Part 2

Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predefined to be thick. The world is but a circumstance, a mis- erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition, imagination, outgrowth,

nutriment, with everything crammed belligerent- ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon- opoly— a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat to the color of the set-

ting sun and stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand- ing still and turning to look back at it— as much as to say my happiest moment has been funereal in comparison with this, the con- ditions of life pre-

determined slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For it? Dismiss agrarian lore; it tells him this: that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

POETRY

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us—that we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat, holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician—case after case could be cited did one wish it; nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among us can be “literalists of the imagination”—above insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion— the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is, on the other hand, genuine then you are interested in poetry.

IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR

not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the fineness of early civilization art but by virtue of its originality, with nothing to modify it but the

mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia- tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band of incandescence that was color, keep its stripe: it also is one of

those things into which much that is peculiar can be read; complexity is not a crime but carry it to the point of murki- ness and nothing is plain. A complexity moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting it-

self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a- bout as if to bewilder with the dismal fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-

ways has been—at the antipodes from the init- ial great truths. “Part of it was crawling, part of it was about to crawl, the rest was torpid in its lair.” In the short legged, fit- ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiæ—we have the classic

multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes. Know that it will be there when it says: “I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”

IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH?

Why so desolate? And why multiply in phantasmagoria about fishes, what disgusts you? Could not all personal upheaval in the name of freedom, be tabood?

Is it Nineveh and are you Jonah in the sweltering east wind of your wishes? I, myself have stood there by the aquarium, looking at the Statue of Liberty.

Printed at the Pelican Press, 2 Carmelite Street, E.C.