I asked you nicely on another thread to stop picking on me. Apparently, you were disinclined to acquiesce.

You should never poke sticks at lions, me bucko. We bite back!
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Terreson
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I did not do this. This is the work of a hacker. I am hoping someone reads this post before it too gets manipulated. By now surely others following the thread have noticed the stepped signature.

Terreson
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Vis à vis John Oliver Simon’s stake through the heart over there on the Verse Drama thread, an appropriate scenario (!), look how sore the spot really was right here. And I put this to you–the majority of the posters on this thread either didn’t want to hear what I was saying or it put them in such a funk that they fled. Indeed, there were a total of 17 posters in the 7 days the thread was up, and only 8 of them contributed positively. Leaving Desmond Swords out of it as he was writing brilliantly from another planet, that leaves 8 who were entirely, gratuitously ad hominem and negative. Out of those 8 only 1 person posted more than 2 posts, Gary B. Fitzgerald with 9 posts, all personal and all negative. The remaining 7 individuals posted 11 posts between them, making an average of 1.57 posts with an average of 3 lines a shot.

Out of a total of 98 posts that is—which is quite a statistic. On the other hand, it wasn’t Billy Collins we were trying to talk about. It was Robinson Jeffers!

Here’s a sampling of the comments, all sic, and none of them sounding much like the Harriet that brought me here in the first place:

“Hooray!”

“Please stop raining on my parade.”

Christopher
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Jeffers wrote in such a way that he was competing with Jesus Christ and towering mountains and earth and rock and blood. YOU LOSE. Nature wins every time, poet. Jeffers can’t give me anything close to my own experience of the outdoors, of rocks strewn randomly. It’s there, waiting for me, right now, outside my door, even if it’s only the sun, shining on an ordinary street.

Poetry is not ‘mountains.’ Poetry is simply all the poems that have been written. Those poems are ‘about’ all sorts of things, but what those poems are ‘about’ are not the poems. Poems fail or succeed on their own term, as poems.

The successful poem out-does other poems.

Readers who need to find all sorts of things which aleady exist outside poems IN poems, are not really interested in poems, but interested more in experiencing reality in a weakened or fake manner. Jeffers is a pair of sunglasses for people who think they are seeing the sun. But they aren’t seeing the sun; there’s no sun in Jeffers, or in any poem; but the ‘Jeffers-sunglasses’ give them a feeling they are experiencing ‘a-sun-so-awesome-it-requires-sunglasses.’ If only the Jeffers fans knew how silly they looked with their sunglasses on.

This still begs the question: what do we find in poems, then? We find poems in poems. Poems that try to be more than poems will fail. Poems that try and give us what we can find more easily elsewhere, fail.
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Go back and read his last post on this thread which he undoubtedly dashed off like all the others. So who writes like that among us? Who’s got that gift?

“Indeed, it is only now as one writes, one has come to understand in a moment of profound realisation which comes with much contemplation on the uniqueness and unity of being – that it was Nature herself, that majestic view of reality beyond the curving sweep of glass, which caused what happened to unravel as it did.”

And does it ever!

So put aside your thesis and your rivalries and go read it. And then if you still think you want to clamp him out, do. But just be sure you know what you’re losing.

Christopher
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I’ve enjoyed the conversations, mostly. I’ve enjoyed the bloggers and their ideas. I’ll read topics from time to time.

Terreson
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Harriet friends, you got a hacker somehow able to enter member posts and alter them. Please get your IT people to see to a fix. If it happens again I will no longer post here.

Terreson
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That the chest bursts in the heat is not a human concern.
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A few corrections: The Eleonora Duse story I mentioned is not legend but an event as described in “The Life of Eleonora Duse” bt E.A. Rheinhardt, (London, Martin Secker/(c)1924&1930.)It was one example of her more humble approach to her art. Bernhardt was an out-sized ego, and sacrred mnster may have been a kind appellation though her performances were great occasions.

Grotowski and Artaud do not really belong in the same frames.One explored trainings based group dynamics and physical capacities for a new kind of performance in contemporary theatre. One survived the cruelties of his lifelong “treatments’ to write and explore cruelty, a decadent civilization, and so much else.A shaman manquee, one might say.

