[Guest Author Note: I asked Andrew McCarron and Anthony Antonucci to share the news of their project to write a literary biography of their friend and mentor the classicist and poet William Mullen. Their essay is below along with a reproduction of Mullen's Enchanted Rock, which was selected by John Hollander for inclusion in the 1998 edition of Best American Poets.]
Think of this post as a press release. We are currently in the process of composing a short literary biography of the late classicist and poet Dr. William C. Mullen (1946-2017). Professor Mullen died last November, just two days shy of his seventy-first birthday. As the unofficial stewards of his literary legacy, we wish to share the insights that we have gleaned from our mentor’s life-in-letters and to demonstrate our gratitude for the compassion, companionship and exemplary model of the life of the heart and mind that he embodied for us.
Bill spent the majority of his dynamic career teaching Global Classics at Bard College, a liberal arts campus in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he was a colleague and friend of the poets Robert Kelly, Joan Retallak, and the late John Ashbery. Unlike these celebrated authors, Bill built an international reputation as a scholar and a translator, rather than a poet. Harvard’s Gregory Nagy, for example, referred to Bill’s book Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton University Press, 1982) as the best book ever written on Pindar’s odes. In the margins of his works and days, when he was not pursuing his research, participating in conferences, and teaching his popular seminars, Bill wrote poetry. Although individual poems of his were published in The Best American Poetry series (1998) and elsewhere, he didn’t live to see his dream of an original book of his own verse in print.
Twenty-four hours before he died alone in the graveyard behind the church rectory in the bucolic hamlet of Barrytown, New York, his home for a quarter century, Bill sent us a collection of thirty new poems. In this email he expressed pride in a series of poems he’d recently completed, though he also lamented the complex circumstances that inspired them. This exchange marked Bill’s final communication with the land of the living.
The remarkable thing about someone’s poetry is that the spiritual fingerprint of that person is contained in their words long after he or she is gone. And perhaps those fingerprints are especially vivid for poets who write primarily for themselves, free from the constraining literary personae demanded by identification with any specific school of writing (e.g., Language Poetry, Beat Poetry, New York School Poetry, etc.), or by the suggestions of market-minded editors and publishers. Indeed, reading Bill’s poetry suggests that it’s in the private work of unpublished writers that we can more readily glimpse the unique role that poetry can play in how we go about making meaning out of our lives as we attempt to decide how to occupy the tent of night. Bill’s poems draw on the traditions of poetic form to engage the places and topics that affected him most: from the landscapes of the Southwest, to Mesoamerican mythology, to the exhibits he’d encountered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, to his lifelong love affair with Homer, to his fleeting romances with men far and wide, or the many locales he lived and taught in over the years, from Harvard to Austin to Berkley and Bard, to Greece, Russia, Italy and Manhattan. As an aesthetic devotee of Wallace Stevens, Bill’s verse combines formal discipline with lyrical beauty to trace order out of chaos, rendering his fraught, thoughtful life meaningful through poetic composition.
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that every life that succeeded in making something meaningful from what it was made of deserved to be told. By this criterion, Bill Mullen’s life story warrants telling, particularly for readers who believe that art can help human beings to realize their final, spiritual form, no matter how difficult the odysseys undertaken to get there. In the space between Bill’s prodigious accomplishments and his private struggles with HIV/AIDS, loneliness, and depression are the marvelous poems he left behind. Stay tuned. The story of William C. Mullen will soon be told! Sing in us, Muse, and through us tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.
-Anthony Antonucci & Andrew McCarron
Enchanted Rock by William Mullen
1
I could sit all day on this esplanade--
always come back here when my trips are done.
Sit with their nectar, claim it for heart's calm,
make it into phrases all afternoon.
Fountain ledges braided by fluted granite,
comforting hexagons of civic stone.
Harbor like the beginningless and the endless.
Heart's calm like the colossal clouds of June.
2
Suppose there were steps down into the Hudson,
for sacred bathing, like a Banaras ghat.
Suppose I could have done with all the honey,
hived in a notebook, like a sacred writ.
June would become July, and mere immersion
make everything look sacred in the heat.
Immersion would become the liberation.
Triumph lie in the not phrasing it.
3
Like student hours, half a life ago,
cloud-watching through my carrel's tinted glass.
There to please the fathers, ravel the texts,
come up with secrets no one else could guess.
In the book dust, the air-conditioning,
I can admit there was a kind of bliss.
The archives acquired by the Texas billions.
The boyish expectation of success.
4
But best was time off at Enchanted Rock,
two hours west of Austin, acres huge,
magma massed over the green steaming plain.
I would sit in full lotus on my ledge,
meditate some secret about Spirit,
how it rides it out, age after world age.
Soar with the heat waves and the thunderheads.
Then climb down to a chute at the Rock's edge,
5
Plunge in its torrent, roar, shiver in silence
on the warm granite, by a tamarisk.
All the time in the world to amaze the fathers
by absolute acquittal of each task.
In the meantime, sitting in princely ease,
my thoughts like riffles, and my flesh like musk,
I had disappeared into a spell of sweetness
about which they would never know to ask.
6
Now it is the fathers have disappeared.
Enfeebled. Disesteemed. Estranged. Or dead.
Their love, when all is summed, was never grudging,
nor the debt ever adequately paid.
A youth will seem ungrateful, or insouciant,
I shrug it off because he's just a kid.
And was there any secret about Spirit
I could have, even had I tried, betrayed?
7
Now the fathers are nowhere to be seen.
And so I see them in colossal clouds
tall all summer out over the harbor.
Their blessedness bestrides the esplanade’s
serenity the livelong afternoon.
Ebbs and floods with the estuary's tides.
Floats in the limpid spaces between worlds,
undemanding as Epicurus' gods.
8
Would the clouds look different after immersion?
Back in the endless and the beginningless?
In the meantime I sit and think of the Rock,
that its sweetness was, that its spell took place.
It is like the sun sunk in these fountain ledges
(their film over the granite an abyss).
Now it is a disc under the cloud cover.
Now it is a dazzle I couldn't face.
