Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theater and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles.
ORSON WELLES:
Hello, the Jeunesse Doree and all the ships at sea and in the maelstromed starry welkin!
Hello, this is ORSON WELLES!
Who knows what poetry lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow knows!
Tonight I stand here on the heath of the Spirit Planet Wolf 767. . I believe I see great spirit whales a leeward and what are those strange constellations wheeling overhead? And I am expecting the poet and wit Candice Ward to be translated here momentarily by the infernal engines of Mr. Blake. Who is a sponsor of this show. And may I offer some words about his fine establishment?
"Blake's Satanic Mills. Visit us at our new Factory Outlet!
Mr. Blake begs leave to inform the public that two products of his manufacture will be available to the Ladies and Gentlemen for the first time at low, low prices:
THE LINEAMENT OF GRATIFIED DESIRE! Sovereign remedy whose superior excellence and utility is attested by all Major Poets.
ETERNITY, the perfume in love with the productions of time!
Mr. Blake's establishment also stocks many other items of his manufacture too numerous to attempt a description of -- all at low, low prices.
Also -- see the Tygers of Wrath that are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction! On display here for the first time and seen very recently by HER MAJESTY, THE FAERIE QUEEN.
Orson: Yes, I am back. I am here. And, tonight, I am with -- here on the heath -- the immortal poet, Candice Ward. Candice…may I call you Candice?
Candice Ward: Why certainly, er, Orson. Or should I call you George? My, isn’t the heath wind bracing!
Orson: Yes, George is my first name, isn’t it? I also named my first daughter Christopher. Your planet is most strange. In any case…
Splendid. Will you, just to get started, join me in singing this wonderful ballad?
Candice Ward: My pleasure. I love all manner of silkie ballads. (“I am a man upo-on the land / I am a silkie o-on the sea…”).
They sing:
The silkie be a creature strange
He rises from the sea to change
Into a man, a weird one he,
When home it is in Skule Skerrie.
When he be man, he takes a wife,
When he be beast, he takes her life.
Ladies, beware of him who be -
A silkie come from Skule Skerrie.
His love they willingly accept,
But after they have loved and slept,
Who is the monster that they see?
'Tis "Silkie" come from Skule Skerrie.
A maiden from the Orkney Isles,
A target for his charm, his smiles,
Eager for love, no fool was she,
She knew the secret of Skule Skerrie.
And so, while Silkie kissed the lass,
She rubbed his neck with Orkney grass,
This had the magic power, you see -
To slay the beast from Skule Skerrie.
Orson: And bad cess to him wherever he may be. Candice, I was shocked, after reading your transcendent book, The Moon Sees the One, to read that it had been thirty long years since you had published a poem. A “hiatus” you call it. Why? What were you doing? Why is it that you denied me the pleasure of your verse while I yet lived? If indeed I lived thirty years ago -- one tends to forget.
Candice: Oh yes, you lived until 1985, and I stopped publishing in the 70s. I continued to write, off and on, all that time, but I’d become sick of the emphasis on publication in my MFA program (UMASS, Amherst) and feared that I was beginning to write for publication. It was enormously liberating then to write in utter solitude.
Orson: Yes. "We will sell no wine before its time" and may I add that Carlsburg lager is "Probably the best lager in the world"
Well, all that is over. Your book is at hand. Here’s one poem
Ballad Child
(for my daughter, Alexandra)
lean your head over
and list’ to the wind
(“The Connemara Cradle Song”)
scrimshow through the window
on the deep roiling braes, on
currachs a’sailing over the furze,
as rues the shad the rose is blown
we never fished for flying glass,
yet chad did happen nonetheless
(we cannot get o’er the Whitewater
business either); really, sulks the lily,
must we list’ to the brass
or heed the windrose?
come by our glenglass,
there go our Windows!
