Kingfisher
 a Journal of Northwest Art and Literature

Dedicated to the appreciation of poetry, fiction, painting,  literary criticism, drawing, sculpture, music, movies, video,
 but not exclusively that produced in the Pacific Northwest

  Summer 2002
Volume One, Number Three, Seventh Edition
 Copyright 2002 Kingfisher Press

 Early Painting of Morris Graves, Water Birds, c. 1932. (Artist's Collection)

THE EYE OF EDISON IS UPON YOU, AND VICE VERSA

Hip art collectors and patrons head North on I-5 about this time each year in order to attend the opening of Edison Eye's first annual show. It gives them an opportunity to be the first to buy some of the new offerings of some of the Skagit Valley's top painters and artists who work in other media. Served up with live music and plentiful wine, the gallery provides a casual atmosphere to see and spend.

The works are not expensive, not by Seattle-area standards, and represent a competitive buying opportunity for paintings by Clayton James, Derek Lowe, Paul Havas, Joel Brock, Charlie Krafft, and Charles Heald. Often their work is not first-rate, but a back-and-white photo montage by Joetta Sotus is very nice, much better than the single frame used for the gallery's mailer, and the Krafft is excellent. Brock rarely disappoints.

The present show is up through August 11, but will be followed by a comprehensive exhibition to celebrate the Seventh Skagit Valley Harvest, opening on October 13.And there will be other shows at Edison Eye into the fall, and most are worth a drive up through the beautiful Skagit Valley, which is a picture in itself.

Reading plath

A chill came over me, as I neared the end of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems—a feeling that can only be called Doom. She is about to kill herself; everybody who loves poetry knows the terrible story—how the mother of two very young children and the wife of fellow poet Ted Hughes, who she was recently separated from, she put the children in the next room, left them with a plate of cookies and glasses of milk, caulked the doors and windows tightly with towels, then put her head in the gas oven and turned on the unlit burner. It had been a long time in the coming, this early death by her own hand. There had been several failed attempts before. We tell ourselves, “There must have been some other way out.”  For Sylvia Plath there wasn't.

Hughes edited the book of poems, so many years later. (He too now is dead, withholding additional comment, having got his licks in earlier and irremediably.) At the back of the main collection he has provided notes to the poems drawn from his assembling and editing them, and adding usually laconically (as though he didn’t know the woman, himself) biographical facts that illuminate the poems. Likewise he edited Plath’s Journals, putting the notebooks and loose sheets together over, what?, nearly forty years, deleting things he thought better left unsaid, especially those entries that might shed some light on her thoughts and motivations in the weeks before she killed herself. Those journals didn’t simply disappear; Hughes destroyed them, though there is the vague hope that one of them is simply lost, he told us, and might reappear and provide us with a beacon to understanding Plath and her last days. It is not much of a hook to hang one’s hope on.

He destroyed them, he said, to spare their children. Of course this only maddeningly increases our morbid literary curiosity about what they, what she, said. The children, adults now and for a long time, could benefit and judge from being able to read the last of the journals, along with the rest of us. We are furious with Hughes (now unassailable) for what seems a gross error in judgment. At the same time it was certainly his right as literary executor and former husband, the children’s father. But what could they have . . . said, those journal entries?

The poems are no clue. You cannot see it coming. Oh, you can make a case from a word here, a phrase there, a stanza that seems oddly prescient, but you could make such an imaginative case anywhere in the Collected Poems and be equally right, or seemingly so. For Plath had had breakdowns before, and had been in and out of institutions. Always the prospect of suicide has been present and known to her mother and husband. It is a recurring theme, almost a leit motif. And Hughes is no help. He writes in his notes to the poems: “1963. From the beginning of this year, in what was to be the coldest winter in England since 1947, SP lived at 23 Fitzroy Road. On 23 January her novel The Bell Jar, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, came out in London. On 11 February she died by her own hand.”

And what newspaper do you work for, Sir, and how long have you been writing such Obits? And what is the significance, pray tell, of it being colder than any year in the past 17? I mean, she didn’t freeze to death out in the back yard, man.