Also, Christopher; my mention was that Lee Strasberg told of An actor in an ancient Greek tragedy, a recent widower,who bore his own wife’s ashes onstage in an urn, to render his performance true, and so to help in the play’s catharsis, for his audience. I made no mention of “Lee Strasberg’s wife’s ashes performed by profoundly disturbed young people who wanted to do good in class.” That’s yours, if you wish to have it.

Back to Jeffers. Yes, Terreson, the terrain he mined, be it the wilderness under the skies or the wilderness under a human’s skin led to some riveting poetry. In lesser hands, it could be made absurd. In his, we have many of the more successful poems to say that it was not.

margo
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Dear Desmond,
I loved that, and it added all sorts of dimensions to what I was trying to say about the ‘Method.’ I was working into that topic because Margo brought up Lee Strasberg’s famous story about some actor’s wife’s ashes to stand for the intensity and risk she feels in Robinson Jeffers, and Terreson comfirmed the legend’s importance by building his last post around it. My own feeling is that it’s a dangerous precedent, and far from making me believe in Jeffers it makes me doubt his tact if not intentions. My argument is that if the experiences were real he would surely have known they were ‘esoteric’ as well, and have kept them naturally private. When they’re left to hang out as he does they become ridiculous, and lose all their power.

In a nutshell.

What you did is perform my whole score in an opera of some magnificence, and I loved every note of it. But the problem is that it’s outside the discourse of any thread on Harriet, and can too easily be dismissed as irrelevant. Well, it is irrelevant, wonderful but irrelevant, and if only you could, using a nautical metaphor, a.) reef it and b.) hold it on course you’d win the America’s Cup

hands down!

Christopher
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It was called the Onion Workshop or something similar (definitley *onion* in the there), peeling and shedding layers of inhibition to get to one’s core-self kinda carry on. It was conducted in the ballroom of the Spa complex in Scarborough, which is a set of beautiful Victorian buildings, all connected, with theatre and whatnot, perched on a cliff, the panaroma of which from the ballroom, overlooking the North sea, is incredibly evocative. Indeed, it is only now as one writes, one has come to understand in a moment of profound realisation which comes with much contemplation on the uniqueness and unity of being – that it was Nature herself, that majestic view of reality beyond the curving sweep of glass, which caused what happened to unravel as it did.

~

Walford was dressed in black leather trews and white flowy shirt that had some modest, yet individual design to it which marked her out as a person apart from the norm, someone arty. A tall women, like a show-biz Maude Gonne, all that was lacking was a horse-whip swishing to and fro about her thighs.

After the welcome speech by one of the organisers, she was brought forward from where she had been standing in silence, like a travelling preacher of great eminence, whose spiritual fame had travelled far and wide within the religious community from whom we take our cue as artists.

She instatly took command of the said Onion workshop, where the entire cohort of students and tutors pliantly entered into that special magic circle of pretend, imaginary space which we hear so much about, where there is an invisible fourth wall seperating one from the audience and which can be a rewarding, immensley emotional and even incredibly dangerous place pyschologically if our mental stability is in any way titlted beyond the boundary of the magic circle and into that ga ga zone where we strip naked and start defecating whilst singing Hallelujah or play Russian roulette with chainsaws and gimps kidnapped from the Desert Inn.

~

What followed was a mass extemporised acting session, where Walford’s instructions and our reaction became the business of Show itself.

We began by having to pretend we were an animal and in our mind had to be very very clear what it was. I was a panther, i think, or at least, a cat of some description, walking round the space, and all trying as hard as we could, to BELIEVE we were whatever it was we imagined ourselves to be.

As we were circling and moving and working int he space, we were told to change form into a bird, and i will never forget, feeling awkward at first, but then seguing into a sparrow and flapping my wings – or rather, by this point, internalising the form of a bird and thereby truly believing as a sincere actoar following the instructions to the best of my ability and not cheating, that i was indeed a winged entity.

Though on the face of it, I was not as obviously flying as the majority of my fellow few-hundred, all in various states of flap. Some clearly birds more than others, emoting loud approximations of avian noise and flailing their arms in wild swing.

