Robert Sward, Rosicrucian in the Basement
(Black Moss Press)

Jack Foley

[T]he Rosicrucian Mystery was one of Divine Rebirth...It sought...that hidden knowledge which Masonry and several early aspects of the Secret Tradition in Christian times supposed to have been lost with Adam. In a word, the mystical character of the Fraternity founded ex hypothesi by Christian Rosy Cross cannot be questioned by criticism. Unfortunately it had many imitations in the past, as it has at this day, to confuse research, while there is evidence also that on many occasions it lost sight of its own real or highest purpose...As Orpheus in pursuit of Eurydice, the Candidate for Exaltation goes down to recover the buried sense of the Divine Word...; and--also like Orpheus--he is in each case put off with an inevitable shadow, for he returns bearing in his hands that which he possesses already in heart or head.

                --Arthur Edward Waite, A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry

Robert Sward’s new book, Rosicrucian in the Basement, is the latest offering from a man whose career began in the late 1950s and who has published a great many books, mostly poetry, over the past forty years. He is a well-known poet, but he is not as well-known as he should be. Sward’s poems are often comic, but they are never only comic. They are the product of a restless, spiritually adventuresome sensibility occasionally masking itself as a stand-up comedian. In his Gale Research Autobiography (Contemporary Authors Series, Volume 13) he describes himself as “Born on the Jewish North Side of Chicago,”

bar mitzvahed, sailor, amnesiac, university professor (Cornell, Iowa, Connecticut College), newspaper editor, food reviewer, father of five children, husband to four [now five] wives....

He adds that critic Virginia Lee called his writing career “a long and winding road.”

I first encountered Robert Sward’s work in the early 1960s. I was a student at Cornell University, where he was teaching. “Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9” was the title poem of the book I bought (or, possibly, stole):

I did not want to be old Mr.
Garbage man, but uncle dog
who rode sitting beside him. 

Uncle dog had always looked
to me to be truck-strong
wise-eyed, a cur-like Ford
 
Of a dog. I did not want
to be Mr. Garbage man because
all he had was cans to do.
 
Uncle dog sat there me-beside-him
emptying nothing. Barely even
looking from garbage side to side:
 
Like rich people in the backseats
of chauffeur-cars, only shaggy
in an unwagging tall-scrawny way.
 
Uncle dog belonged any just where
he sat, but old Mr. Garbage man
had to stop at everysingle can.
 
I thought. I did not want to be Mr.
Everybody calls them that first.
A dog is said, Dog! Or by name.

I would rather be called Rover
than Mr. And sit like a tough
smart mongrel beside a garbage man. 

Uncle dog always went to places
unconcerned, without no hurry.
Independent like some leashless
 
Toot. Honorable among scavenger
can-picking dogs. And with a bitch
at every other can. And meat: 

His for the barking. Oh, I wanted
to be uncle dog--sharp, high fox-
eared, cur-Ford truck-faced

With his pick of the bones.
A doing, truckman’s dog
and not a simple child-dog

Nor friend to man, but an uncle
traveling, and to himself--
and a bitch at every second can.

The poet who wrote that had been reading E.E. Cummings--and one noticed that--but, at the same time, there was something striking and new about what he was doing. You wouldn’t know from that poem (or from the book) that Robert Sward was Jewish--those themes came later--but the North Side of Chicago is right there. The speaker of this poem is clearly a city-dweller--nothing pastoral in his vision. Who had ever had thought to write a poem about a garbage truck--and about a mean, “tough” dog, no “friend to man”? Indeed, the speaker identifies himself not with the man but with the animal: “I would rather be called Rover / than Mr.” The speaker, a child, has no power, yet he sees power in the figure of that dog, and he wants it. Power is to have “your pick of the bones” and “a bitch at every second can.” Power is to be self-sufficient, to belong “any just where / [you] sat.” Power is the capacity to be noticed in a situation in which almost everything around you is garbage. The poem is comic but edgy, problematical; mythic but contemporary; alert but accepting: this, it seems to say, is the way the world is. It is not a world of beauty but a world of power, a world in which some people have things and others do not. And it is a world in which power manifests not in the commonly accepted and respectable (“I did not want to be Mr.”) but in something else--something nonhuman. One thinks a little of Robinson Jeffers’ vision in “Roan Stallion”--another poem in which power and animal are to some degree equated:

                            I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to
                break through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
                                                Tragedy that breaks man’s face
                and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits,
                unnatural crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls
                of nature....

At the same time, of course, the only genuine power the poet has is the power of words, and “uncle dog” is a symbol of that as well.

Family is an issue lightly touched on in “Uncle Dog”--the dog is an animal but it is also an “uncle.” In Rosicrucian in the Basement, family, along with the author’s Jewishness, is at the very center of things. The “Rosicrucian” is Sward’s podiatrist father; there are also poems to the poet’s children and to his mother. As in “Uncle Dog,” the poet is less a participant than he is a witness: it is others who behave extravagantly:

“What’s to explain?” he asks.
He’s a closet meditator. Rosicrucian in the basement.
In my father’s eyes: dream.
“There are two worlds,” he says,
liquid-filled crystal flask
                                                                and yellow glass egg
on the altar...

This is his secret.
This is where he goes when he’s not making money.
The way to the other world is into the basement
and he can’t live without this other world.

“There are two worlds,” he says lighting incense, “the seen
and the unseen, and she doesn’t understand.
This is my treasure,” he says.

“We of the here-and-now, pay our respects
to the invisible.
                                    Your soul is a soul,” he says, turning to me,
“but body is a soul, too. As the poet says,
‘we are the bees of the golden hive of the invisible.’”
“What poet, Dad?”
“The poet! Goddamnit, the poet,” he yells.

Seven years I hung out with him,
even flew to India, meditated
                                                      in his cave
chanting to
                   scorpions, malaria mosquitoes
so illumined they chanted back.

In the Gale Research Autobiography Robert Sward writes,

I had inherited my mother’s large, hazel-brown eyes and so was nicknamed “Banjo Eyes,” after the singer [one would perhaps more accurately say comedian] Eddie Cantor. Friends joked about my name: “The Sward is mightier than the Sword.” And because I had a zany imagination, I had only to say, “Hey, I have an idea,”and other eight-year-olds would collapse laughing. I was regarded as an oddball, an outsider. I had few friends.

For two, maybe three, minutes
I saw two worlds interpenetrating

jewels into jewels,
silver suns, electric whiteness,

World ‘A’ and world ‘B’
one vibrating blue pearl,

world like a skyful of blue suns
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

© Jack Foley, May 2002