11 Jul 11 To My Opposite Number in Texas.

Daniel Rifenburgh

To My Opposite Number in Texas. May 2, 2010

A Review of Daniel Rifenburgh’s Advent: Poems. The Waywiser Press. London, 2002.

Daniel Rifenburgh studied with Donald Justice and Richard Wilbur, with the latter providing an Introduction to Rifenburg’s only book of poems, Advent. Though not mentioned on the book flaps or in Wilbur’s introduction, Rifenburgh, whom I’ve come to know through Facebook, was, he tells me, a student of the poet Robert Hayden, when he was a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Louisville during the spring semester of 1969. Since I myself had been a student of Hayden’s at the University of Michigan a decade later, I was delighted to communicate with someone else who had also studied with him. We exchanged a number of messages. I ordered a copy of Advent and he mentioned he had ordered a copy of my book, The Grove of the Eumenides, which includes my essay “Robert Hayden in the Morning Time.” He remarked “Hayden got me a creative writing scholarship,” but he had never bought his Collected Poems, which seemed odd to me. If I had studied with anyone of Hayden’s ability, though I don’t know who that would have been, I would have at least read all his work and chosen to own his books. It’s a pity that Rifenburgh didn’t. He might have found much that would have helped in both form and content.

Though I have never cared for most of the poetry of either Richard Wilbur or Donald Justice, finding them small academic poets, campus poets, writing usually on narrow, personal, limited subjects, I thought I’d not hold that against Daniel Rifenburgh and tried to give an impartial reading to his poems, when Advent arrived. The Note on the Author informed me that Rifenburgh had spent three years in Vietnam after his study at the University of Louisville, which made me recall Hayden’s bemoaning in poignant poems and prose his students “brutalized” in that conflict, wondering if he might have had Rifenburgh in mind among them. Wilbur’s introduction didn’t impress me at all, nor did his citing some lines from Rifenburgh, which included, “Wandering between the Word and its infinite extension.” I can respect a poet who believes in Jesus Christ and whatever historically evolved denomination or persuasion he or she chooses, or dissents from. I am not entirely unsympathetic at all. I stem from a long line of Christians of many denominations. Christianity is a humane, spiritual, and true vision of life, when not corrupted by human beings, which is the problem, since we seem to have the capacity to vitiate everything. I even find Christianity infinitely preferable to Marxism, capitalism as a religion, and the other endless substitutes for transcendence that modernity has and does produce. I’m well aware that by saying all of that I’ve violated numerous sacred doctrines, religious and secular, but must be honest before my own conscience, and what I actually found and think about Rifenburgh’s poems.

Getting past the first poem was the problem. I can’t even take it seriously in terms of what it’s saying. “To My Opposite Number in Samarkand” is in epistolary form, addressed to someone in the East, who hears, “The gong inside the old Buddhist temple,” and the call to prayer from “The high towers of the mosques.” Nearby, the reader is told, stands “the lone orthodox church, unevangelistic.” One senses there’s a severe judgment in the word “unevangelistic,” less than full sympathy with Eastern Christianity. Rifenburgh, I should explain, lives in Texas, perhaps known more for evangelism than the high church style, and maybe that influences his word choice. After allusions to Dante, Virgil, and Parmenides, the persona seems to take refuge in poetry, which is a thoroughly modern gesture, time honored for over a hundred and fifty years. What poet can quibble with that? Yet, an ersatz, nonetheless, and even Matthew Arnold knew and understood it as such. To his credit, so does Rifenburgh. He soon turns to the lines quoted by Richard Wilbur, after remarking on the overwhelming experience of reading Montale,

Or, so it seems, in the afterglow of such reading,

As if light had an enduring stepchild in the world

Wandering between the Word and its infinite extension,

Finding play in the interstices and lacunae

Where even breath must pause

In its tally of declensions

And what enters then by a grace

Commands our strictest reverence.

His “strictest reverence,” for the Word, is further implied in the closing stanza, in which he writes to his “Opposite Number,” to speak in the ear of the Boddhisatvas, by implication all the Ways of Opinion, “Parmenides.” The subordinate clause, “if you’re able,” slips in a derisive note, sticking the interlocutor right in the guts, if he hasn’t gotten it by now. In another poem, Herman Melville receives similar treatment, which I think constitutes a misunderstanding of Melville’s complexity: “call it a lack,” “a bible would do him little good.”

