First Trilogy

FIRST

TRILOGY

J. HAYES HURLEY

Copyright © 2016 J. Hayes Hurley.

Cover Painting by Douglas Leichter

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4776-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4775-9 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 03/09/2016

CONTENTS

The Poet at Home

My Soul is Among Lions

Professor Chamberlin

THE POET AT HOME

A novel by

J. Hayes Hurley

2015

There was this kid used to come visit me at my apartment here in the West Village. He stopped in at least one hundred times in the past decade while in his doctoral program in English down at Princeton. He wanted to write his dissertation on me, but the problem was I was not dead. So for the longest while he fought with his committee to get permission to write about a living poet instead of a dead one. They finally relented, but with ill grace.

In the beginning I was as skeptical about his project as was his committee. Though he assured me he was smart, and he was indeed a bright kid, I was not sure about his command of poetic sensibilities. I often said as much to him, he but always came back at me with the reminder that while I was the poet, he was the academic. Our roles were different. After a while he wore me down and I just let him have charge of whatever he was about.

His approach to academia, he said, was to be organized, systematic, and unfailingly analytic. I had no idea what good that approach would do me, but I went along with it. He blocked out areas of interest to him about me and he stuck with his plan. Thus it was that the living, writing me got broken up into dissertation chapters. There was an opening chapter on my life. I asked him,

Just one?

Just one. It seems he was from the school of thought that separates a writer’s life from his work. I let it go. After that came a chapter on my poetic influences, a chapter on my mature writing style, a chapter on my poetic content, a chapter on my literary innovations; that being the shortest chapter by far, and a summary chapter on where he thought my place to be was on the world stage. In it he used the word modest thrice.

Finally he submitted his dissertation. It was accepted. Then it got published. He sent me a copy. I read it. In the preface he made the claim that after talking to me for ten years he knew more about me as a poet than I did. He added that his study of me would bare that out. He said that while I was often confused about my own work, and more often than that disappointed in myself, that my perpetual fogginess and my overly critical assessment of me provided the key to my positive productivity. He deconstructed me in his study, whatever that means, and then put me back together again in an orderly fashion, making my work more accessible to sophisticated audiences. Or so he said.

Maybe he is right in everything he said. But I know this much. He misquoted me at least four times in every chapter. He attributed a certain amount of greatness to me that went against the grain of what he took to be my cluelessness regarding my own art. I never bothered to call him up and correct him. I never wrote an article setting the record straight. The reason I never did these things was that I was flattered. I sounded better misquoted. I liked being accredited with insights that had never occurred to me in my lifetime. But of late both his plaudits and his criticisms have been robbing me of my sleep. I think my life does count in relation to my poetry. So I have decided to set the record straight from my side and to submit this report.

2015

I’ve heard it said that whenever a poet strives to obtain a reputation from the outset, or, worse, whenever he makes it his business to maintain a reputation once he has one, he is headed for trouble. It is the writing alone that counts. Let us have a good laugh at that notion and move on. I’ve heard it said that poets equate their attaining immortality with their being entombed in one or more paperback anthologies. What nonsense. I’ve heard it said that it is the admiration of one’s peers that is most appreciated. I can tell you that this is not true. And I’ve heard it said that connecting with one’s readers while one is reciting one’s poems brings primordial satisfaction to both parties and thus assures a sort of two-way authenticity. I think not.

We do strive for pure expression, and we do long for recognition, but even when we achieve both at once it is not enough. There is always something not quite right about it. Something leaves us wanting and wondering. My own wondering is so unoriginal that one can go ahead, redundantly, and ask why I fall into the same traps each time out. If one of my fellow poets gets honored I am automatically made jealous and think that if it was my work being honored instead of his, I would be happy. I would feel satisfaction. But then when I am the one being honored I feel that the honor misses the mark by a wide margin. Even when it hits the mark it is never enough. It does not address the want. We lack. We write. We get recognized. We lack.