Walford then told us to stop dead still, randomly fix our attention on another drama queen and on her cue of *go*, walk immediately over to whoever we had in our sights and ask a question, which had to be sincere, no pretending, but from the secret and sincere part of our very innermost being.

I was nervous because it was all so unique and supremely theatrical: for, were we not in a masterclass with a mistress of fantasy whose alchemic powers had created some of the most riveting moments in the history of contemprary stage-craft?

And here was liddle ole moi, a younger but older actoary chap of 25, with self-esteem and class issues, feeling far, far advanced in years than my student colleagues from all over the island of Britain and beyond, who had gathered into this very space in order to dare to dream for that faery dust to sprinkle abroad our most hidden unspoken hope – for our genius to be spotted by talent checkers on the sniff for the next new batch of luvvies to fly tha flag for Idol US.

I knew when Walford gave the verbal cue to take it to the next level, the ghosts of Thespis of hambone would reveal then to us if gods above had favoured us with *it* or not.

Panicking but holding fast, on her command of *go*, i moved across the vast ad-hoc stage and approaching the pefermance artist one’s head had singled out, asked what time it was, and began feeling as some mist of possession in mid-dissolve, a druidic fog evaporating instantly as a calm peace came o’er mine ear like the sweet sound of music that breathes upon a tank of violents, stealing and pissing odour on the spirit of a now dead Aristophanes, now live Aristotle, then Aeschylus and Dionysia – before Euripides, Phrynichus and Sophocles seemed to enter into my concenteration on the field of play from which the dramaturg commanded her three hundred fawns, all afloat now in a higher realm of detachment from total reality, i thought, as i withdrew from the scene a success who had followed her instructions to the letter, mentally pure and free from any sin of non-compliance with the amazonian presence in leather, the dying rays of a spring sun part too of that show in which a whole room went beyond into group hypnosis.

~

I had seen behind her mask, a technician pulling strings, the cod behind what heirophantic hoo ha, performance mumbo jumbo had got them crazees throwing caution to the wind and truly letting go. Our middle aged drama tutor accompanying us on the trip, a staid and academic presence in class, had fully released and was getting a secene on the go with another tutor who she didn’t know, the heady mix and exotic location of E Yorkshire, effecting them to become their wildest selves, Jill abandoning herself to the moment with gusto and singing opera *I do lurve, oh yes i do love you too* she was roaring to the balding short drama chap herding his own class, and Walford zooming in and out at will, focusing the attention of the performance telescope onto whatever piece of action caught her eye and basically, like flashing underwear, going mahd ye whoar flwoar mwaw yoo hooooo arghhh stuff.

~

But i had set apart, acting but at some point becoming the only spectator of the bunch, of the whole three hundred, and knowing that this is how Hollywood sex-parties start, one charismatic nutter and the whole world’s your oyster.

Walford and i, we knew and conspired without a look exhanged, to behave as though the act was a truly visionary gig, and it was then i think i knew, that space craft is an art few ascend to master on the Whitehouse lawn with just an empty box, an chara.
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I would say such moments too should be kept private. And that’s a serious observation, Margo and Tere, not just a sensational eye-opener. The Greeks catharted all sorts of personal stuff in their tragedies, but the actors didn’t hurt their eyes in the process, and indeed distanced themselves from it with masks. And of course every single person attended.

To understand why that last statement is important is to be aware that not everyone by any means was admitted to the Eleusinian Mysteries, and indeed we don’t know to this day what happened within them. The practise was that well hidden.

I admire Robinson Jeffers guts, I admire how far he could go, and I do like some of his poetry when I’m up to it. On the other hand, I feel certain he damaged himself as well as his reputation by doing far too many private moments!

So did Timothy Leary and Alan Watts, also in California. Alan Ginsberg, bless his heart, didn’t, at least in my estimation. And the reason Alan didn’t, even naked on the mat with his cymbals, is that he always had such a wonderful sense of humor, and was so humble.
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The incest note is an interesting one because of course it’s there in all mythology, and some historical ruling classes have pratised it as a god-given obligation. It’s not incest by any means, but during the 1st World War almost all the royal combatants were descended from an extremely tight gene pool, perhaps one of the reasons the conflict was so bloody in every sense of the word.

