tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post7719199442254137498..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Robert Creeley / Ernst Halberstadt: SomewhereUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-56396028175977992662013-03-26T15:32:08.876-07:002013-03-26T15:32:08.876-07:00On the subject of RC and religion, New England non...On the subject of RC and religion, New England nonconformist strain:<br /><br />RC: My mother's people are the Everetts, which has some correlation with the Massachusetts Bay Colony Everetts... [she] came from a 'good family', as they say, though it was a poor branch of it... The family was religious, but didn't think they needed to make it particularly evident. Well, when my mother was very old. she and my aunt Beatrice did go to a wild drive-in church in Nokomis, Florida; by then they were too decrepit to get out of the car. Again, it's that particular Puritan habit that, on the one hand, specifically does, quote, 'believe in God' -- but on the other, loathes making a particular show of that, and really doesn't accept it, doesn't really want the complications of a communally experienced God.<br /><br />TC: Did you attend church services as a child?<br /><br />RC: Yes, sure. It was a small Baptist church, right in the center of this small town of West Acton [,Massachusetts]. The Baptist minister was a kind of low-key, liberal, not remarkably intelligent but comforting presence. The service was almost like a town meeting; it didn't feel particularly religious. It felt like the sensible and responsible public qualification of social obligation. There was no intensity or fervor... There was a Sunday school, but it felt more like a boy scout meeting.<br /><br />TC: A civic rather than a religious function?<br /><br />RC: Yes, much more religious than social There was bit of theological demonstration, but for the most part it was more social than religious... I *did* however used to think, you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing in the woods, that there was a kind of *immanence* there -- that woods, and places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel: that there was something peculiarly, *physically* present, a feeling of place almost conscious... Like God. It evoked that.<br /><br />from TC: Robert Creeley and the American Common Place, 1993TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-18432057104083162972013-03-26T12:21:47.773-07:002013-03-26T12:21:47.773-07:00God almighty, Reverend, talk about a monopoly!God almighty, Reverend, talk about a monopoly!vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras)https://www.blogger.com/profile/14515165428574974933noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-86434573644211389642013-03-26T08:18:00.846-07:002013-03-26T08:18:00.846-07:00Let us recall that this week we celebrate the 150t...Let us recall that this week we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the delivery of the canonical pastoral advice on this subject by the Reverend C. H. Spurgeon from the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Newington, beginning with the text from Exodus 34:14,"For the Lord, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0502.htm" rel="nofollow">Reverently, let us remember that THE LORD IS EXCEEDINGLY JEALOUS OF HIS DEITY</a>.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-59335239624980683122013-03-26T00:53:26.183-07:002013-03-26T00:53:26.183-07:00A Capital Partnership
(Lord and Jealous Wool Mill...<i>A Capital Partnership <br />(Lord and Jealous Wool Mill, City Mills, Massachusetts)</i><br /><br /><br />Bankrupt—<br /><br />Like the walls of Jericho<br />No longer Lord,<br />No longer Jealous,<br />The no longer envious<br />Lambs of God milling<br />About where or when<br />Wooly-minded enterprise came<br />Blowing its horn before tumbling<br />Down upon them.vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras)https://www.blogger.com/profile/14515165428574974933noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-11762086427899518452013-03-25T17:36:17.959-07:002013-03-25T17:36:17.959-07:00That's a lovely way of reading it. The "c...That's a lovely way of reading it. The "child's" (near) rhyme, stairs/air, leaves us hanging, challenged to keep our balance, as on a precarious staircase.<br /><br />Bob was our neighbor for a time, and somewhere we have (if indeed we still do have it) a photo of him, walking up a steep, winding road on which he then lived -- Terrace, it was called, a terrace above the ocean -- with hands upraised, and extended out at both sides, in comically exaggerated mimicry of someone trying to stay upright on the deck of a ship rolling on troubled seas.<br /><br />I see him on that staircase, in that haunted house of himself, keeping steady when others might have fallen.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-29956648498066520082013-03-25T15:28:32.504-07:002013-03-25T15:28:32.504-07:00Creeley's poem shows us the ramshackle haunted...Creeley's poem shows us the ramshackle haunted houses we all are.Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-77438320380456159622013-03-25T08:03:41.626-07:002013-03-25T08:03:41.626-07:00Thanks for catching that word/picture link, Steve;...Thanks for catching that word/picture link, Steve; that was a chord in the composition; of which, now, for me, the shattered densities of your "dwarf stars" also do become a part.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-45156853117208108032013-03-25T07:51:24.872-07:002013-03-25T07:51:24.872-07:00Tom,
A beautiful pairing here, glass shattered by...Tom,<br /><br />A beautiful pairing here, glass shattered by "a stray lump of coal" together with Creeley's<br /><br />". . .wonder that it was <br />the inside he as me saw <br />in the dark there."<br /><br /><br />3.25<br /><br />light coming into sky above black plane<br />of ridge, bird landing on redwood fence<br />in foreground, sound of wave in channel<br /><br /> “dwarf stars” whose density<br /> exceeds water, second<br /><br /> consider a system, in place<br /> of the field, instead<br /><br />silver line of sun reflected in channel,<br />white cloud in pale blue sky on horizon <br />STEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-85425297633746851712013-03-25T07:40:56.156-07:002013-03-25T07:40:56.156-07:00Yes, the intense internal torquing in that last qu...Yes, the intense internal torquing in that last quatrain is the poet at his best -- capturing, as is his way, an uncanny interiority that is oft felt, tho seldom express'd.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-21616877453128502102013-03-25T07:36:03.256-07:002013-03-25T07:36:03.256-07:00Wonderful rhythm to this morning’s gift of Creely....Wonderful rhythm to this morning’s gift of Creely. And that Mobius strip of a final verse holds one's attention to the poem.Hazenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13417573435195561519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-7686120740529895652013-03-25T05:20:44.310-07:002013-03-25T05:20:44.310-07:00Ernst Halberstadt, for those who don't know, w...Ernst Halberstadt, for those who don't know, was a German-born immigrant to the US -- arriving from Frankfurt with his parents at the age of one, raised in the Boston area, in what are politely called "modest circumstances", trained in art in that city, and going on to work widely as a muralist in the 1930s, for the Federal Art Project and the WPA, as a collaborator with Diego Rivera.<br /><br />One of his major 1930s murals, done at an Army training center at Fort Monroe, later mysteriously vanished, leaving reasonable suspicion in the mind of his grand-daughter, among others, that it had been painted over.<br /><br /><a href="http://articles.dailypress.com/2011-05-23/news/dp-nws-monroe-mural-20110520_1_murals-fort-monroe-authority-doctrine-command" rel="nofollow">Who knows where the political art goes?</a><br /><br />Halberstadt retired to the Massachusetts town of Onset -- where, in the penultimate photo here, we see a house burning in the night.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com