Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound

 

Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound commemorates the life and passing of Alexandra Grilikhes, who had performed at the first Personal Mythologies. The series was named by her.

If you noticed, and it certainly would be permissible if you did not, the title of today’s performance is Personal Mythologies II. Two, because we did the same thing last year at roughly this time (not me and Brian, mind you, but me and two other poets). One of the poets, Alexandra Grilikhes, was giving what turned out to be her last ever performance. She died in February, age seventy, and ending a life of great achievement in the arts. She was an editor, novelist, poet, promoter, and feminist. I was deeply moved by her death, which seemed so untimely, coming on the heels of her first novel’s successful release. Wouldn’t you know, my immediate response to her death was an extravagant outpouring of poetic energy. I wrote a fifteen-page mini-epic called Death Meditations, then abandoned it when I felt I couldn’t go on. The grief, and the desperate longing to create something good, were getting to me.

Tracing the evolution of this poem, I am reminded of an episode in the early poetic life of Ezra Pound. Ez was wandering through a Metro station in London, presumably waiting for his train, which may’ve been late, or simply unwilling to stop for Ezra Pound. In any case, Ez began examining the faces drifting and circulating around him, and these faces brought him to a moment of epiphany. Returning home, he pounded out (no pun intended) an elaborate thirty-page catalog of Imagist impressions. He let it sit for six months, and decided to scrap the whole thing except for two lines: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ petals on a wet, black bough.” This little haiku, In the Station of the Metro, has become famous, and is, for my money, Ezra’s best poem.

As you can probably guess, my Alexandra poem went through a similar metamorphosis. Coming back to it, I scrapped everything inessential, until the fifteen-page piece had yielded a single page of usable material. Hours were spent pruning, paring, crafting, until I finally felt I had done the deceased poet justice. Or, failing that, that I had tried my best to do so. The poem lacks imagery, metaphor, and other savory elements. It is what might be called a vegetarian poem— lean, mean, good for the digestion, but unlikely to titillate the senses. I recognize this, but it is, after all, a poem about mortality. What does death leave us with? It is my attempt to reach Alexandra, wherever she is. It is very hard for me to believe that a year ago, she was standing at this very podium, delivering a performance that unified the threads of her considerable body of work into an artful whole. Without turning this into a would-be séance, I would like to say that this poem is an attempt to evoke her presence, if only in the hearts and minds of those of us who knew her.