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Alan Horvath In Memoriam
As many good things, I don't remember, as an example when I first drank too much beer, or of poetry, when I first wanted more of it after having it. More to be written or more to be read?
the young horses
The Young Horses Will Return Your Land to You
I wasn't there at the beginning or to begin with. But I wasn't far away here in Buffalo, New York. I was too young to know of the realm of the poem. I did know of Ed Sanders and The Fugs. But I understand from E. R. Baxter that levy did walk around Buffalo during Buffalo's age of Olson, which is to say on the campus of the University at Buffalo in the 1960s, which was in Buffalo — the campus, all of it, back then. And Baxter relates that levy did an impromptu reading on campus. But there were many poets on campus back then. It was a time of impromptu. That time and place was 45 years ago or so, after leaping, I find myself a steward in our tradition of that place and that time and what it was and, therefore, is. I work in a poetry library which is a form of mind (a farm of mind, too). Too, Alan was a steward. He was a steward of a particular Cleve-time and a Cleve-place and that person who manifested a leap of 40 years I think of an underground river that now surfaces only again after the huge shifting that occurs in time, A. Horvath. Or, I think of Alan Horvath, each publication was a Mayan time portal. You can move back and forth. It is -time- it is fluid.
Note to self: Was there a film called, The Monster that Devoured Cleveland? Ask Maynard G. Krebs.
The archive of Cleveland is not only what it was as it was created but what A. Horvath made it. He made it: it is. At least in a fashion for me. He was true to the ideal as in even the paper to be used, the artists. He made the essence, the halo, the ambience, aroma, flavor, an artifact that was'is in all the time. And the poets too! The poems of Cleveland from the then and the poems of the imaginary Cleveland now (heavenly city ' earthly city). The poets writing then and the poets writing now are the same poets writing is Pound's notion that all ages are contemporaneous. And the invites also went out to other poets along the way. Extensions and links forward and back. Depot Kirpin. A. Horvath — engineer of the imagination.
That's the energy of it, the action, to do it and leave the door (to time) open. A. Horvath made a monument and in poetry and with it. I am always happy to know such makers of our poetry realm who work on keeping poetry alive and living and operating, creating the space where the poets can cool their egos, the oasis of print and the supper super joy of it.
All of it is memorable. Horvath made a memory of Cleveland, a rarefied and refined and bibliographic correct as if it were each time a gift arriving. The bibliographic charts like the birth certificates of creativity for each poet. Not a photocopy that got blurry with generations but something that became most clear, clearer and more vibrant with age. Wine of letters. The fountain of youth found via a poetry and publication.
So it is each time I pull from shelf a Kirpan. It is a Cleveland, a place made. Wow, the lords and ladies of the revolution. I suppose many would like the 1960s and the company of that time to be nothing more than historic sociology but it was a dance in the cauldron and things were done and some of them done for the last time. The young poets can learn from this and learn from making what A. Horvath did in his stint as custodian of the poetry of Cleveland.
Alan Horvath is a remembering.
I am remembering of a Robert Bly poem. [The lights don't flicker here. There are no angry ghosts in the memory of poetry. No problem with this invocation.] Once a long time ago Bly came to Buffalo to read and he read "The Seal" and it was not the poem I remember so much but what he said that as he read the poem that a vast faceless audience just sat. Only a woman foreign to America cried.
I am pleasantly foreign. I erase the template clerk American each day is a pissing of oil and a filling of toilets. I have come to know that there are these various places — a Venice, Venices, here and there, islands pacific, destinations where the flocks rest. A. Horvath (I always liked the simple A. — the beginning of the alphabet — the beginning each time again new [make it new]) A. was Atlantis. Atlantis rose again from the watery erase. For an incident again in poetry that makes for a memory that will not exit. He made a face in the facelessness.
I recall Bly's poem again. The Seal. The lovely seal slipping into her ghostness. I think of Alan Horvath as an entity other than just a person but a keeper of an energy that lights the heart.
Bly, "Long live your race, your inner tube race, so uncomfortable on land, so comfortable in the ocean. Ducking under as assassinations break above you."
The Poetry Collection
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