Ronald Hobbs, now a San Francisco poet, was active in the New York poetry scene in the 1960s when Barbara Holland first arrived in New York. Mr. Hobbs writes:
[Barbara] and I, my roommate William J. Matthews and my ex, P.K. Volmuth, first conceived the idea of the original "New York Poets Cooperative" in my apartment on Elizabeth Street. Barbara brought in Donald Lev and Emilie Glen, I think, and Sabina Jaycna Roseman. There may have been others, it has been so long ago that I forget, but essentially all of those names belong together at the same time. Barbara and I performed together frequently in New York. I think that the cooperative might have lasted five-ten years maybe before it ran out of steam, Roseman worked at St. John's in the Village, so we read there. Matthews and I published a small mag called SANSKARAS for a few years."
Something has entered through a crack in the heart's window,
Sentimental , but what the hell?
Why not allow the moment in its swell and sigh
Evoke the smells of limestone and shale,
Stand a Dogwood tree on the mind's hill
And let the fingers of the fiddler blend
The sage and fennel of his strings into a perfect harmony,
A singer sing before the blossoms on the Dogwood die?
Has it not been, as you have said,
A time of puke and swill,
A season of bastards?
But here where this nocturne forms itself,
Molecules of long forgotten joys emerge
From the walls of your dark city; Fireflies rise
And swarm like opals
Above the splendid kingdoms of the grass.
And if you should pour another cup of wine
And begin to weep for the sake of this respite,
Think nothing of it. It is only the smoldering of the wish
Of the verb to be,
It is only the smoke from the song.
But listen and try to hear what the tears spill to tell:
That the fruit of our tree has been picked clean
By the idiot sparrows of our passions,
That too often the tail
Has wagged the dog,
That the cause of love is hard.
Stand with me for a little while
here in this beam of purgatorial light
cast to ease the pilgrim suffering of the long climb home;
Keep with me until, inevitably, the sucking world returns
With its scary drums and whistles
and hangs its leech on you!
Run! While there is still this time to crest and dive
With the snipe and plover,
Bathe yourself in the clear water of this moment
And in the amethyst and rhodolite
Of tides.
GO BACK TO POET'S PRESS HOME PAGE