I have a chest of drawers filled with fan letters, a smallish drawer to be sure. When I read them, which is seldom, I fade away from myself. It is as if they are addressing some teacher they admired, a teacher who is secretly wearied by their praise and holds a grudge against them for falling for the cheap tricks. There is so much missing in their adulation. If a young woman says I am her favorite poet it does not mean she wants to bed me. That makes me lack the more. Though if she does want to bed me I dismiss her as shallow. I do reach out for others it is true. If they do not reach out for me in turn I am swallowed up by the ever-hovering horror of oblivion. But if they do reach out for me in turn they bore me.

Why can’t one of us writers get this recognition business in hand for all of us? Who was it, Leonhard Euler, who figured it out, mathematically, why the children of Königsberg could not cross all seven bridges of that city without re-crossing their own paths? After he did that the only children who went on trying to do so were the ones who were still in the dark. Adult poets are not living in the dark. They know that recognition fails to satisfy their basic hunger. Yet they go on seeking it. Yet when they decide to write only for themselves they are worse off. Couldn’t one of us eliminate these vanities in decisive, mathematically correct verse? Well one of us could do just that. But if that happened what would be the result? He or she would produce a generation of poets trying to emulate or outdo that doer and the end result would create a greater lack. So to all of you poets who have set it as your goal to top me, an achievable goal I admit, know this. You will create within yourself a greater lack. Some call that the human condition. And there is nothing we can do about it except to make it the subject matter of some of our poems.

Yes, I secured my reputation. And when that kid came calling I did not protest too much. By the way, he got a job at Vanderbilt and is on a tenure track. He doesn’t write about me anymore and we have not seen one another again. I suppose we can both say that we had done some work together and that was all. I hate that sort of thing by the way.

2015

There are of course giants in the field of poetry. One thinks of Shakespeare and his sonnets. One thinks of Dante and his Inferno. No matter what depreciatory comments one makes about the sonnets, they still get dragged out and taught to high-school children. No matter how much the Inferno is linked to cultural awareness, it retains its same place in academia. Poetry courses are courses students can take like any other. One can take Shakespeare, one can take Dante, or one can take marketing. The credits are the same.

I am not a giant. I am not one of those who is ever above the waxing and waning of popularity. Yet I am in what is called the canon. I am located somewhere in the middle. As such, I have as many detractors as I do admirers. And while those who praise me do not lesson my hunger, those who poke fun at me or who hate me down at gut level leave me feeling piqued.

Like any poet who believes in his or her own work, I dismiss my hostile critics out of hand by declaring them to be mistaken. But that makes for a crowded field. And it leads to the obvious conclusion that making it or not making it into the anthologies is ever a contingent matter. I must agree with this assessment. There is some sort of structural hierarchy set in place by the laughing gods and there is nothing man can do about it. And if your place in this hierarchy is middling; half your readers and critics will argue that you don’t belong there.

Yet the books are balanced on me. I have critics who are as well fans of my work. Thus we poets are like politicians in a sense; we count admirers they way they do votes. We go in and out of up to the minute popularity. But regardless of my standing at any one time my reputation remains fairly secure based the fact that I have been heavily parodied over the years. As a young man I overused the word conduit in hundreds of my poems. While I found this usage facile, and was able to turn out a great deal of material thanks to it, people noticed. One wag called me, Mr. Conduit. Another was more hostile. He said that I could never decide whether I was standing on one side of a conduit while on the other side stood an Other, or whether I was being split in half by my own conduits. The kid mentioned this to me during our talks. He even placed it in his dissertation as an example of my perpetual confusion. In any case I listened to my critics early on and dropped that word for good. I found a better word than conduit, but more on that later.