I am angry. Hughes had the right, but he shirked his responsibility to us and the literary world which he represented most absolutely in the matter. He was the Supreme Arbitrator. And the fact that he published his Birthday Letters 35 years later does not exonerate him. It was a crime against literature, with a capital L. He could have held them back, hid them. He could have arranged for them to be “found,” say, about now, or at least after he was himself dead.

It is fascinating to read her edited  journals and follow her through college (Smith) as an English major. She and Hughes are exact contemporaries of mine, and I can respond to certain elements that were in the air at that time, and to certain academic pressures. She started teaching at the same time I did (Berkeley, in my case) and felt the strain and didn’t like it much. She was already publishing, some of the poems really good, but had her eye on fiction—the well-paying markets of the women’s magazines, plus Seventeen (where she was first published and where she was guest undergraduate editor) and The New Yorker.

The New Yorker didn’t accept any of her fiction, but a few years later, while at Cambridge on a Fullbright, published three of her poems, just when she needed literary support most. Then she returned to teach at Smith and to study poetry writing with Robert Lowell. She began working in tight metrical, rhyming forms and did well in them; this sustained her over the years, developed her skills, and served her well when she (as everybody started to do) began writing free verse. And then—as do some poets and folksingers—she came into her own in her early twenties, having made that mysterious transition from fumbling adolescent rhymester to mature poet of considerable skill.

It is terrific poetry. At the same time she was writing it, her journals indicate an intense academic and literary life just getting underway, and one that would not in itself suggest the quality that her work was quickly achieving. But her editors noticed and she was consistently being published, though every rejection (and there were many of them) was painful and met with angry rebuttal.

One cannot write or talk about these years without bringing Ted Hughes into the picture. Tall, handsome, rangy, he was just what she wanted and needed. At the same time, as a fellow poet, he was in many ways her antithesis. It is tempting to trace many of her mental problems to her relationship with him, but that would be neither fair nor accurate. I think their competitiveness brought out the best in her, perhaps in him as well, even though it may have added a pressure (as poet, student, wife, and soon mother) that was not in her best interests from a mental health standpoint. Yet without the pressure, without Hughes in the picture, she might not have been the poet she was, in her few productive years on earth, and she might not have written so many poems of high quality.

The precise nature of Hughes’s influence on her poetry will never be known and can only be glimpsed from his selection of the poems in the Collected and his terse comments on it as her editor. What a difficult job it must have been, and how lovingly he performed it, thought the lovingly part might not be so readily apparent.

That she loved him, there can be no doubt. And it is the part that will produce a movie that (as with Jacqueline Du Pre and Daniel Barenboim) will make her and Hughes household words outside of the literary community. Perhaps they are deserving of this kind of popular fame. (But . . . Gwyneth Paltrow?)

The poetry—that is what is important. Dig this: It is spring of 1953.  Plath is an undergraduate at Smith, studying English, and writing poetry in her free time. Tonight Auden is coming to town and will read and talk to students at the home of Elizabeth Drew. Plath has been writing structured verse like crazy and sending it out to all the leading magazines that publish poetry. The refusals come back in demoralizing fashion. But today, April 27, there is a letter from Russell Lynes of Harpers accepting not one but all three poems she sent him, along with a check for $100. Not much money today, it was a bountiful amount then. The poems are “Doo

msday,” “Go Get The Goodly Squab,” and “To Eva Descending The Stair.”

(Continued on page 2.)

It seems to me . . .

Hey, Mariners Fans:
Having to watch the same insipid, intelligence-insulting commercials, day after day is the price we are accustomed to paying to watch our favorite sporting event. And we have all grown used to it. But there are limits to what we can endure.

For instance, what about those ads for the Washington Forest Protection Association? Who the heck are they? I've provided a short question and answer exchange to help illustrate what lies behind this ad that is repeated throughout Mariners games. Ready?

Q. What does the Washington Forest Protection Association (WFPA) do?

A. They protect the forests of Washington.

Q. I see. What from?

A. Originally from forest fires. But the Department of Natural Resources now does that. This frees WFPA for more important tasks.

Q. Such as?

A. Well, they tell you what on TV and in full-page ads in the newspapers. They are busy replacing and widening culverts. They want to help the salmon and salmon habitat..

