What If Germany Had Gotten The Bomb First ?

Historical speculations may be idle, and men daydreaming over old battlefields may be as pathetic as young boys playing with lead soldiers on model boards. But historical developments may turn on delicate fulcrums.

Historians have wondered for decades how the outcome of the Second World War might have been different, had the Germans succeeded in formulating a viable atomic bomb, with the means to deliver it, prior to their capitulation in May 1945.

Record show that Germany had begun development and research on detonating an atomic fission device as early as 1939, at the time of the invasion of Poland. But the progress of its pursuit of such a device was hampered by several factors.

During the 1930's, the Nazi authorities had systematically dismantled much of the technical-academic sphere in Germany. Many of the best scientists had fled or been incarcerated in Hitler's campaign against Jews and liberal elements of the intelligentsia. Their ranks had been decimated. Nevertheless, there was sufficient expertise available in Germany to successfully complete a prototype, had there not been additional problems.

Perhaps the single most important obstacle to the success of Germany's military expansion in Europe was Hitler's impatience and irrational over-confidence. By mid-1942, Germany either occupied or controlled four-fifths of the continental land-mass of Europe, and Great Britain seemed well within its grasp. The so-called neutral nations--Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey--were nothing but pawns in this gambit, whose fate would eventually be sealed.

What would have happened had Germany, upon securing France, proceeded directly to the invasion of Great Britain, instead of opening up a Second Front in the Soviet Union? A consolidation of power at this point could well have enabled Germany to devote more of its resources to a further build-up of materiel and manpower, in anticipation of the military involvement of America. If Hitler had been just a little more patient, it's quite likely that all of Western Europe could have fallen under his domination. At that point, an invasion of Russia would have been a much less taxing effort.

Hitler even believed that the "real enemy" was Communism, and that by uniting Western Europe under German direction, he could overcome the Soviet menace. As preposterous as this now seems in retrospect, it should be understood that the inherent disaffection that existed between the Soviet Union and the West in the late 1930's was such that there were many who shared a fear and hatred of the aims of messianic world socialism. The rise of Fascism may be seen in the context of a growing labor sentiment. What would happen if socialist movements in France, Germany, Italy and England were to gain a foothold? The Spanish Civil War [1936-1939] had created an unholy alliance between Spanish Republicans and Communist partisans. Some even viewed Fascism as a kind of political necessity; and it had many pragmatic sympathizers in the West.

The other side of the equation was Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific. Opinion now is that Japan probably didn't need to challenge America's Pacific Fleet. Would America have entered the War, if it had not been directly attacked? It may well be that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese into an attack, as a way of drawing America into the conflict. Unable to persuade the Congress and the American people of the wisdom of defending Britain directly, he had begun Lend-Lease to shore up her feeble defenses.

Imagine a scenario in which Japan doesn't attack Pearl Harbor; instead of invading Russia, Hitler successfully invades and secures Great Britain. His only major obstacle then is the Soviet Republics in the East. Without having to face an American invasion, what would have prevented his by then far superior forces from conquering Russia, with a campaign beginning in the early Spring of 1942?

Historians now believe that had Germany not slowed its research into atomic detonation and delivery in 1942 and 1945, it had the resources and know-how to do so. That's also true of its development of the V2 rocket technology. Even given the problems associated with its military-scientific research, many believe that Germany was probably less than two years away from making an atomic bomb. Imagine what would have happened if Germany had bought time, delayed the invasion of Russia, and developed the atom bomb before America did.

A single bomb dropped on Moscow, for instance, would probably have had the same effect on Russia as it had on Japan in 1945. It's unlikely that Germany would have been able to attack America with an atomic bomb, since its bombers weren't able to fly far enough to reach our shores then.

Imagine, then, that Germany rules all of Europe and the Soviet Union. The neutral countries capitulate. Since Japan hasn't engaged America, its own expansions into China and Korea have been more successful, given the elimination of Soviet influence in the East. Japan consolidates its power, perhaps seizing Australia and New Zealand to add to its growing empire on Mainland China. Only America stands between the Axis powers, and world domination.