That some readers hate me or poke fun at me is better by far than their simply being bored by my poems. In the larger sense it is better to be in someone’s head than out of it. As for that, I confess that, years ago mind you, I was one of those writers who could be seen lurking about in bookstores, eyeing customers who approached the poetry section. I died each time they let their eyes sweep right past my books and focused on those of a rival. And if they did buy a book of mine, something I saw done twice, the thrill I got was a brief one. I knew that, by being in the canon, some readers bought my books now and again. It is a statistical matter. Then again when I entered a bookstore and there were no books of mine in the poetry section, then that was worse. Immediately I felt forgotten. Yet there is something worse than being forgotten. It is being slotted into an ordinary pigeonhole for all eternity. Imagine someone saying this.

Among my friends, so and so is a lawyer. I use him when I want to close on a piece of property. So and so is a doctor. I see him for my checkups. So and so is a seventh grade teacher. My daughter had her in school. And, oh yeah, Jonty Arendall writes poetry. We get together now and again and watch a football game.

Yes, that is my name, Jonty Arendall. I could not have made it up.

2015

My son Ronald lives with me in my small apartment in the West Village. He has been here now for three years. We have fashioned a separate bedroom for him by constructing a wall where my living room alcove once was. I miss that alcove dearly. I used to write there. It was cozy. I would sit at my desk and be able to gaze out across my living room. And from there I could see out of my two floor-to-ceiling windows. There was a tree growing up out of the sidewalk. Now I write in my bedroom and stare at a brick wall. We are as crowded into this apartment as two fish in a can, but what can I do?

Ronald had just turned thirty-seven when he rang my doorbell one day without warning. I had not seen him much since I got back from Nicaragua. He had been working and living in the Bronx for years and during all that time we seldom reached out to one another. Now he lives with me.

Let me say a few words about Ronald’s physical reality. He is a large, ungainly man. He is not portly, though he fills a good deal of space. He has the disconcerting habit of hovering about near walls while looking on at whatever I am doing. He does so with his head bowed. I think he sees through his eyebrows. As his mother, my first wife, Lilly, and I discovered early on, Ronald was born with both a blue-collar mentality and a blue-collar demeanor that he got from neither of us. Ronald wears plaid wool shirts regardless of the occasion or the season. He wears sturdy work pants with lots of pockets that he fills with small tools, and workman’s shoes containing steel tips. I forgive him for all that. What galls me is that he has this nervous habit of dangling a large set of keys from a chain attached to his belt. Plus he whistles tuneless tunes. I can’t stand that about him. But I learned, while he was growing up, not to criticize him the way some people do my poems. His feelings do get hurt. And the last thing I want to do is hurt Ronald’s feelings. I love my son.

My wife, Lilly, could never get over what Ronald was. She hated the way he loomed and hovered near walls. She kept insisting it must have had to do with some recessive gene in my family. Not true. We Arendalls are all sophisticated. When Lilly and I broke up she asked me to take Ronald. She said she would not fight custody. The judge did not listen to her. So off I went alone and Lilly went off with Ronald. Now he lives with me.

I do not mean to single my son out unfairly. I do not mean to be selfish. I love my son. Yet what I am getting at is that he represents a whole swatch of humanity that I do not and cannot identify with, and who in turn cannot identify with me. People like Ronald do not read poetry. They do not feel culturally lacking for not reading poetry. Quite the reverse: they often judge me ill because I cannot fix a lock or paint a room without slopping some of the paint from a wall over onto the molding. But that is enough about Ronald for now.

1944

I was a hypersensitive child. There is nothing revelatory in that. Readers naturally assume that if one is destined to be a poet then that person will be gifted, or, if you prefer, handicapped by their sensitivities. They are right. We are. We automatically overreact to our surroundings. Mine happened to be in a country setting in southern Vermont, but I would have championed the streets of Manhattan had I grown up there instead. It is not what is outside; it is that there is an outside that lends itself to the inner construction in some Kantian manner.

