stonemason/poets

[Tomas Lipps <tmlipps@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello there.

I have heard that there was in Portland, at a certain time,  a "school" of
poetry that flourished in the stone dust of the masons' yards there.  Does anyone
know anything about that?
-or about other poetry written by stone masons or about stone masonry and/or
stone ?
We are interested to publish such poetry in the Old Stone Road,
the magazine of the recently launched Stone Foundation.
http://www.stonefoundation.org/
(a site under construction)

I give you Roberson Jeffers, 1887-1962:

O H,  L O V E L Y  R O C K

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek,
	up in the east fork.
The  rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest
	above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian
	firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slid-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and
	kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling
	darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay
	down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son's face and his companion's and the ver-
	tical face of the great gorge wall
Across the stream.  Light leaves overhead danced in the fire's
	breath, tree trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray
	diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no
	fern or lichen, pure naked rock . . . as if I were
seeing rock for the first time. as if I were seeing through the
	flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange . . . I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and
	childlike lovliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling
	child. I shall die and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through it's rapid agonies
	of change and discovery;  this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem:
	this rock will be here grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above:
	and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

(he was a mason too, and said:
"my fingers had the art to make stone love stone"

which, until I reread it recently, I remembered fondly as:
my hands have the art to marry stone to stone.)

Here's another,

T O  T H E  S T O N E - C U T  T E R S

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts
	found
The honey of peace in old poems