Len Gasparini: Knowing His Night Numbers

Lisa Pike

Night numbers, New Orleans, the occult, the spectre of Catholicism: all come together in “Arithmancy”, one of the final poems of the well-known Canadian poet and writer Len Gasparini. Composed sometime in 2021, “Arithmancy” is the title poem for what would have been his next collection.

Arithmancy

Arithmancy – an uncannily fancy
divination by numbers, or night numbers –
the name I gave them long ago
when I conjured up Marie Laveau
with the aid of John the Conqueroo
and Louisiana Creole Voodoo.

Ensorcell the source. Ensorcell the source.
Eve split the mind from the body
and got the short end of the snake.
It became the great serpent spirit
that I, a post-Christian pagan,
heard tell of down in New Orleans.

The best scene in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
is the appearance of Kurtz’s black mistress.
Do you know your night numbers?
The number of letters in first and last names;
the numbered month and day of your birth …
Are they odd or even? Mine is eleven.

Compared with spells and charms of sorcery,
numerology has too much ology.
Eleven became my psychic shadow,
and an alligator tooth my mojo.
My friend the New Orleans poet Arthur Pfister
had spooky nooky with his half-sister.

The eleventh hour has come and gone.
I don’t know where I’m going. I saw
eleven pipers piping “Gary Owen.”
I try to keep eleven balanced,
but the occult keeps it hidden.
I flirted with voodoo. I got voodoed.

In the 1926 essay “On Being Ill”, Virginia Woolf writes of illness as a land that one enters – a place perhaps unimaginable until one arrives there and begins to inhabit it. Arguing for the legitimacy of illness as literary subject matter, Woolf describes some of this landscape and comments on the fortitude needed for its survey:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise in temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation […] To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy, a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.

When health leaves us, we cannot exist as before; our path is definitively altered. Written at the age of eighty while undergoing a series of treatments for metastasized lung cancer, “Arithmancy” can be read as a personal, late-life meditation as well as a reflection on the craft of poetry.

The table of contents of Gasparini’s Collected Poems begins with a suite of poems about his formative years: “Memories of the Rockin’ Fifties”. Born in 1941, Len both wrote and spoke often about one of his defining life moments: picking up a paperback copy of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novella The Subterraneans in a neighbourhood corner store. Influenced by the Beat Generation and by his experience of growing up in Windsor, Ontario, Gasparini’s poetic practice resists being confined by national borders. As he writes in the introduction to his Collected Essays, published posthumously and modelled in part after John Berryman’s The Freedom of the Poet:

Some Canadian readers have expressed annoyance with the American references in my poetry, short stories, and essays. Granted, I was born and bred in a border city across the river from Detroit. A suspension bridge and an auto tunnel connect the two cities. Take it from there –

John Rechy, Gore Vidal, Larry Brown, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams – these are just some of the names you might hear if speaking with Len about life and literature. In his essay entitled “The Space Between a Bed and a Chair”, Len recounts his 1977 meeting with one of the most important and well-known playwrights of the 20th century: Tennessee Williams. Both were staying at The Morris Inn in South Bend Indiana where Tennessee Williams was giving a reading to an audience of 600 at the University of Notre Dame. Describing the hour or so conversation about poetry and life in Tennessee William’s hotel room, Len writes the following about another one of his important literary influences: “I lauded the artist’s credo of ‘life as a nothing-withholding submission of self to flame’”.

A cursory overview of some of the other literary touchstones sitting on Len Gasparini’s bookshelf: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Patrick White, T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells, LeRoi Jones, Oscar Wilde, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Gregory Corso, Czeslaw Milosz, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, James Baldwin, W.B. Yeats, Edgar Allen Poe. Taking his cue from Kerouac, Len lived life on the road. His possessions were few; his bookcase home to texts key to his literary life and poetic craft. The line spoken by Shabine from Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight comes to mind: the imagination is the only nation to which the artist belongs.

