TWELVE By the time you are twelve your affections are fixed. Then come the decades that roll your heart like a cheese In the sea. Yes, it is surreal. Then you are twelve again, and old. And you find the waxed red ball of your heart on the shore. And you are not surprised by anything now except That you should love at the end what you loved At the beginning. WHEN I GROW UP Wm Yeats claimed when he was old He wanted to be hammered gold. Even if you throw in Gift Of Prophecy That’s a dumb fate; even for artifice, Which is eternal and all. Not that I want to be a salmon Turning hook-nosed and scarlet As I rot in fertilized roe.  Nor would I want to be a roasted golden brown turkey. I want to be mercury. KEEPER Keeper, keep out The wrongs, the angers. Keep them in a manger. Let Adam and Eve sleep Spoonstyle by a brainless river. Keep them from danger. Here come the men on stilts! Let them in. They talk of craft with angels. And keep my wife and me From the life of wrongs and angers. Keep us as amazed as we were the night The cradle blazed. Bluer, slower, deeper, Keeper. MY TRIP TO HADES I had to go to Hades Because I wanted a dark beer. Anne stayed above, drinking The golden stuff.  Once there I couldnt get enough. The other inhabitants were going through hell So they didnt know I was constantly drunk. I stayed there about ten years And grew more and more charming. I was constantly hung-over, of course, But it was a price I was willing to pay For being considered such a nice person. Eventually I got so tired of being sick in the mornings I quit; and immediately surfaced. For two years I was ok. My colleagues even elected me chairman. Then one day one of them treated me As if I were Satan; and then another. They thought I wanted power. All I wanted was to be desired. But I was sober, and so moved on. Being drunk is like being dead, And a death to fear. But there’s one other thing I’d like to make clear. In Hades they brew a great dark beer. THE THING IN THE DIRT In the garden, lying By the brick wall in the dirt Where the sprinklers drench each night And the sun never shines I saw something black, It looked like feces of the elephant ear, Like merchandise, In plastic wrap, thrown Under the plants, repulsive as offal, Daring me to fall on it and Eat it if I really loved life. DOING BEING Those who would know the emotional quality Cannot ignore Pound’s ear, his timing.  And I left My son in the dorm room.  Kissed his whiskered Babyskin cheek, and blew him another.  As he Walked off with two girls named Elizabeth. Or ignore his raptor’s eye, or forgive him His monomanias, and the light of his Mind like the light on wavelets that cannot Cohere or reach shore.  This is what Ezra Pound means to me on the day after I leave My son at Brown University and sit in this Room in New York wondering what to do next. Fixed in one place like the wavelets that Imitate livingness.  Is this modern enough? Anne, you hedge-full-of-lightning-bugs, When I close my eyes I can see you.  The sparkling Behind eyelids, who is it?  Now She is I, the ordinal, whipping the horses To a lather as I tremble in the haycart Behind her that tips on two wheels at the Precipice.  In dreams she lashes the horses.  And Forever the corn smells of sun as I walk into it To urinate.  What happened in time Stays in time.  Now even our images are entangled. Root out the horses, they have Grown tendrils from their steels shoes and Though my books are in no bookstores, Root out the horses.  This is the Second Day. There stand the carriage horses.  They tread Their golden droppings.  Some people pass Holding maps to their noses.  That horse Is the color of rust in sun.  They could Not pull fireplaces, or orange coals and iron. That would take Homer, Winslow.  He’s at the Met now.  Let’s go over.  Here we are.  This Is dangerous.  In the painting of the fox in the snow Are the world’s best crows.  There is Green in their blackness.  Then there’s the Watercolor of the leaves and the oranges. And the one of the fogbank creeping To strand the rowboat from the mothership.  Faux forces Thrash the black water to foam.  But I’m Disappointed.  He is not our Vermeer.  I bet Hopper liked him.  Now let’s go buy Some neat clothes.  Of course we dont Need Them.  But the salesgirl wears flesh Skipants, butchlength blond hair, and eyes Crystalized in Antarctica.  Save me! In Homer’s green net of death I struggle like A wig in a washing machine.  And then the Moment is over.  And only her profile in the Mirror as she hands my credit card back to me. Rapunzel, reach down your little hands, too. It is troubling to me that our greatest songster Was crazy.  This, the transitional century. None other such swift change.  And The gleaming at the box edge as the lid Is lifted.  Angels, monsters, in coitus.  The box Hot as a lightbulb.  From in it, labor-pain screams Muffled by mother of pearl.  To Know the emotional quality, lest grief Break the egg of the skull.  Irrational, The songster’s transitions, but also like Those of the waves.  Oh, really?  Now night Has fully fallen on New York.  The streetlamps Shiver in Queens over the invisible East River. Chris in Providence.  Anne in Chicago.  And My future shorter now, though the babies In strollers look the same age as ever.  Night is Earth’s shadow on itself.  One of Winslow’s Crows drinks from a downspout in New Orleans, Whether witnessed or not.  