Since that day I first read
H.D., I tagged along behind her, wantonly blending her poetry with her
biography.
I wanted to jag from independence to romantic
thralldom, just as she did.
What abandoned lover would not want to emulate her Eurydice’s defiant
cry to Orpheus?
Before I am lost,
hell must open like a red
rose
for the dead to pass.
Eventually, I found H.D.’s
Hellenic range of aesthetics can sometimes seem a little narrow or awkward in
the modern era, but this was simply learning the limitations and humanity of a
friend you idolize at first meeting.
I could easily forgive the tendentiousness of her revisionary account of
the Trojan War, Helen in Egypt,
when I was in the midst of her expansive and iconoclastic Trilogy, arguably one of the few successful modernist long
poems. Even without Aliki
Barnstone’s wonderful edition (which wasn’t available when I first read it)
full of notes on H.D.’s references and allusions, the poem can be read simply
as a poet talking to poets about the power and responsibility found in
poetry--a power she believes in, even as the bombs of the Blitz are raining
down on her:
But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,
so what good are your scribblings?
this - we take them with us
beyond death…
In high school I became H.D. Or
at least her spirit inhabited mine as I read her out-loud to myself, sprawled
on the black beanbag chair in my room, heels dug into the deep, orange shag
carpeting as the lines poured through me.
Like her, I was interested in séances and other supernatural phenomena,
and so figured that the day she died (September 27, 1961) was right about the
time when I, at age three, had a fever that nearly killed me. I reasoned that when her spirit left
her body it found its way into mine, causing the fever. I wrote about this at prodigious length
in my diary.
Now I’ve found more sane
ways of channeling H.D. The poet
Ted Mathys and I have written a screenplay for a biopic of H.D. The whole
process made her more present than any séance ever could. The screenplay centers on her sessions with Freud at the dawn of World War II alternating with scenes of World
War I. Our story ends with her
writing the first part of Trilogy,
“The Walls Do Not Fall,” as the walls of her flat fall in
around her in
London. Of course we’ve already
cast it—Cate Blanchett as H.D., naturally, and Sean Penn as Pound. We’ve gotten honorable mention in a
couple of screenwriting contests, and some agents have been initially
interested, but it’s a tough sell.
After all, when you Google “H.D.” you get a whole lot about
Harley-Davidson and HDTV.
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