Apples from Shinar. Hyam Plutzik
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APPLES FROM SHINAR
APPLES FROM SHINAR
A Book of Poems by
HYAM PLUTZIK
SPECIAL EDITION
With Afterword byDavid Scott Kastan
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
Poems © 1950, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1959
Estate of Hyam Plutzik
Preface of 2011 edition © 2011 Estate of Hyam Plutzik
Afterword by David Scott Kastan © 2011 Wesleyan University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Accent, The American Scholar, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Epoch, Fifteen Modern American Poets by George P. Elliott, Furioso, The Hopkins Review, New World Writing No. 8, Prairie Schooner, Saturday Review, The Sewanee Review, The Transatlantic Review, and Yale Review.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011924376
ISBN 978-0-8195-7167-0
5 4 3 2 1
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER
CONTENTS
A NEW EXPLANATION OF THE QUIETUDE
OF OBJECTS CONSIDERED AS FORTRESSES
TRIO FOR TWO VOICES AND A WOODWIND
THE MYTHOS OF THE MAN FROM ENOCH
AFTERWORD BY DAVID SCOTT KASTAN
PREFACE
A recent traveler in Granada, remembering the gaiety that had greeted him on an earlier visit, wondered why the place seemed so sad. The answer came to him at last: “This was a city that had killed its poet.” He was talking, of course, of the great Federico García Lorca, murdered by Franco’s bullies during the Spanish Civil War.
But are there not many cities and many places that kill their poets? Places nearer home than Granada and the Albaicín? The poets, true, are humbler than Lorca (for such genius is a seed as rare as a roc’s egg), and the deaths are less brutal, more subtle, more civilized. Against us, luckily, there are no squads on the lookout. There is no conspiracy against us, unless it is a conspiracy of indifference. But there are more powerful things in the modern world (and people who are the slaves of things, and people who are things) that move against poetry like an intractable enemy, all the more horrible because unconscious. They would kill the poet—that is, make him stop writing poetry. We must stay alive, must write then, write as excellently as we can. And if out of our labors and agonies there appears, along with our more moderate triumphs, even one