Theos-Talk Archives (July 1999 Message tt00038)

Has anyone read this book reviewed below?
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Chicago Review Winter 1997

Joanne Kyger ~Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky~.
Boulder, Co.: Rodent Press & Erudite Fangs, 1996.

This is Kyger's most recent chapbook, and condenses about a dozen scenes
from the fascinating life of the founder of Theosophy into twenty-two pages.
As a note to the text suggests, Kyger has drawn freely on the recent
biography of H.P.B. by Sylvia Cranston in composing her poetic sketches.
Kyger seems to choose moments from the biography which most concisely
illustrate the thrust of the volume's epigram:

-the `visionary trailblazer'

who was the first to introduce

Eastern religious and spiritual thinking

into Western religion, psychology, art

and literature

and the first to treat Buddhism

"with anything approaching respect",

starting the Buddhist path in America. (3)

Blavatsky's theosophy, along with associated movements of figures such as
Krishnamurti, helped to form the spiritual ethos of the West Coast in the
1960s, fostering both Buddhism and New Ageism. In turn, this religious
climate contributed to shaping the San Francisco poetry community in which
Kyger has long played an active role. Moreover, for Kyger, H.PB. seems to
hover behind modernist literature in general (through the Theosophical bent
of writers such as Yeats and H.D.).

Kyger chooses to follow the biographical narratives which Blavatsky herself
provided on various occasions, rather than the (significantly divergent)
accounts of recent historians. Kyger is not engaged in a credulous
celebration, though. Take, for instance, a passage describing Blavatsky's
meeting with one of the spiritual "Masters":

I have an important task for you, he tells her,

`Go to Tibet for three years'.

She goes to Canada. New Orleans, Mexico,

South America, West Indies,

the Cape, Ceylon,

and India.

They won't let her in Tibet. (6)

There is an almost deadpan quality to the incredible account of Blavatsky's
travels. Perhaps more sharply, on another occasion, Kyger juxtaposes the
spiritual source of H.PB.'s writing with sales figures:

Every day more pages

"appeared in her eyes on another plane

of objective existence". She sees the pages

and translates them into English, working

seventeen hours a day, subsisting on oatmeal.

The book

is twelve thousand small print pages long.

"I AM ALL THAT HAS BEEN, ALL THAT IS, ALL

THAT SHALL EVER BE,

AND NO MORTAL HAS EVER LIFTED MY VEIL."

The thousand copy edition sold out in ten days.

An unprecedented success. In print ever since. (10)

This passage captures perfectly the blend of sincerity and opportunism that
defined Blavatsky's career. Yet she is not, for Kyger, therefore the object
of ridicule, but a source of fascination. In some ways, Blavatsky is such a
compelling figure because she cast herself not as a solemn oracle, but as a
figure of Mercury - who is not only the patron of poets but also of thieves,
and sometimes given the epithet "the trickster." As Robert Duncan writes in
"The Truth and Life of Myth" - in a statement which could apply to Theosophy
as well as poetry-"We work as poets and take seriously what seems to most
men the one ground surely not to be taken seriously - the playreality of
imagined religions, philosophies, sciences. We have been converted by and
have now taken our faith in a truth that is patently made-up."'

Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is probably not
equal to Kyger's better-known books, such as Places to Go (1970) or All This
Every Day (1975). Yet it is written in the clean, flowing free verse which
is typical of the poet, and provides for pleasurable reading in its sense of
spontaneity. Moreover, it is an interesting document of Blavatsky's
continued importance-despite critical embarrassment on the subject-to
twentieth-century writing.




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