Ronald Reichertz was the last of twelve children, all born and raised in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After twelve years of education in the hands of
Franciscan Nuns and three in the slightly rougher hands of the US army,
Ronald took his B.A., M.Sc. And Ph.D. at Madison, Wisconsin and lit out for
Montreal, Canada in 1965 to teach for a year or two at McGill University.
After teaching American Literature, Poetics, Modern Fiction, Modern Poetry,
Creative Writing, Children's Literature and Writing for Children over a
period that stretched to 32 years, he experienced Vancouver and Victoria,
B.C., and learned a thing or a hundred on a number of trips to England and
to Italy.
Reichertz has published poems in Contemporary Poetry, Cheshire, Northern
Lights, Atropos, The Antigonish Review, Four by Four and other magazines.
He continues to write poetry and has been learning to write short stories on
the job as it were. Several stories are out there hoping to make an
appearance, but are not holding their breathes. Along the way Reichertz did
a great deal of research time at the old British Library, the Victoria and
Albert Museum Library and several Oxford University libraries. These years
of pleasurable and exciting research found a place in the last and better
2/3's of The Making of the Alice Books, where they present a context for
Lewis Carroll's fantasies that includes children's books published over two
hundred years.
RONALD'S INFLUENCES:
Reichertz makes a deep and mandatory general bow to Melville, Whitman,
Twain, and Dickinson. A specific influence early on is Theodore Roethke
(discovered through ‘The Lost Son’ picked up blind off a remainder table in
a Seattle book store for 50 cents in the middle 1950's). Other influences
are Olson (including his singular blending of remarkably wide reading)
Thomas, Auden, Berryman, PK Page, Larkin, and Levertov. Recently this list
has widened to include Michelangelo (a very interesting poet), Montale,
Ungaretti, Calvino, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginsburg and many others.
A cluster of earlier work that influenced a group of carnival side-show
poems ( represented here by ‘The Italian Princess’ and ‘The Geek's Spiel’)
connects material from children's literature, folk tales, the fantastic in
stories and circus and film. Some of the works that fuse here include
Swift's ‘Gulliver's Travels,’ J.J.Grandville's ‘Un Autre Monde,’ Carroll's
Alice Books, Walter de la Mare's ‘Memoirs of a Midget,’ Leslie Fiedler's
‘Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self,’ a collection of 20 tales of
fantasy and horror, ‘The Freak Show’ (edited by Peter Haining), that
includes Defoe, Poe, Ray Bradbury, August Derleth, Tod Robbins, Robert Bloch, and Dylan Thomas. Tod Browning's film, ‘Freaks', is based on Robbin's ‘Spurs’ and Hitchcock's ‘Psycho’ begins with Block's novel. Another film, ‘Nightmare Alley’ (directed by Edmond Goulding,1947) is really worth
watching.
NATHANAEL WEST - The Collected Novels / The Day of the Locust
Click image to read Virginia Heffernan's review of 'Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings' on the Boston Phoenix website; for a review of West's 'The Day of the Locust' on the PageWise website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click hereGRAHAM GREENE - A
Sense of Reality (especially a story titled ‘Under the Garden’)
Click image to Greeneland - the world of Graham Greene website; for BBC Books author profile for Graham Greene, click here or for related items on Amazon, click herePRIMO LEVI - If This Be a Man / The Truce / If Not Now, When
Click image for a biography and interview with Levi on the Inch website; for the article, 'Primo Levi's Last Moments' on the Boston Review site, click here or for related books on Amazon, click hereANTHONY POWELL - Venusburg / From a View to a Death / Afternoon
Men / What's become of Waring? / The Music of Time
Click image to visit the website of the Anthony Powell Society and Resource Pages; to read John Perry's Salon.com article on Powell, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.
“My companions, Sir... hills and Sunsets and a dog large as myself”
Dickinson to Thomas W.Higginson
My dog Georgia has
A taste for poetry.
She has:
Bolted Bishop;
Crunched Carson;
Dug into Davie;
Gorged on Ginsburg;
Hacked at Hughes;
Hoovered Heaney;
Lunched on Larkin;
Partaken of Page;
Ruminated Roethke;
Snacked on Schnackenberg;
Tasted Thomas;
And wolfed Walcott.
