TO MARY
TOTUS TUUS EGO SUM, ET OMNIA MEA TUA SUNT.
MYSTIC WINES BY JOHN LARS ZWERENZ
ART WORK BY SIAN DEFFERARY
INTRODUCTION BY PAUL FRANZETTI
INTRODUCTION TO MYSTIC WINES
At some point while one is reading a book, be it a novel, a play, or a collection of poems, the reader goes back to the Introduction in the hopes of understanding the writer better. True, he may wait until he is finished or he might stop in the middle of a page and return to the Introduction to find out “Who is the writer? And what does he want to say?” If that happens with this volume of poetry by John Zwerenz, the writer of this introduction can answer: “I know him. He is my former student and my friend.”
I met John Zwerenz in September of 1986 when he entered my humanities class in that golden year when he was a senior in high school. A colleague had recommended him saying, "I am sending you an amazing student. I placed that amazing student in the last seat of the last row only because his name began with a Z, but I saw right away that he was listening intently. Here was that rara avis in a classroom, a genuine learner.
It is an axiom that the poetic flame burns brightest in youth. In youth Hope is at its apex. The “real world” has its way of stealing imagination’s thunder and imposing its peculiar drabness over the poetic faculties. Not so with John. Life became a school with many classrooms and his humanities class broadened into Humanity’s Classroom. Now, nearing fifty, the one time student poet who sat in that last seat is enjoying a final bloom of Autumn.
Long ago I remember him stopping by my desk to compliment me on my Sappho lecture. Soon after he began to share his fondness for French Symbolists like Verlaine and Baudelaire. He was also steeped philosophy and theology.
But Poetry was his Mistress. It dominated his thoughts and his actions. One day he missed class because he had overslept on a bed of grass in the cemetery adjacent to the school, having fallen asleep while musing on death. Death troubled him; its strangeness perplexed him. His language teacher had just died in the middle of the semester and John said, “Last week he was here, this week he is not; it’s as if he had never been here. A new teacher has taken his place, but where did Mr__ go?” Death was the nexus between poetry and philosophy.
As for philosophy, he was reading Nietzsche at the time and John was troubled by a priest’s comment: ”God forgives atheists, but never Nietzsche.” I didn’t have an answer.
Poetry consoled him, fired his emotions, consumed his energy. He always carried some book of poetry in the halls. Poetry books were like kindling wood. Beside poetry, math and science were banal.
One day after class he played the Tempter and asked me what I thought of some lines he had written. I read them and quipped,
“Pretentious.”
“They were written by Rimbaud.”
I didn’t have an answer for this either.
Those were also the days of endless classes on The Iliad and The Inferno. They took notes dutifully but John found note taking distracting. He was intent on absorbing the material by listening and storing it in his mind. When he raised his hand to ask a question or to answer one, his classmates accorded him the same respect they accorded me. Of himself at that time, John writes,
I was 17 years of age that spring, and from that day onward I immersed myself in just about any poet of renown that I could find. Aside from the French Symbolists of Rimbaud’s era, such as Verlaine, Nerval and Baudelaire, I also fell in love with the great romantic bards from Victorian England and America such as Byron, Shelley, and especially our own Edgar Allan Poe. By the time I entered undergraduate school at Queens College in New York, I was thoroughly proficient in my own poetic knowledge. Not in just being able to recognize good or great poetry from inferior verse, but in composing great metered, rhyming poetry I started to bloom.
In what may be his final volume of verse, John the wanderer looks for a place to rest. By the end he has found one. He is the narrator in The Lane:
We walked as angels in the rosy breeze,
Among holly green hedgerows (just us two).
The lane was gold and the sky was blue,
And we heard through the boughs rare symphonies,
As the grasses framed your naked knees.
He is a second Keats musing on art:
…humble poets seek to learn
Wisdom from the secrets of a Grecian urn
(The Song of John Keats, )
He is the figure on Keats’ Grecian Urn, that Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song… Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! … happy melodist, unwearied, Forever piping songs forever new… Forever panting, and forever young…..
