthermore, I am a
teacher; the kind of poem I write reflects my reading, reflects my
experimentations with traditional verse forms (notably in Orchard Park) and my
experimentation with trying to discover a self-evolved esthetic, an organic
form expressing my own tone of voice (Istambul & VD particularly). But it is more
complex than that, for every serious practitioner of traditional forms tries to
mould them into his own patterns—by controlling rhythms, language, images, and
symbols. The Dervishes, for example, imitates Emily
Dickinson’s experiments with slant rhyme and with off-beat rhythms;
nevertheless, The Dervishes, I hope is my poem, not only in ideas that
would not have occurred to Emily
Dickinson, but in elements of texture that are uniquely mine. So, although a
reader can be helped some through inside information about biography &
social background, he must really look into the poems themselves for the
important revelations. Especially, a
poem that “works” must seem to the reader something he himself might have a share
in. Ankara and Banaras are not so different
but what VD No. 40 should be able to bridge the miles. You and I are not so different but what VD
169 should be able to remind us both of our deep longings. Even VD 117—although you have never been in
New England—might be able to communicate
something to an Indian about encroachments on the beauty of man’s natural
environment. No. 142 may be more difficult for a youthful reader; yet you are
male, and comprehend I am sure what it might be for a much older man to realize
that a necessary surgery has deprived him of the power to eject sperm; how can
he protect himself from despair except to rationalize humourously, and try to
make an advantage out of his tragedy?
Some weeks
ago I sent to you through Dr. Pandeya some reviews of my poems, some comments
of my own, as well as copies of the four books. I hope that by now you have
received these materials. An important new review of VD is about to appear in a
magazine, and if I get it in
time, I will send you a copy.
I hardly
know what to say about your desire to come here to read modern poetry. At Buffalo, we have a great library of modern
poetry and poetry criticism. Yet it is
not easy even to be admitted to our graduate school of English. For next year there were 500 applications for
20 places; one of those places went to a student at Banaras Hindu University.
Even so,he must somehow find the money to bring him here and support him after
he arrives; he cannot get a visa to come to the U.S. without proof of means of
support.
My own connection
with the university is being loosened, for I have chosen to retire early, and
beginning September 1, I will be Professor of English Emeritus. My wife and I have already sold our home and
are building a small new one in southwestern Vermont, near Bennington.
I will look
forward eagerly to reading your manuscript, and I will try to help you in any
way that I can. I suppose that it is
unhappily true that most Indian students of English or American literature will
have to content themselves with learning about that literature from Indian
teachers & books in Indian libraries, just as I had to study British
literature under American teachers and in American libraries.
If your
advisors have faith in you, you should try to get a scholarship that will take
you to England or to the United States. I am sure that you have already thought
about applying for a Fulbright fellowship.
Please call
on me for any help that seems to be
within my province.
Cordially yours,
Lyle
Glazier
Professor of English
I loved
Banaras very much. It gives me great pleasure today to think that what I now
write on this page will, in a few days,
be read by you, there. I wish I
were again at the Hotel de Paris, where you could come to see me.
LG
2.
November
8, 1972
Dear R.K.
Singh,
The day I
got your letter I wrote to Dr. P.S. Sastri at Nagpur and to Dr. Kamal Wood at
Bombay, sending also a shorter note to Mr. Ezekiel telling him I had written to
Dr. Wood about you. I think that Dr.
Sastri would be your most likely sponsor, if he has time. He is not far from you, is a poet himself,
has some of my poems as well as a collection of my essays on American novels.
I like particularly
your poem “The best poetry/that I can
read/is a woman…” “A poet’s simplicity…”
is also very nice. You seem to master in
those poems the different trick of writing a rhythm that any reader can catch
without going astray. That is the great
difficulty with free rhythm; no one else can quite catch what the poet had in
his ear. Poems in a diary form—that seems
a good idea.
I am
flattered to know that you circulated an article about my poems. Dr. Pandeya has just sent a copy of his “Memoirs
as a Form of Poetry: F.T. Prince and Lyle Glazier,” Prajna, Banaras Hindu University Journal, Vol. XVII Part (I), October 1971.
A young
teacher at Tirupathi is also writing on my poems, as well as an associate
professor at State University College, Buffalo.
When you
speak of my poems as confessionals, yes. But the confession is sometimes wholly subjective, sometimes
a looking out at experience. Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow” lends itself
to both kinds of poem. You can—borrowing from Joyce—call them epiphanies; in Dubliners
there are subjective epiphanies (“Araby”) and objective epiphanies (Counterparts),
while in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is the subjective, and Poldy and Molly
Bllom the objective. It is possible to confess
to revelations from within or revelations from without. Does that make sense?
# Uganda’s Amin
slaughtering Christians
for a Moslem
Good is
Richard Nixon
underneath the skin
From PERSON, PLACE, AND THING
# 41 Walking the brown and gold
October swamp
in search of a stray he
stirs the curiosity
of a pastured bull
and come back laden
with orange ferns
and from a ruined wall
a lichened rock
suitably flat for one
more stepping stone
across the incipient lawn
#42 Deep in the swamp
maple and tamarack
birch and pine
give way to feathered ferns
above the glittering stream
speaks to no ear
year after year
till now
I come and stay
a moment
and as softly go
Person, Place, and Thing is only in progress, not
published. Therefore, I cannot now send it to you.
Cordially,
Lyle
Glazier
3.