In passing, these bits lead to rumbles, burps and farts
Not unexpected from one dining on the arts.
But after eating Emily, she
Bays past the burying ground
Flitters with robins and bluebirds
Combs the hives and flight of bees
Is biographer to butterflies
Follows the skitter and hover
Of their samplers on the fabric sky
Rubs up against homespun
Worries the warp and woof
Of vestmented pain and death
Fetches bones of revelation
From the slaughterhouse of evening
Plants them in Greenhouse quatrains
Where they take root, reach and bloom -
Papaveri: estates in Tuscany.
Carolina Gramachi was a famous dwarf in a late 18th century
raree show, an exhibit claiming attention on her own and as a
contrast dwarf to heighten giants. Following her death at the age
of nine, Dr. John Hunter acquired her body, melted away the flesh
to expose her skeleton, and paired it with the bones of the Irish
Giant to create a major attraction for his museum of anatomical
wonders. Standing on a high table, Carolina barely reached the Giant's hip.
How Hunter came by Carolina's bones is buried under layers of
Victorian soot, a fact that allows for guesses such as the one offered
here.
In the beginning coupling us
For show manacled my wit
To the storied dullness of his kind
Diminishing me by stretching him.
Yet one more giant
Distorted by the torque of chance,
Whose reach would turn to early mush,
Set my temper to tarantella.
I set to digging out his heart,
Hiding it like an egg in my nest,
To cozy but to cozen -
Deceiving, wheedling, whittling
Him down to me.
But day by day
His awkwardness gave way,
Layers of cliché peeled off,
Revealing inner grace,
Fetching me to the come and play
Of his making small,
Helping me to hear the fear of Hunter
And his boast to have his giant
As trophy.
When he swings me to his
Shoulder I feel his
Legs tremble and know
He wants me gorgeous
In my sequined dress,
Poised in air,
Phosphorescent,
A humming bird feeding on a sunflower.
Perched on his shoulder,
I follow the sight line of his fear
To a figure we have seen before,
An intimate of mool and mole,
Sent by Hunter to
Keep the Giant on the move,
To choreograph his dance
Toward death and Hunter's
Dream of showing a giant's bones
To crown his anatomical display.
We plot escape,
Plan with fishermen
To cast the Giant's body
Into the transforming sea,
But the smut of money
Betrays sea change.
After the betrayal, Hunter
Had his way and posed the
Giant's bones to welcome
In gawkers come to view
Citizens of paradise
Pared to paradigm.
Now I offer myself, to
Pair us once again, to contrast
The leavings of our lives,
While we reside in reliquary -
Napier's bones that reveal
The logarithm of eternity.
Last line spoken by Tyrone Power in the movie ‘Nightmare Alley’
Sometimes, after a bite,
I turn the chickens loose to circle about,
Spouting blood like martyrs
Scouting Paradise,
Alert to any odd miracle
Of what and why and where.
I was made out of nothing,
Stubbed myself on the hard of Here.
What am I doing wearing a mask
Splattered, crusted and clotting -
Spotted with a fledgling beard?
"Why" sticks like a bone
In the narrowing throat of ends.
Where will the needle
Stop on the cunning compass
That charts beyond need and desire?
I am shaking free and aspire
To nowhere, nothing and never.
In a museum in Italy there is a medieval tray
Whereon Tristram and Launcelot lurk among a splay
Of stylized Rose and Lily and bowered Venus dwarves all.
Lady, you are thrice the
The source of light:
a luminous ring plays
about your cocked and
slightly nutant head
your wall-eyes bespeak
a creamy vision that
knows no peripheries
(below a neck supple and sparsely lit
roundy arms cozy breasts that glow
like dying cedar coals)
and your hips and thighs
are arrayed in blaze
from the coronal of joy
Wanting you yet struck dumb,
Tristram and Launcelot
Sulk among the flowers
NATHANAEL WEST - The Collected Novels / The Day of the Locust
GRAHAM GREENE - A
Sense of Reality (especially a story titled ‘Under the Garden’)
PRIMO LEVI - If This Be a Man / The Truce / If Not Now, When
ANTHONY POWELL - Venusburg / From a View to a Death / Afternoon
Men / What's become of Waring? / The Music of Time