Q. What’s a culvert?

A. Instead of building bridges for their logging roads, the WFPA places structural steel tubes in the stream channel for the water to go through, or else the water would destroy the road every time it rains hard

Q. And this is what the salmon go through in order to get upstream and spawn and die?

A. Not exactly. Salmon don’t like culverts. They prefer bridges that simply cross the stream and do not require the stream to go through a steel tube. But culverts are much cheaper to build. And often the water going through a culvert runs at right angles to the road and at the far end there is a place for the water to drop down steeply and create a pretty little waterfall.

Q. And the salmon like the steep waterfall?

A. No they don’t. They can’t climb a tall column of water,  not unless there are rocks in it and the grade is less than 90 degrees.. So their ascent of the stream is, well, halted. It is permanently blocked.

Q. But what about the culvert?

A. The culvert doesn’t matter to the salmon if they can’t reach its the other side of the road. Besides, they don’t like to go through culvert. It scares them. Only the most desperate of them—the coho—ever try. Often they turn back. Or stop right there and begin to pile up, unspawned.

Q. But the WFPA is widening the culverts for the sake of the salmon.

A. Yes, and they are replacing the old, narrow culverts in hopes that the salmon will evidence a tendency to pass through them on their upstream journey to spawn.

Q. And the fish will do so?

A. Fish biologists think not. They will continue to shun the culverts and turn away from them. Their numbers will continue to diminish. Soon there will be no more salmon except the ones produced in the hatchery.

Q. Then why does the WFPA tell the people of the state that they are helping salmon?

A. Because they want you to like them and to quit trying to make them cut fewer trees.

Q. Because cutting trees is the business they are truly in, not  salmon protection and habitat improvement?

A. Right, Little Jimmy. You see, the people who love the environment, and especially those who love trees, have been fighting a losing battle with the WFPA and DNR over protecting streams by making them stay way back and leaving enough tall trees so that when the trees die of old age—say, in two or three hundred years—one such tree might fall into the stream and cause pools to form and riffles above and below the pools.

Q. And salmon would like that?

A. Salmon would love that because it is what they are used to and what they need. They don’t like new ideas, such as culverts and treeless river banks and logging roads and trucks hauling away their shade and destroying their bank protection.

Q. But the WFPA says they are helping salmon. Isn’t this what all the ads are about?

A. Jimmy, the ads are about money. They are spending money to make more money. This is called business. They want to cut more trees. Every mature tree left standing in a logged area is money lost to them, their corporate executives, and their shareholders.

Q. But the WFPA wants to help salmon. They say so, over and over. That is the business they are in.

A. They lie.

How much work/money would be involved in Southwest Airlines changing a word or two in their nightly bombardment of commercials? I mean, if I was going to fly to their service area, I might well buy a ticket from them. That is, the first few times I heard their string of commercials. But now, the invitation, "Wanna get away?" makes me think I'd rather walk.

For instance, that rock musician who tells the cheering crowd, "Thank you, Detroit." And his peer, whispers, "Detroit was last night." Doesn't he ever wise up? How much effort would be involved in lip-synching the word, "Chicago," or "San Francisco"? I'd even lend them my squeaky voice at a most modest price.

And the kid whose father taught her to keyboard what might be "To The Post" into her recital, why should he want to get away, since he is obviously proud of what she did, and played it much better than the tentative chord progressions that preceded it? Defies logic, I know.

In fact, that is what commercials do all the time, and we neglect to scrutinize them to the extent we might a TV drama. Our loss. For instance, why did Lewis run an ad in the personal column using his work phone number? Maybe he didn't like the job and was looking for a non-confrontive way of losing it. And what were the women in the next cubicle doing, reading and responding to newspaper personals on company time? If Lewis was embarrassed, and needed to get away, I'd think the women would be embarrassed to the fourth power. And their need to get away raised to the sixth.

I know, I know: nobody takes these things seriously, not unless he or she wants to go mad, and I don't mean angry. Yet if we don't look at them critically, we are being programmed mercilessly. We respond to the triggering mechanism, regardless of our wishes to the contrary. It is a form of corporate mind-control, and sets us up for a less-innocent form of emotional programming. Now, Everybody, after me: Saddam Hussein. (Boo.) Iraq. (Hiss.) Limited or full-scale invasion? Or air-strike only? No, this isn't a multiple-choice test. Nor is it true or false.