Chorus: lean your head over
the side of the bowl,
bog down, bog down
Lady Isabel, take cover
if herring is silver, then sour
the cream, as slivers of heather
do sharpen the Tweed
so too may the chains of Old Ireland
bind you
no overlooked clover ever to
find you
when the wind drags the corn
by her silk from the field,
and your hair smells of beer
shorn from the barley,
then shall you have the story,
child, as it was told to me
Orson: I love this, of course. The joke in the title … “Ballad Child” the turn on Child’s Ballads and, then of course, the what? “faerie” humor throughout, all the various shiftings and allusion to the ancient ballads, the medieval, the matter of all that -- humorous in a way I have not found anywhere else and then, finally, very affecting. So many beauties there: “silver” in one line and then “sliver” in the next. So, I think this is only possible, that is writing this is only possible, if one is, first of all, transformed and delighted and, yes, transformed by the old ballads. So, how do you think you came to write like this? All beings will want to know because one can then be immensely cheered. Oh, and by the way, please point out a few of the abounding felicities.
Candice: Thank you, Orson. I spent many weeks several years ago (sorry! I forgot that time must mean nothing to you now) reading and listening to ballads at two websites, one called The Contemplator and the other The Mudcat Café. It was as delightful and transformative as you’ve suggested. All that reading and listening came to the fore when I began to write “Ballad Child,” which reflects the silliness of many ballads as well as their capacity to affect one. But in part of that silliness often lies a code for a ballad’s political matter, so I had to have a couple of political references of my own, “chad,” for example, and “Whitewater” (remember “the water is wide / we cannot get o’er”?). One of my favorite ballads, “The Connemara Cradle Song,” became the basis for the chorus, except for “Lady Isabel,” who comes from “The Grene Elf.” Maybe because I am Irish and rather passionate about Irish politics, I was most attracted to the ballads of Ireland generally, so out of that came the stanza about the hold of “Old Ireland” on me.
Orson: And what is the story as it was told to you? You may tell me. My hair has the scent of beer shorn from the barley. I discovered that essence for my “Macbeth.”
Candice: Ah, that would be telling! It’s a story of lost love, the kind so many ballads tell, and fit only for my daughter’s ears someday. What a magnificently tortured Macbeth you must have been. That’s my favorite Shakespeare play, by the way. I do so love a good murder and am addicted to British mysteries.
Orson: What is your relationship with the Bard? Mine was vexed yet transcendent.
Candice: I’m not sure I have a relationship with him in the sense that you did, as an actor and director. But I’ve certainly been influenced by the poetry and plays, sometimes in odd ways. For instance, I’ll find myself ruminating about Troilus and Cressida: Why did she do it? Cressida’s act of betrayal is, unlike Macbeth’s, unmotivated, as Shakespeare presents it. Of course, I hardly need to tell you that such mysteries are at the heart of life as well as literature.
Orson: You speak Anglo-Saxon I am told. To whom do you speak it?
Candice: My dear Orson, you epitomize the verb blawan with all its windy and phallic connotations. There now, I’m speaking it to you.
Orson: Would you be astounded if I told you that your poems remind me of the poesy of James Merrill? I mean the sheer mastery of technique. Let me read this:
Vertigo under Mistletoe
I’m at a place called Vertigo
It’s everything I wish I didn’t know
(U2,“Vertigo”)
all-heal by the garland flaunted
above the rushes-o punt! what betideth
these yuleclouds magellanic?
O natal star say our
yongling ycomen
littel childe myrrh is mine
its bitter perfume
its babel sound
O hush ye men of strife!
it’s kisses kisses
then into egypt with him
crisscross the rubicon
sun askance the snow
where it lies dinged
by deer on the run
so infant limbs do
blanch to lose their
outdoor color and
touch my robe!
O babe be not
affrighted
desire of nations
mark my step
my good page
holly mistletoe red berries ivy
turkeys geese game poultry brawn pigs sausages oysters
pies puddings fruit punch all instantly
vanish
Orson: The “matter” is wonderful. But, may we, just for the moment look into the matter of technique. I mean the assonance and the half rhymes and all of that. How do you do it? Or…how did this poem come together…all at once or slowly adding this and that…?
Candice: It started out as an e-mail Christmas card called simply “Mistletoe,” made up of bits of carols and the last part from Dickens, of course—his ingredients in my arrangement. Gradually, the poem acquired more of my “matter,” becoming less Christmasy and more vertiginous. At least, it makes me dizzy, which led to its present title, as did the quote from the U2 song. So I owe much of the aural technique you describe to song lyrics, one way or another—one kind or another.
