A Walker in the City: John Sloan and the Gardens of Gloucester

(John Sloan's Sunflowers, Rocky Neck; Dolly Sloan [left] and John Sloan [right] with Alice Beach Winter, Stuart Davis and others at the "Red Cottage" on East Main Street, 1915. Images from Cape Ann Historical Association)

Just as Gloucester is a city of hills, it is equally a city of gardens. There are the formal gardens of Eastern Point and Coles Island, of Annisquam and Bass Rocks. But there are also the intimate gardens, the terraced ones of Portuguese Hill-secret gardens hidden in the back yards of Dodge and Perkins streets, off Mt. Vernon Street or Washington Square. To see these gardens you must walk the neighborhoods of Gloucester, peering behind wooden fences and over stone walls.

It is worth the search, for there are marvelous gardens to be discovered—Turks’ caps breaking out between fence pickets, xenias suddenly exploding in color, gladioli where you’d least expect them.

The New York painter John Sloan discovered these gardens when he first arrived in East Gloucester during the summer of 1914. For five years he and his wife Dolly lived in a little red Cape Cod cottage that still exists on East Main Street (it’s the next to the last house on the left before you turn to enter Rocky Neck). During those years, fellow painters Charles Allan and Alice Winter and Stuart Davis would share the house with the Sloans. It might be said that under the Sloans' roof a good deal of the history of American art was made.

From photographs taken by Winter you can see the flower beds that surrounded the cottage, which has been beautifully preserved and is still painted a wonderful dark red. And from Sloan’s paintings-he did nearly a hundred that first summer-you can discover his neighbors’ gardens, and those on Rocky Neck and Mt. Pleasant Avenue that are depicted on his bright canvases.

On exhibit at the Cape Ann Historical Association is one of the earliest and finest of Sloan’s Gloucester paintings. It’s called “Sunflowers, Rocky Neck.” In the background there is a breathtaking view of Gloucester’s skyline; and in the foreground there are brilliant sunflowers, obviously part of a Rocky Neck garden Sloan happened upon during his daily walks in search of subjects to paint.

This painting is important, not only because it’s an initial example of Sloan’s Gloucester period, but also because in it he pays homage to that great painter of sunflowers, Vincent Van Gogh, some of whose works Sloan had encountered in New York the year before at the Famous “Armory Show,” which brought European modernism to America and changed the face of American art.

Sloan walked the moors behind his house, painting granite boulders half the size of barns and cows grazing peacefully in that still pastoral time. There’s a spectacular painting he did of Dogtown, also at the Historical Museum, a painting whose tints of purple and dark green perfectly capture the primordial atmosphere of Dogtown before Marsden Hartley made it his own.

I can imagine Sloan on those Gloucester walks, up Prospect Street and over to Winchester Court, down that magical set of steps that take you to the foot of Union Hill, where Sloan painted a busy Main Street of trolley tracks and stores with bright awnings, crowded with shoppers.

The Gloucester of Sloan’s day must have been a wonder for city people like John and Dolly, both native Philadelphians. They picnicked with visitors by the ocean and on the ledges above the Seine Fields. They made friends with the neighborhood children, many of whom Sloan painted.

Again and again in Sloan’s paintings you discover the gardens of Gloucester, as if he found in those intimate and private places, so artfully planted and arranged, the hidden imagination of the city.

It was the same in my childhood many years after the Sloans left Gloucester for Santa Fe, where Sloan was to live, paint and garden in an old adobe house on Garcia Street, off Canyon Road, for the rest of his life. I remember the “Victory” gardens of the war years in which we grew the vegetables our mothers and grandmothers “put up” for the winter. Those gardens taught us an early appreciation of food, along with a care for the earth. In fact, many of us who have vegetable gardens today learned how to cultivate them from our grandmothers and our friends’ mothers during the war years.

Italian and Portuguese families recreated the gardens of Sicily and the Azores, producing the most amazing eggplants, squash and tomatoes, along with grapes from which they made their own wine. And there was a woman down the Fort, Mrs. Frontiero, who grew brilliant orange poppies each year in her yard near O’Donnell-Usen’s plant, the birthplace of Birdseye Frosted Foods. “Oh come, poppy, when will you bloom?” Charles Olson asks in a poem about that garden.

The flowers and vegetables people grow, the gardens they create, say a lot about who we are and how we feel about our lives-indeed about the places we live in. Walk the neighborhoods of the inner city and you will discover a world of pattern and color in gardens that thrive even during the hottest summers. These gardens are the life of the city.

