Being rather obscure and out-of-the-way myself, I've always had a taste
for obscure but good art of every sort - composers like Schreker and
Pfitzner and Magnard; in painting, late Derain.  My favorite biblical
verse is from Isaish - The stone that the builders rejected has become
the chief corner-stone ... it expresses a personal hope.  I have a LOT
of poetry of this sort.  The point, of course, is not obscurity but
unfairly neglected  quality and uncomfortable originality.  In passing
let me recommend the poems of Marsden Hartley; the noted early-modern
painter, who died in '43, was also a good modernist poet - Black Sparrow
Press collected his poems. And John Wheelwright - mad Bostonian, scion
of wealth, Communist, harangued the workers while wearing his expensive
camel-hair coat, run down by a car (WAS it an accident?) in '41,
practitioner of a verse whose baroque hermeticism in the service of left
politics bears interesting comparison with Prynne's. (New Directions
press, some years back.) And Matthew Mead, a Brit whose work I have not
seen, or seen mentioned, in many years. But now I want to talk about
Hubbell. - Many years ago a friend, knowing my tastes, gave me what
remains the best obscure, or obscurest good, book in my library, Long
Island Triptych, Swallow Press, 1947, by a poet named Lindley Williams
Hubbell.  I could find out nothing about him.  When Kees' letters were
published I was gratified to find Kees, during the war, calling H. the
ONLY poet doing anything worthwhile in New York.  From the capsule
biographies I learned that H was born in Connecticut in 1901, was a Yale
Younger Poet in the 20s (later saw the book; God-awful).  In 1953 he
became a professor of English in Kyoto and in 1960 a Japanese citizen
with the name Hayashi Shuseki. In 1971 Long Island Triptych was
reprinted with an "Atlantic Triptych," begun in Hartford in 1950,
finished in Kyoto in '64, and published by the English -language Ikuta
Press, Kobe.  By one of those strange chances that befall only someone
who spends his life in used bookstores, I found this volume - in Burbank
- in the late '80s.  I have never seen any of Hubbell's other nine
books; nor do I know when he died nor anything else about him.  Anyone
out there with a taste for incunabulae is welcome to share my obsession.
Perhaps in some dusty second-hand shop in Perth or Glasgow ... Again,
the point is not that the work is obscure but that it's good - and
Hubbell means a lot to me.

>From Long Island Triptych:

III. Glendale

V

In the Devonian, Long Island was under water.
Fish were its most advanced inhabitants,
Appearing first, intent on love and slaughter,
During this age.  Under the narrow sea
Crawled the crustacean, limited of sense,
And molluscs, contented not to crawl but be.

Majestically, where Glendale was to be,
The paddled antiarchi cleft the water.
The jawless placodermi, with less sense,
Were put upon by the inhabitants
Of this prolific and ferocious sea,
Having barely time to breed before their slaughter.

The acanthodians, as adept at slaughter
As sharks are now, had little else to be
Except eating or eaten, while the sea
Deepened and widened, and benath the water
Limestone was laid down.  The inhabitants
Continued to grow in action and in sense.

In action more resourceful and in sense
More intricate, in breeding and in slaughter
Always more complex, the inhabitants
Of these fierce channels gradually came to be
Ready for the day when they would leave the water.
Some left it, others lingered in the sea.

Some of them to this day are in the sea,
While others, more evolved in mind and sense,
Inhabit Glendale.  These who left the water
Have made an art of lvoe, a science of slaughter,
And have developed things that would not be
Intelligible to the sea's inhabitants.

I that am one of the inhabitants
Of land should never have strayed so far from sea.
I would be better off if I could be
As sharp of instinct and as dull of sense,
As limited to progeny and slaughter
As these quick shadows in Long Island water.

Long Island water and its inhabitants,
Their love and slaughter in the shadowy sea,
The untroubled sense, are as they ought to be.


IX

Why are these people cruel?

Because they fear being hurt.
It is a matter of pride
And strategy of defense
To get in the first blow.
Some bitter need of importance
Is satisfied by this.

But how then explain
Their contempt for gentleness
When their need of it
leads them to cruelty?

That is their pride again.
He who defends himself
Despises him who won't,
Despises him who can't,
It is all the same to him
Whether he can't or won't.

He does it without hate.

We are all one of two things,
Sadists or masochists.
The masochist is the tougher
in the long run,
That is what is meant
By passive resistance.

But the passive resister
Is strong only because
He is one by his own choice.

Because he is masochistic.
His self respect is subtler
Because it survives defeat,
Because it grows by defeat.
The sadist has to win
or acknowledge himself a failure.
Mussolini trampled
In Milano streets
Is obviously a failure,
Hypatia, torn with shells
In Alexandria,
Successful to the last.

Pity the cruel then,
The terribly vulnerable
Who build pathetic shelters
Of unkind words and acts.

Pity those who love them,
Who win out in the end.

Pity them both alike.


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