Monday, March 31, 2003
A back-channel comment from
a blogger out in my old stomping grounds of the Bay Area made me sit up
straight:
One thing that’s been really
striking is discovering that for many younger poets, you are “Silliman’s Blog”; while they’re familiar with you in that
role, they are often not familiar with your work, having only a general sense
of you as an “elder” or as representing “language poetry” (understood as an
institutionalized orthodoxy).
Big sigh. Permit me to suggest that readers might start here. The bibliography has
over 700 items & one could literally start anywhere, even with Wet: The Journal of
Gourmet Bathing, which once published an excerpt from Sunset Debris.
But, seriously, the problem
of younger poets in particular lacking much sense of recent literary history is
one of those unending tasks every writer confronts. When I taught my seminar in
the graduate writing program at San Francisco State back in 1981, I had as good
a class as a poet/teacher could want – Susan Gevirtz, Cole Swenson, Jerry Estrin, Terry Ehret,
Margaret
Johnson were all participants. At the first session of the class, I passed
out a list of book titles & a second list of poets and asked the group to
match the books with their poets. This wasn’t an obscure list – it had Plath’s Ariel &
Dorn’s Gunslinger, volumes by Ginsberg,
Levertov, Creeley, Ashbery & the like. Not a single student was able to
match even 20 percent of the poets to their books.
My own experience at the
Berkeley Poetry Conference some 16 years earlier reflects that same
circumstance, except that I knew even less at the time. I had opportunities to
see Spicer, even Olson, but didn’t know enough to understand that they were
opportunities. Spicer only lived a few weeks beyond the conference. While Olson
lived another five years, I believe he only gave one other reading in the Bay
Area after that. I missed that one too. In retrospect, I feel extraordinarily
fortunate to have seen writers like Lew Welch & Paul Blackburn, poets who
died far too young, & who were heard by far too few in their lifetimes.*
In this blog, I’ve generally
focused on writing from the 1940s to the present (or maybe the near future).
While I myself didn’t awaken to poetry really until the 1960s, the writers who
were then defining the literary landscape were themselves still actively
engaged with the writers & issues of the 1950s & ‘40s, so all those
elements were very active still. For example, I think that one could draw a
reasonably coherent line from the poetry of Robert Duncan in the 1940s to the
Canadian Louis Dudek & the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow – all three come
out of a writing in which, say, both Yeats & modernism are active
influences. After the impact of Olson & Creeley in the 1950s, however,
The forty years between then
& now have seen a bewildering array of different threads & strands mixing
together, unraveling & often going in directions that seemed unimaginable
up until the very moment when somebody did, in fact, imagine it. I can recall,
for example, the first time I saw Judy Grahn’s Edward
the Dyke and Other Poems, the satire struck me as overwhelmed into
artlessness by the rawness of the pain it reflected. Today, I read that work
totally differently & see Grahn’s early writing as literally inventing its
audience through the most careful acts of craft conceivable, confident that if
she writes it, they will show up. One seldom sees Grahn mentioned in histories
of langpo or more broadly within postmodern writing, yet Kathy Acker’s
self-publication of her first novels, chapter by chapter, just putting the work
out there without regard to the fact that there was “no place” at the time for
anything even remotely like her writing could not have occurred in a world in
which Grahn’s poetry did not already exist. Acker in turn had an enormous
impact on language writing, even if she herself always tended to keep it at
arm’s length. Nothing that
But such linkages aren’t always
obvious and context matters. If you want to read Jack Spicer, you at some point
need to know not only the work of Robert Duncan & Robin Blaser, but also
Joanne Kyger, George Stanley & Harold Dull. Writers who have long since
stopped publishing, such as Ebbe Borregaard, as well as others who did not
begin to publish until later & at a considerable remove from, say, the
Spicer Circle, such as Larry Fagin, also need to be factored into the equation.
This is, as Spicer himself would have recognized, a cartography
of poetics. Tracing such routes is not just good discipline,
it’s a lot of fun. Rereading George Stanley’s work over the past year has been
some of the most enjoyable time I’ve spent with poetry in ages. There is also
both pleasure & information to be taken by constructing imaginary lineages,
such as one Annie Finch & I have concocted that runs Sara Teasdale →
Helen Adam → Lee Ann Brown.
One question is always how
far back does one need to go. For the blog, I’ve
generally drawn the line at the 1940s, although there are a few writers –
Pound, Williams, Stein, Zukofsky, possibly some of the
other Objectivists – who could cause me to go back a little further. But
reading, say, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ marvelous essay in Genders,
Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry: 1908-1934, on
the Hoos of Hooville,
specifically the use of that nonword “hoo” by
Lindsay, Stevens & Eliot in various poems, constructing whiteness –
DuPlessis borrows the term “blanchitude”
– out of their own depictions of an Other, I realize that to even approach this
sort of topic I would have to construct a mental configuration of a world in
which Vachel
Lindsay is not déjà toujours a
joke. & even if I could do so intellectually, I can’t get there emotionally
– it never feels right.
While I enjoy older
literatures – my kids have heard me reading Chaucer in Middle English & I
sometimes listen to a tape by J.B. Bessinger, Jr.
reading Beowulf
& other Old English texts in the original, a wonderful antidote to Heaney’s
reduction of that text to Bad Sports Writing of the Gods or whatever he
imagines it to be – my own sense of the importance of completely reconstructing
those prior periods is that it recedes with each preceding generation.
Conversely, the process of emasculation that occurs whenever one takes a work
out of its historical context – the inherent problem with Straussian
approaches to education – becomes even more acute as one approaches the
present. Thus while it may not be more important in the larger scheme of things
to understand the impact of Richard Duerden than it is Keats, the failure to do
so can have consequences that are just as serious, perhaps more so. On one
level, I plan to keep blogging until I understand all the ways in which
Alexander Pope → Adelaide Crapsey
→ Talan Memmott
make sense. On another, it’s that latter connection that matters most.
There are of course poets in
any generation who seem to do their work with no sense of the larger parameters
of literary context – and some of these folks do interesting & valuable
work. But in fact most people don’t seem to work that way – at some point, the
Cole Swensons, Jerry Estrins
& Susan Gevirtz’ of any given group of promising & talented young writers
seem to make a decision to take responsibility for understanding where &
how they fit into the larger scheme of things, which entails gaining a far
better sense of what their own personal map of traditions & influences
might be. Indeed, that decision seems to play a significant role in the
transformation into a “successful” poet. It’s a commitment, among other things,
to some hard (albeit pleasurable) work.**
If I am my blog, and perhaps
I am, it is because, for some readers, this is the easiest way to make contact
with my writing. These bite-size pieces are nowhere nearly as forbidding as the
79 page paragraph that concludes the new edition of Tjanting. Nor
do you have to be anywhere near a bookstore to access
it. On occasion, this blog might have the added advantage of being about you.
All are incentives to turn here first. Yet the poets of the next generation –
and the one after that – who will get to define how
all of this makes sense, will almost always be the ones who go out & do the
work.
* I even
got to hear Lew Welch do some of his “Motown” version of The Waste Land in that silky smooth tenor of his.
**
Interestingly, neither of the two women in my class back in 1981 who struck me
at the time as being “the most talented” of the writers there seems to be
producing poetry now, or – if they are – at least not at all publicly. One,
last I heard, was becoming a school teacher; the other appears to be a
full-time member of a Buddhist residential community in upstate
Saturday, March 29, 2003
Peter O’Leary adds some
light – and layers of complexity – to my comments about Ronald
Johnson’s Radi Os and has a few questions of his own.
Dear
Ron Silliman,
I'm
writing to you as Ronald Johnson's literary executor. Very interested to read
your description of seeing the "original" of RADI OS in
The
crossing-out that you witnessed was only the first step of the composition. RJ
kept several copies of that 1892 edition of Paradise Lost, each of which he would use to "compose" or
"recompose" his first draft. He once told me that after he had
initially conceived the idea, he raced through half of
The
next step, after crossing-out, was to type the poems into a draft. I think of
RJ's poetic process as visionary or optidelic (to
coin a word: vision-manifesting). Lest that sound too grand, I really think the
focus in much of the poetry is on the eye. I don't think RJ could
"see" his poem until he typed it out in draft form. What he would do
is type the lines from a crossed-out page, with a 1-1/2 carriage return,
flush-left on the page, typing a five-line underscore after each page. This
way, he would accumulate his poem. When he had enough typed up, he would reread
& revise. If a "page" (taking up maybe a tenth of a typescript
page) didn't work, he would go back into
As an
example of what I mean, the famous (to RJ readers, at
least) opening of RADI OS reads in typescript:
O
tree
into
the World,
Man
the
chosen
Rose
out of Chaos:
song,*
The final
step in drafting the poem was for RJ to retype the poem but this time
"aerated," duplicating in typescript the look of the poem on the page
of
Interestingly,
RJ drafted up to book 9 of Paradise Lost,
with the original intention that the "completed" text would serve as
ARK 100, the "dymaxion dome" to cover the
entire work of ARK. This, in the end, he decided against, feeling that the
additional work he'd done was repeating RADI OS rather than adding to it.
My
own theory about why he stopped with RADI OS is that he perfected this
technique in "BEAM 21, 22, 23, The Song of Orpheus" in ARK: The
Foundations. That poem, which begins with a quotation – center justified –
of the introit to RADI OS, is comprised of a reading-through the Psalms
(beginning at the word "PALMS"), in which he took at least one word
from each Psalm, in sequence, as the vocabulary for the poem. The writing of
this BEAM involved similar revisionary activity to
that of RADI OS. It's the highpoint (great horizontal?) of The Foundations & one of the most amazing sequences in the
whole poem. I suspect, then, that RJ began to feel a whole 12-book RADI OS
would be redundant.
In
the end, he settled on including RADI OS in a series of "Outworks"
surrounding the edifice of ARK. The
Outworks, which includes RADI OS & some later poems, including his incredible
monument to the victims of AIDS, "Blocks to Be Arranged in a
Pyramid," is in the works with Flood Editions. This book will include the
republication of RADI OS (which, regrettably?, before
he passed away, RJ retitled, "Poem Excised Paradise Lost").
One
of the problems we've been facing in imagining this book ("we" being
myself & the directors of Flood, Devin Johnston & my brother Michael), is how to reproduce RADI OS. As you probably know from
your Sand Dollar edition of the book, the text consists of a razored copy of the 1892 edition RJ used for his initial
crossing-out. You can even see razor marks on some of the pages. The text is
also somewhat uneven page by page. One option for reproduction would be to
destroy an edition of the Sand Dollar book in order to create pristine scans,
& then adjust them accordingly (an expensive proposition: in Jed Rasula &
OK.
This has become a small essay. I imagine you get a lot of email for your Blog,
which I quite enjoy; I check in every day or so. Thanks, as a reader, for the
work you're doing.
All
the best,
Peter
O'Leary
* Which is not at all how
this text ends up looking on the printed page:
O tree
into the World,
Man
the chosen
Rose out of chaos:
song,
Friday, March 28, 2003
We have been reminded again
this week of why the saying “May you live in interesting times” was a curse. In
But in
Ironically, I suppose, the
February-March issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter
finally showed up in my mailbox, weeks – indeed it seems like months –
after I first heard about its “Blank Generation” feature. I’d actually seen the
feature itself –
The Blank Generation feature
starts off from two comments, one made by Lyn Hejinian, the other taken from my
Nov.
21st blog entry, both to the general effect that there had been
a depoliticization of the younger generation when contrasted with our own
experience of the 1960s. This is followed by comments from twelve writers, ten
of whom are significantly younger than either Lyn or I. Obviously, events have
substantially rewritten recent history & my initial criticism about
depoliticization is one charge I’ll never be able to raise again. That’s the
good news.
But I’d like to revisit that
comment of mine in the slightly broader context in which it was originally made,
a part of Carl Boon’s interview, a response to the question of why I was doing
this blog. In the passage that follows, the italicized boldface
portions are what were given to so-called Blank Generation respondents &
published in the issue:
But there has also been a depoliticization of
younger people generally & that has impacted poets. Some of it has
to do with the lack of tangible alternatives to unfettered capital following
the collapse of the old Stalinist bloc – although for decades it has been difficult
to find any western Marxist who would defend the so-called “actually existing
socialist countries,” in large part because state control over capital is not
socialism. In the West, there has been no primary shared point of agreement as
to the goals of the left since the
Those edits – the excision
of history, to be exact – are worth noting.
Like Lyndon Johnson & Richard
Nixon before him, George W. Bush has provided just the sort of “primary shared
point of agreement” that has been lacking for so long. To some degree, the
response to date has been predictable, although dramatically accelerated. The
real issue, it seems to me, will come after
the war, when the
The first Gulf War evaded
the issue neatly by its sheer brevity. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al would like
to do that again, but at this moment in history it’s too soon to tell. If there
is a dramatic affective difference thus far between the experience of the
antiwar movement of the 1960s & that of this spring, it is simply that the
level of crisis & action that people have gone through this past week
lasted in the 1960s & ‘70s for ten straight years. In the context of that
degree of exhaustion & frustration, the mistakes of, say, the Weather
Underground or the
My comments were a response
to Carl Boon’s question of why, exactly, I was doing a weblog. Since I made
those remarks four months ago, I’ve been thrilled to see so many other poets
pick up the form. It really doesn’t matter what your aesthetic commitments or
heritage might be – acting, writing & thinking critically will add a
dimension to your work, your poetry as well as anything else you might do, that
I believe can only lead to good things. One excellent example of how this can
be extended in ways that go far beyond poetry is Brian Kim Stefans – one of a
handful of poet-bloggers to be blogging longer than I – and his Circulars project, a weblog that has
become a focal point for collecting & disseminating information related to
the war. The last I heard, it was getting thousands
of hits per day. It should be on everyone’s favorites list.
I want to dedicate this blog
to an old friend, Wade Hudson. I first met Wade over thirty years ago when we
worked together on dozens of projects as part of the
Labels: Politics
Thursday, March 27, 2003
As I browsed through the
tapes available from the
There were five group
readings as well. The first, with an obvious
A third reading featured John Sinclair, Lenore Kandel, Ed Sanders & Ted
Berrigan. Berrigan’s presence is really the only visible sign of the
Until I looked at this site,
I hadn’t realized just how thoroughly present & accounted for Canadian
poets were at this early stage – obviously the first
* Sanders is included in the Shapiro-Padgett An Anthology of New York Poets, but in this context seems obviously
to function as a younger Beat poet. Interestingly, two conference attendees,
Lewis Warsh & Anne Waldman, would discover one another while in
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
A few words
from Jack Spicer about poetry and politics.
It only took me 38 years,
but I finally got to Jack Spicer’s talk on “Poetry and Politics” from the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965.
The Conference was a series of seven talks and 14 readings held on the
At Berkeley, the previous
fall had seen the Free Speech Movement on the UC campus, as attempts by the
Republican right – notably Senator Bill Knowland who owned the then-powerful Oakland Tribune – to shut down student
organizing on campus for local civil rights protests triggered the first
full-scale student revolt in the United States. When one student, Jack
Weinberg, agreed to set himself up for a “test-case” arrest by setting up a
card table at the Telegraph & Bancroft entrance to the campus, he did not
anticipate what then ensued: 3,000 students surrounding the police car refusing
to let the cops take him away – a standoff that lasted for over 30 hours. The
strike that followed brought new phenomena to American colleges – sit-ins and
mass arrests – before finally establishing the right of students to use public
campus facilities for organizing.
