The World of Leonora Carrington, Part II: The Alchemical Kitchen

Collage of Leonora by Leonor Fini

This is a continuation of a series of blogs about the artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). The first part can be found here, including a brief biography that includes her childhood, her entrance into the surrealist movement in Paris in the late 30’s, and her subsequent escape from both her family’s intentions to incarcerate her in a mental institution and Nazi Europe. 

  

 
 Most of the information below was gleaned from Susan L. Aberth’s Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art.  This book is a great introduction to the work of Carrington. 'Alchemical Kitchen' is a term lifted from the book.

New York

New York in 1941 was filled with Surrealists, all refugees from the war; Luis Bunuel, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Piet Mondrian, and Max Ernst among them.  She was reunited with Ernst for a brief period during these years, but Ernst had, since their separation, taken up with Peggy Guggenheim, who had financed his passage to America.  Although it was reported by many friends that they both suffered intensely over the loss of the other, for whatever reasons (and god knows there are many theories floating out there) the two did not reunite permanently. 

Surrealists in NY (Carrington, first row; Ernst far left, middle row)

 Her eccentric behavior during this time has become the stuff of legend.  As Aberth points out, it probably gained more notoriety because of her ‘recent bout with madness.’  “One often-told story has her inexplicably and calmly spreading mustard on her feet while at a restaurant.” (Aberth, pg 54, from Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour). “Another anecdote, recounted by the film-maker Luis Buñuel in his autobiography My Last Sigh shows that Carrington’s experiences in Spain were still fresh in her psyche:

'Separated now from Max Ernst, Leonora apparently lived with a Mexican writer named Renato Leduc.  One day, when we arrived at the house of a certain Mr. Reiss for our regular meeting, Leonora suddenly got up, went into the bathroom, took a shower – fully dressed.  Afterward, dripping wet, she came back into the living room, sat down in an armchair, and stared at me.  ‘You’re a handsome man,’ she said to me in Spanish, seizing my arm.  ‘You look exactly like my warden.’”

Tuesday, 1946

At this time, she developed an interest in cooking, likening it to the alchemical transformation (see

alchemy) of art production – transforming the 'base metal' of the psyche into ‘gold.’  She experimented in the kitchen for her fellow surrealists, creating elaborate feasts from archaic recipes.

Breton on one of Carrington’s feasts:  “Of all those whom she invited to her home in New York, I believe I was the only one to try certain dishes on which she had spent hours and hours of meticulous preparation, an English cookbook form the sixteenth century in hand – compensating by sheer intuition for the lack of certain ingredients that had become unobtainable or exceedingly rare since then.  (I will admit that a hare stuffed with oysters, to which she obliged me to do honor for the benefit of all those who had preferred to content themselves with its aroma, induced me to space out those feasts a bit.)” (Aberth, pg 54)

Surrealist joke or alchemical experiment?  Maybe they’re the same thing.  Either way, she managed to ‘out-surreal’ the founding figure of Surrealism.

During this time she continued to paint and write short stories, publishing in several American journals, but the man she had married in order to obtain a visa out of Europe, Renato Leduc, eventually tired of New York and wanted to move back to Mexico.

Mexico City

Carrington arrived in Mexico City in 1943 and the three year marriage of convenience to Leduc came to an end.   At the time the leftist government under President Lazaro Cardenas Del Rio (1934-1940) was freely granting European war refugees asylum and citizenship. 

Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945

In 1946, Carrington married Hungarian writer-photographer Chiki Weisz, a war refugee.  It was also during these first years in Mexico City that Carrington struck up a friendship with another war refugee, the Spanish Surrealist painter Remedios Varo.  Her friendship with Varo lasted until Varo’s death in 1963.  Although they had known each other in Paris in the late 30’s, this friendship became central to the creative life of both artists.

Carrington:  “The loss (of Varo, in 1963) was even worse than I had thought it would be…because it’s not that easy to have a very close friend.” (from the documentary Gifted Beauty by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Ragg Films, 2000)

Chiki, ton pays, 1947

The unofficial ‘headquarters’ for the European Surrealist émigrés was the apartment of poet Benjamin Peret and Remedios Varo on calle Gabino Barreda.  “Meeting almost daily for years, they (Carrington and Varo) shared their dreams, their nightmares, their obsessions, and their deepest secrets.” (Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, Janet A. Kaplan, pg 93) 

Together they began to experiment, not only in painting – developing a new pictorial language – but also with cooking.  Cooking (following the transformative analogy from alchemy) became one of their avenues into an exploration of the occult.  

Varo wearing Carrington mask

“Using cooking as a metaphor for hermetic pursuits they established an association between women’s traditional roles and magical acts of transformation.  They had both been interested in the occult, stimulated by the Surrealist belief in ‘occultation of the Marvelous’ and by wide reading in witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, Tarot and magic.  They found Mexico a fertile atmosphere where magic was part of daily reality; traveling herb salesmen would set up on street corners with displays of seeds, insects, chameleons, special candles, seashells, and neatly wrapped parcels with such mysterious labels as ‘sexual weakness.’  All used for the practice of witchcraft by the curanderas (healers), brujas (witches), and espiritualistas (spiritualists) who outnumbered doctors and nurses.  Mexico proved a vibrant influence on Varo and Carrington, for whom the power of spells and omens was already very real.” (Unexpected Journeys, Kaplan, pg. 96)

Varo is the author of the painting (The Flutist) that is the background for the title of this blog (see above, see below).

