Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings By Frank O'Hara and Bill Berkson ISBN 0-9669430-5-8 82 pages 2001 $14.00 Ordering information

"From 'St. Bridget's Neighborhood' come these phenomenal coversations between two poets dancing with words. Heady and hearty, the poems, poem-plays, letters, novel fragments look and sound as alive in their twist and turns--which range from the slyly witty to the positivle flabbergasting--as they were when first written four decades ago. Harking back to the Futurists' 'parole in liberatá' and looking forward to postmodernity's tangos performed by the signifier with the signified, they resist description, explication, paraphrased in the friendliest possible manner, inviting you to walk right in and let your hair down, then hit the street again and wonder what happened? Exhiliration is what happened, and keeps on happening as you find yourself reading and rereading, because you can't, and don't have to, remember a thing. 'We discovered many years ago that in french you can say anything.' And then proceed to do so in L'Anglais Américain--salut, chers maîtres!"

--Anselm Hollo

Hymn to St. Bridget's Steeple

It is to you, bending limp and ridiculous, on Ninth
Street, that I turn, colder than usual after a summer
of lime and smoke. I think you are the first of Ireland's
saints, or the last, it doesn't matter, you are my dream
of an actual winter with your icicle hat and your arms
which somehow seem square like something I couldn't see but
guessed at in the last Reinhardt I looked at. It wasn't
black, it was red, like New York if you're waste and
contained, or maybe maroon, like my heart which I imagine
inside me, although it looks black to you, St. Bridget,
although it is quiet and in need of filling. Please
tell me what it means "to pump," as if I were a well
growing upwards and into a steeple which someone who cares
names my own, for always to face the dullest wind,
and you should know, St. Bridget.

10/19/60

*

Reverdy

Reverdy is not like Chopin. He is a long city street with small musical houses on it.

There is a word, rédacteur, in French, of which I cannot recall the meaning.

Here are two cups, a Keats, a comb and a brush, four packs of cigarettes, an ashtray labeled "Chance," two boxes of matches, a rope, Always Love a Stranger, a wire brush and a carved piece of wood, which I cannot understand. This is where Reverdy still lives, inexplicable as ever.

What strikes the eye hurts, what one hears is a lie. What is written struggles through, and then has struggled through and is white. The snow lasts because of the sun. Never letters, always messages.

Here we are, getting ideas like the French, yippee!

We discovered many years ago that in French you can say anything... Except certain things which Eliot, Valéry, Claudel, Béranger and others have said. Yippee!

Reverdy is not a cubist. Who ever was? One hundred Americans a day are accused of cubism. "The pubic area of the male is not a thing of beauty." "The public area of the femal is not a thing of beauty." (These are two American sayings showing a lack of Reverdy.)

Picasso is fire, Reverdy is flint. In America flint is used for arrowheads as well as tinderboxes. Do you like to hunt for what you eat? Are you a cannibal? Is there order outside of insanity or just a maelstrom of velleities and mistakes?

Je suis las de vivre dans le pays natal. When you get to the maelstrom let me know. If you have to pick the ashes off your cigarette, you are born to any given work of modern art. We no longer know what wires are wrapped around us than what air we breathe. We no longer care who is next door; we know how they feel about us. One drinks more than one thinks. There is no sense in coming home "early." We are already in the maelstrom which is why we don't "know" it. I want to get up "early."

In America there is onle one other poet beside Reverdy: William Carlos Williams.

They are both alone. How do you feel about titles like They Are Both Alone, Wake Up and Die with Your Eyes Open Don't You?, Chair Vive, Poem?

We have made ourselves cretins for Reverdy's sake.

We must all pretend to feel fine or get shot like a horse.

(Written for the French of John Ashbery, Paris, 1961)

*

from The Letters of Angelicus & Fidelio Fobb

Dear Angelicus,

Here in the monk-hatch here you have tucked me away I have lots of time to think, grrrr. What do I think on? Well, I think about you and mamma and pappa and Enid having fun on the Lido while I swelter in these tacky drapes. And I look so awful in brown! Even my "guardian angel," a rather amusing Corsican who was appointed by Brother Superior, can hardly bear to look at me before nightfall. I have reason to believe that he is genuinely fond of me, though. We have some very batty religious discussions after lights-out, too, since he is a sensualist and I a mystic. And then, at times, like all things in the Eye of God, our positions are directly reversed--what a wonder is Creation! He is very strong, too, and always wins, which makes me feel quite angelic. And I always think of you for a second when I feel that way. Your name, that is.