A Walker in the City: Summer Afternoons

(The Mount, 1902 and 2007)

Henry James once told Edith Wharton that he felt the two most beautiful words in the English language were “summer afternoon.” Picture James seated on the cool, shaded terrace of The Mount, Wharton’s palatial summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts, enjoying an unsurpassed view of the Berkshire Hills and Laurel Lake. There is an almost preternatural stillness in the air, as it remains so today, interrupted by the rustling of leaves in the trees, the rasping song of a catbird, a cicada’s drone. It is high summer, but the elevation of the house and the shade of trees mitigate the oppressiveness of the heat. The two friends, the finest American novelists of their time, converse. Rather, James talks in the ruminative manner of his late fictions, and Wharton and her company listen to his exquisite observations in rapt silence.

After his visit, James will write his hostess that he felt “surrounded by every loveliness of nature, and every luxury of art, and treated with a benevolence that brings tears to my eyes.” Such was civility at the turn of the century.

That was a long time ago, one hundred and three years to be precise; and all that remains of the two writers are their books—and Wharton’s house, which has undergone restoration and is newly open to the public under the auspices of the Edith Wharton Restoration, founded in 1980. http://www.edithwharton.org

A few years ago, while her house was still under repair, I walked the grounds of Wharton’s estate. Not far from Tanglewood, it was surrounded by the healing July silence, the tranquility of the trees, and the magnificence of her Italian garden. I pictured the two writers, who were together in Lenox in 1904 and before that in Europe, at Pavillon Colombe, Wharton’s château outside of Paris, and even earlier in Florence, where James spent many of his beloved summer afternoons at the Bellosquardo villa of Francis Boot, whose son-in-law Frank Duveneck painted in Gloucester. Looking back, those images seem sun-bleached, receding in time like faded photographs.

I, too, love summer afternoons. As a child I lay on top of the granite riprap that edged the Blynman Canal, endlessly day-dreaming. Heedless of the sun, I raced with my friends along the riverbank down to the high school yard, surrounded then by fields of milkweed, goldenrod and purple loosestrife. There we played hide-and-seek or chased the giant tiger swallowtails and monarchs that fed on the flowers and weeds. I can still see those wildflowers now, though the fields have long since become a vast asphalt parking lot. We also watched the bigger kids play ball in Newell Stadium as a prelude to Junior League baseball whose games the whole town attended on long summer nights.

Once, sitting in the shade of the old baseball bleachers, we came upon a lone artist painting the view across the stadium to Rider’s Rocks. Crowding around him, we watched as his quick pencil sketched in the shapes of houses leading up to the granite outcropping of Rider’s, shapes he soon filled with transparent watercolors-soft browns, violets, magentas. Some kids shook their heads. “It doesn’t look like it,” they whispered of images that weren’t photographic.

Still, I was fascinated as the painting took on a life of its own. While not exactly the rocks I knew from the bruises on my legs as I climbed them, in the artist’s imagination the view had become more essential, magical even. Years later, attending a retrospective in New York of the paintings of Milton Avery, many of them completed in Gloucester, I discovered that watercolor again and realized that I and my friends had for a brief summer’s afternoon experienced the transformative power of art at the hands of a master.

I read a lot on those summer afternoons, just as I do now. What is there about reading The Bounty Trilogy while seated in a mildewed canvas chair on the porch at 3 Perkins Road that gives one a feeling of such serenity? Perhaps it had to do with the summer itself and the fact that school was out, the war had ended, and I appeared to have no worries. That is one of the privileges of childhood. I wonder if young people enjoy it today.

The Gloucester I grew up in is my benchmark for every feeling I have about myself and my birthplace. Centered on the people we knew or met, the things we did, the neighborhoods we lived in, our earliest experiences are primary. Even so, we’re often compelled, like James and Wharton, who became expatriates in order to write more objectively about their own country, to separate ourselves from those experiences in order to grasp their meaning. It is a distance that can often prove painful, as is equally the case with any separation; but in the end, it can lead to a greater understanding of who we are and where we came from.

A Walker in the City: St. Peter's Fiesta

(photographs by Ernie Morin)

Italians have two principal verbs for walking. “Camminare” means simply getting about on foot, while “passeggiare” has the more formal connotation of taking a stroll. As a noun “passeggiata” also means promenade, as of an evening’s stroll along the boulevard or in the populous square of a Sicilian town. Since the advent of the automobile, “passeggiare” can also mean going for a drive.