“To My Opposite Number in Samarkand” and the last one in the book are clearly intended as “bookends,” if you will, that frame the poems in between of mostly much broader range, with many on Rifenburgh’s experiences in Texas and South America. His sequence of poems titled “Andean Music,” for instance, explores his time working as a newspaper reporter in Latin America and Peru. I was struck in particular with the poem “VI. El Condorito,” about “Che Ernesto,” not the Marxist hero, but a local person known for flying down from the mountains of Macchu Picchu in a hang-glider. Later, together, they “headed, in the dark before the dawn, up to the sacred city.” Such poems are the best of his work, involved with life. In terms of other poems, Aristotle in his Poetics emphasized one of the crucial abilities of the poet was to choose the right material to work with. Rifenburgh often seems to me to lack such a sense of decorum, though our times may tend not to like that old tag. It is something poets forget and neglect at their peril. And it is always a temptation for the poet to write with his or her doctrine in mind and not the heart.

The last poem of the book is the title poem, “Advent,” and the reader is meant to feel the weight of the book leading up to it, emphasizing its importance to Rifenburgh. After describing a rainy day and the material decay of various leaves, he writes,

The mind, too, sheds a tattered cloak

And recalls elements of the old story:

The hoop round the omphalos of Christ, Marian,

The cold coin imprisoning Caesar,

A tocsin of alarm dilating the pupils of Herod,

And now the heart shunts the oil

Of incarnation out of its chambers again

In time with the last drumbeats of the rain.

We defeat the world through surrogates, and but briefly,

While placid beasts feed in drizzling pastures,

Building strength for the flight into Egypt,

Yet the son must be born in us, says the Father,

Or wither, when new oil floods the ventricles

And we become, however briefly, His surrogates

Or betrayers.

And for this, in Winter’s dead zero,

We must sing, sing Hallelujah.

The choice laid before the reader is the exclusivism of truth, for, from whatever perspective, this truth is the Truth, either we are “His surrogates / Or betrayers.” Some Muslims, Jews, and others might say essentially the same thing about their own religion. Influenced by the commonly shared Old Testament, the Western world, especially, has a penchant for this kind of approach to whatever the word “religion” means. Not a new idea, nothing tricky about it, just straight out in your face. I like that. Some Christians enjoy it as “scandalous.” That’s fine. That helps me know where I stand. And I respect Rifenburgh’s conscience, conviction, and interpretation. I stand with his “Opposite Number in Samarkand,” and I am proud of it. Rifenburg’s subject is as fit for poetry as anything else, and I don’t find it offensive, just out of touch with all of human history and religious experience, especially the last five-hundred years. Both religious and secular exclusivisms do that to people. They can keep people isolated from other equally valid traditions of the meaning and purpose of life, often not that different at the core from Christianity or an enlightened humanism, if one can be fair and open about it, make the brotherly effort to understand. Rifenburgh exhibits no such openness but continues along the line of what he had stated in the first poem, “Parmenides was right, / None of this exists!” Many Christian denominations have wisely moderated their thinking and teaching beyond caustic, dismissive either/or’s.

Writing off the history and religious experience of much of the world is perhaps not an entirely efficacious approach for any human being, especially a poet, who must be open to all that is human, if he is truly to serve the Muses, the daughters of Zeus, the sacred servants of All. Had Rifenburgh read Robert Hayden’s poetry years ago he would have found a much more open and universal perspective on life than he has spent his minor talent on. Toward universality, not exclusivism, is where the Divine Being, the Lord of history, has been guiding, and continues to guide, humankind. All peoples are able. In the light of the fullness of the literary tradition, which includes all nations and peoples, poets should encourage humanity to choose to travel together and be tolerant of their fellow human beings. We are all human, fallible, and not a one of us has ever had, or ever will have, the entire Truth, though it is human to think otherwise. At a time when it can seem some people in the United States and elsewhere are pushing toward religious fascism or secular utopia, it might help to step back from the brink and reflect on the healthy effect that pluralism and tolerance have had on civilization. People around our small planet need to value pluralism and universality more, not less.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Advent, Aristotle, Christianity, Daniel Rifenburgh, Donald Justice, Evangelism, Pluralism, Richard Wilbur, Robert Hayden, universality

21 Jun 11 Creating Equal. Ward Connerly.

Ward Connerly

Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences. Ward Connerly.

