Silliman's Blog

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Robert Duncan’s model of the older poet as someone who takes on “in the last years of their lives, a major creative phase” is worth exploring. When Duncan makes this claim in The H.D. Book in 1960, he names three of his five favored modernist master poets – Pound, Williams & H.D. – as instances of this phenomenon.

  Was it that the war—the bombardment for H.D., the imprisonment and exposure to the elements for Ezra Pound, the divorce in the speech for Williams—touched a spring of passionate feeling in the poet that was not the war but was his age, his ripeness in life. They were almost “old”; under fire to come “to a new distinction.”

  A “major creative phase” is the first criterion then. But the second & at least as important is “a spring of passionate feeling.” What then of Duncan’s other two poetic masters, Gertrude Stein & Louis Zukofsky?

  Fifteen years Duncan’s senior, Zukofsky in 1960 is 56, right within the age range Robert identifies for his “last years” model. In 1960, Zukofsky is not only less well known than Duncan, but it is Duncan who appears to have arranged for Zukofsky’s 1958 visiting job at San Francisco State. Further, Zukofsky in 1960 hasn’t written a section of “A” since completing “A”-12 nine years earlier. The 1950s instead have been a period in which Zukofsky has focused primarily on a long critical project not unlike The H.D. Book – Bottom: On Shakespeare.

  Between 1960 & ’67, Zukofsky will return to “A,” composing nine sections, a period of white-hot creativity considering the 23 years it had taken him to write the first twelve sections. Then Zukofsky goes quiet again, with only Celia’s 1968 collage of “A”-24 to punctuate the silence. After a three-year silence – modest compared with the 1950s or the eight-year hiatus that took place between the two halves of “A”-9 in the 1940s – Zukofsky returns again to the project, writing what many poets in my own generation take to be the two finest sections of “A,” 22 & 23,* completing the poem 46 years after it had been begun. In the last four years of his life, Zukofsky then writes 80 Flowers, a shorter & more lyrical project, but one that partakes of the intense opacity that first characterizes “A”-22 & 23. At the time of his death, there were apparently notes toward a further project, 90 Trees, that never got written.* Zukofsky might appear to bear out Duncan’s theory – indeed, it offers different works that could be taken as “proof,” suggesting that, as a theory, Duncan’s own formula just might be too general. Yet the answer will depend very directly on the question of which, if any, of these works might best be characterized as “a spring of passionate feeling.”

  My own sense is that “major creative phase” means not merely the composition of one or more important works, but works that diverge or extend our understanding of the project of the poet, the way The Pisan Cantos transform an epic that was heading toward a leaden conclusion betwixt Van Buren & Pound’s own brand of voodoo economics, or the way H.D. breaks free as a poet from the constraints of the imagist framework others had envisioned for her (even if she had left that stage of her writing behind by 1920, spending much of the between wars period writing mostly unpublished & perhaps unpublishable novels). But if transformation is a requirement, then the second half of “A” – or even the works of “An” starting with “A”-14 don’t really qualify, tho “A”-22-23 certainly would.

  The situation with Stein seems even curiouser. Stein is, in certain respects, almost the perfect example of a modernist who both took on a major new phase in her work later in life precisely by tackling the personal in her writing – and this process made her famous. In writing the history of her partnership, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made it possible for Stein to extend her distinctive methodology – as a style – to a truly populist genre & in so doing to create a crossover publishing success unequaled among the high modernists.

  But Autobiography is a book Duncan never once mentions in The H.D. Book, even tho Stein herself shows up on 16 occasions. This is doubly worth noting because in the 1950s & early ‘60s, really until Jerome Rothenberg arrived to take up championing her work as well, Duncan was literally the lone advocate Stein had among American poets. A title such as Writing Writing is not even imaginable without her work. Yet as Duncan sits down to contemplate the project of an older poet as a model for the next stage of his work, the most popular avant-garde writer (who also happens to be the most out-of-the-closet homosexual) of the previous half century warrants only a handful of mentions, compared with, for example, novelists such as Joyce (cited 64 times in the book) or Lawrence (99). Or, for that matter, Ezra Pound, mentioned over 400 times, nearly once per page. 

  Try to imagine a work on the modernists written today that would mention Pound 400 times for every 16 mentions of Stein, a ratio of 25:1 – it’s a good index of exactly how much literary reputations change in 40 years. 

  Duncan never to my knowledge writes of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – virtually all of his actual quotations of Stein in any of his critical works come from her ten-page essay, “Composition as Explanation.” Certainly, her movement into this phase occurs before the war as well. Published first in 1933 – one year after Zukofsky’s Objectivist Anthology – Stein’s crossover hit occurs when Duncan is still just 14 years old. What this means in practical terms is that Stein for Duncan was always that woman who had written that work, who had become famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, who had achieved a notoriety as an egocentric memoirist as well as the creator of works of absolute opacity.

  Yet what separates Autobiography most from, say, The Pisan Cantos, Helen in Egypt or The Desert Music is not that they embody a “spring of passionate meaning” and Stein’s memoir does not, nor that they transform the project of the poet & it does not – The Autobiography does it more completely than any of these other three works – but rather that they are earnest where it is ironic. It may be odd for a writer who penned “Willingly I’ll say there’s been a sweet marriage” to bypass one of the first great presentations of a homosexual union, but I’ll wager that what keeps Duncan from connecting to Stein’s own “spring of passionate meaning” is what also kept him from a closer relationship to the first generation New York School – a discomfort on Duncan’s part with “camp.” Let alone the idea that one might produce great writing in this subversive discursive tone.

      * In the words on one langpo, “A”-22 & 23 “rescued” the project as a whole.  