“Arithmancy” presents some of the poet’s personal signposts and landmarks: the number eleven, symbol of a heightened sensibility, spiritual awakening, and link between human and spirit, darkness and light – Len’s “psychic shadow”. “An alligator tooth became my mojo”: testament to the fortitude required by life and also an additional literary link to Tennessee Williams who insisted on possessing the toughness of the alligator, one of earth’s oldest creatures, symbol of power and resilience. The working writer requires both. The symbolic meaning of the alligator also hints at his personal history and trajectory: growing up in a border city – the most southern in the country – where he was scouted in his teens by the famous major-league scout Tony Lucadello, time spent in his early twenties in the U.S. Navy (and Marine Brig after having gone AWOL), and the experience of hitchhiking across the U.S. from San Diego to Detroit before returning to Canada.

Len travelled extensively at a time when movement, experience, and poetic craft were one – the artist’s life for Len was one of expansiveness and movement; it was one of physicality. There was no virtual alternative to physically moving to and inhabiting a place, discovering it and experiencing something new, something different. People and landscapes were untampered by virtual configurations. A certain kind of personal strength was required to pick up your belongings and get on a bus, train, suitcase and typewriter in hand as Len so often did – in pursuit.

Here in the poem we see one of the other important physical and imaginative locales for Len: New Orleans, where he lived and worked during the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Arithmancy” is steeped in the richness, mystical qualities and sense of otherworldliness that its various traditions embody. The poem opens with the reference to Louisiana Creole Voodoo and its most renowned practitioner: Marie Laveau (1801-1881), herbalist and midwife who, according to historical records, was born a free woman of colour in the French Quarter. John Le Conqueroo refers to both Ipomoea jalapa, a species of morning glory used in various rituals, and the mythical figure in African American folklore known for his creativity and wits. John LeConqueroo turns the tables on those who oppress or want to harm him; in one tale, he even successfully courts Lilith, the devil’s daughter.

Len’s relationship with Catholicism threads its way throughout his work. In one of his later poems entitled “When I Listen to Allegri’s Misere”, we glimpse this relationship and its double-sided nature.

When I listen to Allegri’s Miserere
I feel like I am a child in church again,
immersed in the mystery of the Latin liturgy
with its sacred imagery…wonder-stricken.
And when I listen to Allegri’s Miserere
my feeling is transformed into a darkness
I can hear—the darkness that suffuses
sunset-colored clouds or stained-glass windows.
This choiring psalm sublime swells to a solemn cry
of misery, and, with baroque embellishments,
evokes a castrato soaring into a treble solo
to reach a high C in the Sistine Chapel.
Did sin and mercy ever sound so celestial
That the sinner would not sin again?
O what kind of day did your mother have
when she conceived you? My lips are open.
Who shall my mouth praise? For a while I am
rapt with the delusion that my destiny
is controlled by a power higher than itself.

Ritual and the child’s imaginative powers come together in a feeling of the divine; the adult perspective yields the various failings of the institution: corruption, manipulation, predation. If you spoke with Len on this topic, he’d inevitably begin by telling you that his Catholic schooling involved the Grey Ursuline Nuns, the Christian Brothers, and the Basilian Fathers – all of whom regularly practiced corporal punishment – and end with the tale of Father White, one of his high school teachers who was sentenced to two years in prison for sexual abuse of his students. In “Arithmancy” our sympathies are with Eve who “split the mind from the body and got the short end of the snake”. The power of the serpent is liberated in the poem from its Catholic confines to evoke and even denote its more ancient existence as great serpent spirit, symbol of creation and cyclical renewal. The “eleventh hour” hearkens back to the parable of the workers in the vineyard in the Gospel of Matthew – those hired in the last hour of the workday receive the same pay as those who have worked all day in the field, proof of God’s generosity and sign that it is never too late to join his kingdom. “The eleventh hour has come and gone” the poet tells us, along with the assertion that he saw “eleven pipers piping Gary Owen” – inspirational fighting song and additional connection to the American south.