I’m reminded of these words at St. Peter’s Fiesta as I watch the strolling crowds of children and their parents--brightly dressed teens, kids on scooters, even skateboarders--converging on the square that has been home for 80 years to Gloucester’s most profound celebration of our collective identity (this year's Fiesta began on Thursday, June 28 and ended on Sunday, July 1, 2007).

La Festa di San Pietro is many things. It pays homage to the patron saint of Gloucester’s Italian fleet and it’s also a Solstice celebration. As winter and spring give way to summer, fishermen and their families thank St. Peter for what the sea provides. Competitions like the dory races and the greasy pole contest have their origins in ancient games of strength, whose deeper roots lie in Greek, Sicilian and Near Eastern fertility rites. The climax of the celebration is the blessing of the fleet; and its denouement is the late night procession during which the statue of St. Peter is carried by fishermen and their family members through the streets of the Fort and returned to its resting place in St. Peter’s Club.

One doesn’t have to travel to Italy to understand this powerful annual event. Much of Italy has been transported to Gloucester and remains here in the traditions of our Sicilian community through folkways like St. Joseph’s Feast and the yearly novenas of the Mothers of Grace Club on Washington Street. For that reason, living in Italy often seemed to me like being home in Gloucester. A great deal of what I experienced during the years I spent as a graduate student and teacher in Florence, or on my travels throughout the country that remains my spiritual home—-men drinking coffee and talking politics in cafes, widows dressed perennially in black, children kicking a soccer ball in the street--was familiar to me from growing up here.

That is why I love the idea of Fiesta. As long as there is an Italian community to celebrate it and fishermen to be honored, Gloucester is still Gloucester as we know it.

Fiesta is rite and ritual, it is games of strength and skill. It’s a giant block party and mating dance as young people from all over the city meet and mingle. But Fiesta is also Gloucester’s great annual passeggiata. It’s the place where everyone strolls through the Fort, among the carnival booths, the rides, the games of chance. There is food in abundance-the sizzling Italian sausages and hot peppers, fried dough, cotton candy, candied apples. Fiesta is where old friends and relatives meet, where kids home from college or the service, from jobs in other towns, reunite. It’s where the winter’s babies are proudly displayed and where newly married couples, or those about to be married, declare their love.

Passseggiata in Italy has, from Roman times, been a traditional public ritual. During the evening stroll eligible sons and daughters gave each other the eye under the attentive gaze of parents. The poor observed the habits of the rich, while the rich prided themselves on their ability to set examples of decorum. Confined mostly now to small towns (although the custom still prevails in Naples and Palermo, and Romans have long had to share Via Condotti, Villa Borghese and the Piazza di Spagna with tourists), passeggiata has largely given way to those drives in the car that its secondary meaning describes, or simply to the new life of bar hopping, movies and night clubs that has become the international pastime of young people no longer restrained by parental authority.

Yet in Gloucester passeggiata continues as an integral part of St. Peter’s Fiesta. It remains as I remember it from childhood, when our mothers accompanied us to the Fort. One of the passages into adolescence was to be allowed to attend Fiesta alone or with friends. In high school one strolled among the carnival booths with one’s steady date. Indeed, it was de rigueur to show the world that one had a girlfriend or boyfriend.

Fiesta has changed over the years. Some natives lament the midway atmosphere, which appears now to overshadow the religious dimension of the celebration. But part of every spiritual ritual, like Mardi gras, involves both worship and release. What’s important is that after 80 years we still have Fiesta and that it draws the community to our one big public square. Here, under the watchful eyes of St. Peter, we recommit ourselves to the sacredness of Gloucester’s central occupation, that of fishing and the maritime life.

Vincent Ferrini: A 94th Birthday Tribute

Gloucester’s Poet Laureate, Vincent Ferrini, turned ninety-four on June 24, 2007. To celebrate Vincent’s birthday and in honor of our long friendship, I post the following memoir, followed by What the Hell, a poem by our mutual friend, Peter Tuttle, which pays special tribute to Ferrini. Tuttle’s poem first appeared in Issue 45 (April 2002) of the Minutes of the Charles Olson Society.

