LETTERS: 2000 : 61 - 63
61.
January 31,
2000
Dear Friend Singh,
Your poems and letter dated January 3, 2000 have reached me. You
have taken a great leap forward in the two poems:
TIME
TO BREAK OFF
WOES
OF COLLAPSE
Not only is
there great emotional depth but the rhythm and language seem richer and purer.
I wonder how you account for it. It’s as if you have grown into a new person
with a much more sophisticated vision, but a language that flows more
naturally. Have you taken my suggestion and started reading Walt Whitman’s
“Song of Myself”? I like these two poems more than anything you have sent me
over the years. It’s as if the years have shaken you out of an obsolete view of
yourself and your world. I think you have
the making of a much greater poet.
I should
congratulate you, also on the haiku
Shell-shocked
or frozen
he
stands in tears on a hilltop
craving
nirvana
It is well
deserving a Peace Museum Award in the 33rd A-Bomb Memorial Day Haiku
Meeting in Kyoto, which, as you know, is a southern city of great dignity and
learning. I am proud of you. I have no
objection to an occasional haiku as good as this one; even if wholesale books
full of Haiku may seem cut and dried, an occasional superb haiku like this one
and the one of yours that gave a title to one of the books you sent me may
justify an occasional venture into the form.
You are so
much younger than I am that I can only praise this new vision of yours. I look
forward to more and greater poems in your new vein.
You would
not like the deep snow that covers Vermont landscape this month. This morning I
got up at 6:30 and for two hours used my heavy duty new snow remover to clear
my driveway and then pushed it 300 yards down the country road to my oldest daughter’s
to clear the front dooryard so that Laura and Roald can move their car into the
roadway. This is a world you can
scarcely imagine. I and all three of my daughters and their husbands must have
an automobile to carry us to stores and libraries and banks and the post
office. We would be helpless without
our car.
I wish it were possible
for you to find a guided missile taking off from Dhanbad and landing in front
of my house. I have just spent a lot of money having a Steinway piano
reconditioned so that it will be of some good for my youngest daughter who will
have it when I am gone. To my surprise,
I am finding I enjoy sitting on
the bench and trying to recover one small bit of the skill I had many years
ago. I will never play well, but music
is becoming important to me again. I am
busy also writing my long book on the computer, and will never reach the end of
that story I’m telling in “WICKED…and Spotless as the Lamb.”
Yours,
Lyle
G
62.
June 3, 2000
Dear Friend Singh,
I know well that
feeling of ennui when I’ve felt there was nothing to live for. My first published book ORCHARD PARK AND
ISTANBUL is full of those poems where I express a depression so great that the
only excuse for such poems is that they may possibly be finger exercises for
happier poems if I can ever become happy.
I was never more depressed than in the sonnet on page 15, that was given
the title “Peeled” in the Table of Contents:
Suddenly
he was old: at forty-two
his
bones pushed out through tissue and skin
(i.e.
scared hollow) batted fear out of you
from
their particular hell, what light shone through
from
under the knotted eyebrows was too thin
to
warm a friend; his eyeglance was an in-
vitation
to a dense macabre. Yet it’s not
true
to
say he was undone; he’d had been undone
all
through the latter years—from sixteen on
he
felt the skull bone lying there under the skin,
giving
the lie to the skin, the set of bone
haggard
under the childpink cheeks; now then
it
was out, all out, no child, a terrible man.
My forty-second year would have been 1953,
three years after I got my Harvard doctorate.
We had been living in Buffalo for six years, and in the suburb of
Orchard Park for three. I had become the
chairman of an independent program in American Studies that I created in
1952. On June 2 of that year I had been
summoned before the UnAmerican Activities of the U S Senate in Washington, and
had turned the tables on the Communist-hunting Senators by telling them I thought
we were under great danger from Communism.
And when Senator Jenner, Chairman, jumped to his feet and praised me, I repeated,
“I think we are under great danger from Communism. We have little to fear from the American
Communist Party, which is declining under the efforts of committees like
yours. What we have to fear is that well
meaning patriots like the members of this Committee will destroy us by using the totalitarian methods of
Stalinist Communism in order, as they think to ferret out Communist membership
where there is none.”
Senator Jenner jumped to his feet, and
shouted to the clerk “Strike it out! Strike
it out!
We don’t want that recorded in the minutes of this Committee!”
I couldn’t have been so brash, if I hadn’t
known they had no record of me as a member of a Communist Cell, for, although I
was a grassroots American Socialists, I had already made a statement at the
beginning that I was not a Communist, had never been a member of the Party, and
had no sympathy with the aims and methods of International Communism.
I was, even so, taking a great chance,
because I know I had been under surveillance, and that the Committee had
information I was a bisexual, which they would have used with great joy if they
could have found that I had in the least committed perjury in my testimony.
Actually, when I got back to Buffalo, I learned
that the Committee on Promotions, having learned of my testimony before the
Committee, had that day promoted me from Assistant to Associate Professor.
I realized that my situation was
completely different from yours, for I was teaching at a firstrate university,
and was famous for having created and become chairman of an inventive new
program.
However, three years later, under a new
chairman, who hated me because my Program was filtering away the best students
from the English Department under which my program existed, attacked me so
openly that for the first time I admitted my sexual orientation to my whife,
who, instead of helping me, exclaimed, “I feel as if I’d been cheated,” and I went
on and confessed o my best friend faculty husband and wife team, who told the
chairman, and I had my first nervous breakdown, and for three months had Electric
Shock Treatment, and only by escaping into Fulbright grants to Turkey and then
India, did I salvage my life, and eventually was in a situation to resign my
Chair, and become an international traveler, to the envy of most of my
colleagues, who stayed at home and built their miserable reputations within the
moribund but better-paying and highly competitive machinery of the University.
More than anything else, it was the
discipline of Poetry that saved me, but even there it is only recently that I have
begun to have anything like artistic recognition, for by publishing so many
books abroad, I did not gain any reputation in the New York City poetry
establishment, catered to by the great publishing houses.
I am lucky this year in having had a very
successful series of public readings, and on March 8, a reading of portions of
SEARCHING FOR AMY at the Poetry/Rare Book Abernethy Collection at Middlebury
College and a number of other lucky readings.
I never expected to become recognized in this way, and am not in the
least a celebrity, except in the eyes of WHO’s WHO in America and WHO’s WHO in the World, and that means
nearly nothing to the US Poetry Establishment.
In my 89th years I have had this small triumph, but I’m still
nobody worth talking about unless I can get some major publisher to bring out
one of my books.
Actually, although that would be nice, I hardly
expect it, and must fall back on the consolation that it was the actual writing
of poems that gave me the only success worth having.
Always
your friend,
Lyle
Glazier
A thought: Why not change your format by studying different
stanza patterns (illustrated in Orchard Park and Instanbul) for English
and American poetry & doing some finger exercises maintaining your subject
matter, which is unique?
63.
Season’s Greeting 2000
A Christmas Carol
From Lyle Glazier
After cremation and a long trip
these ashes will be cold
but take off the box top, dip
your finger, it will not be me
but earth, good enough for anybody
From VOICES OF THE DEAD
NY
to London
PAN
AM in flight
Feb 14
1970
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