Remedios Varo, The Flutist, 1955

 The hybrid culture that mixed colonial Spanish with the surviving pre-Hispanic Indian culture also deeply influenced both artists.

Carrington: “Once you cross the border and you arrive in Mexico you feel that you are coming to a place that’s haunted.”  (Leonora Carrington in House of Fear, BBC documentary, 1992)

1940’s/50’s

In the late 40’s Carrington’s work was beginning to be noticed in the international art world.  The Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York arranged for a one-person show in 1948 and the exhibition was briefly reviewed in Time and Art News. 

And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur, 1953

A one-person show at Clardecor in February 1950 in Mexico City introduced her art to a Mexican audience to rave reviews. “The Excelsior announced ‘that although Carrington was British and had lived in Mexico for a while: ‘her temperament is not of one who is limited by geographic environment, but the world in which she breathes is one of extraordinary amplitude.’

By 1959, she was included in Marcel Jean’s History of Surrealist Painting on the same level as the men.  For a woman who was a refugee from Britain, then Europe, a mother of two children (with Chiki Weisz), to continue her extraordinary output is stunning – but also to be taken seriously by the patriarchal world at that time was…well…surreal.

Temptation of St. Anthony, 1947

Carrington:  “I always continued to paint, even when the children were very small.  Only when they were ill I dropped everything and my children became my priority.  But often I said to my friend Remedios: ‘We need a wife, like men have, so we can work all the time and somebody else would take care of the cooking and children.’  Yes, men are really spoiled!” (Alberth, pg 64)

During this time, her ideas of art as alchemical transformation became tied to the feminine domestic sphere, transforming the kitchen into a site of magical power.

A description of her studio during these decades by Edward James: 

Carrington with St. Anthony, Chiki Weisz

“Leonora Carrington’s studio had everything most conducive to make it the true matrix of true art.  Small in the extreme, it was an ill-furnished and not very well lighted room.  It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all, save a few almost worn-out paintbrushes and a number of gesso panels, set on a dog and cat populated floor, leaning face-averted against a white-washed and peeling wall. The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store.  The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.” (Aberth, pg 75)

Carrington in studio, 1950's

Carrington on the cabbage (merging the domestic with the mystical):  “The Cabbage is a rose, the Blue Rose, the Alchemical Rose, The Blue Deer (Peyote), and the eating of the God is ancient knowledge, but only recently known to ‘civilized occidental’ Humans who have experienced many phenomena, and have recently written many books that give accounts of the changing worlds which these people have seen when they ate these plants.  Although the properties of the cabbage are somewhat different, it also screams when dragged out of the earth and plunged into boiling water or grease – forgive us, cabbage…the cabbage is still the alchemical rose, for any being able to see or taste.” (Aberth, pg 94)

Cabbage, 1987

It was during this time that she began experimenting with egg tempura.  “What I needed was technique.  I didn’t want ideas.  Each one of us has those.  Technique, however is something that is learned.  For me it was very important.” (Aberth, pg 66)  As Aberth goes on to say: “One of the reasons that Carrington began to paint with the medieval technique of egg tempera was to create jewel-like tonalities, but according to her friend Gerzso: ‘The fact that mixing egg tempera seemed to mimic culinary procedure further enhanced its use in her eyes.’

The White Goddess

It was also in the late 40’s when Carrington read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess – a scholarly study of the archaic goddess religions, primarily in Britain, sparking a re-investigation into her Celtic roots.

Sidhe, the white people of the Tuatha de Danaan, 1954

And so the Tuatha de Danaan began to appear in her paintings.  Also called the Sidhe, these beings harkened back to the tales told her by her maternal Irish grandmother as a child. 

The Chair, Daghda Tuatha de Danaan, 1955

One of my favorite Carrington paintings was made during this period: AB EO QUOD (1956).  I find, when looking at  visual art, it's important I arrive at its doorstep relatively naive.  Any criticism or explanation - even titles, sometimes - tends to influence and distort my first impression.  What is my immediate sensation?  Although this feigned ignorance sometimes leads to tremendous misunderstanding, I've found that, for the most part, it creates an environment for a meeting - a between place where I meet the work of art halfway, become involved in the act of creation.  Finding out about the historical, technical or theoretical aspects of the painting is all well and good, can enhance the experience - but, for me, that needs to come later.

Having said all that, I am going to place Susan L. Aberth's detailed explanation of AB EO QUOD after the painting.  Will it enhance the view?  Might could.  But don't go directly to the explanation. Scan the painting first. Step inside the room, walk around the table. 

Do you remember what you came there for?  
What was your name before you entered the room?  
What is your name now?