Is this scenario a bad dream, or one possible outcome of WWII? As we know, Hitler's prosecution of the war was fraught with blunders. The reluctance to invade Britain, the Eastern Front; the destruction of the intelligentsia during the 1930's; the persecution and genocide against the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and "Undesirables." The qualities which had facilitated his rise to power within Germany, were not sufficiently moderated to permit him to conduct a shrewd advance militarily, once he began to realize success on the field of battle. Too much audacity in the end.

As we also know, following the war, Russia's acquisition of the bomb technology initiated the Cold War, which kept the world on the edge of its collective seat for four decades, and drove the biggest military expenditure in history. Mutually assured destruction kept the two superpowers at a stalemate, until economic forces eventually dissolved the Soviet Union into its constituent fragments [1991].

Embalances of power are inherently unstable. The current situation in Asia, where China has already become an economic force to be reckoned with, may eventually develop into a military confrontation. Money buys technology, and China will soon enough be outstripping the West in its ability to acquire or develop superior force. In this context, America's rising debt, and decline in GDP, may eventually lead to a serious embalance throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as our ability to maintain a superior military technology fades. What if China were to evolve into an expansionist empire, like the Germany, Italy or Japan of the late 1930's? Like those countries, in the historical scheme of things, China is coming late to capitalist enterprise. China, the sleeping dragon.

Vampire Weekend Indie

I tread on uncertain ground. How many years has it been since I swooned to the jingles of the Stones, the Beatles, the Incredible String Band, The Band, etc.? Ya gotta grow up somewhere. Who can choose to be born in Outer Mongolia?* The contemporary rock group named mysteriously Vampire Weekend burst out of the ground at Columbia University in the mid-oughts. I heard them first on NPR, driving away from the Post Office one early afternoon--which is very untypical, since I rarely follow contemporary music trends.

Whole decades have passed since I could claim familiarity with anything issuing from the sound towers. Nevertheless, a little of the old feeling came back when I heard the first tracks of this group's self-titled debut album. Bucking some unwritten prohibition, this group's modus is an upper-middle class cruise, hedonistically barren and amazed to have awoken inside the cooler. It's wonderful how deprivation concentrates the mind.

One of the commonplaces of popular music in America is its connection to youth. Traditional cultures tend to cling to old styles and folkways, but in the West, the growth of media over the last century has fostered a musical culture which thrives on novelty. As early as the 1920's, young jazz musicians were forming into small bands. After WWII, the decline of popular large swing or jazz bands, and the rise of the torch singer, laid the groundwork for the birth of rock and roll, based on the ascendancy of the guitar. When I was growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, rock and roll music--an amalgam of jazz, blues, country and gospel--was just beginning. I've written here earlier about Chuck Berry.

By the late 50's, rock and roll music had become an integral component of American teen-aged and young adult culture in America. Competing strains have defined its meaning or innovations for six decades--but a common theme over time is the underground youth rebellion. As a marketing strategy, aimed at the juvenile market, pop rock evolved into celebratory and critical modes designed to tap into adolescent rage and immaturity, emphasizing the generational struggles of each successive wave of youth looking for fresh sounds and its own avatar.

As rock passed into its putative dotage, eclectic consolidations and cross fertilizations have tended to make it seem as if rock's energy and drive may have dissipated somewhat--a trend common to any movement. Critics over the years have viewed this in terms of a loss of authenticity. But genuine originality and innovation almost always involve adaptations and a keen awareness of history. Rock's roots may be in jazz and country, but its strength has been in its hybrid multiplicity.

There's been a class issue as well. Disaffected American college kids jamming at semester break are suspect in the same way that White Swing Bands were in the 1930's. Going back and/or clinging to "the Source" may be more about nostalgia and obsession than a living tradition. The challenge, as time went on, has become finding something new in the orchestral combinations, or conjuring a lyrical statement out of fairly fixed alternatives.

What I heard in Vampire Weekend's first signature tracks was a sweet reprise reminiscent of Rubber Soul--45 years back--intelligent kids mixing seven-grain combos with witty half-realized lyrical salvos, unashamed and opaque. Its lively antecedents--punk, reggae, calypso, Afro-pop, late Brit acid-flower--are handled with ease. Mansard Roof or Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa might seem a tad antiseptic to those seeking the essential grunge, but I hear immortal innocence loud and clear--"can you stay up, to see the dawn, in the colors of Benetton?" There's a confident clarity coming through the rye.