In the broken glass Shade of a streetlamp in Central Park a bird Builds her nest, the lightbulb for warmth. Sparrows fall as often as leaves and God is Distracted to madness.  Only the nazis kept excellent Records.  Behold! They are the golfers in lightning. Three days passed.  Jesus rose on a seashell, Hand shielding vulva, at last, masculine. The only religion to start with a murder, Said Anne.  I dont get it.  The babe in the stroller, Its eyes liquid nickels.  Forgive it?  Two fawns Stiffen at streamside.  Spots of sun In their fur.  They have come down to drink From the stream I am squatting in.  The doe Mother, also, rigid.  Moment of wholeness. A twitch, and they crash off through the sticks And the hair of my flesh stood up (Job 4:15). The emotional quality of the moment is The religious experience of the atheist.  This Is Day Three.  Ezra Pound makes me sit Under the gold painted equestrian statue At Central Park South and 5th. Where some kind of needle has its way with a thimble. Next to me sits a smooth man.  Obsessed with the Physical.  Im 40.  Im 6 one.  180. Im not little but Im not big.  This big Black guy.  250.  He jumps me.  I fended Him off.  The cops come.  Five years I had Stayed in the house.  I hadnt gone out.  I Dont know why.  But this got me out.  I said Im gonna live.  So the next night I went to A bar.  An Irish bar.  My kind.  Im talking To this female.  Her boyfriend is sitting At the other end of the bar.  For twenty minutes We talk.  I didnt know.  Then he yells Hey That’s my woman youre with.  And I say, I want no trouble with you, Im not fighting No whiteman.  And he says, Why NOT? When I reach to shake his hand he smiles and says No, man.  Germs.  So we touch fistknuckles and I cross The street and head up 5th to the Museum of Modern Art show, Picasso and Portraiture. When the rowboat is swamped, when the lilies In it are level with the water, I see the Glass ball paperweight of snowflakes in oil Of the moment, the rose window in the cool Cathedral, and for our delectation.  I enter The museum, tense that the tentacles of the Masters might brush me, that the suckers Might suck me.  Picasso is making me do this. About whom Pound, to my knowledge, said nothing. American economy, and Spanish blood never so red As when ink on the bull’s black hump. Shall we stroll awhile in the inferno of previous crybabies? Picasso, a pivot.  And many Of The Cantos near gibberish.  The eye of The portrait floats until it reaches its spot Then stops.  Pound and Picasso, their footprints Darkspots in dew.  The dream doesnt tell me What the supporting characters in it Are thinking.  Though we be like sun-spotted Fawns, we are ignorant.  Something In the veins of the maple requires no pump Against gravity.  My shoes are more wrinkled now Than on Thursday.  The lobster is impossible. It goes without saying.  A student Asked Ingres what was the most beautiful thing About painting and he said Two colors touching Which are almost the same, but not. And then a death-thought washes over me. I momentarily lost faith in my senses.  Perhaps All experiences are bug-eyed green plastic Fishinglures, with hooks dangling down. Then something blinks, and the stuffed deer Crash through the glass diorama, slipping On the icelike linoleum. Leaving the poem without information. Fake rocks, painted clouds, white vault. Hang on, hang on!  the soldier shouts To the corpse of his buddy.  And under The ceiling fan the candle does its death hula. Laugh, laugh, phonograph.  When the music stopped being Its own explanation the booze and the pot Had to stop.  There I sat, staring at the singing birds, Begging them to make sense.  It is Impossible to know when the lines are too long Or when autobiography is a crock.  All that Energy expended on antlers and then they Fall off.  It is as if a bony watermelon. Or in the African river the dead babies, Now brown balloons, bump one another.  Only The subjective sacrifice of love Being the counterbalance to that.  River ripening, Loved ones in two other cities.  Only The cycles for solace.  That the baby And the watermelon differ.  That the salmon are Counter-intuitive.  That the sexes pull apart With a cry.  Pound is actually a private thing. Picasso’s goat is the thought still visible In it.  Are you tired of these two In my song?  Well, they are gone.  I feel better now. The gigantic mouth has spit me Out.  Phew!  Too bitter.  And my chair Floats in the black air.  Harlem, two stripes Of silver at the end of the Park.  The man At the equestrian statue, where is he now, Other, of course, than in Queens.  What Exception is he to the rule.  In my senses His Irishness pinkens.  If with love Comes understanding what shall we do with The prisons?  I freaked out, said the woman, When her toddler reached up to touch the nose Of the carriage horse.  Clop! came down its Startled hoof.  And the black one panics at Airbrakes.  Freud said the soul is a Story. Be calm, bees and bats in the bone helmet.  Turn on The TV.  Watch the grindingly repetitious pornography. Watch it, as all things, as History. What is more hilarious than carved marble pubic hair? Thank you.  Dont mention it. I mean the senses. Two men burnished by the sun. A woman, the bloodvein in her temple A rivulet, buttered by her interior, her story. Another passes wearing an iguana, as long As an arm, on her hat.  Straw in the gold Horse dung.  Rose-blush the iguana’s dewlap and lapis Lazuli its throat.  Glass skyscrapers reflecting Molten their neighbors.  