| Notes |
- She was a poet and painter of note, generally under the name "Gene Derwood."
Edwin Honig, "Gene Derwood's Poems--An Observance." (Poetry 89:43, October 1956):
AT HER DEATH IN 1954 Gene Derwood left a manuscript of thirty-eight poems and more than 150 paintings. The poems have been brought out in a volume (The Poems of Gene Derwood, with a memoir by Joseph Bennett, New York, Clarke & Way, Inc., 1955) introduced by Joseph Bennett. Her paintings are generally little known except perhaps for the striking impressionistic portrait of Dylan Thomas in a red shirt and a humming bird for a necktie which was re produced in a recent number of New World Writing. Although Gene Derwood will be remembered for her poems, her paintings have something of the same intensity, though not the deep assurance, of her poetry. Several of these, as well as the work sheets of her poems, are now in the possession of the Harvard libraries.
Her work is arresting for its solid vigor, its generally acute discomfort, and its fierce resistance to anything like easy assimilation. Yet she is far from being an obscure or hermetic poet; her vivid, strongly eclectic work is wrung by a tough joy and a mantic, heavily charged, almost nightmarish urgency. Technically, she is not an "original" poet. Her meters and strophes are largely conventional and, I think, rather deliberately so, since part of her expressive strength certainly derives from a tradition (apparently English rather than American) which is markedly religious, metaphysical, idiosyncratic, inward regarding, apocalyptic and lyrical by turns. It is variously in line with the idioms and aims of such poets as Herbert, Blake and Hopkins; in its authority-despite-its-unevenness, the poetry also recalls Hardy, Owen, Barker and Crane. If she is unlike some of these in being inventive rather than original, she is like them all in being an undeniably genuine poet. The source of each poem is in its matter (not manner) in its occasion, in its facing up to and its bare handling of a human mystery which cannot ever wholly reveal itself.
It is, in fact, a curiously true book since the effect of all the poems is greater than any particular poem, momentarily rising above the rest, can itself proudly urge, and greater than the gradually engaged reader himself is likely to understand in urging one poem's superiority to the rest. The true-bookness is the impact of all the poems together in which one is aware of the spirit which, once awakened, creates a body and so becomes more than a performance in the words and shapes that one enjoys in different poems. The whole book achieves something that reaches beyond the poems, like the force of prayer which becomes the prayer's fulfillment, a constant benediction. Reading through it, one is peculiarly sensitive to the risks taken and seemingly succumbed to, but then suddenly transcended, awakening, discovering an unperceived life like a dark nebula suddenly defined against the light. One recognizes the life that, having passed into the poems, surpassed its moulds, its forms. And yet one wonders how it came to be a life formed so close to our noses, but strangely different from anything we know. So familiar because it signifies and seals the times we live in. So different from what we merely know because it needed to be imagined first; it needed a poet to risk utterly failing to make it before it could be conceived, visioned, and discovered in forms as factual and as self-demanding as our own bodies. It is therefore also a true book because the poems are not all equal, because there are gross falterings, strained diction, unwieldy puns that scrape against beautifully shaped utterances. The truth is in the making which one is thus allowed to witness; the expense entailed in making mistakes was necessary to the creation of the spirit's body which lives so firmly in all the poems.
Such poems remind us that poetry is nothing if not a profession, in the old sense a profession of faith, of true saying and truth-making. It is not a profession in the sense of the selling of poems or the launching of the maker on a career of serving up balms and certitudes in exchange for social status or literary rank. Gene Derwood's poems are free from any taint of professionalism; they sell nothing, not even their own frequently accusatory cries. They demand life in exchange for the life they create. They demand the reader's faith that life exists precisely where it is most devalued, fragmented and abjured. The example of her work suggests that there is a poetry which by being so intensely and sharply formed, so weighted in its mazed integrity, is of such a different order of utterance from the poetry of most professionals as to constitute a different species. In writing too few rather than too many poems, and in writing under no obligation other than that of the poem's urgency, many of her lines go deep as a diamond drill through rock, A dark hard beauty emerges, and a failure, frequently, that resembles success but is better than success.
Fastened and fasting in the bed-rock man
The assainted, snuffed-down halo strives to rise.
.....
Mountains of dove-tailed pebbles and words wordened.
The newest prism is moulded from the last.
.....
The moon still shines beside the daytime star,
The waters weave, rain cools, dunes move, grain grows,
Soft words bring soft replies, muscles expand.
(N. B., Symmetrians)
Beautiful always the littoral line,
Jointure of ocean and earth where globe winds lean
Over the lace whence Venus rose, the sands
From which little-less-than-gods flung history's sail,
Round wave, round shell, and myth-bound lands.
(The Innocent)
The body housed, the body's firm pale bole
Clothed, the body's self a blank abiding.
.....
Walking or languid through the night or day,
Something familiar for a hiding wall
We carry, as a glove or stare or play
Of lips and brows. That's just a stall
That balks no frankness of the essence,
The too lightning truth of what we are
No man can hide the presence or the absence,
We've come too quickly and too far.
(Shelter)
|
Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1903 - 1954 (51 years)
[1]