I was fifteen years old when I first sought out Vincent Ferrini at his frame shop on 126 East Main Street. I’d already read some of his poetry in Four Winds, the quarterly he and a group of artists and writers published in Gloucester during the summer of 1952. It was just after I’d moved from the Boulevard to Rocky Neck with my family that I discovered Four Winds on sale at the gallery and coffee house owned by ceramicists Doris Hall and Kalman Kybinyi, on the opposite end of Rocky Neck Avenue from my father’s luncheonette.

Before moving to the Neck, which was still in its heyday as a vibrant art colony, I knew nothing of art and less of poetry. But I had a yearning for what I didn’t yet know. That yearning expressed itself in a fascination with words, words that evoked or sustained deep feelings in me.

The poetry we read in school—Longfellow mostly; some Wordsworth I wasn’t ready for—didn’t give me what I was searching after. But in Four Winds I began to find it. That first issue, which I still have, contained poems by Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Cid Corman and Ferrini himself. They were poems the likes of which I had never seen or read before. I was especially taken by the poem of Ferrini’s that was printed on the inside back cover of the journal:

I pass

by day

and night

no one has

seen me

If you ever

want to find

me

and know me

leave behind

yourself

and enter

the caves

of other

people

there you

will find

me

who is

yourself

It was poetry like this—gnomic, different from what I was used to, yet somehow deeply familiar because it struck an instinctive chord—that sent me looking for more of the same. At the Sawyer Free Library I found the collected works of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I discovered Yeats' poetry and some verse by Amy Lowell. But still I wasn’t essentially satisfied, just as music didn’t really speak to me until I started listening to Bartok and Stravinsky and my brother and I were introduced to bebop on "Symphony Sid" Turin's radio program, often broadcast live from New York City's Birdland.

Just about that time Ferrini published Mindscapes, a chapbook of Haiku-like meditations. I came across it at W. G. Brown’s book store on Main Street and I resolved to meet Ferrini. Perhaps he could direct me in my search, I thought.

So I presented myself at the frame shop which at that time, 1952, was located in a shed at the rear of the building Vincent now makes his home in. I poked my head in the door late one afternoon on my way home from school and a welcoming face turned from the table saw. Eyes lit up, the saw was shut off, and I received the first of thousands of strong handshakes I would be getting from Vincent the rest of my life.

I had told Vincent I was interested in poetry. When he asked me who I was reading, I could only come up with names like Whitman and Yeats.

“Yes, yes,” he said, not impatiently, “but who are you reading who’s living—who’s alive?”

I was at a loss for words.

“Let’s begin,” Ferrini said, grabbing some volumes down from what I observed were shelves stuffed with books of poetry.

That day Vincent introduced me to the work of Ezra Pound, to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and I began to visit him regularly to talk about poetry, indeed about life. And he never asked my name initially. It was first things first with Vincent, then as now; and poetry was Number One.

Later it turned out hew knew my father; and even later we talked about our common roots in the Mediterranean, his in Italy, mine in Greece.

Still, I will never forget those early years of our friendship, when I was in high school and Vincent was so accessible, a storehouse of information about poets and poetry on my way home from the very place that was supposed to teach me about literature but only ended up boring me with the tried and true, that is until my English teacher Miss Harris introduced us to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and some of us discovered e. e. cummings on our own.

I went to college in Brunswick, Maine, making sure that the Bowdoin library had all of Vincent’s books. While I was a graduate student in Italy, Vincent kept me abreast of everything that was going on in poetry—and in Gloucester. When I returned home in 1962, our friendship picked up from where we’d left it and it has never waned. And over the years, along with our frequent talks, we’ve exchanged hundreds of letters.

I am only one of the many people, young and old, who came to Vincent to talk poetry and ended up talking life. For him there is no separation; for Vincent makes poetry live in his own work and in his vital presence. I can’t begin to record what I’ve learned from him during the more than fifty years of our friendship because it has become so intertwined with my own life and the workings of my psyche.

What I do know is that Vincent was the first model of an artist for me, a writer. He didn’t show me how to do it, he showed me how to BE it and revealed himself in the act of living and writing simultaneously. For Vincent had, as he describes it in the poem I’ve quoted, entered the caves of other people, and he did find himself; and he has spent the intervening years helping and exhorting the rest of us to do likewise.