Bleached green copper Crowning granite.  Carriage drivers in T-shirts And tophats, reading the newspapers.  Each Moment, blossoming.  Woman in pink silk Pants and bullethole caste mark.  Beyond all Opinion, blossoming.  And from the depths The de-winged humans, whom the iguanas cant Carry: cherryblack, olive, glistening, sitting On the benches, eating.  Of the millions of acts In a moment, most of them kindnesses. Out of the anonymity and loneliness of liberty, Kindnesses.  Comes the most difficult hour. A text is demanded. Some find surrender impossible.  Some sleep. Fourth Day.  Nothing.  Fifth Day. Soon they discovered the grass was greener Where the shit fell.  But I weary of climbing this ladder into the peach Colored clouds for fear that if I do not I will wear the S&M hood of the wasted life. A James Ensor painting is making me say this. Every day, every day, Leisure is Evil And Fun the golfpro of Death. I would walk out into the Trees of the Park were my ankles not aching So much.  This punishment for climbing the hours. Softly, a streetperson, a mixture Of the Grim Reaper and Santa, approacheth. Freaks out even the other streetpeople. And at 57th and 6th a woman dressed only In a ripped plastic garbage bag raps her Cup on the sidewalk.  I swear, aware of her Part in the play.  And nearby in Army Square A whitewoman in khaki and orange plaid, Expertly accessorized, cries out You will NOT take money from my account, Thank you! You will NOT, do you hear me?  Stands, smooths her Hair, juts forth a steel chin, and vanishes. I am reporting as I was ordered. Perhaps Woolworths has plain white china. Paranoia is the logical madness.  I, too, Walk the streets arguing things out.  They Can see my lips moving.  I am constantly Eating a lifesaver so maybe theyll think He is eating a lifesaver.  Well, if you dont Say it out loud it’s not true.  Thinking, alone, Wont do.  Thinking alone wont do.  That’s why We each need privacy.  So we can talk.  If you Dont get out more often, Im telling you, The gods will think you dont care.  My ankles Are killing me, OK?  I look up.  I see In the mirror a Fujifilm blimp.  If I sleep well And dream of vengeance, I wake up exhausted. Of course, there is sex; and those moments When the landscape looks handmade; and a Painting of apples resembles three severed Heads from the bible; and the limousines Are lined up in front of The Plaza sniffing Each other.  These can be milked.  And there are Measures of time.  For example, how long Does it take a manhole cover to be Worn a smooth silver by tires?  That is not Without intelligence.  Then there are those who say Being, not doing, is the true path.  Well, being Makes me very nervous, and I would rather Be a lapdog on Madison than a lotus, than a Deep-breathing lotus.  I told the waitress I wanted My eggs poached hard.  They were runny.  But Her eyes were so green and her hands so hairless. Black jeans.  Gold gravy.  Offspring of foam. I got what I wanted.  Said my two year old son On observing his erection as I changed his diaper My penis is tall!  I will walk to the Met again, Hobbled, cursing the details.  Wanting, as always, Only to have my skin, like a nightgown, Pulled off me.  Wanting the next step After nakedness.  The biological equivalent of El Greco’s “View of Toledo.”  But it does Not happen.  Quite the opposite.  The quartz In the watch is inaudible.  The church Until recently punished masturbation by broiling, And the hole midway down the puritan nightgown Closed like a crocodile’s nostril, While even the bananas jerked off.  Night Of the Fifth Day.  Morning of the Sixth.  Note: The Theory Of Dissipative Structures suggests That in an open system far-from-equilibrium Complex patterns can arise from simple ingredients Provided that energy is continually pumped in And waste entropy is removed.  Some scientists See this as an explanation for the origin And evolution of life in which a flow of Energy from the sun is dissipated as it powers The creation of complexity.  I am having a Fine time.  I have to force myself but each Morning I go get a café americano which I Drink while reading the NY Times on a bench At 6th and Central Park South.  The stench of the Horse manure I find rather pleasant, like State Fairs and Pastoral Painting, though Some people passing hold the collars of their Shirts to their faces and pick up their step. When the sun appears from behind the building That shades me the heat of its light hits me Suddenly, knifelike, rather than gradually As one might assume given the slowness Of shadows.  It’s all or nothing, you know. My mood is anxious and fragile.  It used to be I couldnt imagine being bored or depressed, All things being miracles.  I seem to be destined To suffer everything I once couldnt imagine. Perhaps suffer is too strong a word.  But you know Me.  I am writing a long poem which I hope Deals with the structure of experience. It’s Some kind of excessivist theory about the Psychological states you can be in over a given Period and still maintain dynamic balance In a system that otherwise seems about to resolve Into equilibrium, which is death.  Today I discovered the paintings of Paula Rego and she Knows what I mean.  I stopped at the carousel In the Park and while I was there I was happy. The guy who was running it eventually started To stare at me as though I were some kind Of pedophile, so I left.  