AB EO QUOD, 1956

 

"The cloth covered altar table holds the wine and bread of the Eucharist, a symbolism reinforced by the further inclusion of a wheat-like grain and grapes.  The Christian tone is offset by the addition of a pomegranate with its intimations of the underworld and the goddess.  A glass beaker with wine and two full wineglasses are set to be drunk by invisible participants who are, perhaps, waiting for what appears to be an unfolding alchemical drama to conclude.  Here alchemy has a direct correlation to the transubstantiation that occurs in the Catholic mass.  On the ceiling of Carrington's painting is another white rose, dangling like a chandelier, that drips water on to the egg, thereby instigating the alchemical process, as the steam vaporising off the egg indicates....The walls are covered in arcane diagrams that highlight duality; a white woman's head joined to a black bearded man's, an Assyrian-looking goat rearing on a tree, a circle inscribed in a square, the cabbalist symbol for the spark of divine fire lying hidden within matter.  An embroidered fire screen bears the Latin words 'Ab eo, Quod nigram caudum habet abstine terrestrium enim decorum est', which is a fragment from the Asensus Nigrum, an obscure alchemical text from 1351.  This roughly translates as: 'Keep away from any with a black tail, indeed, this is the beauty of the earth.'  To emphasise this point, the lower portion of the fire screen is encircled by a long and hairy black tail that grows out of the embroidery...Everywhere large moths (perhaps butterflies) are hatching from their cocoons and fluttering about, an allusion to processes of transformation and metamorphosis."  (Aberth, pg 93)

Next Episode:

Symbols and (Ironical) Sorcery,

                                     the 1960’s and beyond....

It was twenty five years ago today....

On April 8^th, 1987,

twenty five years ago today,

the Belgian cement factory town of Villon woke to find dead fish scattered everywhere.

  It was festival day for their patron saint, St Woelfred.

An infamous environmental activist dance troupe 

scheduled a rally at the same time as the festival, 

to protest the cement factory’s decision to lease empty quarries as toxic waste dumps.

 

Sabotage?

  Trick?   

Performance piece? 

Natural phenomenon?

 A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind 
tells the story of six people

winding their way 

through each other's lives

over the course of that 

fateful day.

 

What happened when 

festival and rally collided?

 

A True Story.

  

You can find an interview with Paul Cooper 

from New Welsh Review  

about the writing of

Fish Trapped Inside the Wind

here.

Also, 

a recent insightful review of

On the Side of the Crow

from

The Literateur

can be found

here. 

Check out both sites: 

a great array 

of reviews, essays, 

and interviews.


In other news, 
 April 8th is
the Buddha's 
birthday. 

I can't say whether that's 
the reason things 
 happened the way they did
in Villon 
on that particular day...
but I'm not ruling it 
out.

 

The world of Leonora Carrington, Part I – The Early Years

Leonora Carrington, 1980's

I discovered the work of Leonora Carrington while paging through Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement by Whitney Chadwick in the mid-nineties. 

Leonora Carrington, 1939

The effect of Carrington’s work on me was similar to that of Hieronymus Bosch.  But while Bosch's work is steeped in Christian iconography, Carrington's world is an international hybrid of Celtic legend, fairy tales, western and eastern alchemy, Egyptian symbology, Cabbalistic lore, astrology, including both the Spanish Catholic and Indian traditions of her adopted country, Mexico.

Night of the 8th, 1987

Her paintings (and stories) gave me the feeling that there were creatures moving down my spine, scurrying throughout my net of nerves, holding torches that cast flickering shadows onto forgotten or undiscovered caves and rooms, re-acquainting me with all the strange and mysterious beings that always seemed to hover so close during childhood.

These creatures still hover around me, but have become less and less visible over the years, transformed into shadows darting out of the corner of the eye.  I stumble into them now and again – changed, always changing – waiting for me in the close dark space behind an open door in the middle of the night, or peering out at me from a hole in a dead tree, or slipping in and out of sight with a herd of deer shadows at dusk.

Lepidopteros, 1969

What mysterious beings live inside all of us?  What mysterious beings live among us?  Carrington asks these questions with an enigmatic, wry smile.

Her biography is almost as fascinating as her paintings and stories, but for most of her career she usually responded to questions about her personal life and art with a sardonic surreal wit.

For an exposition of her work in Mexico City in 1965 she wrote a mock artist’s statement called Jezzamathatics or Introduction to the Wonder Process of Painting that opened with this paragraph:

“In the early part of the nineties I was born under curious circumstances, in a Eneahexagram, Mathematically.  The only person present at my birth was our dear and faithful old fox-terrier, Boozy, and an x-ray apparatus for sterilizing cows.  My mother was away at the time snaring crayfish which then plagued the upper Andes and wrought misery and devastation among the natives…”

And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur, 1953

I saw a rare Carrington/Varo exhibit at The Pallant Gallery in Chichester in August of 2010 and felt that most of those moving from painting to painting were captivated, filled with wonder. Maybe they understood, on an intuitive level, that these paintings were alchemical experiments…and that they themselves were part of that experiment…and that the experiment was going to continue into the night, long after the gallery had closed its doors and everyone had gone to sleep.  

But among the visitors walking the gallery, there were those others who needed an answer, one rising from some objective realm brimming with authority (from Jehovah, the International Monetary Fund, an all-knowing Art Critic…), that would definitively answer that eternal, nagging question – what is this? 

From several overheard conversations I gathered that the ones in that camp were a bit - how shall we say - disgruntled.

Adieu Ammenotep, 1960

I believe Carrington's work sits at the apex of the 20th Century Surrealist movement.  Maybe the term Surrealist is too small a box to contain her. She found most labels useless or humorous, so let's just say she stands as one of the giants of 20th Century art. 

The biography below was drawn mostly from the book, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art by Susan L. Aberth.  This book is a great introduction to Carrington's work.

Childhood

Leonora Carrington was born in the north of England, South Lancashire, on 6 April, 1917.  Her father was a textile tycoon, her mother Irish, daughter of a country doctor.  She grew up in a manor called Crookhey Hall with views of the Irish sea and Morecambe Bay.  They had ten servants, a French governess and a chauffeur.  She began drawing at the age of four.