Earlier in the spring of
1965, the Free Speech Movement was followed by the Filthy Speech Movement, as
John Thompson, a local street poet, sat on the steps of the Sproul Hall and
held up a sheet of paper with the F word penned across it. When the campus cops
busted Thompson, other students spontaneously proceeded to follow suit. The
media predictably played the issue for laughs.
These are the immediate
political phenomena that Jack Spicer and his audience were thinking about** as
he began his talk. Lurking further behind the talk was a political event from
Spicer’s own days as a student, the imposition of a
Jack Spicer is dealing with
all of these events & forces and he is, in July of 1965, deeply pessimistic
about the possibility of poetry and politics. He sees, for example, no hope for
either poets nor the then burgeoning student movement
to impact the outcome of the
That may sound like an
extreme version of coterie poetics, but Spicer – to the discomfort of several
people in the audience – makes it sound all very reasonable. At the heart of
his argument is a presumption as to whom the poem is
for – the poet who writes it. The purpose of the poem is not to be read. Indeed,
Spicer says
I don’t know what a non poet can get out of poetry, I’ve never been able to figure it out…. I
fundamentally don’t think that nonpoets ought to read poetry.
Even Spicer concedes that
this is overreaching on his part, as some of these very same nonpoets tell him
interesting and useful things about his own writing as well as that of others.
But still, he argues, the relationship of the poem to a broader audience is
“futile.” “Not to the poets – they get messages from the poems.”
It is because for Spicer
there is a radical separation between poet & poem – Spicer claims there is
an audience for the former, but not the latter – that the poem can achieve its
status of an object of divination for the writer. Selling out, as he puts it,
thus becomes anything which directs the poem toward another end.
“Your enemy is simply
something which tries to stop you from writing poetry,” Spicer says, but he
makes it clear that “if you violate something that was deep inside you … you’re
lost….You don’t write or you write bad poetry or you write for the market.”
It’s a value system in which writing for publication and not writing are
equivalent.
To this, Spicer offers what
amounts to a utopian alternative.
A magazine is a society. I think Open Space proved that. You have to behave within the rules of the
society.
Open Space
was printed monthly in issues of 150 copies maximum over the course of one
year. It had a set & very limited number of contributors – and you were
required to contribute each month. “You couldn’t postpone your poem.” The
magazine was handed out for free & distributed from Gino & Carlo’s, a
tavern in
Thus from Spicer’s
perspective poets create a community – a term that Spicer uses in deliberate
opposition to society, which he sees as negative – a community in which the
poets included can read one another. This is a vision of the journal not as a
record nor as a making public, but rather as lab notes being shared by
researchers involved in a common investigation.
So, in Spicer’s argument,
the poet’s next task, after the writing of the poem, must be to limit that
discussion, to keep the poem from becoming truly public. Spicer recognizes the
irony of making this argument at a place like the Berkeley Poetry Conference,
professing to be doing so strictly for the money. He makes the point, further,
that all poets will sell out – “You have to, for economic reasons” – but that
if you do you should at least understand what you’re doing. Spicer uses the
analogy of peach farmers who produce vast quantities of product without a sense
of what the market demand for peaches might be, so that overproduction reduces
the value of the individual peach to near zero – the implication for poetry is
obvious enough – the idea behind his talk, Spicer says, is to convince young
poets that “When you sell out, know exactly what your peaches cost.” That is,
know what you are sacrificing in the way of the poem as an investigative tool
if & when you transition into the role of being a poet in public.
Hearing Spicer make this
argument & countering the barrage of objections from members of the
audience – aren’t poets the “unacknowledged legislators?” wasn’t Yeats an
actual senator? isn’t Spicer just revisiting Auden’s position that poetry makes nothing happen? aren’t the folk songs of the civil rights movement an
example of verse creating political change? – is fascinating, almost a form of
voyeurism. The one point Spicer is willing to actually entertain is the question
of song. Expressing admiration for Johnny
Mercer, Spicer admits that “if I could write popular songs, I’d do it.”
Spicer’s talk on the 16th
of July comes just five days ahead of Ginsberg’s reading of Kral Majales, a poem that seems to have
infuriated Spicer, who writes a poem in response that turns out to be the last
work he will ever write. Five weeks later, Spicer is dead. He will never get to
see all the ways in which the student movement impacted the Vietnam War,
leading directly to the end of the Johnson
While Spicer’s conception of
the poem as an object of divination may reek of ectoplasm & spoon-bending,
the idea behind it of the poem as a device for investigation is something we
see reappearing in several guises – it’s the aspect of Spicer that one sees,
say, in the work of Robert Grenier or
* Before
Rachel Loden writes to correct me & say that tickets only cost $45,
I would advise her to check her ticket – which she acquired on the 16th,
and which was discounted accordingly. A $45 ticket in 1965 is only worth $367 in today’s dollars. That
would have made zero difference to me in 1965.
** In
Spicer’s talk, the civil rights movement is discussed in connection with its
use of music & song, but no mention at all is made of the assassination of
Malcolm X earlier that year.
***
Parkinson’s TA from the previous year, Burt Hatlen,
was fortunate to be studying abroad in ’61.
+ Given
their differences, both as writers & as people, that’s a significant
statement. One could read all of Language,
at the time Spicer’s most recent publication, as an extended disproof of Olson’s Projectivism. Spicer’s
endorsement is not without its ambivalence, however. Ebbe Borregaard in the
audience asks why Spicer compares Olson to Lyndon Johnson, a deliberately
provocative query since Spicer hasn’t done so here, although he has said that
“There are bosses in poetry as well as in the industrial empire.” Spicer
doesn’t dodge the issue: “I meant that he was in the same position in poetry
that Johnson is in politics.”
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Somebody not long ago –
possibly on a blog or perhaps the Poetics List – suggested that John Ashbery
wrote relatively quickly and without much revision. Whether or not that’s
accurate – I have no way of knowing – I found it a liberating way to think
about his poetry. It reminded me of a similar situation, at least a quarter of
a century ago, when I heard another person, someone involved in the visual arts
as I recall, who said that they were unable to appreciate the paintings of Mark
Rothko until they realized how very quickly most of them were painted &
that, far being from the somber & ponderous works of brooding imagination
that some of Rothko’s advocates had made them out to be, were almost sketchlike in their qualities.
Whether or
not in either instance this should turn out to be the case seems to me far less
important than my imaginative ability to conceive of these works in such terms. I can recall, albeit with increasing difficulty over
the years, how I envisioned the texts of Larry Eigner’s on first reading them
as a teenager – all that white space between words & lines made the text
appear to me as “airy,” almost feathery – and it seemed immediately &
completely self-evident that his choices, both in phrasing & linebreaks,
reflected a language that was spoken. Long before I met Bob Grenier,
When I took the bus across
the Bay to the board-and-care facility Larry was living in at the time, I met a
tiny man with very limited physical abilities – really only full use of one
hand, plus the ability to grasp with the other. His speech was only marginally
better in person – it would in fact improve markedly over his years in
Berkeley, simply because he had so many occasions to try & communicate with
different people – but our ability that first afternoon to make eye contact
enabled us to take full advantage of body language and extra-linguistic clues
to flesh out the conversation. I couldn’t have gotten through it otherwise.
Because the original desk
that had been obtained for Eigner had its drawers on the left, and because
Larry could not move to the right in his wheelchair, the act of taking a piece
of paper & inserting it in the typewriter entailed grabbing it with his
left hand, then turning his wheelchair 360 degrees to the left in order to rearrive at the machine. Inserting the paper was no less
complicated & the whole idea of a carriage return suddenly made it apparent
to me that, even if there were a formal logic in Larry’s poems as to why the
poem ought to gradually drift across the page, with lines starting further
& further to the right as they proceeded down, there was a physical
rationale for the device as well. I never saw any poem of Eigner’s as “airy” or
“feathery” again – in fact, no poet ever worked harder to get his words down so
exactly on the page. I often wondered as to the degree that Larry’s physical
challenges caused him to think so intently on such questions – the very things
that were so hard for him were related to issues in writing, like the physical
placement of the word & line on the paper, at which he had no peer.
Another, very different text
towards which I have a radically different relationship than most people, I
suspect, is Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os. When I
first met Johnson in 1973, during a period when we both happened to live on
Reading Ashbery as though
his poems were, say, written quickly & sans much editing
suggests a very different relationship between Ashbery and the “D word.”
Consider, for perverse example, the opening to “This Deuced Cleverness,” from Chinese
Whispers, whose textual body’s first line continues its title:
is what’s
the matter. Can’t see without it.
Or was it, over the years of
arrears,
swathed in a hoydenish
privacy? No.
It’s ours to deal.
What might it mean for a
“deuced cleverness” to be swathed in a
hoydenish privacy? If I read this poem as though it were layered &
worked over for days, weeks or even years, I might come to a very different
sense of those phrases & their implications, especially the latter one
which, if perceived as the product of quickness, might be read instead as
taking pure pleasure in its overly lush, slightly exotic vocabulary. Similarly,
the sound of “years of arrears” would now loom more important, signaling the
onset of this surfeit of linguistic overload.
Read as jotted rather than
sweated, Ashbery turns into a far more ludic poet, much lighter & far less
difficult, capital D – though I’m not
much of a believer in difficulty, period – much closer to Frank O’Hara than
he might otherwise appear. Certainly far closer to O’Hara than to Merrill or
Warren, the other poets with whom Harold Bloom loves to group the poor man.
Thus the presumption alone, that setting of expectation, changes the poem
itself.
Ironically enough, what this
reminds me more than anything is the deflation of T.S. Eliot’s reputation once
it became clear that the sharp shifts & hard-edged edits of The Waste Land were all entirely Ezra
Pound’s doing & that, left to his own devices, Eliot’s manuscript would
have headed in the drowsy direction that later drugged The Four Quartets. I don’t think Ashbery need worry about his
reputation – though frankly I think Bloom has done it no good – his work reads
very well sans the critic’s furrowed brow.
Monday, March 24, 2003
It was an
inspired reading line-up, to say the very least. On Friday, March 21, the
Anselm, the
older of the sons, read first. It was the first time I’d ever heard him, but
his reading fit almost seamlessly with what I find on the page: an essentially
quiet poetry filled with exacting attention to detail, captured with just as
much attention to phrase structure – indeed a poetry
of the phrase. It looks & maybe even sounds a little
Edmund, by
comparison, writes work that is, in many ways, louder, its humor goofier &
more edgy. As he read from a novella in process, I recall thinking that I hope
he never gets mad at me, because his sense of satire can be positively
slashing. And it would be delivered with a big cheerful smile.
It seems
impossible to imagine that Alice Notley can write anything better than the
works she has produced over the past 15 or so years, as she has been as the top
of her game for a very long time, producing poetry that makes everybody
completely have to set aside preconceptions about form & genre & just
start over with brand new eyes – she does that “make it new” thing as well as
any poet of my generation. But her current project, which might be called
Families
that write are not that common – Howe, Saroyan, Ginsberg & his father,
Creeley & his grandson Trane Devore. Often if relatives are active
intellectually or in the arts, it’s at some angle – Louis Zukofsky & his
son the violinist, Marjorie Perloff’s daughter Cory
directing the American Conservatory Theater or Lydia Davis’ half-brother,
Alexander Cockburn, holding down the crackpot Stalinist franchise at The
Nation. In every instance, a part of what enables especially the younger artist
with a well-known parent (& the Berrigans in
their own way must contend with more than most: Notley, their father Ted &
their late step-father Douglas Oliver) is an ability, very early on, to
articulate distinctly an aesthetic take – an earlier generation would probably
have called this “voice,” but in fact it’s much larger – that is not held in
common. Anselm & Edmund Berrigan pass that hurdle
easily, but it was only hearing the two of them, one after the other, that I
really began to appreciate just how entirely different each is from his
sibling.
Note to reading & event
coordinators: the
Notley-Berrigan Family Values tour would made for a great series of readings,
as much a “natural” as when, say, Bobbie Louise Hawkins did the folk circuit
with Rosalie Sorrels and U. Utah Phillips. Bring it to your town, now!
------------------------------------------------
Michael
Magee wants people to know that he has an article in Contemporary Literature 42:4 (Winter 2001), entitled “Tribes of New
York: Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of the Five Spot,” that
addresses many of the issues raised in my
blog last Tuesday.
I came across the short list for the 1953 National Book Award
for poetry &, a little like the 1957 Evergreen
Review that I was looking at on Thursday, I find that it’s
intriguing for what it tells me about poetry as a social phenomenon. It’s a
lesson in the shifting nature of literary attention.
Awards, almost by definition, aren’t a good
representation of the literary scene. What they register is not necessarily
who’s doing good work, but rather the relative social power of different forces
within the terrain, as filtered – always & only as filtered – through the specific & local politics of a given
award body. The Pulitzer gathers its reputation not from the quality of its
choices – which for poetry over the years have been more laughable than not –
but from the simple fact that, by giving prizes to newspapers in other
categories, Pulitzers get regularly reported by newspapers. The more recent
National Book Critics Circle Awards demonstrates principally that book critics
look to those publishers who advertise, which
invariably means the trade publishers, even if somewhere above 90 percent of
all poetry is published exclusively by small presses. So looking to the short
list of 50 years ago is not the same as looking to the poetry of that time as
it is the forces at play within what
In 1953, Archibald MacLeish won the National Book
Award for poetry – he also won the Pulitzer & Bollingen that year, all for
his Collected Poems 1917-1952. Five
decades hence, it’s arguable as to whether MacLeish is read seriously by poets
any more or merely by the professional class of scholars of modernism.
MacLeish, of all the
MacLeish’s circumstance isn’t necessarily so
unusual. Of the 12 finalists for the award that year, only two strike me as
being read by a substantial number of poets today:* Kenneth Rexroth & W.S.
Merwin. Not necessarily by the same poets, but by poets nonetheless. For
writers however marginally integrated into OVC, the news is not good – the
chances are overwhelming that in 50 years very few poets will be reading your
work. And, remember, this is the case for those fortunate enough to make the
NBA short list. OVCers who fall outside of that inner
circle of benediction can anticipate an even harder time finding audiences in
the future.
But the nature of this integration is what strikes
me as most visible from the short list. MacLeish & Merwin can both be said
to fall fully inside that framework, defined for the moment as connections to
New York trade publishers, major university presses, academic appointments
& this reinforcing mechanism of the “award circuit” itself. Of the twelve
poets on the short list, only five can be truly said to fit within that
framework. In addition to MacLeish & Merwin, there were Stanley Burnshaw,
something of a maverick among the New Critics in that he was active on the
left; Peter Viereck, poet, historian, longtime UMass
Amherst professor & already in the 950s something of a professional
conservative intellectual; and Robert Silliman Hillyer**, the sonneteer who
actively campaigned to have Pound’s works quashed after World War 2. Merwin,
it’s worth noting, started out as a scion of the New England Brahmin formalists
& would, a decade later, become one of several – Robert Bly, James Wright,
Adrienne Rich were others – who dramatically transformed their poetry away from
the cramped verse they had inherited.*** Merwin’s 1952
debut volume, A Mask for Janus, a
Yale Younger Poets volume selected by Auden, is decidedly pre-transformation.
