notes for clara

Two places of significance bracketed my teenage years, & both involved bus stops. When I started high school, the morning trip there was by school bus, a more or less direct trip. In the afternoon, though, it was make your own way home; & the terminus for the only bus route then available for schoolchildren just happened to be outside an electrical & record shop, whose main salesman just happened to be a jazz enthusiast. Thus bebop replaced—though not entirely—the Bach of my parents as my prime musical interest.

In my later teenage years, the bus routes became less restrictive, & I was able to catch one that dropped me off ten meters, rather than the previous ten minutes, from my home. The terminus for that bus, which I would also use at the beginning of my university days, was across the road from what I consider to be the greatest secondhand bookshop I’ve ever encountered. From there, over the next several years, I bought much of the foundation of what would be my first library.

Brief CliffNotes from the intervening time, in no particular order. My parents were readers, which meant books all through the house. My mother wrote poems. My brother read science fiction & left his library at home when he moved away. I heard the great cellist Mistislav Rostropovich rehearsing in the school hall one afternoon & that prompted me to learn to play bass. I discovered a record called Jazz Canto, poetry & jazz, with poems by William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Walt Whitman, et al. I played jazz. I went to the local film society & saw movies by Luis Buñuel, Cocteau, & others. A drummer who I didn’t think had read a book in his life introduced me to Kerouac’s On the Road. My first piece of creative writing was called ‘The Pied Bopper of Harlem’, a poem-with-jazz-backing about a Charlie Parker-like character who came along & blew everyone away. All of which—along with a variety other things—was preparation for what lay ahead.

My first visits to the secondhand bookshop resulted in my taking home quite a few books, but they were also sounding out times, in both directions. I finding out what was available there, the bookseller finding out where my tastes lay.

I came in one day & the bookseller said he had just got in some things that might interest me. He went out the back of the shop & returned with what turned out to be someone’s collection of surrealist writings. There was the complete set of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, six issues published between 1930 & 1933, that contained writing by Breton, Éluard, Tzara, Dalí, Duchamp, Buñuel, & others. There were collections of Éluard, Breton, & Robert Desnos; an issue of a journal edited by E. L. T. Mesens that contained work by Magritte & Ernst alongside that of Breton, Éluard, & Tzara. Various other bits & pieces.

English translations were rather scarce at that time so I started slowly working my way through what I purchased from the bookshop. Some of what I had translated on the run, as it were, I polished & subsequently had translations of poems by Éluard & Apollinaire & Desnos published. I started writing poems in French. I worked my way through what novels fitted in to the canon—Breton’s Nadja, Hebdomeros by de Chirico, the earlier Les Chants de Maldoror of Isidore Ducasse. The paintings of Ernst, Magritte, Dali, & de Chirico I already knew: they were joined by others—Hans Arp, Paul Delvaux, Joan Miró, Duchamp, Méret Oppenheim. Add to that the photographs of Man Ray.

The poets that moved me most at first were Éluard, Tzara, & Desnos. Add to them the predecessors such as Apollinaire, & the contemporaries & successors that their work lead me to—Arp, Jacques Prévert, Paul Celan, Octavio Paz.

Surrealism, therefore, was one of the great early—perhaps, first—influences on my work. The double-Ws were another, Walt Whitman & William Carlos Williams.

Several years later would come Donald M. Allen’s great anthology, The New American Poetry, in which many of the poets included displayed similar influences to mine, but within a new paradigmatic landscape; but before that it was the combination of the surrealists’ visions, & the colloquialisms of Whitman & Williams, that would lead to my writing, at age 17,

     I sit on the parched front porch:
     around me the house is falling down;
     soon my rocking chair may fall through the verandah. 

mark young