Granada in 1936 was as dangerous as Gangland Chicago a decade earlier. So divided was the city by the Spanish civil war, it hadn't had a mayor in months. Bravely, Manuel Fernandez-Montesinos, the brother-in-law of renowned poet Federico Garcia Lorca, volunteered for the job. A week later, on August 18th, he was assassinated and Lorca was arrested the same day by Franco's goons, along with three other men, all of whom were killed by a firing squad within 24 hours. Although Lorca had Loyalist sympathies and was a known socialist, Franco had him executed for the capital crime (to fervent Catholics like the Generalissimo, that is) of "bestiality," meaning his homosexuality. The martyrdom still haunts Spain and every place where poetry is honored. (By the way, his grave has never been found.)
Recently, I have begun what I call "The Lorca Project," whose purpose is to find all music written as a memorial for the poet after his death. So far, I have found only a three-movement chamber-orchestra homage by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and a violin-and-piano sonata by French composer Frances Poulenc. I'm sure there is more. Desperately sure, I admit, because I cannot imagine a world bereft of numerous outcries over Lorca's murder. Some day soon, I hope to share my findings with you.
Meanwhile, with summer nearly upon us, and seashore vacations in the cards for those of us with credit cards, I give you a poem written while Lorca was in New York City, studying at Columbia University, in 1929-30. If you think Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a summit of surrealist protest poetry, Lorca's "Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude" is a base camp for this peak. Certainly, it will prep you for future climbs with its hallucinatory anger. Sometimes, I think surrealism this savage is as much shelter as catharsis. As Robert Creeley memorably wrote, "To look at it is more than it was." Surrealism was a way of both bearing and baring witness in a reckless throes of molten free association and the ecstatic custody of wild imagery. Lorca was there when the bottom fell out of American life, and New York City (in his case, Spanish Harlem) was one of the most bottomless pits of the time. As you read this, see if you don't hear adumbrations of Kenneth Patchen in the 1940s and the Bob Dylan of the mid-1960s when he was rock and roll's Lorca.
My own Coney Island memory: My dad used to dock his small, beloved Chris Craft (I think that was the brand) at Coney Island and I'd accompany him on fishing trips. I still remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper" with him on a portable radio in the summer of 1967 while the boat was at anchor and we were eating lunch. "What do you hear in this music that makes you love it so much?" he asked in slightly testy bewilderment. I was at a complete loss for words. I thought the Beatles would be something we could have in common. After all, Aaron Copland had proclaimed admiration for it. So had Leonard Bernstein. But he refused to share their enthusiasm. For the good of all concerned, we changed stations. By then, there was as much to divide as unite us. But those dwindling points of agreement are another story. I still remember both of us awed by the sight of Coney Island's Wonder Wheel (built around 1920)--both off shore and on land. It was like a monument to merriment and summer--despite already having read and loved Lorca's "Poet in New York". Returning to the poem after 50 years or so, the opening line made me laugh. I remembered the cliche, "It ain't over until the Fat Lady sings." In this case, it must be modified to: "It ain't begun until the Fat Lady is sung about." Lorca, I plan to spend a lot of this travel-less summer with you. You set the itinerary. You'll be a great sherpa for any trips to the heights (or depths). You know these terrains so well.
Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude (from "Poet in New York")
(Dusk at Coney Island)
The fat lady came first,
tearing out roots and moistening drumsticks.
The fat lady
who turns dying octopuses inside out.
The fat lady, the moon's antagonist
was running through the streets and deserted buildings
and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners
and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts
and summoning the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills
and filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.
The graveyards, yes, the graveyards
and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,
the dead, pheasants and apples of another era,
pushing into our throat.
There were murmurings from the jungle of vomit
with the empty women, with hot wax children,
with fermented trees and tireless waiters
who serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.
There's no other way, my son, vomit! There's no other way.
It's not the vomit of hussars on the breasts of their whores,
nor the vomit of a cat choking down a frog,
but the dead who scratch with clay hands
on flint gates where clouds and deserts decay.
The fat lady came first
with the crowds from the ships, taverns and parks.
Vomit was delicately shaking its drums
among a few little girls of blood
who were begging the moon for protection.
Who could imagine my sadness?
The look on my face was mine, but now isn't me.
The naked look on my face, trembling in alcohol
and launching incredible ships
through the anemones of the piers.
I protect myself with this look
that flows from the waves where no dawn would go,
I, poet without arms, lost
in the vomiting multitude,
with no effusive horse to shear
the thick moss from my temples.
But the fat lady went first
and the crowds kept looking for the pharmacies
where the bitter tropics could be found.
Only when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived
did the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.
Federico Garcia Lorca, 1930
-Translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White
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