Charles Galwey - Stadium Concert (1922)
Forgotten Poems #69
—: Stadium Concert :— [excerpts] Welter of loveliness And cash net sixty days do it now. Splendors— And futilities earning dollars— The crowd The individual New York. • • • Straight scream of electric arcs. An orange flame mutters waveringly upward in the dim east city Below the dusty bastions of a park. The focus, a belly of sounding board, a stage, Fat bass fiddles, iron desk. Tables, lonely, barren, bereft of genial foams. • • • The woman, crouched head over knees Big hatted, Her mystery Poignant where the sounds Announce themselves in shadows. The man, tiers under her Unmoving, straw hatted, Common cryptic solitary. INTERMISSION Program list of guarantors, Vaguely existent rich, the powerful ones, Givers of spiritualities out of dollars. FINAL ENCORE Showery clapping dispersed. • • • Dust bare grass Electric glamor of tree boughs. Huge naked breast of water Saturated lead by sewers— Red and green glow of little boats in swarm— In it are sunk the stars. All obsessing electric capitals Warner's Sugar And on the Palisade cliff Surf Bathing Moon silvered coin edge of ragged cloud A chuckle streaking straight overhead. The busses totter spilling the jammed shadows. • • • Illusion winged beauty— A million strangled deaths of trapped souls. The crypts of loneliness, The dreams and immundicities of the crowd. New York.
Charles Galwey published the long experimental poem ‘Stadium Concert’ in underground poetry magazine Broom, founded by Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg, in 1922. Besides this poem, and a few short-stories also published in the 1920s, nothing else is known of Galwey, though this poem clearly anticipates the work of 1950s Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kay Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Janine Pommy Vega, et al.
—: The Book of Gardens :— [excerpts] For Charles Galwey by Dick Whyte I. every garden is Eden, turning the soil wet knee'd & sweating II. eater of fruits, kin to worms & snails III. when none are sacred all are sacred
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This one is unique, Dick. I was surprised to see the date.
Interesting piece, as you say, preceding the Beats by some 30+ years. Love the final lines of your response, Dick!