In some South East Asian countries royalty still assumes multiple wives, and you’d think this might help to clean up the chromosomes. Unfortunately for Thailand, for example, all the heirs were chosen from the few wives who themselves had royal blood, and as a consequence there are very few sons who live to maturity. I would even go so far as to posit that in a sense almost all truly risqué sexual tastes have a certain royal blush to them, and I think Robinson Jeffers had that feeling too. When you reach truly thin air you want to make love only with those who can breathe up there with you, and who you feel have descended from the same sun.
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As Jung pointed out over and over again, the myths are always as dangerous as they are fertile, and human beings have to be really careful when they embrace them. He himself was always in danger of being drowned by them, as he recounts so poignatly in Memories, Dream and Reflections. Indeed, he only just managed to stay on this side of madness–read it and see.

And ditto all the great acting teachers, Margo and Terreson. Ditto Lee Strasberg, ditto Antonin Artaud, ditto Grotowski. The dark stories are as legion as the bright ones, and a lot of damage has been done by lesser teachers who try to imitate them. I was an acting student in New York City and have witnessed first hand events equally as bizarre as Lee Strasberg’s wife’s ashes performed by profoundly disturbed young people who wanted to do good in class. And boy did they ever, naked with real blood on the floor, and real live chickens.

The well-known Eleonora Duse story is almost certainly a legend, but most of what you hear about Sarah Bernhardt was probably true–she was called quite openly at the time a monstre sacré, and loved it. Ditto James Dean. Ditto Marlon Brando.

Last Tango in Paris is a good start if you want to see it in person.

Well written comment, Terreson, and very much to the point. Thanks. I just feel that there really are things that shouldn’t be talked about at all, and that when you break that taboo deep things just become silly. I said the same thing to Annie Finch a while ago, perhaps you remember, and I was deeply moved that she agreed.

The problem with the blog model, and indeed with the American mouth, is that nothing remains sacred. I would have said the same thing to Robinson Jeffers if I’d had the chance: don’t talk so much, you just sowing the seeds of red herrings!

Christopher
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While not a Californian, I’ll presume enough to say I get what you mean. In Jeffers and Una’s day Big Sur was still a wilderness. After the social scandal their love affair caused further south in L.A. it was the wilderness of Big Sur that attracted them the most. (Maybe I should call it wilder.ness) I was in the Pacific Northwest, moving incrementally further into deep forest wilderness when I started taking serious account of Jeffers poetry, philosophy, and perceptions. What I finally realized is that, in such an environment, you tend to put human things into a different perspective. Gradually, but all of a sudden immediately and on one day, you fully get that, in the nature of things, the human experience is not at the center of the universe, barely on the outskirts of the Milky Way, maybe just an evolutionary footnote. Because I figure poetry readers are as environmentally biased in their perceptions as every other type of human being I don’t expect all poetry readers to get at what was at the core of Jeffers’ aesthetic: that an old growth forest, a night sky undiminished by local light pollution, the currents of the North Pacific, it all speaks to a God or a Goddess or a Way that cannot be humanly controlled, that, in fact, vectors humans.

Margo Berdeshevsky says: “Since the ancient Greeks, strong emotion has worked artistically. Brief story, as told by my old actors’ teacher, Lee Strasberg: An actor in an ancient Greek tragedy, a recent widower, bore his own wife’s ashes onstage in an urn, to render his performance true, and so to help in the play’s catharsis, for his audience. Another story: The actress Eleonora Duse is known to have wept into a dish ion her dressing room, before going onstage–so that she would not bathe the stage in tears, and rob the audience of its experience. Both of the above small tales have been, and are, touchstones of art, all art, for me.”

Man, this so resonates for me. And I guess I’ve never understood any other approach to poetry, at least not in my bones and blood and flesh. But, then, a Classicist or neo-Classicist by any other name, in my view, needs to denature poetry. Without duende, I’m convinced, there is no poetry, no reason for it.

One last note. Late in his career Jeffers was crtiticized for his continued interest in incest. His response? Incest is the perfect metaphor for human psychology. I figure he was right. How many adult type people actually relate to a friend, a lover, a wife, a husband, a child, without relating to the echo of mother, father, or sibling? Anyway, Jeffers took from his master, Sophocles, who wrote the best incest story and maybe the best tragedy ever written.

