PASSAGES FROM "THE GHETTO" Old Sodos no longer makes saddles. He has forgotten how . . . Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain, And night by night I see the love-gesture of his arm And the candles gleaming starkly On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face, Like a miswritten psalm . . . Night by night I hear his lifted praise, Like a broken whinnying Before the Lord's shut gate. Lights go out And the stark trunks of the factories And mothers take home their babies, Waxen and delicately curled, Like little potted flowers closed under the stars. Lights go out And colors rush together, Fusing and floating away. Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels Mauve, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples, And burning spires in aureoles of light Like shimmering auras. They are covering up the pushcarts ... Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors— He shuffles up a darkened street And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus. . The moon like a skull, Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts. Alfred Kreymborg Alfred Kreymborg, one of the most daring of the younger insurgents, was born in New York City, December 10, 1883. His education was spasmodic, his childhood being spent beneath the roar of the elevated trains. At ten he was an expert chess player, supporting himself, from the ages of seventeen to twenty-five, by teaching and playing exhibition games. His passion, however, was not mathematics but music. At thirty, he began to turn to the theater as a medium. In 1914, he organized that group of radical poets which, half-deprecatingly, half-defiantly, called itself "Others." (He edited the three anthologies of their work published in 1916, 1917 and 1919.) Meanwhile, he had been working on a technique that was an attempt to strip poetry of its frequent wordiness and rhetorical non-essentials. Mushrooms (1916) was the first collection in this vein. Here Kreymborg continually sought for simplification, cutting away at his lines until they assumed an almost naked expression. Often he overdid his effects, attaining nothing more than a false ingenuousness, a sophisticated simplicity. Often, too, he failed to draw the line between what is innocently childlike and what is merely childish. Kreymborg's most ambitious volume of poetry, Blood of Things (1920), is, for all the surface oddities, the work not only of an ardent experimenter but a serious thinker. Here, in spite of what seems a persistence of occasional charlatanry, is a rich and sensitive imagination; a fancy that is as wild as it is quick-witted. OLD MANUSCRIPT The sky is that beautiful old parchment in which the sun and the moon keep their diary. To read it all, one must be a linguist more learned than Father Wisdom and a visionary more clairvoyant than Mother Dream. But to feel it, one must be an apostle: one who is more than intimate in having been, always, the only confidant like the earth or the sea. DAWNS I have come all the way up to humility The hill was more terrible than ever before. This is the top; there is the tall, slim tree. It is only looking back. under that tree, still another me of mine was buried. Waiting for me to come again, of what I bring next, it looks down. Badger Clark Badger Clark was born at Albia, Iowa, in 1883. He moved to Dakota Territory at the age of three months and now lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Clark is one of the few men who have lived to see their work become part of folk-lore, many of his songs having been adapted and paraphrased by the cowboys who have made them their own. Sun and Saddle Leather (1915) and Grass-Grown Trails (1917) are the expression of a native singer; happy, spontaneous and seldom "literary." There is wind in these songs; the smell of camp-smoke and the colors of prairie sunsets rise from them. Free, for the most part, from affectations, Clark: achieves an unusual ease in his use of the local vernacular. THE GLORY TRAIL1 'Way high up the Mogollons, And licked his thankful chops, 'From Sun and Saddle Leather by Badger Clark. Copy. right, 1915. Richard G. Badger, Publisher. When on the picture who should ride, But High-Chin Bob, with sinful pride "Oh, glory be to me," says he That lion licked his paw so brown And dreamed soft dreams of veal- "Oh, glory be to me," laughs he. Nor ever hawse could drag one dead 'Way high up the Mogollons That top-hawse done his best, Through whippin' brush and rattlin' stones, From canyon-floor to crest. But ever when Bob turned and hoped A limp remains to find, |