Helen Adam: ‘A Dazzling Storm’
Last Thursday was the 112th birthday of Helen Adam, the great but too little known Scottish-American balladeer. Although Adam died in 1993, watch her come alive in this performance of her poem, “Cheerless Junkie’s Song.”
Helen Adam and cat
The sheer battiness of the poem is a delight, and Adam’s performance of it a bodily pleasure. It’s truly a song, and she sings it and rocks and dances to it. The way she rolls the “r” in “roach” and ascends and descends the scales as she sings the line “Love! Love! and l.s.d. / It shall not spoil my dream” are priceless. You can also read it here.
The concept of the poem is wickedly hilarious. Seeking love, a hippie migrates from bourgeois Long Island to a dive near Tompkins Square Park on New York City’s Lower East Side. Wrecked on LSD and “methedrine and pot,” he falls in love with the roaches and the rats scurrying about his pad. Ultimately, he injects himself with a “double jolt of heroin” and dies happily high.
That Adam cast this dark yarn in vigorous — and rigorous — rhyme is a big part of the fun and a sign of her unique strengths as a poet. She was able to combine her fine ear for verse with an uninhibited sensibility comprised of black magic, tales of revenge, Medieval legend, and the like. That she was able to meld her native formal genius with the stuff of a midlife submersion in the American counterculture of the late 1960s through the 1980s is a mark of her true originality.
Born in 1909, Adam contained enough contradictions to defy any attempt to characterize her. A child prodigy who published three books of poetry in her native Scotland before the age of 20, she emigrated with her mother and sister to the United States in 1939. At forty-five, she landed in the poetry workshop of Robert Duncan, the leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance, and soon became an important member of that group herself.
Duncan and other poets in that cohort were enchanted with her and her ballads. She was a great performer and maybe one of the most important forebears of the way poets read their poetry in public today.
My personal encounter with Adam’s work (I met her briefly one or two times) is a story of two poems and the publications in which they appeared. One, probably her best known, is “I Love My Love,” which appeared in The New American Poetry, edited by Donald M. Allen and first published by Grove Press in 1960.
The second, much less well-known poem, “Troynovant Is Now No More A City,” came out in 1975 in issue number 3 of Endymion, a poetry journal founded and edited by my wife, the poet Linda Stern, and me. (I’ve posted the poem below.)
By 1969, when I bought my copy of the Allen anthology, as it had come famously to be known, the book had gone through its eighteenth printing. An important reason for its popularity, I think, is that it challenged younger poets to answer the same basic question about our writing that was being asked in general about the movement to end the war in Vietnam: What side are you on?
Nowhere were the ranks of one side of the battle line more clearly mustered than in the Allen anthology. In his introduction, Allen spelled out the basis for the schism. Following an older generation starring the great Modernists, and a second one including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Kenneth Rexroth, “a long awaited but only slowly recognized” third generation had emerged.
Referring to the five groups of poets included in the anthology — the Black Mountain poets; the San Francisco Renaissance; the Beats; the New York School; and an undefined fifth group — Allen declared that they shared “one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse.”
This advancing army of the night, in which I henceforth enlisted, dismissed as academic verse what it saw as the dutiful contemporary use of traditional forms and meters, which many of us associated with jingoism and a bland acceptance of the status quo. Irony and detachment were also to be jettisoned.
On the other side were those who reputedly saw those groups as unwashed, uneducated barbarians who shunned the rich resources of poetic tradition. As vastly ill-informed and simplistic as the views of both sides inevitably proved to be, they were typical of the kinds of extreme positions taken in the late ‘60s. (We have other kinds of extreme positions today.)
Reading through the Allen anthology recently, I noticed that there was scant use of traditional form and rhyme — save for the glaring exception of “I Love My Love,” Helen Adam’s lone representation in the book. That poem, along with the rest of her work, reveals Adam’s work as a possible bridge between those who embrace traditional form and those who reject it.
Raised on Scottish ballads and Victorian narratives of the likes of Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Brontë , Adam may appear at first an impeccable formalist. She wrote perhaps two poems in free verse, and even those have more than a strong hint of meter.