** Causing some wags to suggest that, had Zukofsky lived long enough, he would have gotten around to 101 Dalmatians.

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Thinking of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book, which I’ve been mulling over now literally for years, it seems, one of the questions that digs at me is why that book at that moment in Duncan’s life? In 1960, when Duncan began the work, he is 41 years old & has just completed the first of the three great books of his prime years, The Opening of the Field, although – as Lisa Jarnot spells out in her forthcoming biography of Duncan – he had not yet found a publisher, or at least not yet settled on one, turning down Macmillan before agreeing to go with Grove. Grove in 1960 was known as a rather threadbare publisher right at the edge where the avant-garde and pornography crossed over into one another. Macmillan was the New York trade presses personified, the publisher (if memory serves me right) of such establishment bad boys as W.S. Merwin.

The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, & Bending the Bow – I think of the three volumes as a single movement or creative arc in Duncan’s life as a poet – also represent a turning away from Duncan’s earlier writing, key poems of which were collected in Selected Poems, the tenth book in City Lights’ great Pocket Poets series – and a book that Duncan apparently never allowed to be reprinted once the initial edition ran out.

Selected Poems came out in 1959, but gathers poems only up to 1950, including nothing from a manuscript that Duncan had planned to call A Book of Resemblances, poems from 1950 through ’53, Letters, another planned volume, containing works from 1953 through ’56 and, finally, a manuscript that, in the frontispiece to Selected Poems, Duncan still calls The Field (poems 1956-59). Instead, Duncan’s writing between 1950 and 1956 falls into a sort of limbo, coming out from smaller presses with limited print runs – Letters from Jargon in 1958, A Book of Resemblances from Henry Wenning, a New Haven publisher, only in 1966. I’ve never actually seen either of these editions, nor Writing Writing, published by Sumbooks in 1964, nor Fragments of a Disordered Devotion, published by Island/Gnomon also in 1966. Indeed, it is not until 1968 – the year in which Duncan completes his trio of great books with the publication of Bending the Bow – that a British publisher, Fulcrum, makes all of this writing generally available in an edition called Derivations.

My argument, or at least my sense, is that something occurred. In choosing – or perhaps simply becoming able to publish with – a trade press, even one as marginalized as Grove, Duncan is positioning himself as Poet – it is often capitalized with him, in his mind even more than on the page – so that fugitive nature of his earlier writing actually becomes an advantage. The Field thus in a very literal sense transforms into The Opening of the Field. Duncan takes up his correspondence with H.D. proper – he had sent her his suite Medieval Scenes, written in 1947, either as a typescript or in its 1950 Caesar’s Gate edition, plus what he calls his “New Year Poem” in 1950, although it is not clear that H.D. read these or responded at that time. He is starting to compose Roots and Branches, whose fourth work is “A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s 73^rd Birthday.”

The H.D. Book thus begins at a critical – possibly even the most critical – juncture in Duncan’s progress as a poet. He has had a recognition that he is now embarked upon his mature writing, and that this writing gets under way first with The Opening of the Field and he is just turning 40. Jarnot is surely right when she suggests that a good part of the connection between Duncan & H.D. can be traced to his sense of her upbringing as a religious minority, a Moravian, not so distant from his own childhood as the adopted son of theosophists in the harsh San Joaquin Valley farm town of Bakersfield. In addition, there is a second coincidence Duncan finds as well. His birth mother died when he was born in 1919. H.D. herself very nearly died in London in the flu epidemic of that year, in part because she too was giving birth to her daughter, Francis Perdita. H.D. however was rescued by Bryher, a young lesbian admirer of her imagist poetry, who also just happened to be the heir to one of the great fortunes in the United Kingdom.

Also important, however, is that H.D. fits not just into Duncan’s pantheon of hero-poets, those he recognizes and announces as Master, again with the capital letter, but of the modernists she is one of three who, for Duncan, achieve their greatest writing not during their modernist years of the First World War or immediately thereafter, but literally during or after the Second World War – which is to say a time when Duncan himself is already a publishing poet. Duncan himself will note this in the H.D. Book:

In December of 1944, H.D. had finished her War Trilogy; she was 58. At Pisa, Pound was 60 when he finished the Pisan Cantos. William Carlos Williams at 62 in 1944 was working on Paterson I. For each there was to be ahead, in the last years of their lives, a major creative phase.

For Duncan, a critical feature of modernism is not simply its challenge of the habitual forms of centuries of the School of Quietude, but also – at least by 1959 & ’60 – for the possibility of a new model for the poet’s career, one that need not be a long narrative of decline a la Wordsworth, or of the short-wicked candles of Keats, Shelley or Rimbaud, burning out well before the age of 40. Duncan is explicitly searching for a figure of the Older Writer. Further, what is distinct about all three – at least in Duncan’s eyes – is that their later work is characterized by a deeply personal quality. The H.D. of The War Trilogy or of Helen of Egypt is something completely apart from Pound’s somewhat fictive creation, H.D. Imagiste. Pound, living in cages at Pisa not unlike their more recent kin in Guantanamo Bay, is figured here not as the writer of The Cantos, but of The Pisan Cantos, notable not just for their extraordinary beauty but because, to a degree unprecedented in that epic’s earlier sections, they include Pound – his life at last becomes the focus of the poem. Williams likewise Duncan reads as coming to a new level of maturity – for Robert, it is the turn he locates in The Desert Music where, for the first time really, Williams has begun to compose by the phrase & is fully freed at last from counting syllables in his lines. Paterson in this reading – which is Duncan’s, not mine – makes this possible again by making the poetry personal.