(An earlier version of this essay was published in The Café Review, Vol. 2, Number 10, 1991, a special issue honoring Vincent Ferrini and later reprinted in Split Shift, in 1996)

What the Hell

-for Vincent

­

That curve that

Corner in the road

East Main Street Gloucester

Massachusetts I knew I’d

Recognize that curve that

Little white house

Not that it was built as a house

His old frame shop where the

Crossed oars

My crucifixion as he put it

Held his framery sign and I

Recognize the curve

It’s almost dreamlike these

Streets I once rode so

Often

Back to them now three

Decades later

Nothing much’s changed

No one’s fixed the curves in the

Street you couldn’t

East Main Street follows the curve of the

Harbor

Buildings pressed up against it on

Either side and down to the

Shore

Over the water in fact

Old wood pilings where all the

Fish plants and flake yards once

Stood

Much of that most of that

Gone now

But the buildings remain and the

Harbor and

Thirty years after I first met him when

Vincent was roughly the age I am now

I was the new kid on the block

Cub reporter for the

Gloucester Daily Times and certainly the

Only person there interested in

Getting to know

Having something other than an

Arm’s length relationship with the

Wild men of Gloucester of which

Vincent was now

With the Big Man’s death

The senior example

Well they interested me

Those guys they weren’t

Shy about literature and they

Weren’t shy about their

Political opinions

Antiwar

All of them though I’d

Missed the worst of that

There- that is- I got it in

School but that’s different it was

Not hard to have antiwar opinions on the

Upper West Side

Here

In Gloucester

It was different and they

No doubt paid the price
Communists

Traitors

Of course Vincent was a

Communist

Back in the Thirties or so I
Inferred

No one came out and told me so but then I

Read No Smoke

His first and best book

1941

About the dying shoe factory town city of
Lynn, Massachusetts just

North of Boston during the

Depression

Possibly Vincent leant me a copy

Possibly I read it

Yes now it seems to me I

Read it in the Library

Part of the collection you

Couldn’t check out

Rare book, even then

And you had the feeling that if

Vincent was no longer a

Believer when he wrote the book

He might well have been one
Proletarian literature

They would have called it

Not a long book

Portraits

One after another of the

People of the city

Everyone from the fat cats to the

Streetwalkers and worse and how

The injustice

The lack of fairness

The lives of work for nothing or

Less than nothing while the

Bosses lived smug and

Comfy
The anger

But it was the idealism that struck you

He wasn’t angry for himself

You thought

Not a selfish book

So though I couldn’t understand some of

Vincent’s later

More recent

Work that looked to me

Influenced by
Big Man’s

The Big Man

Charles Olson

Who’d so obviously

Dominated Vincent’s life

Still the reverence

And that’s what struck me because the

Next book I read was

The Big Man’s big book

Maximus

And found myself appalled by his cruelty to Vincent
Ferrini

Supposedly his friend

This Letter 5 of the

Maximus Poems in which

The Big Man (he was a Big Man, 6’7”)

Savaged Ferrini’s Four Winds a

Literary review that he put out with

Mary and John

(And Vincent was carrying on then

As someone later told me

With

Mary)

Sexual jealousy

Well partly

The Big Man may have

Wanted her too but

Possession

Mostly

The sheer need to be

The Big Man in Gloucester poetry

Virtually the only man and

After all at this point it was

Ferrini who had the reputation

Olson was the new guy though he was

Older

A late bloomer

Come to Gloucester after politics

After academia

To take possession

Try to

Take possession

Of Gloucester by

Poetry and then

Die

I read the Maximus poems

Took a helluva a lot longer than
No Smoke

I tell you
And what I came away with was that
They weren’t really poems about
Gloucester
George Butterick
The Olson scholar
Not a wild man
But a professor at UConn who
At regular intervals hoped I’d

