Alfred Kreymborg
Alfred Kreymborg, one of the most original of the younger insurgents, was born in New York City, December 10, 1883. His education was spasmodic, his childhood being spent beneath the roar of the elevated trains. At ten he was an expert chess player, devoting practically all his time to a study of the game. Later, he became a bookkeeper for a few years, but from the ages of seventeen to twenty-five he supported himself by teaching chess and playing exhibition games. His passion, however, was not mathematics but music. He dreamed of extending the borders of poetry into the realms of tonic art, experimented with new systems of notation, technicalities of rhythm. At thirty, he began to turn to the theater as a medium; finding, in this way, fresh contacts that enriched and ripened his later work.
In 1914, he organized that group of radical poets which, half-deprecatingly, half-defiantly, called itself “Others.” (He edited the three anthologies of their work published in 1916, 1917 and 1919.) Meanwhile, he had been working on a technique that was a fresh attempt to rid poetry of its too frequent wordiness and rhetorical non-essentials. Mushrooms (1916) was the first collection in this vein. Here Kreymborg continually sought for simplification, cutting away at his lines until they assumed an almost naked expression. Often he overdid his effects, attaining nothing more than a false ingenuousness, a sophisticated simplicity. Often, too, he failed to draw the line between what is innocently childlike and what is merely childish. One sees him frequently trying to strike curious attitudes, tripping over several of his buffooneries and sprawling ingloriously.
But Kreymborg, for all harlequin gestures, can do something better than tumble and talk with his tongue in his cheek. An elfin fantasy and no little beauty of thought are his when he wants to use them. Surprising whimsicality and passages of bright color distinguish his Plays for Poem-Mimes (1918), in which the principles of modern art are applied to poetry and acting, as well as the more developed Plays for Merry Andrews (1920).
Kreymborg’s most ambitious volume of poetry, Blood of Things (1920), is, for all the surface oddities, the work not only of an ardent experimenter but a serious thinker. Humor is in these pages, but it is humor lifted to a sort of exaltation. Here, in spite of what seems a persistence of occasional charlatanry, is a rich and sensitive imagination; a fancy that is as wild as it is quick-witted.
Old Manuscript
The sky
is that beautiful old parchment
in which the sun
and the moon
keep their diary.
To read it all,
one must be a linguist
more learned than Father Wisdom;
and a visionary
more clairvoyant than Mother Dream.
But to feel it,
one must be an apostle:
one who is more than intimate
in having been, always,
the only confidant—
like the earth
or the sea.
Dawns
I have come
from pride
all the way up to humility
This day-to-night.
The hill
was more terrible
than ever before.
This is the top;
there is the tall, slim tree.
It isn’t bent; it doesn’t lean;
It is only looking back.
At dawn,
under that tree,
still another me of mine
was buried.
Waiting for me to come again,
humorously solicitous
of what I bring next,
it looks down.
Her Eyes
Her eyes hold black whips—
dart of a whip
lashing, nay, flicking,
nay, merely caressing
the hide of a heart—
and a broncho tears through canyons—
walls reverberating,
sluggish streams
shaken to rapids and torrents
storm destroying
silence and solitude!
Her eyes throw black lariats—
one for his head,
one for his heels—
and the beast lies vanquished—
walls still,
streams still—
except for a tarn,
or is it a pool,
or is it a whirlpool
twitching with memory?
Improvisation
Wind:
Why do you play
that long beautiful adagio,
that archaic air,
to-night
Will it never end?
Or is it the beginning,
some prelude you seek?
Is it a tale you strum?
Yesterday, yesterday—
Have you no more for us?
Wind:
Play on.
There is nor hope
nor mutiny
in you.