The H.D. Book, like the poems to H.D. & like his correspondence at last with his modernist hero, which fully gets underway only in July, 1959, just 27 months ahead of her death, all occur at a moment when Robert Duncan is newly conceptualizing the project of his writing, extending out from a book he has already written toward others that at some level he must already apprehend he will write. The 1960s will be Robert Duncan’s decade. Indeed, after Bending of the Bow, Duncan will take a 16 year hiatus from publishing his new work in book form, with just two volumes to account for the final two decades of his life, a sharp & final contrast with the three great books that occupy this 12-year-arc. It is worth asking just what makes a poet of 40 turn to the conjunction of three writers who, in his narrative of the modernist myth, take on major projects in their late 50s or 60s. But it seems to me inescapable that this animates his poetry, but the H.D. Book as well. Robert Duncan is consciously seeking out how to be an older poet.

Labels: Robert Duncan

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Here, finally, is the last question (and answer) in the 9 for 9 Poets project:

You have just won the Poem to Music Award, and can choose our favorite musical group, composer, band, singer, etc. – dead or alive (our specialists can MAKE IT HAPPEN!)-- to set your winning poem to music!  Who do you choose?  What's the title of the poem/song?  Any particular line(s) from the poem you look forward to hearing sung that you would like to share with us?  You also get to help create the music video for the poem/song.  Give us a synopsis of the video.

Oh ambivalence! If there is a form that has always struck me as universally cringe-making, it’s been the setting of poems to music. Steve Reich’s setting for William Carlos Williams’ Desert Music is one of the giant “don’t get it” announcements – that poem completely eludes him. Oh, and I’ve heard the various settings that have been done for poems by, say, Charles Bernstein or Charles Shere’s settings for Carl Rakosi’s work. And these people are friends of mine, Shere as well as Rakosi & Bernstein. But if there is one experience for my poems I do hope to avoid – this one is it.

I think my aversion here has to do with the fact that my poems are – always already – musical compositions. So the only thing I could imagine would be something that accentuated that element of it. For example, I have thought of a “reading” of Ketjak in which each sentence is read not only a different person, but also by twice the number of people as the previous sentence. You start with just one voice and end with thousands – it would be almost inaudible by the end, a giant roar (in this regard it might sound a fair amount like a much earlier – and far better – piece by Steve Reich, Come Out, in which he uses the tape loop of a boy describing his beating by the cops during a riot – “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them” – focusing just on those last five words with the different tapes phasing ever so slightly out of sync until it also presents a very powerful aural wave).

Now there are, obviously, other ways to do poetry & music – Kenward Elmslie’s musical theater is brilliant comedic work, and the music of Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson & Jim Carroll have always reflected their roots as writers. But song is a different discipline – it’s not like a baseball player moving from second base to shortstop so much as one moving to basketball or golf. Or architecture.

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Here is the eighth question in the 9 for 9 poets project.

Most poets seem to have at least one poet they've read and admired who is not well-known, a poet whose work we like to share with those who will appreciate the work. Is there such a poet's work in your life? If so, who is this poet? Tell us something about how you came to discover their work, and how it inspires you. Maybe share some favorite lines, and titles.

One? I can probably think of hundreds who might fit this definition. Particularly if I were to choose those poets who might be well known, might even be famous, but whose reputations don’t meet up to my own sense of their excellence. Certainly Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Barrett Watten are hardly unknown, but if I were to proclaim this the Age of Watten, say, I would not necessarily be kidding. Rod Smith should be a household name, as should Rae Armantrout & Graham Foust & Linh Dinh. Or David Melnick. Or Lee Ann Brown, or Simon Ortiz. Or Kenneth Irby.

One of the reasons for me to have a weblog is that it presents me with an opportunity to talk about my enthusiasms. I’ve already written about most of the above, as well as such unlikely characters as Besmilr Brigham, Judson Crews & of course George Stanley. Thinking of Stanley, I’m reminded that a project that desperately needs to be done is the creation of a compleat Spicer Circle anthology. It’s one thing to know the work of Spicer, Blaser, Stanley, Joanne Kyger & maybe Steve Jonas – the folks most everybody knows – but Harold Dull was a singular presence on that scene. He seems to have stopped writing in the 1970s, tho Tom Mandel & I were successful in getting him to give a reading at the Grand Piano. Nowadays, he’s one of the leading aquatherapists in the world. Also part of that whole mix were people like Stan Persky, part of the scene in British Columbia for almost 40 years, active in the gay community and with the New Democratic Party there. James Alexander and Ronnie Primack have disappeared from view & I see from Joe Torra’s “Chinese” poems that Joe Dunn must have died. Someone else from that scene who passed on far too early was James Herndon, tho his wife Fran (with Joanne one of the few women in the mix) seems still to be around the Bay Area. I have friends in the California Federation of Teachers who speak of Jim Herndon with great reverence, so his work there must have had lasting impact. Lew Ellingham was there & we’re very lucky indeed that he was taking notes. Another poet who was part of the world at Gino & Carlos, but who is not often thought of in San Francisco terms at all, is Larry Fagin. Then there were the others who were “around” it, but never really part of it. Duncan, for one. Ron Loewinsohn for another. Jack Gilbert for a third. That would make for one hell of a book, but I’m not the right person to edit it.

Then of course there are the poets of one’s youth. David Gitin was the writer who convinced me to start Tottel’s, simply by virtue of sending a submission of work that had to be published, even tho I thought at the time I didn’t have a journal. He’s still around the Monterey area, writing lovely poems that sometimes make me think of what George Oppen might have done if he had been a Buddhist.

