Barbara A. Holland died in 1988. For most of the years
between 1973 and her death, I was her principal book publisher (under the
imprints of The Poet’s Press, Grim Reaper Books, and B. Rutherford Books).
During the intervening years, I have kept most of her chapbooks and books
available, some in print and some on-line.
After 31 years in the keeping of the McAllister family
in Philadelphia, the poet's notebooks and papers have been
transferred to The Poet’s Press. The objective is to find an archive that will
maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital
form. The present volume is the second product of this project, as we have
begun to catalog and scan the papers.
Approximately 200 printed magazines containing
Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s have been scanned. Some of these may be added to the Collected
Poems edition published in 1980; others will form a separate, large Collected
Poems, Volume 2.
Astonishingly, the trove of typed manuscripts contains
five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar
“warhorses,” are largely made up of poems no one has seen outside of their
appearance in obscure magazines. An enormous folder of “Old Poems” spans from
the late 1960s up to as late as 1987. If
possible, I intend to see each of these manuscripts into a print and/or digital
edition before the papers are archived. Holland published, by her own
account, in more than 1,000 small press and literary journals, making her one
of the nation’s most prolific published poets.
Medusa: The Lost Chapbook was the first new book
published, in August, 2019, with the full text of Holland’s first published
chapbook, plus some selections from notebooks and manuscripts.
The Secret Agent
The poems in this cycle are unique in Holland’s output.
They are not “magazine” poems, and only a few could stand alone as
pieces to perform at a poetry reading. Like Rilke’s Duino Elegies, they
are metaphysical reflections on self, on the nature of reality, and even of
religious conflict. A number of the poems reflect a deep engagement with some
form in Hindu theology, and the poet’s attempts to conform herself to the
selfless submission this belief-system seems to require. She chafes against it,
and two mysterious personae help her oppose an immersion in that world: one or
more unspecified lovers or objects-of-love who distract her with worldly
passions, and the Secret Agent, who remains always at the edge of vision. He
watches her; she senses him watching, studying. He is “on the case.”
As Holland weaves in and out of this struggle, some of
the poems make direct reference to Vishnu and Shiva, and to Hindu ritual. Found
among Holland’s notebooks are many pages of detailed “study notes” on the Hindu
world-view, and specifically on Vishnu and Shiva, who would continue to haunt
the poet’s work for the rest of her years.
One might ask how a classically-oriented female
scholar, living in New York in the early 1960s, came upon this line of study.
The likely answer is that she, along with many others on the East Side arts
scene, fell under the sway of Abhay Charan De Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
(1896-1977), who, working from a Lower East Side storefront, attracted young
devotees, including (briefly) poets like Allen Ginsberg, to his lectures and
events. In many poems, Holland refers to chants and mantras, and describes her
state of mind during their performance.
I suspect that she became an ardent student of a man
she took to be an authentic master. Her notebooks may be the fruit of attending
his lectures, or of guided study sessions. She refers in one poem to her “Hindu
dancing master” and that would seem to describe Prabhupada, who was the only
conspicuous swami in the Greenwich Village arts scene.
Rebellion against the teacher, who perhaps treated
women with less patience than he did his male disciples, comes to light when
Holland rankles about her difficulty assuming the lotus position, and her
teacher snaps, “Just do it.” The poet writes in her notebook that she had no
difficulty walking away from the male Christian deities, but that she would
miss the figure of the Virgin. I suspect that “The Secret Agent” was Holland’s
working out of her hesitations, and her liberation from, the seductive Eastern
teachings. Once they were no longer literally true, and no longer required her
active participation in rituals, they could be employed as pure myth, the tool
of every poet.
Prabhupada was not just another visiting swami. He was
the founder of the Hare Krishna cult, inverting the traditional Hindu pantheon
and making Krishna supreme over Vishnu. The mantra that Holland was being
taught was the very one that became an object of mockery when the Krishna cult
spread, its followers became robotic cult members, and, some years later after
the founder’s death, arrests and prosecutions showed the sinister underbelly of
the movement. At heart profoundly unintellectual, the Krishna cult sought
obedient followers, not questioning scholars.
