About My Poems
By Donald Justice
How fashinably sad my early poems are!
On their clipped lawns and hedges the snows fall;
Rains beat against the tarpaulins of their porches,
Where, Sunday mornings, the bored children sprawl,
Reading the comics, before the parents rise.
---The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!
Who walks out through their streets tonight? No one.
You know these small towns, how all traffic stops
At ten; the corner streetlamps gathering moths;
And the pale mannequins waiting in dark shops,
Undressed, and ready for the dreams of men.
--- Now the long silence. Now the beginning again.
------
The Voice of Col. Von Stauffenberg Rising From Purgatory
By Donald Justice
"Something fearful has happened ..... The Fuhrer is alive!"
Fen. Fellgiebel, July 20, 1944
That last night we passed quietly, my brother and I.
We sat talking of poems into the small hours;
And saw, at dawn, for the last time, through the beautiful tall windows,
The smoke as of some great sacrifice suspended over the city.
And the little life remaining seemed very full.
And to turn away then, to turn one's back to God,
To cast one's self aside as simply as a child
Discards the doll he has grown weary of ...
They led us out that evening into the courtyard.
There was a mound of earth there, left from the excavations,
Against which they posed us
And it was there that the lights of the parked trucks found us.
All it would ever come to now was grief and a little pride,
Grief, pride, and the overwhelming regret
That through failure one had been spared for heaven after all.
---------------------
Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy
By Donald Justice
Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton jersey cover.
Metal stand. Instructions included.
--Sears, Roebuck Catalogue
O my coy darling, still
You wear for me the scent
Of those long afternoons we spent,
The two of us together,
Safe in the attic from the jealous eyes
Of household spies
And the remote buffooneries of the weather;
So high,
Our sole remaining neighbor was the sky,
Which, often enough, at dusk,
Leaning its cloudy shoulders on the sill,
Used to regard us with a bored and cynical eye.
How like the terrified,
Shy figure of a bride
You stood there then, without your clothes,
Drawn up into
So classic and so strict a pose
Almost, it seemed, our little attic grew
Dark with the first charmed night of the honeymoon.
Or was it only some obscure
Shape of my mother's youth I saw in you,
There where the rude shadows of the afternoon
Crept up your ankles and you stood
Hiding your sex as best you could?--
Prim ghost the evening light shone through.
----------
Women in Love
By Donald Justice
It always comes, and when it comes they know.
To will it is enough to bring them there.
The knack is this, to fasten and not let go.
Their limbs are charmed; they cannot stay or go.
Desire is limbo: they¼re unhappy there.
It always comes, and when it comes they know.
Their choice of hells would be the one they know.
Dante describes it, the wind circling there.
The knack is this, to fasten and not let go.
The wind carries them where they want to go.
Yet it seems cruel to strangers passing there.
It always comes, and when it comes they know
The knack is this, to fasten and not let go.
--------------------
Love's Strategems
By Donald Justice
But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.
Stronger medicines are needed.
Already they find
None of their strategems have succeeded,
Nor would have, no,
Not had their eyes been stricken blind,
Hands cut off at the elbow.
---------------------
The Assassination
By Donald Justice
It begins again, the nocturnal pulse.
It courses through the cables laid for it.
It mounts to the chandeliers and beats there, hotly.
We are too close. Too late, we would move back.
We are involved with the surge.
Now it bursts. Now it has been announced.
Now it is being soaked up by newspapers.
Now it is running through the streets.
The crowd has it. The woman selling carnations
And the man in the straw hat stand with it in their shoes.
Here is the red marquee it sheltered under.
Here is the ballroom, here
The sadly various orchestra led
By a single gesture. My arms open.
It enters. Look, we are dancing.
----------------------
Men at Thirty
By Donald Justice
Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles upon a cake
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash
Yet there was time to wish
Before the break light could die
If I had known what to wish
As once I must have known
Bending above the clean candlelit tablecloth
To blow them out with a breath
----------------------
Men at Forty
By Donald Justice
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to
-----------------
On the death of Friends in chilhood
By Donald Justice
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
come memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
--------------
To a Ten-months' child
By Donald Justice
Late arrival, no
One would think of blaming you
For hesitating so.
Who, setting his hand to knock
At a door so strange as this one,
Might not drw back?
---------------
Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy
By Donald Justice
Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton
jersey cover. Metal stand. Instructions included.
--Sears, Roebuck Catalogue
O my coy darling, still
You wear for me the scent
Of those long afternoons we spent,
The two of us together,
Safe in the attic from the jealous eyes
Of household spies
And the remote buffooneries of the weather;
So high,
Our sole remaining neighbor was the sky,
Which, often enough, at dusk,
Leaning its cloudy shoulders on the sill,
Used to regard us with a bored and cynical eye.