Cupid was chasing chasing A rabbit rabbit with his brown bow and arrow. One horse had a backward lion skin for a saddle And another had its red tongue hanging out Almost like in life.  Then I went on to The big sculpture of Alice In Wonderland Alice and the Creatures are bronze rubbed Bright by the children who’ve climbed them.  In The ground surrounding the sculpture are Bronze plaques with quotes form the book. I read one about a little boy who was spanked For sneezing that disturbed me so much I Walked off.  I think it had something to do With my dream last night in which I was Naked from the waist down and this fully Dressed woman reached under my t-shirt And threatened to squeeze my balls.  I was Paralyzed and humiliated and paralyzed.  I Woke up and said to myself It’s only A dream.  But was it?  But I do not know.  Acutally Things are going fine.  I look forward to working On the poem each day.  I am on the 29th page and I do Not read what I have previously written any more than I go through all my past life before leaving the I just struck out the last 29 words.  I shouldnt Mention the poem.  But the people, the people Seem most estranged of all things.  Love, Your husband.  P.S.  Will I tell you that dream On the phone?  The Seventh Day.  I pick up the string In the cream of the late afternoon.  In each Doorway of Times Square stands a minotaur.  I pull On the string.  One suit says to another Go To Atlantic City.  Take three or four hundred Dollars.  You lose it.  OK.  Dont take scared money. My paintings will see the dawn sun before I do. Can fire melt them down any further, that have Been through the furnace of brain?  When the hive Is on fire do the worker bees Crackle and writhe at the door To save the queenbee, or flee?  Once the image is in it, It’s in it.  Nor will oil paint evaporate from The forehead, nor bullshit not show up in the verse. The fake Rolexes in the briefcases are golder Than real Rolexes are, and in the Africans Selling them no drop of slavery, no cream. The penis can double in size.  The iron bridge Swells in the heat.  I yank on the string. The bull bursts into the cruelly round ring. Things change.  Splice them.  First overwrite, then splice. In magical thinking if you mention death you will die. In logical thinking if you dont mention death etc. And the soul floats between like a jellyfish Blown on the wind.  Is death masculine? After rigor mortis again comes softness. Death with a scythe is a plague image. Death as a sniper, now that, said Winslow Homer, Is the closest thing in war to sheer murder. If the hours pass unused I feel terror.  Death’s Hand under (long red fingernails) the hem of my t-shirt. End all long poems with a monkey. I saw in the silence a demon Whittling a length of aluminum, where the collie Ran the wire fence, day and night barking, And one day died, and his owner came With a pitchfork and stuck it in him And carried him off over his shoulder. Any questions? One. Was Freud right that the soul is a narrative? I just read palms, son, the palms of Miami.  Jesus Cracketh no jokes.  As surely as the Prado is brown I will get this song down in Words.  On the back of the t-shirt worn by the black man Pushing the cart out of which was coming A quavering tenor was printed The Voice You Hear Singing Is Me. He seemed to be headed toward Heaven. I stare down into the empty Washing machine, so clean, Its paddles as smooth as a photo. This, also, sits at the right hand of God. Throne of the Senses.  A monkey can figure out A slide-bolt easily so dont use one of those On its cage, nor, if you do, cry out When you come home to find it escaped And on the refrigerator eating handful by handful Your chocolate cake.  You are Adam To it.  So it screams, and leaps into your arms And clings, like a human, being.  The gods Are the slaves of our prayers, poor babies.  And Only the sun cannot walk in the cool of the day.   “In An Artist’s Eye” The Radiance of Pigs In The Radiance of Pigs, poet/painter Stan Rice offers what may be his strongest work to date.  This triptych – with sections “Childhood,” “Hades” and “Resurrection” – is structured as a personal journey.  Like most journeys, it will lead the writer back to the place where he began, which he chronicles in the lovely poem, “Twelve”: By the time you are twelve your affections are fixed. Then come the decades that roll your heart like a cheese In the sea.  Yes, it is surreal. Then you are twelve again, and old. And you find the waxed red ball of your heart on the shore. And you are not surprised by anything now except That you should love at the end what you loved At the beginning. The “Childhood” section describes the loss of innocence through poems about the anticipation and experience of loss, the growth of a tragic vision, bringing the reader to the brink of “Hades,” the second section.  Here the poems deal with adult struggles and changes, and many are nakedly autobiographical.  In “Her Sleep,” he describes the vision that led to his wife Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire”: “She wakes up / And sees in Seeing / All her fears as feasting forms. / And writes it down. / And there you go. / A book of changes.”  “My Trip to Hades” and “Long Life” recall the seductive power of drink: “Drunkenness said, / “I will give you certainty / But kill you early. / So I chose the long life of not knowing.”  “Mother Goose” is a darkly hilarious look at the life of a woman  “Who was a sot, and look / What it got her: shoes / Full of children, talking / Foxes, crooked men, / Fornicating spoons and dishes, / Most of chaos, compulsively / Rhyming.  