Heyen, William 1940-
HEYEN, William 1940-
PERSONAL:
Born November 1, 1940, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Henry Jurgen (a cabinet maker) and Wilhelmine (Wörmke) Heyen; married Hannelore Greiner, July 7, 1962; children: William, Kristen. Education: State University of New York College at Brockport, B.S.Ed., 1961; Ohio University, M.A., 1963, Ph.D., 1967.
ADDRESSES:
Home—142 Frazier St., Brockport, NY 14420. E-mail—wheyen@rochester.rr.com.
CAREER:
Springville Junior High School, New York, English teacher, 1961-62; State University of New York College at Cortland, instructor in English, 1963-65; State University of New York College at Brockport, assistant professor, 1967-70, associate professor, 1970-73, professor of English and poet-in-residence, 1973-2000. Fulbright lecturer at Hannover University in Germany, 1971-72; visiting professor, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, spring, 1985; visiting writer, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1980, Hofstra University, 1981, 1983, Southampton College, 1984-85, 1987, 1989, 1991; poetry leader at Chautauqua Institution, 1993, 1995, 2000.
AWARDS, HONORS:
Borestone Mountain poetry award, 1966; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1974 and 1984; Guggenheim fellowship, 1977; Ontario Review award, 1977; Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine, 1978; Witter Bynner Prize, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1982; New York Foundation for the Arts grant, 1984; Fairchild Award and Small Press Book Award, both 1997, both for Crazy Horse in Stillness: Poems.
WRITINGS:
(With William Taggart) What Happens in Fort Lauderdale (nonfiction), Grove (New York, NY), 1968.
The Mower, privately printed, 1970.
Depth of Field (poetry), Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1970.
(Editor) A Profile of Theodore Roethke, C. E. Merrill (Columbus, OH), 1971.
The Fireman Next Door, Slow Loris Press (Buffalo, NY), 1971.
The Train, Valley Press (Rochester, NY), 1972.
The Trail beside the River Platte, Sceptre Press (Rushden, Northamptonshire, England), 1973.
The Pigeons, Perishable Press (Mount Horeb, WI), 1973.
Noise in the Trees: Poems and a Memoir, Vanguard Press (New York, NY), 1974.
Mermaid, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1975.
The Pearl, Slow Loris Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1976.
Cardinals, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
Of Palestine: A Meditation, Abattoir (Omaha, NE), 1976.
Pickerel, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
Dusk, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
Eighteen Poems and a Story, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
The Trench, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
The Carrie White Auction at Brockport, May 1974, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
(Editor) American Poets in 1976, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1976.
XVII Machines, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
Ars Poetica, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
Mare, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1976.
(Editor) I Would Also Like to Mention Aluminum: A Conversation with William Stafford, Slow Loris Press (Buffalo, NY), 1976.
Darkness, Rook Press (Derry, PA), 1977.
Fires, Croissant (Athens, OH), 1977.
The Elm's Home, Scrimshaw Editions (Derry, PA), 1977.
The Swastika Poems, Vanguard Press (New York, NY), 1977.
Son Dream/Daughter Dream, Rook Press (Ruffsdale, PA), 1978.
From This Book of Praise: Poems and a Conversation with William Heyen, Street Press (Port Jefferson, NY), 1978.
The Ash, Banjo Press (Potsdam, NY), 1978.
Witness, Rara Avis Press (Madison, WI), 1978.
Lord Dragonfly, Scrimshaw (Ruffsdale, PA), 1978.
Brockport's Poems, Challenger Press (Brockport, NY), 1978.
The Descent, Sceptre Press (Rushden, Northamptonshire, England), 1979.
The Children, Sceptre Press (Rushden, Northamptonshire, England), 1979.
Long Island Light: Poems and a Memoir, Vanguard Press (New York, NY), 1979.
Evening Dawning, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1979.
The Snow Hen: Sections 1-7 of The Chestnut Rain, a Poem in Progress (also see below), Ewert (Concord, NH), 1979.
Abortion, Stefanik (Ruffsdale, PA), 1979.
The Descent, Sceptre Press (Rushden, Northamptonshire, England), 1979.
Mantle, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1979.
The City Parables, Croissant (Athens, OH), 1980.
The Shy Bird, Rosemary Duggan (Concord, NH), 1980.
Our Light, Tamarack (Syracuse, NY), 1980.
My Holocaust Songs, wood engraving by Michael McCurdy, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1980.
1829-1979: The Bells, Challenger Press (New York, NY), 1980.
December 31, 1979: The Candle, Martin Booth (Knotting, England), 1980.
The Ewe's Song: Sections 8-18 of The Chestnut Rain, a Poem in Progress (also see below), Ewert (Concord, NH), 1980.
Auction, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1981.
Bean, South Congregational Church (Concord, NH), 1981.
Blackberry Light: Sections 19-32 of "The Chestnut Rain," a Poem in Progress (also see below), Ewert (Concord, NH), 1981.
The Eternal Ash, Tamarack (Syracuse, NY), 1981.
The Bees, Tamarack (Syracuse, NY), 1981.
The Trains, Metacom Press (Worcester, MA), 1981.
Lord Dragonfly: Five Sequences, Vanguard Press (New York, NY), 1981.
The Berries, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1982.
Jesus: Three Poems, Tamarack (Syracuse, NY), 1983.
Along This Water, Tamarack (Syracuse, NY), 1983.
Ram Time, Stone House Press (Roslyn, NY), 1983.
Ensoulment, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1983.
The Numinous, Scarab Press (Salisbury, MD), 1983.
(Editor) The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, Ontario Review Press (Princeton, NJ), 1984.
Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, Vanguard Press (New York, NY), 1984.
Wenzel/The Ghost (also see below), Ewert (Concord, NH), 1984.
Winter Letter to Dave Smith, Palaemon Press (Winston-Salem, NC), 1984.
Eight Poems for Saint Walt, with wood engravings by John De Pol, Stone House Press (Roslyn, NY), 1985.
The Cabin, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1985.
The Spruce in Winter, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1985.
At West Hills, Long Island, Stone House Press (Roslyn, NY), 1985.
The Trophy, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1986.
The Chestnut Rain (includes The Snow Hen, The Ewe's Song, Blackberry Light, and Wenzel/The Ghost), Ballantine (New York, NY), 1986.
Vic Holyfield and the Class of 1957: A Romance (novel), Ballantine (New York, NY), 1986.
Brockport Sunflowers, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1986.
The Amber, New England Reading Association (Manchester, NH), 1986.
The Bells, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1987.
Mother and Son, Northouse & Northouse (Dallas, TX), 1987.
What Do You Have to Lose?, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1987.
Four from Brockport, Northouse & Northouse (Dallas, TX), 1988.
Brockport, New York: Beginning with "And," Northouse & Northouse (Dallas, TX), 1988.
Americans, Ewert (Concord, NH), 1989.
(Editor, with Elizabeth Spires) The Pushcart Prize Fifteen: 1990-1991, Best of the Small Presses, Pushcart Press (Wainscott, NY), 1990.
(With L. D. Brodsky) Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems of a Jew and a Gentile, Timeless Press (St. Louis, MO), 1991.
Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology, Time Being Books (St. Louis, MO), 1991.
The Shore, with wood engravings by John DePol, Stone House Press (Roslyn, NY), 1991.
Ribbons: The Gulf War: A Poem, Time Being Books (St. Louis, MO), 1992.
The Tower, Magpie Press (Drayton, England), 1993.
The Host: Selected Poems 1965-1990, Time Being Books (St. Louis, MO), 1994.
With Me Far Away: A Memoir, Stone House Press (Roslyn, NY), 1994.
Crazy Horse in Stillness: Poems, BOA Editions (Brockport, NY), 1996.
Diana, Charles, and the Queen: Poems, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 1998.
Pig Notes and Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 1998.
Annuli, Timberline Press (Fulton, MO), 2001.
(Editor) September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, Etruscan Press (Silver Spring, MD), 2002.
Shoah Train: Poems, Etruscan Press (Silver Spring, MD), 2003.
The Rope: Poems, Mammoth Books (DuBois, PA), 2003.
The Hummingbird Corporation: Stories, Mammoth Books (DuBois, PA), 2003.
Home: Autobiographies, Etc., Mammoth Books (DuBois, PA), 2004.
Contributor of poems, articles, and essays to periodicals, literary magazines, and newspapers, including Poetry, New Yorker, American Scholar, Prose, Southern Review, Nation, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Prairie Schooner, New York Times, Quarterly Review of Literature, and Saturday Review.
Collections of Heyen's poetry are held at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University Library, Ohio University—Athens Library, and the University of Rochester Library, New York. Other manuscripts are housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
SIDELIGHTS:
William Heyen is a respected American poet whose work has been compared to that of his spiritual forefather, Walt Whitman. Heyen has professed his indebtedness to Whitman in several books, including Eight Poems for Saint Walt, by echoing Whitman's belief that "the poet's art is not to chart but to voyage," and that "poetry is an activity of mind and heart that explores, embraces, and reconciles," according to William B. Thesing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Speaking more broadly of Heyen's themes, Thesing wrote that "Heyen's lyre has basically seven thematic strings—memory, nature, perception, disintegration, death, the past in Long Island and Germany, and the present community in Brockport [where he makes his home]." Beyond this, Heyen's poetic sensibility also owes something to Eastern religions, said a Publishers Weekly reviewer in regard to Heyen's collection The Host: Selected Poems, 1965-1990, particularly in his "precise observations of physical detail." Heyen's reputation as a poet was established with his first collection, Depth of Field, which John T. Irwin of Poetry called a "must." More than thirty years later, Philip Brady stated in the journal Artful Dodge that "William Heyen combines [the] traits of allegiance and prescience in a way so attuned to heart and world that at times it seems preternatural."
Heyen focuses closely on his memories in Long Island Light: Poems and a Memoir. The volume is reminiscent of Whitman and also Thoreau, according to an essayist for Contemporary Poets, who noted that "Heyen stays at home and descends within himself into various layers of the past." Like Leaves of Grass, Long Island Light is "ever-expanding," the writer commented. "The depth of Heyen's emotional and spiritual commitment, the steady growth of his technical skills, and the intensification of his vision has elevated the people and places of his Long Island past—the farmer Wenzel, Gibbs Pond, Lake Ronkonkoma, Short Beach, St. James Harbor, Nesconset, even the Jericho Turnpike—to the status of myth."