Carrington:  “Do you think anyone escapes their childhood?  I don’t think we do.  That kind of feeling that you have in childhood of being very mysterious.  In those days you were seen and not heard, but actually we were neither seen nor heard.  We had a whole area to ourselves.  I think that was rather good, actually.”  (Aberth, p 12, from House of Fear, BBC documentary, 1992). 

Early on, she was placed in the care of an Irish nanny who, along with her Irish grandmother, told the children stories and tales, bringing her into contact with Irish folklore and igniting a lifelong interest in fairy tales.

Crookhey Hall

Carrington:  “My love for the soil, nature, the gods given to me by my mother’s mother who was Irish from Westmeath, where there is a myth about men who lived underground inside the mountains, called the ‘little people’ who belong to the race of the “Sidhe.’  My grandmother used to tell me we were descendents of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political religious ideas.  They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold.  The stories my grandmother told me were fixed in my mind and they gave me mental pictures that I would later sketch on paper.”

Crookhey Hall, 1947

In the custom of the time, she was sent off to boarding school when she nine years old. Her family was Catholic, so she ended up at a convent school. Within a short period of time the school administration asked that she be removed from the school for being ‘mentally deficient.’  She was subsequently expelled from the next convent school.  And the next.  The nuns thought something was wrong with her because, according to Carrington, she could write with both hands and preferred to write with her left, backwards. (Aberth, pg 18) 

Carrington:  “I think I was mainly expelled for not collaborating.  I think I have a kind of allergy to collaboration and I remember I was told, ‘apparently you don’t collaborate well whether at games or work.’  That’s what they put on my report.  They wanted me to conform to a life of horses and hunt balls and to be well considered by the local gentry I suppose.” (Aberth, pg 18)

She was sent to Florence for a year and then to ‘finishing school’ in Paris.  Again, she was expelled for unruly behavior.  She escaped and ran off to a family that she’d heard about from a friend and they took her in until she was ‘presented’ at the court of George V.  After this experience, she informed her family that she intended to go to art school.  Her parents, of course, opposed the idea, and refused to pay her for her tuition  Despite this she left home to attend art school in London.

The House Opposite, 1945

Carrington:  “From the Kings Court I went to a pigsty.  I lived in a basement and didn’t have money.  I barely had enough to eat but my painting and classes distracted me from this.”  (Aberth, pg 21)

Introduction to Max Ernst and the Surrealist Movement

On June 11, 1936 The First International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries in London, providing Leonora with an introduction to Surrealist ideology and art.  But it was the work of Max Ernst that attracted her.   

Garden Aeroplane Trap, Max Ernst

Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale, Ernst

A friend of Leonora’s arranged a dinner party to introduce her to the internationally famous artist, then 46 years old…and the rest is history…or myth…according to whichever way you choose to butter your bread.  

Carrington:  “It was love at first sight. I was holding a beer and it was starting to go over and Max put his finger on it, that way it doesn’t go on the table.  That was the story of my big love.” 

Carrington and Ernst, 1938

They quickly became involved, and she was immediately propelled into the heart of the Surrealist movement.

Carrington:  “Living with Max Ernst changed my life enormously because he saw things in a way I never dreamed was possible.  He opened up all sorts of worlds for me.”  (Aberth, pg 27)

 She moved to Paris with Ernst and became an active member of Breton’s Surrealist circle.  She was, of course, immediately ex-communicated from her family. 

The Surrealist movement was dominated by men and, for the most part, they believed the function of women in art was primarily as muse.  Especially young women.  The belief was that a woman-child, being innately naive, was in direct connection with her own unconscious and could 'serve as a guide for a man.’ (Aberth, pg 37)

Syssigy, 1957

Carrington, probably because of her confidence (an attitude of entitlement that she readily acknowledged as coming from her privileged upbringing), and natural defiance against being put into any niche, never conformed to this role among the Surrealists. And oddly enough for the times, she was accepted as one of them from the beginning.  Two major Surrealist exhibitions in 1938 included works by Carrington (including Self-Portrait, The Horses of Lord Candlestick, and The Meal of Lord Candlestick).  It was during this time she began publishing her surrealist stories.

Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), 1937-8

The Horses of Lord Candlestick, 1938

The Meal of Lord Candlestick, 1938

Outbreak of War, Down Below

When World War II broke out Ernst was interned in a camp with other German nationals near the farm in St. Martin D'Ardeche where Carrington and Ernst had set up house.

Carrington in kitchen at farmhouse in St. Martin D'Ardeche

He was soon transferred to Aix-en-Provence and Carrington lost track of him.  In isolation in the country she became increasingly mentally unstable.  The account of this time was eventually written down and became the book En Bas (Down Below).  Friends passing through took her with them to Spain where they hoped to secure a visa for Ernst in Madrid.  She was ultimately incarcerated (through the intervention of her family) in a Spanish mental institution.  “Diagnosed as marginally psychotic, she was treated and cured with three doses of the drug Cardiazol, which chemically induced convulsive spasms similar to electrical shock therapy.” (Aberth, pg 46)

Down Below, 1943

She was eventually released to a family guardian, who was to take her to a mental institution in South Africa.  She escaped to the Mexican Embassy in Lisbon, to a friend who was then Mexican ambassador, Paul Leduc.  The only way to secure a visa out of the country was by marrying him – so they arranged a marriage of convenience.  Under Mexican diplomatic immunity she could no longer be committed by her parents and so sailed to New York with Leduc.

