Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Form Destructionist—Sculptor

Robert McAlmon

MANY moods—apathy tagged to the end of most—

Had gone into the carving of his masterpiece:

Lady with a three-cornered smile.

He groveled when a critic spoke of his

“Ironical incision, and sensitive cognition of inner essence.”

God!—he could not so facilely

Plumb for himself the dolorous enigma of his art.

Her obese countenance

Proclaimed his contempt for most of mankind—

At their best making an art of adaptation,

And at their worst …

Words signify nothing when silence is permissible.

Three times he had destroyed beginnings of his last work,

Fearing that they were not authentic expressions

Of impulses indigenous of his own contacts.

Given the alien substance of some trifling annoyance,

His nature could furnish nacre

For finer pearls of concept and of execution than these.

Some things of his, completed—

Minor things, not a discredit to him—but …

He shrugged an intellectual shoulder inwardly

When they were praised.

Certainly he knew

He’d caught the tigerish amative spirit

Of the over-pure in his Satyre Religieux;

But its blazing orbs, lecherous with lust-light,

Treacherously savage with repression,

Were too flamboyant a repetition of satire well done before.

The plastic suavity of his Enigmatic Nun,

With a smile of invitation upon her saintly lips,

Gratified his sense of attainment but slightly.

“Realism and truth be damned!” he was often heard to say—

“They are trite insistences.

What is the realism of a plasmic germ

Whose species we do not know?—

Creation is the only reality.”

Phantasmagorical statues almost emerged

From the gray draperies of his subconsciousness

At moments of such proclamation.

Everything in the universe swirled

Or went through his mind in fluid conceptions.

“There is no infinite—only our questions

Which are unreal until we answer them definitely;

Only space which our minds do not fill with forms.

But it is not of the ego … it does not exist.

I am my universe. What I know, exists.

What I do not know is not”—

He would say to his reflection in the mirror,

And it did not disconcert him with a refutation.

Whereupon impulses that were themselves masterpieces

Arose from the dormancy of his will.

He planned to put them into marble.

“Eternity is the metabolic process of the universal germ;

The universe is an organism …

Species the corpuscles in its blood, its veins;

My intellect is the skeleton of my universe”—

He told portraits upon the wall of his room.

They acquiesced.

Some day through the sweep of his imagination

He would come upon form, transcended

Beyond the limitation of line and contour.

Meanwhile … He worked on lesser things, recalling:

The tiny spotted fawn he had found in the woods—

A hunter must have killed its mother,

For hunger had robbed it of instinctive terror.

An inquisitive baby snout had sought his face

As he carried it in his arms—

Moist nose, little hungry tongue licking,

Luminous trustful eyes …

Tenderly he recalled the tiny thing

Which of course died, too young to eat as he could feed it.

So beautiful, so sweetly pathetic an impulse

Was in him,

He put it into marble in the form of an oval,

With dim lines to subtly suggest many possibilities—

New life, love, destruction.

He would always disdain visual reproduction.

Tiny lizards, antelope-like in grace,

That he had watched for days out on the desert,

Certainly could not be caught in cold hard stone

By showing them in any fixed postures.

Their alert listening bodies, when they stopped

In running through lavender sage-weed,

He had memorized in marble

By slender oblongs that bent upward in a quick angle.

Only because the unique shape of sea-horses

Fascinated him had he copied their likeness.

Twining two stallion-necked, worm-headed beasts

With watch-spring bodies together, he felt gratified

Believing he had them as they made love

In the marine garden’s tank.

Yet he was not sure that his tapering-based

Interrogation marks did not please his sense

Of the thing to be done with them in art the more.

And for these things to be called

“A symbolistic ironist!” He shuddered.

He trifling with that ephemeral quality—irony,

Doing a burlesque of the things that change!

“I have no religion but self—

Nothing I worship but my art,”

He told his quivering sensibilities to soothe them.

He knew there was lion passion in him

As well as lamb softness.

He would run the gamut of experience,

Then compress a year’s living into a gesture, a line;

So that his passion of resistance,

His thwarted longings amidst loneliness,

His cleansing of soiled actualities,

Had permanent expression in symbols

Sufficiently withdrawn not to be subjected

To the misinterpretations of the multitude.

Music that sent him forth

To walk across Brooklyn Bridge,

His heart caught between the pricks

Of pointed melodies,

His breast cold in the salt wind,

His wrists singing with the pain of being,

This music—

Flutes—cold water ringing on thin glass,

Sombre violins droning bee-tragedies—

He would hold these tonalities into being

For a longer time than it takes silence to seep them in.

He would put music into white marble—

Marble that sang;

And dancers—and colors—

These he would transform to marble too—

White marble—abstract of form.

But sensitive intuitions would recognize

The color, the motion, in them;

Attuned ears would hear the music

Of his white marble—

Gray-green-violet, magenta-orange-blue-yellow

Moss, melody, movement,

Caught in white marble,

Caught in the whiteness of abstraction,

Worshipful beauty for spiritual intimacies.

But this morning he could not speak to himself in the mirror.

Morning was a pathologic time of Time for him.

From his window he saw that hills were green,

But he did not care to explore their greenness.

After all, green is a slavery—

Green trees, then red-yellow, white;

Spring, summer, autumn, winter,

And after some years

Other trees come into the slavery of the same routine.

As for his sculpturing,

Well enough—

But what of his living?—

Between sunrise and sunrise any life is held pendulating.

What if a few stars are stitched

In the hem of the garment one cannot throw off—

The sky one cannot look far into?

What of his living—just to live?

Life swirled past him in a flowing stream—

Ebb the tide, flow the current—

Wind of Time:

The only thing existing the things in his mind,

And it a mind wild for freedom …

Wind-gust were dry leaves crackling,

Dust on his windowpanes.

He washed his teeth, and combed his hair;

He tied a colored cravat in a freshly linened collar.

In the mirror his face was a morbid picture,

Rather appealing perhaps—

Sullen with youth … grave with despondence.

But there was breakfast to have—

The day was never his without his coffee.

So he thought of coffee:

In his mind the universe—thinking

Alone of coffee—sieved his self-perceptions.

Coffee—with not too much cream and sugar.