Henry's ancient history (ca. 1980...)

John Tagliabue

A poem by my children's grandfather, the late John Tagliabue, was featured on the Writer's Almanac program yesterday. The title ("'Thou hast me on the wrack' in various styles") is taken from a line in Act III of Othello. Othello is describing to Iago the pains of the jealousy he has inflicted : "thou hast set me on the rack"...

& over the Cliff Notes we go again, with Read-Along-with Rest Note :

Poem #8 :

(dedicated to John Tagliabue, my (ex)father-in-law, who died last month; last Saturday (which would have been his 83rd birthday) a memorial gathering was held, people filled a restaurant to read poems, reminisce. A group did a staged reading of an excerpt from one of the Mario puppet plays. There were a few old hippie-zen people from the 50s or 60s - one guy who said he had come upon one of John's poems in a magazine, & it changed his life : he was holding a "tailgate" party outside the restaurant, sharing bottled water and his enormous collection of small-press Tagliabue materials, which he'd been collecting for 50 years. He could hardly speak before the audience, this old taoist hobo. It was an emotional day.)

8.1 : "Hobo drifts..." etc. - poet as exile, outsider, prophet. "privy contretemps" - could mean a number of things. Private shame, embarrassment; Yeats's "the quarrel with ourselves" out of which we make poetry; and (punningly) a secret or arcane (prophetic) anachronism, or "counter-time" : the poet's alienation has something uncanny about it. "pet raven" - his muse here is one of denunciation and doom (self-doom, too, thinking of Poe's "Raven").

8.2 : "narrow gauge" - both a type of railway line and a "gage" or glove thrown down for a duel (between the railroad - here representing social power, generally, that which "railroads" everybody, in Populist parlance - and the "thin red line" of the poet's lips - here in a martial sense of doing battle. But the lips are closed, in a "curved plum of silence". At this point the poem's emotional affect turns (on that curve). Paradoxically, the place where ships seemingly "descend" - "go down" - is a measure of the earth's curvature, the horizon : and the "promise of their tutelage" - that is, what is learned, from the exploratory effort of the ships, is a promise of concord : at the "vanishing point" - ie. at the meeting-point of all the lines of exploration.

8.3 : underlines the hopeful direction of previous stanza : "shared reality". However, this is one of the poems which is short (by one) the usual 7 stanzas, marked by an asterisk-break at the midpoint.

8.4 : The divide marks another turn in the poem's register of feeling. The second part of this poem shows not so much a simple union or reunion (symbolized by the ships or the earth's curvature) : here it is more a matter of establishing a balance between firmly separated things. "Edith, I slept.../hopelessly" - In a poem dedicated to John Tagliabue, there are a lot of personal elements emerging here. Hobo, Teddy Roosevelt, Lazarus, & the speaker are blending together somewhat. "Edith" was TR's wife's name. "Edith" is also the 1st name of my ex-wife, John T's eldest daughter (though everyone from the beginning called her by her middle name, Francesca). The "jade tree" - an India Jade - was a wedding gift from my mother, which is still growing (large) at the corner of Francesca's house. Hobo, Whitman, "Passage to India", the earth's curve, etc... "the driftwood" etc. - the image here is a sort of fusion between a sense of life & time's "drift" with the image of the swingset - symbol of a mysterious sort of constancy, recurrence, strung from "parallel" ropes from a tree. Image itself recurs in many forms through the poem so far.

8.5 : "suspended gravity" etc. - the idea is that the desire and longing in the human heart have an otherworldly (anti-gravitational), infinite aspect (the parallels meet in infinity) - which is, in reality, the ultimate measure of things and of the goals of the human will and activity. Out of the vision of this comes the "inclusive arch" (in a sort of echo of Crane's Bridge) of poetic speech; it is the source of the Whitman-style magnanimity which Tagliabue, in particular, lived out so eloquently and fantastically in the course of his life.

