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03-09-2004, 08:15 AM
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As I've been away from the web a year or so, I don't know whether or not Virginia Hamilton Adair has been previously discussed on this board. Her standing among English-language poets, already considerable, will doubtless rise to greatness in the years, decades and centuries ahead.
Preserved for some years now at another website (Alsop Review/Noted on the Gazebo) is a debate between R.J. McCaffrey and myself about the villanelle in English, so I hope we need not reprise that argument here. However, this villanelle ŕ clef by Virginia Adair is, to me, as moving and as nearly flawless as any I have read in any language.
Song for Seven*
For many a spring I watched the buds unfold.
First love, your fifteenth summer was your last.
The leaves fly earthward, and the earth is cold.
Tristan, I was both sister and Isolde.
Letters and poems across the years amassed.
For many a spring I watched the buds unfold.
My best beloved, my heart, how could I hold
one who was living in his country's past?
The leaves fly earthward, and the earth is cold.
The truth of suicide is never told.
Four I held dear called death, and death came fast.
For many a spring I watched the buds unfold.
I was the sheep that sought a shepherd's fold,
he in the amorous role of Jesus cast.
The leaves fly earthward, and the earth is cold.
True Shepherd, lead, for I am blind and old.
The life so bound, desires and dreams so vast.
For many a year I watched the buds unfold,
the leaves fly earthward. And the earth is cold.
* S.A., L.B., D.A., J.J., E.C., A.W., K.J.
[This message has been edited by Golias (edited March 09, 2004).]
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03-09-2004, 11:15 AM
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Wiley,
Yes that's beautiful. I once posted (as I mentioned on an earlier thread) her "serpent" poem to Mastery, and the thread went nowhere. I am stunned at how few people in erato seem aware of her. Of course, she was so-little published that it's no surprise the average reader's unaware of her work, but in here? I was amazed.
So let me pop the "Serpent" poem back up here:
*******************
GOD TO THE SERPENT
Belovéd Snake, perhaps my finest blueprint,
How can I not take pride in your design?
Your passage without hoof or paw or shoe print
Revels in art's and nature's S-curve line.
No ears, no whiskers, fingers, legs, or teeth,
No cries, complaints, or curses from you start;
But silence shares your body in its sheath,
Full-functioning with no superfluous part.
Men strive to emulate your forkéd tongue,
Their prideful pricks dwarfed by your lordly length.
Two arms for blows or hugging loosely hung
Are mocked by Boa Constrictor's single strength.
How dare men claim their image as my own,
With all those limbs and features sticking out?
You, Snake, with continuity of bone
Need but a spine to coil and cruise about.
Men fear the force of your hypnotic eyes,
Make myths to damn your being, wise and deft.
You, Snake, not men, deserve my cosmic prize.
I'm glad you stayed in Eden when they left!
— Virginia Hamilton Adair
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03-09-2004, 11:45 AM
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Bob Mezey persuaded her to assemble her first book,Ants on the Melon, edited it, and got it published by Random House in 1996, when she was 83. Since then Random House has published two more of her books: Beliefs and Blasphemies (1998) and Living on Fire (2000). All three have been received enthusiastically by the reviewers and critics, but it may take some time for her reputation to spread widely. She would be 91 now and lives in a small room in a Claremont,California retirement home. Bob knows more about her. Perhaps he will drop by and bring us up to date.
G/W
[This message has been edited by Golias (edited March 09, 2004).]
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03-09-2004, 02:51 PM
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I met her in the late 60's or early 70's; a friend was at Cal Poly and told me about her. I have the Ants on the Melon book, didn't know about the other two. Thanks, Wiley; they're on the to-buy list now.
(robt)
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03-11-2004, 10:25 PM
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I'm surprised and saddened that no one here but Robt and I seems to know or care about Virginia Hamilton Adair's life and work. This says much more about the group here than about her poetry. Her first book, Ants on the Melon, has sold more than 80,000 copies since it came out in '96, and her other two books, which I think even better than her first, are also selling many times the copies that even an established poet can expect to sell.
The quality of her work, both in metrical verse and free, is exceedingly high. Her poems are sometimes tragically moving, sometimes funny, always interesting.
If you haven't read Virginia Hamilton Adair, you aren't in it, so far as American poetry of the last 60 years goes. If you've read her and don't think she's great, there's something radically wrong with your thinking apparatus.
Today, at 91, she's very frail as well as blind and deaf. She went blind in the mid 90's,of glaucoma, and some poems in her most recent book, Living on Fire, deal with that experience. I offer you this one more of Virginia Adair's poems, then you are all on your own -- swim or sink.