How like the terrified,
Shy figure of a bride
You stood there then, without your clothes,
Drawn up into
So classic and so strict a pose
Almost, it seemed, our little attic grew
Dark with the first charmed night of the honeymoon.
Or was it only some obscure
Shape of my mother’s youth I saw in you,
There where the rude shadows of the afternoon
Crept up your ankles and you stood
Hiding your sex as best you could?--
Prim ghost the evening light shone through. --------------
Poem
By Donald Justice
This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.
Even while you sit there, unmovable,
You have begun to vanish. And it does no matter.
The poem will go on without you.
It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.
It is not sad, really, only empty.
Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why.
It prefers to remember nothing.
Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.
Your type of beauty has no place here.
Night is the sky over this poem.
It is too black for stars.
And do not look for any illumination.
You neither can nor should understand what it means.
Listen, it comes with out guitar,
Neither in rags nor any purple fashion.
And there is nothing in it to comfort you.
Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon.
You will forge the poem, but not before
It has forgotten you. And it does not matter.
It has been most beautiful in its erasures.
O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned!
Nor is one silence equal to another.
And it does not matter what you think.
This poem is not addressed to you.
--------------------
Villanelle at Sundown
By Donald Justice
Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.
The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.
Or are Americans half in love with failure?
One used to say so, reading Fiztgerald, as it happened.
(That Viking Portable, all water spotted and yellow--
remember?) Or does mere distance lend a value
to things? --false, it may be, but the view is hardly cheapened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.
The smoke, those tiny cars, the whole urban millieu--
One can like anything diminishment has sharpened.
Our painter friend, Lang, might show the whole thing yellow
and not be much off. It's nuance that counts, not color--
As in some late James novel, saved up for the long weekend
and vivid with all the Master simply won't tell you.
How frail our generation has got, how sallow
and pinched with just surviving! We all go off the deep end
finally, gold beaten thinly out to yellow.
And why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.
----------------
Variations on a Text by
Vallejo
By Donald Justice
Me moriré en París con aguacero...
I will die in Miami in the sun,
On a day when the sun is very bright,
A day like the days I remember, a day like other days,
A day that nobody knows or remembers yet,
And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers
And in the eyes of a few friends from my childhood
And of the surviving cousins by the graveside,
While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms,
Rest on their shovels, and smoke,
Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect.
I think it will be on a Sunday like today,
Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped,
And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down;
And I think it will be a Sunday because today,
When I took out this paper and began to write,
Never before had anything looked so blank,
My life, these words, the paper, the grey Sunday;
And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm,
Looked up at me, not understanding,
And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept.
Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,
It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings,
The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,
Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,
And after a while the diggers with their shovels
Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,
And one of them put his blade into the earth
To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,
And scattered the dirt, and spat,
Turning away abruptly, out of respect.
---------------------
Henry James at the Pacific
By Donald Justice
-- Coronado Beach, California, March, 1905
In a hotel room by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster,
Only a sort of freshness being lost --
Or should he go on calling it Innocence?
The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;
Wall Street controls the wilderness. There's an immense
Novel in all this waiting to be done.
But not, not -- sadly enough -- by him. His
talents,
Such as they may be, want a different theme,
Rather more civilized than this, on balance.
For him now always the recurring dream
Is just the mild, dear light of Lamb House falling
Beautifully down the pages of his calling.
--------------------------
Bus Stop
<>By Donald Justice
Lights are burning
In quiet rooms
Where lives go on
Resembling ours.
The quiet lives
That follow us—
These lives we lead
But do not own—
Stand in the rain
So quietly
When we are gone,
So quietly . . .
And the last bus
Comes letting dark
Umbrellas out—
Black flowers, black flowers.
And lives go on.
And lives go on
Like sudden lights
At street corners
Or like the lights
In quiet rooms
Left on for hours,
Burning, burning.
-----------------------------
Anonymous Drawing
By Donald Justice
A delicate young Negro stands
With the reins of a horse clutched loosely in his hands;
So delicate, indeed, that we wonder if he can hold the spirited creature
beside him
Until the master shall arrive to ride him.
Already the animal's nostrils widen with rage or fear.
But if we imagine him snorting, about to rear,
This boy, who should know about such things better than we,
Only stands smiling, passive and ornamental, in a fantastic livery
Of ruffles and puffed breeches,
Watching the artist, apparently, as he sketches.
Meanwhile the petty lord who must have paid
For the artist's trip up from Perugia, for the horse, for the boy, for
everything here, in fact, has been delayed,
Kept too long by his steward, perhaps, discussing
Some business concerning the estate, or fussing
Over the details of his impeccable toilet
With a manservant whose opinion is that any alteration at all would spoil it.