Rexroth very pointedly was never part of that world.
In the light of this short list, I see him as one of four examples of
“regional” verse that were being called out in 1953 to acknowledge just this
phenomenon. In addition to the western Rexroth, Book Award nominees included
two Appalachian regionalists, Byron Herbert Reece of Georgia & Jesse Stuart
of Kentucky, and Colorado’s Thomas Hornsby Ferril,
the somewhat unacknowledged founder of cowboy poetry. Reece, who committed
suicide later in the 1950s, has become something of a folk figure in his native
state where one of the access trails to the
This leaves three other writers, two of whom seem so
distinct that it would be foolhardy to put them into a list such as
regionalists, the third being more mysterious. The first of these is Ridgeley
Torrence, a one-time
Like Merwin, Naomi Replansky was nominated for her
first book. She was also the only woman among the twelve nominees. Replansky
continues her work as a poet to this day, although she apparently went over
thirty years between her first volume, Ring
Song, and her next volume. A correspondent in the 1950s with poets such as
George Oppen and an out-of-the-closet lesbian during the starkly homophobic
postwar years, she’s an important (if somewhat secret) figure in the history of
women’s writing. Interestingly – and perhaps ironically – Replansky’s poem “Housing
Shortage,” taken from Ring Song,
turns up on all manner of “inspirational poetry” websites, many of which seem
blithely unaware of its dimension as a poem about the personal politics of the
closet:
I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one
Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place
With all the apparatus of living
You stumble over it daily.
And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.
Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Given yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.
You too dreaming the same.
I don’t know enough about Replansky’s poetry to
understand why it’s not been more widely published or read. Or perhaps it is, but
by a community about which I know far too little.
Replansky, however, is hardly as mysterious as
Ernest Kroll, nominated in 1953 for
I
recall Andrew Schelling telling me once that he
thought it was okay that poets “disappeared” over time, that it was all part of
the composting of literary influences that results in
a constant regeneration. I, as readers of this blog & my other work must
know, feel much more ambivalent about that. I wonder, for example, how the
regionalism of 1953 leads to – if it does – the regionalisms of today, such as Afrilachian poetry. I also wonder if the
school of quietude doesn’t need to get off its collective butt and think about
creating real institutions & traditions that would enable its writers to
develop the kinds of lasting influences & reciprocity that characterize the
post-avant scene’s heritage. For while the poets of quietude
may get a disproportionate share of all the institutional awards for poetry,
their work nonetheless seems largely destined to dissolve rapidly over time.
Some
links to the poets on the short list for the 1953 National Book Award:
* Your
chances were just as good if you were nominated in the fiction category, as
were both May Sarton and William Carlos Williams.
** If
Hillyer is a relative – most Sillimans in the
***This
1960s revolt within the school of quietude has generally been lost amid the
many other more flamboyant rebellions & transformations of that decade, but
it is certainly worth studying in its own right. One question that might be
answered by such an investigation is whether or not John Berryman’s Dream Songs & Sylvia Plath’s Ariel
should be viewed as part of that rebellion, or as the liveliest elements of the
tradition that remained.
Labels: School of Quietude
Saturday, March 22, 2003
I almost never think of
David Shapiro as a
The reason I was thinking of
David Shapiro – beyond of course the pure pleasure of same – was the onset of
Bush’s war, the death of a young woman under a bulldozer in the Gaza strip,
& comments, implications more than statements, that were made on this blog
last October & November that suggested that New York School poetry was
generally apolitical. Thus I’d suggested then that there were aspects of
It’s important to keep in
mind just how remarkable a book such as this was. Shapiro was born in 1947
& is thus one year younger than
This context is worth
noting, because it’s the one in which Shapiro’s work was read by poets at some
distance from
The suite itself consists of
18 poems, only one of which extends as far as three pages, in a wide range of
styles – so great that any specific section, singled out, would probably
misrepresent the whole. Shapiro can be extraordinarily lyrical at moments &
yet also uses prose here in ways that extend the possibilities of prose, really
for the first time in poetry since the Williams of Kora or Stein’s Tender
Buttons. Thus “The
On the ship there is an international
airport.
Here, their passports are taken away from
them.
These walls, these acoustical
bricks, protect the man holding an acoustic panel against a wave of shock and
sound.
Ordinary microphones don’t hear
it, only the microphones with “great surface” permit us to – Walls and closets
will not stop it – we will take these sounds to our grave.
Hearts working with determined
frequency like twenty hearts, hands black as glands.
The heart contracts to the
accompaniment of electric phenomena. Here is a microelectrode penetrating into
the heart of a dog.
The allusion to Williams in
that last sentence is no coincidence. Nor is the couplet that leads off the
poem – this is, at one level, a tale of coming to
But if there’s a tale,
there’s not a plot. Here is the fourth section, “Statue of a Breeze on
Horseback,” just for the sake of contrast:
In a corner of air
On a couch built of air
We make a very little angle
Between “diode and triode lie
near together
Are you in the corner of
meteors?
You’re in the crust of the
earth
You have not yet extinguished
the light complex in me
On my languorous couch of air
Air, which is alternately
Black and brilliant and crushed
like a coin
That lies under the rocks at
Deal
You are here
Here is the debut of culture
Here is your light face which
Michelson and Morley followed
Here are the spores.” Sir
Alexander Fleming.
Note how those quotation
marks work. Note also how Michelson and Morley take us right back to the
question of waves from the first poem. But how radically differently this poem
feels to be set into quatrains – how much of that determines what we feel about
“You” and/or vice versa? And how, or why, does it lead to the inventor of
penicillin? One could do a whole little riff of the sonic effects as well,
following, for example, the ten instances of a hard c in this poem, nine of which start off words.
It seems clear to me that
one cannot sketch out the 18 works into an argument, as such – that’s not their
relation. Yet the ways in which these poems invoke history, as well as
discourses such as science, make it instantly evident that the social realm is what is at stake – that for me is an
almost perfect invocation of the political. Yet it is not the one-dimensional
landscape one associates with a Levertov or Ferlinghetti. There is, for
example, a running theme in these poems of small creatures: crickets, bees,
squirrels, mice – as if Shapiro were anticipating the graphic fiction of Art
Spiegelman.
The one overtly political
poem in the sequence is “The Funeral of Jan Palach.” Jan Palach was a
twenty-year-old philosophy student who, in 1969, set himself ablaze in
When I entered the first
meditation,
I escaped the gravity of the object,
I experienced the emptiness,
And I have been dead a long time.
When I had a voice you could
call a voice,
My mother wept to me:
My son, my beloved son,
I never thought this possible,
I’ll follow you on foot,
Halfway in mud and slush the microphones
picked up.
It was raining on the houses;
It was snowing on the police-cars.
The astronauts were weeping,
Going neither up nor out.
And my own mother was brave
enough she looked
And it was alright I was dead.
Even the lines that grammatically
don’t require end stops have some sort of punctuation right up to that
next-to-last line, Shapiro controlling the reader’s breathing & sense of
halting rhythm. & again, the question of the microphones, which throughout
this work is the question of empathy, which means both compassion & the
ability to experience pain.
“A Man Holding an Acoustic
Panel,” is a dark & brooding work composed within a genre that has never
been known for its seriousness. I have no idea how it must have been received
by those close to Shapiro, but I know that at the time, my own response was
incomprehension – I simply did not have the critical framework in my head at
the time to recognize this work for
what it was, and is.
In an excellent interview
conducted by Joanna Fuhrman for RainTaxi, David Shapiro
speaks of brooding on a comment Marianne Moore once made about his work
lacking “adequate starkness.” There is hardly anything inadequate about the
starkness here. Shapiro’s poem, as it turned out, inspired architect John
Hejduk’s monument to Palach in
So it’s no accident, I
suppose, that I’ve been thinking about this poem this week, not only in the
context of the tragedy of Iraq, but also the homicide of Rachel Corrie,
the 23-year-old Olympia, Washington, native who was literally bulldozed to
death by the Israeli army last weekend. Unlike Palach and his American &
Vietnamese counterparts in the 1960s, Corrie did not plan her fate. In the wake
of the media overload over
* A volume
that includes not just the usual suspects, but others whose connection may seem
more tenuous to the aesthetics of founding papas Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch &
Schuyler – John Giorno, Ed Sanders, Tom Veitch – and whose introduction mumbles
an apology for failing to include Allen Ginsberg & Charles Reznikoff, but
remains silent over its inclusion of only a single woman, Bernadette Mayer. No
Waldman, no Notley, no Guest, all of whom would have been reasonable inclusions
in 1970.
** Ithaca
House was a funky little operation, funded by a writing professor, Baxter
Hathaway, as a means of instructing students in what the poetry world was
really like. Because David McAleavey had then getting his Ph.D. there, writing
what I think might have been the first dissertation on George Oppen, Ithaca
House in the early 1970s published first books also by David Melnick & Bob
Perelman, as well as Ray Di Palma’s second volume.
*** Howard
Moss & Frank O’Hara were jointly awarded the prize that year, O’Hara
posthumously.
+
++ By
contrast, the self-immolation of Norman Morrison, a
Quaker father of three, in front of Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon
had less of an impact in the
Friday, March 21, 2003
Lourdes
Vázquez is a poet, essayist & fiction writer, a librarian by profession
who is a leader in developing resources on
Park Slope, readers away from the East
Coast might not know, is the section of
The poems – it seems more of
a series than a serial poem – are short & deceptively simple:
“Are we inside the fog or outside?” You asked.
“Inside,” I responded.
Like upside-down cats, we snuck away
from the dew and
the clouds.
The lamp-post lit the few open bars and
the anxiety in my
face knowing that you were recovering.
It is the anomalies that
drive this poem, the “upside-down cats” & the “anxiety” rather than relief
at the idea of recovery. The whole question of being & knowledge is tucked
into that figure of fog in the first line. This is a piece that, in both its
density & sharpness, reminds me a little of the writing of Rae Armantrout –
the highest praise imaginable.
Translated from the Spanish
by the author & her daughter, Vanessa Acosta-Murray, the poems of Park Slope remind me also of another
At one level, Park Slope is a narrative project –
there is a troubled relationship around which so many of these poems turn – yet
not one articulated with beginning, middle & end. Rather, each poem seems
an intervention, coming at the same set of questions from a wide range of
different angles. Some of the most powerful are among the very shortest:
To close my eyes.
Let memory disappear
Let time cease and my sheets
never remember.
One word on the translation
– there is no facing Spanish, which is a shame, as these pieces in English
demonstrate an excellent ear & I’m more than a little curious as to how
they might sound in the original. They are in fact so well written I would not have
guessed that they were translated if there were not a note to that effect on
the acknowledgements page.
* One
suspects that
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Kirk Johnson yesterday
encouraged me to keep going, to provide “something to read in normal
circumstances,” though indeed the circumstances today are surely obscene. I’ll try.
Ж Ж Ж
Thinking first of Ken Irby
& then of Paul Goodman & his relationship to the New American poets
this past week sent me back to the second issue of the Evergreen Review, published in 1957. The issue was devoted, as the
blue cover testifies, to the “San Francisco Scene.” Edited by Barney Rosset,
mastermind of Grove Press, &
The issue contains
contributions by 16 writers, plus eight photographs of writers by the great
Harry Redl. Ten of the 16 will be included in the
Allen anthology in 1960:
§
Brother Antoninus, O.P.
§
Robert Duncan
§
§
Michael McClure
§
Jack Spicer
§
James Broughton
§
Gary Snyder
§
Philip Whalen
§
Jack Kerouac
§
Allen Ginsberg
The four creative writers
who won’t be included in the New American
Poetry are every bit as intriguing as a list:
§
Kenneth Rexroth
§
Henry Miller
§
Josephine Miles
§
Michael Rumaker
According to Allen’s
introduction to his later book, he excluded poets who were already firmly
established, which presumably would have included Miles & Rexroth. Rumaker, only 25 in 1957, the same age as McClure, appears
to have been seen strictly as a fictioneer, thus
excluded along with Miller & Bill Burroughs when it came time for Allen to
cobble together his epochal collection of verse.
While Rexroth writes the
introduction to this issue, two other critics also appear. Ralph J. Gleason
contributes an essay on the San Francisco jazz scene, while Dore Ashton, then the art critic for the New York Times, has a piece on the “San
Francisco School,” notably Rothko, Still, Diebenkorn & Sam Francis, with a
nod at the end toward David
Park, Elmer
Bischoff and the “return, four years ago, to figurative painting.”
Some of the individual
contributions from the poets & novelists are worth noting as well:
§
Ginsberg’s Howl,
Part I (a reprint from the City Lights Book)
§
“October in the Railroad Earth” by Kerouac
§
“This Place, Rumord to Have Been Sodom” & the start of “The
Structure of Rime” by
§
Seven pieces by Jack Spicer, including “Troy Poem,”
“Psychoanalysis: An Elegy,” and “Berkeley in Time of Plague,” easily his most
important publication in the 1950s, possibly the most important magazine
appearance of his life
§
Selections from Coney
Island of the Mind & the whole of “Dog Poem” by Ferlinghetti
§
Whalen’s “Homage to
That is a huge slice of the
great writing of one decade to show up in the pages of a single issue of just
one magazine. Just imagine: with the exception of Howl, all of those works came into print on the same day & in
the same binding. American writing is a completely different animal by sunset.
The longest piece in the
issue is Rumaker’s story, “The Desert.” Its 41 pages are the reason why one
can’t usefully do the math of 16 contributors, 160 pages & expect an
“average” of ten pages per writer.
Gleason, a polymath &
San Francisco music critic since the
1940s* – his column for the San
Francisco Chronicle was syndicated by over 60 newspapers nationally, and,
in his spare time, he was a vice
president at Fantasy Records, host of the TV series Jazz Casual,
contributed to Ramparts (the
radical antecedent of publications like Mother
Jones, The American Prospect & In
These Times), & cofounded Rolling Stone with Jann
Wenner which Gleason was active in editing until his
death in ’75 – alludes to Rexroth & Ferlinghetti reading poetry aloud to
jazz. Gleason’s piece doesn’t quite do justice to the degree to which the
“modern” SF jazz scene, centered around Dave Brubeck
& Vince Guaraldi, came out of the colleges, with Brubeck studying under
Darius Milhaud under the GI Bill at Mills while Guaraldi attended SF State. But
it’s a decent portrait of a world that will soon be washed over as if by a
tsunami by the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead & Big
Brother.**
Ashton, whose article
contrasts the “San Francisco School” with her own local “New York” one, could
have written her piece without crossing the George Washington Bridge – her most
direct observation comes from a letter by Hubert Crehan
that Ashton quotes in full. Both imperious & slovenly written, a bad
combination, Ashton’s “Eastern View of the San Francisco School” is most
noteworthy in that, in addition to Rothko & Still, she pays attention to
some relatively forgotten but wonderful painters, Ernest Briggs
& Edward
Dugmore. Ashton’s one small concession to her
work appearing alongside poets is to mention Rimbaud & Baudelaire! One
might assume that Ashton’s article is placed at the end as a counterweight to
Rexroth’s introduction – Gleason’s piece comes roughly in the middle
(immediately ahead of Redl’s photographs) – but I
think the real reason is one of embarrassment. The thought of framing all this
new writing with three essays, one on the poetry, one on the surrounding music
scene, and one on the associated art world, must have seemed like a great idea.
But why go to
Yet Rexroth’s introduction
is nearly as strange – he declares right off the bat that the last thing he
wants to write about again is the
What I like about this “The
San Francisco Scene,” which I’ve owned for years, is how it contextualizes the
community at a particular moment in time – unlike the Allen anthology just
three years hence, there is no division here between the San Francisco
Renaissance, Black Mountain and the Beats, although all are represented in the
issue. The presence of Rexroth, Miller & Miles offers an ag
Also worth noting is who is not included here – Lamantia, as Rexroth
so pointedly remarks; Bob Kaufman; Robin Blaser; Helen Adam; Lew Welch;
Madeline Gleason***; Richard Duerden; Kirby Doyle; Bruce Boyd; Ebbe Borregaard;
Peter Orlovsky; Ron Loewinsohn; John Wieners; David Meltzer – all but Kaufman
turn up in the Allen anthology three years later & were extremely visible
in the San Francisco writing community. Indeed, Wieners Hotel Wentley Poems is one of the classics of the City. Presumably
George Stanley, Joanne Kyger & Harold Dull were too young in 1957 – one
could argue about their absence from the anthology in 1960, especially in light
of the presence of Boyd & Doyle. But Creeley was in
So it’s a
Forty-six years later, I
believe just three of the contributors to the magazine are still alive. Yet the
world they shaped, and which
* In 1968,
Gleason lifted the San Francisco Scene
line from this issue of Evergreen Review
for a book on the 1960s rock music scene.
** The
relationship between poetry & jazz and poetry & rock is a study worth
pursuing in its own right. Jazz was the most popular music in
*** Special
thanks to Alan Brilliant, who just sent me Gleason’s Concerto for Bell and Telephone, published by Brilliant’s Unicorn
Press in 1967.
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
No message for today. I’m
too sick at heart at the impending onset of the war. It really is the end of a
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
What my kids know about Paul
Goodman is that their father regales them with a few lines of “The Lordly
Hudson” every time we cross the
Yet I have personal evidence
that the New Americans took Goodman seriously. In 1965, during the Berkeley
Poetry Conference, one of the largest and most well-attended parties – my
memory tells me that it occurred the same night that Ginsberg gave his reading
of Kral Majales in Dwinelle Hall –
was an affair given in
honor not of Ginsberg, but of Goodman, who was not a participant
of the conference at all, but happened merely to be in San Francisco and
Berkeley that week on some other business. As a hanger on at the fringes around
Ginsberg, I dutifully trooped off with the King of the May and maybe 50 other
souls from the campus to the nearby Victorian – the party as I recall spilled
over through multiple units in the house and into the “in-law” cottage in the
rear as well. I was frankly puzzled at the idea that this older guy was somehow
more of a big deal than Ginsberg, but that certainly was what I picked up from
Allen’s deference to him.
That turned out to be the
only time I ever saw Goodman and the question of his relationship to these
younger writers – Ginsberg was born the same year as my parents, so he didn’t
seem that young, although until least
1970 everybody in that whole scene was being valorized in the media for their
very youth – hasn’t crept up that often since. Michael Magee appears to be out
to change that.
Since I never read Magee,
poetry or criticism, without learning something of value, I pay attention. In
the new No, he has a short essay
entitled “Personal Poems: Pragmatism from Paul Goodman to Frank O’Hara.” In
it, the argument Magee makes is that O’Hara’s Personism joins the peripatetic
lunch poet’s interest in black culture to the history of American pragmatism and
that, thereby, the coy manifesto “Personism” is in fact “an unrecognized
‘classic’ of American pragmatism.” That is a large claim to make for a document
that is all of six paragraphs long. Strategically, it’s a somewhat circuitous
argument, in that Magee uses comments O’Hara made about Goodman in order to
justify his thesis for O’Hara as a philosophic mind, even while what Magee is really doing – particularly in the
context of No – is using O’Hara as a
mechanism for relegitimating the relatively neglected
Goodman.
It’s worth examining the
text in question. One could characterize “Personism: A Manifesto” as four
paragraphs debunking the theories of meaning and literature that underpinned
modernism, one paragraph mostly debunking abstraction* and one that serves as a
swift getaway. As in O’Hara’s poetry, the brilliance lies far less in what he’s
doing than in the way, in the most immediate sense, that he does it. Certainly the
poem that O’Hara is describing in the manifesto is itself far from his own best
work, not the sort of thing you would normally think to build your most
important critical statement around:
we don’t like
Lionel Trilling
we
decide, we like
Henry James so much we like
Herman Melville
Not the most unusual lunch
gab to share with a friend, perhaps, but, as a critical process, actually
existing Personism seems a lot like the gate keeping one used to associate with
Studio 54.
Magee makes the case for
Goodman’s impact on O’Hara forcefully. The number of out-of-the-closet
intellectuals, especially during the 1950s, was still in single digits, a
significant number of them poets, such as Ginsberg and Duncan. And one can surely
hear the echo of the New Americans in some of Goodman’s poems, such as “April,
1962”:
My countrymen have now become
too base,
I give them up. I cannot speak
with men
not my
equals. I was an American,
where now to
drag my days out and erase
this awful
memory of the
how can I
work? I hired out my pen
to make
my country practical, but I can
no longer
serve these people, they are worthless.
“Resign!
resign!” the word rings in my soul
-- is it for me? or shall I make a sign
and picket
the White House blindly in the rain,
or hold
it up on Madison Avenue
until I
vomit, or trudge to and fro
gloomily in
front of the public school?
Draw a Venn diagram around
the various poetic impulses in O’Hara, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg
and something like this might in fact emerge.
Less clear in Magee’s
overall schema is the role of black culture. Both O’Hara’s essay and “Personal
Poem” take as their point of origin a lunch that O’Hara had with the then-LeRoi
Jones at Moriarty’s on
* O’Hara’s
example seems almost deliberately aimed at the work of Barbara Guest.
** The
impact of post-war jazz does seem pretty minimal in Ashbery and Schuyler and Ted
Berrigan’s collection of Arthur Godfrey records hardly demonstrates an ear for
the nuances of Mingus or Monk.
Monday, March 17, 2003
When I was but a pup, still
in high school or just barely out of it, I would frequent the South Campus
environs of the
It would be several years,
literally, before I would muster the courage to introduce myself to that poet –
he seemed so much older, at least 25, & his sense of concentration amid the
chatter, sound of dishes & coffee house music – the Med in those days
favored classical – was truly awesome. It seemed as though he were contained in
a bubble of perfect focus. His name, it turned out, was Kenneth Irby, and he had some
sort of grad student or post-grad job with the University, operating, if I
recall correctly, a mimeograph machine.
It also took me awhile to
understand fully what a wonderful writer Irby was. As was evident even with his
early books from Black Sparrow, Irby was completely persuaded by the poetics of
Projectivism, perhaps because he came to it with the most exquisitely tuned ear
of any poet I have ever encountered. It was as perfect a marriage between a
poet’s gift & his practice as one might imagine.
For all of his obvious &
intense devotion to the process of poetry, Irby never did demonstrate much of
the anxious attention to publication, fame or the “career of the poet” that, in
fact, enables many a lesser writer acquire a far wider reputation. Plus, Irby
was part of a difficult generation, too young to have appeared in the New American Poetry,
too close in age to really separate out fully from those older guys into
something identifiably new & marketable. While some of the poets from that
“tweener” generation did go on to establish
themselves in their own right – Ronald Johnson, Kathleen Fraser, Joanne Kyger,
John Taggart, Clayton Eshleman – many, such as David Schaff,
Seymour Faust, Jonathan Greene, Gail Dusenbury,
Harold Dull or Robert Parker, dropped out of sight entirely while others
transformed their aesthetics in some dramatic fashion, as did Daphne Marlatt & David Bromige. Some, like Irby and George
Stanley, have continued to produce excellent work, but have done so at a
considerable distance from any major scene: Irby has been in
So when I found a poem by
Ken Irby in the new issue of No, adrenalin rushed through my
system. The poem, “[Record]” – the brackets are part of the title – recounts,
as I read it, a dream in which Irby confronts the dead, specifically his mother
& Ed Dorn. While Irby has always liked dreaming as a source for his poetry,
“[Record]” is in some ways an unusual work for him, using a good deal of the
parallel construction one associates more with the Beats:
And
when you die, or when you think you’re dead, or when you dream you’ve died
your feet are turned backwards and your legs and loins
but not your waist
and your arms embrace your head and backwards too and
one of them waves goodbye to the air in the air
and the dancer on your belly whirls and reaches to
regenerate the sun
and rides your body like a boat curved on into the sun
holding all you’ve ever done up like a ticket from amongst
the snakes
and blossoms sway to tickle your navel, the entrance
and the exit, the swivel and the plug, the cast and the release, and the call
That’s just a taste, just
one of the poem’s eight sections, but typing it up here, reading it aloud as I
do, makes me want to holler with excitement. The rhythms capture perfectly an
otherworldly sense of ecstasy, death not as loss but as passage. Whether or not
this should be what eventually greets us – or greets us only in dream – is to a
large degree not relevant, because Irby’s use of rhythm makes it credible, one
hears it in the body as well as in the mind.
* Some of
the terminal hipness of all this drained away when a high school teacher of
mine, Ken Davids, published a novel with Grove Press
about life at the Med, The Softness on
the Other Side of the Hole. Having come full circle, Davids
now writes about coffee.
I, on the other hand, haven’t had a cup in 13 years.
Sunday, March 16, 2003
I want to give a hearty Yes
to No,
the new book-sized journal from Lost Roads Publishers, edited by Deb Klowden & Ben Lerner. It’s a rich panoply of writing
& visual art, packaged in a binding sturdy enough to go through the mails
without a cover or package & arrive in perfect shape.*
No is also
a reminder that pumping money into the design process isn’t the same as good
design. The publication goes out of its way to make it hard to figure out who
its contributors are. The pages containing their work list only the last names
along the bottom – which is fine if your name is Armantrout or Lauterbach, but
a problem if it’s Wright or Johnson or Nelson or even Waldrop. The table of
contents only makes matters worse, listing works – with two exceptions – only
by their titles, although – a test to see how unreadably busy a contents page
can be – putting contributor’s notes
under each such listing.
The two exceptions to the
no-name in the boldface table of contents listing belong to graphic artist Che Chen, whose work appears in four-color glossy format in
different spots of the journal as well as on the Jasper John’s homage of a
cover, and Keith Waldrop, whose booklength contribution, Songs from the Decline of the West, is published on gray chapbook
stock quite different from the eggshell white of the rest of the journal.**
The editors would do well to
take a look at Kiosk, noted
here previously for an example of what elegance in publishing can be. But
even Conjunctions, the
publication that No most closely
mimics in look & feel, stands as
a perfectly good model of how a table of contents page ought to function. The
self-indulgent cutesy approach undercuts the seriousness with which the rest of
the issue is produced.
And the content, once you get
past the packaging overkill, is terrific. Not too surprisingly for a
publication that has its roots at Brown (even if the editors live in New York
City), the core of No is ellipticist:
virtually everybody associated with that term save for Jorie Graham – at least
I couldn’t find any work by her in
the issue – is represented. But, if ellipticism is it’s core, No extends outward in quite a few
different directions, some of them surprising, to make what editorially is a
significant argument for its literary vision. Thus we find John Taggart,
Michael Harper, Jean Valentine & even
One person whose work made
me terrifically happy to read it here is Michael Davidson. Davidson doesn’t
publish a lot of poetry & that has combined with his geographic distance
from the rest of the literary scene to keep him from becoming nearly as famous
as he deserves to be. His poem is entitled “Bad Modernism”:
“Suddenly all is / loathing”
–
John Ashbery
and
there’s plenty to be unhappy about
if I can
just get the reception area festooned
in time for
their arrival, paper cups
and those
little plastic whatsits so that,
gorged on
meaning,
they troop
through the glass doors
seeking
interpretation, first floor
mildly
historical, second door on the left
desire
matrix, parents accompany
their
indiscretions straight
to the
penthouse and someone
hands them a
phone, “turtles”
they’re
called, heads bobbing
as though
they had a choice
to be
party favors, deep structure
on your
left follow the clicking
to a
white cube, we only work
part time
the other part
we illustrate
profound malaise,
I like these cream filled
versions
so unlike
what we get at home,
having said
which
we rewind
the tape,
slip it
through a slot marked “aha”
and take
the El home,
the smell
you smell afar
is
something boiling over.
Langpo historically is
supposed to be a far cry from the
The title “Bad Modernism” is
worth thinking through more carefully. The body of the poem itself is a full
deck of postmodern devices, or at least of devices that get associated with
postmodernism. I think it seems evident enough that Davidson’s own relationship
to both text & title is significantly bracketed by layers of irony (i.e., I
don’t necessarily believe he really does “like these cream filled versions”),
but at what level does he appear to be saying that one definition of the
postmodern might, in fact, be “bad modernism?” Davidson carefully doesn’t
answer that, but rather leaves it for us to decode.
Ellipticism’s preferred
Is this a sign that literary
formations are starting to gel for the first time in over 20 years? I still
don’t see the evidence. Like Stefans’ theory of Creeps, Ellipticism has been
more of a description of impulses than an engine of collective behavior. It may
be, however, that No will have an
impact on this. Younger poet/editors can do that at times. Tom Clark was far
more militant in his advocacy – and border patrol – of the
* Kenneth
Warren, take note.
** Thus
it’s Rosmarie who gets the “bottom of the page” last
name treatment for her work. Actually, the clearest roster of who is included
in the issue is the arty-but-alphabetical way they’re incorporated into the
design of the rear cover.
*** Do you
think George Plimpton realizes that the most
significant thing he ever did in the poetry world was to hire Tom Clark? We
suspect not.
Saturday, March 15, 2003
It can be interesting when a
great poet writes something that doesn’t quite work. There are more than a few
examples of this particular sub-genre, but the poem I’ve been contemplating has
been Lorine Niedecker’s “Thomas Jefferson.” It’s not in any particular sense a
bad poem – the lesser works of top-level poets are often better than virtually
everything else out there. But contrasted with Niedecker’s extraordinary gift
for the minute details of daily life, this textbook reconstruction of the
revolution’s second Renaissance man (Franklin having been the first) has the
air of an exercise. One can see, for example, the influence of Pound &
Pound pretty much at his worst at that, the Van Buren Cantos as a model for historical portraiture. Given Niedecker’s
radically different art, the parts of it all never quite cohere. Yet portions,
as with all her writing, nonetheless border on brilliance – reading it gave me
the sense of attending a beautiful car crash.
Niedecker did not so much
write serial poems as she did poetic series & this is one example of that
aspect of her work. Unlike most of those poems, “Jefferson” is for the most
part marked off not by periods or asterisks separating individual sections but
by Roman numerals* – possibly an allusion to Jefferson’s attraction to
classical & neo-classical thought, but also I suspect as a mechanism for
registering her own discomfort or distance.
But if “
This sense of alone-ness
reminded me of another Niedecker poem about a very different president, “J. F.
Kennedy after the
To stand up
black-marked tulip
not
snapped by the storm
“I’ve been duped by the
experts”
– and
walk
the South
Lawn
Niedecker can see the
isolation in anyone.
It’s worth noting that the
extraneous detail here – “black-marked tulip / not snapped by the storm” –
which actually takes up one-third of the lines in this taut little poem, is
something that doesn’t really occur at all in “Jefferson” – perhaps Niedecker
thought the poem’s diffuseness, spread out over six-plus pages, couldn’t
accommodate it – yet this tulip is precisely why the JFK poem proves so very
powerful. To reduce the couplet to an “objective correlative,” as would have
happened once upon a time, misses its function
entirely. Rather it is the contrast that throws the human reactions entirely
into relief.
There is a famous photograph
taken by Yoko Ono of John
Lennon’s glasses resting on a table in their apartment at the Dakota. One
lens is still splattered with Lennon’s blood. Through the other lens one can
sort of see the view out the window, that expansive sense of
* There are
asterisks, but within sections.
** He wore
them first for his role in Richard Lester’s 1967 anti-war film, How I Won the
War. They were seen by most people for the first time on the cover of
the inaugural issue of Rolling
Stone.
Friday, March 14, 2003
Yesterday, Matthew Zapruder
made some comments in his email here that are worth examining in greater depth,
both for what they say and what they presume. The context you will recall was
some poetry by Noah Eli Gordon that was rejected from a poetry reading being
staged in opposition to the impending war on
Are Ashbery's "Leaving Atocha
Station," or Mina Loy, or Shakespeare's sonnets for that matter, as easily
apprehendible on first reading as let's say Philip
Larkin or Charles Simic? I'm not talking about the further and endless levels
of complexity in a good poem, regardless of its surface. Just
its surface. A poem does have a surface, doesn't it?
I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is
willing to grant that the notion of "difficulty" has any place at all
in poetry. That's an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and
elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that
reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely thought
that Noah's poem was too difficult to work effectively in that situation.
It’s the belief in that
distinction I want to question. Not because I want to bludgeon this particular
event into the ground, but rather because a decision predicated upon that distinction
stands as a metonym for a wider range of behavior that occur in & around
poetry in this society.
It’s a distinction that
underlay a decision by one post-New American writer I know over a decade ago to
not recommend Robert Grenier for the
short list for a teaching position at his school, a state university. This
writer not only fully understood Grenier’s reputation among his peers as a
poet, but also Grenier’s reputation as an innovative, engaged teacher
in the classroom. “I just cannot bring myself to deal with the backlash,” is,
in essence if not in words, how he explained his decision to me at the time, “if I recommend somebody whose most important work is a box.”
I could replicate other
examples of this same sort of decision-making all across the continent with
respect to jobs, to publications, to grants, the entire gamut of what constitutes
the literary life. At one level, this is a type of thinking & acting with
which Whitman had to contend. Certainly the growth of bureaucratic institutions
in the wake of the Second World War, as the American post-secondary education
system rapidly expanded toward what it is today, gave full reign to precisely
the sorts of decisions that might be made around variants of this particular
distinction. The first volume of Hank Lazer’s excellent critical work, Opposing
Poetries, documents this phenomenon intelligently & carefully. Jed Rasula’s American
Poetry Wax Museum does likewise.
The distinction is not about
difficulty versus simplicity – although that is one form that this question can
take – nor is it about surface versus depth, nor even intelligibility versus
whatever the opposite of intelligibility might be. Rather it is a distinction
that has to do with expectation, the expectation of what is possible. It’s a
distinction between what I – or anyone – already know and what I might now
confront.
The school of quietude is
almost entirely predicated on a pathological desire to avoid just this
confrontation. Indeed,
as Edgar Allen Poe observed when he first coined that phrase to describe
the very same tradition that persists to this day, that is why this school is
so very quiet.
Imagine the life experiences
of a person relatively unfamiliar with poetry coming to a reading in the
In this context, which is an
ordinary context for any poetry reading in the
A few years ago, my sons,
who were five at the time, got into the great puzzle books of Graeme Base, and asked me
if adults had puzzle books or books that were games as well. So we read together
all of Tom Philips’ A Humument
and then we read the first 80 or so pages of Finnegans Wake. This morning,
six years later, one of my boys asked me “What was the other name of Finnegan
besides Everybody?” “Humphrey Clinker Earwicker?”
I asked in reply. “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. Which is not
such a bad retention level that many years later. While my kids didn’t
catch all (or maybe even any) of the
bawdy references in either work, neither book when read aloud can honestly be
said to be too difficult for kindergartners. That doesn’t mean that the Wake necessarily works as a book – I
think that Joyce’s philological approach to language led him astray – but its
reputed difficulty is not a difficulty of the text itself but rather of the
social context into which works such as this have been integrated – or, more
accurately, marginalized – in our society.
Another example of how
people who aren’t readers read poetry. Seven years ago, I discovered a pair of
siblings I had not known that I had. Both live in the
It’s only when you know what
poetry is supposed to be and you
confront something that falls outside of that framework that it starts to
become genuinely hard. And that knowing what poetry “is
supposed to be” is taught – it’s neither natural nor integral to the poem, but
rather is superimposed over it.
So, yes, I will admit that
there is a difference between ”Leaving Atocha Station” and the work of Philip Larkin**, but it is
not a question of a difficult vs. an easy surface. Larkin wrote an impoverished
poetry & Ashbery respects his readers. Larkin’s work may be apprehended on
some level at a single sitting – but this is invariably a sign of deprivation.
Bad TV sitcoms can be apprehended at a single sitting because there is never
more than a single idea to any scene. Bad poetry is not so terribly different.
But even Friends & Seinfeld have strived for more than that. I have never
understood why any human being would subject others to such an information-drained
experience? Why would one deliberately write a poetry
of sensory deprivation?
The presumption underneath
Zapruder’s question is that univocal, one-dimensional poetry is in some way
“normal,” when in fact it is radically unlike the everyday experiences of
language of any human being in this society. I won’t argue the point that there
isn’t a considerable amount of such poetry around, but almost invariably
univocal poetics can be traced back to structural failures in the educational
system, literally funneling a segment of the population into a narrow
conception of poetry that is pathologically bizarre. That the school of
quietude has grown into a self-reinforcing ensemble of social institutions
dedicated to the preservation of this world view is something that social
psychologists of the future will no doubt have lots to say about.
Historically
the Left has always demonstrated considerably anxiety around all issues of
culture, from the faux hillbillies of the Popular Front to John Sayle’s cinematic sermonettes. In some sense, a poetry reading against the war in
GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!
GOOOOOOOOOR!
GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!
Grah goooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeeer! Grayowhr!
Greeeeee
GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAHHHRR! RAHR!
RAHR! RAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!
BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE
looking for sugar!
GAHHHHHHHH!
ROWRR!
GROOOOOOOOOOH!
Some
time around 1970, there was a giant reading also against the Vietnam War at
These conceptions of what
events like this should be have
bedeviled them forever. In some sense, the organizers of this reading were only
acting as links in a larger chain of fear that they share across time with
Jerry Rubin & Denise Levertov. For his part, Noah Eli Gordon, like McClure
& the People’s Prick before him, with his poem that read
aloud slowly lasts less than two minutes, got to play the role of the
barbarian at the gate, the promise or threat of a little polysemy into a world
that is sworn to avoid it.
But Jerry Rubin, you will
note, changed his mind. Within three years of putting the kibosh on McClure’s participation
in the teach-in, he would show up at the New York Stock Exchange wearing only
an American flag &, in
I’m not necessarily an
advocate of Rubin’s politics, fun though they might have been. But it seems
apparent to me that the issue of complexity is a spectre
that is going to haunt poetry forever. The reason the anti-war poems of the
school of quietude, well intended as they were, had so little impact in the
1960s was because, regardless of what they said about the war, the form of
their work argued (sometimes, if it was well written, forcefully) precisely for
all the institutions of order as they apply to language & meaning. Sam Hamill’s sad little chapbook is merely the repetition of
that history, this time as farce.
* Not
literally backwards speaking. His role was recorded with him reading his words
backwards – sdrawkcab sdrow --
& the tape was then reversed so that it sounded “frontwards,” but as if spoken from Mars.
** There is
considerably more going on in any poem by Charles Simic, so I don’t want to
extend this argument to him. I have some fondness for the soft surrealists of
the 1960s: Simic, James Tate, Bill Knott. There’s more to their poetry than
some of their fans seem to get.
Labels: School of Quietude, Theory
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Matthew
Zapruder & Noah
Eli Gordon both sent in lengthy & thoughtful responses to their exchange
previously on this blog. John
Erhardt, who calls his own blog The Skeptic with
good reason, adds his own perspective, calling me on my use of the
First, Matthew Zapruder:
Dear Mr. Silliman,
I'm glad this discussion is happening,
I think it's worth talking about on many levels. So this is just to briefly clarify, in order to further focus on what I
think are the real issues here.
Calling some poetry "difficult" is NOT
necessarily to say that it is "thereby excludable." I think, on the
contrary, that granting that some poems are more difficult on their surface
than others is to come part way towards a readership, and an audience, with
respect and humility. And thereby to help more difficult poetry, and poets,
gain a wider appreciation.
Sure, "difficult" CAN mean "excludable," and often does. And that stinks. And we
should all struggle against that. But "difficult," or "dense,"
or "abstract," can also just mean those things. And someone can, in
good faith, use those adjectives to describe a poem without inevitably
exercising a value judgment. I know I often do.
Are Ashbery's "Leaving Atocha
Station," or Mina Loy, or Shakespeare's sonnets for that matter, as easily
apprehendible on first reading as let's say Philip
Larkin or Charles Simic? I'm not talking about the further and endless levels
of complexity in a good poem, regardless of its surface. Just
its surface. A poem does have a surface, doesn't it?
I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is
willing to grant that the notion of "difficulty" has any place at all
in poetry. That's an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and
elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that
reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely
thought that Noah's poem was too difficult to work effectively in that
situation.
By making that distinction, and behaving accordingly, they
should not be inevitably tarred with the brush of those who are "dumbing
down density," or who "argue always against social change and for a traditionalism whose sole justification is inertia." On the contrary.
One can agree or disagree about the judgment the
organizers made about Noah's poem. I guess I just don't think it's true that
the only conclusion one can draw from someone who thinks that Noah's poem was
too difficult for that situation is that they believe that the audience is
"functionally illiterate." That seems too extreme. After all, on
first hearing, "Will Sacajawea haul her
child/out of the prison of our new coin// Will she still point toward the
river" is perfectly clear linguistically, but not necessarily in any way
clear thematically. One might, in good faith, say, "huh? Why did he just
say that?"
Which is a great thing to ask
people to say, really, most of the time. But maybe not
all the time, in all situations. It's just a matter of degree. And the
organizers were making a good faith judgment, drawing the line in this
particular situation where they think it belongs.
However, if you don't think that the distinction between
more or less complicated poetry has any meaning, then of course the only
possible conclusion is that the organizers are malicious policers
of the aesthetics of dissent, or cretinous victims of
their own preconceptions about what poetry can do.
My final word is the following: hammering people who are
trying to organize a war protest over a borderline judgment call about a poem
that, let's face it, is not exactly "The Broken Tower," seems plain
old selfish and self-absorbed. All in all, it just seems like the best thing
given the horrifying and helpless situation we find ourselves in -- on the verge
of being implicated in a totally unjust, hegemonic, and plain old unbearably
stupid and risky war, by people whose attitude about human life is hopelessly
cavalier, and whose use of language undermines the fabric of our national
agreement about who we are when we are at our best -- would be to put aside our
own egos, and our own tendencies to obfuscate and divert the issues (which is
what the government does so horribly well), and instead to do everything we can
to stop it.
From Noah Eli Gordon:
Dear Ron Silliman,
Matthew Zapruder’s recent letter entirely misses the point
of my correspondence, and, regretfully, in it’s vehement assertion of my
intention as self-promotion and thus self-righteousness, completely recasts the
discussion until, as you remarked, his argument “more or less dissolves into
smoke.” Some of that smoke nonetheless
needs addressing, if only to insure that it doesn’t mask any still smoldering
embers.
I want to briefly address the three parts to Zapruder’s
stated motivation behind his letter, which are, in my mind, collectively
emblematic of the “erasure” of what you call the “post-avant community”—and all
the more problematic as Zapruder is the publisher of Verse Press, which is
quickly becoming one of the more important and influential new small press
ventures.
What prompted my initial email was the desire to further a
dialogue on precisely the phrase which was so troubling to Zapruder, the
aesthetics of dissent. The forum section from the latest issue of The
Poetry Project Newsletter featured 12 poets responding to the
following:
From Ron
Silliman’s blog: “There has…been a depoliticization of younger people generally
& that has impacted poets…You see the long-term result in a lot of writing these
days that is simultaneously politically correct and depoliticized, a politics
really of cynicism and disgust. So this also becomes an incentive not to
organize, not to write critically.”
From an
interview with Lyn Hejinian and
Do you
agree with these characterizations? What is your own sense of the
writing/situation/outlook of the younger generation(s) vis-à-vis politics?
What followed this was an interesting, albeit somewhat
loaded debate, as Hejinian’s comments were made prior to September 11th,
and its continued aftermath, which obviously helped to codify a new historical
moment, if one frames historical moments as stemming from a locus of
opposition. One of the responses that I found most compelling was from Michael
Magee who began by evoking Williams’ introduction to The Wedge,
published in 1944 (there’s a historical moment for you!) which begins:
The war
is the first and only thing in the world today.
The arts
generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a
turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of
the field.
Magee goes on to write, “The state has always attempted to
co-opt the language of dissent and so de-fang it, and the democratic-capitalist
state (yes, I know) does it better than any other because it can couch the very
act of co-optation as either ‘dialogue’ or as a marketing of a revolutionary
new product (cool).”
So the idea of what marks dissent as such, of how one is
able to articulate dissent was very much on my mind. I attended and
participated in a Poets Against the War reading on February 12th in
Northampton ( where I DID read someone else’s poem, section 20 of George
Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” ) and, ironically, left feeling exactly the “one
part amazed, and one part appalled” of Zapruder’s reaction to my email. In
fact, for pretty much the same reason he brings up as the first example of the
impetus behind his email; I found the “hypocrisy and self-righteousness really
annoying.” But where Zapruder was referring to the context for my questioning
of aesthetics, I merely mean the aesthetic framework within which the majority
of the readers for that particular evening were working.
And just as Zapruder writes, “The fact that Noah decided not only not to read another poem, but not even to attend
[the March 5th reading], makes his whole motivation more than a
little suspect. I don’t want to sound crude, but what’s more important to Noah:
Noah’s poem, or protesting the war?” I too felt a similar uncertainty behind
the entire event (of February 12th); the utterly solipsistic nature
of most of the poetry read that evening was hard for me to stomach, but I
realize it’s a question of…(drum roll)…the aesthetics of dissent. I left that
evening feeling quite torn, questioning, as Zapruder pointed out, the
effectiveness of preaching to the converted here in what some call the
Personally, I’ve got a lot of unresolved conflicts
brewing, not only as to what the merits of political poetry are, but also as to
how one defines a poem as political. Not to belabor the point, but the poem of
mine included in my original email was written over three years ago, and
represents an aesthetic stance I’ve moved away from, which, admittedly, as
Zapruder writes, “seems to treat the whole war as a personal problem for the
poet,” regardless of the fact that the “war” in that particular poem is the
Cold War.
I think Michael
Palmer’s comments in a recent interview with Daniel Kane help to clarify
the discussion:
DK: …How do you see your writing as a “critique”
of power if, as I suspect, poetry in the Untied States appeals to a relatively
limited, privileged audience? I ask you this especially because the polyvocal,
non-narrative language you employ is not used as a “clear” political rhetoric
of a Malcolm X or, from a literary perspective, the Marxist-informed writing of
Amiri Baraka.
MP: A poetry of instrumental rhetoric, such as some of Baraka’s, or some
of Neruda’s, or some of Hikmet’s
and Cesaire’s, or some of Mayakovsky’s, or some of
Ginsberg’s and Rich’s, aims to incite action. It is directed outward, and is
direct rather than indirect (though exactly how direct might be worth
exploring in detail). It speaks for an imagined many, with whom the author
identifies in terms of utopian aspirations. It is the poetry we properly think
of first when considering explicitly political verse. However, poetry of
critique, and critique of power, exits in many forms. Anna Akhmatova refusal to
efface her erotic subjectivity was a real enough critique to draw significant
attention and concern from Stalin, in a nation where poetry was known very much
to matter. The complexly visceral lyric experiments of
To understand the resistant effects of poetry, it is
probably most convenient to consider those totalitarian societies where it is prohibited
or strictly controlled, and many have done so. Yet we must look inward too,
toward the censorship of the marketplace, fully supported by our supine media,
for regulation and surveillance of poetry within our culture. To cite a
ludicrously blatant example, we have only to turn to The New
York Times Book Review where, on the rare occasions it does review
poetry, only the blandest of pap receives a “safe for consumption” label. It is not really so
far from the robotic and shamelessly simplistic speech of our 43rd
President, the one who was not elected, the one who is a poetry-free zone unto
himself, and who would seem, at least initially, to have a free hand to direct
our response to the monstrous crimes of the 11th. I fear that no
terrorist could wish for more, but I deeply hope I will be proven wrong, just
as I hope that the flag will not be manipulated as it has been in the past to
sanction anti-constitutional measures and the murderous abuse of force.
Poetry in the
And it is precisely in the opportunity (or lack thereof)
to “offer an alternative to discourse as usual” where I felt taken aback by the
organizers’ aesthetic stance, as the alternative to said discourse covered the
narrow range you pointed out between “formalists, slam poets, and everyone in
between,” a kind of “discourse as usual” in regards to the public expectation
of poetry of dissent. Zapruder rhetorically inverts my original correspondence
when he mentions his second reason for writing, “Also, when I see a poet
self-righteously complain in a public forum about whether his poem was
suppressed or not [funny, I thought I was “complaining” about the clarity of
what constitutes dissent], under the guise of defending the right of poetry to
be able to do whatever it is that he thinks his poems is doing, while bombs are
about to fall on Iraq, as a poet I feel embarrassed.” Well, let me return to
Williams: “It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the
field.”
I too feel embarrassed, I feel embarrassed that I’m unsure
where I stand as a poet, that I’m reluctant to merge the articulation my
political beliefs and my current poetic practices, embarrassed that I’m putting
time into the writing of this email rather than shouting in the middle of Main
Street. But this is what I do. Tinker in the dark.
The third reason Zapruder supplies is
where I see the problem of erasure cropping up.
He writes, “And third, because poets ought not sit with our arms folded pretending that all poetry is
equally apprehendable (regardless of difficulty of syntax, or unfamiliarity of
imagery, etc.), and that anyone who can’t see that is a cretin. On the contrary
it’s our job to try to help educate and prepare our readers for the next new
thing.” Holy hyperbole Batman! I was absolutely polite in my email to Sean. In
hindsight, yes, it was somewhat condescending of me to refer to him as a
“student.” But I hardly implied that he, or anyone else, was a cretin. I’m glad
that he and others put in the effort to organize the reading and I think I made
that clear in my email. But what I find most problematic about Zapruder’s
comment here is the subtle way in which he argues for the oracular role of the
poet. If, as Zapruder states, “it’s our job to try to help educate and prepare
our readers for the next new thing,” then I am wholly outside of his choice of
“our” as the operative pronoun. I don’t feel it’s my job to do anything but
write as best as I can, without making hierarchical judgments of my readers, as
I’m infinitely more interested in asking questions.
Yours,
Noah Eli Gordon
Finally, John Erhardt:
Ron;
Your body of evidence for this statement is exactly two
emails. Allow me to reciprocate. I've seen a picture
of you, and I know that you are bald. I've seen Charles
Bernstein read, and I know that he is bald, too. Does that mean I can say,
with any certainty, that "all Language poets are bald?" or that
"Language poetry makes people bald?" Of course not.
You can literally go in any direction if your data consists of only two
examples.
You disprove an entire University's literacy by appealing to
a single day's visit to your son's junior high. Why such sweeping
generalizations? I've gotten used to your version of inductive reasoning and am
somewhat prepared for it now, but this is simply foolish. I'm happy that your
day of instruction went well, and I'm pleased that the students were able to
perform. Maybe "perform" isn't the best word, since that implies they
were acting. I'm pleased the students were able to suspend their educations and
actually experience poetry. But what does that mean? Nothing.
Nothing at all. You admit that you haven't been in a
school for 20 years, and so your one example is rather isolated. It's also a
tainted sample set since your son attended the school; I think the likelihood
that the students WERE "performing" increased when that variable was
introduced. I can remember one career day where we hung on every word of a
speaker, not because we were interested in sewage treatment and civil
engineering, but because the speaker was a friend's father.
<<Considering the disputations here of
late concerning poetic difficulty & ant-war readings, it’s worth noting
here that I built my own little 30-minute presentation around a reading of the
opening section of Ketjak, a text
significantly more difficult than anything Noah Eli Gordon was proposing for
the UMass reading.>>
Why is this worth noting? Any time one makes a comparison
like this, a hierarchy gets created. Here, you are on top and Noah is on the
bottom. But since I've been reading your blog since shortly after it appeared, I
know that I don't expect you to put yourself anywhere but at the top. Whenever
an intellectual discusses intellectualism, they will always place themselves
within the circle of acceptability. But as long as we're noting things, I think
it's worth noting that this reading wasn't a Umass reading at all; it was at
If you were a lousy poet this email would have been a lot
more fun to write. But I don't think that at all. I know that you are
intelligent, and so this post strikes me as particularly curious. I simply
cannot see how you would arrive at the conclusion that Umass
is populated by "crippled literates." It can't be political, since Umass (and the community) is pretty close to Socialist, and
I know of your ties to Radical Society.
So I can only conclude that you've GOT to be withholding something, though what
that something is, I don't know. I'm guessing you have strong feelings toward
workshops in general (as I do), and that Umass proved
to be a convenient punching bag at the moment. Whatever this additional
evidence is, I would assume it's highly limited. I happen to know both Matthew
Zapruder and Noah Gordon, and they are both very intelligent people who love
poetry. Your comments make them sound like poetry clowns, which simply isn't
the case.
I don't expect you to respond. You must get a hundred
emails a day that talk about your blog, and I don't expect special treatment.
But I did want to voice my disappointment with today's post. If you've made it
this far, I thank you.
John Erhardt
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
This is an especially fun correspondence, taken from
the archives of Whale Cloth Press,
concerning its recent publication of Robert Grenier’s Sentences
and the topics of identity, difference, democracy & JavaScript. Thanks to Jessica Lowenthal &
To Whom It May Concern:
I am a graduate student
at the
Sincerely,
Jessica Lowenthal
Ж Ж Ж
Jessica Lowenthal:
Thanks for your
interest in Sentences. I'm
I'll try my best to
answer your questions, but please note that while I was responsible for certain
(very differing) aspects of production for both the original and the current
versions, any opinions, intent, etc. are my own and don't necessarily reflect Grenier's.
The original and the
"new publication" are, of course, as you indicate, quite different in
the sensory aspect of handling the cards. This is the case for most every
"book" or artifact that makes its way from the 3D world to non-3D representation
on the web. Another aspect of the web version that differs from the original is
the containment of the cards in a box. There is no box, so to speak, on the
web, unless you consider the browser window or web site a container. It's
interesting to note though that this aspect of the work had its own evolution.
Grenier created the work on 500
When you say, "I
sense that there's something to the handling of the cards that's important to
the boxed version, but there's something more democratic in the online version
that brings the new accessibility of the piece more in line with the reading
experience," I'm not sure how to respond because I'm not clear on what you
mean. There's no prescribed way to read the "boxed version". I do
remember observing that most people were careful in their handling of the
cards, although this surprised me. One can read the cards one at a time,
stacking them back up on top of each other on a new stack, one can lay them out
in groups of one's own arrangement, one can shuffle them, one can pin them to a
wall, etc. And so, in some way, one could say the "boxed version"
allows for a "freer" mode of interacting with the work than the
online version. Is the original then, in fact, "more democratic" than
the online version or is it just better suited to an individual reader's preferences?
Is this what you're getting at when you align "accessibility" and
"democracy" (it can be read by more people because it's on the web)
with the "reading experience"?
In any case,
similarities exist between the two versions in that they both present(ed) design/production challenges. Containment,
sequence/randomness, consistency, materials are all issues that present(ed) themselves in both instances.
As for how I randomize
the cards... In JavaScript I wrote the following code which ensures that the
array a() contains all the numbers from 0 to 499 in
random order without any duplicates. This happens every time you navigate to
the work. The value at each array index is used in turn as a lookup index to
another array (not shown) that contains the text of the individual cards. The
work is different when seen in Internet Explorer 5.5+ browsers than with any
others since I use an Internet Explorer-only Transition effect to animate the
cards changing. Other browsers don't support that animation effect.
var a = new Array();
function CreateArrayWithRandom(){
var
m,n,i,j;
i = 0;
j = 0;
while (i <= 499)
{
m = (500 * Math.random()) + 1;
n = Math.floor(m);
for
(j=0;j<=499;j++)
{
if (a[j] ==
(n-1))
{
j = -1;
break;
}
}
if (j != -1)
{
a[i] = (n-1);
i++;
j=0;
}
}
return;
}
I hope this has been of some help.
Ж Ж Ж
Jessica Lowenthal in turn responded:
Dear Michael,
Thanks for all the information; very helpful stuff – and very
kind of you to respond so quickly and thoroughly.
By "more democratic" and "in line with the
reading experience" of the original, I meant (as you guessed despite my cryptic
prose) that although the web version eliminates the reader's ability to
manipulate the cards (to stack 'em, sort 'em, shuffle 'em, or pin 'em), more
people can read the text now that it's online. It's one kind of freedom for
another: the "freer mode" (as you say) of the boxed version is
replaced by "free access" to the website. I was trying to suggest
that the new freedom of access somehow matched the collaboratory impulse of the
original.
As to your surprise about how carefully readers manipulated the
cards: I suspect that now the cards are handled with more care than ever
before. I was afraid to touch the
version I saw! I watched as the owner of the box flipped randomly among the
cards, producing a reading experience sort of like the online version (without
the script), in that I read a set of cards randomized by an external hand.
Anyway, thanks again for your help.
Sincerely,
Jessica Lowenthal
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Reading Jenn
McCreary’s doctrine of signatures,
one might expect that the immediate association from McCreary’s text would be
in the direction of Chris McCreary’s The
Effacements. The two are married, co-editors of Ixnay, and their texts even share
a common binding, having been published yin/yang style by Gil Ott’s Singing
Horse Press. Yet the book that kept popping up as antecedent in my imagination
as I read signatures was former
Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s bk of (h)rs, Like McCarthy, McCreary makes great
use of ye olde texts & concepts, employing them
as a framework through which to examine contemporary life.
The doctrine of signatures
itself is a concept that underlies most forms of herbal medicine, the notion
that plants have specific medicinal destinies & that these can in turn be
divined by the “signature” of the plant, if only one knows how to read it. The
classic example is the use of hepatica for ailments of the liver because the
plant itself is shaped roughly akin to a liver. One can find variants of this
in Islam & in ancient
My sense is that Jenn McCreary uses this doctrine neither as an adept nor an
apprentice, but rather the way Jack Spicer once used baseball: as a lens
through which events come into focus or are refracted, & as a discursive
horizon. It’s a strategy that enables McCarthy – like Spicer before her – to
compose a lengthy serial poem that is deeply personal & to some degree
private in such a way as to convey its cohesion – & its deeper concerns –
to an outside reader who might well never have met the author.
On the surface, the poem as
a whole is divided into five sections, each of whose titles are bounded by
colons, a device that calls to mind Simon Perchik:
§
:pre
script:
§
:whistling
in the dark:
§
:humors:
§
:receipts:
§
:a doctrine
of signatures:
Roughly speaking, these
sections are what they say they are. Yet, at a deeper level, the structure of doctrine is very different from this
five-part scheme – rather, the poem strikes me more as being built out of two
halves. The first half contains the first four sections combined, while the
second, slightly longer half is composed of only the final section. At one
level, I see the first four sections as setting up the second half, especially
since it contains one of the longest runs of great writing I’ve come across in
some time. Yet, in fact, some of the very best work in doctrine occurs in the “:receipts:”
section, so even as I type this I’m conscious that my description fails to do
the poem justice.
“:whistling in the dark:” to my reading is the theory section,
literally the statement of a thesis or problem, how to communicate from here
(where I am) to there (where you are). “:humors:” – the
one section of the book I’m not completely sold on – appears to stalk out a
range of options, cataloged precisely by the humors: blood, bile, choler &
phlegm. It’s the most descriptive section &, as such, feels the most
restrained. “:receipts:” just takes off – I read it initially
as a series of overheard (& one-sided) communications – it’s the passage
that brought Spicer’s serial poetry to mind. But there are
recipes here also, droll commentary, moments of horror, allusions to Charles
Olson. It’s among the richest six-page sets of writing one can imagine.
Until, that is, it gets just
blown away by the range & majesty & depth of the second half, the title
section of the poem. Consider these two passages:
4.
he said, you write like I cook – or try
to cook. I promise you a poem of domesticated
purslane, of
lettuces & lemons. I promise you
a poem
as perfect as a potato
is
perfect, that tastes like valium
feels &
turns the sky to honey
& lavender.
5.
we’ve
important work
to
do: cataloging, giving
things names,
putting to order
an unruly
home –
a
kitchen in the choirloft, a bedroom
in the
belfry. a
grotto,
in the
most proper
sense of the
word, juniper berries crushed
underfoot &
all that moss
spread out,
creeping
velvet
lichen.
we like
to be compelled
by things
& the things
compelling us
here
are true: the first was hung
by her
hair; the second
had her
hair set afire
& asphyxiated
on the
smoke &
deaths by
hair this week – which means
something, but
we know
not what.*
Both the passages themselves
& the broader contexts they throw into sharp relief work at every possible
level: as sound, as intellect, even as drama. At one level, one could
characterize a doctrine of signatures
as a love poem, a rare thing in these postmodern days. At another, it’s a
treatise on communication. On a third, it’s a remarkably detailed portrait of a
society, one that both is & is not our own. On a fourth, it’s a meditation
on the interaction between our own world & the nature that lurks in signature. On a fifth . . . well, you get
the idea. There’s an enormous amount of
stuff going on in this poem, so effortlessly written that the experience of
reading it feels like the consumption of a text far shorter than what is
actually here, even given the small page size of the
Singing Horse edition.