Another poet from that same period who meant a lot to me was John Gorham, a one-time student of Robert Kelly’s at Bard, from the same 1960s generation of Kelly students that gave us Tom Meyer (whom Gorham first introduced me to) and Harvey Bialy. Gorham was a grad student at Berkeley for awhile, then dropped out of the scene altogether. He’s a freelance writer now, doing features for trade magazines. He was somebody who had read Dorn (another person to whom he first introduced me) very deeply. Once, when I’d been billy-clubbed by the Berkeley cops at a demonstration – they’d made a point of going for my kidneys – he got me to a hospital, for which I’m eternally in the man’s debt. There are still a few lines of his that pop up in various guises in my work – waylaid by brigands on a voyage to get millions – I love the measure of that, always will.

A good poet from that scene, now gone, was d alexander – d (no caps) was his full first name, which frankly he resented. He was the first poet I ever knew who worked in the computer industry, tho he died long before the dot com boom & the rest of that sillyness. He was living somewhere down the peninsula from San Francisco, in the hills behind Stanford, La Honda or some such, and had been a college mate of Clayton Eshleman’s. When he’d heard I was starting a magazine, he showed up at my front door one day with his address book. His address book! He knew that I would want to know how to reach poets & once, when he’d been younger, Paul Blackburn had done the same for him. I barely knew the man at the time, but it was a great act of giving.

A final poet from that era who disappeared altogether was Seymour Faust, a Brooklyn poet as I recall, who I first met through Cid Corman. Cid & I may have been the only people ever to publish him.* But it was the 1960s and he was a hawk on Vietnam, which neither Cid nor I were, and our relationship couldn’t survive that conflict. Here is a poem of his I published first in Tottels #6 in October, 1971:

With Reservations

1.

old books

words polished for a hundred years

and put away a thousand

stories polished for a thousand years

odyssey, logia of jesus,, and of kung

how you have been true to us, and false

2.

in this century

how you have been false

how the airplanes have made liars of you

the nuclear piles in the pressure hulls

electromagnetic waves

how you are undercut by the spectroheliograph

the cardiogram

optics

guidance systems and gunnery

how advertising puts you down

and the unions and the powerful

the whole radio audience knows better than him

whom you mislead

3.

how your paradoxes pall

your parables and fables

your modular stories

how your symbols fail

techniques of dialog

stream-of-consciousness

points of view

figurae

4.

better anything than you

better to strain your eyes on protoplasm

s it flows indistinctly in bright or darkened field

under the lenses of the turret

in the utter silence of concentration

at your cosmic distance

                   or

close at hand

to trace the rockflows of the maria

the traces of devastation that radiate

from the circular maria

or film the solar prominences in hydrogen light

5.

better the doctors lifetime

the lifetime of the assyriologist

the searcher of beach terraces of the north

at Denbigh or Krusenstern

or Onion Portage

     disinterring flints and cores

already seeing man as something over

or one at work

     on the improbable future

the designer of high speed high altitude aircraft

the meteorologist

     tracer of clouds

or at opposite poles

the observer at Byrd Station

The mix between rhetoric & vocabulary here is unique to my experience, yet I don’t believe he ever published a book. I have no idea what became of Seymour Faust, and I know that Cid lost touch as well. What I have of his, as with Gorham or alexander, is an echo I can hear in my head to this day, utterly articulate, completely unlike anything – or anyone – else. I’ll never be able to thank them enough for all I was given.

* No, I see that Frank Kuenstler – another one of the lost strange bards, a New York street poet if ever there was one, halfway between Bob Kaufman and Khlebnikov – and Tuli Kupferberg (better known as one of the Fugs) published Faust also, in an issue of Bread&, published in 1960. You can find references to him in the selected letters of William Bronk & in Corman’s papers, but every other mention of Faust on the web is actually by me.

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Today, I finished The Alphabet.

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Philadelphia

Progressive Poetry Calendar

July Sky Edition

July

19, Monday, 7:00 PM: Walter Mosley, Robins Books, 108. S. 13^th Street, 215-735-9600

22, Thursday, 7:00 PM: Haki Madhubuti, Robins Books, 108. S. 13^th Street, 215-735-9600

September

11, Saturday, 7:30 PM: Shin Yu Pai & Ish Klein, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut Street

17-19, Friday-Sunday, times vary: Zukofsky /100, celebration of the LZ centennial, at Columbia & Barnard, New York City. Details here.

22, Tuesday, 7:00 PM: Ron Silliman, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

25, Saturday, 7:30 PM: hassen presents Patrick Herron & TBA, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut Street

30, Thursday, 8:00 PM: Fiona Templeton, Temple University City Center, 15th & Market, Room 222

October

7, Thursday, 8:00 PM: Jonathan Letham, Temple University City Center, 15th & Market, Room 222

9, Saturday, 7:30  PM: Noah Eli Gordon & Pattie McCarthy, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut Street

23, Saturday, 7:30 PM: Kathy Lou Schultz presents TBA, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut Street

28, Thursday, 8:00 PM: Tracie Morris, Temple University City Center, 15th & Market, Room 222

November

6, Saturday, 7:30 PM: Brenda Iijima & Chris McCreary, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut Street

11, Thursday, 8:00 PM: Caroline Bergvall, Temple University City Center, 15th & Market, Room 222

20, Saturday, 7:30  PM: furniture press presents TBA, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut Street

December

4, Saturday, 8:00 PM: Rodrigo Toscano & Jena Osman, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut Street

6, Monday, 6:30 PM: Ron Silliman, Free Library, Logan Square, 1901 Vine Street, open reading follows

All events are in Philadelphia
unless otherwise noted

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A note from Chris Stroffolino. The ellipses in what follows are his.

Dear Ron —

Just a quick note about Michael Moore's oeuvre as you summed it up in your recent blog. We just returned from seeing F911 with Continuous Peasant's bassist, and political science teacher, Bob Gumbrecht, and his wife (and saw Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy in the audience as well) — and yeah, we too, had to wait for a ticket (or they graciously waited for me, while I rested my broken leg), as the 5:50 showing was sold out (made the 7:30 showing)....