Heyen has shown a persistent concern over his family's German roots and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, which he explored fully in The Swastika Poems. He used a variety of voices and perspectives to try and come to terms with both the victims and perpetrators of Nazi atrocities. It is a difficult but rewarding group of poems, in the opinion of numerous reviewers. The Contemporary Poets writer called The Swastika Poems "a courageous undertaking, and to read it, to feel its cumulative power is a painful but memorable experience." Other reviewers noted the challenges faced by a poet writing about the Holocaust, especially a poet who was not an eyewitness. As Sandra McPherson wrote in American Poetry Review: "a bare prose account by any survivor of the death camps is so strong that a poet who wasn't there faces a very hard task indeed." Yet Heyen met the challenges well, according to Peter Stitt of the Georgia Review, who wrote that "Heyen's book ultimately is as fine and important as it is courageous. These are not poems to be read and reread endlessly for the sheer pleasure of it; they are much too painful for that. I am sure there are many people, in fact, who will not be able to look these poems in the face. And how much harder must they have been to write? … This book will not—cannot—be forgotten; it shows decency and human love triumphant over the darkest side of the human spirit, and we cannot ask for much more than that." Heyen himself addressed his own ambivalence about writing on such a charged topic. "On the one hand, I believe fervently in chance-taking, wildness, writing toward breakthrough as we follow our words to get at meanings beyond words," he told Philip Brady in Artful Dodge; "on the other hand, I believe in being careful here: the Holocaust first of all belongs to the murdered and to the 'survivors,' and to insult or humiliate them, to assume we can know them and their experience, to use them, to take advantage of them for the purposes of art—art which is voracious and intent on itself—may be dangerous and immoral."
Heyen's 1996 collection, Crazy Horse in Stillness: Poems, is an exploration of the spiritual aspects of George Custer and Crazy Horse and the battle between Native Americans and the country's European settlers. George Wallace, in Academic Library Book Review, wrote that Heyen is "respectful of the complexity of his subject … instead of handing us a straightforward plot, with its inevitable distillations and oversimplifications, the poet offers us hundreds of rapid-fire, multi-angled, randomly organized moments. Each is complete, telling, and epigrammatically crystallized detail." Other reviewers found Crazy Horse in Stillness to be a great accomplishment. "[Heyen's] ability to maintain the reader's sense of surprise and wonder through an avalanche of poems both surreally plain ('Footnoted') and plainly surreal ('Custer in Cyberspace') is an amazing achievement in itself, enriching our sense of the past with a singular sense of the present," wrote Fred Muratori of Small Press. Other writers questioned Heyen's credentials for writing about Native Americans because of his non-Native heritage. While Heyen is sensitive to such criticism, he notes that "examples of cross-cultural art are myriad," and that "it is easy to reduce to absurdity the argument that an artist must be limited to only certain subjects, that his imagination may be allowed to seize only ideas and stories within his own culture," he told Brady.
In Pig Notes and Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry, Heyen proved that his writing talent extended to prose as well as poetry. Each of the brief pieces in the collection "posits some thought or scene that is rich enough to cause reflection and resonate harmoniously like some beautifully struck bell," commented a reviewer for Booklist. "Heyen demonstrates sensitivity and playful curiosity while remaining steady in a pursuit of inspiration," the reviewer concluded. A writer for Publishers Weekly praised Heyen's "kind but acerbic" wit in the ninety pieces that span more than twenty years, calling it a collection that "reveals the omnivorous curiosity that drives the intelligence of this poet-teacher."
In the same vein as The Swastika Poems, Heyen put together September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, an anthology of original poems dedicated to exploring the effects of that single horrific day. Included in the collection are poems by Robert Pinsky, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Updike, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton, and Denis Johnson, which, in Heyen's view show how that day "had awakened us and shaken our senses of identity and security." Heyen launched his project just days after the attacks, because, as he told a writer for John Carroll University, "I needed community … the community of creative writers … I wanted to catch our first naked reaction to events." Though Heyen recognized the danger in writing poems so soon after such a major historical event, the critics allayed those fears. Brad Hooper, writing in Booklist, praised the collection for its "deeply emotional tapestry," which is full of "poignancy" and "anger."
Heyen once told CA: "[The following] brief prose piece, 'History,' may serve as a sort of parable of what I've been up to in several of my books:
"Evening. I sat at the dining room table, working with tongs, sorting a shoebox of German stamps that had reached me a few months before from Switzerland after an Internet auction.
"I found dozens of glassines thickly packed with issues ranging from the 1850s to my own century's end. Below the glassines, too, were a few inches of loose stamps, used & mint. Thousands of Briefmarken in my horde. As I sorted, I was excited, alive. I realized that my American dollars had gone a long way.
"Sorting, I remembered as a boy spending much time with my stamps. But another childhood memory kept crowding in until I wondered why: hour after hour, I'm at my microscope, tilting its mirror to catch the indoor or outdoor light, eyedroppering pondwater onto slides, staring, surprised by the dimensions I can keep focusing into view. Just when I think I've located every organism in a particular drop, another amoeba or paramecium appears, or a grotesque & fearsome hydra that startles me.…
"Time passed quickly. I was tonging various stamps into various groups. I mounted some in my albums, placed others in stockbooks, others in new glassines that I arranged in numerical Michel catalogue order in my files. There were the shield varieties of the early confederation, & many Germanias of the early empire, and a great many of the inflation issues of the 1920s, but I am most interested in the issues of the Third Reich.
"I found several of the death's mask Reinhardt Heydrich, the 'Blond Beast' whose assassination led to the annihilation of a village in Czechoslovakia, Lidice, & most of its inhabitants. But of all the propaganda stamps from this period, the greatest quantity were those of variously-sized &-colored Hitler heads.…
"As I grew tired & my eyes began to cross, I hoped to at least organize all the stamps in this particular series, but it seemed no matter how long I sorted through the glassines & then the loose stamps at the bottom of the shoe box—all this history emanating from the center of Europe—there was always another right-facing profile of the Fuhrer. Each time he appeared, he seemed smug, enriddled, immortal, not at all surprised to have reached light again, to have made his way even to America. Each time he appeared, I realized I'd never be able to isolate & bring into focus all the animals in this pond."
William Heyen contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:
HOME
The most meaningful word in the language for me is "home." I want to feel at home here in Brockport, New York, where I've lived for most of my life, where, probably, I will live until I die. Maybe, I've thought, I don't quite feel at home because this is not Brooklyn, where I was born, or Suffolk County further out on Long Island, where I was raised. Maybe, just as birds return south when a precise angle of light triggers something in their brains that tells them it is time, I am yearning for a particular Long Island slant of light as the sun appears and disappears over those horizons three hundred miles away from me now. Maybe, to take this romantic idea even further, I do not feel completely at home because the planet itself has sailed several hundred miles a second away from where it was when I was born on the first of November, 1940, and I desire those gravities, those particular glimmery calibrations—after all, a seismograph is not a thousandth as sensitive as a human body-soul. We are as sensitive as Thoreau's Walden: "Study the dimpling circles which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies and trees.…Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty.…It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface." Following this observation, as though from wherever he is now, Thoreau muses: "We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it."
Wenzel was a childhood farmer-neighbor who has appeared often in my writing. You'll notice in this poem, "Sheep This Evening," my desire to be home again:
I live on a star
moving at great speed,
directionless, toward Virgo,but Wenzel's sheep
this evening, themselves their own cosmos,
poised in dumbness,
graze, nipthe growing grass short,
while I gaze Virgo,
its bright star Spica,
space I pray to curve from,as the animals' world persists,
their bleat-musics,
green-black grass
within the light's years.Lord, preserve
such fields, and I would be
among them when all matter
disappears, the bodilesssheep one evening not surprised,
their eyes revolving, light recording
that I've returned.
Maybe, the simple truth is that human beings do not feel and are not meant to feel completely at home, wherever they are in the world, no matter how long they live in a particular place. Home, maybe, is with God, to whom/into which we shall return, and pangs of discontent, restlessness, displacement are reminders of this. Maybe.
(I realize that my word "maybe" is the act of poetry itself, the spider-soul flinging out filament, filament until, if it ever does, Walt Whitman's ductile anchor holds.)
Yesterday, again, bicycling on a perfect July morning through Brockport's side streets on the way to the college gym where I'd play basketball with friends as I have for twenty years, I felt anxiety building in me, that hollow space expanding beneath breastbone, and for no reason that I could locate. My wife and children are safe and happy, I have no money problems, I enjoy my job, I've been managing to write new poems, I have a month of vacation left. But I found myself again, as I bicycled the maple-shaded streets of this western New York Erie Canal village, wanting to hide, as though I didn't belong here, as though I were an interloper. I find myself, often, skulking about, ducking around corners, avoiding even friends on purpose. Part of this has to do with my shyness, certainly, which might or might not have its own reasons. (I've read just recently that shyness might actually be genetic.) But there must be more to it than this.
Maybe, I've told myself, home is not a place, but is a person, and for me home is Han, my wife of twenty-six years, my dear friend, and the woman I love and need in all ways. And it is true that when I am with her I feel "centered"—a word I've taken from May Sarton—grounded, at home. Sometimes, "home" alone, I find myself acting strangely, closing curtains, jumping when the phone rings and then not answering it. When Han is home, I feel much more at ease, let the light in, unlock the doors, even answer the phone cheerfully.
In his poem "Temporary Facts" William Stafford rhymes the words "elm" and "home." For me, from the perspective of my own Brockport acre on which elms are still dying from blight, this is the deepest, most poignant rhyme I know, the "m" sound of blissful satisfaction, the knowledge of loss at the same time implicit, all coming together as Stafford's speaker remembers an Agnes from his boyhood: "On spellbound evenings you call your brother home, / coming toward the streetlight, through shadows of the elm." And in one of my own poems from Long Island Light (1979) called "The Elm's Home," written, maybe, before I knew Stafford's, I look up
into the elm and hear each leaf
whisper in my own breath, welcome
home, this is your home,
welcome home.
