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The poet in June 1965
"Stone's
Capacity:"
The Legacy of Robert Sund
A
critical reading
1
Robert Sund died on September
29 in Anacortes after a long illness.
Diabetes and cancer ate away his life
forces, and he died a slow, unpleasant
death. Gone now a while, his
poetry and paintings linger in my mind
with a fierce determination.
Both are better than only a handful of
close friends know. I am not
among them, but I knew him for fifty
years and always enjoyed his poetry.
I came across his paintings only
recently and am impressed.
I committed the common fault of paying
him scant attention and thinking of
him as a "character" (which
indeed he was), but not taking him
seriously. Well, that was a
mistake. The time has come to
give the "character" his
recognition and to set the record
straight. His achievements are
rather remarkable. He is a poet that bears a close look, a
painter very much in the wide,
open-ended Pacific Northwest Tradition,
which happens to have a lot of the
Orient in it. It is no
coincidence that he lived much of his
life in and around LaConner and
Anacortes. They are towns that
nurture the arts and artists. The
sea is near and so are the hemlocks and
cedars vital to many for meditation.
He
and I came out of a fabulous past, most
of us lit students at the University of
Washington in the late 40s and early
50s. The Ave was a large part of
our lives and continued its strong
influence even after, one by one, most
of us moved away. Poets were Jim
Wright, Richard Hugo, David Wagoner,
Mel LaFollette, Richard Selig, and
Carolyn Kiser. Painters Mark
Tobey, Morris Graves, Richard Gilkey,
Ward Corley, and Jim Martin wove in and
out of everybody's street life. I saw
them about as often as I see herons
today. For I live in Ish country.
Sund gave it its rightful name.
The war in
Korea ground on and many of us, when
our number was called, went off to
military service.
Life on The Ave went on, anyhow. (It is
an Anyhow Place.) The Blue Moon
Tavern was the common watering hole;
nightly we bent to the trough.
The evening Dylan Thomas read at
Guggenheim Hall, and the party
afterwards, was our brief epicenter. We
celebrated for days afterwards in the appropriate manner. Bob, or
Sund, as we called him then, was part of our
large, amorphous group. This
happened nearly fifty years ago.
Many are not around to remember it.
His
poems are usually simple and direct,
and bring an immediate Zen-like
pleasure upon even a casual
reading. Enlightenment may not be
the wrong word for it. His
simplicity is often deceptive,
however. It
takes a lifetime of hard work to
achieve such a goal. He has acknowledged
Ted Roethke, a former teacher of ours,
as his mentor. Not so obvious
influences are William Carlos Williams
and Ezra Pound.
And of course Walt Whitman.
2
Let Sund speak for himself. He always has.
His voice is sonorous and direct.
Besides, it is nearly impossible to
paraphrase a Sund poem.
The following
quote is from his third and last book, "A Note on Publishing
Shack
Medicine," and comprises a
short, untitled poem in itself. It is
similar to the way he communicated with
his friends, but is obviously more
complex and carefully thought out:
And
all the while the dreamer of
festivities
Is waiting just by the door,
Juggling small blue trumpets
and paper oranges.
The poet says:
"Might well have inclined to
Formalism,
Had not the surprises kept
coming."
And the juggler replies:
"Me, too.
I began to hear
The small struck bells of
enticing particularity!"
(Continued on page 2.)
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Only three
years later
It
Seems to Me ...
A
new art gallery opening up is
good news, even in LaConner (an
artsy-craftsy seaside town,
lacking a beach). But when we stop to
think about it, there aren't so many
galleries at all. Photomontage folded
after a run of about a year in its new
fancy quarters, and this leaves, ugh,
the Thomas Kinkade sales outlet,
upscale Serendipity, and of course the
Great Cultural Center Itself, the Museum of
Northwest Art, where the good stuff is
not for sale.
The opening of
The Vixen seems at first an unmixed
blessing. It turns out to be Joel
Brock's old studio across from Maple
Hall, at the far end of town.
Sure enough, two of Brock's fine
paintings are for sale ($750, $850)
there. Now Brock isn't always
great (see, for instance, his numerous
oils in the new Stanwood/Camano Medical
Center), but most often his stuff is
very good and reasonably priced.
And these two pieces are.
Other
work is somewhat uneven. Douglas
Bajurin's small
Orca sculptures are priced at
$420. Quinn K. Thompson, who bills
himself as a Gonzo Starving Artist, has
bright, bold oils for $75 and
$150. His plan, evidently, is to
work fast and sell cheap, and make a
living at it. I wish him well.
Artists represented at the opening
include Jacqueline De Gavia (watercolors
nicely matted and framed for around
$225), Michelle Fehner, Amy Griffin,
Skye Harju, Ed Kamuda, Anne Martin
McCool, Laura Murdoch, Diane Perlow,
and Anne Volmering. Some of these
artists are from neighboring Anacortes.
A word to the
owner/attendant: come out of your
glass-enclosed office when you have a
visitor. You may be missing a
potential sale, at most, and at the
least you are being inhospitable.
And both you can't afford to be.
At
MONA,
in a show soon to close, are wonderful cast
bronze sculptures by Ann Morris, huge
and gnarled, often antlered, vaguely
human figures, which she says
"emphasize the masculine and
feminine principles of consciousness
within the human psyche and asserts
that a holistic relationship between
them and with nature is essential to
human health and
development." They speak
much more directly than this,
however. They are primal and
immediate. More of her
sculptures may be viewed in her
sculpture garden, "Sculpture
Woods," on Lummi Island. I
assume they are viewable by appointment
for potential sales.