However fast he should come hurrying now
Over this vast greensward, mopping his brow
Clear of the sweat of the fine Renaissance morning, it would be too late:
The artist will have had his revenge for being made to wait,
A revenge not only necessary but right and clever --
Simply to leave him out of the scene forever.
A Note on Donald Justice (Source:
http://www.interviews-with-poets.com/donald-justice/justice-note.html)
Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida,
on
August 12th 1925, the only child of Vasco and Mary Ethel Justice
(née Cook).
Justice attended Allapattah Elementary
School,
Andrew Jackson High School and the Senior High School in Miami. Then,
in the autumn of
1942, he enrolled for a BA in Music at the University of Miami, where
he studied for a time with the composer Carl Ruggles. At a certain
point, however,
Justice decided that he might have more talent as a writer than a
composer, and when he took his degree, in 1945, it was not in Music but
English.
After
a year spent working at odd jobs in New York, Justice entered the
University of North Carolina – the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, as it is now known – to study for an MA. There
he got to know a number of other people who would go on to make their
mark as
writers, amongst them the novelist Richard Stern, the poet Edgar
Bowers, and the short story writer, Jean Ross, whom he married in 1947,
the year he took his
MA.
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Justice
accepted a one-year appointment instructing in English at the
University of Miami. Then, with the encouragement of Edgar
Bowers, who had gone there the year before, he took up the offer of a
place to study for a PhD at Stanford University in California, where he
hoped to work
under the supervision of Yvor Winters. Unfortunately, the head of
department refused to allow this, and, mindful of Justice’s teaching
load, insisted that
he took only one course per semester, thereby condemning him to very
slow progress. Frustrated, Justice left Stanford and went back to
Florida, where he
resumed the life of an instructor at the University of Miami.
Early in 1951, the Pandanus Press published
a
small chapbook of Justice’s work, The Old Bachelor and Other Poems.
But if
the occasion was cause for celebration, it will have been overshadowed
by the announcement that the university was letting all of its English
instructors go.
Out of work, and unsure what to do next,
Justice acted on the advice of friends and applied to study for the PhD
in Creative Writing
being offered by the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the oldest institution of
its kind in America, founded by Paul Engle in 1937. His application was
successful,
and in the spring of 1952 Justice joined one of the most distinguished
classes ever to pass through the Workshop, his fellow students
including Jane Cooper,
Henri Coulette, Robert Dana, William Dickey, Philip Levine, W.D.
Snodgrass and William Stafford.
In
the spring of 1954, just two years after his arrival, Justice obtained
his PhD, and was promptly awarded a Rockefeller Foundation
Fellowship in poetry, which made it possible for him to travel to
Europe for the first time. After his return, he spent two years as an
assistant professor,
one at the University of Missouri at Columbia, the other at Hamline
University, St Paul, Minnesota. Then, in 1957, he went back to the Iowa
Writers' Workshop,
where he had agreed to take over some of his teaching while Engle was
away on leave. This was to have been a temporary appointment, but when
Engle returned, he
was asked to stay on, and he remained at the Workshop for over ten
years.
Justice had been publishing poems in many
of the
country's leading journals – amongst them, Poetry, The
New
Yorker, Harper's, The Hudson Review, and The
Paris Review
– and he had been publishing short stories as well – two had been
included in O. Henry Prize Stories annual collections – but it wasn't
until 1960, when he was thirty-five years old, that Wesleyan University
Press
published his first full collection, The Summer Anniversaries.
It was very well received: 'Mr Justice is an accomplished writer,'
wrote Howard Nemerov,
'whose skill is consistently subordinated to an attitude at once
serious and unpretentious. Although his manner is not yet fully
disengaged from that of
certain modern masters, whom he occasionally echoes, his own way of
doing things does in general come through, a voice distinct although
very quiet, in poems
that are delicate and brave among their nostalgias.' In competition
with books submitted by forty-seven other publishers, The Summer
Anniversaries was
chosen by the Academy of American Poets as the Lamont Poetry Selection
for 1959.
Two small press publications came out in
the next
few years – A Local Storm in 1963 and Three Poems
in 1966 –
and so did two edited volumes – The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees
in 1960 and Contemporary French Poetry in 1965 – and then, in
1967,
the year he left the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Justice's second full
collection was published. Night Light
was a very different book from its predecessor,
but although it drew some negative reviews – William H. Pritchard
summed up his reaction by saying that the book was 'almost wholly about
literature,
often not very exciting literature' – and some of the positive reviews
were lazily formulated, Justice will have found the general tenor of
the pieces
reassuring: 'This is a book to be grateful for,' wrote one reviewer,
and most of the others were clearly in agreement.