Well, come home. Well come, home. Welcome home. So be it, I pray, in the end.
Maybe I am too lucky, too fortunate, make too much money for simply reading and writing and studying with young people, and feel guilty about this, so slant in and out of my life and do not feel at home. Or maybe my equilibrium is uncertain and doom builds in me because our planet loses its ability to sustain life as we rain poisons on our food crops and oceans, as the air we breathe darkens, as the world's population increases by eighty million a year while in the United States alone each year one million acres of farmland go the way of asphalt and mall. Maybe the inevitable catastrophes to come keep me ducking into corners, not wanting to go on witnessing, not wanting to go on deluding myself that all is well because Brockport itself seems on the surface so healthy. When I see the ignorance and stupidity around me—neighbors still spraying chemicals on their lawns as though chicory were criminal—when I see that some nations will not stop slaughtering whales, that we seem bound and determined not to develop solar energy until our last greedy impulse makes the last dime on the last drop of oil (and my internal litany goes on and on, day and dream), then what else can sanity do to protect itself but hide out, live obliquely, consolidate consoling intuitions of the transcendental while closing the curtains?
In "The Snapper," first collected in Noise in the Trees (1974), I say of the title creature that he is "the pond's old father, its brain / and dark, permanent presence." At the end of my poem, "He rises: mud swirls / and blooms, lilies bob, / water washes / his moss-humped back where, buried / deep in his sweet flesh, the pond ebbs / and flows its sure, slow heart." Water and snapper seem to be one body in that early poem. In this more recent one from The City Parables (1980), the old romantic dream of natural harmony gives way to fear and prophecy.
The Host
In the dying pond,
under an oilspilled rainbow where
cement clumped, cans rusted, and slick tires
glinted their whitewall irises,
at the edge where liquid congealed,
a lump of mud shifted.
I knew what it was,
and knelt to poke it with a wire
from the saddest mattress in the world.Maybe a month out of its rubbery egg,
the young snapper hid,
or tried to, drew back its head,
but algae-scum outlined its oval shell,
its ridged chine diminished
toward its tail,
and I lifted the turtle
into the air, its jaws open,
its crooked neck unfolding upward.It twisted, could not reach me.
I found out its soft, small undershell where,
already, a leech lodged
beneath its left hindleg, sucking
some of whatever blood
its host could filter from the pond.
They would grow together, if the snapper lived.
Its yellow eyes insisted it would.
I gave it back to the oil sludgewhere it was born, and watched it
bury itself, in time, and disappear …
I'd like to leave it living there,
but churned slime above it blurs, burns,
bursts into black glare, every atom
of chemical water, rust residue, human vomit
shining in deathlight. The snapper's
bleached shell ascends the 21st century,
empty, beyond illusion.
Maybe, though, something else is part of my frequent feeling of incompletion and anxiety, of being on the edge of homelessness. Just this week I read a strong and moving book by Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. She quotes an Israeli psychiatrist who sums up much of what she herself came to discover: "The trauma of the Nazi concentration camps is reexperienced in the lives of the children and even the grandchildren of camp survivors." I am not Jewish, my parents did not experience cattle cars or concentration camps ("only those with blue / numbers along their wrists / can truly imagine," I say in "The Numinous"), but Epstein's book has made me realize that I, too, the son of German immigrants who settled in America before World War II, who in their own ways had to diminish themselves within the increasingly hostile community around them—they'll never forget the swastikas painted on their house in Woodhaven (they'd sailed to this country from another "haven," Bremerhaven)—I, too, bear their fears into the future. They know that what happened in Europe could happen in America—runaway inflation and unemployment, hunger, madness, war, and holocaust beyond our imaginations. Within my mother, especially, there has always been an undersong of almost debilitating anticipation and nervousness, and I seem, by family osmosis, to have inherited this.
Many of the children of survivors in Epstein's book heard their parents' stories, when their parents did speak, again and again, but for a complex of reasons could not/would not remember. This has been true of me, and was one reason I decided to interview my mother and father. In 1982 I recorded them for several hours, and have just this summer, six years later, finished transcribing these interviews. I've been dwelling on them, looking up between sentences and trying to feel my way into them.
My father, Henry Jurgen Heyen, was born on May 20, 1910, in his grandmother's house at Walle, a small town northeast of Aurich, which is north of Bremerhaven on Germany's North Sea coast. His father drowned at twenty-six at the port of Emden in 1915, not as a fisherman as I say in my poem "Stories" in Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (1984)—was it fortunate for me and my poem that I didn't know better at the time?—but as a sailor in the German navy.
My father served his apprenticeship as cabinet maker, but there were no jobs, and his stepfather, who worked for North German Lloyd, helped connect him with someone in America who would vouch for him. He arrived on the Stuttgart, after a two-week voyage, on March 26, 1929, at the Christopher Street pier in New York, where a man by the name of August Hermann was supposed to meet him. After a time, all others left the pier. My father, eighteen years old with no English and only a few bucks in his pocket in this new world, waited and waited, but August Hermann did not show up. My heart still goes out to that boy sitting alone on that pier thousands of miles from home. And to the young man who, in 1929 when the Depression hit and he lost his job, "took," as he says, "a little satchel with tools and I walked along Third Avenue, downtown New York, where you had a series of antique-furniture stores, and I knocked on the doors, and I asked if they had any work to do, and I landed a few little jobs that way, just repairing some furniture, or changing some furniture, maybe making a chest of drawers out of a cabinet …"
My mother, Wilhelmine Auguste Else Wörmke, was born August 1, 1914—all Bremerhaven assembled in the city square to hear news of the war that began that day. Her father, a streetcar conductor, would later escape from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, a story "he loved to talk about," my mother says. (My father had no father to hear stories from. I have been both fathers to my children, sometimes there to tell stories, sometimes distanced within the writing always going on in my mind.)
My mother followed her two older sisters to America when she was twenty, though her father did not want her to leave home: "same houses as here, same streets, what do you think America is, a gold mine? …" About two years later, after working as live-in maid and baby-sitter, she met my father, and about six months after that, they waited at the city hall in Brooklyn to be married. Guess what? The same man who was to meet my father at the pier, who was this day in 1937 to serve as witness to the marriage, again didn't show up.
By 1941 my father was a foreman at Bethlehem Steel, overlooking crews that refitted liberty ships into hospital ships. When I listen to his proud voice as he tells of how he put together melting-pot work crews to wage war against the "home" countries, I hear America singing: "The old-timers in Bethlehem Steel in that yard had been there during the First World War and this was the Second World War. They were all seniors, senior citizens, all old guys, very old guys, I think the youngest guy was the foreman himself and he was over sixty. And there I came in and all the young guys and I picked them off the boats as they came in because they hired everybody. The boss told me go on the ships, he says, we're getting in seven-eight hundred carpenters this week, go on the various ships and look around. I said okay. He gave me a free hand to hire whoever I felt, and I saw a Dutchman here with a nice cabinetmaker's toolbox and another one there with a toolbox that was dovetailed, so I got Little Joe and John Burgess and Ernst Berg and a few of these Dutchmen, and I got Lisjack, the one who lives in Buffalo, who came to your wedding, and that's how I got them, one after the other until I had—a few Italians of course and other nationalities—but I got a bunch together, boy …"
My mother was at home in Woodhaven, raising my older brother, Werner, and me; keeping my father in some sort of line when he drank and gambled too much; preparing hot meals of kale, spaghetti, beef, sauerkraut three times a day even in one hundred degree weather. She remembers the oak bedroom set my father made in his spare time at Bethlehem Steel and brought home. And she especially remembers, "He worked Sundays, too. Ach, he worked all the time. I was always alone."
There are stories inside all these family stories, of course. My father's two brothers were killed during World War II on the German side, one a hapless apolitical foot soldier who died in Holland the year I was born and for whom I was named; the other a rabid Nazi ("brainwashed," to use my father's word for him) who was shot down over Russia, whose name appears nowhere further down the family tree. "Stories" ends:
Wilhelm was killed in Holland,
Hermann over Russia. The North Sea's spawn
did not miss a rhythm when Berlin
burned to the ground.What if the world is filled with stories?—
we hear only a few, live fewer,
and most that we live or hear
solve nothing, lead nowhere; but the spruceappears again, rooted in dreamed tears,
yes, each branch, each needle
its own true story, yours,
mine, ours to tell.
The spruce of that poem is one I remember from our property in Nesconset, Suffolk County. After the war my parents owned a bar in Jamaica, then one in Hauppauge, and then my father went back to his trade, built a woodworking shop behind the several acres they bought in undeveloped Nesconset, fifty miles east of New York City. I have shards of memories from Woodhaven (a street, a green fence and gate) and Jamaica (the ski-ball machine in the bar, the flight of dark stairs up to the apartment where we lived, a vacant lot across the street), more substantial memories from Hauppauge (riding my first two-wheeler on Route 111, gathering buckets of box turtles at a pond, finding a litter of kittens in a hayloft, seeing my father conked out at midday from the night before, sitting in a first-or second-grade schoolroom and waiting in a parking lot for the bus that would take me home—on one of these bus trips, we passed a dark and swampy area of which I still dream), but when I see myself as a child it's in Nesconset, where I came to consciousness, to personality.
My best friend was Ronny Patac. I was a grade ahead of him later on when I skipped the fifth, but we were the same age. He lived on Lake Avenue, which was across Gibbs Pond Road and across the Terliks' field. He had a playhouse under oaks and within the rows of azaleas and rhododendrons and Easter flowers his folks raised for Mrs. Patac's brother who was a florist in nearby Saint James, and for the estate—somewhere in Nissequogue, I think—for which Mr. Patac worked on weekends when he didn't work for Grummanns. The Patacs treated me like a second son. They had been born in this country, but often spoke Polish, and I heard that language almost as often as I heard my parents' German. Over the years, I went on dozens of day-long picnics with them to various Island parks, did my first clamming with Mr. Patac and Ronny, and sometimes when I biked or ran across the field to their house and Ronny and his father were away, I'd talk with Mrs. Patac. Glad to have company, she'd come out and sit on their back cement steps. A short woman, she must have weighed two hundred pounds. She always kept her straight brown hair under a babushka, and usually wore tent dresses that she herself made, sometimes out of flour sacks. As time went by, I cared for her more and more, her laughing gap-toothed face. She became beautiful to me. She told me stories that I've since forgotten, but I can still hear her voice.