Now that I have been no longer "in the world" for three weeks, I wonder how poor mamma puts up with Enid. I can understand her resignation to having her around the villa, especially since she stays way up there in the back wing, but when pappa wouldn't even go to Venice without her it did seem a bit mean, not that I am judging poor pappa, who doubtless has his own problems at his age. But I do hope neither you nor I get that way when we are really grown up. I mean, I agree with Holy Mother Church that one should be discreet, and not deliberately humiliate those who love you, unless of course you can't help it, which perhaps pappa can't.

Oh. What is all this Sophie business? I don't remember any Sophie, and I haven't been here that long. Were you perhaps thinking of that charming day when we took all the workers in the soap factory to lunch? Talk about your déjeuner sur l'herbe!!! Oh dear, I'm not supposed to think about those things while I'm here.

By the way, how long do I have to stay here? You said it would only be a retreat, but it feels more like incarceration. I think, in all brotherly affection and love, that you should examine your conscience. Weren't you just a little bit jealous when pappa gave the whole racing stable to me, and you had to ask my permission to go riding? Is that why you arranged all this? The first night here I almost drowned in tears at that thought, I wept all night wishing I had just given you everything you wanted and gone away to die in some far off place among the yaks. And then I felt guilty which is why I haven't mentioned it till now.

They have a very nice pet elephant thethered in the cloister, the gift of a regenerate sultan, I believe. After morning prayers we go out and play with him for fifteen minutes each day. The other morning the elephant, while we were all running about the cloister in a wonderful spring-like mood, stepped on the robes of one of the brothers pulling them off him completely! It was so funny, we all just laughed and laughed. But mostly the elephant just stays quietly in the cloister garden, trampling the herbs.

I have been reading a most interesting volume on Romanesque art. Do you remember our friend John Button saying he'd "had Romanesque up to here"? I don't feel that way about it at all, at least not in books. What have you been reading?

As one of the first favors I have ever asked you to do for me in my whole life, Angelicus, please try to get me out of here before the summer is over.

Your loving,
Fidelio

PS Please send stamps. The pittance you gave me was all used upon a present to my "guardian angel." (I don't mean to sound snappish.)

*

Alhambra Hotel
Secondary Bridge Rd.
Punselheim, Pa.

August 14, 1961

Dear Fidelio,
Upon lighting my first cigarette of this morning, I found that I was excrutiatingly bored, not to say sick unto death. Even the persimmons which Prussy has placed and arranged so delicately on my breakfast plate could not assuage this terrible feeling which must have had something to do with the night before and the day (or days) ahead.

I know you are always thinking of dying, and I always think it is too good for me. Disgust is a bigger and better habit than sex. Sex, however, is not a habit. Memory is an absolute fabrication of little oddities which somehow will give the future more to write home about. That is: "When I was six I was bitten by a garter snake. It left no scar but I am sure the incident has burned itself into my very soul. Perhaps a real scar will appear tomorrow, but that is unlikely. It is more likely that I will trip on a fire hosr and get up unhurt with everybody standing around worrying about me. I have, to this day, no fear of garter snakes, although I am desperately afraid of water mocassins and rattlers and always expect to find one in my bed."

When I was twelve I found a baby crying on my doorstep. I went running up to my room in tears and that was the last I ever heard of him. I know it was "him" because I looked before I ran--something I had learned from the nice policeman at the corner--the only thing I ever learned. That evening I read Captain Courageous and realized for the first time what a fool I had been. Nothing changed after that and nothing ever will. I will never learn to dive from heights. I will never learn to climb them either. If I find myself there, it is of course a different story.

More of this later.
(signed)
Angelicus

Home | Current Publications | New Releases | Authors | Ordering Info | Events | About Us

© 2003 The Owl Press. All rights reserved.