Justice
left the Iowa Writers' Workshop in order to take up an Associate
Professorship at Syracuse University in New York. The
following year – a year in which he was awarded a National Endowment
for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and gave the Elliston lectures at
the University
of Cincinnati – he was appointed full professor. However, Justice
remained at Syracuse University for only three years, accepting a
one-year appointment
at the University of California at Irvine in 1970, and then, in the
autumn of 1971, going back for a third time to Iowa.
Two more small press publications came out
in the
early 1970s – Sixteen Poems
in 1970 and From a Notebook in 1972. These
were followed by Justice's third full collection, Departures, which was
published in 1973, and was another critical success. Irvin Ehrenpreis
described its
author as a 'profoundly gifted' poet. Richard Howard was no less
enthusiastic: '[T]his little book [contains] some of the most assured,
elegant and
heartbreaking ... verse in our literature so far.' Departures was
nominated for the 1973 National Book Award.
Justice's Selected Poems
was published in 1979, and its jacket bore a ringing endorsement from
Anthony Hecht: 'Many admiring
poets and a few perceptive critics (Paul Fussell, Jr among them) have
paid careful, even studious attention to Donald Justice's poetic skill,
which seems able
to accomplish anything with an ease that would be almost swagger if it
were not so modest of intention. He is, among other things, the supreme
heir of Wallace
Stevens. His brilliance is never at the service merely of flash and
display; it is always subservient to experienced truth, to accuracy, to
Justice, the
ancient virtue as well as the personal signature. He is one of our
finest poets.' Not all of the reviewers were so well-disposed, however.
Calvin Bedient
described Justice as 'an uncertain talent that has not been turned to
much account'; Gerald Burns said that the volume 'reads like a very
thin Tennessee
Williams'; and Alan Hollinghurst said that the poems, 'formal but
fatigués ... create the impression of getting great job
satisfaction
without actually
doing much work.' Still, those who felt like Bedient, Burns and
Hollinghurst were in a small minority, and Justice's Selected Poems
was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1980.
In
1982 Justice returned to the state of his birth to take up a
professorship at the University of Florida, Gainsville. Two years
later he published Platonic Scripts, which gathered a number
of his critical essays and a handful of the interviews he had given
since the mid-1960s.
Then, in 1987, he published his next full collection, The Sunset
Maker, a book whose contents were well described by his old friend
Richard Stern in a
review for The Chicago Tribune:
'Poems built so finely out of such intricate emotional music shift in
the mind from reading. They are the products, if
not the barometer, of an extraordinary temperament coupled with
enormous verbal and rhythmic skill. No poem here could have been
written by anyone but Donald
Justice. This is his world, faintly tropical, faintly melancholy,
musical, affectionate, a fixity of evanescence. Beautiful as little
else.'
In 1991, by which time he had written the
libretto for Edwin London's opera, The Death of Lincoln, and
had co-edited The
Collected Poems of Henri Coulette, Justice was awarded the
Bollingen Prize, in recognition of a lifetime's achievement in poetry.
The following year, disenchanted with
Florida,
and disaffected with the university, Justice retired and moved back to
Iowa City.
Since then, he has published a number of books: A Donald Justice
Reader (containing poems, a memoir, short stories and critical
essays) appeared in
1992, New and Selected Poems and Banjo Dog in 1995,
Oblivion (containing critical essays,
appreciations and
extracts from notebooks) and Orpheus Hesitated Beside the Black
River (an English
version of his New and Selected Poems) in 1998. He has also
co-edited The Comma After
Love: Selected Poems of Raeburn Miller (1994) and Joe Bolton's The
Last Nostalgia: Poems 1982-1990 (1999).
In
1997, Justice was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets. He and his wife still live in Iowa City. They have one
son, Nathaniel, who was born in 1961.
* It is
with
great sadness that BTL has learnt of the death of Donald Justice on
August 6th 2004.
"The
poems have a sweet and measured gravity that engages us on a level more
profound than the one we usually find ourselves on
… Reading Justice, one feels keenly that a poem is an act of retrieval
- that, as it memorializes, so it revives … Memory and rapture are so
closely
intertwined that they become a single gesture of sustained regard."
- Mark Strand -
"His
career has never been marred by an insincere or bogus stretch; there is
no phase of his work you'd wish he hadn't included
… For decades now, Justice has sought to capture the quality of a
farflung, subsiding sunlight, and the best of his poems should - like
chased metal in a
museum case - hold their gleam for a very long while."
- Brad Leithauser -
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