Orson: Now, if we may, we will -- angels and saints -- ( I always want to say “angels and saints forfend us” but somehow that’s wrong…if we may we will look at your great work-in-progress. A poem you have been working on for years. Could you, perhaps, select some passages, comment on them and then chat a bit about the whole? The poem seems to encompass, well, the history of all poetry in English.
Candice: I don’t know about “the history of all poetry in English,” but “Rendezvous (Refrain)” probably constitutes the history of all my poetry in English! I’ve been working on it, off and on, between poems that I finished, since the mid-70s. It was a three-page poem called “Rendezvous” in my MFA thesis (Hound of an Empty Heaven), which now stretches to eleven pages. At the time, James Tate, my thesis director, called it a “metaphysical” poem, but it’s since become more of an alchemical one, based loosely on the work of the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician who called himself Paracelsus. It’s also acquired a number of graphics, which can’t be reproduced here (alas). These represent an attempt to get beyond language in a poem, however futile and perverse such an ambition is. Here are a few sample passages from the text that, hopefully, give a sense of the poem’s flavor:
into the lightcut
of manner born to
dissolution distill!
sublime & cropped
for want of cereal
eviction
cue the tattoo
let shepherd tend his dinner
let lamb be led to sweater
we’ll have all 9 yds
with our taste for
fabrication:
pontic
stiptic
werish
all in the Manor of Arcanumskulduggery:
lapisophistry
pyramidiocy
gnomeopathy
her metabolism et passim
tomorrow’s arrow grows
lonesome at such speeds
sangfroid in the shade
this sunny neutrino sings
soprano abandonado
Miss Fortune serenading
her shipwrecked sailors
help is but a step a cheap
skate away over the laws
of northern metaphysics:
ICE
seeks no ECHO
ECHO
strikes no VOICE
VOICE
cuts no ICE
remember the almanac!
lest punctuation be forgotten
in vehemence hazardous
as if this vile drizzle is
not enough as it is
or so it seems
do you hear chimes
god the irony
next will be symmetry
so unnecessary or worse
Matthew Arnold back to
bring that eternal note in
again ill-gotten away from the window
untimely as was
it must be space
this passive voice
Orson: What is all this talk about wanting to get “beyond language?” What is there that poetry cannot do? Despite your inevitable protestations, and equally inevitable disappointment, poetry cannot be expected to make any attempt to describe, in words, the sound of the Elhanan Q. Hackenback Memorial Grand Pipe Organ in the Basilica of St. Gladys de la Croix on Washington Heights as I played it one wintry midnight in 1939. What say you?
Candice: It’s a poetic challenge I set myself all those years ago, that is, to try to capture the sort of dispossession my character, Sylph, experiences in the poem through her loss of language as she’s transmuted following the death of her corporeal self. That character, whom I call Glyph, goes back to the earth, and Sylph (the sidereal self) must take her leave of Glyph before rising to a higher plane:
but say what snatched purse
you clutch for heart now
Glyph of my Self/Same
Salami, will it hear me &
beat to my step / though it be
earth / in an earthy bed?
O hear me, dusty, & gather
trembling for gardening
together again, for the
world’s so woodsy
sharp in tree & deep
to the foot planted
in memory of
in memory of
afoot?
ahead!
. . . .
husht wisht on a star she’s pastry
no more your once pufft (my gone my gone
why hast thou
& so on
2 feet
few words
for whoso slurs
her surrey gets singed up top
what’s due is done the morning
no you never heard no crying
truth to tell
blood will out
walk me out
Candice: Ultimately, Sylph progresses so far upward and northward that there is nothing left of her but the sound of an impossible song hanging in the air. Even her subjectivity is shed before the end of the poem:
WE sing of THEE
the illicit Passion of Ice for Echo
with its scandalous solo
The Rendezvous Duet
opera is like that
yes it is
grand
yes it is
. . . .