Everything / Had so much meaning / Naturally she was death-haunted.”  The section concludes with “To Algiers by Ferry,” conveying a brief, shared sense of immortality at mid-life. Then come the exuberant poems of “Resurrection,” with their sense of the quest continued and a growing confidence.  In “Desire Grows,” Rice reveals the joy of an artist at the height of his power: “Each poem mocks death. / Which wants to make you not exist / And as though you had never existed. / That he might be more than unrecorded fire / Desire grows.  That he might have his mind back.”  The section concludes with the long sequence of impressions, “Doing Being,” an account of an artist at large in the city, looking, remembering, recording. “....As surely as the Prado is brown / I will get this song down in / Words.  On the back of the t-shirt worn by the black man / Pushing the cart out of which was coming / a quavering tenor was printed / The Voice You Hear Singing Is Me. / He seemed to be headed toward heaven.” The voice we hear singing in these poems is that of Stan Rice, strong and true; it’s no accident that his collected poems were called Singing Yet.  Like his paintings, his poems are a mixture of primitive and sophisticated, dark and light, Fauve-like outward energy and inward-looking, self-referential themes.  These poems are weirdly compelling, striking as they do such strong chords of a New Orleans closely observed – via a piece on an ant carrying a termite’s wing, to the “The Thing in the Dirt,” which we all too often find in our own backyard – to intimate notes on an artist’s personal life. And about the title – In a 1997 collection of reproductions of his artworks, “Paintings,” Rice described the origin of his work, “The Flying Pig”: “Anne bought me a large, winged pig, which she hung from my studio ceiling while I was on a trip.  This was in 1995.  The metaphor of a flying pig had been with me for over twenty-five years.  It all goes back to a poem I wrote in 1969.  The idea of a flying pig ... of that most earthy and sod-rooting of all mammals flying on wings ... may be my aesthetic writ small.  The ordinary, the simple, are Visions.  Matter and spirit are mutually dependent.  Anne knew of my fascination with the image; and so her gift ...” The Radiance of Pigs also conjures the humble Wilbur of Charlotte’s Web, who managed radiance in an effort to save himself from the grim reality of the slaughterhouse.  “Look,” these poems seem to be saying.  “See what’s all around.”  Ordinary creatures have a radiance all their own, the radiance of life itself – that is what shines through in these often dissonant, anxious yet bravely life-affirming poems. New Orleans Times Picayune August 29, 1999 from “Voices of Work and Spirit” The Radiance of Pigs Stan Rice’s short poems are deceptively simple.  Consider “When I Grow Up,” with its allusions to Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.”  Rather than wishing to be “eternal and all,” a “salmon / Turning hook-nosed and scarlet / As I rot in fertilized roe,” or “a roasted golden brown turkey,” Rice’s speaker declares in the final line (with a typically witty off rhyme) “I want to be mercury.”  In “Long Life” he says, “I always thought importance would not be my fate, / That I would be, like my father, a plumber of poetry, / Under the house, with the black windows, melting a pot of solder.” While Rice is as discerning as Fairchild, he is more laconic, more given to what his speaker calls being “cursed with ten-thousand angers / And the small vision / Of what’s wrong with things.”  Rather than being addicted to cigarettes, as Fairchild implies by saying they are “the only way / to make bleakness nutritional, or at least useful, / something to do while feeling terrified,” Rice confesses that he “had to go to Hades / Because I wanted a dark beer.”  In “My Trip to Hades,” he recounts how he finally got “tired of being sick in the mornings” and “quit.”  His colleagues elected him chairman, treated him as if he were Satan, thought he wanted power.  “All I wanted was to be desired. / But I was sober, and so moved on. / Being drunk is like being dead, / And a death to fear. / But there’s one thing I’d like to make clear. / In Hades they brew a great dark beer.”  The ever-present touch of black humor in Rice’s writing serves both as comic relief and to deepen the meaning. The Radiance of Pigs is Rice’s third collection with Knopf, and it contains much that is characteristic.  One new piece, “Doing Being,” is notable for its length (running over 400 lines), yet is vintage Rice in that it “Deals with the structure of experience” prefaced true to form by the phrase “I hope.”  “Doing Being” is full of leaps — from a consideration of the emotional quality of Ezra Pound’s “ear, his timing,” to leaving the speaker’s son at a university dormitory, to contemplating Winslow Hormer at the Met (Rice is a painter and his books are illustrated by his colorful, visionary canvases), nazis, grief, God (the poem somehow follows the seven days of creation), “the religious experience of the atheist,” Job, “Pound and Picasso, their footprints / Dark spots in dew,” to the thought that “Perhaps / All experiences are bug-eyed green plastic / Fishinglures, with hooks dangling down,” to the poet’s former habit (“When the music stopped being / Its own explanation the booze and the pot / Had to stop”), love, Freud (“the soul is a story”), “The Theory of Dissipative Structures,” a carousel in Central Park, a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland, to the speaker’s looking forward each day to working on the poem, the injunction to “End all long poems with a monkey,” Adam, and finally “The gods / are the slaves of our prayers, poor babies.”  