Unlike so many recording artists of the last 15 years who seem to have approached composition as a promotional strategy, Vampire Weekend are so weirdly themselves, seemingly unafraid of being thought simple-minded. We tend to see the high R&R phenomenon in terms of the social upheavals of the Sixties--Berlin, Sputnik, the Cuban Missile Crisis, bombing of North Vietnam, the assassination of Kennedy, Selma & Watts, assassinations of King & Robt Kennedy--but it was also a period of unprecedented economic expansion begun during the 1950's.

Four decades later, we find ourselves a debtor nation, in economic decline, with rising unemployment (and a demonized labor force), seemingly unable to summon a political or artistic will to broker a revived social contract with capital. In our popular arts, political awareness and concern seems at a very low ebb. Is this a reflection of our belief that the arts can no longer be an expression of serious feeling about outward events and consequence, or an acknowledgment that our immediate future may be neither the fulfillment which used to be the presumed birthright of the resident middle class, nor the shangri-la-la magnet for the rest of the world's underclass?

If the world is getting smaller, perhaps the great musical melting-pot will foster a greater sense of cooperation (don't count on it). Like many groups these days, Vampire Weekend borrows or adapts from diverse indigenous--but now increasingly panchromatic--influences around the world. I'm not sure what Vampire Weekend's success so far tells us. Consider the lyrics of this piece called California English. If this kind of complexity seems to harken back to Bob Dylan's faux-intellectual patter, I might be excused for waxing nostalgic.

Wouldn't ever gag you with a spoon, my only true love
Never really heard you speak that way, it's unworthy of
Funny how that little college girl called language corrupt
Funny how the other private schools had no Hapa Club

Someone took a trip before you came to ski in the Alps
Your father moved across the country
Just to sunburn his scalp
Contra Costa, Contra Mundum, contradict what I say
Living like the French Connection, but we'll die in LA

Blasted from a disconnected light switch
Through the condo that they'll never finish
Bounced across a Saudi satellite dish
And through your brain to California English

No one sits inside a freezing flat and stays there 'til May
Leafing through a stack of A-Zs to surf the UK
Waiting with the wind against your face
And gel in your hair
Shivering in little undershirts, but don't seem to care
Find More lyrics at www.sweetslyrics.com

Blasted from a disconnected light switch
Through the condo that they'll never finish
Bounced across a Saudi satellite dish
And through your brain to California English

Sweet carob rice cake
She don't care how the sweets taste
Fake Philly cheese steak
But she use real toothpaste

Cuz if that Tom's don't work
If it just makes you worse
Would you loose all of you faith in the good Earth

And if it's all a curse
And we're just getting worse
Baby, please don't lose your faith in the good earth

Blasted from a disconnected light switch
Through the condo that they'll never finish
Bounced across a Saudi satellite dish
And through your brain to California English

One critic--Mike Powell--in January 2010--seems to see some social conscience in it:

"Ezra isn't writing about college or Northeastern geography anymore (terrific), but the loud nouns are still there. Take "California English": "Sweet carob rice cakes, you don't care how the sweets taste/ Fake Philly cheesesteak but you use real toothpaste/ 'Cause if that Tom's don't work, if it just makes you worse/ Would you still lose all of your faith in the good earth?" In other words, what if all the products and symbols that gave your life meaning-- and status-- fell away? What if you replaced the organic toothpaste with Colgate? (Which still "says something" about you, namely "I don't have the time, inclination, or money to give a shit about toothpaste.") Would life still look as rosy? Or, roughly, "Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?" These aren't ad-copy platitudes about the irrelevance of image-- if image didn't exist, he'd have less to write about. His point is simple: Image is important, but don't think yours is better than anyone else's, especially if it's constructed by things you buy." --Pitchfork Album Reviews

If product placement takes a back seat to intelligent discrimination, we all stand to gain from an increased preoccupation with sensible choice--assuming that buying is the premier political statement we can make in the consumer world of Tomorrow-land. What does it cost to make the wrong choices in the marketplace of ideas?