I remember when the Patacs had their first indoor toilet installed in their one-bedroom home. This was maybe just after mid-century. I'm sure that my generation will be the last one in this country to remember outhouses. Or seeing television for the first time. I remember the late winter afternoon when our first set was delivered, a ten-inch black-and-white Philco. The service man focussed in on the test pattern of crosses over circles, then switched channels and, magically, Howdy Doody appeared. The first film our family watched was a Charlie Chan mystery. I can still see us in our darkened living room. My mother was very happy to be at home that evening. She brought us carrot sticks and ice cream.
There was no art or music or high "culture" in our home. I never saw either one of my parents read a book. For them, life was a serious affair of getting and spending, of consolidating what we had, and of gaining security in the booming Long Island economy. My father built another shop, this one on the Jericho Turnpike. Years later, he moved Nesconset Woodworking right to the center of Smithtown, where walk-in business helped him once and for all get out of debt and set himself up for retirement. But even though my father's business prospered there, people carrying out chairs and tables and cabinets as fast as his crew could make them or as fast as he could order them from mills down in Virginia and the Carolinas, not one of his four sons showed any interest in taking over the business from him.
Because of Mr. Patac, I thought that someday I'd be a nurseryman. I planted flower beds at home along our garage. I kept my eyes and ears open at our place and at Wenzels' and got to know the living things, their colors and edges and textures and names, called carnation, phlox, marigold, pansy, nasturtium, petunia, peony, black-eyed Susan, rose, rose of Sharon, pine, goldenrod, tiger lily, calla lily, lily of the valley, sweet William, tulip, crocus, hyacinth, daffodil, dandelion, dogwood, clover, hollyhock, grape, pear, apple, maple, catalpa, willow, moss, honeysuckle, oak, cherry, huckleberry, raspberry, blackberry, strawberry, gooseberry, daisy, iris, fern, and forsythia, by the time I was nine or ten. I got to know vegetables, moles and mice and the rats that fought Wenzel's terrier, insects, birds, the fish and newts and leeches and turtles and snakes (at one time I had a half-dozen different kinds of snakes, for which my father built me wire-screened cages) and other residents of the freshwater ponds and Lake Ronkonkoma just a few miles away and the saltwater Sound just six or seven miles away. I had a subscription to Nature magazine, read books on nature, my mother called me "Nature Boy." Werner raised rabbits and pigeons. I had a microscope and spent hours alone in my room fathoming drops of pond water—it was amazing that I could look until I thought I'd seen everything, but then a monster would appear from another dimension from under a miniscule fragment of leaf or cells of algae. I got to know the sheep and chickens that Wenzel raised and slaughtered for market, the spectacular—at least the males were spectacular—golden ring-necked pheasants he raised mainly for the iridescence that flashed from them between coops and behind the crossbeams from which he hung bouquets of chickens upside down to cut their throats. Later, beginning high school at thirteen, I'd get caught up in sports, in my first infatuations, in rock and roll, but during those first years in Nesconset my mind ramified with such Island profusion that even now I can't begin to surround it all. During the winters, I fingered my shell and rock collections and stared into my several tanks of tropical fish. I raised coleus plants and small cacti in my room: it amazed me how, when I pinched them back, they would grow new shoots and limbs, just like starfish. Now, in my late forties, I try to stay as wide-eyed as I was then, try to see so that I do not injure the world by forgetting the myriad miracle it is. William Wordsworth in the meditative blank verse of "The Prelude," Whitman in the conversational free verse of "There Was a Child Went Forth" and "Song of Myself" and "This Compost," and Theodore Roethke in his beautifully modulated "North American Sequence" are the three poets—Rilke, also a poet of things, is too artificial for my sensibility—who give me the most pleasure, who best capture for me the vibrations of nature within the poet's brain and heart and the occasional soulful conjunctioning of both that is the moment of poetry itself, the poetry of poetry.
But I was not all sweetness and delight. I was a murderer, too, killed hundreds of birds with my BB gun, shot squirrels with my. 22, killed stray cats, gathered thousands of baby toads and frogs and catfish and turtles that ended up dying in my leaky backyard makeshift pools when I turned off the hose and left to play baseball or to play pinball at Bertino's Sugar Bowl a quarter-mile up the road. As most young boys are, I was stupid and selfish, a marauder, took things for granted. Now, I hesitate to fish, or even to kill insects, though I do: couldn't, I keep wondering, God's creation survive without mosquitos? (A Greek friend told me, as I keep telling myself, spiders in the house are lucky, but I still squash them.) Wendell Berry discusses "kindly use" of the land, of our whole cosmos, as our salvation, and I try to make this Brockport acre (or at least leave it alone so that it can become) a place that balances the scales of my life. All winter now I feed the same black-capped chickadees that I used to shoot. They were so easy to kill: I could drop one out of the row of pines between the Wenzels' property and ours, and its companions would remain nearby until I ended their singing, too. Even when I felt sick at heart when several corpses lay under the pines, I'd be back the next day and kill more of them. I liked them, but shot them anyway. Now, many chickadees have been born on this acre. Each spring, I hear the young ones in their annual nest just fifteen feet away from where I write in this eight-by-twelve-foot cabin at the back of our property. They mean, I tell myself, that I'm forgiven. There's a line in the seventh section of my book-length poem The Chestnut Rain (1986) which mentions "the black-capped chickadee's ministry." It's a playful line, as the blackcap is a playful and trusting creature. Now, I try to justify that trust, and in turn hope to trust you as reader not to end my life as I run my tongue along this sentimental razor of memory and poetry, as I often try to do.
I suppose I know more about sports than I know about anything else. Maybe, knowing so much, I haven't had to write on this theme to try to understand. I've a few sports poems—"The Stadium" and "Mantle" have been reprinted often—including this recent one which was published in America, a Jesuit magazine, and lately reprinted during football season in Together, an ecumenical newsletter distributed to some sixty congregations in Alaska and four other states. I like to think that a few bored kids yawning in their pews picked it up and passed time with it during the sermon.
Until the Next Time
If Jesus played football,
he'd be an end.
He'd lope out under the long, impossible passes,
cradle them in his arms,
or, if he had to, dive for them, his fingers
owning that space
between ball and ground.
On short routes, his sprints, feints
and precise cuts
would fake the defense out of their cleats;
on his feet, still running,
in a moment of communion
he'd knock off their helmets
with a stiff arm.
Once in for six,
he'd spike the old pigskin.
In that spot would sprout a rose,
or a sunflower.
By the time time ran out,
both end zones would bloom with roses and
sunflowers
where we would wait for him.
After his shower, he'd appear to us
to pose with us for pictures by his side.
He'd ask us home for supper.
We'd glide from the stadium together,
until the next time—
happy, undefeated, unafraid—
if Jesus played football.
And I've written, just over the past few years, about twenty short stories that have sports themes. But, for now, only the remaining arc of this paragraph to note something I would someday like to flesh out in a book, but probably won't. "Coming or going / always at home"—this little Zen poem of enlightenment apprehends that centeredness I spoke of, and I've realized these past several years that I feel always at home in a gym. Basketball, especially, which I've played since I was five or six (long hours by myself in the Nesconset schoolyard, practicing, and then years of pickup games, and then years of organized ball) and which I still play three times a week over the noon-hour, connects me with my childhood, with my childhood body, with my fearful years of high school when my only identity and sense of self-worth came from sports, with the thousand practices and hundred games in college, the years of town-team ball. When, now, I dress to play, tighten my knee brace, walk into the gym, I close my eyes, inhale, and feel at one with the person I am, have always been. Eternity is now say the mystics. Playing basketball, thoughtlessly thinking, I sometimes know and feel what this means. It is as though that boy I was forty years ago always knew the man he would become, and vice versa. Playing basketball I know, too, that I am the father of that child, and that I have always been all ages at once … I walk into the gym. I walk to where my friends are warming up. We begin to talk, to bullshit, to shoot baskets. We divide up into shirts and skins and begin to play. Rhythms of muscle memory. Sweat and pleasurable strain and the basketball equivalent of what Richard Hugo described as the "ghost bearing of old sluggers." I try to play fast and slow at the same time, the way Sam Fathers in William Faulkner's "The Old People" tells Ike McCaslin to shoot, the way Eugen Herrigel in Zen in the Art of Archery tries to release his arrows, the way Sadaharu Oh in Zen in the Art of Baseball tries to hit—he needed an eye in his hip, he was told. The way language images well up in the mind, and the way good sentences are released. I know, when writing or when playing basketball, I need to see with my whole body. For the next hour, running, paying no attention to anything and yet concentrating at the same time, coming and going within the astral plane of the court, I'll be at home.
A few years ago Han and I drove through Springville, south of Buffalo, where I'd taught a year of junior high school after graduating from SUNY-Brockport in 1961. I wanted to see my old school, maybe sit in my classroom—second story? third?—beside the huge maples. But I couldn't find the school, even though I'd thought I knew its street, its exact place. Finally, we walked across a patch of lawn to a plaque to learn that the venerable Griffith Institute had been torn down years before. It may be that the emotions I felt at that moment are often the emotions of my poems.
Hannelore Irene Greiner and I were married in 1962. She was born in Berlin a few years before her father was captured at Stalingrad and died in a war camp in the Urals. Her mother fled Berlin just before the Russian army broke in. A few years later she married an American soldier mainly, I believe, to reach the States with Han and her two brothers. They arrived when Han was eight. They found an apartment in Dunkirk, in western New York, and then managed to buy a farmhouse in nearby Nashville. Han's mother and stepfather worked as unregistered nurses in mental institutions. Han's mother died in 1982 after being in a coma for months. A few years ago Drachowski married a much-younger Yugoslavian woman he'd met only two weeks before, whose language he couldn't speak, a woman who again mainly wanted citizenship from him. Han and her brothers were suddenly completely disinherited, even from such things as their mother's papers and their childhood toys. The woman told us that since she was going to bed with Drachowski, she deserved and wanted everything.
