Maker of Stones

 

by Brett Rutherford

     After Magritte and for Barbara A. Holland

So many years of war,
of plagues and masks,
of fluctuating identity —
we all live now
in Magritte canvases
where anything can happen
and does, and anyone might turn
from flesh into solid granite. 

Has all New England
dropped all its glacial
detritus of a sudden
onto Manhattan? What gives
with all this geology?

You, of all people,
a slant-wise Medusa,
seem able to summon stones,
rock-hurler, caller-up
of hidden pebbles,
summoner of quarry blocks
as easy as hailing a cab. 

Almost without a thought
you are one of those poets
whose thoughts reshape the city.
For each one of your silences,
as we stroll through the Village
some quarry leaves off
another oblong obstacle
to reasonable walking.

Blithely you move forward,
while I must up-and-over
a never-ending hike-trail.

 Is the coast now smooth in Maine?
Are Vermont’s fields
now friendly to the plow
since all the impediments
have come on south?

 I am used by now
to the gravel you hurl
as periods; the shards
of gneiss that mark
your exclamations
(thank goodness they are few);

 but the small boulders
that pile around us
in the outdoor cafe
each time you leave a sentence
unfinished, are good
for no one but the pigeons.
I am not sure the waiter
will even find us again.

 The chalkless slate slab
you put up in front of us
is good for privacy
when a Jehovah’s Witness
comes leaflet-laden
with Biblical boredom;

 but it is all too much
for those of us unwise
in the ways of labyrinths
or masonry, inept
at making the rocks go
where they will serve
some purpose.

 When I go home,
I find my friend Steven petrified,
stiff as a Pharaoh
on a basalt throne.
The bowl of apples are marbleized;
whatever he had cooked
is dust on a plate of sandstone.
What am I going to do with him?

 And now some castle,
which huddled squat
on some peak of the Pyrenees,

hangs like the Goodyear blimp
just over Central Park,
and the stones of the Ramble
decide to evacuate vertically,
rock-root and trees and all
to form a hedge around it.

 Was this your doing, too?
Living as you do, one foot
in the surreal, you smile at this.
I guess you expect a ladder,
at some point, descending,
and an engraved invitation
from whomever it is up there
who is still flesh-and-blood.

 “Imagine the view!” you tease me.
“I wonder what they wear,
and from what century
their customs derive.” 

While that aberrant hulk
hangs like a dream-balloon
for your discourse
with air and lap-tongued clouds,
with whomever you choose as company
for your non-Newtonian discourse,

I stand below, confound with physics
what my eye receives,
and wait, with folded arms
its eventual fall.

 

The Barbara Holland Reader Now Available!

Edited by Brett Rutherford.

Created as a one-volume introduction to the poetry of Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988), the mysterious Greenwich Village poet who was a centerpiece of the 1970s neo-romantic and Gothic poetry movement, this volume presents all the reviews and essays about Holland that appeared in her lifetime, along with the poems quoted or cited in those articles. This makes it a perfect book to study and teach the remarkable work of this 20^th-century American poet.

Twenty-eight of Holland’s most memorable writings are here, including the terrifying “Medusa,” “Black Sabbath,” and “Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Her work is garlanded with a group of poems about her by her contemporaries and by younger poets she influenced, including Shirley Powell, D.H. Melhem, Marjorie DeFazio, Dan Wilcox, and Vincent Spina. A memoir of Holland in her coffeehouse haunts by Matthew Paris establishes her image and milieu as a fixture of the last Bohemia of Manhattan.

Interviews, reviews and essays about Holland are presented here for their first time since their appearance almost four decades ago. Those who shed light on Holland’s unique place in American poetry include Olga Cabral, Stephen-Paul Martin, Maurice Kenny, A. D. Sullivan, Robert Kramer, Ivan Argüelles, Kirby Congdon, Claudia Dikinis, and Michael Redmond.

Since Holland’s more than 800 extant poems are scattered across numerous chapbooks and books, this volume includes a complete bibliography of the currently-known poems. This is the ninth and final volume of a series based on the Barbara A. Holland Papers, and the archives of The Poet’s Press.

Published July 2020. This is the 290^th publication of The Poet’s Press. 198 pp., 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $14.95. ISBN 9798668830121. Available NOW from Amazon.

Abecedephobia

by Brett Rutherford

     after Barbara A. Holland

 

The letters of the alphabet

frighten me terribly.

They are sly, shameless

demons, and dangerous!

 

You open the inkwell

to release them, and off

they go. How will you ever

get control of them again?

 

Coming to life, they join,

separate. They ignore commands,

arranging themselves

on the paper, serif'd black

with horns and tails.

 

You scream at them

and implore in vain.

They do as they please,

preening and pairing up

shamelessly before you.

 

They gleefully expose

what you had hoped to conceal,

yet they refuse to voice

the truth that struggles deep

in your bowels, that one thing

you want to share with

    all of Mankind.

 

Why time and again

I took up this quill,

why time and again

I abandoned the act

of writing. Things,

if they are to be said at all

must be said in letters,

the little devils whose

conjunct joinings alone

make words that are more

than exclamations. The gods

must forgive me if "O!"

cannot convey my message.

 

Demons of the alphabet,

come take my hand.

Eyes closed, I cannot do this;

eyes open, I risk

the heart attack

of seeing what I say

too late to smudge

the fatal words away.

