8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 ::DAY 3:: RUBY MARS on MERLE HOYLEMAN
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by four incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks , please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here!
This week’s curator is Magdalena Zurawski, author of the Don’t Be Scared
There is a whirl wheel of contemporary interest in the supernatural which often reduces it to a simple aesthetic interest. Somehow, even engagement with the spirit has become commodified. This aesthetic interest runs parallel to an active desire for encounters with the fascinating/exciting/sexy Other; see Kesha’s “Supernatural” (a really good song), or any number of ghost-themed aesthetic blogs on Tumblr.
But encounters with supra-human entities are not always consciously planned efforts with projected ends, nor are they always nourishing or pleasant. The poet Merle Hoyleman had a very strong connection to the supernatural that was, by all accounts, a consistent and unwanted torture. Megan Shay, in a biography of Hoyleman’s friend Esther Phillips, reports that Hoyleman would talk about how spiritual forces would follow her onto the bus:
[They would] sit next to her, and goad her into a confrontation. “She would say, ‘I know who you are and what you want and you won’t get away with it!’ Then, with a certain amount of disgust and satisfaction, she would announce that ‘they’ inevitably got off at the next stop.”
CA Conrad categorizes her with the poet Hannah Weiner as someone who receives painful and unwanted visions:
“In one corner of the living room, the walls were completely bare of any art and sitting in the corner was a chair and small table with paper and writing tools. She stood facing the corner of the ceiling above the chair and table while SCREAMING at what she called The Scum, which was a group of spirits who would visit through this ceiling portal in her house. Jonathan said her screams terrified him like someone was being murdered. Then she calmly said to The Scum, “Okay, okay, I hear you, I am sitting down now.” And then she sat at the table and began writing for the next two hours without stop. All of her poems were messages from The Scum.”
I found Hoyleman through CA initially; in one of their somatic rituals they say something about Hoyleman being an extremely singular talent. This remark is echoed in a few blog posts by CA, which I found because they’re really the only mention of the poet anywhere I can find with a Google search.
Hoyleman wrote two books for publication. The only one published in an edition of more than a few copies is Asp of the Age. It was published in 1967, but some of the poems in it date back at least 30 years prior. It contains 3 long poems: Asp of the Age, Mind Province of the 10th Month, and A Latter Beast in the Noon. The three poems in Asp of the Age are visionary poems, each internally consistent with a particular private mythology.
The other book, Letters to Christopher, is more prosey, but it’s still basically a book of poetry. It was only published in an edition of 25 copies by the Asphodel Book Shop in Cleveland in 1970. A projected Jargon edition failed to materialize. George Marion O’Donnell describes it as a “loose novel of character,” with each letter being “a kind of impressionist interior-monologue in disguise.” It’s a lifelong work that she unsuccessfully attempted to publish for about 40 years. Its 160 pages are only visible in full via a visit to the University of Buffalo’s special collections library.
I was able to find one of the 300-some copies of Asp of the Age online a few months ago, fully convinced of Hoyleman’s talent by the excerpts I was able to find. It’s a beautiful, large, orange and green paperback. The pages are all printed in Hoyleman’s handwriting in green ink, supposedly at the instruction of the Scum.
To give an example of the look of the pages, the first page of Mind Province of the 10th Month:
Hoyleman’s is the kind of work only rewarded by a type of spiritually-aware devotion to its world and its shrouded message. Flashing from it is the sense of urgency that one finds in a prophetic religious text — but without the certainty of ethical instruction that religious prophecy gives you.
In fact, the works are filled with half-certainty. Lots of questions. But the kind of questions Hoyleman asks in a piece such as Mind Province of the 10th Month don’t express any doubt as to whether her landscape of decay is real. They have more to do with the specific nature of the populations within the rot of the mire:
“These unfed, gaping with none to wean them, lose the spirit of speech
As41 the siege for milk thirst galls the dumb curdling of bowels.
Shall they see the she wolf give lime (42) to wasted flesh,
Soul to the circuited bread (43) of death,
Glands (44) to impregnate affliction, oiled foreheads (45) to defy fever
That unites them as lice (46) to the living dead,
After the hasp (47) of tongued men hangs upon the foul-strung harp (48)?
41. they would that they had nursed hunger which is their weaning
42. new body
43. death’s network likened to that of our body’s nervous system
44.secrete fluid to make affliction pregnant with her own young
45. men’s flesh pour out the oil of the land through the pores of their bodies
46. this parasite would make them see as the dead
47. sucking strength and lock of tongue
48. Lyra, destiny’s astute shape”
The dual prongs of faith and uncertainty point to the tortuous mental state that accompanies visions of this kind. In Hoyleman’s communications, there’s no doubt about the reality of the source of these visions — the Scum are a (daily?) consistent, painful, and forceful presence. The tone of the work, too, presupposes the consistency of its landscapes. This is the element of faith. Uncertainty comes in when we ask what relation her world bears to ours. This involves the question of why the Scum need Hoyleman to put their topography into words with such violent urgency — a question I imagine Hoyleman herself had.
