Eunice Tietjens - 7 Very Short Poems (1919-1929)

Forgotten Poems #110

    
              —: Epigraph :—

       The whole world passes at my shoulder
       And all flesh does is to grow older.
    

    
              —: Transcontinental :—

       The train spins forward endlessly.
       Outside
       The sunlit trees and the patient procreant fields
       Flash past me and are gone.
       Drab little houses pass me silently,
       Colored without from the drab lives within.

       I see them, and I see them not.
       My heart
       Half dwells behind me, lingering with lips new-lost,
       And half leaps forward to the journey's end.
       Only my body sits here listlessly,
       Here where the sunlit trees
       Flash past me and are gone.
    

    
              —: To Amy Lowell :—
	              Who Visits Me In A Hospital

       Like a fleet with bellying sails,
       Like the great bulk of a sea-cliff with the staccato bark
            of waves about it,
       Like the tart tang of the sea breeze
       Are you;
       Filling the little room where I lay straitly on a white
            island between pain and pain.
    

    
                —: Weariness :—

        I am so tired!

              A haze of heaviness is over me.
              Voices come dully through the void;
              And though I hardly understand
              And my mind fumbles like a sightless thing
              My tongue makes answer thickly.
              All my world, the prick of all my being,
              Dulls to this: only to rest, to rest,
              And to be sunk miles deep
              In inert flesh . . .

        I am so tired.
    

    
              —: Beset :—

       I am a fire, beating in a storm,
       Turning and twisting to keep me warm.

       The wind blows and scatters me,
       The rain comes and batters me,
       The hail falls and shatters me.

       But still I burn.

       And I turn
       This way and that way.
       I flicker and strive;
       I eat my own heart—but I keep alive.
    

    
              —: Overplus :—

       I have been so long with you that I crave
       Your absence.

       You are meat to the hungry, and wine
            to the sick at heart.
       You are the sun that warms me, and the
            quick air I breathe.
       You are my own heart beating in me.

       Yet, for that I am mortal, I crave
       Your absence.
    

    
             —: Sacred Mountain :—
                          [excerpts]

       The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place.
       This is the end that has no end . . .

       The stone grows old.
       Eternity
       Is not for stones.
    

NOTE: A kind of ‘found tanka’ or ‘stitch’ sewn together out of two fragments or ‘cuttings’ from ‘The Most Sacred Mountain’ (1916). This is partly inspired by tan’renga (a kind of ‘linked’ poem in which two poets collaborate on a single tanka together, in call and response fashion) and the ‘stitches’

Ann Collins

has been making out of Forgotten Poets posts on notes (if you don’t know Ann’s work, check out their newsletter Microseasons—it’s dope!).

“Eunice Tietjens (1884-1944) was born in Chicago, Illinois. She has written a novel, Jake, and has worked as an editor [significantly, she was as an associate editor on Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine for over 20 years]. In 1917-18 she was a war correspondent in France… [She is] remarkable for an astonishing versatility of thought and technique and her best work has an assured brilliance.” (Marguerite Wilkinson, Contemporary Poetry, 1927) Published numerous books of poetry including Profiles of China: Sketches in Free Verse (1917), Body & Raiment (1919), and Leaves In Windy Weather (1929).

“Tietjens writes free verse as well as she writes rhymed stanzas, and she writes rhymed stanzas as well as she writes free verse, which is unusual. Moreover, she writes as well about a baby as about a steam shovel, as well about ‘greatness’ as about any human emotion.” (Marguerite Wilkinson, 1919) Furthermore Tietjens excelled at translation, particularly of Chinese and Japanese poetry, both of which influenced her approach to poetics. For instance, Tietjens’ own translations of Akiko Yosano—an experimental Japanese tanka poet of the early-1900s—clearly had a lasting impact on her work;

   
       The heart of a woman of thirty
       Is a measure of fire,
       Having neither shade, nor smoke,
       Nor sound.

       It is a round sacred sun
       In the sky at evening;
       Silently,
       Penetratingly,
       It burns—burns.

                                        —Akiko Yosano
   

Poetry = Emotion + Magic

“When the poet has seen clearly the core of the emotion, there remains to be captured that other essential without which no lyric can live, that greatest of imponderables, magic... For no net can capture magic, and no recipe can teach us how to create it. Often it is found clothed in the purely 'poetic' words. Yet poetic words are not an integral part of it... Sometimes it seems to come from the sound of the words… Yet this element is also only secondary.”

“In the world of today the lyric poet is the successor of Merlin. They alone can weave spells about common things and turn them by a sure alchemy into the pure gold of inescapable beauty... Today the outward phenomena of magic have been stripped away. It was enough for Aladdin's djinn to wave his hand and create a palace overnight. Nowadays any wealthy man can wave a million and create the same effect. But we know it is not magic. What was magical in the djinn was the escape from reality, the freeing of the heart of Aladdin from the bounds of self. And this is the power of the lyric poet—a power which time cannot touch.” (Tietjens, ‘The Lyric in Poetry’, 1923)

    
              —: After Eunice Tietjens :—
                         by Dick Whyte

       also bodies are wild
       &
       a kind of wilderness:

       fleshed out we
       map
       the desert of the real,

       let's go!
    

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