[Alfred Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) - The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) - oil on canvas - 70.5cm x 90cm - (1896-1908) courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art]
AG: There’s one painting in here I’m looking for. It’s a painting of (Albert) Pinkham Ryder, which is really uncanny. Anybody know Ryder? Death on a Pale Horse?, a Rembrandtian painting, dark-brown, black-ish, of a horse riding around a race-track, with a skeleton with a scythe on top of the horse, going around the cycle. So this is the painter of that, who lived on Fourteenth Street in New York, and he’s the great American Blake-ian, Blake-ian painter, that is, (a) self-taught, indigenous, lonely genius who lived in a grubby furnished room and painted paintings which are now considered the greatest of all American indigenous paintings.
[Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) - Portrait of Albert Pinkham Ryder - oil on masonite - 71.1 x 55.9 cms (1938) - Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art]
So that’s his (Marsden Hartley's) portrait of (Alfred) Pinkham Ryder. You can see there’s something going on
between them. It’s a great portrait. I don’t know what the colors are like –
I’ve never seen the original.
So that’s the kind of man - that kind of straightforward, monumental.
His paintings are monumental, straightforward, rock hard. And his poetry has a
little bit of that. And we have that at the beginning of our anthology. And the reason (William Carlos) Williams liked him was that Hartley (like Williams and like (Alfred) Stieglitz, and all the other
folks of his time, even Hart Crane later) was preoccupied with discovering his own psyche in an American Place
(that’s why the gallery was called “An American Place”), as distinct from a European place, as distinct from
European poetry and European painting.
There was a problem of recognizing our own speech, recognizing
our own speech rhythms, and beginning to build a new poetics or a new prosody
and a new way of approaching poetry by listening carefully to the actuality of
our speech (to our idiom, the
American idiom, which is Williams’ term) beginning to become conscious of that
and measuring that. Becoming sensitive to it so that you could hear the little
cadences and halts and strange diction, strange local vernacular diction (like
Williams writing down on his prescription pad the phrase, “I’ll kick yuh eye” –
Y-U-H E-Y-E, which he showed me on his prescription pad as an example (sample?)
of American-ness or Rutherfordian -
“I’ll kick yuh eye” – Y-U-H E-Y-E” – He said, “How can you measure that by the
English measure of iambic pentameter or stress count? - “I’ll kick yuh eye” – actually, it’s more like the Greek (or the)
measurement of Greek tones than English. Because Greek had a little accent, a
little circumflex, for tones that rose and fell – “Akhilleus, I’ll kick yuh eye”! – So Pound was researching Greek as a
hint for how to transcribe American cadence and tones. Williams was listening
with naked ear to mouth-tongue-talk from the kitchen, and Marsden Hartley just did it naturally as a painter, because he was
focused clearly – that one solid gull,that one solid portrait of a guy in a wool cap. And so he fitted in with
the whole intellectual circle and artistic circle of post-World War I and the
‘Twenties.[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately three and a quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately severn minutes in]
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