Given my circumstances it will come as no surprise to say that I worshipped the seasons. In spring I stared for hours at the three poppies that sprung up by the side of our garage. I worried that the lone iris beside our kitchen door would tip over in the rain. I smelled the sweet peonies growing behind the tool shed and declared them to be sweet. No great insights there, I admit. I romped in the fields and threw myself into the waving grass. I collected cherry blossoms. I kept track of the many green hues the leaves turned as days passed. I bent down to drink from a flowing stream. In summer I worshipped the warm sunlight. I welcomed the buzzing bees. I let the blue jays feast on the blueberry bushes. I listened to the cicadas at dusk. I chased fireflies. I counted the stars up to a hundred. I held grasshoppers in my fists.

There is no need here for a complete list for each season. Suffice to say that in the fall I watched the leaves give up their deepest greens and turn rusty. In the winter I thrilled to hear the crunching noise of snow under the runners of my sled. All this stuff must be yawningly familiar to you as a reader. No doubt you are rolling your eyes. You can say, and rightly so, that all God’s children do these things that I have mentioned, and that there is nothing I said that is out of the ordinary or especially reserved for poets alone. Yes but then again, and to use your argument against you, we poets do it with more sensitivity.

Still not satisfied? I know what comes next. You want to see unfolding within the hypersensitive child some evidence of superior language use early on. Well, not so fast. The child first has to go from being supersensitive to being committed for life as a writer, and only then on to using language as a means of expressing what he senses. None of that involves the adopting of meter and rhyme at the outset. At least that was not the case with me. So, if you do not agree with me here at the start, you have lost me. But I know what I am talking about. And let me add this: the world is full of young people who have written a few good poems. But they are not poets.

1948

At the age of eight I made an extraordinary, life-altering decision. I decided to live on the poetic edge of existence in every moment. That will take some explaining. Let me do so just here.

There are people, and maybe you are one of them, who, hearing a certain kind of music for the first time, decide, then and there, that they will devote their lives to living out the mood this particular sort of music produces. I know someone who, while down in Brazil and hearing Bossa Nova for the first time in his life, felt what it was like to be cool. He came back from South America, being cool in every moment. But he could not sustain that mood. He had a quick temper. He was impulsive. And he could not resist going to sports bars where he drank beer and watched Yankee games while rock and roll tunes blasted away above the crowd noise. Bossa Nova went away. But that was not quite what happened to me.

I could stay in the poetic mood for days on end. This had nothing to do with writing the stuff. This was about living it, having it, acting it, doing it, knowing it, loving it, and being caught up in the wonder of it, always. I was not yet in my conduit phase, I was simply giving myself over to something I knew not what, except to say that it set me apart from all others. So even if my moods did change, and of course they did despite all, it did not affect me the way it did my friend some years later. I was able to ride the wave, stay in the atmosphere, and to be the poet, if not in every moment, then at least when I sat down to scribble. That was the trick.

So, at age eight, I was blessed. I was different. I was anointed. I was directed. I greeted others with a faint smile of superiority on my lips and they reacted to me in kind. Friends did not react so much to my saying that I was going to be a poet, as they did to my demeanor. I became like a child-god if one can say that without exaggerating too much. People volunteered to guide me about in this world as if I was precious. And I in turn graced them with that faint smile.

I still have my poetic mood about me. I know that moods are supposed to be temporary; mine is what I call come-and-go permanent. I am the same now as I was when I was a child. But here is the irony. My commitment to poetry through mood has made no difference in the long run. In the long run I live like anyone else lives. I pay my taxes. I grumble about the utility bills. I have occasional bouts of heartburn. I hate the noise in this city. When I go into a supermarket no one makes way for me. I yell at the television set when I hear politicians telling the same old lies. I worry about my finances. Long gone adolescent grudges return to me and wake me up at night with some regularity. Most of all I hate it that I am an old man living in this tiny apartment in noisy Manhattan with my son, Ronald, who rattles his keys and whistles tuneless tunes while his hulking body hovers close to walls. That I made an extraordinary decision at age eight to be a poet doesn’t get across in the wider world anymore. People in this city do not guide me about as if I was precious. That was used up in childhood. And in the formal world of poetry, I am like any other poet. I am not special. I am judged by my words. Critics want to know what words I choose. They are every bit as interested in what words I leave out. They want to be the ones who decide what my words mean, and what is conveyed to my readers. So the kid who came to visit me may be right after all.

