Commentary by Tark Mackintosh
In the December 4th, 1935 issue of the Outland Messiah Crux (official literary organ of the former Outland Messiah College) an astonishing if overlooked poem appeared, which if one had been paying attention to the local news on the same date, mirrored an entry in Healdsburg, California’s own Healdsburg Tribune, Enterprise and Scimitar Obituary section. In that organ of truth’s final section, The Obituaries for the fateful day included a curious entry for one Forrest Stout Jr., a non-entity or john doe who subsequently proved to be a bit of a practical joke, not according to subsequent reports an actual vagrant decapitated after passing out on the rails. The poem by Professor Stout too was entitled ‘Forrest’, and obituary had been submitted and paid for by his housekeeper and biographer Ada Potter Barclay as ‘a cosmic joke’ (sic? The Potter Papers, 489). It was a strange enough name for a poem that seems to have been plagiarized nearly wholecloth from the 1934 poem ‘Forest’, a poem composed and published by one of modernism’s most famous bards, the revolutionary troubador-guerrillo Gulliver S. Gulliver, verses originally immortalized in Mexico City’s revered La Decepción.
Was Professor Stout in fact leading a double life, hiding his true identity to protect himself from the Cincinnati gangsters on his trail, yet plagiarizing his own work to do so? The stipend for contributors to the Outland Messiah Crux in 1935 was $25, a small fortune for a man on the run, as was GSG in the early Thirties.
hissing… / Slow molasses Cf. GSG’s original The implausible hissing of wild / Cats is the slow agony of molasses dripping. The repeated sibilants represent implausible hissing, not molasses dripping. It is as though the poet were attempting to represent the sound of Ada Potter Barclay when she found him passed out under the kitchen table at 3 in the morning.
To moss, to wind-whipped bodies Cf. GSG’s To moss, to treacle basted bones, to / Too wind-whipped cadavers. If GSG was indeed attempting to conceal his identity, he was not trying very hard. The ethics of an artist straight up plagiarizing one of his own works has been discussed at length in Markenbaldi’s (unfortunately too-trite, published for cash by the popular imprint Gosh I Still Love Books!) monograph A Rose By Any Other Name (Houston, 1983). That esteemed Doctor concluded that it is impossible for an artist to plagiarize his own work; rather the terminology and hence esprit of the act is a reworking, an act of revision, not theft. ‘If in fact GSG were hiding out in California, pretending to be a dumpy, down-and-out literature professor,’ writes Markenbaldi, ‘and took thematic material or even vocabulary from one of his old poems and reworked it to form new material with a similar thrust, it would not be plagiarism.’ Well then! Our work here is done, Markie!
The sense of the original lines is of course lost to modern readers, unless GSG was talking about the famous Belittler Bridge Body, a john doe discovered by himself and his riding partner Felipe Starks beneath a bridge in besodden Fleethorn, Arkansas in 1926, as immortalized in his poem ‘Belittler Be’: Belittle not the belittled boy / Though bits of belittler besplattered be, lines acknowledged by many to be the most heartfelt and purple of his entire canon.
Paced through sullen autumn Cf. GSG’s Reverently pacing through fallen autumn / Leaves. Later REWORKED by John and Michelle Phillips in their popular rock and roll song ‘California Dreamin’: All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown) / And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray). Professor Stout, however, is already in California.
derrieres / On my valise The artist has been traveling, but in the company of whom? Cf. GSG’s Scent of powdered detergent in our dresses.
Soles In the famous Tark Mackintosh introduction to GSG’s Selected Poems, the reader is reminded of GSG’s proximity to his family’s shoe factory: ‘With the outbreak of the First World War [GSG] volunteered to work as a common labourer in a munitions plant in New Jersey, and later turned down a scholarship to Yale in order to help his father with the running of the [Gulliver] Sole Factory in Welford.’ More evidence, scant as it may be, that Professor Stout was in fact the lonesome troubador whom the world knew more grandly as Gulliver Sampson Gulliver.
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