"Spam From Romania" should also be a Tom Waits song!
. . . it does at that.
Can you recommend anything by H.D. or Bryher as an introduction?
Bryher, easily, but that's because I haven't read as much of her work. I linked her second collection of poetry, Arrow Music (1922), because it is amazing and bizarrely unknown: "Horses of Tros" is one of the poems I want to run out and shake strangers until they read; "From Helix" and "Amazon" are close seconds. The same site hosts her two early semi-memoirs Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923); they are queer and beautiful and I keep an eye out for them in used book stores, because they were reprinted together as recently as 2000. You especially want to track down her novel Visa for Avalon (1965), which I read in 2010. Almost no one seems to know it, but it feels like a secret history: the source text for every novel of the quotidian and incomprehensible fantastic. I can't find any evidence that M. John Harrison read her, which is confusing.
H.D. I love unreservedly and therefore have to think about what to choose. (I own nearly her complete poems, absent one late collection; it's the fiction and nonfiction I'm still discovering.) Start with Sea Garden (1916), her first and most identifiably Imagist collection: she writes in English as though it were Sappho's Greek. After that skip thirty years and go straight to her arguable masterwork, the collected Blitz poems known as Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). I read them in mid-college. You will almost certainly be able to trace the imprint she left (the image here is not a fossil, but an ebb of wave over sand or a ripple of refracted light) in the ways I think about words. She was always a powerful summoner of the numinous, but it is the primary language of her war poems—there's an uncollected one in the gigantic New Directions Collected Poems 1912–1944 that I love as much as Trilogy itself, a chance encounter on a train where an angel of annunciation might come as an airman with a stammer ("R.A.F."). If you want late H.D., Helen in Egypt (1961) is a beautiful discursion on the alternate myth of Troy in which Paris stole a shape of cloud and the real Helen spent those ten years in Egypt; H.D. makes it a palimpsest of the war and its heroes and the stories men tell of women and the stories women find for themselves, plus Hermetic magic. It has great evocation of the sea. She and Bryher are both great with the sea.
I have not yet seen Borderline (1930), the only surviving film by the POOL Group, the avant-garde film collective H.D. formed in the late 1920's with Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson (mutual partner, married to Bryher; writer, filmmaker, I know much less about him once he leaves their lives). I'm not linking to the BFI's writeup of the film because it's horribly queer/poly-erasing; I shout about it in Rush's comments if you want to know what they got wrong. The point is that the film stars H.D., Paul Robeson, and Eslanda Robeson, and I think it's only on DVD in the UK. I've been curious for years.
no subject
. . . it does at that.
Can you recommend anything by H.D. or Bryher as an introduction?
Bryher, easily, but that's because I haven't read as much of her work. I linked her second collection of poetry, Arrow Music (1922), because it is amazing and bizarrely unknown: "Horses of Tros" is one of the poems I want to run out and shake strangers until they read; "From Helix" and "Amazon" are close seconds. The same site hosts her two early semi-memoirs Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923); they are queer and beautiful and I keep an eye out for them in used book stores, because they were reprinted together as recently as 2000. You especially want to track down her novel Visa for Avalon (1965), which I read in 2010. Almost no one seems to know it, but it feels like a secret history: the source text for every novel of the quotidian and incomprehensible fantastic. I can't find any evidence that M. John Harrison read her, which is confusing.
H.D. I love unreservedly and therefore have to think about what to choose. (I own nearly her complete poems, absent one late collection; it's the fiction and nonfiction I'm still discovering.) Start with Sea Garden (1916), her first and most identifiably Imagist collection: she writes in English as though it were Sappho's Greek. After that skip thirty years and go straight to her arguable masterwork, the collected Blitz poems known as Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). I read them in mid-college. You will almost certainly be able to trace the imprint she left (the image here is not a fossil, but an ebb of wave over sand or a ripple of refracted light) in the ways I think about words. She was always a powerful summoner of the numinous, but it is the primary language of her war poems—there's an uncollected one in the gigantic New Directions Collected Poems 1912–1944 that I love as much as Trilogy itself, a chance encounter on a train where an angel of annunciation might come as an airman with a stammer ("R.A.F."). If you want late H.D., Helen in Egypt (1961) is a beautiful discursion on the alternate myth of Troy in which Paris stole a shape of cloud and the real Helen spent those ten years in Egypt; H.D. makes it a palimpsest of the war and its heroes and the stories men tell of women and the stories women find for themselves, plus Hermetic magic. It has great evocation of the sea. She and Bryher are both great with the sea.
I have not yet seen Borderline (1930), the only surviving film by the POOL Group, the avant-garde film collective H.D. formed in the late 1920's with Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson (mutual partner, married to Bryher; writer, filmmaker, I know much less about him once he leaves their lives). I'm not linking to the BFI's writeup of the film because it's horribly queer/poly-erasing; I shout about it in Rush's comments if you want to know what they got wrong. The point is that the film stars H.D., Paul Robeson, and Eslanda Robeson, and I think it's only on DVD in the UK. I've been curious for years.