Next Episode -  

The Alchemical Kitchen, in which Carrington is reunited with many surrealists in New York, moves to Mexico City, begins a 20 year friendship and artistic collaboration with the Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo, and maintains an unrivaled 60 years of creativity as a Mexican artist...

Interview with Small Press Legend Don Wentworth (Editor of Lilliput Review and author of Past All Traps)

Cover by Wayne Hogan

Back in the summer of 1989, I was just beginning to send poems out into the small press poetry world and heard about a little magazine that had just printed its first issue called Lilliput Review, edited by Don Wentworth.  The actual size of the magazine (4.25” X 3.5”) reflected both its name and focus.  The submission guidelines asked for poems of ten lines or less.  Curious, I sent off a buck or two and received a copy in the mail.   

I’ve been reading it ever since. 

A phenomenal twenty-two years later the format for the magazine remains the same, although some time in the first or second year of its existence Lilliput expanded to include Brobdinang feature poems  (in keeping with the Gulliver’s Travels theme), broadsides, and The Modest Proposal Chapbook Series.  In 2006, Lilliput Review was nominated for an Utne Reader Independent Press Award for "General Excellence" in the category of Zines.

Cover by Harland Ristau

In 2009, Don started a blog, Issa's Untidy Hut, extending Lilliput Review’s vision into the netstream, posting poems from the magazine’s huge archive, small press news, reviews of books, musings about life and art, a weekly haiku series, and, up until last month, Issa’s Sunday Service – posts of songs that have a literary reference (litrock).  Lillie also has regular posts on Twitter and Facebook.  World dominance can’t be far behind…

Over the years many luminaries of the small press (and the larger press) have contributed poems to the pages of Lillie, including, Cid Corman, Miriam Sagan, Charlie Mehrhoff, Albert Huffstickler, Tom Clark , Alan Catlin, Jack Collum, John Martone and Lyn Lifshin, along with many, many other brilliant poets too numerous to name here.  In any one issue you can find a range of styles – from haiku and tanka to the beat and surreal – but what I always find is a consistency of vision: the poetry within the pages of Lillie share an aesthetic of precision, along with an intense curiosity about the world.

Don is also the author of a book of short poems, Past All Traps, released in June of 2011 by Six Gallery Press.  Past All Traps has recently been shortlisted by the Haiku Foundation for the 2011 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award.  The collection was also chosen as a “Nov/Dec Pick” by the Small Press Review, has garnered rave reviews (one of which can be found here ), and was included on several end of the year reading lists, including one from Joe Hutchison and one from Kris Collins.

Sometime in mid-June, I checked my mailbox as I was heading out the door to a meeting, and found a book-sized manila envelope in my mailbox.  I didn’t have time to take it back upstairs to my flat so I opened the envelope out on the street.  Past All Traps slid out and I read the first poem:

Stop counting syllables,

start counting the dead.

Captivated, I walked for a good mile – across Swansea – seeing nothing but the poems, hearing nothing but the poems – totally engrossed.  I was very surprised when I arrived at my destination, my legs taking me where I needed to go, seemingly without ever looking up from the book.  I don’t know of any better praise I can give the book (especially since I don’t usually listen to music, talk on the phone, text, much less read, while I walk). 

The interview is divided into two parts.  The first section focuses on Lilliput Review and Don’s editing process; the second section is about Don’s own writing and the writing of Past All Traps. 

PART I:  LILLIPUT REVIEW

First off, why the size of the magazine?

There were two basic reasons for the size of the mag: first, my then (late 80s) growing interest in brief forms of poetry and, second, how economical it might be to put out a small magazine whose format actually mirrored the content when that format is the brief poem.  I had seen a couple of magazines that could literally fit in the palm of your hand and that intrigued me.  To a great extent, these mags were meant to be ephemeral: published quickly, inexpensively, and sometimes topically.  That’s how Lillie started.  Yet, somehow, I always knew I was in it for the long haul and, from the perspective of today, I now see it as my life’s work. 

Why do you think you're so attracted to the short form?

The story of my attraction to the short form is a simple one.  I returned to writing poetry around the age of 30 for a variety of life-inspired reasons.  I wrote lots of work in what was, and still is, a fairly standard free verse lyric form of 20 to 36 lines or so, some a bit shorter, some a bit longer.  A close friend at the time, a musician/song writer, who was the only one paying any attention to what I was doing and who was not a poet, simply said your short stuff is your best work, the rest is crap.  At the time, Rolling Stone was using very brief works as column filler in their album review section at the end of every issue and my friend urged me to send them poems. Naively, I did.  And, amazingly, the work was accepted.  That was the beginning.

Art by Wayne Hogan

In any issue of Lilliput, mixed in with the poems that are 10 lines or less are some amazing haiku.  Also, every Wednesday on your blog you post haiku.  Had you read much haiku before you started Lillie? 

The short answer is no, if my memory serves me well.  An interesting story is connected with this.  I received a letter from Rolling Stone one day that they forwarded to me from a reader.  The reader was the well-known literary agent, Virginia Kidd, who commented on a particular poem (Autumn: “One day all the colors of death / just fell into focus / and out again.”), that it was just a perfect haiku and could she reprint it in the newsletter she did for her clients.  I, of course, was flattered and agreed and then ran out to find out what a haiku was.  And she was right, it was a pretty good haiku, not great, but reasonably good.