Notice I don't criticize those Pepsi Britney Spears commercials.

Ever wonder how dumb a state patrolman is? (Not ours, of course.) See the Pennzoil commercial, while waiting for Edgar to come up and bat his patented double.

Two cops are sitting inside a patrol car. It is a hundred degrees F. outside, according to one. But the one in charge keeps the motor and air conditioning off in order to protect the engine from overheating. So they don't chase the first speeder, who is doing 100 mph, nor the second. Protecting the patrol car comes first. Question: what is the interior temperature of the car? And, are the brains of the two cops cooked? And what about the company execs who okayed the commercial?

Robert Arnold, Editor

It’s True —A MAN TURNS INTO A HOUSE!

Imagine this: It is forty years ago and two poets are sitting in the Blue Moon Tavern, having an afternoon beer. A stranger joins them. He offers to buy a round, then says, “I am from the future and I have news for the both of you.” He turns to the older poet, Ted Roethke, already famous, and says, “One day you will become an auditorium. Famous poets, like yourself, will come every year of so to give a reading to honor you.” Roethke laughs, and says, “Fat chance. But, thanks.”

The other poet says, “But what about me?”

The stranger says, “Better news yet for you, Richard Hugo. In time you will become—ready for this?—a HOUSE.”

“Not likely,” says the younger poet, who, already, is  starting to  resemble the older one, corpulent in the same ways and with a similar pasty, pinched frown. “Maybe an old storefront in White Center, or an abandoned church on East Marginal Way. A HOUSE? Not unless it’s a whore house. Never.”

But it came to pass, and now the HOUSE on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, is on its way to becoming an institution, its people institutionalized. Each day poets of many ages and dispositions flock to its poetry readings and workshops . Sex is known to occur between and among them. The HOUSE publishes online a monthly newsletter of happenings and events.  See:
http://www.hugohouse.org/

fEATURED POET

Melvin Walker La Follete  lives in Redford, Texas. His first book, The Clever Body, was published by Spenserian Press, San Francisco, in 1959. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Botteghe Oscure (Roma) The New Yorker, Northwest Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and in several anthologies. An ordained Episcopal preist, he has preached and taught literature all over the world.

Here are a few poems from the Sixties:

NEW DAY

I hear the horses, neighing down the canyon,

Woken long before, who arch their hooves

As scrupulous as unicorns--one swerves

To miss a boulder, spills into the sun.

The red day burns upon the blueing dawn,

Hedges of silver poppies, birds in droves

Garble our sense, now in the meadow moves

Fleet as if hooved. . . I whistle and you come.

There is only one day, one unicorn,

One word you will not say, I have not spoken;

Let us pretend our minds are on the horses, Your knuckles, white, clenching the saddle-horn

Do not exist--and while the pack-train passes--

I am not here; your foot was never cloven.

(from The Beloit Poetry Journal, Vol. 14,  No 3)

MARSYAS

The  weak are strong, my lord, with flabby strength

Like sheepskins flayed you cannot  tear in two;

Look, master! I can play as well as you.

I am a sissy. In love, I shall be true

To my own weakness; and yet, you shall believe

That I am noble, brave, a worthy thing

For you to destroy. My lord, I shall make you grieve.

I am Arkadian. I shall deceive

Your worshipping eyes, and laugh, and make you sing

Purely for once, your license turned to flame.

The boys in the field shall taunt, and the girls in the town

Shall squeal: "The king is crying like a clown!"

Stroke my flayed hide, and tremble, for I am

As terrible and soft as any lamb.

APRICOT WALK

Who can remember the golden boughs of fruit

These gnomic trees belie in gracelessness?

They squat like bad dreams metamorphosed into wood

In that grey brumaire which always precedes the scream;

Who can turn comfort from the soggy dream

That fatal blossoms shall, at least they should,

Return? Who would trade unconsciousness

For hope blown badly on an untuned flute?

Shall resurrection bore us, when it comes,

Making a metaphor of all our flesh,

No longer dependent on the seasonal fear

That spring will not come? The nibbling deer

Flag in the startled light, and clear the brush;

Deep in the apricot's tumultuous heart the hornet hums.

