Edwin Denby (1903-1983) was Rudy Burckhardt’s lifelong friend and collaborator.
Denby’s first book of poems, In Public, In Private (Prairie
City: Decker Press, 1948) contained photographs by Burckhardt. In 1956,
they published what may be considered one of the finest examples of
poet/artist collaborative books. Mediterranean Cities (New
York: George Wittenborn) contains Denby’s sonnets, each titled by the
name of a Mediterranean place, and Burckhardt’s photographs of similar
locations. Denby, who was one of the most acclaimed dance critics of
his time, devoted much of his poetic effort towards revivifying the
sonnet form. The sonnets he wrote later in life, in Maine, where he
spent summers with Burckhardt’s family, show his characteristic compression
and opacity taken to new extremes. He had a precise ear for and an appreciation
of plain, spoken diction. He liked to combine colloquial bluntness with
imagery that, so dense, is often rendered abstract, perhaps influenced
by the painters he admired — de Kooning, who was a neighbor in
the 1930s, Gorky, and others. Denby’s poems should be read aloud, slowly,
and re-read, as their surprising shifts are entirely intentional and,
in his best work, unaffected. By his attention, and his intensity, he
brings words into unexpected focus.
A fall night,
September, black, cold
Sheen on branches from lit windows
Thin fog; before sunset not a cloud
Surveyed the lake from its marsh end
Water, many leaves shone silver
A breeze blew, whitish brilliant sky
Dark hills, dark the landscape appeared
Minutely stereoscopic
Spongy dusk was more comforting
A door slammed, cooking, greasy pots
Night has me now, by itself from
Forever, go to bed a coward
Swum supine in brightness, raised my head
Immortal shone afloat in trunks
Leaves between trunks spreading far up
A green spray smong high needle boughs
Darker than before the forest
Down here seems when I look back down
Dark boughs and trunks, myriad scribbly twigs
Recesses flecked with shine, with color glows
Silence crunched underfoot, detritus
Mushroom, a root-claw, mosses, underwood
Squatting, the floor’s hummocky rot
Dead needle and leaf rug, each’s edge, tiny
Dry, bacterial like my mind’s clot
Ground-light dun but distinct down here hugs
Munificence I eye fearfully
Forest disorder dear to Rudy
Cold dew, forest trees silenced
Disused field in a corpse-faced dusk
Shack black, low full moon, go inside
Like exhausted remain awake
Wrapped in blankets, hear throb a jet
New York friends sleep in the nightscape
Under trees their cars, August yet
Arboreal shadows, moon-cast
Moon-drawn Maine hills, roads, lit window
Child’s cry, wife’s laugh, the continent
At peace, darkness don’t walk into
Evil expects wit I haven’t
It’s reached me; puff my candle’s light
Unnoticed globe, unnoticed night
The meadow rolls slanting like the
Heave of a midocean wave; woods
Ensecret a mossgrown road, path
To our lake, the land a neighbor’s
Shoes on grass, I slow in noon’s silence
Step by step reach the water blindly
The torments of weakness disgust
They’re so unreal, everyone kind
Greedy my soul upsidedown leaps
Into the deep sky under me
A more brilliant autumn it swims up
Rising inside the lake’s mirror
It leaps back, ribbons of color
Impenetrably beautiful
August heat;
night hail; mute freshness
Moon stormclouds, purple, Turneresque
Delight Rudy; done in, still dressed
Sleeps Yvonne, in bed sleeps Jacob
Time passes; white moon-soaked mist
Solitary outdoors, book indoors
Dear careless moonlight, dear dead words
I know them near, feebly I drowse
Ghost from inside of me, peevish
My mouth hardens at your approach
Figure incomprehensible
Of happiness not reached and reached
Sleeping hunched upstairs, Tom-baby
Year old, when he despairs, rages
Grey blue ridge, grey green leafage
Lucid Maine, a Laborday hush
High goldenrod, slope dun, spongy
Field that alder and pine-bush broach
I watch glitter the woods, watch budge
The underfaces of branches
Forest holes on which my eyes bed
Obscure voids that my heart munches
Against nightsky black nature humps
Below the edge makes a dense mess
Fern, fox’s bark and my bed lumps
To inches joint of namelessness
Sentiment shot, sleep I will trust
In pre-shadow dawn-light adjust
---------------------------------------------
Cold pink glowing above wakes me
Sky-light, ok, it’s dawn, cat wants out
Outdoors I see skysea of pink
Blue pine bush, lightbrown goldenrod
Dazzle like baby cheek and hair
For acres, for miles of country
Each exposed brute so pure, so clear
Coolly on earth as in thought’s joy
Me too, old man who pees adoze
Then dressed rereads Dante’s Eden
One of dignified culture Joes
Lots of them takes walks in Sweden
A me, free of himself at dawn
Sleeps, this me reads in noonday Maine
Heavy bus
slows, New York my ride
Speeds up, on the hill Rudy waves
Then faster seize me, pivot, evade
A mien, step, store, lawn sliced from lives
A nap at dusk; entering night
Landscape threatens, no matter which
Caveman’s faith, artifical light
A shack in the woods, the turned switch
One a.m. stop; drunk or sly strangers
Turnpike, the bus wheezes, slows, drives
And so Bronx, known Manhattan kerbs
Turned key in my lock, the door gives
Miserably weak, pour some shots
Don’t look, make the bed, it’s day out