1953

I did not develop my craft in the same manner as most fledgling poets do. I was enthralled with language, yes. I read volumes of poetry, yes. But from age eight, on until I came to puberty at the age of thirteen, it was the content of my poems that mattered to me much more than my writing style. I admit that this approach is questionable. In any case that was what I did. I turned ideas into poems without worrying too much about what words I used or how I arranged them.

What ideas galvanized me? I was a boy who took the religious beliefs doled out to children literally. I wrote about vulgar piety. I thought Holy Water had magical properties. I stared at plaster statues of saints hoping to catch them crying. As well, and as I said before, I chronicled the seasons the way one going to a grocery store compiles lists. Television was a new medium at that time, so I often dedicated poems to my favorite shows. And because my penchant for content came before my childish sense of rhyme and meter and the like, I even sent in scripts to the networks, though I never heard from any of them. Let me dwell on those scripts for the moment. Television scripts are what they are. They are like short stories converted into twenty-two minute comedies and tragedies, if one leaves room for the advertisements. So what did that have to do with poetry? All I can say is that, following my hypersensitive observations of the changing seasons I suppose what I was writing then are to be called prose poems.

That will do. I was at this time in my life a sensitive list maker. I wrote down what I was reciting in my head based on what I saw with my eyes, doing so in a direct manner. I had no idea of placing the words in front of the experiences, much less of substituting the former for the latter in any significant sense. I was writing poems the way one chops wood. I counted the pieces as they accrued into piles.

1954

Content driven as I was, I could not avoid the issue of style forever if I wanted to go on calling myself a poet. It is true of course that if one writes for years and years, eventually one unconsciously adopts an organic writing style that is peculiar to them, if only on the level of the repetitive use of favored sentence structures. But that was not enough. I had to do something about this style business sooner rather than later, so I set out to do so the way one sets out to get some task done in their yard. I assumed that it was a matter of putting in the hours.

I was wrong. Adopting a style as opposed to growing into a style, organically, is not at all an easy task. One thing for sure, I was not enamored by any of the contemporary approaches to poetry writing presented by the poets I was then reading. All of them, it seemed to me, were following the same trick, that of getting the reader to slide right into the reading of the poem via the first line, the way one is charmed by a pretty face. Furthermore, all these sliding-right-into-the-readings of first lines began to sound like tin in my ears.

I struggle to make myself clear on this issue, even at my age. So let me state it this way. Most poets put the bulk of their energy into creating the first line. The idea is that if we can get the reader hooked that early on then the rest of the poem will make two things possible. First, the writer will be able to feed off the effectiveness of his or her first line and carry out the effort to the end. Secondly, the reader, hopefully, will be carried along from the first line to the last. I just saw through this. I judged that few poems, written out in full, lived up to their famous first lines. So I did not adopt this strategy and I suppose I am not known as a contemporary poet in that regard. Nor did I adopt the classic approach. Iambic pentameter was not for me. Besides, I had no like for nor interest in engaging in literary marathons of the sort we attribute to poets like Byron. I would write no epics, and no mock epics. No thick volumes would issue from my pen centered round a single hero and his exploits. So what about my style? What did I finally do?

I will answer that here and now, though it means confessing what is already out there for everyone to see. The fact was that no matter how hard I tried I could not invent a completely new writing style now that I had ruled out my coming to develop one organically. I had to do what others do; I had to choose from whatever was already out there and make it my own. And that left me with teenage depression. I felt guilty for not being original when it came to style.