Anyway, I still haven't "digested" the movie enough to come to an ultimate assessment, though I'm pretty sure I agree with much of what you have to say about what Moore might be able to achieve in that movie that often "the left" has been not able to achieve (though with some reservations that I need to sort out), particularly, as you point out, with regard to the issue of the U.S. military. If anything, I wish he would've emphasized more, perhaps by placing it earlier in the movie, the human impact on the life of the U.S. underclass. I thought the focus on so many phases of the military, from recruiting (and his comic attempt to recruit congressmen's sons), to the gun-ho soldiers playing heavy-metal when they kill, to footage of their beating and killing Iraqi civilians, to their increasing frustration with Iraqis (something to the effect of "they are angry at us for being here, but then are also angry if we don't do anything"), to their increasing anger with Bush ("why are we here?" said one in combat, the amputated soldiers in hospitals, and the last letter from the soldier to his mother, severely criticizing Bush), and even anger at Halliburton (the juxtaposition of the Halliburton ad about they "feed soldiers," to the Halliburton corporate luncheon back home, and the priceless footage of the U.S. Soldier at an Iraqi oilfield complaining about how he gets $2000/a month to put his life on the line, while the guys he guards who work for Halliburton get paid at least 4 times as much, he approximated, to drive a truck around....

I wonder if this message will reach the "swing vote," the "conservative democrat" like Lila Lipscomb, and others. I'd like to think it might, but wonder if the way the movie is billed, as ANTI-BUSH, or BUSH-BASHING (partially because of the way the movie is ordered; it takes Moore a while to get to his sympathy with the soldiers) may undermine that message. I have to think about that more....

But, that being said, the main point I wanted to raise, as a possible point of disagreement with you, concerns not your assessment of F911, but of BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, which I thought was a very successful movie, and far more subtle than you're giving it credit for. You claim that in B FOR C, Moore DOESN"T explore "AT ALL" what you call the "anomaly" of Canada's lack of gun-control and the fact that there are less gun-related deaths there, but that "He instead focuses on the gun-lobby." True to a point; Moore does famously confront Heston, and theatrically take the victims of the Columbine shootings to K-MART to get them to stop selling ammunition. But, along with this, you could call it rather "shallow" analysis, Moore also, and I think more profoundly, offers a deeper analysis, in considering the "culture of fear." He quite specifically and consciously explores what might be seen as the "discrepancy"  between gun-deaths and gun-control laws in Canada to undercut any simplistic conclusion that gun-control will solve the problem in the USA. In fact, he begins the movie by talking about his own childhood fascination with guns, and how he himself is still a member of the NRA (which at first may seemed to be a "put-on" but it's not at all clear it is). So, either Moore is talking out of both sides of his mouth, on one level advocating gun-laws and on another level saying "GUN CONTROL WON'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM!," or he's astutely recognizing the need to work on a variety of fronts, straddling a wedge issue, in at least as "fair and balanced" a way as F911 deals with the question of "You don't have to be anti-SOLDIER to be anti-THE IRAQI war." And it is precisely this that allowed him to emphasize the analogy to American response to 9/11 and American response to high-school shootings, in B FOR C. In some ways that linkage of the seemingly more "local" with the "national and international" attitudes (and the role in the media) may have made B for C an even more radical movie (if not necessarily better—-they each serve their different functions) than F911, in terms of depth of analysis. In some ways more, since I felt Moore could have done a better job of investigating Bush's relationship to Saudis and Bin Laden. Because Moore came off as not just "another liberal" wanting to "take away our guns" in B FOR C, I think the movie possessed a persuasive power that may also exist in the new movie. Conservative commentators couldn't as easily just write him off. In this movie, because it begins so clearly as an anti-Bush movie, I'm not so sure it will — but the jury (of which I am not a part!) is still out on that. "No silver bullet?"

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The following note from Anne Berkeley concerns the Korean censorship of all blogs emanating from Blogspot.com, not just this one. Personally, the idea of loading the video of a beheading onto a blog site turns my stomach. Yet I myself have in the past provided links to the website of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), whose site documented the execution of women in that country under the reign of the Taliban. And I took my children to see Fahrenheit 911, which itself includes footage of a beheading.* There are contexts in which such material is appropriate and possibly even necessary.

As a writer, I’m a First Amendment absolutist. The Korean blocking of these sites is disturbing & ultimately stupid. Given that I’ve never written a word here about either North or South Korea, it’s completely galling.

Ron,

I read your blog from time to time because I'm interested in poetry and your take on things outside the mainstream. I like the way you unpick poems and listen to the sounds and intervals. I relish your chastisements of the School of Quietude.

But I'm not writing to flatter you.

Do you realize your blog has just been banned in South Korea? It wouldn't surprise you about China, perhaps - but Korea is supposed to be a modern democracy, with freedom of speech enshrined in its constitution. It's the most wired and internet savvy nation on earth. Ah but.

It all started on 24 June when the video of Kim Sun-il's murder started circulating. The Korean Ministry of Information and Communication (Orwellian or what?) closed access to internet sites showing it. They could only manage it by the bluntest of means - by closing access to the hosts.

As you are hosted by Blogspot, and they are one of the hosts of an offending site, Korean access to Silliman's Blog is denied. The same is true for blogger, blogs and Typepad. That's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of blogs denied to Koreans, some of them even blogging from Korea (though most Koreans use Cyworld). Some Koreans can manage to access blocked sites by using a proxy server such as unipeak.com, but that crashes at busy times. And doubtless that will be blocked too when the government realizes. Probably more foreigners than Koreans will suffer in practice, and there is no love lost for Americans in Korea.