Write up his efforts

Articles published about Olson in

Little reviews

Quarterlies

Which I did

Glad to

They all

Ferrini and the

Other two

Disciples

Said how much Olson knew about

Gloucester

The historical research

Studying paintings by

Fitz Hugh

But not

As I saw

Much real history

The history of Gloucester is the

History of its fishing industry and the

Fishery of the

Gulf of Maine

That’s what drove the economy

Built all those captains’ houses that

Edward Hopper painted some

Forty years later on the

Hills overlooking Gloucester

White clapboard victorians

Crowding the streets

Looking out over the water from the

Hills

Even by then gone to seed

Fishing had been falling apart for

Quite some time and those

Captains were the

Captains of the

Glorious days of sail

Long before the Italians and the

Portuguese arrived and the

Side draggers

Well

That was my critique but I kept my

Mouth shut because these guys

They were like some kind of a

Cult of Olson

This man who so dominated their

Thinking that they (then) all

Seemed to think it was enough

Was the right thing

To just go on

Sort of worshipping the Man

Not a word

For all the praise of Maximus of

That cruelty

Right there in the poem

To Ferrini

And how did he feel about that

Well, hell

I wasn’t going to ask him

An excitable guy

I tell you

Kept stabbing his workbench with his

Mat knife to

Emphasize his points

Probably politics

But injustice

Always the injustice

First time I met him

I certainly wasn’t gonna

And you know

You couldn’t

You could see the vulnerability

The wound

It went too deep

So I said

Nothing

Then

Now

Thirty years later

Rented car

Back visiting family

Flown in from the Midwest

Dumb rental car

Most of them

They’re all dumb

Riding this street that I’d

Ridden as a young man

Much younger man

Just out of

College then

Even had a girlfriend

Down Rocky Neck

In fact I dropped a motorcyle on

One of these curves

Sand

Skidded

Not hurt but it

Didn’t help the bike any

Riding home from her house at

1:00

AM

Well

It was like a dream

Sunny summer July day now

But the street was real

The curve was real

And there was Vincent’s

Little white clapboard place

A gable end almost touching the road

Not much bigger than a long

Single car garage

No sign now

No more crucifixion

Living on social security

I imagined

Poetry didn’t make you

Rich and neither did framing

But still

Late 80s

Vincent had praised my poetry

Said it might become

As he put it a

Creeping best seller

Imagined the Boston Globe reporters

Green with envy at a

Reporter who could

Write poetry

(I doubted that

Mostly I thought they
Just wouldn’t care)

There was the place

Said I’d buy him lunch

His choice

Least I could do for

All his kindness

Vincent didn’t have to

Praise this book by this guy who’s

Been gone thirty years

So

Well

Tell you truth he

Didn’t look a

Helluva a lot different a

Testimonial to

Walking five miles every day and

Staying away from booze

And sheer determination

He’d lived long enough to

Outlive the McCarthy era
Tar and feathering

Lived long enough to

Outlive Olson

Now he could be the Olsonlike

Figure

Conscience of Gloucester

Writing the letters to the

Editor and they’d made him

Somehow

I’d have loved to have been at that

City Council session

Poet Laureate of

Gloucester

Though fewer of us

(Perhaps our fault)

Understood much of what those later

Gloucester poems

All Know Fish

Were about

Didn’t matter

He was still there

And still wrote

Letters to the editor about

Local or national matters when he

Saw things were

Unfair

He put his hat on

Broadbrimmed black
Vanity a friend had

Confided

Didn’t want people to

See him bald

So the poet’s broadbrimmed black hat and

That hot July day we drove the

Not so long way to
Halibut Point

Decent restaurant

Fresh fish and

Talked about

This and that

Where we’d been

Drove back after

He invited me in

And then

And then

I don’t know why

About that Letter 5

Showed my his reply

His last copy of his reply

Written then

In the Arriving in which he

Turned the other cheek

Said how Cid Corman had told him it would

Be the making of him but

Of course the unmaking too

Because he took it

Didn’t turn on the Big Man

Couldn’t

I couldn’t really imagine

Loving or needing another

Man so

But they were all like that

The three of them

Ferrini and the

Other two

Disciples

Olson the Father

Well, all right for one

He was a young man

But Ferrini

Pretty much the same age

Published sooner

Reputation

Now smeared

For what motive

By this guy

Hell

I never met Olson and

Already with Letter 5

I didn’t like him

But these guys

All the children of immigrants

First generation educated

First generation literary

He held something for them

That I didn’t see

Fame?

Connection to the bigger world?

All I can tell you is that in

Gloucester

Among these men

He wasn’t Ishmael

He wasn’t Moby Dick

He was Ahab and

From what I could see

From the evidence of Letter 5

Perfectly willing to use to drive to consume

Anyone for his purpose

This

Possession of

Gloucester by poetry which he

Should have known was

Bound to fail

But to see Vincent

Old

But not frail

To listen to him
Make it new!

Terrible advice

It’s ruined poetry

They think making it new is

Making it different and

No one knows what the hell they’re

Talking about

Postmodern

You know what that is

It’s just second generation

Modern

They have to go even

Further out there than the
First generation did
Look at this
And he showed me a
Little review
They publish my stuff but
I have no idea what the hell
Their poems are about

What

The

Hell.

--Peter Tuttle

(copyright 2002 by Peter Tuttle/ all rights reserved)