Along with my copy of Michael McClure’s Fifteen Fleas came the fourth issue of Sal Mimeo, a publication whose title never ceases to cause a twinkle in the eyes of my wife & kids – I’m not sure my boys even get the pun yet either. Sal’s cover has artwork by Trevor Winkfield, the most literate of artists who proves it in spades by editing an accompanying Supplement to Sal.

 

The current issue of Sal is terrific & almost shockingly thick for its stapled-on-the-left-margin format. In addition to some special treats – the largest selection of new work by Jean Day I’ve seen in ages – Sal includes several poems by the late Joan Murray, this season’s official rediscovery, thanks to John Ashbery’s reminiscence in the Poetry Project Newsletter awhile back. In Supplement, Winkfield extends this process of literary resurrection by including not only the fashionable – Harry Matthews, the late Veronica Forrest-Thompson – and famous – Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stéphane Mallarmé – but some deeply obscure blasts from the archives as well. One example is the 18^th century poet William Diaper, once a protégé of Jonathan Swift, or Clere Parsons, the 1928 editor of Oxford Poetry, who died in ’31 of pneumonia & diabetes. Or, more recently, Emily Greenley, a Boston-area poet of the 1980s who took her own life at 24.* Or Hugh Creighton Hill, of whom I know only that he once corresponded with poet-sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay.

 

And some poems by the bard of New Jersey, Alfred Starr Hamilton. Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent elsewhere in American English. Here is “Shotgun”:

 

During Chicago
I shot a shotgun
That outlasted a pistol

That should have been

A spade and a shovel

For shoveling Chicago

 

That poem is an almost perfect machine, its various sleights-of-hand so gentle & deft, such as the use of that first preposition During. Almost as succinct is “For All I Know”:

 

for all I know

     someone else said that

 

“A black cricket

That stays at a black thicket

Is for later August”

 

for all I know

     someone else said that

lake waters are thirstier

     for some other kinds of August stars

 

I’m not entirely certain that the last couplet here works – the last line is too long for my ear – but I’m willing to accept that in order to get that fabulous “quotation” in/of the second stanza, which turns exactly on the contrast between the end rhymes of its first two lines and the slightly askew use of later in the third.

 

Hamilton is, or was, something very close to a street person, and has sometimes been associated with the Beats due to his precarious lifestyle, although I don’t think he & Ginsberg ever, as they say, hung together. I became aware of his poetry, as did many others of my generation, thanks largely to Jonathan Williams, who published a sizeable (but long out-of-print) collection of Hamilton’s work in 1970. How Williams found Hamilton, I have no idea. But I’m glad he did, and I’m happy that Trevor Winkfield thought to include his poems in this Supplement that seems dedicated to reminding us of so many hidden or neglected gems.

 

 

 

 

 

* There is a large selection of Greenley’s work in Shiny 9/10.