There are two petitions doing the rounds. Neither is wholly satisfactory. This one accuses the government of being fascist, but I signed it anyway. This one sums up the situation quite well. The final sentence of the second paragraph is problematic for me because the situation's much more nuanced than that, but I signed it too.

Korea has a history on this, frequently blocking sites concerning N Korea, and gay sites.

OK, so there are lots of far more desperate human rights issues round the world, but I thought you might be interested since your blog is involved, and be able to spare a moment to sign  one or both petitions.

There's an interesting and informative article in Asia Times (30 June). There is more of the western angle in OhmyNews - MIC: Burning Down the Internet posted on 2 July. CNN picked up the story on 30 June, but they don't seem to have realized quite how blunt an instrument was being used. Otherwise there's been a deafening silence.

When the FKTU expressed dissent, they were quickly shouted down, as Robert Koehler reported in his blog on 25 June.

You can read more about the constitutional position here. Free speech is a constitutional right, but the devil is in the detailed regulations. They seek to "protect minors".

I don't have a particular line on this - I'm English, I like Korean poetry, I enjoy reading some Korean blogs, I feel involved, I get outraged. (I only happened on this interest in Korea through the internet, through reading a Korean poem on a Canadian blog, of all things.)

I don't believe in censorship anyway, but it astonishes me that so many innocent blogs on my own regular reading list are suddenly prohibited to Koreans. And on your own blogroll, there are masses of poetry and poetics sites, all now banned along with blogspot or one of the other proscribed hosts. I gave up counting when I got as far as Li Bloom, and there were already 17 of them!

Forgive me for writing at such length, and out of the blue. I don't know what else is to be done. Maybe a protest to Blogspot? Do they have a news section? Not having a blog myself, I haven't worked out how to contact them about this sort of thing. But at the heart of this is the issue of censorship, which I believe is wrong in principle. That blogs like your own are affected by the fallout makes it worse, but ironically, may help to bring pressure on the Korean government.

This sort of thing has implications for all of us online in the free world.

with best wishes

Anne Berkeley
Cambridge UK

* Tho at such a distance and so quickly that neither of my boys could identify where it occurred once the film was over.

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As noted in this blog before, Ahsahta Press, now a part of the Boise State University publishing empire, has – in addition to publishing books by interesting new writers – Noah Eli Gordon is next up on their to-do list, having just received the Sawtooth Poetry Prize – been doing serious work making available books of poetry by poets whose work might otherwise disappear from view. In particular, the press has taken on something of the project of tracking American modernism of the west, especially that which was not automatically linked up to a second-tier publishing center like San Francisco. 

In addition to Genevieve Taggard’s To the Natural World & Judson Crews’ The Clock of Moss, the press has brought out two volumes by 1926 Yale Younger Poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Hildegarde Flanner’s The Hearkening Eye, as well as books by Haniel Long & Norman MacLeod, among many others. Unlike its volumes of more recent authors, such as Graham Foust or Lance Phillips, published as Ahsahta Press New Series, the books in its Modern and Contemporary Poetry of the American West series have a print-on-demand look about them, with matte covers and no real cover art beyond the press’ logo, with no blurbs or copy on the backs. My copies of both the Crews & Taggard volumes both disintegrated during their first reading, as if the glue in the binding were there more as a gesture than a commitment. Still, I’m exceptionally happy to have my hands on all of this material, whether it’s fairly obscure (as Taggard has become, say) or more recent, like the book by Crews or one by William Witherup – another little mag staple of my youth – or (and this is a gem of a discovery) what appears to be Cynthia Hogue’s first book, The Woman in Red. While I’ve been kvetching for decades over the problem of “disappearing poets,” Ahsahta has been quietly doing something about it.  

If one were to divide the world of poetry, as Josephine Miles pictures it at the end of World War I, into “the poets in the Whitman tradition, trying their new freedoms, and those who held closely to or were renewing a kind of neat quatrain power,” Taggard might be said to fall closer to – tho not exactly in – the latter camp. Indeed, Taggard reminds me of the fact that Ezra Pound’s great poem, “A Pact,” from Lustra (“I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -- / I have detested you long enough.”), is predicated by precisely the problem that the choice as posed, say, by Miles, of Whitman or the chains of quatrains, is finally not enough. One could, to some degree, see  modernism in poetry as the attempt to offer an alternative to heritage of closed forms other than through sheer orality.

Taggard herself was born in 1894, a decade ahead of Carl Rakosi, a decade behind Pound, Wlliams, Marianne Moore & HD. Born in Waitsburg, Washington, northeast of Walla Walla & not more than 50 miles from where I was born, Taggard grew up in what was then outside of the United States, in Hawaii, returning at the age of 18 to attend the University of California, after which she lived a life in constant motion, living everywhere from Capri & Mallorca to San Francisco & New York. Rare for someone in her generation, Taggard taught poetry at three universities. Married twice – her first husband was confined to a mental hospital – Taggard died in 1948.

There is one poem in Taggard’s 1980 volume that addresses the question of competing aesthetics. It is called “Aleatory Wind” & Miles, clearly on the quatrain side of the fulcrum, characterizes it as “an essay”:

Much offends.

Especially the new beauty;

The honest eye that shines and pierces

Even while it pours its honest love like a vapor of healing.

The bare ritual offends;

And the ritual of brotherhood

Which is the basalt sense of the world

Offends, is made to seem contrary and ugly

By means of another ritual with a flimsy deity

And a fantastic logic.

                         Where the hands have no liking

For stones and where minds are blind

To structure. Wherever the hands cease to take hold,

Where the mind backs away from the plain and the related.

This ritual will hurt

The hands of those

Who have left the wilderness of necessity.

Deep mutuality, the sense of distance,

The sense of depth.

Of the fertility of stones, their tears.

Of the electrical star, its tears.

Of the hilarity of the stone brotherhood, the activity of jasper,

Of the inertia of stones, the fixity of basalt,

Of the vigor of stones in their power to draw,

To test metals, to build shapes, to be in space,

To become fluid in the blood of volcanoes,

Of these I made claim . . .

“No art,” said the European, sidestepping the rattlesnakes,

With ballet steps. “Unreal,” said the European, “No ghosts.

No culture.”

I took a stone of weeping in my right hand.

And a stone of laughter in my left.

So the ritual always began, testing the power to hold.

Holding them behind me I juggled them evenly and said “Choose.

Lodestones and touchstones. Magnets subtle, complex.

The greathearted jewels of the obsidian world.”

And looking downward I saw a finger of wind in the dust,

Spinning the dust in a wheel, erratic,

In a funnel, a nothing of wind.

New-world dust sang a sulky little song.

But the tourist heard no song

And saw only liver-colored dust

About a foot high, suspended, in which to wade.

This stone is the electrical star,

The cleaver of space; can you, will you

Bowl it in nine-pins?

Curve it, will it to glide

In dream repetition?

We learn slowly the ritual of stones

And the tactile sense. The snap of action.

The excellent flash of the body

When it kneels and swings.

In this ritual we dance.

For we clasp our ghost, we whirl with a new music.

He is the man we murdered,

The red man. He goes. He is here.

Our ghost is our culture. And we embrace another.

He is the man we murder.

The black man. He returns and returns,

Teaching ritual. And every kind of man

Draws into this whirl. The wind veers

As if to nullify all.

The center of the earth is basalt.

Here we gaze to commune

On action’s articulate bones,

Observing our guilt; the rituals of food and power

All wrongly played. Of this we know much.

Sharing aleatory wind

A thin ether.

Playing with skulls, colors, gadgets

Inventions and dice.

A dangerous country. With a culture like whisky.

The European wore gloves,

And under the gloves, thimbles

On each finger – clumsy.

He turned the pages of old situations

And muttered his pity in the stony places.

This is not, you may have noticed, great poetry. But it doesn’t need to be to make my point. Taggard, not unlike Pound, is trying to find a grounds for an aesthetic other than “the European, sidestepping the rattlesnakes, / With ballet steps.” Not unlike William Carlos Williams, who found Pound’s promotion of Eliot to be a capitulation to “the European,” Taggard likewise attempts to define something uniquely American (i.e. non-European) in which to ground formal differences.

The poem’s opening suggests that Taggard is going to find this quality – X – in some mystical notion, literally something capable of supporting “the fertility of stones.” It’s almost as if Taggard is anticipating Olson’s sense of landscape – or as he liked to call it, in caps, SPACE – but in fact she turns away from that dimension, at least as transcendant cause, looking instead on the temporal access. Thus, if the European’s complaint is that the new world – and by inference its poetics – lacks history – “No ghosts” is the complaint – Taggard counters precisely with the ghost of genocide, and not of one race, but of two.

Considering that a considerable portion of Taggard’s own work could easily be characterized as “European” in the sense that Miles suggests as “renewing a kind of neat quatrain power,” Aleatory Wind is an intriguing thought experiment. At one level, Taggard gets it that American poetry might prove inherently different from its cousins across the pond. Yet she wants the causes for this to be relatively straightforward – none of this “base vs. superstructure” stuff that was fashionable once upon a time here. What she ends up with is not that far removed from a version of American exceptionalism – the theory that attempted to explain why the US never had a major socialist movement. If the origin of European culture – those “ballet steps” – can be said to be history – “ghosts” – it is not that the US lacks its own apparitions, but rather than in our truncated sense of the past what we have instead are two genocidal movements – the Indian “wars,” and lynching.

And this is where I wish I knew just when Taggard was writing here – the only mention of this poem,  the longest in the book, I can find among the index of her papers at Dartmouth is a collection of typescript fragments, undated. Is she testing open form, pushing it beyond her normal sense of the poem, which frankly is how I read it in the context of her other poems here? Or is this a kind a set-up? Is she arguing that what is distinctly American – our ‘”rattlesnakes” – is a kind of toxin, the literary vestage of our own damage? Hard to imagine that view too close to World War I, or WW2 for that matter.

The poem appears in the “Washington and California” second section of the volume, after the juvenilia of “Hawaii,” so presumably was written either when Taggard was studying at Berkeley, or relatively soon thereafter, thus the work of a woman in her twenties.

Yet if she is arguing for a connection between the violence & poisons of the American experience, this poem is, in the same moment, an argument for this indeed. What “offends,” after all is “new beauty,” “honest love” and “the ritual of brotherhood.” There is an articulateness to the opacity of the landscape, its immanence –

New-world dust sang a sulky little song.

But the tourist heard no song

It’s a conundrum that plays out in our own landscape as well.

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There is a wonderful evocation of a lost world in a 1980 note by Josephine Miles that serves as a preface to Genevieve Taggard’s To the Natural World:

In a legendary time in the Greek Theater in Berkeley at the end of the first world war, poets gathered around the visitor Witter Bynner with a great sense of inventiveness and praise. Names I have heard from that time were Genevieve Taggard, Hidegarde Flanner, Eda Lou Walton, David Greenhood, Jack Lyman. A decade later, all were scattered, and new figures were slowly appearing from a distance, Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood and his wife Sara Bard Field. Marie West. Yvor Winters, Kenneth Rexroth, Lincoln Fitzell. There persisted a contrast between the poets in the Whitman tradition, trying their freedoms, and those who held closely to or were renewing a kind of neat quatrain power, as we could read elsewhere in the country in Millay, Teasdale, Wylie, for example. Bynner lauded both.