In any event, it is hard to imagine our West Village
Sybil, Barbara Holland, roaming around the streets of Manhattan in saffron
robes, clicking finger-cymbals, yet she indeed confesses to taking part in just
such a ritual in her poem, “Krishna in the Afternoon”:
One of my many selves
sits on the grass
with the children,
driven by wonder
at the marvels that come
through our eyes, to sing
in the chapels of our heads.
Where the two brows
come together, perched above bridge
of the nose as a bird,
Krishna alights,
and the sun on the cymbals
burst with him on the darkness
we have yet to break.
Suddenly, wind rises;
the finger-cymbals are stilled.
I am another self
with a workaday tomorrow
and today, as the death
of my incense, grown down
to the burning of my hand.
Who, or what, is the Secret Agent? For this we turn to
the art world, and to the paintings of Belgian surrealist René Magritte, one of the poet’s abiding passions. Magritte
admired mystery stories and films about secret agents, especially the Fantômas film series, and
was fascinated with Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the mystery genre with his
detective Dupin in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
When I
interviewed Barbara in 1986 for our new edition of her Magritte-themed poems, I
was unaware of the Secret Agent cycle. The poet had included “Close Call for
the Secret Agent” in her Magritte cycle, and of that poem she said that it was
her pursuit of Magritte’s personality. “I wanted to find out what kind of man
he was, and never did figure it out,” she recalled. The poem evokes the many
pictures of bowler-hatted men who stare straight at you with mask-like
inscrutable faces. Magritte’s paintings, The Menaced Assassin and The Month
of Harvest come to mind. The Menaced Assassin contains visual elements from
a Fantômas
film of 1913.
 |
| Rene Magritte. The Menaced Assassin. 1927. |
As
Holland investigated Magritte by studying his paintings and reading monographs
about him, she also then allowed The Secret Agent to investigate her and her
state of mind. The poems do not form a consistent narrative despite this, and
the Secret Agent, Vishnu-Shiva, and The Loved One form a tripartite dance. All
we can do is to provide context for the psychic struggle contained within its
pages. The many striking lines and beautiful images make it worth the trouble,
just as many readers delight in Rilke’s poems without ever quite knowing what
he was getting at.
Since
Holland returned to her original roots to write many poems that place her
inside the psyches of sorceresses, witches, the Gorgon, the prophetess, and the
Sybil, she definitely made her choice. When the followers of the Krishna cult
purchased land in West Virginia and many left New York to join them as dutiful
drones of the land, Holland stayed behind, true to her Muse. Or she may already
have turned her back on the course of training.
I knew
one poet who actually made the trek and bought a little cottage adjacent to the
Krishna settlement, but I suspect he was attracted by the nubile young women in
saffron robes. The actual life inside the Krishna cult would send any
sensualist fleeing. The Master required that only married couples had sex, only
once a week, and only after five hours of chanting. Although Krishna had
coupled with 10,000 girls, there was to be no hanky-panky in West Virginia. The
disappointed poet returned to his abode in Brighton Beach.
Two
poems suggest to me that Holland made a clear break with the Master. “The
Cart of Jagganatha” describes the festival of Ratha Yatra, held each June or
July in Puri in the state of Odisha, India. The ceremony honors Lord Jagganath,
a syncretist god who is “Lord of the Universe,” taken as a form of Vishnu. This
god, who is not anthropomorphic, has no arms or legs, and would have appealed
to the poet’s interest in Chthonic mythology. Three enormous chariots, almost
literally rolling temples, appear in the ceremony. As the largest chariot gains
momentum from being pulled by a thousand or more devotees, it becomes
unstoppable, and and any person or animal straying into its path can be
crushed; hence, the term “Juggernaut.” Holland’s poem describes the ceremony
approvingly, and she tries to place herself uncritically among the devotees.
The Hare Krishna cult adopted the figure of Jagganatha as part of their
iconography, so the identification with the group is emphatically made in the
poem. This is as close to a “membership card” as we can come.
A poem
from Holland’s “Old Poems” folder, however, presents the same festival in a
different light. The typescript page has no name and address and therefore was not
typed for submission to a magazine. “The Festival of Ratha Yatra,” appears
to be a rebellion against the entire Krishna version of Hindu myth. The poem
begins with the only ALL CAPS lines in any of her poems:
It all means
NOTHING
WHATEVER;
these three tall temples
of crimson canvas
mounted
high on their wheels
and
superbly phallic,
which
hallow only
the
sacraments of wind that ripple
in
their walls beneath
their
saucy pennants.
