Chapter I: Front Matter

Minna and Myself

_MAXWELL BODENHEIM_

Pagan Publishing Company
New York City :: :: :: 1918

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Our thanks to the following publications, for their kindness
in permitting us to reprint, in this volume,
poems that have appeared in their pages:
The _Little Review_; _Poetry_; the _New Republic_;
the _Century_; the New York _Tribune_;
the _Touchstone_; the _Seven
Arts_; the _Pagan_; the _Egoist_.

Copyright, 1918.
Pagan Publishing Co. New York

DEDICATED BY BOTH OF US TO
FEDYA RAMSAY

CONTENTS

MINNA
Poems

MYSELF
Poems

THE MASTER POISONER
A One-Act Poetic Play by Maxwell Bodenheim and
Ben Hecht

POET’S HEART
A Poetic Play in One Act

A FOREWORD

It is hard for me to realize that this is a first volume of verse. Most of the initial ventures that have passed under my jaundiced eye have been precisely what such early collections are expected to be. They were, as Wilde expressed it somewhere, “promissory notes--that are never met.”... But though it is hard for me to believe that this is a first book, it is still harder for me to believe that this is Maxwell Bodenheim’s first book. In these days of the much advertised “poetic renaissance,” when the _Dial_ out-radicals the _Little Review_, and even the New York _Tribune_ prints _vers-libre_ on its editorial page, I expected to see nothing less than Bodenheim’s Collected works.... This pleasure will evidently have to be deferred.... Meanwhile, here is an indication, and no slight one, of how distinguished and decorative that collection will be. Without Kreymborg’s caustic and acerb irony, or Johns’ fluent lyricism, Bodenheim has something that neither they nor, for that matter, any of his colleagues in “_Others_” possess. I refer to his extreme sensitivity to words. Words, under his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober adjectives bear fantastic fruit. It is a strange and often magic potion he brews from them; dark and fiery liquids that he pours into curiously designed cups. Sometimes he gets drunk with his own distillation, and reels between preciosity and incoherence. Sometimes the mixture is so strong that even his metaphors, crowding about each other, become inextricably mixed. But as a rule, Bodenheim is as clear-headed as he is colorful. Among the younger men he has no superior in his use of the verbal _nuance_.

But it is not merely as word-juggler that Bodenheim shines. He has an imagination that he uses both as a tool and as a toy. Personally, I care more for Bodenheim when he plays with his images (as in “Poet to His Love,” “Hill Side Tree” and certain of the poems to “Minna”), than when his figures attempt to build or destroy something (as in “To An Enemy,” “The Interne,” “Soldiers”). It is as a decorator that his gifts serve him best. Even such an intimate picture as “Factory Girl” is saved from mawkishness by his delicate sense of design. The composition in which Death is seen as

“...a black slave with little silver birds
Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head”

has a quality that suggests the Beardsley of “Under the Hill.” In the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks with a light but sure footstep.

There are doubtless other things--sharper and more important--in the following poems that will attract many. But the ones that I have found seem to have a quiet, unofficial, dignity of their own. Others may ask for more. For me, they are sufficient.

LOUIS UNTERMEYER.

MINNA

I

Twilight pushes down your eyes
With shimmering, pregnant fingers
That leave you covered with still-born touch.
With little whips of dead words
Silence cuts your lips to a keener red.
Your heart strikes its bed of dark mirth, in death,
And your hands lie over it, guarding the corpse.
Night will soon whisk away this room
But you are already invisible.

II

Your cheeks are spent diminuendos
Sheering into the rose-veiled silence of your lips.
Your eyes are gossamer coquettes
Ringed with the sparkling breath of dead loves.
Your body strays into lanterns of form
Strewing the night within this room....
The light dies; you are still
And spill the frolicing night of your heart
Over the darkness about you, making it pale.