Pipe this into my favorite green super mall and I'm back in business. Is it a limited franchise, or a messianic call to arms? I can't tell, because I'm so far from the sources of my own innocence I've forgotten the address.

It's going to take a little time

While you're waiting like a factory line
I'll ride across the park
Backseat on the 79

Wasted days you've come to pass

So go I know you would not stay
It wasn't true, but anyway
Pollination yellow cab
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/v/vampire_weekend/m79.html ]
You walk up the stairs
See the French kids by the door
Up one more flight
See the buddha on the second floor

Coronation rickshaw grab

So go, I know you would not stay
It wasn't true, but anyway
Racist dreams you should not have

No excuse to be so callous
Dress yourself in bleeding madras
Charm your way across the Khyber Pass

Stay awake to break the habit
Sing in praise of Jackson Crowther
Watch your step along the arch of glass

Back in the Sixties, we thought we were living through a dark time, but dreamed of a better world. Dreams die hard, but sometimes we get lucky. The law of unintended consequences says that for every virtuous intention, there will be a contrary effect. The best things often arise in the unlikeliest of places. Honesty is not a quality which only grows out of deprivation and injustice. It can be bought and contorted into all kinds of weird shapes. Who are these guys, anyway?

______________

*If you had, you'd live a life our ancestors did, maybe, like, thousands of years ago, chasing little ponies and herds of--? If you think they lack a popular music culture there, think again.

A Little Dotty

This poem card was printed by Rosemarie Waldrop at the Burning Deck Press, of a poem I wrote back in the 1970's. I suppose technically it is a postal card, but it feels more like a broadside. Yet, at 3 1/4 x 9 inches, it's too small to be mounted on the wall. Just the sort of thing you print when you have a nice stack of waste paper left over from a serious job.

What I like about it is that the visual representation of the meaning of the poem is the literal letter the poem describes--the lower case "i". The i, then, becomes an eye mounted atop a pedestal or pillar. The eye's pupil is like a literal dot--the mind's focus. The poem's shape is both the letter itself and the description. A happy conjunction of word, letter and intention. A self-defining artifact.

Bristlecones - Gaunt Gnarly Survivors of Millennia

The Ancient Bristlecone Pine is a survivor. Dated by ring-count, individual plants may reach up to 5000 years in age--the oldest known living things. These strange trees live only under certain conditions, far up the slopes of mountains in the American Southwest, at or near the tree line.

In California, they are found in Inyo County, in the White Mountains, at about 9800-11000 feet, just West of the Nevada border, and East of the Owens Valley, due North by Northeast of the town of Bishop.

There are difficulties in reaching the Bristlecone Pine Forest. Most automobiles don't function properly at that altitude, and starved carburetors will often peter out. My 1983 Ford f250 pick-up nearly didn't make it the two times I visited there. Also, the thin air can make you feel light-headed and easily fatigued. I'm not an experienced hiker, but I have good natural stamina (or used to); but something odd happens to you at high altitudes: You tend to lose track of time, and after 15 minutes of casual activity, you suddenly realize, looking at your watch, that an hour and a half has passed!

Photograph I took near the Bristlecone Pine Forest Reserve in 1987.

(4x5 Wista, Tri-X bw film, f22 at 1.5 seconds, red filter)

Bristlecone Pines have become a favorite subject of large format landscape or nature photographers. Countless devotees make the trek up the White Mountain road to scrabble around on the white shale slopes looking for good shots of these strange trees.

Physically, the trees exhibit very unusual qualities. The wood is extremely dense--almost like rock--very resinous. Because the trees grow so slowly, much of the structure of the wood is often, in fact, no longer living. Trees which have been dead for hundreds of years stand as gaunt sculptures against the deep blue of the clear sky. Thin strips of living tissue connect the roots to small bunches of leaves.

The trees develop lyrical twistings and gnarlings which seem to express the extraordinary tension between the difficult environments in which they persist, and their intense will to live. When the bark wears off, the naked wood reveals narrow, sinuous grooves, smooth to the touch, but with razor-like rifts which can easily cut you like a knife-edge. The wood is so dense, that trying to cut or saw it can ruin ordinary equipment. Even coring tools break off.