 

(based on a 1971-72 journal entry by Barbara A. Holland)

Introduction to "A Barbara A. Holland Reader"

by Brett Rutherford

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 were transferred to The Poet’s Press in 2019. The objective was to find an archive that will maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital form. The present volume is the ninth and final product of this project.

The intent of this volume is to present the critical articles about Holland published in her lifetime, in the same volume with all the poems which are cited or quoted in those articles. This yields an ideal single-volume resource about the poet and her work for students, scholars, and poetry lovers.

The new material in this volume is a collection of memoirs and poems about Barbara A. Holland, gathered over the years since her death. Most of these have been housed on The Poet’s Press website.

The trove of Holland’s typed manuscripts included five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar “warhorses,” were largely made up of poems no one had seen outside of their appearance in obscure magazines. These separate manuscripts were edited and published in 2019-2020 as:

Medusa: The Lost First Chapbook
Out of Avernus: The Exiled Sorceress & The Fallen Priestess
The Secret Agent
The Shipping on The Styx
The Songs of Light and Darkness (in Shipping on the Styx)

For another volume, The Beckoning Eye (2019), I turned to approximately 200 printed magazines containing Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s. While a few of these poems are familiar from the poet’s later collections, most had never seen print since their magazine appearance. Since no manuscripts survive for most of those poems, they were presented as printed by their respective magazines, with silent corrections of obvious typographical errors. 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, so this modest collection of “unknowns” was only a sampler of her magazine publications.

Finally, the large compendium After Hours in Bohemia included newly-found magazine poems, the remaining unique poems from typed manuscripts, completions of poems from hand-written notebooks, and poems from a posthumous chapbook. The editing and completion of the notebook poems brought the number of extant Holland poems to over 800.

Two additional books in this series did not come from the Barbara A. Holland papers, but from The Poet’s Press’s own archives. Returning to books I published in the 1970s and 1980s, I prepared two new volumes that represent Holland’s own selection of her works from 1980, 1983, and 1986. Selected Poems. Volume 1 reprints a 1980 book that was ambitiously titled Collected Poems, Volume 1, adding to it poems she selected in 1983 for another collection (Running Backwards) issued by Warthog Press.

For the record, that volume also incorporated all the poems from her chapbooks, A Game of Scraps; Penny Arcana; Melusine Discovered; On This High Hill; Lens, Light and Sound, and You Could Die Laughing; plus an unpublished chapbook, East From Here.

The inclusions from the 1983 Running Backwards also folded into Selected Poems, Volume 1,  items which had earlier appeared in Poet’s Press chapbooks, Burrs, In the Shadows, and Autumn Numbers.

Selected Poems, Volume 2 consists of all of Holland’s poems that revolve around the imagery and concepts of the paintings of Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte. This had been published as Crises of Rejuvenation in two volumes in 1974-1975, and then reissued in 1986 as a single volume. This new version, with annotations and illustrations, is the definitive version of the large Magritte cycle. (To further clarify the bibliography, a twice-printed chapbook titled Autumn Wizard consisted of excerpts from the Magritte cycle, a teaser for the two-volume edition.)

Thus it will be seen that Selected Poems is Holland’s own choice of her important poems, a necessary starting point for her readers. The Holland papers — from magazine publications, type manuscripts, and hand-written notebooks — did not include all or even most of these poems, and she had no “master set” of her works. They are literally “everything else.” The overlaps with the “warhorses,” her most-read and most-known poems, is that she used those repeatedly, in her book manuscripts and proposals. 

I have been asked why I have devoted a year of my time to this project, issuing books that few will ever read, the more so since so many of Holland’s contemporaries are gone. I know only a handful of people who remember Barbara Holland.

It comes to this: in 1975, I took Barbara out to lunch at a Thai restaurant at the edge of Chinatown. We were celebrating her 50th birthday; I was 28 years old. I told Barbara that afternoon, “I will keep your work alive.”

It was a promise, and I have kept it.

Grateful acknowledgment is made here to the still-living critics whose essays are included with their permission: Claudia Dikinis, Ivan Argüelles, Stephen-Paul Martin, Robert Kramer, and Michael Redmond, and to Matthew Paris for his memoir.

— Brett Rutherford
Pittsburgh, PA.
July 21, 2020

The Shipping On The Styx Now Available

Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called “the Sybil of Greenwich Village,” for her sometimes eerie presence and her incantatory readings. By 1970, she had published her work in over 700 magazines, and had read her work everywhere a poet could read. After seeing several small chapbooks published, Holland decided it was time to tackle the big New York publishers. The Shipping on the Styx, recently rediscovered in the poet’s papers, was rejected by all the publishing houses by the end of 1972. What would have been her “breakthrough” book is finally presented here. Its three parts include a solitary observer’s impressions of bustling New York harbor; a medley of her Manhattan-based poems that she read in coffeehouses; and her blistering and unforgettable Gothic poem, “Black Sabbath.”

Rounding out this volume is Songs of Light and Darkness, a manuscript that probably dates to 1951, the end-point of Holland’s graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. These poems show the poet embarking on her career as a devotee of the work of T. S. Eliot and, perhaps, of Thomas Hardy. Pre-dating her “New York style,” this never-before-seen glimpse at the early Holland is a revelation. This is the 259th publication of The Poet’s Press.

Published December 2019. 110 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9781679125287. $12.95 from Amazon. PDF Ebook to be published at a later date.

Introduction to Barbara A. Holland's "The Secret Agent"

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