Drachowski and his stepchildren were never close. In fact, it grew much worse than that. Han has sometimes had a hard time breaking emotionally with the only father she ever knew, as insensitive and even brutal as he often was. From the dead German soldier she at least has a Meissen brooch he gave to her when she was an infant, imagining her, with love, as a young woman. There is too much to tell in all this, too much that I find myself not wanting to call up, so won't, at least not now. For twenty years I've kept a diary-journal. Let my journal remember family misery, the stories that never seem to resolve themselves or to end.
Depth of Field, my first book of poems, most of which I wrote while teaching for two years at SUNY College at Cortland between graduate degrees or while in graduate school at Ohio University in Athens—I finished the Ph.D., dissertation on Roethke, in 1967—was published in 1970. Since I'm a book collector and one of the writers I collect, as though I didn't know him, is William Heyen, I still have several copies pristine in their original shrink-wrap. These copies remind me of the best poems in the book, ones that seem to preserve their words as petrified wood preserves its grain. I can respect them, but can't quite befriend them. They came into their crafted beings as objects almost apart from me. The title poem is representative:
The dew's weight is imperceptible
that gathers like a haze on the dark grass
and darkens imperceptibly the whorl
of threads in which the widow curls to passher night. Now the first shaft of sunlight
steers among the blades, touches and drums
taut by drying the edge of her vapor-white
web, now free to the low wind that strumsit alive. Unraveling her legs, hearing
her net sing the music of a dying fly
or violin of a gnat's feeble wing,
she rises to focus her hundreds of cells of eyeupon her field. And yet, within her sharp
geometry of sight, she is not angling
deep enough, or high. It is the harp
of the curved sun that orchestrates the morning.
To write such poems, and others even tighter, more literary, and more pyrotechnical, I often stayed up all night drinking coffee, smoking, trying to become a writer. A poem such as "Depth of Field" might have taken a hundred drafts. I have no regrets. I learned how slippery language is, how even a slightly different rhythm or line break creates different thoughts, how I wanted simultaneously to dominate the poem and to give it its own say so that it would be able to go on suffusing meanings within itself or to a listener forever. I wanted a cut-glass perfection, a master engraver's control. I wanted my poem, as my life was not, to be invulnerable. I was anxious about school, marriage, our two children born in Athens, getting a job, the Vietnam draft, finding home, but I wanted my poems to be assured, to speak a speech that couldn't be interrupted or laughed at. I wanted my poems to be Poetry. During those years, I learned—much of my learning, of course, was not conscious, and I understand better now what I was up to then—that the writing itself, the semitrance, the long-staring, the mantralike repetitions I went through as I wrote the same phrases over and over in different contexts, the process, helped me find my balance, helped me to compose myself (in the several senses of this phrase). The act of writing was as strenuous as running, the concentration required sometimes made me feel as though a smoky flamethrower had been touched off in my skull. With luck and perseverance, the poem, in the end, burned clean.
It was in Athens that I first came into contact with people who wrote and published poetry, stories, novels, criticism. My first summer there—this was in 1961, the year before Han and I were married—a Brockport professor who happened to be teaching at Ohio University invited me to meet a friend of his, Jesse Stuart, the first writer I ever heard read. I'd bought The Thread That Runs So True, a touching autobiographical book that should be required reading for prospective teachers, and the Kentucky author inscribed it to me. (I now have thousands of inscribed books, but that was the first.) Later on, in 1966 or 1967, James Dickey read in Athens. I didn't meet him, sat far in the back of the auditorium, reminded myself no doubt that I had long-range plans to become a poet, that this would take me at least as much hard work as it had taken me at Brockport to become a first-team all-American center halfback in soccer. The way to poetry, however, was much more uncertain and mysterious to me. I'd pass Daniel Keyes, author of Flowers for Algernon, and Walter Tevis, author of The Hustler, in Ellis Hall. David Madden swept in and out. I had classes from Hollis Summers, Jack Matthews, and Richard Purdum, a quiet and deeply thoughtful teacher about whom I've written in my memoir Noise in the Trees. He killed himself the year after I left graduate school. Here's a recent poem, written quickly but twenty years in the making:
Waterhook
My dead teacher, a suicide, as a boy in Michigan:
the trees so green they seemed created instant
by instant by his own wonder, river so near to the real …Here, now, as he taught me to know, somehow,
he's there again, if there is a there, there.
He hooks a bullhead, whiskered lunker so blackI create it now, imploded star—
the exact location of his soul—
to hook this to to fathom the baffling waters.(for Richard Purdum)
Among fellow students, Mark McCloskey was publishing, as was Stephen Parker. Benjamin Franklin IV was a lively spirit. Barry Leeds would go on to publish books on Norman Mailer and Ken Kesey. He and the poets Stanley Plumly and Anthony Piccione are still friends from those Athens years, as is Patricia Goedicke, who with a friend edited a small magazine called Page. Each issue was just a page or two, and you could buy it for a nickel or dime at the local bookstores. They accepted two of my poems, and I've never been more excited to see something of mine in print, unless it was to see a poem from Prairie Schooner not only appear in Best Poems of 1965, but win the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award first prize of three hundred dollars, better poems by Dickey and Richard Wilbur being ranked second and third. I lost sleep over my luck. Summers and Matthews also had poems in that volume, so they saw my poem and were proud of me. From that point on, I felt as though the English faculty knew me. It was a good feeling. While still in graduate school, I had other acceptances from Poetry, the Southern Review, Western Humanities Review, Wormwood Review, Poetry Northwest, the American Scholar, and other little magazines. (I even coauthored, with my friend Bill McTaggart, What Happens in Fort Lauderdale, a soft-porn pseudonymous piece of trash excerpted in Evergreen Review and published by Grove Press/Zebra Books that is now so rare I don't have to worry about your finding a copy.) I wanted to belong, wanted to be at home among those lights in Athens who were all far ahead of me. Writing and publishing helped. The day he received a boxful, Jack Matthews inscribed and gave to me a copy of his novel Hangar Stout, Awake!: "For Bill Heyen, with great esteem & high good hopes for his continued success with the word." That rare man is still inscribing his books to me, and I'm thankful I've had some of my own to send to him.
I should point out that this community was there at Ohio University before the twentyfold proliferation of creative-writing programs across the country. I was studying literature, took only one creative-writing course. But this was a place where many of us, faculty and students, had it in our minds to make our own poems and fictions, if we could.
During the 1966 Christmas break, I drove the hundred miles from Nashville, New York, where we were staying with Han's mother—I've always thought of it as her place, not her husband's—to Brockport to interview for a job. There were several openings, and my snowy drive back to Han and the children was a happy one. We'd be moving to Brockport the following fall. Han and I would be returning to the place where we'd met, the place about which, as I'd say in a poem years later, "We know so much we never have to think of." All I had to do first was to finish my dissertation by the end of the summer. I did. (Its often heavy-handed three sections were later published in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, John Berryman Studies, and the Minnesota Review.) At graduation in August, I bent my head and received the Ph.D. hood. Have I felt like an imposter ever since, never to be at home among scholars? In any case, Han and I took out a loan, loaded all our possessions and our son and daughter into our old red Dodge station wagon, and headed back to our home state and school.
In Brockport, we rented a house for two years, and then (thanks to a loan from my parents, a couple good poker wins, and a summer writing grant) managed to put a down payment on our home at 142 Frazier Street where I have placed myself on this. 95 of an acre as few of my poet friends have placed themselves. I've had opportunities for more prestigious jobs at more prestigious universities, but I know that in this floating world this small property of house, trees, lawns, cabin within this village, this woof and warp of generations of Brockport friends, is crucial to me. More and more, I'm reluctant to leave this acre for any length of time. Whenever I find myself at an airport, I think I must be crazy.
Those first years back in Brockport, my anger and disgust with the undeclared war in Vietnam deepened. I took part in local protest marches, wrote antiwar poems including, I remember, one about our increasing troop commitment, "Good Money after Bad," that appeared in the Nation. I remember leaving a party one evening with the late John Logan—a party thrown, in fact, by Michael Waters, a Brockport student at the time—and with John speaking and reading to students on the college mall. I told them they would be victims if they submitted to the draft. But I did not translate my feelings into proper action, did not stop paying my taxes, as I probably should have (though now I am cynical enough to know that I'd spend my life in jail if I did not pay taxes each time I felt betrayed by our government's policies). I was building my academic career, writing and publishing poems, essays, reviews, applying for grants, finishing Depth of Field. And I was beginning to think about and write about Long Island, which would be the subject of my second book, Noise in the Trees: Poems and a Memoir (1974), five years later expanded to Long Island Light, a book I hope to revise and expand again.
For several years, too, I'd been working on poems about World War II, the Holocaust, the Third Reich. By 1971, when I began a Fulbright year in Germany with Han and the children, I'd written about half the poems that were to appear in The Swastika Poems (1977), but hadn't thought consciously about making a book of that work. The purpose of poetry was to praise, I thought, to give hope, to affirm. What possible good would a book of these other poems do anyone? These poems seemed filled with unrelieved, insoluble darkness. But, after a dream, or after a walk in the German woods, or after reading another book on Hitler or by a survivor, I'd write another poem, sometimes in one rush, sometimes after many drafts. Back at Brockport, I sporadically continued reworking these poems and writing others. I began to see that they were stronger than my Vietnam poems. I remember that I was very worried about some of them, wondered if I should have written them, wondered what they were, wondered if demonic impulses of mine were down inside them despite my conscious effort to control them and know them—and I knew/know that the poetry of a poem cannot lie, however much the conscious mind and will attempt to manipulate. I began to shuffle the poems into various orders and to see various possibilities. And then I discovered an essay by Susan Sontag that I felt allowed me to publish a book of these materials. In her essay on Rolf Hochhuth's controversial play The Deputy, Sontag mentions "the moral function of remembering." Such remembering, she says, "cuts across the different worlds of knowledge, action, and art." Whatever my many motives, I was trying to remember. And at the same time that I was straining to be responsible, I suppose I sensed that I had to let my poems breathe, had to allow them their own psychic life (Emerson says that he does not believe that he has the devil within him, but would have to speak from the devil, then, if that be the case, rather than censor himself), or they would themselves be victims of an order and a reason that would leave them as dead as the innocent slaughtered by the Einsatzgrup pen.
