I was not familiar with the work of Samuel Hazo until I found a book of his in a thrift shop last year and snapped it up, recognizing a jewel when I saw it. I suppose it was my bad that I’d never encountered him before. He is a much-published poet, a contemporary of Richard Wilbur’s, and he remains director of the International Poetry Forum. (
http://www.thepoetryforum.org/)
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading these and perhaps you’d like to discuss his work and ideas.
Hazo’s early poems are written in strict metrics:
CAROL OF A FATHER
He runs ahead to ford a flood of leaves—
he suddenly a forager and I
the lagging child content to stay behind
and watch the gold upheavals at the curb
submerge his surging ankles and subside.
A word could leash him back or make him turn
and ask me with his eyes if he should stop.
One word, and he would be a son again
and I a father sentenced to correct
a boy’s caprice to shuffle in the drifts.
Ignoring fatherhood, I look away
and let him roam in his Octobering
to mint the memories of those few falls
when a boy can wade the quiet avenues
alone, and the sound of leaves solves everything.
THE CLEAVING
Imagining my wife dead, I am stopped,
stilled, halved and driven singly back to fears
too real for loneliness alone to name.
Then, nothing. Slowly intimidations shame
me back and up from hell like Orpheus,
saying
it was not time, it was not time
to leave her rouged and coffined for the dead
still left alive to see. I learn instead
that death in dreams or out of dreams is loss
enough to stun my waking like a wheel
left spun and spinning from an accident.
But while I wonder what it means or meant,
I think of Orpheus who charmed the king
of hell and calmed the tortures of the damned
with songs just long enough to find his wife
again and lead her by the hand to life
until he lost her twice. What lover mocks
the lot of Orpheus who dared the gods
and bearded them for someone else’s sake?
With nothing but a dead girl’s life at stake
he sang her to the stars before he faltered,
panicked and let her go. The myth survives.
The fear of loss is every lover’s hell.
Remember Orpheus and how he fell.
THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD
Call it the dark wood’s year. Call it a year
of hell and mountains and a guide to keep
at bay the leopard, lion and the wolf.
Call it something! I am ripe for parables.
My only mountain is the one I climb
to work, and I am tired of climbing it.
The up-and-downing mornings slash and cut
to dust my threescore years and ten. Divide
by two, and here I stop. Midway and rushed,
I keep what I started with: my father’s name,
my mother’s eyes, righthanded ways with forks,
pencils, fights and good handshakes, no real
philosophy of pain, a few vague doubts
in God, some fear of death and no regrets.
In similar darkness Dante searched for peace
from devil’s ice to stars. Today I smirk
at years when men could rhyme their way to God
as they could love, beget and die on the same
mattress. I have no tooth for comedy,
and there is hell enough on earth to jar
me loose from poetry for life. I fear
God’s underlings who damn the innocent
and kill the merciful. If I could climb
from zero to the holy peak, I still
would say that any sparrow’s fall defines
the yea of heaven and the nay of hell.
I rhyme no answers from the cold and far.
I ask no more than starlight from a star.
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After a while, he began writing in looser lines of three or four stresses:
TO A COMMENCEMENT OF SCOUNDRELS
My boys, we lied to you.
The world by definition stinks
of Cain, no matter what
your teachers told you. Heroes
and the fools of God may rise
like accidental green
or gray saharas, but the sand
stays smotheringly near.
Deny me if you can. Already
you are turning into personnel,
manpower, figures on a list
of earners, voters, prayers,
soldiers, payers, sums
of population tamed with forms:
last name, middle name, first name—
telephone—date of birth—
home address—age—hobbies—
experience. Tell them the truth.
Your name is Legion You
are aged a million. Tell
them that. Say you breathe
between appointments: first day,
last day. The rest is no
one’s business. Boys, the time
is prime for prophecy.
Books break down their bookends.
Painting burst their frames.
The world is more than reason’s
peanut. Homer sang it real.
Goya painted it, and Shakespeare
staged it for the pelting rinds
of every groundling of the Globe.
Wake up! Tonight the lions
hunt in Kenya. They
can eat a man. Rockets
are spearing through the sky.
They can blast a man to nothing.
Rumors prowl like rebellions.
They can knife a man. No one
survives for long, my boys.
Flesh is always in season,
lusted after, gunned, grenaded,
tabulated through machines,
incinerated, beaten to applause,
anesthetized, autopsied, mourned.
The blood of Troy beats on
in Goya’s painting and the truce
of Lear. Reason yourselves
to that, my buckaroos,
before you rage for God,
country and siss-boom-bah!
You won’t, of course. Your schooling
left you trained to serve
like cocksure Paul before
God’s lightning smashed
him from his saddle. So—
I wish you what I wish
myself: hard questions
and the nights to answer them,
the grace of disappointment
and the right to seem the fool
for justice. That’s enough.
Cowards might ask for more.
Heroes have died for less.
NIJINSKY IN ST. MORITZ
“I am a madman with sense and my nerves are trained.”
—from his diary
Ask anyone. The cannibals are here
and everywhere. They eat whole men alive,
though not by mouth. Mouths savor
pigfat, bullflank, chickenskin . . .
Eyes are more ravenous. Insatiable,
they steadily devour matadors,
saviors, nudes or kings like meat
flung to piranhas. And human ears
have fangs. They can reduce a man
to powder just by listening.
Why frown? What, my fellow sacrifice,
could be more natural? Infants
eat their mothers. Lovers relish lovers.
I have been swallowed by Diaghilev,
my wife, my daughter and the doctors.
Unnatural? Then, everything’s unnatural. God’s
supper is Himself, and everyone is God.
Deny it if you can before you say
I’m mad. Don’t look so damn insulted.
The cannibals are here. I’m one. You’re one.
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Here’s how Hazo explained his change of heart in an interview (and something tells me it just might spark some argument on these blue screens):
"In earlier poems I tended to write in traditional metrics. I found out somewhere along the line-I can't tell you where, although I think it was in a book of mine called Bloodrights-when I discovered that the iambic pentameter line and these various trimeter and other lines were not made for our language. These were the metrics of Greek and Roman prosody brought over into continental languages and then adapted to English. Anyone who has ever studied Latin prosody, Ovid or Virgil for example, knows that every pentameter line breaks. It's usually after the second or third foot, or very rarely, after the fourth foot. It's never a complete five foot exhalation of words. The most common break is a break after you have spoken three stressed syllables. Take Shakespeare's "They that have power to hurt, but will do none,/Who do not do the thing they most do show/Who, moving others are themselves as stone." Each line breaks up. My conclusion was that the normal length of expression for a human breath is three stressed syllables, no matter how many unstressed syllables occur between them. And it was in this sense that Hopkins, for example, in his theory of "sprung rhythm" was absolutely correct. He showed that in English you could have more than four unstressed syllables between stressed syllables. You could have five, for example. There's no foot for that in Latin or Greek or in the Latin or Greek prosody transposed into English. So I began to write poems in which every line contained three stressed syllables."
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After a certain point much of Hazo’s work looked like this on the page:
http://al.gcsu.edu/s_hazo2.htm
Here is a link to the entire interview.
http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr8/hazo/interview.html
Linear Mode