(both poems above are from The New Orlando Poetry Anthology, Vol. 2, 1963)

VACATION SNAPSHOT

(For Fred Staver)

Your letter, fat with snapshots, came today;

The boys playing ball, our wives with windy  hair,

Bright sunburns breeding in the hazy spray.

Our flesh as the reflex of water, earth, and air.

In sharp words, a sign beyond the rocks

Demands that we must leave no fire; the paint

Is fresh, this season's surely, time mocks

Us only, the outline of your nearer face is faint.

I warm each awkward picture with my hand:

The lens was on infinity--no prize

For these, and yet, the camera never lies.

Because we made the scene,  we understand:

The  faces are blurred, the distant driftwood clear--

We shall burn it again, against the colder year.

(from The New York Times, 14 November 1963)

Mel was a classmate of mine at both the University of Washington and at Cal Berkeley, where he was James Phelan Scholar in Literature. He was elected a Yaddo Fellow in 1964. I published him in the English Department's Month's Best in 1952, when we both were getting started in this lit business and I was the  journal's editor.

Later, we studied Old English together and translated the written language into a spoken one, Anglo Saxon, in the instances of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea. We gave several impromptu reading in front of Cal's Dwinnell Hall to astonished students passing by. Working separately, yet together, we translated The Battle of Maldon into contemporary English.

Mel has been a friend of the years and is an all-around good fellow. I am pleased to republish several more of  his poems below. All are from The Clever Body, and reprinted with the author's permission:

(Continued on page 2.)

CLAYTON JAMES, Sixty Years an Artist
by Robert Arnold, Editor


A crude sketch of Three Helmeted Heads from the era of View Nam War. inspired by Henry Moore and some Etruscan armor seen in Italy in 1966. James had hoped to turn one head from this series into a towering anti-war monument.

1. The Painter

I went to see the Clayton James retrospection expecting to be bored, but came away highly impressed with the accomplishments of this dedicated painter, potter, and sculptor. (Note, the word order is his own, and we can assume he ranked them in their order of importance to him, though we are free to disagree.) In the Famous Fifties he painted in oils, as did his contemporaries, Morris Graves and Richard Gilkey, and in some cases those who strongly influenced him—Ryder, Dove, and most especially Adolph Gottlieb, who nobody much knows of but him. He had studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and thought of himself originally as a painter. Work from this period shows similarities to his models in use of palette knife and a subdued Northwest palette, but I find those few paintings still available excellent. Two in the current exhibition at the Museum of Northwest Art in LaConner (up from July 13 through October 6, 2002) area outstanding: “Untitled (Island Landscape)” 1956 and “Silvana” c. 1956. They resemble Kenneth Callahan and Graves oils from the time, but are strong, individualistic expressions. It is a pity there aren’t more of them around.

All landscapes are boring, but boring in ways that are quietly exciting. Therein lies a paradox. Life and landscapes are, well, dull. They are repetitive and banal. Painters and photographers often resort to hokey effects—fiery sunsets, dramatic cross lighting,  fantastic cloud formations. More difficult is to render the landscape’s subtle beauty in tone and gradation. The Pacific Northwest is famous for its incandescent light—called iridescent by some. To paint in oil this illusive quality  is difficult and requires both skill and constant application. In his early oils, James does this work well.

In his middle years, when he was primarily a potter, James' paintings became abstract, or non-representational. I like these less well and find them less successful. These are pleasing but not important paintings. Some involve the use of circles (Cf. Leo Kinney), which James admits represent a “cosmos untainted by dualities,” such as heaven or hell. As such they are psychically needed gross simplifications, perhaps over-simplifications. Yet they remain visually pleasing.

About ten years ago James gave up sculpting and pottery (hard, hard work) and resumed painting. Some of this work is less than exciting, but some of it is excellent—broad colorfields that are nevertheless representational of plein air landscapes that he has visited, often in the company of painters Derek Ward or Paul Havas. They are often large—two by three feet, or three feet by four. Three on display at MONA are very good:  “Glacial Haystacks, Waterville Plateau,” 1997, 36” X 45,” is excellent; I gave it an A+ in my fieldnotes. “Near Conway,” 2000, oil on wood, 30” X 54,” is good, too. And so is “Winter Sky,” 1999, oil on wood, 27” X 33”, is good. Paintings like these would make a handsome addition to a home with a large, vacant wall.

