The 34 poems that compose City Above The Seas And Other Poems were written over many years, in fact, just after publication of my first book of poetry, I Will Mean (Meanings Press, Camden ME, 1975) and well into our new century, a period of about 30 years. In fact, the earliest of these poems were written about the same time as Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, first written in 1975 and subsequently revised in 2005 and published earlier this year.
Both Rhyming And Non Rhyming Pieces
These 34 poems are a mixture of rhyming and non rhyming pieces and some of them were presented to a live audience to the accompaniment of a jazz band at a Starbucks Coffee Shop in downtown Washington DC. In terms of subject matter, they may be described as autobiographical, philosophical, political, social, or visionary—or, in the broad sense—religious. They may also be described as embodying my concept of how poetry may be written—as highly expressive, declarative, exhortative, and prophetic, as well as the basis of dramatic narrative, as in Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat.
They embody my conviction that good poetry does not have to be plaintive and full of personal angst or always striving for clever allusion or having to turn back upon itself.
Beat Movement Extols Declarations
With the advent of the beat movement in the 1950s, poetry seemed to be moving toward a more declarative approach. This was an exciting time for poetry and for me as a young man just getting through high school and college. Poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti created great excitement and were often highly political and specifically left wing. Unfortunately, as the fire of the Beat Movement began to fade so too did the spark that these poets brought to the form itself. It was this flame that I sought to keep alive in I Will Mean in 1975 without having to resort to the political and economic extremism of the left.
In a poem like “Solomon Bricker,” which is included in this volume, I attempted to depict a middle class or “bourgeois” hero, namely my maternal grandfather and to attempt to present his virtues without exaggeration. It was my grandfather’s quiet triumph that, while facing the range of challenges of daily life he was able to start small businesses and to work to make them a success against a backdrop of the cycles of business upturns and downturns.
Not Immune To Fade Ideas
Interestingly, my grandfather was not unmindful of the political and economic currents of his time and while fulfilling the role of a usually successful middle class business manager and shop keeper would occasionally succumb to the fantasies of socialism that were so prevalent at the time. This after all was the period of the rise and seeming success of the Soviet Union, a delusion that would become clear under Mikel Gorbachev.
As I assert previously, it was the best of what I saw in the Beat poetry movement as well as the best of poetry in general that I was striving to give life to in I Will Mean, my first book of poetry—the idea that poetry could tell us what to do and how to live without having us tear down the middle class for being so…well, so middle class. For me, I will admit it, the best poetry has always been close to religion. I believe that and will take that belief with me to whatever comes after this world, if anything, for me.
Role Models Are The Greats
My role models have been a wide range of the greats of poetry in English such as John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, and many many others. Most of them were practitioners of the art before the curse of modernism set in with the work of its most famous or infamous practitioners, namely Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The greats, specifically those who practiced in the 19th century such as Emily Dickinson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Walt Whitman, managed to avoid the excessive and silly personifications of Victorianism, such as are found far too frequently in the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The curse of modernism, as I call it, from which I continue to struggle to extricate poetry to this day, carried with it several assumptions. The first was that the poet could say anything he wanted no matter how wrongheaded and disgracefully immoral so long as he said it with conviction and in the name of the art of poetry. Hence Ezra Pound, the antisemite, traitor to the United States, devotee of dubious economic theories and upholder of the insidious philosophy of fascism—and this was during World War II, no less—was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949.
Obscurity Upheld As Virtue
A second conviction is that obscurity in poetry is a value to be cherished and the more layers of scholarship and research, as well as the more layers of allusions that a poetical work is overweighted with the better. For this dubious feature of modern poetry we once again have Ezra Pound as well as others to credit. During his lifetime Pound was credited with the breadth of his scholarship as reflected in his poetical work, which embodies his admiration for various pogroms, witch hunts, slaughter of the innocent, and other examples of humanity at its worse.
Inevitably the two books I have the privilege of coming out with this year will be looked at for their similarities as well as their contrasts. The most obvious similarity is in the belief in technology and the hope for the future because of it that is a strong interest of mine and which I have been motivated to put in works like Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems. I can’t say exactly where this belief and this hope come from other than to attribute them to the work of a mysterious universal spirit. In the last stanza of one of the short poems in City Above The Sea And Other Poems, entitled “Say There Is Beauty,” I say the following:
Invention, discovery, outrageously creative act.
The new begets a resonance,
the new clatters through space.
The new such as the concept of the computer and the concept of the Internet and the promises of the space age have the power to change our whole universe of experience, and they have. They give us hope that humankind will solve other problems that confront us such as the ill effects of global warming. It is my belief that poetry can play a central role in giving energy to the idealism that is embodied in this belief. We must believe that we can solve our problems, that we are not hapless victims. We must believe that we can make our world better. We must believe that poetry has an important role in making our world better.
For more examples of the writing of Stephen Alan Saft, please see the comprehensive site http://www.sasaftwrites.com.
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft
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