As The Swastika Poems was about to appear, and when I thought I was done writing such poems, I had a dream and wrote "The Children":
I do not think we can save them.
I remember, within my dream, repeating
I do not think we can save them.
But our cars follow one another
over the cobblestones. Our dim
headlamps, yellow in fog, brush past,
at the center of a market square,
its cathedral's great arched doors.
I know, now, this is a city
in Germany, two years after the Crystal Night. I think ahead
to the hospital, the children.
I do not think we can save them.Inside this dream,
in a crystal dashboard vase,
one long-stemmed rose unfolds
strata of soft red light.
Its petals fall, tears, small
flames. I cup my palm to hold them,
and my palm fills to its brim,
will overflow.
Is this the secret, then? …
Now I must spill the petal light, and drive.We are here, in front of the hospital,
our engines murmuring. Inside,
I carry a child under each arm,
down stairs, out to my car.
One's right eyeball hangs
on its cheek on threads of nerve and tendon,
but he still smiles, and I love him.
The other has lost her chin—
I can see straight down her throat
to where her heart beats black-red, black-red.
I do not think we can save them.I am the last driver in this procession.
Many children huddle in my car.
We have left the city. Our lights
tunnel the fog beneath arches of linden,
toward Bremerhaven, toward
the western shore.
I do not think we can save them.
This time, at the thought, lights
whirl in my mirror, intense
fear, and the screams of sirens.
I begin to cry, for myself, for the children.
A voice in my dream says
this was the midnight you were born …Later, something brutal happened, of course,
but as to this life I had to, I woke,
and cannot, or will not, remember.
But the children, of course, were murdered,
their graves lost, their names lost,
even those two faces lost to me. Still,
this morning, inside the engine of my body,
for once, as I wept and breathed deep,
relief, waves of relief, as though the dreamedrose would spill its petals forever.
I prayed thanks. For one night, at least,
I tried to save the children,
to keep them safe in my own body,
and knew I would again. Amen.
I realized that maybe this was the most optimistic poem I'd ever written. It does not veer from the reality of Nazi programs that exterminated children considered subhuman and worthless—"Later, something brutal happened, of course"—but its speaker still says he tried, and would try again, to rescue the dead. Otherwise in my Holocaust poems my speaker is confused ("Did I close those doors / or did I die?"). Here, for once, at last—and true to at least this dream—a flicker of light. Other poems flickered ("The Halo," "The Vapor"). I was anxious to add them to my book. I revised and expanded The Swastika Poems, changed the book's title to Erika: Poems of the Holocaust. Since 1984 when Erika appeared, I've written other such poems, and I hope to revise and expand this book, too, one of these years.
Now, for better or worse, I'm not as afraid of such poems when they come to me as I once was, even when they rave and get away from me, as does the long "Poem Touching the Gestapo." But I want to remember how uncertain I was about what I'd done, how afraid I was that I'd done something gauche, unconscionable, self-serving, evil. As Elie Wiesel has said in so many ways, the subject of the Holocaust is sacred, and must be approached fearfully. And I want to remember how it was that poets understood, how they helped me. I first read any of these poems at the Allendale Poetry Festival in Michigan in July of 1975. I remember a full auditorium, almost pitch black. I was listening hard to myself, trying to stay within the poems, but I could hear sighs and weeping from in front of me. Then someone yelled, "He's a Nazi," and clattered out, willfully misunderstanding even "Erika," a prose piece about a visit to Belsen. Shaken, I read more poems. When I was done, silence. Then, a silhouette rose from a seat on the aisle against the back wall. I knew that it was James Wright. He clapped, slowly, solemnly. He allowed the poems to exist. It seemed that everyone else stood to do the same. And when, two years later, I received from Vanguard Press statements they'd gotten from poets to whom they'd sent proofs of The Swastika Poems—Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, David Ignatow, William Meredith—I read them and wept. Gratitude and relief.
Later, there were many reviews. A few were negative, but only one of these seemed to me gratuitously nasty, a Chicago Review reviewer quoting lines from "Two Relations" for example and saying they were badly written, ignoring the fact that these lines were taken directly from a source identified in a note. I'm glad I didn't see this review until ten years after it appeared, by which time other writers (Anthony Hecht, Hayden Carruth, Vince Clemente, Sandra McPherson, Cynthia Ozick, Norbert Krapf, Harry James Cargas, Karl Shapiro, and others) had spoken up for the poems, allowing them their precarious existence. Years later (by the luck of the draw, was it?) that same reviewer attacked The Chestnut Rain in the New York Times Book Review. Again, he did not once suspect his own ability to hear, or question his own assumptions, his own sense of what a poem must be and do, but bayonetted his way in. Only one other review of my work ever drew blood, a review in Poetry of Noise in the Trees by someone who had apparently never written any poetry, or anything else for that matter, himself.
By inspiration, luck, hard work, necessity, accident, you write a poem. You've spread your arms wide. You've said to a reader, hit me, take your best shot. You can work ten years on a book of poems, knowing full well in the end how some arrogant fool (I have myself been that fool) might try to take your work from you so that you will never be at home with it. Even though he has not been through the process, even though he cannot imagine how a poem might just already far in advance have laid up its stores, how a poem might just already have considered and dealt with and resolved within itself what will be his objections, he will not blink or stop for a thoughtful moment to question himself. But you will persist. You will read your own work over and over a hundred or a thousand times—no exaggeration here—until you feel and know it as best as you'll ever be able, until you know it is what you are, in its images, echoes, rhythms, yearnings, hesitancies, tides, contradictions, declarations, idiosyncrasies, balances, asymmetries. You dasn't (Mrs. Patac's word) be intimidated by those who are not among the roughs (Walt's word), who probably (not maybe), as I say in my poem "The New American Poetry" (TriQuarterly, number 59, 1984), were "born in the Ivy League, and inbred there," who "wait by their coffins in the parlor, applying rouge to Poe and Beau Brummell," who do "not hear the cheap and natural music of the cow" (Thoreau's point and image), who "wash their bands of subject matter," who do "not harvest thought, or associate with farmers," whose "city is not the city of pavement or taxis, business or bums," whose "emotions do not arise from sensible objects," who dwell "on absence and illusion, mirror refulgent flames," who do "not define, catalog, testify, or witness," who hold "models before the young of a skillful evasion, withering heartlessness" (MacLeish's argument). You will have done what you can do. You will release the work to do its own talking when you are not around, or even, should you plant your feet solidly enough in an increasingly psychotic world, when you are. Then, you'll start over again, in essential ways always a beginner.
September now, and classes have begun again. As always, I've finished only two or three of the six or eight summer writing projects I'd set up for myself. It's easy for me to read and daydream whole weeks away, I guess, but whether I'm lying to myself or have hold of something true to myself, I think I do get to the writing I should do. I mean that if I spent eight hours a day in my writing chair rather than an hour or three, the resulting poem or story wouldn't get done any sooner, wouldn't be any longer, or better. In general, I write in bursts after a matrix of language and feeling has been both firming up and agitating the swamp of the unconscious. When the time comes, I will find footing. The best description of poetic inspiration I know is by Max Rieser in his Analysis of Poetic Thinking (1969):
In the instant of creation the realistic efficiency of the consciousness of the poet is toned down. Musical images, symbolic sounds, flow in a rhythmical narcosis … There is a world of subjectively determined associations (similes and symbols), a pointedly sensuous, colorful psyche, … and a certain blunting of thought-activity.
In language that I could elaborate on into a book of my own experience with writing poetry over the past twenty-five years, Rieser continues:
A twilight-world evolves, a world of dim lights, a rhythmically moving world of visions, plastic images, similes, symbols, onomatopoetic effects. It is a world whose mode of association diverges from the customary one, a world in which the need for causal comprehension aimed at in the realistic-scientific exigency for the unveiling of the world recedes in face of the more primitive need for expression.
I have a section of American Literature II this semester with fifty students. About half of them are English majors, and about half of these will go on to be teachers. I see myself sitting out there in front of me. I began at Brockport as a sixteen-year-old physical-education major. (Because of my mediocre grades, I'd been turned down by the only other two colleges I'd applied to, but Brockport's soccer coach interviewed me in New York City—my high-school coach, Thad Mularz, had played for him—and that did it.) Two years later, for several reasons—I was afraid of an upcoming apparatus course, I realized I wanted to coach high-powered teams but not run gym classes the rest of my life, I knew there were few if any available teaching jobs in physical education, and maybe, just maybe, I sensed a different life cresting in me, a life of reading and writing—I switched to English education. As sappy and suspect as I sometimes seem to myself, I've never been sorry.
When I taught at Cortland, I supervised student teachers, drove out to a dozen rural high schools, and I can now picture my Brockport students teaching in those and in city schools, teaching in part by way of things that they have learned from me. But what, beyond information, do I have to give my students? What do I profess? What is the true subject matter? What have I given Bill, my son, who graduated from Cornell and is now an engineer at Kodak in Rochester? What have I given Kristen, my daughter, who graduated from Ithaca College and is herself an elementary-school music teacher in nearby Webster?
We begin the semester by reading and discussing two of the greatest poets who ever lived. What a blessing that we have them. Without Whitman and Dickinson, the nineteenth century in American poetry would seem like what Ezra Pound called a "blurry, messy" period. And beyond the things I've learned over twenty years to do so that a class develops and intensifies, beyond assigning my students a demanding full-semester writing project that will help them feel and think their way inside our texts, I try to keep in mind what my friend Walt declares and exemplifies, that "folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls." I try to keep in mind Allen Ginsberg's rock-bottom assumption: "There is a universal consciousness, folks." Great poetry has always been a ship, an icebreaker, keeping the channels open to the spirit-ocean. I try to keep in mind, studying literature with my students, living the quotidian in all ways, Stephen Spender's "those who were truly great / … remembered the soul's mysteries." In "The Poet" Emerson quotes Spenser—"For of the soul the body form doth take / And soul is form and doth the body make"—and then exclaims, "Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in the pleasant walks of critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world—there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety." I believe that I believe that "there is a there, there," and that our way to it is through the things of this world, the "dumb, beautiful ministers who wait, who always wait" as we break toward awareness.