But these personal signposts – credos and references to places lived, experiences had, are linked to the act of divination which is also a poetic one. Meter, rhyme, syllabic counts, prosody, alliteration, repetition, all these are part of the incantation, the casting of the poetic spell. In an interview regarding his candidacy for Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford published in The Guardian in 2010, poet and neuropsychologist Seán Haldane affirms the transformative capacity of poetry – both for the reader and for the poet: “I think poetry has more capacity to change people than psychotherapy. If you read a poem and it gets to you, it can shift your perspective in quite a big way, and writing a poem, even more so.” In her recent book, Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature, Sarah Hart, Gresham Professor of Geometry, references the work of Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton who states that both poetry and mathematics can “lift the mind above the dull stir of the Earth.” She also calls to mind Ezra Pound’s 1910 The Spirit of Romance in which he affirms: “Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for human emotions.” As Hart puts forth: “the elegant brevity of a mathematical expression, just like a poem, can encompass multiple layers of meaning, and the more layers and interpretations it can contain, the greater the artistry.” In the essay “Wherefore Prosody?” included in his Collected Essays, Len shares some of these same sentiments while lamenting the loss of formal structure in poetry:

The four-beat line is the predominant rhythm in the structure of the English language, and the iambic pentameter provides it with counterpoint. This brings to mind the most common metrical feet in English: iambus, anapaest, trochee, dactyl, spondee, pyrrhic. When was the last time you saw or heard these words and remembered what they represented? […] Rhythm and sound, sound and sense the world over. Celtic prosody, Classical prosody, Romance prosody, Slavic prosody, German prosody and so on. Every person with literary ambition can now become a poet regardless of talent. Literary criticism is obsolete. Where are we headed? Do we ask the fact for the form, fearful that the fact no longer has a form?

Poetry, numerology, divination, personal identity and destiny all come together in the poem “Arithmancy”.

A copy of John Berryman’s Dreamsongs always sat within easy reach on a corner of Len’s desk while he composed. And, of course, two to three dictionaries with their pages dog-eared and worn. His habit and ritual of reading the dictionary daily would inevitably be accompanied by him saying the following phrase: “new words are new thoughts”. Throughout his illness Len continued to write, revise, and spend time at his desk. He meticulously went over clippings and notes and the many book reviews he had published over the course of his long career as a working writer (he sometimes boasted that his last regular salaried job was in the late 1960s working as a labourer at Windsor Salt; incidentally, it was during his nightshifts there, keeping an eye on the bags of salt moving down the conveyer belt that he began writing what would become some of his first published poems). Some of the fruits of his labour throughout his illness became the book Edgewise and Otherwise: Collected Essays, though he did not see its publication.

In the same 2010 interview with The Guardian, Seán Haldane is asked if memories “have a shape or a syntax of their own”. He is also asked if we are in essence “the sum of our memories”. His reply recalls his childhood in Northern Ireland where “mind” and “remember” are used interchangeably. “I think they were synonymous for Shakespeare, too” he adds. And, “loss of memory is loss of self”. For Len, poetry, memory, and sense of self were inextricably linked. The final stanza of “Arithmancy” turns powerfully on this point. The poet is unable to see the road ahead and there is a collapse of what lies behind. Unlike John LeConqueroo, he is unable to conjure up his powers – he cannot outwit the current circumstance. He cannot overcome his present illness.

But perhaps we can also read in these lines that the mysteries of life, the unknown, the eleventh hour come and gone, these things are, ultimately, the fate of us all. We are not in control. As Woolf so aptly reminds us toward the end of her essay:

The wave of life flings itself out indefatigably. It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal – that she in the end will conquer; the heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag our feet about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out. Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there, thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn. But with the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle.

Though for Len, his final days at both the typewriter and the desk were more in the vein of “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”. And, I still contemplate daily: is it any wonder that his time of death was 1:37pm, the sum of which is eleven?

See Remembering Len Gasparini – ‘eight reminiscences about the irrepressible poet’.
Lisa Pike is the author of the novel My Grandmother’s Pill, the collection of short stories Industrial Roots, and the poetry chapbook Policeman’s Alley.