Weather up at these altitudes can be brutal. Winds at 90-110 mph are common. Extreme storms and cold test the limits of all growing things. The Bristlecones have evolved over millions of years to withstand these hardships, and to thrive. Life is incredibly durable, and persistent, and adaptable. At the top of the genetic chain, man is the only creature tasked to understand and appreciate these miraculous developments. We can appreciate and admire nature. Bristlecone Pines are the living expression of that effort and adaptability over time. Their beauty is a testament to their will to survive.

Beautiful Breathing

She rises, and She falls, and

She rises, and She

falls, and She

rises,

And She

falls

and She—

hesitates— (for a second

at the crest

of the wave

of breath,

before

falling

like a sigh

on grass, or

“shshshshshshshshshsh”

like surf

pulling

away

and down

under the sound.

Darrell Gray - RIP

(Photo credit David Highsmith)

Ron Silliman has mentioned the late poet Darrell Gray several times on his Silliman's Blog, but he's never addressed Gray's own poetry as such. Silliman has basically abandoned commentary on his blog, after declaring himself interested in other media and other projects several months ago, not long after shutting down his comment stream. In one of those ironic coincidences, his interest in discussing poetry on the internet declined at about the same point that blogging, as a media fad, began to fade. So I guess it's up to stragglers like me, to keep the discussion going.

Silliman's interest in Darrell Gray was primarily limited to his devotion to a documentation of minor movements in Post-War American poetry. Largely as a spoof, Darrell invented a poetic "movement" called Actualism, even edited an anthology--The Actualist Anthology, Morty Sklar and Darrell Gray, eds., The Spirit That Moves Us Press, 144pp., 1977; and published a collection of prose pieces, Essays and Dissolutions [Abraxas Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 1977] in which he laid out, with tongue in cheek, some of the "principles" of the movement's aesthetic. The Actualist movement, which he named, began in 1970 in Iowa City, largely because of the presence there of Anselm Hollo, Dave Morice, Allan Kornblum and George Mattingly--the last three of whom initiated little magazines and/or publishing concerns which had some legs--Morice's Gum magazine, Kornblum's Toothpaste Press and later Coffee House Press, and Mattingly's Search For Tomorrow magazine, and Blue Wind Press. Darrell Gray had graduated from the Writer's Workshop in 1968, and, casting about for social and literary connections, had hung around the college town after taking his degree. He fell easily into the "anti-workshop" scene which tended to cohere around Hollo (Berrigan had left the year before, taking Alice Notley with him), setting up as a kind of late faux-Beat-cum-New York School wunderkind.

Right after arriving at the Workshop myself in 1969, I had read a sheaf of Darrell's poems in Poetry Magazine (which can be viewed here), which really impressed me. It was clearly "workshop" material, but it was head and shoulders above what Poetry had begun publishing when Daryl Hine took over as chief editor (1969-1977). (Probably, Darrell's work had been selected during Henry Rago's tenure, but appeared after Rago's death.) The day we met in a small coffee shop in Iowa City that Fall, I mentioned to Darrell how impressed I was with these poems, and we struck up an immediate friendship. I think we both realized that he had moved on, so to speak, and no longer was interested in that kind of work, but Darrell was very eclectic and broad in his tastes, and could accept his previous attempts as valid efforts, even if they may have seemed passé to him later. When he collected his early work in Something Swims Out [Blue Wind Press, Iowa City, 1975], he included all of them.

What was pretty clear about Darrell, once you got to know him, was that he was a kind and generous soul, but that he'd had a fairly unhappy childhood, raised by a single parent (his mother), and that he was frankly lonely and somewhat introverted. Poetry--and the poetry "scene"--provided him with an identity that he wouldn't have been able to find elsewhere, on other terms. After only a few minutes talking with him that first Winter, it was apparent that he had an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary poetry--the writers, the magazines, the publishers, the schools, everything--and that he used that knowledge to place himself in relation to the world. In this sense, perhaps, Actualism was a valid expression of his way of participating in the great debates about form, meaning and history. But rather than try to express my opinion about Actualism, which in any case was never really a serious attempt at storming the gates of the literary establishment, at least in my view, I'd simply like to talk a little bit about those poems of his I first read in Poetry Magazine.