I confess further that I almost gave up writing poetry altogether at this point. My crisis was self-inflicted: who was I at the age of fourteen to think that I could develop my own style, one that no one else had dreamed up? I asked an English teacher about this and, to my deep chagrin, he told me that I was confusing poetic style with poetic form! Then he said I was confusing style with type, and he went on to list dozens of types beginning with ballads and ending with free verse. He then said that my idea of poetry was all in my head and that I had not thought the matter out in any realistic manner.

I cannot tell you in words what a fool I felt hearing that. I cannot tell you in words how angry I became the next day. Oh, yes. Forms! Style was internal; form was external. Types are to be listed and, damn, the reason I resisted letting that kid into my world in the first place had a lot to do with my emotional memories of that English teacher.

Well then, what about my forming a new form? I could not do that either. Of course I experimented the way any young poet does. I wrote short lines and long lines and mixed them up in novel ways. I wrote poems using varied trickeries with margins, sort of like Dylan Thomas writing all over a page while he turned it with his hand. I spaced out words and lines in the way a football coach designs plays using X’s and O’s. Any of these approaches would have sufficed, technically speaking. But, frankly, I thought that such doings were crude. Still, my negative judgments were getting me nowhere. Finally I decided that not another day could not pass without my adopting some poetic form. I looked at several lists. There were about five-dozen ways to go. And since I tended to make my poems relatively short I cut down on that number by only considering the short ones. Soon after that I found what I wanted. I went whole hog Japanese.

I was just a boy, remember, and I had grown up writing poetry in my own mind as that damn teacher quipped. Now it was time to show up publically in some sort of format, and as cynical as I was, even at that time and at my age, and being as disillusioned about how these things go as could be, I simply went ahead and dumbed everything down to syllable count while knowing that syllables do not really translate between Japanese and English. I did what I had to do if I was to go on calling myself a poet. So I wrote Katula in 5/7/5. I wrote Tanka in 5/7/5/7/7. I wrote Choka in 5/7/5/7/5/7/5/7/7. I wrote Bussokusekika in 5/7/5/7/7/7. I wrote Sedoka in 5/7/7/5/7/7. And I wrote Haiku in 7/5/7, 3/5/7, 3/5/3, and in 5/8/5.

There is my confession in full. But then again you, the reader can read all about it. So why should I call it a confession? The point is that I felt ashamed for what I did. And I still feel ashamed. I wanted to insert my own content into my own style and form and syllable count, too, and then place everything into a formal setting unique to me. That I did not do that, that I could not do that or ever could do that, makes my cheeks burn.

2015

Ronald is Ronald. He just is. He is his own plenitude. He is not retarded. He is a blue-collar guy who fits the image of a blue-collar guy. He and I live mundane lives here in the same apartment it is true; but while Ronald calls me Dad, and while he recalls countless incidents from his family past, the majority of which include me doing things with him, like tossing a ball, I have this other life I lead, the poetic life, and as far as Ronald is concerned, I might as well be writing my poems in Sanskrit. It is not that Ronald cannot understand them so much as that he doesn’t bother doing so. It is not that he is not particularly skilled in any sort of work of his own; he just is there, there, there!

There are lots of tender autobiographies written by men and women of talent and sensitivity who have been raised by parents of a rougher hue. The basic assumption is that love allows the child to overlook the limitations of the parent and thus to handle the guilt that comes with transcending them. But it seldom is of interest when this sort of thing runs in the other direction unless, as I mentioned above, the contrast is stark and the child is cognitively challenged. Again, this is not the case with Ronald. He is stolid. He is. He fills space in our apartment. He is in himself entirely.

Well, that is not entirely fair. I said that he could hurt inside. And he is aware of my overall attitude toward him. For the third time, Ronald is not retarded. I fear he does understand that I am disappointed with him being who he is. This is not a moral stance I take over against him. Far from it! Ronald is not a troublesome person whom I have to worry about when he is home and I am not. He does not drink more than a beer or two a night and everything else about him