A Courageous Man and a Brilliant Book…. March 25, 2000

In Creating Equal, Ward Connerly returns the *human* dimension to the realities of race in America. Where so often what the poet Robert Hayden called “race rhetoric” substitutes for thought and dialogue, Connerly confronts long-held affirmative action doctrine with compelling insight into the pervasive devastation race preferences have actually had for all people. His emphasis on the necessity of basic human virtue and morality stands as both an indictment of us all and a call to struggle together toward a new vision of what it means to be an American.

At last someone other than a radical black or white “civil rights professional” has found a way to speak to these issues and reach all Americans–not merely the campus crowd.

Connerly rightly deserves to be more widely known not merely as an opponent of race preferences but rather as a matchless defender of free speech and conscience, a cause for which he has also suffered dearly at one university after another throughout our country.

Whatever shape our future will take regarding race, Ward Connerly’s personal and public odyssey will be part of the answer, as it is a clear sign for renewed hope that reason and sanity may yet prevail.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Affirmative Action, Black, Creating Equal, My Fight Against Race Preferences, Race, Race Preferences, racism, Robert Hayden, Ward Connerly, White

14 Jun 11 Why I’ve decided to blog my reviews

Why I’ve decided to blog my reviews…July 13th, 2006

I wearied long ago of submitting to magazines and waiting for months on editors who couldn’t understand where I was coming from and whose views I didn’t share, finding their underlying vision of life stultifying, out of harmony with my own experience, so much so that it was obviously futile to continue to seek a hearing in their pages. The problem was theirs, not mine. I have a decade and a half of rejection letters to prove it, from every New York and university publisher and many “prestigious” editors, benefactors of nepotism and otherwise, dullards, really, it always seemed to me, often corrupt, parasitic corporations, destroying the culture, with decadent and demeaning visions of life.

So for more than fifteen years, nearly every magazine and journal of the time, and publishers, had shown themselves only capable of rejecting my writing, while rarely demonstrating even a trace of understanding of what I was actually doing, in my own terms. There are times in literary and cultural history when the best thing a writer can do is return to, or stay put, in one’s home, stay in Concord, Copenhagen, The Hague, or Derry, New Hampshire, as good as anywhere else, the gods having planted you there, apparently for a reason, try to learn and understand their lessons.

At about the turn of the millennium, Amazon was for a few years a new technology and forum that seemed promising, but soon proved too commercial, lacking discriminating taste and reflection, and highly manipulated. My MCRI blog in 2006 was my introduction to the blog, and so I explored it for things that really interested me, in various incarnations, eReading and Reviews, bringing my disparate parts together now, in the summer of 2011, for the first time, on The Globe, a healing of sorts, or gathering, perhaps a resolution and perspective time can sometimes provide.

Following William Blake, Walt Whitman, and other writers, I followed the traditional route of turning to one’s own devices, “under one’s own steam,” as Robert Hayden once phrased it to me, going around the prevailing mentality, evolving with the times, from conventional printing, to worldwide POD through Ingram’s Lightning Source, for both hard and soft cover books, then Jason Epstein’s Espresso Book Machine, and finally ebooks, the last of which I believe resolves all of the problems confronting writers and readers for reasons I explain elsewhere:

The Mission of Earthrise Press

Publishing in the Post-Gutenberg Age

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Amazon, ebooks, Espresso Book Machine, Ingram, Jason Epstein, Lightning Source, New York Publishers, Publishing, Reviews, Robert Hayden

11 Jun 11 Hating Whitey. And Other Progressive Causes.

Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes. David Horowitz.

For Betty – Oh God, What Have We Done…. June 16, 2000

One brings to a book everything one is and has been through. Let me discuss David Horowitz’s Hating Whitey by seemingly digressing a little on my own experience. I grew up in the white suburbs of Detroit during the `60s and `70s and have vivid memories of the Detroit riot and my uncle and aunt’s bakery being almost burnt to the ground, while their neighbors and friends were increasingly driven out by violence and the erosion of social order. In the end, they too accepted the inevitability of flight for their lives. More than forty years of programs and promises of “renaissance” have only produced a dysfunctional city that often can neither educate its young nor reliably provide the most basic services such as snow removal and, for a couple of days now, electricity.