But even our weather changes, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that temperatures will rise three to ten degrees over the next hundred years, that ocean levels will rise up to ten feet (they're probably underestimating), and I know we are losing the earth, that in a century or two, or sooner, there might be no human life on this planet. The oceans will be as dead as the Baltic Sea is revealed to be in the current Greenpeace. I trust myself in this bone-white realization because, in part, I know what I saw and felt, and what saw and felt me, as I waded those Island ponds when I was a boy, what sees and feels me now as I sit in this chair in this autumn cabin as leaves fall and as birds migrate through this acre. What I must give "all my sons," what I must myself become, is imagination itself. We suffer from some lack of perspective, some lack of balance that almost makes it seem as though we do not want to survive. The greatest poems and fictions tell all these truths, even if they tell them slant, and we need to learn, past the dulling habitual mindlessness of our works and days, to hear.
November. I've read over, again, what I've written. I like what I've done, despite all that is left out, and I seem to have said some things central to me. But I still have the feeling that the voice of this autobiographical piece is not quite mine. Maybe the problem is that I spend most of each day within a kind of dishevelment of language, daydreaming or thinking in fragments and tangles of thread, and that whenever I write in sentences and even semicoherent paragraphs I seem too clearly to be someone else invented for the occasion. I like to wear dungarees, flannel shirts, like to watch junk television in my old bathrobe with holes at the elbows, not in a satin smoking jacket.
This past week, a new book of my poems arrived in the mail. It's called Brockport, New York: Beginning with "And," and since once a book is past the proof stage I almost forget about it until it is published, it seemed to have appeared from nowhere. And since I try to distance myself from my poems, keeping them in my mind in the third person even if their speaker is an "I"—I do this in order to ask if they are complete within themselves and satisfy or if they or I have more to say about what they have to say—as I've been reading the book over, several times, I've managed to get inside and actually hear this Brockport resident who speaks these poems of his home. At one point, he imagines a visit to his village by "Brockport Sunflowers."
If they could walk, they would walk slowly.
They would shuffle onto our roads from their fields,
lally-gag into our village, sway on sidewalks,
dangle their silly and beautiful heads.
Sexless, they would not bow to women,
or shake men's hands with their leaves.
Desiring nothing but sunshine and water,
they'd peer into our shops with amazement.
Seeing themselves in windows, they'd know themselves holy.
They would love the children, and listen to them,
all day long, until the children were ready for bed.
As the evening star rose in the heavens,
they would nod goodbye to us, not having said a word,
and return, like walking haloes, to their fields.
This is an easygoing poem. In no hurry, unambitious, it proceeds at sunflower pace. The resident knows what is wrong, and here imagines, in effect, soul embodied in sunflowers. There seems to me to be much yearning in this poem, a yearning for a timeless and spiritual home.
I've another Brockport poem, one done since I put together the new collection. My resident, this time, enters more nearly the language-stream that I usually feel within me, the language of rhythm and place that keeps helping me know where I am, and where I am not, yet.
Parabola
I kneel at auction to a box of the woman's things who is
buried in Brockport's High Street cemetery I
walk there once a month or so summer winter they
rest in merged lilac-and maple-shadow snowlight these
whisperers villagers home to the place born from I
pick through spools of thread thumb address book then—she
must have been almost blind—silver-framed pair of her
half-mooned bifocals so thick I
close my eyes try them open up to her
fields woods beyond and all is the gray blur of her
nine decades' parabola here from which we
see too clearly for maybe five or fifty more years all
wanderers for now until we return to the same place with her.Summer/Fall 1988
POSTSCRIPT:
William Heyen contributed the following update to CA in 2004:
How could it be that my older brother, my childhood protector and lifelong friend, no longer exists? How could it possibly be that if I drove to Mountainhome, Pennsylvania, in the Poconos where he lived I would not find him in his home and be able to talk with him? Werner, a prodigious smoker, died of cancer on April 16, 2003. He was sixty-five. I'd seen him in his hospital bed in Scranton about two weeks before. I thought I'd see him at least once more. A line by John Berryman keeps ringing in me: "All the bells say: too late."
My wife and I had spent April 14th and 15th at Lawrence Academy in Groton, Massachusetts, where I'd met with students and faculty and given readings. On the morning of the 16th, we were driving south to Mountainhome when we heard by cell phone that Werner had died a few hours before. We veered east to Long Island to break the news to my old mother, spent three days with her. Werner's widow, Barbara, arranged for a memorial service for him in Hampton Bays. Werner had retired from the Southampton Town Police Department, and many of his friends were there. He was laid out in his lieutenant's uniform. I knew, saying goodbye to him, to his mortal remains, I'd break down. I waited to kneel at his coffin until almost everyone had left. And then I was lost in the ancient wild lament of death.
Our father had died six years before. And I'd grieved the passing—"passing" is a faithful word, one that suggests movement from one mode of being to another—of publisher and close friend William B. Ewert in 2001, of Brockport poet friends Al Poulin and Anthony Piccione in 1996 and 2001. But it may be that for each of us there is one death that is the death, and for me this death, so far, has been Werner's. All the old consolations of religion that have been veils for me since I was a boy now console very little. One morning I found myself in a sudden gust of weeping during which I was repeating to myself, "He really loved me, he really loved me, he really loved me." I was mourning, of course, for myself as much as I was for him and his family. I've never forgotten the lesson in Gerard Manley Hopkins' sermonic "Spring and Fall." Whatever we believe the source of our earthly sorrows to be, as the seasons pass it is ourselves we mourn for. Yes, it was Werner's brother Bill I was grieving, the decades that had wisped away from him as he sped toward his own death. But, too, I really loved/love Werner.
Since retirement from teaching at fifty-nine in 2000, I've been that cliché, a retiree so busy that he wonders how he ever had time to work. I've been catching up with myself: three new books have appeared in 2003; three more will appear in 2004, including a collection of thirty years of essays called Home: Autobiographies, Etc., and a book of stories with one of my best titles, The Hummingbird Corporation. This is a time of harvest for me. I miss teaching not at all, though I do think about the money I could still be earning, money my wife and I can get along without but which could have gone into college accounts for our four grandchildren. But their parents are doing well, and I was getting sappy from classes and busywork and I quit at the right time. At the end, even when about to meet with a dozen of Brockport's best students in an advanced poetry class, students who would go on to Master's of Fine Arts programs at New York University, George Mason, Eastern Washington and elsewhere, I still wanted out of there. Well, I began teaching when I was twenty. In addition to my regular classes over the years, I'd read or lectured at about 250 other universities and elsewhere. And I had a writing life that more and more created and defined the person I had become.
But for this son of a blue-collar worker, retirement was still a difficult decision, psychologically complex, mixed in with feelings of unworthiness and failure and the fear that I'd be lost and might for one reason or another find myself with only blank pages in front of me. I wrote to poet Phil Levine about this. In maybe the most helpful letter I've ever received he replied, in part, "There's no way someone else is going to write your poetry or you're going to stop writing it. By now it's obvious: you're in for the long haul."
If I hadn't retired, I'd have been beginning classes again in the fall of 2001. There's no chance I'd have been able to edit September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond which appeared in 2002 and which gathered raw and immediate reactions from more than 125 creative writers to the events of that watershed day in our history. The psychic disequilibrium at that time, especially among poets, seemed almost palpable to me, and necessary, and right. My thoughts had been inchoate about poetry and politics for years. I'd gone as far as I could on this theme in an essay on Seamus Heaney in Pig Notes and Dumb Music called "At the Gate" in which I argued (no doubt protesting too much) that poems must come to be able to stop tanks. I'd written whole books of poetry on the Holocaust and the Gulf War and ecological degradation and the collision of cultures at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, and had wondered why more of my contemporaries weren't similarly disposed to enter and engage history as best they could. Now, seemingly all at once, the climate was as poet David St. John in his essay for September 11, 2001 described it: "[After September 11], every writer I know was asking himself or herself 'Where now do I fit, where do I belong, against this horrifying landscape?'" Some writers declined my invitation to contribute, some said they would contribute and then for various reasons didn't or couldn't. From across the country, I could hear teeth grinding and brains short out from the shock emanating from Ground Zero in New York City and from the Pentagon and from that field in Pennsylvania where heroes died to keep their death plane from obliterating the Capitol or the White House. What could poems and fictions contribute, reveal, warn, prophesy? Could there be a new literature of some kind, one not relying on the dispensation Heaney assumed to be the very soul and saving grace of poetry? Reading several hundred submissions to my project, scanning poetry Web sites devoted to September 11 where I found little beyond the trite and boring, the soporific and the blindly patriotic, I was immersed in questions of aesthetics. I wanted the truth that exists beyond careful thought, beyond what scholars and journalists can give us. And, almost struck dumb myself by the enormity of what had happened, I needed the community of creative writers. I worked hard for months on the anthology, but in the end it has given much more to me than I gave to it.
Segue to another anthology, this one edited by H. L. Hix and called Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation (2003). It includes a new poem of mine:
Andes Flame
Other sacrificed maidens are found, chipped from graves in the sacred mountains, but this one cannot be accessioned, &, as she thaws, disrobed, a few stitches
at a time. This one remains beautiful, frozen, my pottery set around her—black & red, zigzag designs. I chose her, revered her, died within prayer when I lost her,
but now we are almost gone to that distance where heat from dead stars still seeks her beneath my breastbone, but cannot reach her, ever, love of mine.…
In the outer world, skyscrapers flame and fall, the Balkans and Africa and Iraq and the so-called Holy Lands seethe with bloody discontent, corporations run governments by way of their own greed—I am a participant in this as I root for my own pension fund, of course—and sports stars become idols who can get away with rape and murder. But in the end, whatever the poet does with these events is determined, it may be, by his or her deepest personality which in turn is formed by experiences that remain mysterious and which themselves generate such a poem as "Andes Flame." I'd seen a television documentary on such a sacrificial burial as I sketch here. As I wrote the poem—there were many drafts—memories of my high school girlfriend who'd cut herself away from me when we graduated took hold of me. I'm not sure what my poem, in the end, does—maybe it creates its own inviolable place where the speaker's memory leaves the maiden inviolate.
