Painter Print

I hear the brittle poetry of the day…
What pensive poetry holds me?
Perhaps Imagery (it’s hard to say).
I find the glitter in the vanished past:
Its array: worlds of blues, whites and grays;
In far-off distant seas, under moon beans.

Ah! but my friend he could not rest: in the
Winds, and stars on the oceans breast—;
Thus, he left, he just up and left (kind of)
To a land where they have no iron walls, no fence.

So brave and passionate he was: he was
Swept back to his “…cool, gray city of love,”

For everything else was simply a mirage!

—by Dennis L. Siluk

Comments: Although George Sterling was not from San Francisco, originally, once he visited the city, he remained there, it became his home, away from home one might say. A poet he was, to his dying day, even though he wrote other things, plays, and etcetera. #1339 5/4/06

“The Step Ladder”

George Sterling died in 1926, in 1927, “The Step Ladder,” a Monthly Journal, offered what was known as “The George Sterling Memorial Prize” $100-dollars to the best poem published in its pages during the year 1927. In the issue Volume XIII, for the first time in this book journal [magazine] Clark Ashton Smith’s poetry was published, by the efforts of George Sterling. Also, in this issue or journal, Helene Margaret wrote a poem offered up to Mr. Sterling:

Is this your message? You who bore the light
And gathered rhythm from the symphonies
Of earth, who ravelled colors from the breeze
And wove them into shadows of the night?
Your sense of darkness should have been but slight,
For you found pulsing life in all of these,
More opalescent than the changing seas,
More lyrical than swallows in their flight.

And yet, the shadows of your life grew thick,
And fell like shrouds of dusk upon our thought,
Until your sensate soul was madly sick
Of life and all the strangling gloom it brought.
And though you’ve passed, the wondrous argosies
Your fancy formed shall sail the centuries.

It might be noteworthy here to mention: in the summer of 1926, George Sterling got Clark Ashton Smith’s poetry published in Braithwaite’s 1926, Anthology, where Sterling had nice compliments to say about CAS. At this time Smith lived in Auburn, California. The selections the Step Ladder put into its magazine, were taken from Smith’s books: “Ebony and Crystal,” and “Sandalwood.” Such poems like: The Barrier, Query, Deleted Love, The Crucifixion of Eros, Quest, A fragment, Love is not Yours, Love is not Mine, The Love Potion, Maya, Beauty Implacable, Ave Atque V Ale, Incognita, Semper Eadem, and several more.

See Dennis’ web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com