Juliet
D. E. Steward
More than ten million African slaves and a total two million Europeans had arrived in the
Americas by 1820
By then the white European population had grown to twelve million and slaves numbered roughly half that number
Paul de Man and de Gaulle, but on the other hand, Tocqueville
French post-structural literary theory took hold in the American academy almost without
there having been a structural phase
Something different for a PhD thesis instead of still another go at symbolism in
Hawthorne or Dickinson’s dictional quirks
Heidegger wasn’t generally acceptable grist for American philosophy departments and
came, along with Derrida, in through the comp lit back door
Lévi-Strauss all along was considered a strange bird
The old American tendency to scorn the French
Common sense and pragmatic realism, change-your-own-flat-tire style
Kazakhstan and Montana are in ways the same place
Les Murray’s “…but for the ignorant freedom // of my talking mind”
Erich Korngold, prodigy, b. Brno 1897, his four Wagneresque operas were produced in
Hamburg and Munich in the twenties before anti-Semitism buried him
He scooted out of Nazi Vienna for Hollywood in 1934, and before the War started he had won two academy awards
He said, “It’s not keypunching, stir the keys with your whole arm, not just your fingers,
not notes, waves…. The piano’s both a blessing and a curse, such a range of notes to
choose from, but the piano’s a machine; push a button and get a note”
And, “Internalize the song, even hum it aloud to make it sing”
Let canorous waves of triplets flow
Trusting his interpreters, Mozart didn’t provide many directions beyond the notes
Golden, golden-toned, golden-voiced, golden-tongued, ariose, arioso, mellifluent
Two tufted titmice fussily spread out on their bellies on the slant of a roof with wings
spread to bask their primaries in the July afternoon sun
The ingenuity of parids astounds
“English-language readers of [Victor] Serge today have to think themselves back to a
time when most people accepted that the course of their lives would be determined by
history rather than psychology, by public rather than private crises” – Christopher Reed
Outside the double-pane apartment windows of Stalin-era winters, parids acrobatically
foraged for freeze-dried summer spiders in the high corners and masonry seams, and for
the windowsill crumbs the apartment dwellers spread for them
Inside, “tinned fish, boiled eggs, Dutch stoves, saucepans, borrowed gas rings, kitchen
tables, tramcars, bad plumbing, communal apartments, residence permits, health
problems, and endless changes of address, as well as nicknames, gossip, erotic mayhem,
tantrums, poetic creation, lost manuscripts, sacrifice, betrayal, forgiveness, plank beds in
Siberian barrack huts, and common burial pits” – Emma Gerstein
Soviet lives lost
Old rose dusty gold
The subjective won out generations ago
Nearly boundless, but fated, savvy
Everything is change
Remember the ideal of wanting to write things that expressed everything about
everything? Remember what it was like to understand that trying to do this was possible,
and to realize that living to do it would probably be the most significant thing you could
ever do? Remember comprehending that in the intent of trying for it lies the essential
quality of good writing?
Just remember what it is like to write with full purpose and to not hold back trying to
match some set of cautions
“Identity is the vanishing point of resemblance” – Wallace Stevens
A Cooper’s hawk hunting over the center of town
Four Cooper’s fledglings lined up on a bare limb in deep woods a mile away
The American civitas of schools, post offices and local government moved out of town,
wooden sidewalks gone, stores with porches demolished, others derelict
Updated with sealed-windowed flat-faced commercial blocks and parking lots
Com sensação, com saudade
Sadness like the third movement, Andante malincolico, of Nielsen’s Second
And as quiet as Mark Tobey’s Dusk, 1973
Expansive like Tobey’s huge and spectacular Sagittarius Red, 1963
Golden, gilt, gilded, aureate, golden-yellow
Carl Nielsen wrote his classical Quartet no. 1 in G Minor while he was a second violinist
in the orchestra of Copenhagen’s Theater Royal
It won him a state subsidy that allowed him to travel and to go on to write his six bright,
driving symphonies with their literary names like, Sinfonia expansiva, The
Inextinguishable, Sinfonia semplice
“I found it extremely moving to walk past those paintings of slender, luminous beings
with their blank eyes and pursed lips, an experience I can only compare to looking at old
photographs of people I don’t know but whom somebody once knew, who had a real
existence – a life – in a certain place and time. There is that extraordinary patina of their
having been some particular person.” – Arthur Danto on Modigliani
Some African languages have dozens of cow-markings terms, and Russian has many
terms to describe the event of snow, English should have a vocabulary for human facial
types instead of dull adjectives like fat, round, long, pasty
English has mostly looks-like descriptions, “she’s like a young Julia Child,” or “he looks
like a dumb Bill Gates”
English with its lingering Victorian cum Edwardian rhetorical norms
George Innes, painting his View of the Tiber from the Balconata in Perugia, the pose out
there staring southwestward with the easel, the big paint box, the hat
Back home in the decade before, during the Civil War, Innes had dived headlong into
whacko, epiphanic Swedenborgianism, the heavens had opened up to him and he kept
trying to paint them
The old fool’s gold of transcendent landscape
Open sky and space is there, always has been, is our proscenium, our sure magnificence
Where the snow cover begins to thin across the tight coil of switchbacks, a golden eagle
soars across boldly, directly above the windshield
Intense purpose about its level glide and in its eyes
The most emphatic wild thing since coming up into the deep snow two days before
A strange and different world where there is heavy, untouched snow
Sitting behind our midden in the front of our cave looking out
D. E. Steward's “Juliet,” like “Octovre” Anomalous Press 5, and "Septambro" in Anomalous Press 3, is a month in a sequence written month to month for over 27 years, with months finished to date numbering 324. Over two thirds are published. The cycle, Chroma, attempts to chronicle, to build on, and to enhance some of the realities of the times. Google "d e steward poetry" for more.