His wandering has led him to his own back yard where he rests from the Muse that has been whispering to him:
The iridescent sky
At the peak of its beauty
Reigns like a cosmic oligarchy…infinite peace is married to delight….
There are pianos playing in the trees by the piers
On either side of the breeze blown lane.
There are mystic wines within the rain,
Which sanctify my pages, wet - as with tears
There he has built a bower with statuary—not of Greek gods and goddesses--but of the angels and saints of Christendom, and especially to Mary, the Mother of God. His poetry has turned devotional. He is not inspired by French symbolists but by French saints, like Therese of Lisieux and Louis de Montfort. His garden is his "shrine upon a down." In sanctity he finds his worthiest subject.
Beyond the maze of city streets,
Where sounds become suburban retreats
I found a shrine upon a down.
Silhouettes of oaks, and an iron fence
Found me amid blooms which marked the entrance.
....in one corner of the shrine's pure light
I beheld the spirit of good Saint Anne,
And discovered what it means to be a holy man.
(St Anne's Shrine)
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
As an English teacher, I was interested in his poems on English writers like Stoker, Keats, Byron, and Stevenson:
My love can not be found in the verse of Poe.
Nor in Shakespeare's litanies of the wise man's woe.
Verily, I tell you, you will not find her there,
Resting upon a balcony, in a state of swooning, mad despair.
No Romeo can lure her from my arms…
His Ode to Bram Stoker is worth quoting at length. He loved the novel Dracula but ruthlessly critiques Stoker.
…sallow hearts…
To the regions of the mystic north,
To the rocky shores of Whitby's sand
Where Stoker wrote his masterpiece,
Hidden in that haunted land.
Do you all not know
That every monster in embryo
Is borne from an ill played piano?
Its airs do spread like vampire wings
Over poorly protected, humble things.
And when the wild harbor glows at night
With an odious, translucent, ominous light
The colored panes of Saint Mary's show
Reds morose, upon the doomed archipelago
Warning us all of what exists down below.
And Stoker, drunk, over his morbid manuscript
Attempts to raise Lucifer's clan.
Saved or sullied, kept or ripped,
He hands the pages to the swallowing, tan
Dusk that has taken his psyche to the east,
To the Northern Sea, that boundless beast
Filled with hungry Sirens, all craving blood;
Their teeth, ivory as the Roman colonnades,
Their hearts, older than the freezing Celtic glades
Fill Stoker's ink well with the all consuming flood
Of a despair far darker than of Dante's mind.
For literary fancy has become unkind -
And worse than real -
Which no desperate dawn can appease nor reveal
The slightest possibility of hope
As the author doth wail
He flees to the grasp of a tightly wound rope -
Dare you place your dear self in this horrible tale?
In The Ghost Ship Zwerenz pays tribute to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner:.
My vessel left Boston, seaward in the rain,
….I witnessed a commotion -
A vision reserved for the rabidly insane.
For above thick, nebulous billows,
Which clapped over the emerald sleep,
Like a shroud of gloomy, dreadful pillows,
Dark clouds did amass, foreboding and deep.
In the distance, barely seen on the watery court,
Sailed a cryptic schooner, wooden and old;
It swayed to either side in the maritime cold,
Wild and wavering from starboard to port.
And without rhyme or reason,
Devoid of any tangible treason,
This ship of ghastly vacancy
Revealed to the eye not a soul on board.
And without a trace of clemency,
It leveled the waves like a terrible sword.
And then, to my abject horror I beheld
An animated corpse with skeletal hands
Clasping the wheel, on deck, alone,
Save for spiritual contrabands,
Which possessed that devilish specter's groan.
The horrid wraith did reel with the wind -
And an ominous rush, a poisoned zephyr,
Did cling to my neck, with the dusky scent
Of an ill and tainted tamarind,
A grave and dreadful, dark disease.
