“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.”
-- E. A. Robinson
The heft and substance of Crawling Calliope
(the first of two “small books” enclosed herein)
was composed in the year after our move back home –
all poems save for “Rock of Ages,” “Neal Cassady”
and “Locomotive Breath” (my Tull tribute...
I wrote that one while listening to Aqualung
and contemplating the skillful animation
behind the lurching train scenes from Polar
Express – the recent Xmas cartoon with Tom Hanks…
my final, soggy January in Shuang Xi…
Kirin after Kirin to keep me warm,
always homesick for Winter ala Whittier
and Frost – no more available on Oahu
here than it was in Southeast Asia there…
although a trip back home this winter did manage
to convince me that reminiscence now and then
can more than suffice one’s imagined need
for actuality’s crude, bodily presence).
The other poems included in Calliope
serve a heteronymous occasion
for which I hope the author may be forgiven –
the bald necessity, that is, of providing
Andy Jones, my prosaic counterpart,
with something in the manner of a livelihood
beyond the pittance with which these worded beings
may bring him for his editorial
and custodial exertions on my behalf.
I saw fit to go back to school, in other words,
which necessitated returning home
(or “home” in its Pacific remove or outpost,
at least). The onus was on me to “make it fun”
by way of several concerted stabs
at intellectual satire (“academic
satire”, that is – a sub-genre of the former),
all of which my profs took in good humor,
thank God. Anyway, I’ve a perfect GPA,
whether or not they’re glad now to be rid of me.
Lady Fingers was written in the months
prior to our move – something of a lyrical
swansong to my poetic career in Taiwan.
I like these poems quite a bit. Enough said?
Please read the second book first (if it pleases you
at all to read either of them, that is to say).
Then go to the first book, Calliope.
Finally, read Lady Fingers a second time.
By then, I suppose, you’ll pretty much have it licked.
Opus Seven, a book by Gilchrist Haas.
I really can’t say if there’ll be any more.
I’d like to keep going. Sure. But no one’s reading.
Literature is over, by and large.
This will seem a conservative proposition.
But there is less and less space indeed to the left
of the “culture industry’s” expanding
column or to the right of MFA writing
(and you may judge the extent to which “left” and “right”
are exchangeable here as metaphors
]with political valence or application).
It’s not so much that what we’d fain call poetry
has been increasingly “marginalized”
as that the margins themselves have simply vanished.
True poetry (Adorno would say) has become
invisible. What’s more (Lacan would add)
this invisibility itself can no more be seen.
But hell…you can’t stop going once you get going…
I’m my only reader…also my best.
“Someday others may join me who’ll make it their home,
but for now I’d just as soon be here on my own.”
Dear numberless readers inside my head,
here it is: my seventh, vanishing Flaschenpost.
Gilchrist Haas
July 19, 2007
Honolulu