Until
recently Charles Gullans (1929-1993) amounted to little more than a rumor. I associated his name
loosely with Yvor Winters and Stanford University. I knew he had written poems
and bibliographies of Turner Cassidy and J.V. Cunningham. He co-translated Last Letters from Stalingrad (1962),
which I’ve printed out from its original publication a year earlier in The Hudson Review. Gullans was a
professor of English at UCLA, and seems to have been appealingly eclectic in
his interests and abilities, yet I’ve never seen even one of his books. I’m correcting
that with the help of interlibrary loan.
Last
weekend, as we exchanged thoughts on Edgar Bowers, Boris Dralyuk sent me a link
to “Anti-Faust,” a poem by Gullans published by the Los Angeles Times in 1990. On Wednesday, Boris sent a poem from
Gullans’ “little-read second book, Letter
from Los Angeles. (My copy is inscribed in ink on the flyleaf, under a
penciled price: 50 cents. O tempora o
mores…).” Here is “Measures”:
“A clock
cannot say why.
Only the
terse and dry
Renewal of
its chime,
Beguiling as
a rime
In tongues
we do not speak,
Tells us the
fact we seek.
The clock
hangs on the wall
And knows
nothing at all,
Nothing at
all to say,
Except, `This
hour, this day,
This minute
that I chime —
There is no
other time.’
But we know
better, we,
In our
extremity,
Know we
outlive, outpace,
The single
moment’s race
Toward its
extinguishment.
We know our
own intent
And with
preemptive line,
With words
that name, define,
And classify
our fear,
We write
what you will hear.
Our names
are on the words
As flight is
in a bird
And form
blown into glass.
Our force,
our breath, will pass
And fear
will die away.
Our words,
perhaps, will stay.”
Gullans
writes in couplets of iambic trimeter (auto-correct changes it to trimester) while avoiding metronomic
tedium. I thought immediately of the white-faced clocks that hung on the walls
in grade school, implacably ticking off the seconds, announcing that other
tedium. Clocks in their mechanical impassivity seem to taunt us. We are the
ones cursed with foreknowledge of mortality. The poem suggests that writing is “preemptive”:
“Our words, perhaps, will stay.”
2 comments:
Charles Gullans was not only an excellent poet. He also started an exemplary small press, Symposium Press. It printed poetry in fine press limited editions. He published books by Timothy Steele, Turner Cassity, Edgar Bowers, and himself. I reviewed the series back in 1982 for The Hudson Review. These beautiful editions are worth searching out.
Dana Gioia
Avoiding metronomic tedium, as you say; and also avoiding the (potential) prison cell of the rhyming couplet, with the frequent line run-ons.
And the couplet:
But we know better, we,
In our extremity,
could have come from one of the metaphysicals.
A delghtful gem.
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