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

An Exeter Vampire

by Brett Rutherford

Here is another little lesson in how line length can be used to create a special effect. This poem is about the famous Rhode Island vampire, Sarah Tillinghast, who comes back to kill off her family members one by one. (The family members most likely died of tuberculosis.) I wanted to create the effect of weakness, being out of breath, and suffocation. So instead of writing in the customary blank verse (10 syllables per line), I experimented by having the poem's lines being nine syllables long. They are cut short. The opening line, "She comes back ----- in the rain --- at midnight" is halting, 3 x 3, supporting the idea of being short of breath.

She comes back, in the rain, at midnight.

Her pale hand, not a branch, taps the glass.

Her thin voice, poor Sarah Tillinghast

whines and whimpers, chimes and summons you

to walk in lightning and will’o wisp

to the hallowed sward of the burial ground,

to press your cheek against her limestone,

to run your fingers on family name,

to let the rain inundate your hair,

wet your nightclothes to a clammy chill,

set your teeth chattering, your breath a

tiny fog within the larger mist.

You did not see her go before you,

and yet you knew she was coming here.

Soon her dead hand will tap your shoulder.

Averting your eyes, you bare your throat

for her needful feeding, your heat, your

heart’s blood erupting in her gullet.

You will smell her decay, feel the worms

as her moldy shroud rubs against you.

Still you will nurse the undead sister,

until her sharp incisors release you

into a sobbing heap of tangled hair,

your heart near stopped, your lungs exploding,

wracked with a chill that crackles the bones.

The rain will wash away the bloodstains.

You will hide your no more virginal

throat like a smiling lover’s secret.

Two brothers have already perished—

the night chill, anemia, swift fall

to red and galloping consumption.

Death took them a week apart, a month

beyond Sarah’s first night-time calling.

Honor Tillinghast, the stoic mother,

sits in the log house by the ebbing fire,

heating weak broth and johnny cakes.

One by one she has sewn up your shrouds—

now she assembles yet another.

She knows there is no peace on this earth,

nor any rest in the turning grave.

Storm ends, and bird songs predict the sun.

Upstairs, in garret and gable dark,

the children stir, weak and tubercular,

coughing and fainting, praying for breath.

The ones that suck by night are stronger

than those they feed on, here where dead things

refuse the Lord's sleep in Exeter,

sing their own epitaphs in moon-dance,

and come back, in the rain, at midnight.

_____

Exeter, Rhode Island’s “vampire” case of 1799 ended with the exhumation and destruction of the corpse of Sarah Tillinghast after four siblings followed her in death by consumption. They burned Sarah’s heart and reburied all the bodies.

Triptych: A Philosophy of Love

i
Eros,
you are a child no more:
you have grown ripe for mouths to taste,
tongued tender neck to shoulder line,
breast taut and sloping down where firm
yet yielding to a poet's fingers
what dragons beneath the belly
in longing flesh awakening!
I set my eyes upon you now
in your statue-perfect moment—
ah, winged-foot kouros, do not move!

Beneath your sandaled tread the earth
indents and hardens, hungry clay.
You swim the sea, delight the waves
foam-white with arm- and legstrokes bold;
when you turn back, the ebbing tide
tugs out and downward, desperate
like a disappointed lover.
Sea beasts thrust up green tentacles,
amazed at your beauty, craving
the hoarded air in your ribcage.

Your vanished body, diving, mocks me.
You cannot drown! The gods have much
to utter through your vocal chords!
A lifeguard zephyr transports you
above, beyond the crashing surf.
Eyes closed, you ride on mist and cloud,
immobile as marble, your hair
a boreal banner of gold
across the blind, astonished sky.

You do not see the eyes that watch you,,
do not acknowledge worshippers;
your youth an uncrossable chasm.
I hesitate to speak, my hand
in greeting grasps you too lightly.

You flee the seven-hilled city.
I watch from a bench on the summit
as you hurtle down Angell Street.
Long I linger, long I watch for you
as you turn down the twisted lanes.
But you are always departing—
your future is too much my past.

You are too beautiful to touch,
almost too beautiful to live
in our tawdry and tarnished world,
unbearable Phoebus, a searing star!

2
Philia,
           more rare than lust, more lasting,
desiring all and yet beyond desire;
the unseen walker-beside of dreamers,
first ear to my poems fresh from the pen.
You are the comforter of solitudes,
the perfect thou in silent communion.
For you the bread is baked, the teapot full,
the door unlocked, the sleeping place secure.
If you came for a day, or forever,
it is the same to me—what's mine is yours.

I swear I shall not pass a day with you
unless it be filled with astonishing things.
At night, the room you sleep in breathes with me,
the darkness between us webbed with moonlight,
cicadas heralding my dreamless sleep.

 

Scarce half a dozen times I've met you now,
soul mate and artist and fellow outsider.
How many leagues we two together walked,
how many ancient stones deciphered! Worlds
turned within us as we riddled science;
with thought alone we toppled cathedrals,
lived in all ages and nations at once,
counted as friends the poets and sages.
(These the mingled streams, the parting rivers,
the memories that are always with me,
friendship true in a world without honor,
with brothers who choose us, and whom we choose.)

3
Agape,
          rarest and last of all the affections,
you come at the end as solace to the spirit,
friend of all who cannot trade in beauty's coinage,
the vestal hope of love outliving the body.

It matters not if him you love returns your gaze.
It matters not if he chose his death by drowning,
or if his brain burned mad, or he wasted away,
or if he squandered his genius to mate and die—

it matters not to love's eidolon, in whose eye
all types of love are stippled in a deep gravure.
You are the bird-sleep stillness preceding the dawn,
the astonished hush that follows the thunderclap:
you are lord of all benevolent silences.

At the unvisited cell of hag and hermit
your threads drop down like gilded spider webs,
a boon and blessing from the ever-burning stars.
For those who dare translate your enigmatic verse,
tribe, shade and totem, time and sorrow, slip away
as all who strive become ensoul'd in one great heart.

This is the love the gods and philosophers knew—
divine yet having nothing to do with heaven—
human, yet far beyond the lusts of animals—
at alchemy's heart, the Midas wand of autumn
turning temporal green into immortal gold.

4
Always my loves are three-faced,
     triptych in unity.
Approached, they hesitate
to give their names.

One name is not enough.
Lust was too quickly slaked
to hold them long, the vows
of hollow fellowship too soon betrayed.
No one suspected the aspirant god
in their bones, defying weight,
yearning toward the zenith.

And you, my momentary captive,
caught in my weave of words,
am I to be your lover,
     brother,
     fellow spirit?

Is my yearning for hair and bones?
For hearth and soul mate?
For winged companion to Olympus?
I do not know,
     cannot define
my troubled and troubling affections.

And as for you,
     Adonis, Atys, Adonai,
who knows what you mean
by being beautiful?