Terreson
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Don’t say anything about this poem.
Look! this poem is published elsewhere
In a finely bound book, happily selling
And being purchased even as I copy
This poem as a favor to you.

Even now, as you open your mouth
To say something about this poem,
Someone more beautiful than you,
Wearing a silk jacket featuring a landscape
Middle eastern, is admiring my book

And caressing its pages, the book ($9.99 plus tax)
Which has my poem and many others, equally good.
It is pointless to say anything about this poem
For it lives somewhere else,
Even as the words march into your eyes.
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(You have other issues, Christopher, but they are not what I was/am primarily following here, nor your rights or wrongs.Really.)

As to the sore spot, no, I don’t believe I need to know better.We each have a hand in the fire.

margo
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I’ve reviewed the whole thread and see no point at which I was impolite, used improper language, was misleading or off target. My metaphors have been strong, indeed they have, but surely we can deal with that. And if we can’t, why bother?

My hunch is that there’s a hidden rift, a crevasse in the Robinson Jeffers glacier we’re riding. On the one hand there’s Terreson who has a huge romantic fantasy about untrammeled nature, and for whom Robinson Jeffers is the torch bearer in a display of almost Nuremberg purity and fervor. Fair enough–there’s no doubt it’s there. At the other extreme there’s Thomas Brady who sees red at the slightest hint of extremism, of jackboots, or stainless steel behavior–a Nazi hunter if there ever was one, and we know who he’s got in his sights! And between them there’s you, Margo, who just likes Jeffers and is old enough to know better but also old enough to know that most everything hurts.

So my question now is, is the spot just too sore for us? Is that it? Should we abandon the thread altogether?

Christopher
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I worked a bit with Stella Adler and Michael Howard, so I know what you’re talking about. Artaud, Grotowski. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Alexander Crowley. Lacan in full song, or voiceless. Or John Cage.

But never say it’s easy, and never say it isn’t a terrible mess or terribly destructive.

A crucifixion.

Christopher
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m
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Since the ancient Greeks, strong emotion has worked artistically. Brief story, as told by my old actors’ teacher, Lee Strasberg: An actor in an ancient Greek tragedy, a recent widower, bore his own wife’s ashes onstage in an urn, to render his performance true, and so to help in the play’s catharsis, for his audience. Another story: The actress Eleonora Duse is known to have wept into a dish ion her dressing room, before going onstage–so that she would not bathe the stage in tears, and rob the audience of its experience. Both of the above small tales have been, and are, touchstones of art, all art, for me.

Jeffers may be nearer a grotesque Lear than a wise Solomon. Or maybe just his own cragged heart is sufficient in the foul winds. (As I said, Terreson, I make no pretense to being his scholar; yet lines I’ve already quoted in this thread, and many of the poems–now remain. Cassandra? Many refused to listen. I’m one who would; and though I found the poem that Joel initially quoted, flawed, obtuse, much more in the oeuvre haunts me. I’ve used that word already, also, but am not shy to repeat it. To me, haunting is rather a positive. Biblical? There’s so much in the old testament that I dispute, yet the language urges me. The images. Comfort? I personally don’t ask that from poetry. “Le Misanthrope,” I’ll leave to Molière. For the sublime, I have the whole vast landscape, on earth or not, and prophets and Cassandras, Lears, and shelves and shelves of poets, even the foul rag and bone shop, and yes, even a dose of Jeffers.

margo
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I said it this way: “One is so lucky to grow up in one Faith, and be fulfilled within a single tradition. Nothing could bring greater happiness than that. Yet the unexamined life is not worth living, and nothing brings greater unhappiness than smashing the tribe and its idols.”

Which he did.

One Faith is a small room too, and providing you let no air in you can breathe in your own comfort zone. But the cold icy blast from the uninhabited mountains will blow your comfort away. People will say things you don’t want to hear, for example, perhaps even at a length you find unacceptable. God forbid, cow pats and hammers may suddenly become relevant, and the discourse of the cross resumed.

You can’t have it both ways, my friends. It’s Billy Collins or Robinson Jeffers.

Christopher
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