8.6 : "lambency/of recursion" - in poetry, the word both recurs and recoils on itself (in a doubleness like a swing's back/forth motion). "almond shadow-lens" - many things compacted here. The almond tree, flowering in winter, links back to the uncanny "exile" of the hobo (almond being the representative tree of Judaism, faith of wandering exiles) and the otherworldly "suspended gravity" of the heart's desire. The "shadow-lens" goes back to the Lazarus camera obscura; "shadow" also implying something still (or always) hidden from view. (A lens is itself an almond-shape : the geometrical vesica, joining 2 intersecting circles.) "twirled into one/untutored sport" - the oscillation of the swing takes on inertial energy of its own, twirling - into the "untutored sport" of nature. No longer under the "tutelage" of explorer-ships, the poet-hobo is an athlete, a "sport" whose "spirit-ditties" seem effortless, unschooled - like the Taoist poets & painters whom Tagliabue emulated and seemed to become, eventually, himself.

this obituary for John Tagliabue first appeared in the Providence Journal:


John Tagliabue, 82, of Providence, a well-loved American poet, died at Miriam Hospital on May 31st, of complications from pancreatic cancer. He passed away quietly, while listening to family read his poems aloud.

Mr. Tagliabue was a gifted, inspired person, from whom poetry seemed to pour forth with natural grace and gaiety. As his daughter Francesca remarked, "he wrote poems the way other people breathe." Over six decades, he published over 1700 poems, in scores of journals and anthologies. He was the author of six books of poetry, the most recent being a volume of 600 selected poems from the National Poetry Foundation. Mr. Tagliabue's muse was not confessional, but contemplative and world-embracing. He grasped Walt Whitman's magnanimous vision, and set out to bring it to fruition in his own way. As Fulbright lecturer and traveling scholar, he taught and gave readings in Italy, China, Indonesia, Lebanon and Japan; in Greece, Spain and Brazil; at schools, libraries, bookstores and galleries across the United States; and at the Library of Congress. He was deeply engaged with the culture and arts of Asia, spending two years in Japan and seven months in China; many of his poems and theater pieces reflect those influences. His roots also ran deep in the region of his birth, northern Italy. As he wrote : "I cannot help but think / that we Lombards are related to the ancient Chinese / I see it in the face of old peasants / and in their love of rice. . ." Mr. Tagliabue's art, as many writers and former students will testify, does what only great and vital poems do : it performs a metamorphosis. It celebrates the beautiful variety manifest in the universe - and the currents of love and playfulness surging through it. Praise - the central calling of the poet - was the keynote. As poet Amy Clampitt wrote : "John Tagliabue writes out of a deeply sacramental sense of nature and history… It comes to this reader, poem by poem, as a Franciscan act of courtesy and praise." Here is one of his briefest poems, in its entirety:

FOR THE ATTENTIVE TRANSLATOR

 
Damp stone
moss covered

 
if quietly you listen closely enough
you will hear its song

John Anthony Tagliabue was born July 1, 1923, in Cantù, Italy (a small city near Lake Como), to Battista and Adelaide (Boghi) Tagliabue. In 1927, he and his mother joined his father in Jersey City, N.J., where he attended school. He graduated with an M.A. from Columbia University in 1945. In 1946, he married Grace Ten Eyck, of Schenectady, N.Y. He then taught English and American literature at the American University in Beirut (Lebanon) and Alfred University, N.Y., followed by a tenured position at the English Department of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine (1953 to 1989). He retired from Bates as Professor Emeritus. Grace and he moved to Providence in 1998. Mr. Tagliabue also lectured at Tokyo University in Japan, 1958-60; at Fudan University in Shanghai, China in 1984; Jakarta, Indonesia in 1993. His books include : Poems (Harper & Bros., 1959), A Japanese Journal (Kayak Press, 1966) and The Buddha Uproar (Kayak, 1970), The Great Day (Alembic Press, 1984), and New and Selected Poems, 1942-1997 (National Poetry Foundation, 1997). His works also encompass over 30 travel journals, essays, puppet plays, children's books - and, in a lifelong collaboration with his wife, a number of beautiful prints, watercolors and broadsides, in which poems and visual images are married.