Karin was born in Norway. There's a poem by Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen, translated by Robert Bly, called "The Old Women" that begins, "The girls whose feet moved so fast, where did they go? / Those with knees like small kisses.…" They've become old now, perhaps even ghosts, but the poet cautions us to be kind to them: "Bow clearly to them and greet them with respect / because they still carry everything with them, like a fragrance.…"
Karin and I separated to attend different colleges in 1957. The Dear John letter came—actually it was a phone conversation that still leaves me shaken for that vulnerable boy—over that Christmas vacation. I was heartbroken for a very long time (and sometimes, almost fifty years later, still dream of her). This melodrama continues: I saw her only once more, at a high school reunion on Long Island in 1997. We spoke for just a minute. She'd been married to the same man for thirty-eight years, she said. She'd lived in California. She said she knew I'd become a college professor and a writer, and congratulated me. Self-effacing, she said she'd become only a kindergarten teacher. I remember her blue dress of that occasion (as I remember the dress she wore on our first date when I was sixteen), and I've wondered if she was buried in that dress, for just a couple years ago, surfing the web, I learned that she'd died in 1998 at the age of fifty-eight of lung cancer—did she smoke? did her husband smoke?
I snail mailed and e-mailed her husband—I'd have liked to have a program from her memorial service. No answer. No matter. I'd even sent two or three holiday cards to her and her family in the years after the reunion, but no one took the time to write me a note that Karin had died. No matter. She belongs to them, yes, but belongs to my poem now and to other writings (including "Trauma," including in oblique ways the entire book Diana, Charles, and the Queen) sparked by her. The heart does not keep time or place, Long Island or California. My poems are zig-zag patterns and designs that sound sources I'm afraid to locate entirely in case poetry itself might stop in me.
About five years ago I wrote a love poem, and include it here to try to remind (or maybe convince) myself that I have, in fact, grown up since high school. It traces an experience that might serve in essence as the curve of my whole spiritual life.
Fana Al-Fana
Islamic mystics' fana al-fana,
the passing away of the passing away,as when, last night, my wife of thirty-five years
held me & told me she loved me:at first, I was afraid, our decades only
the rootless light of dead stars,but then my soul received her words,
& the passing away passed away.
"The name of it is Time, but you must not pronounce its name," says Robert Penn Warren. Yes—a stark realization of our brief span on earth can shock the system. But during our clearest moments, it may be, we realize that timelessness, eternity, too, is obvious, and the fear of death, by way of love, may pass from us.
My brother dead, my old flame dead, but I remain in luck, for now, happily married for more than forty years, children and grandchildren healthy (knock on wood), my body still making its way up and down the basketball court two or three times a week. I've slowly begun typing the diary-journal I've kept since 1964—four-hundred single-spaced pages so far, and I'm only into the fourth of thirty-five or so blank books. Despite my best efforts over the years to conceal my lack of admirable character, this personal writing often reveals me to be callow, gauche, naïve, petty, and sometimes unfair, at best. But I'm glad that these millions of words of mine exist, and I hope eventually to publish them entirely, keeping in mind Walt Whitman's belief that the only obscene book is an expurgated one, keeping in mind Lucien Stryk's disdain for the "hateful will to impress." I've other books in the works, too, and hope to be on hand when they arrive.
And here's "Trauma," a very personal prose piece that may strike a balance with "History":
Trauma: An Autobiography
I'm a college freshman on Christmas break, 1957. I'm up front at the Fox in Brooklyn with three friends—we've driven to Allen Freed's famous rock & roll show from Suffolk County when Commack & Smithtown & Hauppauge & St. James & Nesconset are still farms, woods, fields surrounding the first few shopping centers. My chest alternately aches & empties—my high school love has shafted me, I don't sleep much, my bravado at home & with others is a strain & a lie—but I'm hyped, damned if I ain't, & I've been to Brooklyn only a few times before & then only to Ebbets Field where I saw the Boys of Summer—(Furillo & Campy, Newk & Pee Wee, Hodges & the Duke)—so I'm heartbroken but hyped as little Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers ask me why fools fall in love & Jimmy Bowen twangs "I'm stuck with you baby" as though from an echo chamber inside me & Bo Diddly weaves & hypnotizes & says that if the diamond ring he buys his love don't shine / he's gonna get himself a private eye & the Killer pounds out "Whole Lotta Shakin" & Chuck Berry wails "Maybelline" (why can't she be true?) & Bill Haley & the Comets rock around the clock & The Platters see right through me with "The Great Pretender" & the song I'd listen to a thousand times over the years, "Only You," & I'm trying not to know that I might never get over the hollowness I feel & Lee Andrews & the Hearts sing "Oh if we only could start over again" & I'm lost but hyped up & then darkness in the huge pent-up place & then a beam of light center-stage up front & it's Little Richard.
Goldglitter heels about as high as his foot-high pompadour, earrings & scarlet-lined silvery cape, lipstick & rouge & ruffles & daddylonglegs eyelashes, fluorescent blue satin pants, who knows what else but he's just there all at once & I'm hurting but for a few seconds intermittently at least I forget as when he jumps about three feet high & slams down on the stage as though after a dunk & screams "Do you want it?" & we're all standing now & yelling Yeah & the cops in the aisles are bristling & he jumps again & screams "Do you want it?" & this time we all scream together Yeahhhh & he jumps again & almost cracks the reverberating stage & screams louder than I've ever heard anyone scream "Do you want it" & we almost bring down the building Yeahhhhhhhh & I know that here in this mob darkness with rock & roll already in my blood I'm seventeen & wounded & will be & I want it, want what Little Richard has, want it desperately, whatever it is, whatever sex & power & release & noise & spirit & joy & courage he's got god help me I want it.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 9, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 18, 1981.
Contemporary Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.
Heyen, William, From This Book of Praise: Poems and a Conversation with William Heyen, Street Press (Port Jefferson, NY), 1978.
Magill, Frank N., editor, Critical Survey of Literature, Salem Books (Pasadena, CA), 1992.
Magill, Frank N., editor, Critical Survey of Poetry, Salem Press (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1983.
PERIODICALS
Academic Library Book Review, summer, 1996, George Wallace, review of Crazy Horse in Stillness.
American Poetry Review, November, 1977, Sandra McPherson, review of The Swastika Poems, pp. 31-32; January, 1978, Stanley Plumly, "Chapter and Verse"; March, 1980, Dave Smith, "One Man's Music."
Artful Dodge, 2002, Philip Brady, "As for Me: A Conversation with William Heyen," pp. 44-60.
Bellingham Review, summer, 1998, John Hoppenthaler, review of Diana, Charles, and the Queen, pp. 114-118.
Black Dirt, spring-summer, 1998, pp. 119-167.
Booklist, January 1, 1996, Elizabeth Millard, review of Crazy Horse in Stillness, p. 778; January 1, 1998, review of Pig Notes and Dumb Music, p. 766; 2002, Brad Hooper, a review of September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond.
Bulletin of Bibliography, summer, 1979; October, 1979, Ernest Stefanik, "William Heyen," pp. 157-176.
Choice, October, 1977; March, 1980, Dave Smith, review of Long Island Light, pp. 40-43.
Georgia Review, winter, 1977, Peter Stitt, review of The Swastika Poems, pp. 957-959; spring, 1980, Peter Stitt, "The Sincere, the Mythic, the Playful," pp. 202-212.
Hudson Review, winter, 1979-80, Vernon Young, review of Long Island Light, pp. 621-634.
Library Journal, March 1, 1981, Robert Peters, review of The City Parables, p. 562; September 1, 1984, review of The Generation of 2000, p. 1676; February 15, 1998, Frank Allen, review of Diana, Charles, and the Queen, p. 145.
Manassas Review, summer, 1978, Kenneth MacLean, "Animate Mystique," pp. 70-79; Hayden Carruth, review of The Swastika Poems, pp. 97-98.
Modern Poetry Studies, Volume 9, number 2, 1978, Pamela S. Rasso, review of The Swastika Poems, pp. 158-60.
New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1977; July 27, 1986, Richard Goodman, review of Vic Holyfield and the Class of 1957, p. 18; November 11, 1990, Robert von Hallberg, review of The Chestnut Rain, p. 42; November 11, 1990, p. 60; November 29, 1992, Gardner McFall, review of Ribbons, p. 18.
Ontario Review, spring-summer, 1975, Tom Marshall, review of Noise in the Trees, pp. 90-91; spring, 1980, John R. Reed, review of Long Island Light, pp. 81-82.
Parnassus, spring, 1982, Michael McFee, "The Harvest of a Quiet Eye."
Partisan Review, Volume 47, number 2, 1980, Robert Phillips, review of The Swastika Poems, pp. 317-318.
Poetry, September, 1971, John T. Irwin, review of Depth of Field, pp. 352-353; July, 1975; May, 1983, Bonnie Costello, review of Lord Dragonfly, p. 106.
Prose, spring, 1972.
Publishers Weekly, July 13, 1984, The Generation of 2000, p. 42; October 26, 1984, review of Erika, p. 93; May 2, 1986, review of Vic Holyfield and the Class of 1957, p. 72; March 28, 1994, review of The Host: Selected Poems 1965-1990, p. 89; December 22, 1997, review of Pig Notes and Dumb Music, p. 50; May 13, 2002, a review of September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, p. 68.
Small Press, September-October, 1997, Fred Muratori, review of Crazy Horse in Stillness.
Tar River Poetry, fall, 1996, Elizabeth Dodd, review of Crazy Horse in Stillness.
Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1977.
Western Humanities Review, summer, 1969, "The Individual Voice: A Conversation with William Heyen," pp. 223-233.
ONLINE
John Carroll University Web Site,http://www.jcu.edu/news/william_heyen.asp/ (January 9, 2004), "Poet William Heyen on September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond."