Janet and Clay,

Actually, Louise Bogan is well anthologized in the anthologies that count. Her fine work, much of which I like, is in both “The Norton Anthology of Poetry” and “The Norton Anthology of Modern poetry.” If you’re in one of the Norton Anthologies, you’ve arrived. My two copies are almost worn out from over reading.

Bobby


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Visit Bobby's Urban Rage Poetry Page at:

www.prengineers.com/poetry

Thanks

Bobby
I am in a different publishing stream. She is not in my English "international" anthologies. Neither is Hecht. I am poor. Our books cost twice as much and we pay shipping on top of the rest.
Janet

Whereas I am merely stupid, without excuses.

--CS

I'm glad she's in the Norton, but the Norton's a rotten anthology so it's no great matter. She is left out of most of the anthologies (along with Edgar Bowers, Miller Williams, Dick Barnes, Henri Coulette, Ted Kooser and a dozen other fine poets). Janet, I felt a little regretful speaking of Bogan in regard to other women; it does her a disservice to be put in that category. Bishop was right to refuse to allow her work in anthologies devoted to women poets. Bogan is not merely better than Millay, H.D., Graham, Rich etc etc but she is a good deal better than most of the men. I think she was better than Ted Roethke, a very good poet who was her lover for a while. She has not had a biography or a collection of letters, as far as I know. She did write an autobiography, which is well worth reading although not very revelatory. I don't know why she is not more highly regarded. The feminists have never taken her up (perhaps because she wrote a rather toughminded poem about women). Some of it is simply that her great virtues are not only unfashionable these days but in many quarters regarded as positively reactionary and contemptible--that is, a clear rational argument, lyric purity, formal elegance, and a refusal to spill her guts for the prurient reader. She would have been horrified by Sharon Old's poems. Just yesterday, as I was sorting and shelving books in my new house, I found an old battered copy of one of my early books in which I'd copied the following remarks by Bogan (I don't remember where I found them):
"The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself. The repressed becomes the poem. Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there." (I had tucked this note into a copy of my sequence COUPLETS, of which it could not have been more apropos.)
Well, here's to you, Louise, wherever you are.



[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 04, 2004).]

Robert
Of course you are right about women artists. I am from the generation and a place (New Zealand) where women were patronised. (First women to get the vote but that was about as far as it went.) I remember being asked why I bothered to paint since all the great painters were men. I remember hearing the counter tenor Alfred Deller when I was becoming a singer and feeling that there was no hope. Of course I proved that wrong in England but my need to conform in order to succeed induced anorexia.
( It was easier in America even then.)

As a child I read about George Eliot and here in Australia we had a woman writer forced to call herself Henry Handel Richardson.

And then the organised conformists.

It is a knee jerk response for me even now.
I never joined a feminist organisation because of their narrowness but only a privileged few enjoy equal opportunity even today. I wear a wedding ring because I am still astonished that anyone can put up with me.

I so agree with Louise Bogan about the repressed narrative. I love Roethke. He's not in many English-based anthologies either.

I won't think of her as a woman poet. She is a poet.
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 04, 2004).]

Here's the poem that gets her in trouble with women, written when she was twenty-six:

Women

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is a friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

Actually, when you consider the situation of women in this country in 1923, it's a pretty fierce, proto-feminist manifesto, akin to say, a Langston Hughes decrying the passivity of the negro. Sam anthologizes it in his invaluable Penguin Pocket Anthology which includes many Spherians, unlike the rotten Norton Anthology.

Tim
I can identify with that even while it makes me a little angry. When I was that age I used to wonder why men put up with women. Now I wonder the opposite--with the exception of my husband and a few others.
Terrific poem.
Janet

Robert and Tim,

A reading from the “Book of Bobby.”

There is one anthology,
anthology is great,
and its name is Norton.
You will have no other anthology before it.

I’ll post some of hers that I like from the Nortons a little later.

Bobby

Ok, here are the Bogan poems. There are of course, other poems by her in the Nortons. These are my favorites, starting with "The Dream"

Bobby

The Dream
by
Louise Bogan - 1941

O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.
Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.

Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
Another woman, as I lay half in a swound,
Leapt in the air, and clutched at the leather and chain.

Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
Throw him, she said, something you alone claim.
No, no, I cried, he hates me; he's out for harm,
And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.

But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand,
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

Juan’s Song – 1923

When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who could discern when love was over.
What the wise doubt, the fool believes--
Who is it, then, that love deceives?


Roman Fountain -1937

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain's bowl
After the air of summer.


Song For The Last Act – 1954
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden, There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.



------------------
Visit Bobby's Urban Rage Poetry Page at:

www.prengineers.com/poetry

Thanks

Portrait


She has no need to fear the fall
Of harvest from the laddered reach
Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing
....... From the steep beach.

Nor hold to pain's effrontery
Her body's bulwark, stern and savage,
Nor be a glass, where to forsee
.......Another's ravage.

What she has gathered, and what lost,
She will not find to lose again.
She is possessed by time, who once
....... Was loved by men.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 05, 2004).]