We all
become the Lord
of the
Universe together
in the
long flow of our stride
that
takes us nowhere . . .
Later
in the poem, Holland writes “Hurry, Krishna/ Hurry, Krishna,” mocking the
sacred “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna” mantra by mispronouncing it. I do not think
the dancing master Prabhupada would have been at all amused. She saved herself,
and even if the occasional Loved One in the poem cycle was of little use except
as a reminder of the body’s urges, we can thank the Secret Agent for his lift
up and out, as the personification of her rational, skeptical alter-ego.
Indeed, Holland wrote, about this time, a short poem, “Celebration of the
Self,” a nod to Whitman but also an anthem of confident egoism. If “The Sound
of the Tinkling Cymbals” is Holland’s baptism into Krishna Consciousness,
“Celebration of the Self” is her self-expulsion, sword in hand.
Poems from Notebooks and Manuscripts
For this section, I have turned to Holland’s
hand-written notebooks, and to the large “Old Poems” typescript folder. The
poet’s hand-written notes are mostly preliminary sketches, often a dense block
of lines, not yet broken up in any kind of meter or breath-phrasing. The same
lines might appear on several successive pages, re-ordered but still with
little hint of what might become a typed poem for submission to a magazine. A
number of these were coherent and polished enough that I felt them worthy,
especially as they demonstrate the poet's attempt to take everyday journal ideas
and develop them.
Thus, from some notebook sketches, I have “constructed”
poems. Some needed only lineation and punctuation, and since I often worked
with Barbara on the final appearance of her poems in print, I did what I always
did. I know her style and her voice. Where they were untitled, I invented
suitable titles.
In the process of editing typed manuscripts, I have
also done what any book editor would do, which is silently to correct
misspellings, to replace words where another word was clearly intended, and in
a couple of places, indicated with square brackets, to insert a word that I
would have persuaded Barbara to add or substitute. I have added a few footnotes
to help the general reader.
Lens, Light, and Sound
The poems in Lens, Light, and Sound were
published as a stapled chapbook in 1968. Among Holland’s friends in the Boston
area were author and illustrator Edward Gorey, and Boston-based photographer
Donald Curran, and, later, Jack Powers, a poetry advocate and organizer who
founded Stone Soup Poetry Magazine, and brought her into Boston’s open
reading poetry scene. The poems in this collection were intended for a book
with Curran’s photos and Holland’s poems on facing pages, but that project
never came to pass. The chapbook may have been printed as a handout for
Curran’s photo exhibit, which must have reached California, since the book was
printed in Los Angeles.
There are some fine poems here that stand on their own.
Others suffer, as any ekphrastic poem must, from not having Curran’s photos in view. I can find no trace of Curran or his work online, other than several
photos that appeared in Stone Soup Poetry magazine. The one photo
that matches a poem in this set is included in this volume, reproduced from the
pages of the magazine.
“Portrait of Lazarus,” “Stars Over Grove Street, “and
“The Sybil of Cumae” are three powerful poems that create their own imagery,
and it is hard to imagine a photograph as rich. This group of poems also made a
good practice run for the large cycle Holland would write based on Magritte’s
paintings. Several of the shorter poems employ rhyme, revealing Holland's early attachment to T.S. Eliot.
Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn
During her early years in the Greenwich Village poetry
scene, Holland met two women poets with radically different outlooks and
techniques. Ree Dragonette (1918-1979) and Emilie Glen (1906-1991) ran poetry
salons and mentored and encouraged young poets. Both featured Barbara at their
salons and introduced her to a wider circle of poets, editors, and publishers.
Dragonette was a linguistic high-wire artist with a Maria Callas-like presence
who had performed with jazz musicians, and I have always believed that Barbara
perfected her style under Dragonette’s shadow. Dragonette acknowledged this;
Holland generally denied it.