Nov
25 ‘72
Dear friend R.K. Singh,
Your letter of Oct 19 reached me when I was just returned
from a trip to Iceland and New York City for two weeks with my friend Prim who
came from Bangkok to meet me for a reunion with a wealthy Icelandic businessman
and his wife, who paid for Prim’s travel.
After that I went to Buffalo to talk to a graduate class in literary
criticism where VD was being used as one text, and to give a poetry
reading. That visit coincided with the
publishing of three chapters of STILLS in the magazine PAUNCH; I sent a copy to
you. When I got back home, I was abed two
weeks with a virus flu, and then went to NYCity for a week as consultant to a
branch college of City Univ. of N.Y. Now
I am at last trying to catch up with a basketful of correspondence.
What you say about The Dervishes strikes me as
exactly right; the whole poem hinges on irony.
I am not a scholar of 13th century Turkish mysticism, but in
1962 at Christmas I went from Istanbul to Konya and saw the dervishes whirling
beautifully for an audience of Turks and tourists. Although the Turkish government had outlawed
the dance as a religious rite, it was clear to me that the dancers still were
trying to solve human problems by whirling into a trance. However beautiful,
such a spectacle seemed to me as monstrously inadequate as the mumbo jumbo of
Catholicism or Protestantism, or, if you will pardon me, of Hinduism, or
Buddhism, or Shintoism, or another religious ism, and as inadequate as the
bogus Democracy of the West, or the bogus Communism of the Soviet. Everywhere in religion and in
politics there is an occult search
for salvation by means of an elite, and
no real respect for a non-competitive egalitarianism.
In 1968, when my wife and I were spending a year in Ankara,
we planned to go to Konya to see the dervishes again; in fact, we had bought
our tickets for the bus and the dance. However, Amy became ill and we couldn’t
go. At that time, December 4, 1968, the English language DAILY NEWS, published
in Ankara, had a front page article on the Dervishes, and I read it
carefully. Later when I was invited to speak to an Ankara linguistics club, I started
to write The Dervishes, partly to illustrate the way symbolism—that basic
instrument of language – spreads from culture to culture. The stanzas on Mevlana and Şems ‘i Tebrizi
were taken straight from the article: “The
climax of Mevlana’s mystic poetry didn’t come about until he met a companion
Sems ‘i Tebrizi, who is considered an iconoclast from an orthodox Islamic point
of view. He brought music to Mevlana’s
life and to this day music has an essential place in the Mevlevi order. Their
conversations over the Absolute, the Creator, and the Beloved are reported to
have lasted for hours without a break. Şems
left Konya just as quietly as he had appeared in Mevlana’s life because of the
rumors spread about town about their infatuation with each other. Mevlana’s most touching poetry was written
after Şems’ departure…”
When I returned to Buffalo in the fall of 1969, I brought
with me copies of my book YOU TOO, which had been printed in Istanbul. A young teacher at Buffalo State College, a
friend and former graduate student of mine, read the book and decided to use it
as a text in his American literature course in Spring ’70. He came to see me to talk about the book in
December ’69 or January ’70 when I was getting ready to go back to Ankara for a
semester as visiting professor. He made
two tapes, one devoted to readings and comments for poems in YOU TOO, and the
other a reconstruction of my lecture to the Ankara linguistics club, including a reading
of The Dervishes. This second
tape was later typed up and made into an article for STRAIT,Vol 1, No 3, 27
October-November 9 1971, New York State
University College at Buffalo. I think I
sent you a copy; this is my completest
statement on the poem; if you have lost your copy, I think perhaps I can scout
up another one for you.
In the spring of 1971, when I returned again to Ankara, I
arranged with the editor of the press at the university where I was visiting
professor to have The Dervishes printed by the press and dedicated to
the Head of the English department of Hacettepe University, where I was
teaching. Unfortunately, between ’69 & ’71, Turkish politics had shifted
Right, student rebels had been jaoiled, and a government under Prime Minister
Erim reflected the wish of the United States to see political leftism wiped
out. Meanwhile, the head of the English
department & I had a falling out
over another matter. The editor of the
press reported that he could not print the poem because someone (I presume
theHead) had read it and was shocked by my irreverence for one of the great
Turkish Heroes, that business about his
love affair with Şems ‘I Tebrizi.
So I withdrew the poem, and sent it to Istanbul Maatbasi, which was
already at work on a publication of VD.
When the Ankara editor told me that The Dervishes would be
considered seditious by the official censor, who had to pass judgment on every
book printed in Turkey, I waited until my trunk containing 450 copies of VD and
the same number of The Dervishes had
cleared the customs in Istanbul and was on a vessel bound for New York. Then I gave a copy of The Dervishes to
the surprised editor. It was my last
invitation to visit Hacettepe University as visiting professor.
I still have an early draft of the poem, handwritten into
the front of a diary I kept during that 1968-9 year in Ankara, and I have
a whole folder full of revisions of the poem. Almost the last revision was the first line,
changing “Roused from no motion” to the simpler “Out of no motion” but the whole
poem was much gone over, considerably more than I remembered till just
now when I got out the folder again.
I am sorry to hear that you have troubles of communication
with your father. Does he think you
should be contributing more to the
support of your family? What a terribly
unjust world we live in, where good, intelligent, worthy people do not have
enough to keep body and soul together! I suppose I was lucky (what a terrible thing
to say!) in that my father and mother committed suicide when I was 22, and I
had then only one younger brother to support.
It was in the early Depression, and my father lost his job.
Please excuse my delay. Has Mrs. Petrosky sent you a
copy of Rapport?
Yrs.
Lyle G.
Lyle G.
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