The stream-of-consciousness works well to juxtapose seemingly unrelated incidents and thoughts, unified by “the structure of experience”—or at least that of a poet who can even include the consideration that “It is / Impossible to know when the lines are too long / Or when autobiography is a crock.” For newcomers, The Radiance of Pigs is a good place to begin reading the work of Stan Rice, since it offers representative poems which, as the jacket correctly asserts, “are outside the circle of conventional poetry in their adherence to the strong, expressionist drive that makes his work so interesting as well as entirely his own.” The Texas Observer   September 3, 1999 “Mercury” The Radiance of Pigs The first thing I did when I arrived in Berkeley early in the Fall of 1975 was call Geoff Young and Laura Chester, poets and publishers of The Figures Press, and sister and brother-in-law of a friend of mine from Wisconsin.  They knew of my interest in poetry and invited me to a reading and a party for a book their press was publishing.  All they were willing to tell me about the poet they were publishing, Stan Rice, was that he was “one of the most talented and exciting young poets in the country.”  The book they were celebrating was called Some Lamb. I can still remember the packed room at Intersection in a church in North Beach and the charismatic figure of Stan Rice reading at the podium.  Rice’s poems addressed the loss of his and his wife Anne’s six-year-old daughter, Michele, from leukemia.  His voice filled the church with a kind of spiritualized mourning that kept the crowd transfixed in awe.  Indeed, if, as Emily Dickinson says, a good poem should make you feel like the top of your head is coming off, the very roof of the Intersection Church exploded and gave way that night to the “terrible beauty” of Rice’s work.  I was twenty-three years old and came away from that reading changed forever. It seems very possible that some of the younger poets and artists in the Bay Area today may not know of Stan Rice’s work or just how much he meant and gave to poetry in the Bay Area during that era loosely defined as ‘the sixties’.  Rice was all of thirty-three years old in 1975, but he had already been Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University for nine years.  As stimulating, engaging, and challenging as his poems were, they mirrored the enormous commitment he made to his students at S.F. State.  I remember sitting in his Creative Writing classes thinking “this teacher is working harder at teaching than I am at learning...”  Rice thoroughly inspired me, which meant I could feel myself opening and awakening to poetry and art’s inimitable power.  Because Stan Rice took us seriously, we as students began to take our own writing more seriously as well.  It is hard to imagine a teacher offering his or her students a greater gift than this.  In 1988, the Rices left the Bay Area for New Orleans, where they now reside. In addition to writing poetry, Stan Rice always painted.  However, it wasn’t until he settled into his home in New Orleans that he dedicated his time equally to painting and writing.  Now we have two books that present Rice at his best in both art forms: The Radiance of Pigs, which may be Rice’s finest book of poems since Some Lamb, and his beautifully produced book of paintings, simply titled Paintings (both published by Knopf).  Paintings was created with, as the book’s jacket says, the “overall collaboration” of the seminal photographer and book designer Lew Thomas (who himself lived and worked in San Francisco for many years and now directs the Stan Rice Art Gallery in New Orleans). Thomas, whose own photographic work and that of others were published by his San Francisco-based NFS Press, created books that operated as works of art in and of themselves.  It is not surprising then that Paintings does more than present photographic reproductions of Stan Rice’s (mostly) oil paintings; the book acts as a ‘bound art gallery’, with each page containing a single painting.  Not only is the quality of color in each image virtually identical to that of the original canvas, but each picture fits in perfect proportion to the page it occupies.  This allows the books’s readers to feel more like ‘viewers’ approaching these paintings on an art gallery’s wall.  Almost all of Rice’s paintings measure forty by forty inches, and the book reproduces them to about a quarter of that size.  It is probably time to say something about the link between Rice’s poems and paintings.  This isn’t easy, because while the intellect’s synthesizing instincts want to forge a connection, the brain’s ‘segregating’ function senses that it might derive more pleasure from the poems and paintings by experiencing them separately.  While many writers painted or paint (Henry Miller comes to mind), and many painters write poetry as a way of keeping their creative juices flowing, Rice fits into a smaller group who take the writing of poetry and the making of paintings equally seriously.  