Alfred Kreymborg - 6 Short Poems (1915-1917)

Forgotten Poems #105 || Reissue #17

     
              —: Clay :—

       I wish
       there were thirteen
       gods in the sky.
       One blessing won't do.

       Or even
       one god
       in me.

       I can't
       shape this thing
       alone.
    

    
              —: A Clear Day :—

       Sky:
       Nowhere in you is affectation.

       Is it that you alone are blue?
       Is it that you alone are high?

       Sky:
       Take me to you!
    

    
                  —: Credo :—

            I sing the will to love:
       the will that carves the will to live,
       the will that saps the will to hurt,
       the will that kills the will to die;
       the will that made and keeps you warm,
       the will that points your eyes ahead,
       the will that makes you give, not get,
       a give and get that tell us what you are:
       how much a god, how much a human.
       I call on you to live the will to love.
    

     
              —: Etching :—

       There were seven in all,
       clothed in black,
       seven silent crows,
       standing,
       not quite vertical,
       around an ebony box ;
       and in the box,
       an eighth,
       lying quite horizontal.
    

    
              —: The Tree :—

       I am four monkeys.
       One hangs from a limb,
       tail-wise,
       chattering at the earth;
       another is cramming his belly with cocoanut;
       the third is up in the top branches,
       quizzing the sky;
       and the fourth —
       he's chasing another monkey.
       How many monkeys are you?
    

    
              —: Matins :—

       May the sun
       blink open your eyes
       and find the room within
       all blue,
       and that tiny
       broken relic
       of last night's unhappiness
       vanish like a moth.

       You will see
       no bird
       can fly
       more swiftly away.
    

Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966) was “born in New York City in 1883 and was educated there by life and experience. He became an expert chess player, and earned a living by teaching the game and playing exhibition games. Worked for a time as a bookkeeper. After working hours his passion was music. He became the organizer and leader of a group of whimsical, radical poets who called themselves 'Others'.” (Contemporary Poetry, 1927)

Was a member of Alfred Stieglitz's 291 artists’ group, and co-edited the literary magazine The Glebe with May Ray (1913-14; they would go on to publish the first Imagist anthology). Moved to Man Ray’s artist’s colony ‘Grantwood’ in Ridgefield, New Jersey, also frequented by artists like Marcel Duchamp. The following year he founded the experimental poetry magazine Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1915-1919), publishing early work by Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, et al. In 1921 went to Europe, and co-edited the poetry magazine Broom, with Harold Loeb.

Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff, from Kreymborg’s Funnybone Alley (1927).

I wish . . .

Alfred Kreymborg (Others, 1915): “The old expressions are with us always, and there are always others.” Rather than opposing “new verse” (informal, free, unrhymed) with “old verse” (formal, metered, rhymed), an opening: the more the merrier! The logics of “both/and” rather than “either/or.” Riverine thought: the “old expressions” are the banks of the river, guiding its twists and turns, while the “others” are the river itself, slowly reshaping and smoothing the banks. An interdependent multiplicity, producing endless connections and combinations; rather than individuated unities, limited oppositions, and binaries.

One blessing won’t do . . .

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980): “There is indeed such a thing as measured, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river between its banks or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a rhythm without measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.”

I can’t shape this thing alone . . .

Judith Butler (Examined Life, 2008): “My sense is that what’s at stake here is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency… posing the question, do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other? Do we or do we not help each other with basic needs? And are basic needs there to be decided on as a social issue and not just my personal, individual issue or your personal, individual issue? So there’s a challenge to individualism… And hopefully, people will take it up and say, ‘Yes, I too, live in that world in which I understand that we need each other in order to address our basic needs. And I want to organize a social, political world on the basis of that recognition’.”

     
              —: After Alfred Kreymborg :—
                           by Dick Whyte

       gods
       of the warp and weft
       bound
       us together

       looming
       like wind as it weaves
       through
       tangled reeds

       now we must
       learn
       to sing or perish
     

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