At the University of Michigan I studied with Robert Hayden, a former Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress, who thought of himself as a human being, first and foremost, though he begrudgingly accepted Afro-American, despite his preference at times for Negro, coming from an older time. The child of an interracial marriage, Hayden loathed the divisiveness of racial politics and lacerated radical blacks on more than one occasion. Ultimately, his vision of human oneness melded with that of Martin Luther King and similar figures, challenging us all to a deeply demanding spiritual ethic, a universal standard holding all accountable, before which all must struggle and strive.

David Horowitz devastatingly chronicles the result of the lack of such a standard on race relations during the last forty years; the result in the university; the result in the media; the result in the legal system; the result in politics; the result in the hearts and minds and souls of our entire nation.

As someone who has edited the poems and prose of a human being usually identified as black, I have had the experience several times of being invited for job interviews at colleges only to be met with disbelief and gaping mouths when I, a “whitey,” walked in through the departmental door! I am one who has lived through almost everything about which Horowitz writes regarding academia, including losing a tenure track job as the result of a relentless and byzantine conspiracy of “colleagues” who wanted a black in the position, one widely perceived by those fit to judge as nowhere near my intellectual equal and who eventually had to be removed from my post for incompetence.

Horowitz’s major shortcoming, typical of the modern secular mind, liberal or conservative, is that his critique, unlike Dostoevsky who understood the nature of modernity, does not go deep enough into the spiritual collapse that underlies the dynamics of race, as they underlay the collapse into communism. This failure is also evident in hisDestructive Generation, which is, nevertheless, another of his brave and brilliant books. Perhaps someday Horowitz will plumb further into the depths of radical causes. (His autobiography Radical Son does touch on his ambivalence towards Judaism and religious belief, leaving him ultimately “stubbornly agnostic.”)

Being a white man and given the politically charged nature of race today, Horowitz demonstrates a rare streak of moral strength and courage by his daring to speak his conscience against black racism and the misguided designs of race elites. Fortunately, he is not alone. Along with Hating Whitey, those truly interested in beginning to understand and confront the race dilemmas of America should also read Ward Connerly’s Creating Equal, Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred, and Thomas Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice, works by exceptional, heroic human beings who have all been slandered as Uncle Toms by more than one race radical.

 

Tags: America, Black, David Horowitz, Hating Whitey And Other Progressive Causes, Race, Relations, Robert E. Hayden, Robert Hayden, Understanding, White

30 Oct 08 The Globe. A Journal.

As long ago as a couple of decades I thought of creating a literary journal named “The Globe,” but the time never seemed right, and I knew the required effort and time would interfere with my own study and writing. Being a very solitary individual and writer, I knew too I did not possess the gregariousness and patience needed to draw together a group of people of similar worldview, literary, artistic, political, and so on, that a publication must have. From very early as a writer, I knew I was largely on my own. Only Robert Hayden and I were able to understand one another, and even then I felt he failed to confront many issues of the highest import, especially in terms of the Baha’i Faith and its cultural and historical implications. The few other young Baha’i would-be artists I knew or heard of were hopelessly naive and incapable of independent thought and reflection. There were no other people of sympathetic vision, aesthetic, moral, spiritual, political, in terms of the United Nations or a cooperative body like it, to which I could turn and work together to create “The Globe.” The prevailing ethos, as always, was entirely closed off in its conventional assumptions.

So I continued on my way. Solitude, study, reading and confronting the masters, wavering between the deepest ravages of self-doubt and despair and the highest exhilarations of vision and inspiration, writing as I could, struggling year after year to find and chart a different course, one true to my experience of life, attempting to embrace all of humanity, or as much of it as I might reach.

And now a new form comes along, over the last several years or decade, now well established, and the time is right for me to turn to and use it, enabling me to pick back up, as it were, in electronic form, the writer’s journal I left off from nearly thirty years ago, back then, after a decade of writing one. Perhaps this is The Globe I’ve wanted for so many years. And a way to speak to humankind.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postmodernity, Robert Hayden, The Globe, writer's journal