2. The Potter

Pots. Lots. Large. Graceful.

Do people use pots like these as sculpture? Yes, but they also put flowers and plants in them, as does James, in a fine video that accompanies the exhibition, on the museum’s second floor. Pictures of the artist at work by Mary Randlett (who else?) are on the wall there. He builds his pots by the coil method, which is a little unusual today, when potter usually throw them on a wheel. It is a slow, demanding process, and when done carefully produces a fine finish or patina, which is important to James. His work is influenced by Henry Moore, who has had a tremendous impact on everybody who has seen his work. They may also be influenced by Martin Puyer.

 
Some of James's sculptural shapes

3. The Sculptor

Though James lists himself as a sculptor thirdly, I think the world might disagree. He is a sculptor above all. And when in his early Seventies he gave it up as too rigorous, or out of fear of repeating himself, and turned back to painting¸ it is highly understandable, but if his reputation is at stake (it isn’t) is as a sculptor that he will be best known.

A generous sampling of his sculpture—usually mid-sized and studio-built—is on the first floor of MONA, and it is impressive. The soft, firm curves show the impact of Moore, but they are also original and organic is shape. There are similarities from piece to piece, almost as though James has to work his way into and through an idea before he can abandon it, or it can desert him. This is only natural. And some of the shapes resemble human anatomy, female, though not tritely or monotonously so. (A nice change, after viewing so many male representations in the paintings of his friend, Guy Anderson, or so it seems to me.)

You are not supposed to touch sculpture, but good sculpture asks to be reached out to and have a hand gingerly laid upon it.  (This could harm the patina if done so frequently.) James’s pieces have this allure and appeal. They also ask to be sketched. Well, I couldn’t resist. For some reason photographs don’t do some kinds of sculpture justice. The mass is not represented fairly; the light and shadow inherent in the piece seems to dissolve when the piece is flooded with light. But sketches don’t do the work justice, either. The most they can do is futilely reveal some impressions of the mass and the strength of the composition. And, as with most photography, such as is included in the museum publication done by the University of Washington Press, scale is lost. And in this book, color representation of James paintings are of necessity broken across the two-page layout’s spine, which makes them hard to view in their entirety and produces a deep, shadowy gap off-center in the middle of each painting, which is detrimental to their appreciation. I think it would have been better to make the reproductions smaller, but kept the painting all on a single page.

All in all, a fine show, and a retrospective that enhances Clayton James’ long career and brings it deservingly to a greater audience than it has had in the past.

WHEN BEING BEAUTIFUL IS NOT ENOUGH

In the Glass Room at MONA, and running concurrent with the Clayton James Retrospective (July 13-October 6, 2002), is an exhibition of glassware by Dante Marioni, entitled “Mosaics.” I am not a great fan of glass, either blown or thrown or stacked up tall, and wrongly consider it to be a form of shiny pottery.  (This may be the Philistine in me coming to the fore; sorry, Dale.)

I snarl, “Pretty!” and turn back to the large room in order to view the paintings I’ve come here to see. Rarely am I disappointed with what is on the walls.

In the case of Dante Marioni, I ask, “What? Not the same thing, over and over again? But why? What not do something different?”

I did not count them but there are many glass. . .vases, I guess they are. All are the same shape and have the same etched design. They differ only in size and color. The shape (see below) repeats over and over. Now, it may be a nice design to start with, and even useful, if you have a huge, single-stemmed flower, say, a lily to showcase. Let's put it a little more kindly: such repetitions surely are a sign of an artist who is not afraid to repeat himself. The big question is why? I could speculate on some deeply rooted psychological problem and come up with a neo-Freudian explanation in the form of neurotic obsession (but I won’t). Or maybe an idée fixe .

Sure, it’s beautiful, but so what? So was last night's sunset. I’d hate to see the same splendid Puget Sound sunset (even one over the San Juan Islands) over and over again.  The eye, the soul, needs relief, even if it is only comic relief.

Sometimes being beautiful—and these vases unmistakably are—simply isn’t enough. The soul hankers for variety, and it reckons for what is different, even if what is different may be inferior. There is such a thing as working a good idea to death. It can’t come quickly enough, in this instance.