Cyclopean Liqueur: An Appreciation of Laurence Weisberg’s Poetry
MUSEUM POETICA: NEGLECTORINOS
A supposedly random glance over the 2011 Oakland, CA version of Garrett Caples’s bookshelves brought me to the poetry of Laurence Weisberg. The light-grayish blue book with the plain title, Poems (2004, Anon Edition) lay on the spine along with a man’s name I had never encountered before. It’s not a book to be casually leafed through, which is what I did only to find myself propelled into a cataclysmic world of bewitched obsidian and telepathic wounds. I didn’t regret being so casual, but knew I would have to sit down with the book, really cast my eye/ear further into the poems. In fact, the book demanded it. Visionary, unhinged, oddly romantic, classically surrealist (if such a thing exists), and of such strange, esoteric force I immediately had to know who the poet was. Thus began my journey.
Laurence Weisberg was born in Los Angeles on May 6, 1953. He began writing poetry as a teenager, was an atypical student who experimented with psychedelics, and briefly attended CalArts around 1969 while still technically in high school. During this time his poems were published in the seminal literary journal, Caterpillar, whose editor, Clayton Eshleman, encouraged him to seek out the American surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. After having established contact with Lamantia, he then eventually left Los Angeles for San Francisco with his partner at the time, the dancer/choreographer Alice Farley, where he joined a group of Surrealist-inspired poets and writers who were in frequent contact and collaboration with the elder poet.
While living in San Francisco Weisberg’s poems appeared in City Lights Anthology: San Francisco 1974; Arsenal; and the pamphlet The Glacial Blush, a collaboration with composer Peter Garland. He also attended the World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago in 1976 and was briefly associated with the Chicago Surrealist Group. A restless spirit, he bounced around Mexico, Paris, Indonesia, rural Pennsylvania, San Francisco, and the Southwest. The 80s saw Weisberg living in New York working at bookstores, including Weiser Books (where he met the artist Leonora Carrington), participating in the surrealist organization Group Hydra, and creating texts for Alice Farley’s dance troupe.
Weisberg was not a prolific writer, preferring “pure psychic automatism” to dictate the poem. As evidenced above, he published rarely: Weisberg had a deep suspicion of poets whose work did not reflect the visionary and had no interest in journals or magazines that didn’t present the Marvelous within their covers. The elective affinities he shared with his immediate group of artist/poet–friends were far more profound to him than what was on offer in the academic mainstream or “experimental” poetry worlds. The two-volume tome, Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – The Untold Story (2011, Anon Edition) documents the activities of this underground group of Surrealist-inspired artists and writers.
At some point in the 90s he returned to live in Los Angeles, engaging with West Coast Invisible Heads and fellow travelers such as poet/artist Will Alexander. On the night of March 12, 2003, he died in his sleep at the age of 49. Weisberg’s poetry is little known outside his circle of friends and associates. His complete disdain for the “poetry world” ensured that his work would remain in the sub-underground. I am hoping that sympathetic eyes and ears will find something of great value in his work. In 2012 the now-defunct City Lights Books blog published my dossier on Laurence Weisberg, Modern Beasts Have No Memory, which contained the reminiscences of his friends and photographs. The poems for Peter Garland and Philip Lamantia were also included in that dossier. The other poems in this piece are from the book Poems by Laurence Weisberg (2004, Anon Edition), and they are the copyright of The Estate of Laurence Weisberg.
Many thanks to Allan Graubard, Peter Garland, and Garrett Caples. More info on Invisible Heads, Group Hydra, and associated happenings can be found here:
(all spelling discrepancies in the following poems are present in the original publications)
Laurence Weisberg photographed by Leslie Yudelson
*
(for Philip Lamantia)
Saturn suffocates in my groin of marble.
In darkness the hands break apart haloes
return melted glaciers to the root of the saxophone.
Within these linen sheets rainbows play upon flesh
hunt out light die of exhaustion
leaving over the sheets stains of prismatic fluid.
Restless fire of coma breathes a secretive thigh
wherein I dream myself rescuing you Oh Mother
from the convulsive throat of paranoic desire.
