Comments on: Dispatch from a Banquette

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:44:28 +0000

It is so easy to forget the thrill of live performance… and the collective experience–the comradery–of a live audience, as opposed to an individual in front of a screen. The Velveteen Rabbit sounds enchanting.
(My geeky response: Alas, character and charisma are not related, character being from the verb for “stamp”, and charisma being from charis–joy, grace.)
I’m fascinated with ballads and obviously must get this book–another book for the Christmas list! Though first thing in the New Year’s Resolution list is to build or buy some new shelving, as the books are completely taking over all available surfaces.
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By: john

john — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:41:21 +0000

Reading Duncan’s abjuring of “originality,” in his statement on poetics (or was it his bio statement?) in the New American Poetry, crediting Helen Adam as one of his teachers, still carries the original thrill of (paradoxical) post-modern breakthrough.
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By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 02:18:37 +0000

Didn’t Helen Adam later publish other sorts of poems under another name? Or am I thinking of another Scottish Californian?
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By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:15:04 +0000

Thanks, Don. This reminds me suddenly of Tom Whalen’s book Dolls: Prose Poems. The uncanny is alive and well.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:18:49 +0000

What a story, Ange! Here’s Robert Duncan (from the Reader) on Helen Adam’s ballads:
“Not so very long ago, in Scotland there were such dances or balls where witches and their daemons lost their minds, enthralled in iamb and anapest, spondee and caesura, keeping in syncopation the tyrannical insistence of the Devil’s beat. Then in dance-songs or ballads, the measures and images of the witch-cult continue. The Old Ones have entered the imagination and set up their Way now in story that was once in Scotland. Though Helen Adam was born in Scotland – Glasgow, December 2nd, 1909 – and bred in the north of Scotland – she came to America in 1939 – her ballads took place in an other place and time in an other time; as once in those dread meetings or joyous meetings, men and women sought in delirium to take their place in an other place and their time in an other time. That other ‘Scotland,’ the invisible World and Its phantasy, is the proper scene of these passion-possessed lovers and haters of Helen Adam’s lore as it was the proper scene of those others who sought their hideous rapture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Long ago? and far away? So all the old stories say it. But the dolls and mirrors, the stricken children and monstrous consorts of these poems, these sorceries of desire, are as near to the real as they ever were.”
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