* You can
find four other passages of this section in the excellent DCPoetry Anthology 2002.
Monday, March 10, 2003
It’s been 20 years at least
since I last did a day as a poet in a school, so when I was asked to
participate in a special one-day program at my sons’ middle school, it was a
return to an experience I hadn’t had in some time. Each year the schools in the
Tredyffrin-Easttown (TE) district put
on some variation of the same program, intermingling concepts of arts, culture
and character. This year, the program for this school was Imagine That: Lives
Well Lived, focusing on people who had passions that took them out of the usual
run-of-the-mill career paths. There’s an assembly one day with a theme speaker
for the week: Robb Armstrong, the cartoonist behind Jump Start. Then, on
another day, the middle school is flooded with various sorts of odd ducks &
the classes literally trooped from room to room during the day, getting
presentations about whatever. There was a former NFL player who quite football
to sing opera, several members of People’s
Light & Theatre Company, playwright Tom Gibbons, an
architectural photographer, the chef from the General Warren Inn, an
investment banker who did alabaster sculptures, another fellow who carved owls
out of tree stumps, a quilt maker, myself & several others. Over the course
of the day, I had four fifth-grade classes & two seventh-grade ones.
Considering the disputations
here
of late concerning poetic difficulty & ant-war readings*, it’s worth noting
here that I built my own little 30-minute presentation around a reading of the
opening section of Ketjak,
a text significantly more difficult than anything Noah Eli Gordon was proposing
for the UMass reading. I’m happy to report that the
poem didn’t prove at all difficult for fifth or seventh graders, which only
reinforces my thesis about the community at UMass
being crippled as literates by the university itself.
I started each class by
asking students to define poetry. No single definition showed up in all six
classes, but a few did turn up in five of the six:
§
“Words put
together”
§
Writing that
expresses emotion or feelings
§
Writing that can
rhyme
At least one fifth-grade
class also offered “writing that doesn’t have to rhyme” as a definition. A
student in one class suggested that it was “what you think,” which I rather like.
The persistence of that first definition, which I heard in exactly that
formulation at least three of the five times it appeared, made me suspect that
this is what students had retained from whatever formal training in poetry the
TE district has given them in the past.**
Ketjak of
course does use rhyme, albeit not in the vulgar sense so popular among the new
formalists. In at least two of the classes, I put up one of Robert Grenier’s scrawl works
from r h y m m s*** that demonstrates how rhyme itself can exist
even without the presence of words.
In the Q&A time that
rounded out each class, there were a number of questions about process – how
long did a poem take, how long does it take to write a
book+, where do I get my inspiration, do my kids ever figure into my work
(yes!) – but the one question that showed up in every
single class was “which book (or poem) is your favorite”? I’d passed around a
dozen or so books as I’d read, everything from In the American Tree to Toner
to Demo to Ink as well as both
the Salt and Figures editions of Tjanting.
It’s an interesting question, in part because it’s so very difficult to
respond, but also because it suggests a relationship between poetry &
desire or poetry & passion that these kids absolutely get, but for which
they don’t exactly have the words. I always respond to this inquiry in the same
way, saying that I can’t pick among my poems any more than I could among my
children – I have intense personal relationships with every one – so that when
asked to sort through this conundrum, I invariably turn to something with which
I have had relatively little involvement, the actual design & printing of
the book itself. Unless the cover itself is actually botched, as was the case
with the first edition of In the American
Tree, I tend to like all of them likewise. But if I look at the cover of What, I can literally see the
neighborhood in which I grew up in John Moore’s
painting, right down to where my mother now lives on the back cover. That’s as
good a reason as any.
* About
which more later this week.
** I know
that
*** Albeit I
realize now that I inverted the lines. How, I wonder, did that change the poem?
+ I’m a
funny person to ask that particular question, since it’s been easier for me to
“write a book” than to “finish a poem” – The
Alphabet at this point consists of ten published books, but not yet a
completed poem.
Sunday, March 09, 2003
Intellectual fashions tend
to wash over poetry. Robert Duncan, in The
H.D. Book, marvels at the secular imagination of the Imagists even as he
prepares to undermine it:
The immediate
persuasion of Imagist poets was against the fantastic and fictional as it was
for the clear-seeing, even the clairvoyant, and the actual, for percept against
concept. The Image as “that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in time” or “the
local conditions’’ could open out along lines of the
poet’s actual feeling. The poem could be erotic and contain evocations of
actual sexual experience as I have suggested in the poem Orchards.
And then, the image was also something actually seen in the process of the
poem, not something pretended or made up. It was the particular image evoked in
the magic operation of the poet itself—whatever its source, and it usually had
many sources. In reviewing Fletcher’s poetry in 1916, H.D. may be speaking too
of her own art: “He uses the direct image, it is
true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer images—a
pebble, as it were, dropped in a quiet pool, in order to start across the
silent water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of
sound.”
H.D., of course, turns out
to be anything but a proto-Objectivist. Between Freud & her imagined
classic landscapes, she creates a world that is perfect for a young man
committed to the idea that “the authors are in eternity.” & it is to Ms.
Doolittle that
Given that Duncan himself is
not so widely perused these days – there are few Duncan clones manqué out
there, not a one under the age of 60 – it is interesting how much of our own
literary landscape today proves to be the one that Duncan willed: Spicer,
Stein, Zukofsky: all are much more widely influential now than in the 1960s.
H.D., Helen Adam –
I’ve commented before on the
decline of mysticism, those “other and vaguer images,” as an active element
in poetry. Not that it has entirely disappeared; merely that it is not the omnipresent
phenomenon that one saw in the 1960s. Its presence in anthology’s like George Quasha’s Active
Anthology or in magazines such as Coyote’s
Journal or Caterpillar was
unmistakable. What intrigues me at the moment, still basking in the wake of the
Social
Mark Poetry Symposium as well as
Brian Kim Stefans’ Creep
anti-manifesto, is the question of what might now be filling that social
role in poetry, what might constitute the wisdom discourse of otherness for
younger poets now.
That’s a tricky question.
One can certainly talk about discourses that appear important to writers in the
21st century – technology & the anti-globalization movement are
two obvious ones, with some interesting interrelationships. But neither
discourse as discourse – with the
possible exception of something like the remarkably fuzzy-headed Empire by Hardt &
Negri – seems overly prone to the most problematic aspect of mysticism as
practiced in the poetry of the 1960s: as a domain in which the poet held
special knowledge that was then being revealed to (& likewise concealed
from) the reader. Such a discourse has less to do with its content, which
could, frankly, be anything, and more to do with the unequal distribution of
power between writer & reader that it enacts. Today such a one-sided
discourse would seem wildly anachronistic. That to me feels like one of the
best aspects of contemporary poetry.
An interesting variant – a doctoral
dissertation for someone combining literature & a social science, whether
history or sociology or even psychology – might be to take a closer look at
those poets over the years whose approach to some given discourse to some
degree overwhelmed their poetics:
§
Eli Siegel taking what would later
generations would have called the guru path, becoming a “healer” who focused on
“curing” homosexuality
under the rubric of Aesthetic Realism
§
Trim Bissell going from the pages of Poetry to the Weather Underground & the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in the 1960s
§
Robert Sward
& Richard Tillinghast each taking some years out from their careers to follow
spiritual journeys
§
Perhaps the most
extreme instance ever of this last path, the writing of L. Ron Hubbard, whose spare poems from
the 1930s reflect a reading that certainly must have included Williams, cummings
& Langston Hughes but which never got the attention of his sci-fi novels
before the founding of Scientology
There were, of course,
others who never volunteered for such journeys, but were invited into them,
usually by the state, such as Margaret Randall’s having to flee to Cuba after
rescuing her children back from the Mexican police who were after her for her
support of the 1968 anti-Olympic games demonstrations there, or John Sinclair’s adventure with the
authorities, ostensibly over cannabis sativa but really more for his support of
various elements of the Detroit rebellion in the 1960s, a phenomenon that
joined everything from street riots & the White Panther Party (not a typo)
to the music of the MC-5.
The question of music itself
might well be raised – one might add another bullet to this list for Leonard
Cohen, Patti Smith & Jim Carroll.
I would distinguish all of
these folks from writers such as Thomas Merton or Norman Fischer or Phil Whalen
or Gail Sher or Brother Antoninus/William Everson who
take a distinct – in their cases, spiritual – life path & combine it with
poetry. This is where the question of the path overwhelming the poetry comes
in. I would similarly distinguish someone like Amiri Baraka from those on my
list, even though it is apparent in his poetry how dramatically powerful the
impact of his political evolution has been. Ditto Diane DiPrima, although you
can see in her Revolutionary Letters precisely
the dynamics of special discourse as proprietary wisdom.
And I would also distinguish
this phenomenon from those writers – especially thick around the music industry
– who suddenly come forth with poetry, from Jewel to Henry Rollins to the late Jim
Morrison.
If/when the serious shooting
begins – we’re already sporadically bombing some Iraqi defensive positions – in
Saturday, March 08, 2003
Matthew Zapruder objects:
Dear Mr. Silliman,
I was one part amazed, and one part appalled, to read the recent
entry featuring the disagreement between Noah Gordon and the organizers of
the reading to protest the war in
Where to start? Well, how about with what the hell does
the "aesthetics of dissent" mean? That's the mother of all straw men
if I've ever met her. Is the implication of the use of that term that the
organizers were trying to make (or were the unwitting victims of, in which case
policing seems like the wrong, yet perfectly passive aggressive, term) firm categories
about what kind of poetry is acceptable to protest the war, and what isn't?
Come on, does that really seem plausible, or to the point? Isn't it more likely
that they were doing the best they can to hold an event with a bunch of readers
for an audience probably not used to listening to poetry, and making the
judgment (to which Noah is of course, since we still live in a democracy,
entitled to disagree) that his poem wasn't going to work in this particular
situation?
"Policing the aesthetics of dissent?" Holy
unnecessary jargon, Batman! It seems that the organizers were pretty clear, not
to mention polite, in expressing that they just thought that Noah's poem wasn't
going to work in that context, because of its "density" (i.e. the more
elusive relationship it has than your usual anti-war poem to protesting the
war). Agree or disagree, but they are the ones who are responsible for throwing
the event, and making it work, and they honestly seemed to think the poem
wasn't appropriate for the venue or situation, which seems like a very
reasonable thing to think about given the fact that this is not a poetry
reading for Noah, but a WAR PROTEST. If I wanted to get up and read a ten page
poem about a wilting flower as an allegory for this war's effect on democracy,
I think the organizers would be pretty well within their rights to tell me to
go find something a little less brilliant to read.
And holy naked act of self promotion, Batman! Call my a cynic,
but I don't think that the fact that at least one of these parties (the other
being dragged in clearly against his will) is willing, if not eager, to share
his correspondence (not to mention his poem) proves anything about anyone's
"best possible intentions." For, lo and behold, in the guise of a
discussion on the "aesthetics of dissent," we end up discussing ...
Noah's poem! I also love the repeated reference to Sean Bishop as a
"student" organizing a reading against the war. Whose student? Noah's? Noah Gordon also happens to be a student, of the MFA
Writing Program at UMass, which is a very fine thing
to be, and certainly doesn't stop anyone from being a good poet and publishing
worthy poems long before getting a degree. Yet I have the inescapable feeling
that what really pisses Noah off (in a polite and patronizing way) is that a
student had the gall to judge his work, or at least its potential effect on an
audience. Frankly, the politics of that situation seem a lot more hierarchical
and problematic than worrying about anyone "policing the aesthetics of
dissent."
This is particularly evident in the part of Noah's letter
which discusses the abstraction of the war. This just seems like a clever point
to make, with at best tenuous relevance. Is the fact that people in the U.S.
tend to apprehend the war as an "abstraction" (i.e. something that's
not "real," but just an idea, which in a way seems the exact opposite
of the problem -- people aren't thinking ENOUGH about the ideas and rationales
for this war, and just accepting the given terms) somehow a justification for
Noah reading an "abstract" poem, whatever that means? What a weird
kind of mimeticism.
And does Noah really accept the definition of his poem as
"abstract" (which it isn't, as you correctly point out)? Those of us
who teach know that when a student says a poem is "abstract," what
they really mean is, "I don't know what you're talking about, and/or why
you've bothered to say it." It's mainly a word to hide the word "bad"
behind. In this case, to give the organizers credit, what I think they meant
was that they felt the relationship between the anti-war sentiment and the
imagery and general mechanisms of the poem wasn't clear enough for the
situation of this particular reading.
They may be right or wrong in their judgment (I personally
think there's some good stuff in the poem, but it's kind of histrionic and
self-righteous ... it seems to treat the whole war as a personal problem for
the poet, which is the thing that makes writing political poetry really really hard). But here's the real point: if the motivation
to read at a war protest is, in fact, to protest the war -- and not to read our
latest poems to a lucky, albeit captive, audience -- then I would think that
even if the organizers were so horribly misguided as to incorrectly judge the
possible effect one of our brilliant poems would have on said audience (which
by the way, they have taken the time, responsibility, and trouble to assemble),
then perhaps we could put up with their lamentable short-sightedness and
stupidity and figure out another way to put our queer or otherwise shoulders to
the wheel.
The fact that Noah decided not only not to read another
poem, but not even to attend, makes his whole motivation more than a little
suspect. I don't want to sound crude, but what's more important to Noah: Noah's
poem, or protesting the war?
Well, I can think of other reasons why a war protest in
Because first of all, as should be obvious, I disagree
with everything that Noah has said, and just find the hypocrisy and
self-righteousness really annoying. Also, when I see a poet self-righteously
complain in a public forum about whether his poem was suppressed or not, under
the guise of defending the right of poetry to be able to do whatever it is that
he thinks his poem is doing, while bombs are about to fall on Iraq, as a poet I
feel embarrassed. And third, because poets ought not
sit with our arms folded pretending that all poetry is equally apprehendable
(regardless or difficulty of syntax, or unfamiliarity of imagery, etc.), and
that anyone who can't see that is a cretin. On the contrary, it's our job to
try to help educate and prepare our readers for the next new thing. The way we
do that is by making an implicit contract with them: if you promise to listen
carefully, I will promise to make something that hangs together in some way,
and (here's what's important here) exists for a reason other than to promote
myself.
To turn this situation into a discussion on aesthetics, or
the nature of dissent, seems disingenuous and self-absorbed, which is
particularly upsetting given the stakes. For whatever reason, the organizers
didn't want Noah to read his poem. I don't think they're suppressing dissent in
the least: Noah could have read a different poem, or (god forbid) a poem by
another poet, one that would have been more easily apprehendable to the
audience at this reading. Or he could have just gone to the reading and clapped
when other poets read their poems. And if he thinks that this particular poem
is such a great way to protest the war, why doesn't he get up and read it in
the middle of
It seems evident that there is a time and a place to fight
this battle, and a war protest is neither. I realize
that with this last sentence I am going to open myself up to all kinds of
attacks ("when IS the right time to defend poetry?" "what's the real battle we're fighting here?" "isn't the struggle for clarity of language, versus easy
propaganda?"). In fact, I've listened to "My Back Pages"
probably too many times, as have we all ... here's to hoping we can all be a
little bit older, if not wiser, than that now.