The Last Dawn
I rose and balanced with my cane.
When would the daylight come again?
The desert air was pure and cold.
Strange to be blind and deaf and old.
Where was our little desert shack,
the two-hole privy at the back?
The ring of mountains, high and stark?
Our land had vanished in the dark.
Then, beacon to my pinprick eye,
a strange fire in the eastern sky
across the lost hill deeply spread:
within the black, a burning red.
I stand in silent ecstacy:
a final dawn is granted me.
[This message has been edited by Golias (edited March 11, 2004).]
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03-11-2004, 10:57 PM
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sigh....
(robt)
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03-11-2004, 11:34 PM
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While I was once moved enough to pay a 20% premium for the hardcover edition of Ants on the Melon in Hong Kong after I had browsed through some of its poems, I get the sense that the poems in the subsequent books are not as strong (at least based on cursory glances), and thus have chosen not to purchase them. To put it mildly, I also don't feel as strongly about her poems as I did upon first encountering them; in fact, prior to this post, I hadn't thought about her in years. I think this is largely because these days I long for a certain degree of complexity and edginess that I find in poets like, say, Hecht, but that I don't always find in her; she has a tendency to tie things up a little too nearly for my taste. (So I guess there must be something wrong with my mental faculties.)
One of the poems that made me buy Ants was the final poem:
TAKE MY HAND, ANNA K.
My mother wept in church, Episcopalian;
Over her far-off town the sun shone bright.
Her New York City child, I felt an alien.
Coming to a crossing the train cried in the night.
My only home is in the poems I write
Who now am exiled by my failing sight.
Words vanish like a flock of birds in flight.
Coming to a crossing the train cries in the night.
Here end my tracks of passion, reason, rhyme
Before the terminal rush and roar of light,
All go together under the wheels of Time.
Coming to a crossing the train cries in the night.
For whatever reason (tone? sound? theme?) this poem reminded me of Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know" when I first read it:
THE TRUTH THE DEAD KNOW
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Now that I have a few years between now and my first encounter with "Take My Hand...," I begin to notice a few blemishes, like "the sun shone bright," which is rhyme-driven and a somewhat unexceptional phrase; and "flock of birds in flight," which is similarly rhyme-driven. I still admire the poem's sense of mystery, how it ends on an image and doesn't try to explain it (which isn't always the case with her), and the poignant allusion to Tolstoy in the title. But her images seem to pale in (perhaps unfair) comparison with those of Sexton, who can come up with "the dead ride alone in the hearse," "the sun gutters from the sky," "the sea swings in like an iron gate," and "the wind falls in like stones." Sexton's poem is full of danger, and while Adair does have some "blasphemous" poems (I remember one about a shepherd and his sheep in Ants--sorry, don't have the book with me), these often still seem rather "tame."
I thought that it might interest people to note that Dana Gioia and James Wood had a dialogue about a few books of poetry, including Beliefs and Blasphemies, in Slate. Wood is quite hard on Adair, and while Gioia is more charitable, he still doesn't seem too happy about the book.
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03-12-2004, 12:33 AM
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Interesting reply, Jodie. let me ask you this; how do you feel about Grandma Moses and other American Folk Painters of that ilk? Serious question...
(robt)
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03-12-2004, 09:48 PM
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This isn't really meant to be an evasion, Robt, but I haven't really seen many Grandma Moses paintings. Having said that, I do appreciate what I've seen of hers; her work reminds me quite a bit of Breughel's, but "rougher" (I do not mean that disparagingly) and with less people.
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03-13-2004, 01:44 PM
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Location: Queensland, (was Sydney) Australia
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I feel so out of the loop when a poet like Virginia Hamilton Adair is discussed. I love what I read here--and I love edgy Hecht poems as well.
I have never heard of this poet before. I love Grandma Moses but there seems to be more conscious sophistication in Virginia Hamilton Adair than there is in Grandma Moses?
Judith Wright is a great Australian poet (dead) who touches some deep natural spring. Virginia Hamilton Adair seems to belong in a similar category.
I think that simplicity is often mistaken for naivety. I don't find these poems at all naive.
If I were to post Judith Wright's poems I would have to type them out and I don't have enough time for that just now. She seems to have her ear to the ground. I feel something similar iin these poems by Virginia Hamilton Adair.
Janet
PS
I've just googled some Grandma Moses paintings and they don't look too naive either. How easily we label people. She was wonderful. Cézanne would have appreciated her.
[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited March 13, 2004).]
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