ICE & ECHO azygos
sing la dolce prospettiva
NOLO CONTENDERE
it is so cold here
yes it is winter
we must go on now
no it is too cold
(refrain)
NOLO PROSEQUI
here is winter
on we go
so cold now
must we too
(refrain)
Orson: Magnificent! You were awa. That is tho the river is wide and we can’t get o’er neither have we wings to fly you decided, for many years, to leave the poetry world behind so that you could compose in solitude. I hope this is right. Don’t you feel that you missed the poets? Those mad, bad and dangerous to know. Did you (do you) miss their fine madness?
Candice: Oh, I didn’t leave the world of poetry, but rather began working for my PhD. in medieval literature: Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain poet, the mystery and morality plays, the Old English charms and riddles, and, of course, Beowulf—all poetry. In fact, I was so stunned by the experience of reading Beowulf in the original, realizing how important it is historically, that I didn’t write another poem for several years. Everything I tried to write seemed so trivial by comparison, not that I was trying to write epics, mind you.
Orson: I recall a poet I met here in what may be called the Spirit World. He was always impressive. Not just when sneering and swiving in the Vampire Brothels of Paris, and not simply because he betrayed the King when the poor fellow tried to escape during the Revolution just (as he once told me) to see what would happen, and not only because I once saw him cut down 30 of the Cardinal's men while conducting a conversation about the origin of the Tarantella with the Countess Borgia whom he was just then abducting... but there was something inhuman and alien about him always -- and he always dressed well. Are there any poets like this alive in your reality?
Candice: Not many I know dress well, but that alien air is very familiar. It may be that, to write great poetry, one must cast a cold eye on the world, even squeeze the life out of it. Whatever, it’s probably the poet’s intense engagement with language that disengages him or her from the living, to some extent. The novelist Thomas Berger says that “all writing is about language; everything else is a lie.” I tend to agree with that, “Rendezvous (Refrain)” notwithstanding.
Orson: Mad Ireland hurt John Barrymore into poetry. Did something similar happen to you?
Candice: To the extent that I was cursed (or blessed) with mad Irish parents, yes. Reading anything and everything I could get my hands on was my escape, as writing also came to be by the age of ten. Perversely enough, my parents were proud of my writing and often said they hoped I’d “do something with it” someday. But I think they meant sell it, which rarely happens with poetry. I was astonished to receive a $72 payment for a poem from a magazine last year!
Orson: Oh,well, you know I am friends with Robert Bly and he tells the story of Japanese poets ascending a pass to a towering black rock and there carving haiku on the stone: poems about the view – the wind, the hawks, the sky, the moon. But then ah then, the poet BASHO ascended, looked about, and then wrote a poem about the wind FROM the black rock. Nothing like anything the others did -- and Bob Bly looked at me (as I looked at him in his old reindeer sweater) and said, “See! See! Wind from Black Rock! That’s what poetry is!” How do you get the wind FROM the black rock into a poem?
Candice: That’s the eternal challenge, to find that crevice, even to recognize that it must be there in the first place. Basho was, of course, a poet of the first rank. Most of us would look out and away from the rock without ever noticing what we’re standing on as the source of the maelstrom around us. (I mean this planet, in our case.)
Orson: You have to have a sleepover with Ezra Pound or Vladimir Nabokov. Who would you choose?
Candice: I should choose Nabokov, as the more hoity-toity one, but I’d be too intimidated even to try to make conversation with him. Pound would no doubt rattle on and never let me get a word in edgewise—but what exhilarating talk it would be! I would be happy if he spent the night talking only about his alchemical poetry, from which I’ve learned so much.
Orson: Which of my movies do you love most?
Candice: The Magnificent Ambersons. I’m a sucker for family dramas, and yours is the classic American one, as Wuthering Heights—novel and film—is the English classic. (Did you ever see the Monty Python “Semaphore Wuthering Heights”? Now, there was a classic!)
Orson: And, just asking, so there – out there – are billions and billions of stars yet there is more of woe and wonder in a science fiction story of the forties than in many poems today – that seem so, well, earthbound. Do you know of any poetry that transcends this – just in a way a movie might, a pulp novel even. Damn. Are there any poets anymore that take on the cosmos?
Candice: My late teacher, Larry Levis, took on the cosmos throughout his career, and nowhere more so than in his last, posthumously published collection, Elegy. It is all about death, as if he saw it coming and imagined it in various forms, such as a boy in an arcade. His poems always reached beyond the intimate and the personal, though. In an early collection called Winter Stars, for example, he took up the subject of our parents’ deaths cosmically.