Emilie Glen, who had a fifty-year stint as a full-time
poet, knew the ropes of getting published in little magazines, and she almost
certainly tutored Holland in how to compile lists of publishers, to submit
queries, and to mail out poems on an almost industrial scale. Glen had
published thousands of poems, and doubtless Holland wanted to achieve the same
ubiquity. Glen was an avid bird-watcher and had a ready market for her poems
about birds and the Central Park coterie of bird-watchers. She also loved cats,
and placed hundreds of poems about real and imagined felines. Her forte was the urban short narrative poem, inhabiting the voice of a single character.
I find in Holland’s notebooks a number of attempts to
write about cats. They are tentative, almost phobic. She describes cats as
creatures she attempts to approach and understand, but she never writes about a
cat from the inside. She seldom succeeded in writing the kind of narrative poem
from inside a character that was Glen’s forte. Holland is an opera mad-scene
singer, a Roderick Usher, a sensitive plant, a receiver of signals, all nerves.
She can inhabit Medusa, a Sybil, Melusine, or Eurydice, but the story is
already a given. As wonderfully evocative as her Medusa poem is, for example,
Medusa doesn’t do anything. She lists her annoyances, urges the hero to lop off
her head, and then laments that it will be worse when she’s dead. It’s very
much a stand-and-sing opera aria.
She did not need to compete with either of her
mentors/rivals, for she honed this style to perfection.
And yet … in her notebooks I find her trying for an
extended narrative, in sketches for, of all things, a cat book. “The Flying
Cat,” exists as sketches only, not in polished form. It has more than 30
sections, most with blank facing-pages, one section per page. At first glance,
it appears to be an attempt at a children’s book. The sketches are not yet
poems, and they do not rhyme. Yet this is not a children’s book: some of
the details are gruesome, such as the description of unwanted kittens being
drowned. The un-named woman who owns the flying cat is dreadful.
Just as the Secret Agent poems seemed to reveal
themselves in the context of Holland’s time and place, “The Flying Cat” makes
perfect sense as an attempt to sketch a Gothic faux-children’s book in the
manner of her friend Edward Gorey, whose ghastly little illustrated books were
a sensation in the 1960s and 1970s. Barbara and I were both avid Edward Gorey
fans, and we talked about him many times. She may have had a mind to persuade
Gorey to illustrate “The Flying Cat,” had she found a publisher. The difficulties
were that, first, she did not write rhymed verse like Gorey’s, whose text was
full of Edwardian whimsy and camp humor; second, she let her plot trail off and
never finished the story. She ends it abruptly after her Flying Cat leaves
home, has several adventures, and then returns, to be taken to the veterinarian
to look at why his wings have failed to grow as he matured from kitten to
tom-cat. If it was to be a book in the Gorey vein, some calamitous ending was
required.
Faced with this tantalizing fragment, I had two
choices. I could leave it for future scholars to pore over in the Holland
papers, or I could attempt to edit and complete the work in the Gorey vein. I
have done the latter. In a poet’s frenzy, I edited, “overwrote,” and added to
Holland’s original. The story is complete, and Buster, the flying cat, comes to
his terrible end. In the Gorey manner, I changed the title to “Buster, or The
Unclaimed Urn,” and made Barbara Holland’s name into an anagram, “Abadon
Barr-Hall.” This has been a light-hearted
diversion in the midst of a somber enterprise, charged as I am with making what
I can of a great heap of notebooks and papers. It is not the best of Holland,
and it is not the best of me, since I did not feel empowered to do more than a pentimento
over her original, and then completing the far edge of the canvas. I hope it
gives pleasure.
Selected Supernatural Poems
To close this volume, I have selected some of Holland’s
most notable supernatural poems, the best but by no means all. These are some
of her warhorses, the poems with which she made her mark at readings all over
the Northeast. Some were included in my anthology, May Eve: A Festival of
Supernatural Poetry (1975), and others in the collections, In the
Shadows (1984), and in Crises of Rejuvenation (1974). These are the Barbara
A. Holland poems that can make your hair stand on end.
This series will continue with more never-published
complete book manuscripts, more poems from notebooks, and
more than 200 poems that appeared in little magazines that were not reprinted
in her published books. We will also include reviews of Holland’s work so that
those interested in the reception of her work will see what has been done thus
far.
— Brett Rutherford
Pittsburgh, PA
August 26, 2019
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