Mr. Tagliabue is survived by Grace, his wife of 60 years; a sister, Erica Dorf, of New York City; two daughters, Francesca, of Providence, and Dina, of Torino, Italy; and four grandchildren (Juniper, Tera, Alexander and Phoebe). In lieu of flowers, the family requests the sharing of his poetry. As he said at the very end of his life, "If you are looking for me, you will find me in my poems."

Have been dealing with family repercussions this week. Someday perhaps I'll write something more considered about John Tagliabue. Hard to maintain "critical distance" in this case.

A few days ago (before he died) I was digging around my books, looking for something, & came upon an edition of Pound's translations from the Confucian anthology (early classic Chinese lyrics), which I hadn't remembered, or ever looked into. Then I noticed it was inscribed, from John, for me.

One of the last things he said was, "If you're looking for me, you'll find me in my poems." This was an allusion to Whitman's Song of Myself ("look for me under your bootsoles").

American poet John Tagliabue passed away yesterday, on Walt Whitman's birthday.

Tagliabue learned much from Whitman, but he took what he learned and went far beyond, into the world and into his own singing world. In fact it would be more accurate to say that he, like Whitman, was inspired by a certain very pure note of spiritual joy.

You would have to go back to the Psalmist for a real comparison. This is not saying too much. Tagliabue's theme was life itself, and all it contains - time, space, suffering, love, joy, beauty & grace, freedom. From the beginning - from his earliest poems from the '40s & '50s - he discovered that in affirmation - in singing a resounding yes to experience - through the artful yes of poetry - his affirmation is doubled, is magnified, redounds on itself, finds its own balance, symmetry and grace. His fellowship is with Blake, Whitman, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Shakespeare, St. Francis, Marianne Moore, & all the Chinese & Japanese poets he knew & loved... (I hope & expect he is with them right now).

He was born in 1923, in Cantu, a northern Italian town near Lake Como. His first language was Italian; he & his mother rejoined his father a few years later in Jersey City, where his father worked as a chauffeur & eventually ran a restaurant. (Tagliabue later attended Columbia, where he was a student of Mark van Doren.)

I point this out in order to emphasize that there was, in this American poet, something very ancient, a kind of spiritual hilarity. From an early age, Tagliabue was always dancing : his first ambition was to be a ballet dancer. I remember him in his late 60s, prancing around the room to some Indian ragas with his delighted grandchildren. Tagliabue most likely would have felt right at home with those serene, smiling people who emerge from the Etruscan sculpture of his native region. The sweet hilarity & refined exhaltation of his poems is infectious - that is their purpose. He was devoted every day of his life to praise.

In a land obsessed with physical sports (his cousin Paul, by the way, was commissioner of the NFL), this spiritual athlete, with his Italo-Chaplinesque quirks & laughter - with his daily devotion to poetry, meditation & correspondence - was the best of all.

8

     
                             for John Tagliabue

 
Hobo drifts through rusted railroad world.
His tongue rasps out the iron flavor
of refusals, privy contretemps.  Over
cautious caravans, his pet raven hurls

 
exacting retribution - narrow gauge
thrown down to a thin red line of lips.
That curved plum of silence, where ships
descend... the promise of their tutelage

 
a concord at the vanishing point.  Stout keys
of shared reality.  Not disenchantment,
now, but hopefulness - ninefold reconcilement
(sweet reunions, recognition's ecstasies).

                    
                   *

 
Edith, I slept across the roots of the jade tree,
hopelessly.  Above me, the driftwood
(strung from slow parallels) rocked quietly,
back, forth... drawing a pattern (see-

 
saw) out of suspended gravity.
It was the inclusive arch, spread tenderly
between obdurate stones, above the turmoil
of indifferent waves.  A lambency

 
of recursions, curled toward equanimity;
an almond shadow-lens (cornerstone
of coronations) twirled into one
untutored sport - light spirit-ditty. 

I went to visit the poet John Tagliabue in the hospital today. He's my ex-father-in-law, my children's grandfather. He dedicated his collected poems to them, along with his wife & daughters.

He's dying of cancer, in a great deal of pain. Tomorrow (probably) he goes into a "hospice" room in the hospital. It's a block down the street from where my children grew up.