(Photo credit Alastair Johnston's "Rogues Gallery" http://poltroonpress.com/rogues.html)

As those who read Silliman's pieces about Darrell Gray know, he developed into a serious alcoholic after he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, and eventually died in 1986, probably of a heart attack brought on by debilitating alcoholic abuse (his body was discovered in his apartment), and his active writing had lain dormant for some time, though Darrell often could be seen in taverns and at poetry readings in the area during the 1970's and 1980's.

After I returned to the Bay Area in the mid-1970's, I rarely saw or heard from Darrell, but we did meet a couple of times, though he was usually drunk and a little woozy in his speech. There are some writers--Bukowski for instance--who can handle alcohol even while they are addicted to it, and may even use it to augment their inspiration--but Darrell was not one of these. Drink just destroyed him. And of course Darrell was usually broke, and his situation precarious. As with all gifted people who suffer from a powerful addiction, it was sad to see someone with so much potential fritter away his ability, wallowing in self-pity and frustration. We did have mutual interests, but I was tied down in a dead-end government job in those years, and we didn't run in the same circles. Darrell always complimented me on my own work, and I think, under different circumstances, we might have become great dear friends. But it was not to be.

(Photo credit Shelly Vogel courtesy Poltroon Press)

Here are the six poems in their entirety:

Elephants

"Elephants are at home anywhere"

--Peter Schjeldahl

1

How can we sleep with all these elephants

Around us? Oh Muse, must I placate you

Like the moon! I'm not so young anymore,

And moonlight on those huge sad humps

Leaves me helpless. Must they stand

At the foot of our bed? My peanuts are gone,

And their trunks are cold and hard.

2

Remember the jungle? Of course. Let's go

To sleep. I can't. Those mounds of sunlight

Running all over our feet. We were lost

For days in the wind. When miracles

Fell on us we had forgotten their language.

It was like living in a cloud. We felt

A breeze and suddenly the ocean appeared

"Out there," or so we said. I had a toothache.

You photographed the local ferns and vines.

3

It was there we saw the elephants. They

Were walking on the water, their long tails

Leaving little waves behind them. It was beautiful--

Those huge things silently on the water.

When we left, they followed. Now, our house

Is a heaven of snorts. The yard looks tough

In the sun. We live somehow, loving

And helpless, and always in their shadow.

Poem

"Grace to be born and live as

variously as possible"

--Frank O'Hara

1

The lightning arranges us

here in the tranquil reaches

where the red flowers

have history to grow from.

Around them, we become

direct & conversational,

having stood for so long

accomplishing great stumps

on the frozen lawn. But soon,

we imagine, we will collide

with furry places--the rose's

moist explosion--symmetrical,

dangling, alert.

2

One cannot close this eye.

For it is the world in the end

that moves us--its miraculous urges

waking us each morning. The sky

focuses on all the strange little plants,

and we are among them, strangely,

holding a cup of coffee,

because we can't be perfect.

And the car drives over it,

soundlessly, its volume equivalent

to the air its movement displaces.

Today is Water

Today is water

flowing from the faucet.

I shave, noticing a smear

the rain left on the window.

Outside, dark pools

are lying on the ground.

Leaving the house,

I see myself in the water,

smaller in the smallness

of the pool.

For the Future Occupants

Having shortened the space between our fingers,

and felt the walls pull finally apart,

we are no longer ourselves

on edges nor care to be.

Breaking the surface of the formal past

we discover endless cups of coffee,

paper-weights containing tiny oceans,

and old shoes emitting a slow

blue light.

Our neighbors in the bone stand close together.

Their children draw on our doors

mountains and rivers,

and below them, in bold letters:

IF THOSE THINGS IN THE DISTANCE ARE STARS

THEY'LL HAVE TO BE TAKEN AWAY

No one listens to the shafts of sunlight

arriving continually to take our place.

At the moment, we are not here. The moment is

shortening, takng us

in. But we come back on the sand,

on lawns. We look around.

We are on an archery range that extends forever

like a photo of arrow caught in mid-flight.

Some of us have glimpsed the dart-games of ruminant angels,

and some, touching the delicate curves

of clavicles, have forgotten their names.