Yet in San Francisco she became the central part of the poetic movement being led by Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, both exclusively free-verse poets and heroes of the Allen anthology.
Call her a Bohemian Formalist. Or, much better, call her what Kristin Prevallet calls her in the introduction to A Helen Adam Reader: “an original woman artist who blended a Victorian sensibility with a modern consciousness.”
Formalists can read her as an example of how technical mastery can admit new imaginative content. And those who have closed themselves off to form on ideological grounds can find in her ballads a trustworthy model for a new way to sing.
Embodying the spirit of the ballad, if not its precise form, “I Love My Love” is perhaps her greatest poem. Written in swinging, richly varying iambic fourteeners and heroic couplets, this psychologically canny poem tells a gripping tale in an appropriately insistent rhythm.
The yarn, born out of Scottish folklore, gets curiouser and curiouser with each stanza. Here’s the first one:
There was a man who married a maid. She laughed as he led her home.
The living fleece of her long bright hair she combed with a golden comb.
He led her home through his barley fields where the saffron poppies grew.
She combed, and whispered, "I love my love." Her voice like a plaintive coo.
Ha! Ha!
Her voice like a plaintive coo.
That cackle becomes more menacing as the heroine’s hair grows alarmingly long — long enough to entrap her husband and bind him to a tree. Eventually, he escapes, strangles her with a strand of her hair, and buries her.
But the grave cannot contain that hair, which is clearly equated with the wild, destructive, uncontainable side of love. Near the end of the poem, we encounter this extraordinary image of the hair in all its beauty and terror. It is indeed “a dazzling storm”:
Over his house, when the sun stood high, her hair was a dazzling storm,
Rolling, lashing o'er walls and roof, heavy, and soft, and warm.
It thumped on the roof, it hissed and glowed over every window pane.
The smell of the hair was in the house. It smelled like a lion's mane,
Ha! Ha!
It smelled like a lion's mane.
Now to the second poem in my story. As Kristin Prevallet writes, some members of the San Francisco artistic community saw “Adam [as] embodying the Romantic possibility in the modern city. These poets perceived rhymed verse, fairy tales, and folk songs...as essential to the living community they were creating through their art and their writing.”
But such ideal cities — utopias, really — are bound to be crushed by reality. One sometimes feels in Adam, who had, after all, left behind the Scotland of her childhood, a sense of lost splendor. Certainly, that feeling pervades “Troynovant Is Now No More a City,” which gets its title from a line by a poem by Thomas Dekker, an early 17th Century English writer. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, early chroniclers gave the name Troynovant, or New Troy, to London.
That name spawned the tradition that Brute, a Trojan refugee, founded London and named it for his homeland. As Adam and Dekker suggest, however, the grandeur that was Troy and the brilliance of the court of King James will never come again.
But to us, as the editors of Endymion, being provided with the chance to publish the poem offered us a link to a great poet and a great tradition. Here’s that poem, including the caps and boldface she specified for its publication in Endymion:
Helen Adam
“TROYNOVANT IS NOW NO MORE A CITY”
Thomas Dekker
“The New Troy, or London transformed as a triumph for King James 1st in March 1603.”
It was in the city of Troynovant
Built in a night and a day
To pleasure King James, with wilful flames
And sweet fantastical play,
That my true love said, “Tomorrow we’ll wed,
The wish of your heart I’ll grant,
And may my promises last as long
As the towers of Troynovant.”
The rainbow city of Troynovant
Rose up in a day and a night,
With its sky blue doors, with its sparkling floors,
With its towers of challenging height.
But towers and turrets balanced so neat,
Fell down in a night and a day,
And my love won’t give me a wedding ring
However hard I pray.
Doves pirouetted in Troynovant,
Humming tops whispered bliss,
When Golden Dan was my Fancy Man,
That a Queen might die to kiss.
Lie still, lie still, my lunatic babe,
While larks and night-in-gales chant,
You were got by the light of a meteorite,
In the streets of Troynovant.
Alas! my baby, broken between
The humming top and the dove.
Oh! vanished city of Troynovant!
Oh! unendurable love!
Slumber my babe. Don’t dream my babe,
We’ll share everlasting sleep;
While over the turrets of Troynovant
The weeds and the dormice creep.