On Corman

On Corman

by Robert Kelly


I lift a little
cross-shaped flower
white to smell it
and all I smell’s
my finger,
could a flower’s
scent be so
transparent?

As I finish writing that down,
very late at night,
scraping the barrel of the mind,
or wherever it is that we find things to say,
I find myself thinking about Corman.

Chaster and quieter than I am,
he would have written:

I lift a little
flower
white
my nose
smells just my finger

or even less.

Maybe less playful that day,
he’d drop the nose:

I lift a little
flower
white,
smell just
the finger.

Yes, that’s where he’d likely stop—
and he would keep the “I.”
He never abandoned that paterfamilias
of poetry, the authority of the perceiving,
recording I.
But he’d drop the ‘my’—goes without saying.
Maybe he’d add—I can almost hear him—
Poetry is what goes without saying.

There is a wonderful human push in saying it,
saying it anyhow, saying it
though it can’t be said.

He trusted the silence around his words,
trusted silence the way a man trusts
the walls of his house.
Not many of us live in houses
whose walls we raised ourselves,
yet they are our walls, we take them,
they hold us, and they stand.
Silence is the firmest thing of all.

Few of us carve the silence
in which words sometimes consent
to happen hard.

Only in silence are words really hard,
and only when they’re hard can they be
themselves
and mean themselves.

How to trust the words:
trust nothing else.

I began to correspond with Corman
in the late 1950s, and most of the urgent,
almost daily exchanges took place between
then and 1962, when he brought out the issue
of ORIGIN (2nd Series) that featured my work.
(William Bronk was in that issue too.)

The brusque, testy rightness of Corman’s
letters—always the same length as the letter
he was answering, doing so (this was a pride
of his) the same day he received it—was a
severe and valued guide to me in those early
days, and many another poet grew strong and
clear on Corman’s strictures.

One of the first books by Cid I read was
also the longest I know, his poems from Matera,
the parched austere Italian landscape he
exchanged for Kyoto. Sun Rock Man he called
the book, the words stacked. Those poems won me,
as his grace and acumen had mastered me earlier.

And now I think:

CID
COR
MAN

Cid is the hero, el mio Cid, el Campeador,
who is both a hero and a poem of the hero,
subject and object intricately connected,
the unknown narrator writing of mio Cid,
my Cid, as well as el Cid,
as we usually remember him.

Cid, el Cid, al-Sidi, the lord—
(like the Sidi Hamet who was the author
of Don Quixote that Cervantes discovered
in his head or in his heart to tell the story),
the champion of a struggle against the Saracens,
who bears a Saracen name,

and Cid is Sidney too, so common a bourgeois
Jewish-American name made romantic, estranged
from the seventy-years-gone calms of Roxbury
and Dorchester into the Extreme Orient of poetry,
the land where the pearl comes from,

the thing we need, the word we find, the text that
suddenly understands us.

The double sense of the name—the exotic,
the commonplace—reveals at once the starting point
in the everyday, the common light, which through
the ardent listening of the poem turns out to be
the sparks of Lurianic splendor.
The glory is always here and now.

And Cor is heart of course,
his work never failed to feel,
never for all his love of the minimal,
the barebones,
the harsh Zen light on the rice fields,
never stopped referring gently
to the eternal triangle of speaker
and a found world and a heart that hears.

He had such grace.
We imitate his minimals with ease,
but they seem slim or slack or trite,
lacking the heart he had.
The heart he heard.

It is so easy to take on those Japanese
clarities, brevity, lucidity, and take them
as excuses to be brittle, disconnected,
uncommitted.

How false it would be to think of Corman
that way—read his translations of Celan,
or his great verbalization of a real-time
enactment of a Zeami Nō play or his wonderful
reading of Bashō’s pilgrimage, and you find
the emotional complexity of tenderness, gesture,
response. Always he was searching for that,
always letting silence cancel out the usual
acceptations and associations of words, as
only silence can,
and let the revived meaning speak.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Cipher Journal