The Poet of People

"After the play," says William Alfred, a Teaching Fellow in English, "some people felt that they could talk to me only about iambic pentameter, really the most boring thing." The play, Agammenon, produced as a dramatic reading at Sanders Theatre just two weeks ago, had its birth in a translation which Alfred made at Brooklyn College in 1948. "It was a loose, double-jointed piece but both Brooklyn and Hunter put on the first two acts--in turtle-neck sweaters and bobby socks." Then in Archibald MacLeish's writing course Sb, Alfred rewrote his academic work as a play, taking liberty with the structure and dialogue to suit his own ideas on drama. "Rather than force an idea, I tried to conceive a development of human situations which come to a logical conclusion and which people can draw their own ideas from."

Alfred's interest in poetry grew up alongside his religious education. While attending the Holy Innocents, he embarked on a fourteen page epic about Christ: "Since my experience was ended at twelve, I couldn't picture anyone older than twelve--so I had him commit suicide." Such is Alfred's marvelous compound of a serious scarch for answers in life and an equally acute eye for the comical. "I remember a bobby soxer walked into Briggs and Briggs one day and asked for Dylan Thomas' recording of all the useless Christmas presents he received." Alfred thrusts his upper teeth out on his lip and puffs, and hisses, then gesticulates with his arms in gestures of wonderment and ecstacy. "She really couldn't understand at all, but thrilled all over."

In his junior year at Brooklyn College, Alfred met James Meagher, a poet who was a great inspiration to his writing. "In 1941, he sold a piano and started a magazine, The American Poet--with the grandiose idea that he could take any mass of writers and get one good poem, from children' jumping-rope rhymes to cerebral stuff. We got five hundred a week and only three of us to edit them . . . We had a sense that something great was going to happen, week after week, expecting a volley of applause . . . nothing would happen."

"I began experimental things in forms, what I called 'involute rhymes'; you know, the sonnet seems somehow fancy now." Among many short poems, Alfred also contributed three odes on religious themes and has devoted himself mainly to longer poems ever since. "A poem usually takes me a few months, mostly elegies of people on my mind who keep coming back to me." The magazine folded in 1943 because Alfred and his friends had to enter the army.

"For some odd reason, they put me in the tank corps; they never could teach me how to drive, I never could drive anything. So they said I was a menace and classified me as unteachable. Then in the Quartermaster Corps I was a butcher, assigned to a ration-breakdown. Enormous dead cows were tossed on the floor and I had to hack them up." Before he left the service, however, he managed to learn Bulgarian.

During this period, Alfred began a long poem which would take twenty problems that people face in the world and voice them through twenty characters who travel the underworld. Then, representing the church, militant and triumphant, the theme would change to twenty saints who had solved the problems. Scaling down this ambitious project, Alfred published the work as Anunciation Rosary in 1946.

The poem concerns the pain experienced on losing close friends, transcribed to Mary's feelings at the crucifixion of her son. Alfred never dwells upon the morbid aspects of death, however. On occasion, he visits old women at a rest home in the area. "It's like a prison for them," he says. "One delightful women there the nurses consider 'silly' because she refuses candy and won't speak. When I realized she spoke French, she replied with a snort, 'I hate the stuff' and we had a fine conversation."

Over the past three years, he has been collaborating on Milton's Of Reformation. "That ought to be out any century now; it's one of those things built for fifty years." Alfred has published in Hudsons, Commonwealth, and next fall his Agammenon will appear in Botega Oscura. "I disagree with people who say you shouldn't publish until you have a matured expresson. You can learn a lot from the shock of seeing your own stuff on a printed page."