 How has editing Lillie influenced your own poetry?

Collage by Guy Beining

Running a one person small press operation for over 20 years is, among other things, a learning experience.  In one way, it was my school: I absorbed work of all kinds and quality.  Editing a one person mag has been, for me, an experience I can only ultimately describe as an analog to writing poems.  There are a number of steps in the process, the two most important of which are finding a poem and integrating it into a larger whole.  What I’m driving at here is this: there is a creative spark, an intuitive leap that can happen if you allow it to in the assembling process.  It is my favorite part of the process and, ironically, it takes the least amount of time. Trusting that inner voice to put together  a 16 page collection that works both in terms of the individual works and collectively is poetry.  And, as with writing poetry, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Occasionally I look back and just scratch my head.  But, overall, when I look back I feel like I’m looking at a secret journal of my own creative life.

Art by Guy Beining

To be more specific, encountering and interacting with great writers in the short form – writers such as Charlie Mehrhoff, John Martone, Cid Corman, Ed Baker and many, many more – has been the schooling I referred to.  Along the way, a poet/editor picks up techniques, little trade secrets, approaches, things like that. The kinds of things workshops provide.  But ultimately none of that matters without true in-spire-ation.  Anyone who has ever been possessed by the creative spark knows exactly what I’m talking about.  When that takes over, it is the greatest high in the world.

Can you describe what it is you're looking for when you read for Lillie - and how that has changed over the years?

The old cliché “I have no idea what it is but I know it when I see it” applies.  Emily Dickinson’s “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” has always struck me as true.  It really is an almost a physical, a visceral feeling. 

One thing that can be a struggle is a battle against sameness.  An issue shouldn’t be an issue of poems Don Wentworth wrote or could have written.  Sometimes I need to publish poems I disagree with.  Sometimes they need to be more lyrical, sometimes more abstract.  No matter what I do, the mag will be colored by who I am.  I made peace with that a long time ago.  Lilliput has changed greatly over the years.  As I became a better reader, it became a better magazine.

Art by Guy Beining (left), Wayne Hogan (right)

I consider myself successful at editing when I can hand a copy to anyone, non-poetry readers included, and they take something away.  There is something about the format that makes people smile immediately and that is such a great advantage for a poetry magazine.  It disarms people.  What is it disarming them of?  A natural bias against poetry, I think.  In American culture, this seems almost inbred. Something in the American educational system is broken.  Somehow the actual size of the magazine takes away the intimidation factor.

At that point, you need to nail it home.  The content, too, needs to be less intimidating, that’s part of what I strive for.  So generally when you have that fish on the line and they open the mag for the first time, they’ll find that Lilliput poems are brief, plain-speaking, cutting to the heart of what matters everyday: emotion, death, love, life, and the mystery of all things.  

The plain-speaking mystery.  It’s found regularly in Eastern poetry.  Plain-speaking without mystery to me is prose.

PART II:  PAST ALL TRAPS

In June of this year Six Gallery Press published a collection of your poems, Past All Traps.  The cover of the book shows two Citipati, Tibetan Lords of the Cemetery, with arms and legs entwined, in apparent mid-dance.  When I finished the book I saw how each poem in the collection was a continuation of this terrifying and yet, paradoxically, joyous death dance.  Could you talk a little about how your perception of death - or, to put it another way, at the transience of all things – has influenced your poetry?  Or conversely, how the attention required for the writing of the poetry has influenced your own perception of death?  

Right to the core of the matter, eh, no pussyfooting around here.  How to begin?

When people, mostly non-poetry reading people, ask me about what kind of poems I write I tell them I write haiku-like poems.  That usually piques their curiosity – what’s the difference between a haiku and a haiku-like poem and, more importantly for me, what are the similarities?

Basho

I attempt to write in the spirit of haiku, as far as is possible for someone who is a Western, non-practicing Buddhist (when pushed for more specificity, I say I’m a lapsed agnostic).  What is the spirit of haiku?  Well, what I’m after I would say is a spirit akin to the idea of satori, or enlightenment.  In Eastern culture, specifically Japanese culture, there are the various Buddhist practices known as Ways.  There is the Way of the Samurai, The Way of Ikebana, The Way of Tea, and, also, specifically as practiced by Bashō, The Way of Haiku.  The idea is, for both poet and reader, the practice of haiku as a striving for enlightenment.  The idea of putting together certain elements, usually nature-based, that spark a third element or revelation, in the experience of seeing/writing the haiku, and in the spirit of reading haiku. The idea of satori in Zen is direct pointing, direct experience, and revelation. 

That is the spirit of Haiku, direct pointing, the striving for transcendence.

Death is at the core of all experience, it is what gives life its meaning, its essence, its flavor.  Without death, life would be intolerable.  Still, we are all humans and we all wish not to die so, largely, we suppress this knowledge, particularly in the West where we are so removed from the Earth, from nature, and direct experience.  I am attempting to write haiku-like poems that bring people back to the experience of basic things: animals, insects, trees, nature … and death, which encompasses all these things.

One of the techniques I use in this particular book is direct address in the second person singular: you.  Direct address immediately says, hey, you, wake-up, I’m talking to you.  Satori is, in fact, the act of waking up, the act of awakening.  Poets and writers have been using this form all through time.  Its use in haiku is at once a violation of the rules and a perfect Western analog to the idea of satori.  These kinds of poems are not contemplative, they are not passive, they require action, reader/listener reaction.  And they are particularly effective for public readings.