You probably haven't heard of him. He's a very fine & dedicated American poet. He went to Columbia with Allen Ginsberg : he sort of lived out a parallel version of Ginsberg's dedication to Whitman's example.

He traveled all over the world & brought things back, in Whitman fashion, in his poems.

He's written many thousands of poems. A "Collected", published by the National Poetry Foundation, probably only skims the surface. He's written even more letters. He used to get up in the morning & write, & walk, & teach, & write. This short, excitable, Chaplinesque person (born in northern Italy, grew up in Jersey City) is a real spiritual & literary athlete. He comes from a talented & energetic clan - his cousin (another) John Tagliabue writes for the NY Times; his other cousin Paul is the retiring head of the NFL.

I will have more to say about this unusual poet. He asked me today if I remembered the poem he had written about his mother & father. I couldn't, but I'm looking for it now.

This is one of those late Mandelstam poems - one among so many - which come through for me even in translation.

He can still remember the wear and tear on his shoes,
and the worn grandeur of my soles.
I, in turn, remember him : his many voices,
his black hair, how close he lived to Mount David.

 
The pistachio-green houses on the foxhole streets
have been renovated with whitewash or white of egg;
balconies incline, horseshoes shine, horse - balcony,
the little oaks, the plane trees, the slow elms.

 
The feminine chain of curly letters
is intoxicating for eyes enveloped in light.
The city is so excessive and goes off into the timbered forest
and into the young-looking, aging summer.

Mandelstam, exiled in Voronezh, is remembering a fellow poet & Tiblisi, the capital of Georgia (near Mount David). (Resonates oddly for me, since John Tagliabue & his family lived a block down the hill from Mount David, a little hill in Lewiston, Maine.) The ordinariness of these lines is suffused with melancholy & loving memory. (Translated by Richard & Elizabeth McKane, from the Bloodaxe Bks edition of Voronezh Notebooks.)

Today is the 80th birthday of John Tagliabue. His New & Selected Poems is available from the National Poetry Foundation.

Phoebe flies to Rome today, for summer school further north. Same school her mother attended 35 yrs ago. La mia bella figlia. Dans les mains de la Charite, j'espere. On steep Angell St., into an art gallery at lunchtime. The show is "Italia", by Michael Sherman : watercolors & paintings, landscapes, cityscapes. Va bene.

[p.s. note to previous post/link: Green Constellation was a basic model Sears typewriter; Francesca Tagliabue gave me hers, it's next to my desk here.]

Marcel Proust was undoubtedly the greatest archaeologist, unearthing the model of a lost artifact, within another model (time's vast turtle-turns). 1979 seems like Pre-Cambrian era to a 50-yr old BOOMER. In that year my 2nd book appeared, titled "Stone", with a quotation from Mandelstam dedicated to Francesca Tagliabue (daughter of neo-Whitman & Ginsberg-contemporary John Tagliabue) and a photo by Aaron Siskind on the cover (Denny Moers, protege of Creeley & Siskind, spender of '78 Blizzard Weekend on my wife's couch while I was stranded in Boston, found it for me); published by Edwin Honig's & David Cloutier's Copper Beech Press. Time, the Greek gift, like language. That's why I was doubly gifted when I ran away from it for a while, like Jonah.

Here's another old poem in this vein:


INVOCATION


Twilight. Beyond the high school soccer fields
the green-bronze nipple of the Catholic Church
peeks up over Camp Street. Evening
earth immerses the pedestrian horizon,
nudges the last daylight into wine.

Soon it will snow. The trees nearly bare,
a tattered blaze against the pastel houses.
The air, chill. I whisper the lines
walking home from work - a spell,
an invocation, one shadow to another.

Star to star, flint to flint. . .
someone moves from village to village,
small tornado, vortex, unpredictable
- and in the councils, whirlwind
of uncomfortable affirmation.

A veteran, I wait here (in the tunnel
of a small town planted in space)
for these medallions of sundown. Lift
the dry cup to my lips, familiar.
Drink to your seashell breakers.

11.20.92