We are going back to where we had no name,

back through the grass, through the groves

of pianos. We are approaching woodlarks, crickets,

and bridges long covered with water.

In the distance, transparent tractors

climb the terraced hills, and into the fields of dark poppies

whose seeds contain old photos of the Civil War.

The Thought

When I think of everything I have been thinking

It appears like the reflection of footprints on a glass floor

Through which I look down on the park

Containing the bodies of the young girls

Under the trees, their faces startled by the glass

Birds flying through the green depths of the day--

Typographical errors take root, and the future becomes

An enormous glass harp attracting the sleep of animals

As my life continues to roll its electric ball of darkness

Leaving no mark on the ground

Planets

For Cindy

Our bodies are like the shadows of unborn planets.

Sometimes, when we are alone, they are all we have.

Though in many ways these strike me now as typically "workshop" poems from the late 1960's, in a style which many people were using in those days, I still find they have redeeming values, and they show Darrell's typical modesty and tact--though he could, on occasion, exhibit boisterous humor. Darrell often used laughter to defuse tension, or to cover his embarrassment, something I think that was typical of some of the people he tended to associate with. Though he was erudite, he frequently settled for simplistic transactions in mixed company, and could, on occasion, clam up without warning.

In the Sixties, the Workshop became known for a certain kind of poem, exemplified by the work of James Tate, which you can read in his first (Yale Prize) collection, The Lost Pilot. That collection is anchored by the emotional intensity of the loss of Tate's father, a pilot in WWII. But the overriding stylistic character is a prosaic narrative style, employing techniques from Surrealism to free verse, but in every poem keeping to a strict simplistic arc. Formally, the work doesn't ask anything of the reader, except a mild curiosity. It is as if Eliot and Stevens and Moore and Pound and Williams had never existed. As if Modernism had never happened. The Workshop became known for promoting this kind of writing, perhaps as a consequence of the way that workshop classes are run, or were run in those days. Reacting to new styles and different kinds of writing takes time. Sitting down and reading new work for the first time in a class setting, it may seem that a charming, witty, playful, humorous or clever poem makes more sense than one which challenges our expectations. Hence, a poem like "For the Future Occupants"--which seems more about the rote strategies of expedient construction, than about any compelling argument or story. Each statement proposes a peculiar, tantalizing assertion (i.e., "dark poppies whose seeds contain old photos of the Civil War"), but the purpose to which such events or fantasies might refer is not furnished. You could say it's lazy writing, except that the evident confidence of the rhetorical devices used tends to dampen our curiosity. It's almost as if the sequence of phrasing--the matrix of the whole poem's syntactic layout--is a scaffolding, into which a number of different statements, metaphors and images, could be put without disturbing its basic design. That's very much what Iowa taught, in those days--the strategic template for writing successful, risk-free, poems. Poems weren't supposed to challenge the reader, but to satisfy him, make him nod approvingly, "yes, yes...that makes sense...um-hm...it all fits together." Making things fit.

But Darrell demonstrably didn't "fit." And his anxiety to do more than just use poetry as a social entry into a purposeful life, made him abandon the path these early poems had made for him. In an earlier post on The Compass Rose on my late fellow student poet of the late 1960's, Patrick Schnoor, I speculated about the casualties, of those caught up in the enticing diversions of those years--drugs, sex and the underground life. As Darrell seemed someone whose life would forever be incomplete, his eventual decline and demise may appear to have been fated.

I recall certain lines of his--"The sky focuses on all the strange little plants, and we are among them, strangely, holding a cup of coffee, because we can't be perfect"--which seem themselves nearly--but not quite--perfect in their appropriation of his singular humility and ironic virtue. "I see myself in the water, smaller in the smallness of the pool."

The poem about the elephants is certainly a wholly successful effort. What is the significance of the elephants to the speaker? Are they powers over which we have no control? Or slightly overgrown playthings, remnants from an overactive childhood imagination? We share space with these slightly disquieting Pleistocene deities, which haunt our dreams. I think Darrell would have liked this picture of an elephant swimming, photographed from under the water. It's not walking on the water, but just seeing it swim, from this vantage, is nearly as miraculous a phenomenon.

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