Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts.
Samuel Greenberg.
James Laughlin, Garrett Caples, Eds.
New Directions Poetry Pamphlet. 2019. 64 pp.
ISBN 978 0811228138.
The Greenberg Manuscripts consist of circa 600 holograph pages of poems, prose, and plays written by Samuel Bernard Greenberg (1893—1917), an impoverished, untutored young jewish immigrant from Austria—an ardent reader of classic English poetry with only a sixth grade education—who died a lonely, untimely, and tragic death at the age of 23 in the tuberculosis ward of the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island, New York city. After Greenberg's death, his manuscripts (written in notebooks and cheap tablets and on loose sheets of paper, including calendar leaves and wrapping paper) passed into the hands of William Murrell Fisher, who had befriended the young poet, lending him books during his long illness and encouraging him in his writing. Six years after Samuel Greenberg's death, late in the year 1923, Fisher showed some of Greenberg's poems to the poet Hart Crane (1899-1932). Crane was immediately taken with the poems; indeed, he was seized by excitement, pacing the floor and declaiming them aloud. Crane made his own copies of the poems and ultimately appropriated from Greenberg's poetry numerous images, phrases, and entire poems, incorporating them into his own work without acknowledging their source.
Only after Crane's death were the Greenberg poems discovered as having served as uncredited sources for certain of Crane's poems. This disclosure then led to an interest on the part of some scholars and poets into Greenberg's own work, previously unknown to any but Fisher and Crane. The first appearance of Samuel Greenberg's poetry in book form under his own name was a 32-page volume in stapled wrappers, edited and with an introduction by James Laughlin (founder and editor of New Directions Publishing), printed in 1939 and titled Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts. This rare booklet has now—after 80 years—been reprinted by New Directions in a "new, expanded edition," edited by Garrett Caples. The incisive original introduction by Laughlin has been supplemented by an equally insightful preface by Caples, and the original selection of poems has been expanded to include ten additional poems together with a letter and two prose pieces by Greenberg.
Greenberg's poetry is cast in various forms, including end-rhymed quatrains and unrhymed quatrains, blank verse sonnets and free verse. His poems not infrequently contain misspellings and erratic punctuation, as well as grammatical, syntactical and lexical errors; they mix archaisms and poeticisms with mysterious word coinages. They tend toward the effusive and rhapsodic, are marked by ellipsis and incongruity, by shifts and juxtapositions, and by rolling metrical phrases and amazing sweeps and leaps of language. They are, as Hart Crane wrote to a friend, the poems of "a Rimbaud in embryo."[1] Or, as the poet Philip Lamantia observed of them, Greenberg's poems are "veritable wounds of wonder."[2]
Recurrent among Samuel Greenberg's poems are images of light and color. The things of the world are seen by him to glimmer and shine, they glow, are luminous, splendorous, brilliant or bright; they are of cerulean, rose, ruby, silver, violet, gold, pink, green, yellow. The beauty of the world, its light and its hues, can seem to reflect a truer Beauty beyond the visible world. Yet "the sordid earth" is also known to the poet as a realm of "solemn woes," of foulness and staleness, fear and pain, where mortals rave under "vanishing skies," and where "Love is truly a lost jewel." Also recurrent in Greenberg's poems are allusions to divinity and the sacred: to Jehovah, to God and the Lord, to deity and saints, to prayer and the soul, to psalms and "spiritual thought," to the heavens and eternity, and to "the spiritual gate" we seek to discover, beyond which lies the redemption and restitution of all things. At times the poet laments his particular plight, his doomed life: "a stricken creature I am," "an extricable prisoner bound / to essence" from which he strives to emancipate himself, but Greenberg senses that the poetry he creates participates somehow in a larger mystery: "that which rises from my inner tomb / Is but the haste of the starry splendor dome." The exalted lyricism of Greenberg's poetry strains against the limits of language striving to express a visionary experience akin to that of poets such as George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, William Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Certain of Greenberg's poems seem almost to be transcriptions of dreams, charged with their strange, swift drama. "Conduct," one of the group of poems enigmatically titled "Sonnets of Apology," possesses a vivid, oneiric quality:
By a peninsula, the painter sat and
Sketched the uneven valley groves
The apostle gave alms to the
Meek, the volcano burst
In fusive sulphur and hurled
Rocks and ore into the air,
Heaven's sudden change at
The drawing tempestuous
Darkening shade of Dense clouded Hues
The wanderer soon chose
His spot of rest, they bore the
Chosen hero upon their shoulders
Whom they greatly admired, as,
The Beach tide summer of people desired.