Matthew Zapruder
Zapruder appears not to agree with my presumption that Noah Eli Gordon is “motivated here by the best possible intentions” – as in fact I think both sides in that exchange are. What I found troubling – and the reason I thought to include the correspondence, poem & all, in the blog – was precisely the point that Zapruder blithely accepts with regards to the poem:
they just thought that Noah's poem
wasn't going to work in that context, because of its "density" (i.e.
the more elusive relationship it has than your usual anti-war poem to
protesting the war).
The problem – and this is why it was important to
include Gordon’s text – is that the claim of density or elusiveness patently
isn’t true. And, if it isn’t, then the rest of Zapruder’s argument more or less
dissolves into smoke. For the claim to be true, the
I agree completely with Zapruder – & I think
Gordon agrees also – that stopping the war is far more important than any
poetry reading. But I’m concerned about a practice that would edit out a poem
that would not have been either dense or particularly elusive at a protest for
World War I. What bothers me about it is how neatly this dumbing down of
density fits into a broader pattern of behavior that dates back decades now, of
treating progressive writing, from the modernists to the current post-avant
community, as though it were difficult – & thereby excludable – when, in
fact, that is not the case.
Such behavior is part & parcel of the (not very)
benign neglect that underlies not merely the sort of editorial malfeasance one
associates with the likes of a Helen Vendler, but even, alas, with the Poets
Against the War project. If one sees the broader
spectrum of poets who have contributed to its website, the poetry that is
part of its official “chapbook”
is notably skewed toward the school of quietude – the principle exceptions are
This sort of intellectual
bad faith has become so widely & deeply associated with the broader school
of quietude that it, in fact, always needs to be publicly pointed out whenever
& wherever it shows up. Not only is such erasure profoundly anti-democratic
& inherently dishonest in & of itself, the process reinforces – just as
the establishmentarian poetics of the school of quietude do – the larger social
forces that argue always against social change & for a traditionalism whose
sole justification is inertia.** From the perspective
of the poets who commit such misdemeanors of editing, this dumbing down is
merely self-contradictory and self-defeating behavior. For the poets who are
consistently disappeared by this process, it’s invariably a painful reminder of
the structural inequalities at the heart of the “American way.”
* Whalen
deserves extra credit for submitting his work while dead.
** It’s no
accident that the great antiwar poet of the
Labels: Theory
Friday, March 07, 2003
One thing about the
Internet: when you get it wrong, you can be corrected from a great distance
almost instantly. From
dear ron silliman
we think you are making too much of the obscurity of seitlhamo motsapi's poem. how about simply
moni = money
culculatahs = calculators (with pretensions)
conputers = computers (with the con of capitalism)
robert berold+ paul wessels
Moni
being money brings the stanza I was
most confused by into much greater focus:
their kisses bite
like the deep bellies of conputers
the gravy of their songs
smells like the slow piss of culculatahs
But I wasn’t arguing for the
obscurity of Motsapi’s poem, only my own difficulty
at knowing how “to grasp some portion of the references & allusions without
importing too many.” While I thought conputers was clear enough, the initial “cul” of culculatahs threw me – I still don’t hear it, although the reference back now to moni pulls the chain of elements
into a single overarching scheme of references tightly enough. The problem, if
it is one, is that I personally lack the context – literally – for hearing moni as money, there
simply isn’t enough diversity among the speakers in my social milieu for that to
strike me as a probable variant. My own ignorance here simply underscores the
question I was raising. Happily, though, my conclusion that “I don’t need to
know this in order to recognize that ‘moni’
is an unquestionably wonderful poem” still stands. Motsapi
strikes me as a poet absolutely worth reading, regardless of how much cultural
baggage I need to shed in order to do so.
Thursday, March 06, 2003
A couple of people wrote to
suggest that my general list
of outsider poets was far too “inside.” Michael Helsem
notes that
Xexox Sutra
Editions (now Xexoxial Endarchy)
published several writers who must be considered bonafide
"outsiders", notably the artist/poet Malok
(who is now online); his drawings in particular bear comparison with anything
at
Chris Sullivan, editor [if bricolage can be called editing] of the excellently weird zine, Journal of
Public Domain, comments:
Todays
discussion of "outsiders" got me to wonder [sic] if you are aware of the "song-poem" genre.
There's a website devoted to
it, and I'm forwarding a link to a page about Thomas Guygax
http://www.aspma.com/guygax.htm
To which I would note that, yep, these guys are so
far outside that they need to carry
sun block. In general, the writers I listed were successful poets who, for
various reasons, live or lived pretty marginally, at least in economic or
social terms. But, since the original note from Jason Earls to which I was
responding invoked Henry Darger
as its example, the hospital janitor & pedophile painter/novelist whose work
would have been lost had not his landlord been an art-savvy professional
photographer who discovered the paintings & writing among Darger’s effects after this escapee from a “home for the
feeble minded” passed away, perhaps I should have been thinking further outside
the box.
These notes harkened me back to my work with the
Tenderloin Writers Workshop in San Francisco between 1979 & ’81, and some
of the writers there, especially Harley Kohler, a bearded (!) cross-dresser who
wrote generally obscene sonnets in a language given almost entirely over to
neologisms, or “Spider” James Taylor, a young man who penned long, obsessive
novels with a gritty comic-book realism. The Workshop – which had a “no guns in
class” rule that I made up on the spot one evening – included an amazing
diversity of inner-city perspectives, from drug-addicted street people to
senior women who would crochet while listening to the different readers, then
simply comment something like, “Well, I think all junkies should be shot,
present company excepted.” A few of the writers who participated in the
workshop – Mary Tall Mountain, Bob Harrison, Charles Bivins
– went on to publish quite successfully. But one of the strongest memories I
have of the group was an evening in which Bob Holman, traveling through
There were even writers in the Tenderloin in those
years whose lives proved so far outside that even the notably free-ranging
workshop was far too confining. One man, whose name I only knew as
One of the things I like most about Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American
Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Wisconsin, 1989) is
how Nelson constructs a panorama of the entire range of between-wars poetry
starting with one of its most “despised” subgenres, leftwing doggerel published
in “non-literary” political tabloids. The idea that the whole of writing might
be continuous may be something of a theoretical fiction – it’s much more like
overlapping tectonic plates – but Nelson’s tour-de-force
(the book is a single long prose meditation on the violence hidden in
canonization, while the footnotes, which consume half or more of almost every
page, constitute a history of one period of American letters as detailed as any
written) does demonstrate just how much further beyond the traditionally
conceived boundaries belle lettre truly extends.
Everywhere, people write. My experience of the
Tenderloin was that I got to see manuscripts from perhaps two percent of the
adult community in any given year. Extrapolate that out across the population
of the
Over the years, I’ve learned an enormous amount from
writers like Harley Kohler & Spider
*Kohler
in particular got to know some of the other poets in the Bay Area, such as Lyn
Hejinian. His partner at one point was a caretaker in the first
board-&-care home that Larry Eigner lived in when he first moved to
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
A letter with some correspondence & a question from Noah
Eli Gordon:
Dear Ron,
Since it seems like yr
blog has become somewhat of a forum as of late, I figured I forward you this
email exchange and ask your opinion on the aesthetics of dissent...
I sent four poems,
including the following, the most straight-forward of the bunch, to a student
organizing a Poets Against the War reading in MA:
a black
mirror for the capital
1
Decision can still the clock’s hands,
wrap the
moment in a voluminous straightjacket.
In the room, six flights underground,
two men
wear identical keys around their necks, waiting,
as though
the gears of the earth could be silenced
by the
flick of a wrist.
Rubble, a suffix for the burning city,
a coat
stitched from the strikepads of empty matchbooks.
2
It’s clear enough:
the gutted
chassis of a pickup in black & white.
& you’ve seen the girl, naked & screaming,
arms
splayed as though she could take flight
from the
road—from this heat.
The body shackles memory beneath the skin,
raises a map
of welts:
the
blueprints for a massive ark.
3
Will a sandbag stop a bullet,
keep a
hot-air balloon from melting near the sun
Will staring at a solar-eclipse burn the retinas,
is the
reflection in a puddle safe
Will the rats grow too large
to
squeeze out from under the floorboards
Will Sacajawea haul her child
out of the
prison of our new coin
Will she still point toward the river
4
Someone once asked me
what
forgiveness feels like,
now I’d
know to take my finger
& trace the mortar
between the
bricks
of an
abandoned fire station.
This was the student's
reply:
Noah,
I'm happy to tell you that we have sorted
through the submissions for the "Poetry in Protest" event, and some
of your writing has been approved for the reading. Because of the density of
most of your writing, we suggest that you only read a small piece of "a
black mirror for the capital." We would like you to read only the first
part of the poem, ending with "a coat stitched from the strikepads of empty matchbooks". We felt the rest of
it, while good, was a bit too abstract for the setting.
We are asking all participating poets to
be at the West
Lecture Hall of Franklin
Paterson Hall by
Sincerely,
Sean Bishop.
And here was my reply to
Sean:
Dear Sean,
Let me say that it's
great that you've been working on putting together this reading. It's an
important event, important not because it gives folks a chance to read, rather
in that it's able to offer poets a forum to publicly show their dissent against
the atrocious policies of our current government; however, I'm a bit taken
aback at your policing of the aesthetics of dissent. I'd completely understand
if it were merely a question of time constraints, but to use a phrase like
"too abstract for the setting," is problematic for me on two
accounts.
Firstly, it seems to me
to be a judgment not of the effectiveness of the poem to convey whatever it's
attempting to convey, but a judgment of the notion of audience. I take it to
mean that you want to make sure everyone "understands" the poems,
that everyone is able to leave each poem with the sense that, yes, that poem is
against the war, that yes, I get it, which is exactly the problem of war: it's
not that simple.
Secondly, war is just
about the most abstract thing to us Americans that there is. We won't see any
of it on tv. Our lives will go
on as usual, a bit foggy perhaps with the idea that people are dying somewhere.
War really is the ultimate abstraction. That said, I wanted to let you know
that I just wouldn't feel comfortable reading in such a setting and have
decided that I won't attend the event. I hope it goes well, and again, it's
great that you've been working to bring the event into existence.
Yours,
Noah Eli Gordon
I'm just wondering where
you stand on the issue of poetry of dissent, what is poetry of dissent? It seems
like the last issue of the Poetry
Project newsletter took
some of your comments out of context, so perhaps you could address the issue.
yrs,
Noah
I asked Sean Bishop for permission
to run his letter here, which he immediately gave with a couple of tiny edits,
also suggesting that I should include his response to Noah:
Noah,
I'm sorry our decision upsets you, but I
rather resent your remark about "policing the aesthetics of dissent."
We had to make editorial decisions. These decisions were not always based
entirely on the quality of the work (whatever that word means.) We weren't
judging your capabilities as a poet, but yes, we were making some aesthetic
decisions. The length of your poem was the largest factor in this. A short
abstract poem can be appropriate for a reading setting, but yours is quite
long, and we suspected the audience would be entirely lost by the beginning of
the third page/section. Paul and I both felt that the piece began to lose its
grounding after the first part, which is entirely capable of standing alone as
a poem, and which is really quite striking all by itself.
You wrote that you thought this was less a
judgment of the effectiveness of the poem to convey its message, and more a
judgment of the audience. In truth, both are true. We don't want everyone to
"get" what every poem means, or to know with certainty that a poem is
"against the war." We do want them to understand the bare bones of
the poem: what is it talking about? where is it? how does one image lead to another or engage in dialogue
with another? the messages insinuated from the imagery
and language of a poem do not need to be comprehended immediately, but for the
purposes of a verbal reading, we felt a certain sense of continuity was
necessary.
Yes, war is an abstract concept for
Americans. No, the war is not simple. Perhaps I should have used a better word
than "abstract" to explain your poem, but the only other word I could
think of was "convoluted", which sounds like an attack. I'm sorry you
won't be attending the event. You seem to feel that we were searching for a
particular aesthetic, and anyone who didn't fit into that aesthetic was
rejected, which simply isn't true. We have formalists, slam poets, and everyone
in between reading at this event.
Best wishes,
Sean Bishop
I should say at the outset that I
think both Gordon & Bishop are motivated here by the best possible
intentions – and their mutual willingness to share this correspondence reflects
that.
Having said that, the poem &
correspondence itself raises questions. While I think it is possible enough to
argue that the poem loses a little focus in its third section, the second –
clearly grounded in part by Nick Ut’s infamous 1972 photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc
with her clothes burned off by napalm – can hardly be called either abstract or
convoluted. It’s one of the most widely recognized visual images associated
with the atrocities of war.
What I do hear in Bishop’s words,
especially in his second letter, is a question of intelligibility & yet if
I look at the text of Gordon’s poem, no such problem even remotely exists. So I
go back to Bishop’s own words, noting that he argues that the event would have
“formalists, slam poets and everyone in between.”
That’s an interesting phrase, precisely because it describes only a narrow
segment of the literary community, maybe 25 percent of the possible range. My
immediate association was to the way in which television, & PBS in
particular, has tended to represent the political left through people like Mark
Shields, a Democrat in name only who positions himself
well to the right of center. Thus PBS can have debates between the center and
far right and pretend to be representing the entire spectrum of ideas.
Bishop underscores my association in
his second letter when he suggests that a reader would not get “the bare bones
of the poem.” To not get the bare bones suggests a reading problem as well as
fairly stunning lack of historical memory. If anything, the second section’s
association of Vietnam’s brutality with other instances of devastation – I
think it’s possible to associate the “gutted chassis of a pickup” with both the
first Gulf War & the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, an
ambiguity I believe Gordon intends: the final image of the “abandoned fire
station” is being set up this much in advance.
Bishop’s phrase reminds me of all
the times I’ve heard language poetry – I’m not suggesting that Gordon is in any
way a langpo or even post-langpo – described as difficult or unintelligible or,
in the words of Robert Swards immortal review of Clark Coolidge’s Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric,
printed in Poetry back in March,
1967, “a psychedelic outpouring,” “verbal hop-scotch,” & the ever popular
“chic, trivial piling up of images.” Bishop doesn’t go this far with Gordon,
but he doesn’t need to. The problem in some ways reflects
School environments of course are
notorious – with reason – for their lack of openness to the new. One can simply
read the reviews of the student John Ashbery in the archives of the Harvard Crimson,
an online archive that goes back to the 19th century. But at least Ashbery
& Koch were noted as student writers there – Creeley appears to have been
the invisible undergrad.
I have no idea what Bishop’s
aesthetic commitments might be, whether he positions himself in that tiny
conceptual slice between slam poetics & formalism – two genre that depend
mostly on the same literary devices, contextualized differently – or in the far
broader terrain where the bulk of American poetry has thrived for the past two
centuries.
With regard to Gordon’s final question of the forum in the Poetry Project