First Loves [by Greg Hewett]

You can tell a lot about a poet by his or her first loves as a reader of poetry, so by way of introduction I thought I’d recount my first time reading a modern poet outside of Dr. Seuss, and describe my subsequent obsession.  I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, in upstate New York, in a middle-class household devoid of poetry.  My father read Michener and Ludlum, while my mother read Erma Bombeck and I’m OK, You’re OK.  But, far away, in the City (as we called New York), my great-aunt Leocadia adored poetry, as well as all the arts.  She had gone to Hunter College just after the First World War and was what we called cultured; she even had, my parents said, “real oil paintings” on her walls.  Perusing the thin volumes lining her shelves when I was around thirteen, I was drawn to the title Sea Garden.  I vaguely recalled from one of my father’s out-loud New York Times crossword sessions that H.D. was a poet’s abbreviated name.  I opened to “Sea Rose”:

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf…

In some inarticulate niche of my boy-brain, I knew that this was everything I wanted in a poem, in a poet, in me.  Of course I didn’t think of the stanzas as “Imagistic” or “crystalline” (things one learns in college).  As hopelessly un-Modernist as it sounds, I dared for the first time to feel fierce emotion and correspondence with another soul. In short, I lusted.  Her sounds, her rhythm and her imagery made me want to run out to Jones Beach and roam the shore with her voice in my head—or better, I wanted to run with this poet who could call a rose “harsh,” wanted to be “flung on the sand” with that rose, with her.  But the real question is this:  How, in a world of Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels, Saturday Night Fever and Last Tango in Paris, the Carpenters and Janis Joplin, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Fear of Flying, did a teenage boy get nailed by H.D.?

Comments

[sarah]

H.D. was one of my early loves too, I took Sea Garden with me wherever I went for maybe 2 years at least, and Helen in Egypt + Trilogy are two of my favorite books of all time. Her insatiable curiosity, elegance, and imaginative synthesis of the archaic/feminine mythic with psychoanalytic insight and political outcry, her reimagining of the "feminine epic," changed my poetics and my life, and really expanded the field of American poetry. Thanks Greg!! XO