Although your work is grounded in the theme of transience and death, the journey you take the reader on is really quite playful, wry, and somewhat trickster-oriented.  I’m thinking of Love Song for a Dead Porn Star:

The petals of the mimosa fall out in pink

& white clumps, thick sap staining the car’s

finish where they stick. They gather on the

ground round the trunk, a fallen garland, a

veil shadow, the flat reflection of a former

beauty, branches stretched out above, naked,

an Eastern goddess or a cheap show stripper,

dancing, dancing on the corpse of the world.

I love the poem because it includes everything– tree, car, goddess and stripper – without judgment.  They all belong; they are all beautiful (in their way); they all will pass.  What do you see as the relationship between beauty (and even the erotic) and transience?

I have to say that you may be the first person who not only got this poem in its general sense, you are the first person who has ever even remarked on it.  Love Song for a Dead Porn Star is an older poem, dating back to the era when AIDS first began to be felt heavily throughout Western culture.  Initially, in the West, AIDS was culturally divisive – it was the “gay disease.”   When people began to realize what it was, what it was doing, and what it might develop into, it changed our culture forever.  In a backdoor way for straight culture, one of its most significant effects was to raise consciousness about gay men and women. 

Kali

This particular poem was meant at once to be a poem of mourning, a poem of transience, and a poem of awareness, with a potentially dire message for all.  The porn star who died was John Holmes and he was the first high profile “straight” case of AIDS to become generally well-known.  In a very real sense his death was a turning point.  Of course, what he did for a living invited the same type of blame-the-victim response that had previously been used to denigrate gay men.  It seemed important to me to mourn this man, to put his death in a natural context, with a mythic backdrop of Hindi culture to give some portent to its significance beyond his simple passing.

All that being said, there is a wry, ironic playfulness to the poem also, and I believe that specifically highlights the erotic aspect of both his life and death, and also the loss of beauty we all experience.  It has an initial joy, then sorrow, and then it darkens.  One must think, though, that in the cycle of Kali’s dance, there will be a rebirth, and a second coming, which leads us back to the beginning of the poem.  As with all death, it is part of the greater cycle of things.

Do you take copious pages of notes and then pare your work down, or are you more like a sumi-e brush painter, scrawling it all down in one go?

My work has changed greatly over the years but at its center is inspiration.  Without the creative spark there is nothing, at least for me as a poet, and I think my fascination with that spark is what has made me hone down the image to its very essence.

Don in HS, reading "Lost Horizon"

I don’t take copious notes and, as my style has developed over the years, I frequently write the entire haiku-like poem, in one burst – as you say, sumi-e like.  Like any other poet I go back over those few syllables again and again, to get it just right, to bring the essence, the one thing, forward, highlighting the briefest of moments in the best possible way.

Until fairly recently, it has always been about paring down; now, I can see that expansion, too, can work, which is what has attracted me to the 5 line tanka form. Some ideas or images are meant for one, some for the other.  Some much longer poems have been coming my way, too; who knows what the future might hold?  Though normally I “think” in the short form, I try to let whatever it is be what it needs to be.

In these poems there is a sense of you blending and merging with your surroundings – in opposition to the belief that we are all isolated bodies and personalities moving around other isolated bodies and personalities (billiard balls clacking together, so to speak). 

Undressing

this late autumn evening,

yellow leaves

piled around

your feet.

Spider puts me gently

in his little box, takes me

back inside.

What is your sense of self?  Or, what do you see as the perimeters of the self?

Sumi-e by Suresh K. Bhavnani

I would have to say, honestly, what you are sensing is true and it is what I’m sensing, too, but I’m not sure I can adequately characterize it in terms of self.  There is sensing, there is feeling, and there is knowing, but what I believe you are getting at is really transcendence and, though I sense it, I’m not sure I literally see or am it.  The poems themselves are a working toward “seeing”, a working toward transcendence.  I do believe in the oneness of all things, definitely, the first poem you note, “Undressing,” is exactly that.  Have I ever felt it?  Yes, I have to say I have, fleetingly; mind-altering drugs can conjure this experience, and I’ve had that, but I’ve also had the oneness of feeling that Richard Bucke, in his seminal study Cosmic Consciousness, talks about so astutely.  It is my belief that all nature is one, including humans, that as Alan Watts was often fond of saying “We come out of the world, not into it,” in direct opposition to how Western spirituality characterizes the experience of being.

 The second poem, “Spider,” might, in fact, be a sort of transcendence.  I do literally take bugs, such as ants and spiders and centipedes, outside when I can and I have a little box for that.  Suddenly, one day when doing this before dawn, standing outside my house in the dark after having replaced some tiny creature back outdoors, it occurred to me that my house was my box, and I was being put inside and outside of it by the agency of the bug in a very real way.  The salient point here is the dance, the relation between bug and person. 

My favorite poem in the book is Samsara (for those who don’t know Buddhist terminology, Samsara means ‘the endless round of birth and death’.)

 Samsara

Don

On the museum tour,

we listen politely to the docent

while looking at a 100-year-old photograph

of the room in which we stand.

I don’t even want to ask a question now, for fear of possibly ruining the experience of this poem (maybe I just wanted to post it in the interview!), but here goes: When you are writing a poem, do you have a particular sense of time you are working in?  