Mother of Night
I touch your body
twelve sleeping children sprung from your head
a jungle suspended over your shoulder
over your thighs the lost galaxy swims toward my
outstretched palm
summoning suns to surround this hotel of spirit.
What excrement flies out of your ass perfumed?
the stupor it achieves is thrust from hieroglyphic
shadow is a hurricane that marks up my lips with shyness.
You govern the space in which the noble sun
crowned with paperclips weeps openly cascading down
to me the untranslatable rays of totemic bile.
You stand alone this night on a thick balcony
remembering the time wasps came and stung you from
head to foot
and returned to pull the stingers they had forgotten
in their ecstasy.
Mother of Night I hear stars mumbling inside your heart
I feel the radiating card and the soft eagle of depression.
Great lover of all men I see fortune locked into your window.
I bear down in my lust snapping bones
revealing the demonic syntax.
*
So long ago the kiss of magic
So long ago the armour of spirit and galatic misery
the tower of faith sways under the ribs
of the tortoise at midnight the hands
of the tortoise are milked
for its precious prayer.
*
Your cheek against
stone convulsive
erect as daylight
No one
smoothes the eye between
grindings of
frustration
My heat
is my own labor of
love
(Originally published in Caterpillar #17, 1971. Weisberg’s first published work.)
Targets
The brackish trail marked out by a honeycombed shelter of ice
with a fingerprint of blood
walks in mandibles of sight like a blue parrot
opening a canal of foreheads and fixes confluent armies
integrating a vast sulphur corpse
with Babylonian turbines that spin on
in rooms hatched from drums of stretched water
as if night could come unscathed from the mill of intrepid goats
who fill your eyes with the light of ritual murder
that will not unlock all the arms from the oars of a ship of roses
Castaway in Arcadia
jade seeds fall from bagpipes at the feet of a scorpion
who raises his cup with the lost look of space
a huge space of uninterrupted cries that call to us
from a tiny cathedral of crystal that bends the leaf of your eyes
where the wolves have gathered upstream
walking over a sword of vapor
cashmere to coffee in a poppy’s symbol
a mole near your left ear surmounts all but the Druidic bicycle
Obstacles of Sleep
The snail with the one cloven hoof
burns my tongue with its solar bell
My tongue swollen with vertigo overturns the sky
with one dark stare
My grip is unfailing The dogs have crawled out of
the wallpaper of infinite meaning
they bear on their backs the infinitesimal theatre
of the air and closer their paws burn the wound
of night
and it is night with the end of salt
Birds pull with their rosy beaks the strings
supporting the fountains of glass whose spray
of sex collapses the mirror of sleep
and it is day with the beginning of lead
In my ear a tusk of light grows branches of flesh
and I touch the cry forced from the mouth of the rain
which is louder and more fierce than your key of sweat
My sweet stone you the antagonist a pentacle
within the short circuit fish within
the blood of our desires come reside everywhere
about us
Eyes of brick cut the stem of your heart so carefully
Hide in the tree where I wait for your dream
all the allure of a precipice dark
and victorious over the earth
Paris 1972
*
The Thirteenth Instinct
Beneath a toga of bewitched obsidian
a lynx of ganglia ruminates a transatlantic maze
of intertwining lacerations
fallen from the eyes of deer
as they cross streams of refracted pubes
like hypertense balms of quilts
revealing children of prehistoric sorcery
that are trilobites of silken vowels in the hummingbird’s chest
oviparous canoes drifting toward the philtres and edenic ritual
of the water’s evaporation
dragged to the sunset in countermotion of light
you were caught up in the threads of your laughter
The End of the Fall
With my eyes I pulled the air apart and re-visaged the golden number
With my body I dived into the light-quarry of breezes
and set the night-avalanche spinning toward the spellbound
animals of the burning forest
Fate drank its first sip of air
And I for the feather’s last night drank the wine of ten thousand dreams
My fingers spoke to the hyacinth
And its mask told me sadly of her misfortune
My ribs extended their magic animals to the twilight
Dusk of lips and ashes
I walked into the ellipse of shudders
The night sky
Fossils that lit me in nacre-sounds
*
When the hour kissed the tuberose of anguish
the sky released its lions
The fence encountered the fox