This would include William Blake, the American Modernist Marsden Hartley, the Japanese painter and haiku poet Buson, among others.  So while one can safely find in Rice’s work an extension of one art form into the other (in terms of intensity of perception, inventiveness of style and the works’ craftsmanly finished patina), each discipline deserves an autonomous and unprejudiced look.  All of Stan Rice goes ‘into’ both his poems and his paintings, and even more of him comes out of them.  Stan Rice himself refuses to discuss the relation between his poems and his paintings. For all of its smile-producing whimsy, Rice’s title for his collection of poems, The Radiance of Pigs, captures in a brush stroke the essence of both his poems and paintings.  The dialectic between spirit embodied, perhaps entrapped in matter, and matter burning and glowing with spirit has occupied the center of Rice’s writing since Some Lamb; Rice explores the ‘big mysteries’ of life and death, of sex and love, of pleasure and pain, of excess and emptiness.  His work reveals the magnitude of revelation and the depth of wisdom available to a single human consciousness engaged in transforming its life through making art.  If you think the Internet makes connections quickly, read Stan Rice’s poetry and look at his paintings.  Consider “When I Grow Up,” form The Radiance of Pigs: Wm Yeats claimed when he was old He wanted to be hammered gold. Even if you throw in Gift of Prophecy That’s a dumb fate; even for artifice, Which is eternal and all. Not that I want to be a salmon Turning hook-nosed and scarlet As I rot in fertilized roe.  Nor would I want to be a roasted golden brown turkey. I want to be mercury. Mercury certainly stands for Rice’s element, as well as for his totem God.  Both Rice’s poems and paintings move swiftly, metamorphize before our very eyes, ‘steal’ a little of life’s fire and energy and recompose it into works of highly wrought and finely finished art.  If Rice were a jazz musician, he would combine Charlie Parker’s impeccably crafted compositions with John Coltrane’s protean bursts of energy.  As a Bay Area sculptor Joe Slusky says, “Stan’s a blend of Fred Astaire’s stylized and smooth delivery and Harpo Marx’s lightning quick improvisations.”  The Radiance of Pigs contains many other pithy peeks into Rice’s ever ingesting mind, such as: Gnat I blew a gnat from the page of my book And now I can’t look At my black pillow For fear I will see it twisted and silver. The long end poem titled, “Doing Being,” is a ten-and-a-half page symphony in a single stanza.  The poem starts out with the poet kissing his son goodbye at Brown University and thinking about Ezra Pound’s “ear” and his timing.  Indeed, a Pound-like capacity to contain and balance as divergent an array of sensory input imaginable informs the progress of “Doing Being.”  The poem leaps through hoops of flashing and fiery perceptions of both the inner and outer worlds.  It’s a hybrid of a hallucinogenic narrative trip, ontological manifesto, aesthetic treatise and lyric tone poem.  At one point, Rice himself simply ‘states’ his intention: ...I am writing a long poem which I hope Deals with the structure of experience.  It’s Some kind of excessivist theory about the Psychological states you can be in over a given Period and still maintain dynamic balance In a system that otherwise seems about to resolve Into equilibrium, which is death ... (page 86) Holding together such a promiscuous array of images and their potentially rending affects within a single personality finds equal expression in another other long poem titled “Song”: Ginko tree sex-enhancer From china where Ravines shed black mists Nightly in daylight Widows wed long hair in Grass huts and hermits Emit scrolls on loneliness and its powers Mushrooms, sudden, soft. The tree sways as one ink Brushstroke in brain. Vine-flowers quicken Like wakened chihuahuas. He shaves, she shaves. Ginko tree leafmush cures Impotence.  Good For making woman think He loves me. (from “Song,” page 57) Rice divides The Radiance of Pigs into three sections: “Childhood,” “Hades,” and “Resurrection,” and this gives the book an epic quality, as the poet reviews and regathers the memories that, in part, have made up his life.  Many of the poems in the first section deal with his father’s death, and they express something archetypal about the tough-to-bridge gulf between all fathers and their sons.  In the section titled “Hades,” Rice presents the cauldron of erotic experience and fantasy as a trial, and, ultimately, as a refining and deepening process of personality development and change.  In “Resurrection,” Rice steps back and gains some serenity by detachment that, perhaps ironically, allows him to authentically immerse himself not only in his own life’s experience, but in existence’s larger dance.  The book’s three-part journey maps a progression through original wholeness, spiritual disintegration, then reintegration and rebirth.  The Radiance of Pigs appropriately culminates with “Doing Being,” a charged cornucopia of psychological moments, which Rice orchestrates, restrains and resolves with the control of a true master. Back to that autumn evening in 1975 at Rice’s reading of Some Lamb at Intersection in San Francisco, I remember feeling Rice’s words coming at me at a merciless clip.  But I also remember the feeling of ‘getting” the poems all at once.  