Not
so wonderful are paintings by Mary
Henry, who studied with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
at the new Bauhaus School and at the
Institute of Design in Chicago.
Her paintings are large, geometrical
abstractions, bright and bold, and
unfortunately they don't communicate. I
search their surfaces for meaning, however
elusive, but don't
find much or any. Perhaps the fault is
mine. I look forward to MONA's
next show, Iridescent Light: --
The
Emergence
of Northwest Art, which
includes
21
painters, photographers, and sculptors of the
so-called Northwest School, along with a book to match,
text by
Delores Tarzan Ament and photographs by
Mary Randlett. (Kingfisher plans
to review show and book comprehensively
in its next issue.)
Recently Read
and Recommended
Heather
McHugh, Hinge & Sign, Poems
1968-1993, Wesleyan University Press,
1994.
McHugh is an excellent poet, working in
the Irish tradition of Joyce and
Beckett, with a keen ear and a taste
for puns. She also teaches
writing at the University of
Washington's English Department. I like her work a
lot. Let me quote from "Not
A Sin"--about the sexiest poem
I've ever read.
(Note, John Donne: It takes a
woman to be truly sexy in verse, and in
much else.) It is too long
to quote in its entirety, so I include
only its beginning and end, with
apologies. But go find the book
and read what lies in between:
"It's
not a virtue either, really, this
rubbing and rubbing against someone,
yourself
a someone too, until
someone must burst or yell.
* * *
. . . As bushes burst,
as flames float off in heart-boats, in
the flood,
I open up
my mouth and find
you've filled it full
of flesh. I mean
you made me feel
the way I feel
so words would not
be proud. I know.
You made men so I'd kneel."
The other poems are equally fine, each
in a different way. Heartily
recommended.
Anthony
Powell, A Dance To The Music of
Time. Four
volumes, twelve novels, various
publishing dates.
The English Proust, he has been
carelessly called, Powell has written a
monumental work about the long,
interwoven lives of four boys from
Eton--Nick Jenkins, the narrator; Peter
Templer and Charles Stringham, friends
and peers; and the nefarious Kenneth
Widmerpool, loathed and despised, who
nonetheless prospers, rises
mysteriously through the officer ranks
during World War II, becomes a knight
of the Empire, marries a woman
(Pamela Flitton) who sleeps with
a huge cast of characters, but
not her husband, and in the end
joins a occult hippie colony and dies
in a novel and highly surreal manner.
(Continued
on page 2.)
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In
1992 with autoharp
A Tribute
to Robert Sund
Recollections
Compiled by Arthur Greeno
Preface:
Singer
in the Shadows
Singer in the shadows, wake up:
A song is required that never has been
before.
Come prepared!
A cleansing wind will announce
you,
Afterwards, the sea will fall silent
and you will sing and then be lost
again
as the sea
commences,
A small stone set before the door of
eternity
will recall
the day you were honored.
Born
on November 29, 1929 in Olympia,
Washington, to Swede-Finn parents,
Robert Sund was adopted as a young
child by Evart and Elsa Sund of Elma,
Chehalis Valley, Washington.
He grew up at the family farm on
“Swede Hill,” with his parents,
grandparents, and brother.
He
graduated from Elma High School in 1948
and went on to Pre-Med Studies at
the University of Washington.
There he met his future teacher
and mentor, the poet Theodore Roethke,
who took him away from the study of
medicine and set
him on
his life’s path. He recalled Roethke asking
early in their relationship, “You
have a musical voice; do you know
languages?”
And, of course, he did,
treasuring fluency in Swedish all of
his life.
To pay for tuition, he
worked summers in the woods at one of
the last railroad logging camps in the
Northwest.
He
finished his B.A. in Creative Writing
in 1954.
In the late 1950s, he worked in
the Alaskan fishing industry, mostly as
a boat’s cook.
During this time, he filled
notebook after notebook with poems and
observations of the vast natural beauty
around him.
Of that unpublished work he has
said, “There may not be much there .
. . a lot of people have done
better.”
He returned to graduate study at
the University in Comparative
Literature (English and Scandinavian)
from 1957-1963.
He
was briefly married to a fellow student
of Roethke’s in the early sixties,
Maire Magee, whom he nicknamed Ireland.
“She was beautiful,” he
said, “but it was mistaken.”
(Continued on page 2.)
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"For
Bob Arnold—
Frogs herons swallows & beavers
some flowers
and river silt—
Robert
Sund"
He wrote this on the flyleaf of Shack
Medicine and mailed it to me in 1994, following a chance encounter at
the Stillaguamish Festival of The River, where he
and
some friends were reading their poetry
to an inattentive audience of
denim-dressed country people, most of
them towing or being towed by children,
on a sweltering Saturday in
August. In return I sent him a
copy of my 1993 flyfishing book.
We
saw each other only a couple of times
after that and never long enough to
have a good chat, which we both wanted,
since we were school chums and had lost
touch. Never close, we
nonetheless had a lot of friends in common.
Now we needed to exchange gossip, which is
one of the ties that bind.
It never happened, and we remained
unbound. I tried to get a note to him,
when I got
word how ill he was, but I was too
late. He lay comatose. Dead
now several months, he seems more
alive to me than back in the mid-90s, when he was only
moderately sick, in and out of
hospitals, some of them charity
wards. Friends held a poetry
reading and benefit to
help pay his bills. (Everyone should have friends like
that. And never need them
to do this.)
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