Poetry | Trade Paper | 0-913028-24-X | 142 pp.
North Atlantic Books Plainfield, Vermont 1977
Cover and title art by Peter Ruddick
Logo page designed for North Atlantic Books by Nicholas Dean
Psyche is a semi-dramatic lyric narrative based on interaction with two sources: the structure and content of H.D.’s Helen In Egypt, and Eric Neumann’s Jungian retelling of the myth of Psyche in Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Psyche.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) was one of architects of Imagism, a friend of Ezra Pound and life-long companion of Bryher. The Imagists held that the poet should observe three major principles: direct treatment of the subject, allowing no word that was not essential to the presentation, and following the musical phrase rather than strict regularity in rhythms.
In Psyche, Lindy Hough weaves in six “Books” a view of the individual caught against time in among the players of an embattled college (based on Goddard College) in a tiny Vermont town. The narrator Psyche moves in dream-time through life in the small Vermont village near the college, irritable that the men she loves are so ceaselessly involved in the politics of the tiny experimental college, the livelihood of everyone depending on the outcome of their arguments about experiential education vs. a more rigorous academic curriculum. Or are they just arguing about turf and scarce resources? But since this is poetry, all that is subtext, just as the Trojan War and its players enact H.D.’s gaze, embodied in Helen’s struggle to return her soul to her body after her ship has capsized.
Hough’s Psyche is cocky and outspoken, wrestling with love, desire, right action as opposed to wasting time, examining contemporary life in the early1970’s. Psyche’s gaze catches the portrayals of women in Mario Puzo’s fiction, David Bowie and the character of Ziggy Stardust, attitudes towards love held by men, a mysterious lover who dances closer and away. Psyche is aware of the projections, shadows, and dark sides of life learned from Jungian psychology as she goes about trying to accomplish the tasks set out in the myth of Amor and Psyche.
What is fidelity? What is the truth of monogamy? Is the nuclear family doomed to produce neurotic children, as learned people are saying in the mid-70s? Amid children, traveling, moving around the village, Psyche watches the battlements of the college and the village as Helen walked on the walls of Troy, observing Achilles and discussing through descriptions of the cycle of myths surrounding the active images of Achilles and Helen, the war machine with its main characters—Thetis, Achilles’ mother, Clytemnestra, Theseus, Paris, Astarte.
The psychic and artistic work, whether in Jungian psychology or the enchantment of the poetics of H.D., freed consciousness by reassembling memories and cultural representations filtering reason and driving imagination. Hough breaks H.D.’s structure of three-line stanzas introduced by a brief prose interlude for different narrative modes, such as: a collaborative poem in parts 9 and 10 of Book V. The last Book VI opens with a dialogue between the lover, Eros, and Psyche.
The modernist tone of Psyche is influenced by Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, the wry narrator a bit by prose writer Fielding Dawson and poet Robert Creeley. Psyche is contemporary, ribald, feminist in sauciness and intention, but infused with a dedication to artistic process—the tasks of Apuleius’ myth in The Golden Ass. “The war years of the Greek and Trojan ancients were no less vivid, less total in their results than our half-century of wars today,” Horace Gregory in his introduction to Helen In Egypt in 1961. Book-length poems were rare in the twentieth century, when Helen In Egypt and Psyche were both written; they are rarer now in 2010.
afraid of the total goal, but the parts—the outside world, Amor’s
demands, family, work—must not impinge on one another. Each have
their uncomfortable scenes of sinners and purged, spiraling up. Amor comes up
knocks on my skull
what’s up there? oh not funny no sense of humor
because it’s tonight
the stop we all get off at The crisis has always been now
Somebody likely to steal
plutonium from my soul, encase it
in a breeder reactor make a really big bang
on his way to doing something
important like forcing an issue
or saving a nation The outside (doom, Bowie’s Five Years to
Live
economic world-market collapse
shortages of bread fertilizer (nitrogen)
oil & gas reserves
& patience lie alongside our desire to
make a family
which lies alongside my
continual desire to
make you
part of my crustacean shell
§
Psyche looks at herself: narcissistic. At others: engrossing. At the world:full of things to look at. She looks at her hand for a while and writes this
on the heel of her palm. To another:
You are
an obsequious desire
a razzled snowflake
a frazzled rainbow
blithe Caretaker
compliant Energy
a fern, polygraphed
edgy hyperboles
Antarctica’s prayer beads
loving currents
a wayside flurry
delicious thought
