The Sardonic Arm

If I yield to the remorseful redundancy of a foreword, with its bedraggled battalions of fiercely insinuating words, it is from no mere desire to invite the ridicule of impatient time, or to rail against that host of vacant insincerities which betrays the animations of life. It may be that I do not look upon words as intimidating a fixed content, or beckoning to an inevitable style. It may be that I regard words as flexible lures seducing the essential emptiness of life, with little, false promises—promises of emotional and mental gain and reward; haloes and bludgeons with which a void may attain the mirage of toiling or dancing importance. And perhaps, in the desperate hope of achieving a proper festival of sound, I have summoned words to a reiteration of defeated antics, without in any way attempting to gain those exhausted futilities known as convictions and explanations. And if, through this foreword, I can revel in a pensive obscurity—a veil that must be carefully removed with the reading of poems that follow—I shall feel that I have furnished the exercise of amusement to certain sterile and over-confident rituals of emotion and mind.

The poetic situation in America is, indeed, a blustering and verbose invitation to boredom and a slight, reviling headache. When not engaged in scrubbing the window pane ten times over, lest it prove opaque to an astigmatic public, American poets are discovering, with great glee, the perspiring habits and routines of sex, or naively deifying the local mannerisms of a blithely juvenile country—a lurching, colloquial, fist-swinging melee of milkmen depositing bottles on doorsteps and acquiring dignity in the process; chorus-girls and farmhands telling their troubles in a stilted slang; factory-owners falling in love with their female employees, to the tune of delicate and novel symbolism concerning “a longing to enter the house of her being”; ravings over the strength and poignancy of corn-fields and country-roads—“O, the corn, how it aches!” and “What is better than the patient and sturdy road?”—; much roaring about the importance and hard beauty of mills and factories—crudely smoky boxes of avarice faced by little, kneeling poets.... Ah, the list, when extended, defies amusement. You must leave the theater unless you desire the thankless experience of vomiting.

The commercial cacophony of American lusts and greeds has borrowed a clarinet, a flute, and a saxophone from the admiration of American poets and is one-stepping with thousands of words, after the office and factory have closed for the day, “Swee-et Mama, well your papa’s done gone mad!”—the jerky, leering pandemonium of actual jazz on a polished floor interests me far more than its more proper and adulterated echoes—the glorious American poets of our time.