With this particular poem, it was a literal moment, this happened.  I work in a large urban public library attached to a museum and happened to be working in a room in the library that had formally belonged to the museum.  A museum docent was giving a tour that I observed and over his shoulder I saw a 100 year old photo with a group of people, standing in the same contiguous spot, as the group of people huddled around the docent, only clothed in markedly different dress. It was like a literal palimpsest – the revelation for me hopefully is also the revelation for the reader.  It is getting out of the way of the poem, getting out of the way of life, really, to let it do what it needs to, to let the poem be written.  It is direct pointing.

So, this poem is, indeed, not only about time but in a very real sense my experience of time universally, in a non-mathematical way, if you will.  Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that it is an experience outside of time, which is after all only an artificial intellectual construct.  In a larger sense, all of these poems are an attempt to get “outside of time”, a way to experience the eternal in the moment, in the now.

There is a poem in which you lambast Ted Hughes for thinking that being a poet ‘will ever be more/important than/being’.  I don’t know anything about Ted Hughes, having only read Crow and Gaudete (which I really liked), so don’t know any of his proclamations about the role of the poet.  Having said that, what do you see as the ‘role’ of the poet (if any) in our brave new 21^st Century?

The poet is a town crier, a priest, a seer, a magician, a trickster, a singer.  Poets bring the news, good or bad, the emotional, the visceral, the unconscious news.

As to the Hughes poem: it was part of a series of poems I wrote using the idea of Ted Hughes as the archetypal male poet in which I posited a number of ideas I wanted to discuss.  Here it is the idea of the poet and what that might mean to some and what it means to me.   It isn’t particularly fair to him – I’m not sure I’m actually reacting to a Hughes pronouncement specifically, though I might have been; it is more of a feeling.  This, too, is an older poem and a bit fuzzy in my memory.  However, I do remember in the series coming around to the idea that I needed to treat him fairer than I had and I wrote two other poems entitled “Forgiving Ted Hughes” and “Loving Ted Hughes.”     

I know you’ve given a few readings of Past All Traps in the last six months. How do you perform such short poems? 

Performance of the short poem changed my work, at least a certain aspect of it.  I never imagined reading a poem as brief as a haiku in public.  God, reading poetry in public is a naked enough experience – to read something so brief that the listener might not have the opportunity to catch it was just frightening.  And then one day I saw a reading of Issa translations by Robert Hass and it was positively revelatory.  It was poignant, in your face, humorous and wonderful.  The result was I saw an element in my own work that I’d been developing that I knew would work and knew it would work well.  And that element was this.

 I’d be writing poems that were written in the form of direct address such as:

Morning glories

open to everything,

even you.

The direct address, as I mentioned earlier, was the immediate connection to a live audience and, though probably a blatant violation of every rule in the haiku handbook, it has, in my mind, its direct corollary in the spiritual element of Zen known as satori, or direct pointing.  Direct address as a form of direct pointing.  Here’s another:

            The sweet magnolia

            bows to all creation –

            and you were saying?

When I’ve read these poems at readings they evoke laughter generally, and it is this use of humor to get to revelation that is at the core of much of Issa’s best work.  Humor is very important in many spiritual and philosophical systems and, with poems like these, first the listener laughs and then, if she is on a certain path, she thinks.  It is with that thought the poem is completed, in the listener’s mind, and that, that most certainly is in the very spirit of classical haiku.

Another technique that is very effective in readings is where the poet pokes fun at himself.  For instance:

            My head up my ass

            not nearly far enough –

            the Meditation meditation.

Of course, this gets a big laugh … and then …

There are many, many of my short pieces that I wouldn’t perform at a reading because they wouldn’t make this kind of connection.   I have lots of pieces that are effective on the page

that don’t translate at a live reading.  I’m not all that sure it is very much different for poets who work in longer forms, it’s just more immediately obvious in haiku length work.

What’s next on the horizon in terms of your own work?

My publisher, Six Gallery, is interested in a second book as Past All Traps has sold well for them.  I have been writing virtually non-stop all year and have more than enough material for a new book and probably enough for a third.

The work itself has been varied and, the more I write in the brief haiku-like form, the more refined it is becoming.  Oddly enough, with something so restrictive, it seems to me to be, like 12-bar blues, infinite in possibility.  I also have written some in the tanka form and other simple open form short pieces.  I’ve also written 3 or 4 much longer poems recently: two are rants for oral presentation (“Poetry: a Definition” and “We Are Not Amused”) and a third poem concerning Richard Brautigan.  All of these, surprisingly for me, have been well received at readings, so there is that.  Currently, I’ve been drawn to reading a wide variety of classic Chinese poems and find myself very inspired by them.

First, though, I owe Six Gallery the manuscript for the 20^th anniversary anthology of Lilliput Review.  Between that manuscript and the day-to-day work on the magazine, every spare moment I have is accounted for.  All I can really do, concerning my own work, is write and store away the random tiny slips of paper I scrawl on throughout the day.

Don Wentworth, Past All Traps

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CODA 

It's just occurred to me that Lilliput Review has been around long enough now for someone who was born during the summer of ’89 to be writing their own short poems, and that young poet could be – right this minute, as I write this – sending them off to Don at Lillie. And so Lillie has entered the great wheel, having been around for an entire generation – something mostly unheard-of in the small press. 

All hail Lilliput Review.