Willard Maas

Above, Marie Menken and Willard Maas at home.

If Willard Maas is well-known today, it is as the director of the film below, 'Andy Warhol's Silver Flotations'. It's a film of Warhol's 'Silver Clouds' installation, and I think it's a great short film, surreal, bizarre compelling eery and beautiful. Some people disagree, (one youtube comment reads 'this video is so lame'), but I'm sticking to my opinion.




Otherwise, Maas might be remembered as the 'did he? - didn't he?' off-screen presence in Andy Warhol's 1963 film Blowjob.

Above, DeVeren Bookwalter in Andy Warhol's 'Blowjob'. It is rumoured that Maas was an, erm, administrative assistant on this film.

And finally he might be remembered as the husband of experimental filmmaker Marie Menken, whose 'Glimpses of the Garden' I put up here last week. (That film is on soon at BFI in london I believe, as part of a series of 'Garden' films). Maas and Menken were famous for their bohemian salons in 40s-50s-60s New York.

Maas isn't usually remembered, though, for his poetry. I only have one book, 'Concerning the Young', which came out by Farrar & Rinehart in 1938, and I really like it. Below is the titular poem in its entirety:

CONCENRING THE YOUNG

Boys walk along the sanded river-banks
Dreaming of saxophones, April fugues,
And summer girls of cloud-winged evenings,

The empty street, seeking answers in
The Gothic archways leading to velvet tombs,
The sound of hymns within the gilded pipes.

Beyond spring's tender hills and stone towers,
Words receding into the plane of night,
They have heard the rumor bearing darkness.

The young having died, the old seek atonement,
Lifting their eyes to statues in the parks,
Mounted iron horses, the bronze inscription.

Whether the heroes be of Lexington or the marne,
Dry winds of rhetoric ruffle the thinning beards
With orations at the marble drinking fountain.

(The cold lips torn from the jawbone, the meadow
Smoking with handgrenades in the early flowers,
The waters sleeping with mines beneath the foam.)

They have heard the rumor, remembering
A pathway of warm stars, the deserted docks,
Dormitories, pennants, and painted beds.

Speak of the green hills against the winter sun,
Forged from the heart weapons against defeat:
They have heard the rumor of days ending in blood.

Out of the classrooms past the factory wall,
They stand upon the platform in the square,
Erecting barricades against the night.

The world revolves about the darkling mouths
And guns retreat. They have heard the rumor
While the sky turns to dusk and the least leaves fall.

I don't know, maybe you hate this, find it 'lame', don't think it comes off. But for me, that parenthesized portion about two thirds through is exquisite, a complete entanglement of war and foam and lips and cigarettes. I love the line 'erecting barricades against the night' too, and desperately want to work that into a poem somewhere. Either that or just sing it as a mantra daily.





Gerard Malanga and Maas.

Go here for more info, (and a playlet my Dwight Ripley!) on Menken and Maas.