whose eyes unearthed the last index of supernatural rumor
The white buildings disgorged torrents of blood
into the grey melancholy of the street
Noon’s phantom the axe and wind splitting time and hope
Your beautiful hand resting on the diamond railing
Will you walk up these stairs
to the star-fossils and the wine of pain
Will you seize the obscure flames of my breath
Birds drink them
*
I have thrown up the sickness
I have thrown up tiny arrows that have missed
their marks
There is a red circle around the moon
My black vomit on the green grass
Birds from every direction circle
They come to pray in my sickness
They perch and nest in its branches
They will build a monument to my hysteria
I remember the simple music that tore from
my limbs an instrument of sand
which caused the birds to swell and burst
with heaven expanding
in their throats
I remember my broken tail
and my stupendous wings
Commingled in heat
we merged
in the food of worms
in the psyche of wings
*
What you were in the night
and in the occult chambers struggling with time
you are no longer
your body through its hidden signs
is more transparent now
you are drawn toward the black lids
and intangible ashes of my eyes
you close your eyes over the wingbeat
of hazy birds clinging to the threads of my voice
words and rain are mixed with your image
in the obscene alembic of mirrors
from broken vases your radiant breasts drink
the silence of the deltas
and rising toward the tip of my lance
I can see the actual birth of words proceed
to their bodies luminous with rivers
*
Her head became a solid block of moonstone inlaid with orchids and carved by the velocity of gazes. In my stomach an astrolabe revolved corresponding to her breathing which was visible as a cone of changing prismatic shades extending from her lips to any object that caught her eyes. When an object because of its particularly pathetic beauty brought tears to her eyes, the object explodes into deep violet then literally turns inside out becoming its opposite in a dialectically aberrant way. For instance, the keys on the table become the whiskers of a cat then through mediation both eternal and instantaneous because of the extreme pressure of the light becomes a pitcher of milk with lightningbolts floating near the top like cream. The cream of the unexpected.
Before Every Storm
Somehow she lost the red mouth of the sea on her way back to the House of Ivy. On an icy paper she saw the future corpse of summer exfoliate among seeds and mushrooms that were quickly eaten by storms of ghosts from far yet near conflagrations of spirit resurrecting the dead but immediately oracular children of the future. They burned with the sacred energy of mirrors. Life is hard here. The sea has no mouth. But life goes on and continues to burn with both sexes vertical to the void.
For Peter Garland
On the orchid’s doorstep of needles
the blind widow of hours
shakes her nettle skirt with the hips of brass dogs
A fluid in flight she brings down the twins of the cliff
With a trumpet of sand the caves of gold conquer the flies’
valet
and I take your place in the arena of broken opal
A horse in the mirror wants to know the meaning of all these
invitations
all these deep sighs and human eyes via the elk’s garb of
hammers
and all these naked women huddled around a snake’s shed skin
I erase the flame’s key with mockery of the clock’s buttocks
red and blue the greater weapon is forged with saliva
The raven of shards rehabilitates the constant rye
and comes to drink at the web-footed smile
the sky was last night’s well
where I pulled you through the chime of yellow leaves
the muzzled heart canopied by scorpions
who strike over and over again
the wound which opens like a huge flower
under the eyes of my spilt throat
Scarlet mane entering the birth of the blue fern
The mystery of algae swept into the currents of the mirror
touching consciousness and forming its shadow
Her spine a harp Her fingers when she rests them in water
become fish in the eternal spawning field of secret
tongues
The foam of her baptismal mirror of the words surprised
in the cat’s skeletal smile
twisted on rails of fur
toward the bloody heron’s eyelash
that stops the water’s heart of human water
comes to rest in nests made from my breath
hour by hour
THE FEVER OF PALMS
THE EMERALD EYE OF THE SUN’S SPEAR
THE LOST BRACELET OF SUN AND MOON
THE BEE’S CORONATION OF BLOOD
BENEATH THE EART OF OUR DELIRIUM
Weisberg looks through DuChamp’sThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. Photo by Alice Farley.