Other poems by Greenberg , such as "The Pale Impromtu" and "Tusks of Blood" seem to be transcriptions of a discourse below conscious awareness, disjunct, fecund, a welter, a torrent, a tumult of words:
Hidden winds perspired foul—as
a palmed rose
The well shade
Urgent fears
Eyes jealousy
painted mirth
royal flesh
candle salve
consumed moon
And here, the ash tray was Blown!
(from "The Pale Impromptu")
The brief gong of Greek gales
Have found the inner teeth alone
Here, listen someone is calling
...
thy Mongolian fringe of foul perfume
The falling off—weep for a keep
That O shade salons its pierce
(from "Tusks of Blood")
Also included in this edition of Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts is a long, lyrical letter titled "Between Historical Life," written by the poet to his brother Daniel, together with two surreal, stream-of-consciousness prose pieces: "Poetical Development" and "Yiddish, or Impressions in Sentiment." The letter, written by Greenberg from his hospital bed in 1916, the year before his death, recounts memories of his life from earliest childhood in Vienna to his present situation confined in a state hospital on Wards Island. Greenberg recalls with special pleasure his early school days in the United States, writing "I was a reaper of hard fact and geographical bliss, a whole world of purity and history was given to me to take home and examine at my interest. It was an unusual thanks-given material that served as an unconscious guide to my spiritual labors." Other sources of childhood happiness were baseball games played in the streets and reading dime novels. He recalls also his family's sordid life in the tenements of the lower East Side of New York city, caught in "a dreary, cold-web sleeping-cave of rats and cabbage, sawdust floor—smelling sulphur fumes in an empty musical tomb." Later, there was the tedium of labor in a leather factory before "Sickness closed in with its careful teeth." Yet it was only during his enforced stays in a succession of charity hospitals that Samuel Greenberg at last possessed the time to read and to write poetry, producing in his few last years a remarkable and highly original body of work.
It is neither hyperbole nor exaggeration to say that Samuel Greenberg's poetry was without precedent in American writing. This solitary and untutored poet single-handedly invented American literary surrealism and, indeed, anticipated by some years the surrealist movement in Europe. Clearly, these poems will not be to everyone's taste. Ecstatic, excessive, dense, intense, held together by dream-logic and incantatory rhythms, they are likely to appeal primarily to readers receptive to the visionary and the mystical and responsive to what Aldous Huxley has named "verbal recklessness." By this is meant those poems written in an exalted state of uninhibited inspiration, poems drawing directly on the pre-conscious mind, the kind of poetry that breaks conventional dictionary meanings of words, together with their syntactical and logical order, releasing thereby their latent mysterious, magical power and opening, as Huxley says, "unsuspected windows onto the unknown."[3] Writing alone in the interstices "between historical life," Samuel Greenberg brought back from an inward elsewhere tokens of convulsive beauty.[4]
NOTES:
[1] The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study by R.W.B. Lewis, Rahway, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 181.
[2] "Poetic Matters" by Philip Lamantia in Arsenal No. 3, Spring 1976, p. 9.
[3] Literature and Science by Aldous Huxley, New Haven, Ct: Leete's Island Books, 1963, p. 35.
[4] The final sentence of André Breton's novel Nadja (1928) reads: "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all." Translation by Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press, 1960, p. 160.
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