The element of uncertainty, for me personally, is something that doubles back and produces my faith in the work’s implications. Asp of the Age feels like a mucky documentation; a very measured trawl through a seemingly alien landscape in an attempt to experience recognition.
By certain standards, her work is “experimental” in the sense that it includes imagery and wording that’s pretty far-out, divorced from the poetic tradition, etc. But the categorization of the work as such can only do that — categorize. To see something unrecognizable and pronounce it experimental, and to use that pronouncement as a starting point, immediately devalues work like this. To place Hoyleman’s work anywhere near the desire to experiment, or to simply “make new,” ignores basically everything about the work itself and the situation of its creation. The visual vocabulary of the pieces is vibrantly unrecognizable, but that doesn’t mean it’s unreal. There is something behind the difficulty and headiness that is very, very tangible. Sometimes it feels like the labyrinthine nature of the wordings and syntactical structures are protecting the reader from the full spiritual force of their implications.
Part of this feeling of tangibility is from the kind of language that Hoyleman uses to bind the spiritual to the physical:
“Intelligence (37) strikes up meditation and maulish error of brain,
Blows hot cinders (38) of immomentcy against the torment of split tongues
Tied tight, cord-hard to the roof of the mouth,
With tendons of knees cut loose upon the steel’s swell,
Blasted, brazed as they lean to guess the braying of wind-donkeys.
Lower still are they to stretch, to pitch the tent of adversity
Until39 the hollows of the hands sprout hair
And lewdness uneases the rheums of the muck-eyed ooze (40).
37. service is directed to itself
38. past trivial thoughtlessness
39. more humility is required
40. quarters of the bat”
It’s hard to place this scene within our world, but there’s not an abstraction in sight. She’s trying to make as concrete as possible the nouns we take for granted as clouded qualities. Intelligence, as a force, has an absolute physical relationship to the tendons of the knees of the muscled beings in this passage. Lewdness, as a concept, interacts with the rheums, the watery discharge, of the hooded bat’s home.
Everything unfamiliar or abstract seems to relate back to some physical world. This is why I hesitate to call the work transcendent, even though that’s my instinct, and even though it reckons with visions that are totally unrecognizable to our sensibilities. Even at their most disconnected, the mythic characters and abstract elements always find a way to engage with the most tangible, and often bodily, aspects of the immanent realm. Hoyleman isn’t describing some inaccessible dimension. She is offering us, through the eyes of her personally developed mythological world, a filtered vision of the events of an intersecting plane.
This vision, although at times coated in the mud of apocalypse, often also hints at a more hopeful mental-global state. With work that is this interested in transforming all understandings of the physical world, I think it’s important to consider that implications that seem dire can still point at an underlying hopefulness. This passage from “eagled serpent of the orbits” in Mind Province, for example:
“…the winged thousand tails is a testament (6) to incandescence
In the heavy pilgrimage to the ark of vision
Where none shall walk, nor feel, nor see,
But (7) confess, proclaim, and utter to avenge
6. a sacred dispensation
7. only the soul shall wake”
Hoyleman is giving us a little bit of a shorthand for how spiritual vision can transform perception. The whole of Mind Province is interested in this kind of “mental rebirth,” a total remapping of our understanding of what it is like to exist as a being. The telos is of post-decay, but the work is mired in the moment that decay takes hold. In other words, Hoyleman is exploring how the transformative process of decay — in all its rotten intensity — can make possible a new understanding of embodied experience.
Of course, even diving to this extent into Merle’s mythos in this essay doesn’t do the work justice — As O’Donnell says in the introduction to Asp of the Age, the difficulty in easily communicating Hoyleman’s work is “not one that glossing can remedy; for to offer an exposition of a private mythology is actually to do violence to it without really explaining it at all.” You just have to try to put on Merle’s eyes — I guess this is what I mean by the necessity of a spiritual devotion to the work.
Through this devotion, her scrawled silhouettes begin to grow light very slowly. Hoyleman’s material landscape was consistently difficult and unpleasant; there’s plenty cataloguing of that. But there’s also a lot of reaching in these works. It’s a reaching towards the light above the dirt of burial, the comfort found in the movement that human thought takes when it moves past its current physical boundaries.
From Letters to Christopher:
“O kindly heart arrange the order of my features for the eternal messenger, who lately would conquer all, outshown the brilliant shield immortality chooses us to wear…
Before we skip the state of death, we will have exchanged our lips and eyes; and mastered a universe the ages never numbered, where spindles science — past Egypt, past Greece and Rome — beyond a history digit and human breath.”
Ruby Mars is a rave music enthusiast and future angel living in Athens, GA.
publication:
twitter: @fruitsolutions