And then, with a hatred I had never known before,
His dead and steely eyes had bent
Over the infinite, oceanic floor
Before he exclaimed to me,
Through the black and dour, briny breeze,
Unhallowed, untamed on the ferocious sea:
"I am death,
And your hopeful desire
To reach the shore safely
Shall now expire
As I take you down -
To eternal fire!" ….
One poem Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa 1894 , jarred my aesthetic equilibrium, because Robert Louis Stevenson is the only writer I wish I had known personally.
I shall go to the wine cellar
And retrieve some cold chablis
In this dreadful chill of winter,
Encompassed within a dour ennui.
Outside on the frozen dales,
Aristocratic ladies daily change their faces
In eerie, haunted, dusky places
As the overwhelming daylight pales.
Yes, the tangerine sun -
It weeps and wails,
Delightful to no one;
Oh, these doleful, maddening tales! -
If I could only find the gate,
I would gladly assassinate
My ghastly imaginations,
Filled with innumerable specters of self hate;
And bitter recriminations.
Perhaps it is too late?
My dear, I am in the basement; Do come down here,
And witness what I can not prevent.
Every slice of the decaying casement
Has left my breath without a vent -
And all has turned to a fatal malice.
And my face - Is it changed?
Is this the fate heaven has arranged?
O God, is there no solace
For the damned and the deranged!?
Lord Byron, once his favorite, evokes only horror now:
I approached his mansion of dark gray stone.
…I inhaled his many deaths as I did dare to dream,
And then, I beheld a horrible sight:
For Lord Byron's ghost descended down the stairway;
His countenance was white and I could hear him say:
"You will not survive the coming night."
Then, from the graveyard, from each pale, sickly reed,
I heard empty voices bereft of all hope
Rise from coffins, from the dreary slope
Which surrounded the house, as my brain did bleed.
And Byron smiled as a maddened bard.
Then the moonlight bled through the ashen glass
And I fled to the foyer, into the black yard,
Mad beneath the rusty pass,
Hearing Byron laugh as the horrid night
Consumed the entirety of the accursed land.
And my own fate, doomed, passed from my soul
Forever unwhole,
Into the grip of his frozen hand. (from Byron’s Ghost)
The wandering is over for this Poet. He has come home to “Patmos.”
Living with Mary, in a rural place,
Saint John was but a diadem
In the golden crown of her royal grace.
And there each utterance was a sacred gem.
With unspeakable beauty she tended to the home.
And John, her faithful son, never thought to roam.
And on winter nights, beneath the stars,
She would kneel and pray, beside the glowing, wooden bars.
And when they were forced to suffer a bitter goodbye,
(For he was exiled in Patmos, an isolated isle.)
She still retained her lively faith and gorgeous smile,
With a longing and a grievous sigh…
Then one evening, solemn and mild,
When the time for grieving had come to an end
For both mother and child,
He witnessed her rise
Above the dell where the reeds did bend.
With the moon at her feet,
Surrounded by twelve brilliant stars,
In the ineffable realm of celestial skies,
Her glorious Assumption was complete.
And so does end the sacred tale.
Ave Maria, gracia plena,
And holy Catholic heaven hail!
(Ode to St John)
I ventured out, one cold winter's night
To an isolated furrow, to a holly green pond.
I looked up high to the grand beyond,
And saw rumbling from the sky, a tremendous light.
No passersby did see me, no human eye did know
That I came to seek my Maker,
In the sun and on those trails of snow.
Still I heard no sound from Him.
Then I pleaded for a sign.
And I heard from God a distant voice:
"I am yours, and you are mine!"
(Peace)
Byron wrote The days of our youth are the days of our glory. John disagrees. Heaven is the lasting and real place for glory, and the Catholic Church, not Poetry is Heaven’s muse. The desire for worldly fame is the whisper of a False Muse.
Do you all not know
That every monster in embryo
Is borne from an ill played piano?
The choice for him was the same as it was for The French novelist and art critic Charles Marie Huysmans, whose friend had observed, “There can only be one of two endings for such a writer, the gallows or the cross.” John has chosen the latter.
Paul Franzetti June 24, 2018
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
