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Unread 08-18-2009, 01:46 PM
T.S. Kerrigan T.S. Kerrigan is offline
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Location: Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
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Default Remembering Louis Simpson

Remembering Louis Simpson

When I was young in the fifties with never a crack in my heart Berkeley was an exciting place to be. One walked along Telegraph Avenue with the likes of Pauline Kael, Thom Gunn, Lois Simpson, and a host of visiting poets. The Peninsula was the domain of the imperious Ivor Winters, the Commissar of metrical poetry, and across the bay Ginsburg was howling, Ferlinghetti was promoting his City Lights Bookstore and Mort Sahl was perfecting his political standup rotine.

But Simpson was my principle interest in those days. One of the predominant formal poets in the country, he was shortly to abandon meter and rime for the seductive call of Walt Whitman. By I still treasure some of the earliest of his poems. Early in the Morning was one of my favorites.

Early in the morning
The dark queen said,
“The trumpets are Warning
There’s trouble ahead.”
Spent with carousing,
With wine-soaked wits,
Anthony drowsing
Whispered, “It’s
Too cold a morning
To get out of bed.”

The army’s retreating,
The fleet has fled,
Caesar is beating
His drums through the dead.
“Anthony, horses!
We’ll get away,
Gather our forces
For another day…”
“It’s a cold morning,”
Anthony said.

Caesar Augustus
Cleared his phlegm.
“Corpses disgust us.
Cover them.”
Caesar Augustus
In his time lay
Dying, and just as
Cold as they,
On the cold morning
Of a cold day.

It was a great poem to read to each of my six children and night, The Man Who Married Magdalene was its equal.

The man who married Magdalene
Had not forgiven her.
God might pardon every sin…
Love is no pardoner.

Her hands were hollow, pale and blue,
Her mouth like watered wine.
He watched to see if she were true
And waited for a sign.

It was old harlotry, he guessed,
That drained her strength away,
So gladly for the dark she dressed,
So sadly for the day.

Their quarrels made her dull and weak
And soon a man might fit
A penny in the hollow cheek
And never notice it.

At last, as they exhausted slept,
Death granted the divorce
And nakedly the woman leapt
Upon that narrow horse.

When he woke and woke alone
He wept and would deny
The loose behavior of the bone
And the immodest thigh.

Of all the poetry I read to my kids. I suspect these two never matched the popularity of The Tyger or Daniel Hoffman’s wonderful In the Days of Rin Tin Tin, but I still get a thrill rereading these poems. When John Oelfke asked me to edit The Raintown Review, I decided to do an anthology formal poetry type issue, alaThe first issue of the Formalist sans the fuddy-duddy slant. I wrote to Simpson, asking permission to reprint some of his early poems, but I got no reply.
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