Allen's Basic Poetics class (today from July 1st, 1980) continues. The tape begins approximately one-and-a-half minutes in. There is some brief delay at the beginning.
AG: I’ll be right back, I’m going to get a chair - PO: Do you want me to get one?
AG: Sorry I didn’t get here
earlier… There were a couple of little things
I wanted to clean up that I mentioned before. We were talking about “All the night by rose, rose” – what was that? anybody know where that is? – “All
night by the rose, rose/All night by the rose I lay – “All night by the rose,
rose" - (page six) –“All night by the rose I lay/Dare I not the rose steal" (actually, "dare I not the rose tree steal")
– that is, he was scared to steal the whole tree but he bore the rose away – “Dare I not the rose steal/ Yet I
bore the flower away"
So, there is a mention here of a
poem, a twentieth-century poem by Phelps Putnam that seemed to borrow from
that, a poem I always liked, it’s obscure, a poem of H.Phelps Putnam, who was a
friend of e e cummings and a lot of big-time poets of the (19)20’s, who had some
kind of reputation in the (19)20’s and early (19)30’s, and then drank a good
deal and fell into obscurity, and his Collected Poems were put out in the early
(19)70’s, and didn’t make much of a splash. And he’s kind of an interesting
figure of his time. And there’s one classic poem he wrote called “Hasbrouck and The Rose”
[Allen reads the poem in its entirety] - (It was at a drinking party of his
friends)
Hasbrouck
and the Rose
Hasbrouck
was there and so were Bill
And
Smollet Smith the poet, and Ames was there.
After
his thirteenth drink, the burning Smith,
Raising
his fourteenth trembling in the air,
Said,
‘Drink with me, Bill, drink up to the Rose.’
But Hasbrouck
laughed like old men in a myth,
Inquiring,
‘Smollet, are you drunk? What rose?’
And
Smollet said, ‘I drunk? It may be so;
Which
comes from brooding on the flower, the flower
I mean
toward which mad hour by hour
I travel
brokenly; and I shall know,
With
Hermes and the alchemists—but, hell,
What use
is it talking that way to you?
Hard-boiled,
unbroken egg, what can you care
For the
enfolded passion of the Rose?’
Then
Hasbrouck’s voice rang like an icy bell:
‘Arcane
romantic flower, meaning what?
Do you
know what it meant? Do I?
We do
not know.
Unfolding
pungent Rose, the glowing bath
Of
ecstasy and clear forgetfulness;
Closing
and secret bud one might achieve
By long
debauchery—
Except
that I have eaten it, and so
There is
no call for further lunacy.
In
Springfield, Massachusetts, I devoured
The
mystic…
[Allen is momentarily distracted]
Now he gets to the point. This is where the poem gets really great
[Allen is momentarily distracted]
Agh! – it’s hard to read if you guys come in late!
It’s hard to put on an act, you know, get on stage [Peter Orlovsky arrives with a chair]
Okay. So.. “Long debauchery" might do it, "Except that I have eaten it, and so/ There is no call for further lunacy..."
Now he gets to the point. This is where the poem gets really great
In Springfield, Massachusetts, I devoured
The mystic, the improbable, the Rose.
The mystic, the improbable, the Rose.
For two
nights and a day, rose and rosette
And
petal after petal and the heart,
I had my
banquet by the beams
Of four
electric stars which shone
Weakly
into my room, for there,
Drowning
their light and gleaming at my side,
Was the
incarnate star
Whose
body bore the stigma of the Rose.
And that
is all I know about the flower;
I have
eaten it—it has disappeared.
There is
no Rose.’
Young
Smollet Smith let fall his glass; he said,
‘O Jesus, Hasbrouck, am I drunk or
dead?’
Like a real good drunken poem .
Phelps Putnam. There’s a whole series of poems about Hasbrouck and his friends, (Hasbrouck speaking, Bill & Smollet, Smollet, the poet, local characters, New England,) 1931, first published.
So, actually, it’s a little chapter of
twentieth-century American poetry that might amuse you, see what happened to..
Probably, you know, in a hundred
years. it'll be real famous like, you know, the guy
who wrote "Bishop, Lawless.." - like some. you know… go down in an anthology, and
will be resurrected. And his name is Phelps Putnam, and this book is in the
library