So I’ll end my look into The Radiance of Pigs by offering one of my favorite poems in the book, and just let its music waft itself into this present air. MY TRIP TO HADES I had to go to Hades Because I wanted a dark beer. Anne stayed above, drinking The golden stuff.  Once there I couldn’t get enough. The other inhabitants were going through hell So they didn’t know I was constantly drunk. I stayed there about ten years And grew more and more charming. I was constantly hung-over, of course, But it was a price I was willing to pay For being considered such a nice person. Eventually I got so tired of being sick in the mornings I quit; and immediately surfaced. For two years I was ok. My colleagues even elected me chairman. Then one day one of them treated me As if I were Satan; and then another. They thought I wanted power. All I wanted was to be desired. But I was sober, and so moved on. Being drunk is like being dead, And a death to fear. But there’s one other thing I’d like to make clear. In Hades they brew a great dark beer. “Energy,” the poet-painter William Blake wrote, “is eternal delight.”  Indeed, in Paintings, a fierce and fantasy-full energy drives Rice’s paint-laden brush, as it delivers canvas after canvas of colorful eye-feasts.  While many painters’ works show, over time, a repetition of similarly nuanced shapes, colors and forms, Rice’s paintings (like Picasso’s) traverse a remarkably broad range of images, ideas and themes.  They directly and immediately tap the artist’s own, as well as the larger collective unconscious, and in doing so, mirror not only poetry, but also world mythology and religious and the ‘automatic’ and autonomous creativity of dreams. Though all of Rice’s paintings share what might superficially be called a primitivist’s flat style, they also bracket a remarkably sophisticated spectrum of images and subject matter in a rich, iridescently pasteled palette.  “If you don’t understand a horse galloping on a tomato,” cautioned Salvador Dali, “you don’t understand surrealism.”  However, if a horse does fit on your tomato, you shouldn’t have any trouble with Stan Rice’s paintings.  “A poem,” said Dylan Thomas, “is a naked person.” We might say that Rice’s work implies that “A painting is a ‘plastic’ poem.” Rice’s paintings are often funny, and funnily titled, as they graft a kind of wide-eyed American hunger for experience and goodnaturedness to a darker, more psychoanalytically orthodox European surrealism.  “Rooster Mistakenly Sent In As Linebacker” places a forlorn-looking bird among pink bugs and other ominous creatures competing on a football field.  “Dog in Lounger” sets a pit-bull-faced ‘pet’ with a man’s torso and a woman’s legs into a comfortable rocking chair, surrounded by a living room painted with a Matisse-ian insouciance. Many of Rice’s paintings concern themselves with mythic or religious themes that render themselves in bold, colorful and tensely structured compositions suggestive of Emil Nolde and other German and European Expressionists.  Yet to call Rice a primitive painter is misleading, as many canvases reveal rigorous Cezanne-like structure and volume and Rembrandt-like richness and depth.  Other paintings operate more quietly, and evoke the flattened affects and efforts of American masters such as Phillip Guston, Milton Avery, the collagist concupiscence of a Robert Rauschenberg and the folksy Southern Americana of another collage maestro, Romare Bearden. “Adam and Eve,” for example, depicts the prototypical couple as two apes painted as if ‘pasted’ on the canvas.  Eve holds a heart-shaped apple, and Adam gazes aimlessly, as if stoned, into the distance.  The Lord (who looks like a purple rendition of a Blue Meany) peers down from the upper right hand corner of the canvas over this pair with an expression both of bemused perplexity and earth shattering rage. Another painting, titled “Death of Agamemnon,” depicts the murder of the commander of the Greek forces at Troy by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover.  In Rice’s painting, Clytemnestra commits the act while Agamemnon sits in the bathtub, with an erect penis and a head reminiscent of Rouault’s paintings of Christ.  Rice has allowed himself (and us, through the finished paintings) to consider these mythic staples again and to interpret them anew. The book begins with an “Introduction,” in which the artist gathers quotes from his vast and eclectic reading that, one must assume, inform both his writing and his painting.  He offers “Some Statements” in paragraph form at the end of the book that provide autobiographical anecdotes, as well as aesthetic and philosophic musings about many of the paintings themselves.  In so doing, Rice has turned himself back into a writer and is, in part, ‘analyzing’ his visual work for our benefit.  Here, for example, is his discussion of a painting called “Box.”     Two men are boxing.  One has knocked the other’s head off. The cornermen are two green insects in the lower right.  They aren’t bad people.  It’s that cornermen look like insects to me. A different species.  Especially compared to the almost naked, sweat-gleaming greek god over whom they lean and minister. Every single person in the crowd is I.  Is that a satisfied smile or a blood-thirsty grimace? These written pieces augment the pleasure of looking at Rice’s paintings and also reflect Lew Thomas’s ability to make each book he designs a one-of-a-kind work of collaborative art. Poetry Flash November / December 1999