The British poet J.H. Prynne also addresses the cosmic in specialized vocabularies such as the neurobiological. Although it may seem as if most poets, especially the lyric ones, are intensely inward-looking, the best are always stretching for the vastness outside themselves.
Orson: “Wish I was Bob Dylan," Robert Creeley wrote. You seem to wish you were Tom Waits. What is it about his songs that appeals to you -- a medievalist, solitary and someone whose sensibility seems to combine the sensibilities of Dorothy Parker and the last troubadour of the fading West?
Candice: That’s a pretty good description of Waits’s sensibility in fact. The wit is there throughout his lyrics, but so is the busker in his freewheeling music. He’s an extraordinary performer as well as a lyricist and composer—all roles informed by his great intelligence. It’s as if he were Brecht, Weill, and Lotte Lenya all rolled into one. (If you can, wherever you are, try to see his New Year’s Eve concert video of many years ago.)
I’ve also learned a lot about writing for the ear from Leonard Cohen, another master of lyric, music, and performance. And I love the recent songs that poet Paul Muldoon has been writing for his rock band Rackett (see under “Recordings” at Rackett.org). Then there are the rhymed, comic poems of Joe Green—poems that are songs in their own right, to my ear anyway.
Orson: You were recently given a quite wonderful review in “Overcoat.” http://jacketmagazine.com/34/dickinson-ward.shtml by Mark Dickinson.
Your chapbook described this way by this fine fellow. “Candice Ward’s chapbook is one of those beautifully glittering rarities that seldom surface, but when they do, it seems they do so stealthy (in keeping with a mysterious art) half lit & partially obscured.” Do you intend to storm the poetry world somewhat soon so that we fellows do not have to search through long long nights for your work?
Candice: No, I expect to creep along as usual at a pace of 2-to-3 poems a year. Appreciate your interest, though, Orson, and will keep you posted.
Orson: Let me read this from the review: “The deft delivery, the delight in the dance of words draws favourable comparisons I think with the likes of Swinburne, cummings, Laura (Riding) Jackson and more contemporary figures like Denise Riley. This dance allows for a very accessible poetry not overburdened with intellectual idealism, it also has a wonderful mysterious quality that is altogether gnomic.” Exactly right though I might have expressed this myself less eloquently. I would say “damn fine poems” and then I might mutter about the mystery of where they come from. Bob Dylan received his songs from the Commander. Where do your poems come from? Yes, tell us. Do. Yes, where do you feel they come from? And what is this intellectual idealism that you are not overburdened with?
Candice: Beats me, on both counts. My poems have been coming upon me since childhood, but from where I really can’t imagine. As for “intellectual idealism,” who knows? It sounds vaguely Hegelian, doesn’t it? And far too uptown for me!
Orson: Delightful. And now, one final question. Did you know that after Germany had been defeated, a selection of military personnel and scientists had fled the fatherland as Allied troops swept across mainland Europe and that these followers of Hitler established themselves at a base on Antarctica from where they continued to develop advanced aircraft based on extraterrestrial technologies? And that only the Shadow might defeat them? Will you join me as I tell this tale?
But, first, a word from Blue Coal!
Don't let a few days of mild weather fool you. You'll need a fire for a while -- six to eight weeks. most likely. So, folks, in order to continue efficient firing right down to the last day give your furnace a cleaning now. And here's what I mean. Get the fly ash off the heating surfaces where it's been accumulating all season. That's the main thing. You know, fly ash gradually coats the heating surfaces and acts as an insulator -- even better than asbestos. So get rid of all fly ash. It's the simplest thing in the world to do. Don't disturb the fire. Just open the clean out door. With a wire brush or scraper give the heating surfaces a light going over. Make sure you brush or scrape off all the fly ash that's accumulated …that's all you have to do. Cleaning your furnace is a small job but it pays off big. Because with a clean furnace you'll get more heat from less coal for the rest of the season. I thank you."
Goodnight, Candice Ward and may you thrive ever and ever!. This is Orson Welles.