“There persisted a contrast” as indeed there did & does.* Miles’ portrait is intriguing, leaving out for example such major figures as George Sterling and Ina Coolbrith. And was Robinson Jeffers that far to the south? No more so than Sterling.

But other than Rexroth – somewhat – and Winters, principally through his student Thom Gunn, there is almost no way I can imagine any connection between the Bay Area poetry scene of my day, starting say with the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, & this “legendary time” Miss Miles envisons.

Some of this has to do with the nature of publishing, especially problematic at such a remove from the economic centers of an emerging corpratist trade book industry in New York & Boston. Lyman, whose actual name was William Whittingham Lyman, co-edited, with Vernon Rupert King, a volume called Today’s Literature in 1935. But there is precious little mention of him or it on the net & indeed, Miles’ own poem on the same page provides as much detail as you are apt to find.  

“A decade later, all were scattered,” Miles writes, a phenomenon not restricted to the poets of 1919. I suspect that the Bay Area – which has always had a highly mobile population, with a substantial portion of its citizenry having migrated from elsewhere** – has always had a transitory literary community. As noted in this blog before, the so-called San Francisco Renaissance figured as a major section of Donald Allen’s epochal The New American Poetry was, at least by contrast to its sections on the Black Mountain Poets, the New York School & the Beats, largely a fiction of editing. The Beats were, in fact, as much a phenomenon of San Francisco as the Renaissance, even tho most of them seemed to have been born on the far coast & their tenure in the Bay Area seemed all the more ephemeral, collectively identifiable as just a couple of critical years in the mid-1950s. In fact, Allen put Phil Whalen, Michael McClure & Gary Snyder all in his fifth or “unaffiliated” section, alongside LeRoi Jones, Ray Bremser & John Wieners. Yet how is one to think of them today? And why are Whalen & Snyder not in the SF Renaissance section alongside their fellow Reed College alum, Lew Welch (who spend a fair portion of his Renaissance days working in that SF suburb known as Chicago))?

What brings this to mind, curiously, is not just the depiction of a scene – two scenes, really, ten years apart in time – in Miles’ intro to Taggard’s book, but the announcement of a forthcoming conference on Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, planned for November at UC Irvine. I know – by which I mean that you don’t have to tell me – that this is not precisely what the organizers, Carrie Noland & Barrett Watten, had in mind by the use of the term diaspora. But at some level, it very much fits.

If one looks back at the generation of poets in the western section of In the American Tree, for example, you can trace the migration patterns of a literary scene. In 1982, when the largest portion of the book was edited, 16 of the 18 poets grouped under West lived in the Bay Area. Had it been done a couple of years earlier, Erica Hunt would have made it 17 of 19. Today, just eight do. Of the ten poets in the East section who were then living in & around New York City, all of the nine still living reside at least within driving distance of the city, albeit Michael Gottleib’s ride in from the northwest corner of Connecticut must be quite a schlep. Indeed, of the twenty poets overall in that section, only two, Diane Ward & Clark Coolidge, have permanently moved to other parts of the country. It’s interesting – maybe even counterintuitive – that New York City proves to be (at least in this one instance) more stable a community over time than the Bay Area.

Economics obviously play a part of the equation – and a significant part – but I’m less sure that that was the case prior to 1950 & yet here are not one but two sequential generations of pre-WW2 poets who proved no more stable than the poets of the 1970s & early ‘80s. And while one can, I think, talk reasonably of the continuities of poetry in the Bay Area since the end of World War 2 – essentially since Rexroth & the New Americans came together – it’s the discontinuities that strike me most today.

* Tho, in the very next lines, Miss Miles – having known her somewhat, I cannot imagine calling her anything else – denies being able to hear it any more in the poetry of a quarter century ago.

** Indeed, I was always considered something of an oddity, having gone to high school just over the line from Berkeley in Albany. Yet, of course, there were other East Bay poets around as well, if one just knew where to scratch below the surface. Stephen Vincent, for example, went to high school in Richmond, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino in Berkeley, Michael Davidson & Barrett Watten in Oakland.

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It’s been about a week since my twelve-year-old sons & I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 in nearby Oaks, Pennsylvania, a dot of a town northwest of Valley Forge. I’d gotten our tickets over the net ahead of time in order to ensure that it wouldn’t be sold out, but I was surprised, frankly, to see that the theater was showing the film in a room larger than the one reserved for White Chicks. In fact, our theater wasn’t sold out, but it was 97 percent full, maybe a smidgen more. Afterwards, we stood around with some friends who passed out voter registration cards – we were lucky, as it happened. At a mall in nearby Downingtown, another acquaintance got busted for passing out such cards. Five state police cars arrived at that theater within a couple of minutes in spite of the fact that the nearest barracks is 20 minutes away. Did I mention that I live in a community that has elected exactly one Democrat to anything – the schoolboard in the 1940s for a single term – since the 1890s, but that Al Gore won here in 2000?

I’ve reseen all of Moore’s major films in the past few weeks, ever since one of my sons picked up the book Stupid White Men & noted that “this is a guy who makes funny movies from a left perspective & writes funny books from a left perspective – this is like looking at my future.” Just how big of a hint does a father need? After we’d watched Roger and Me, we’d discussed how Moore didn’t present the entire picture with regards to globalism – rather, that film was a look at the short-term impact on a specific community. But that’s a view that is sustainable only if you argue that the United States has the right in perpetuity to utilize one-quarter of the world’s resources for the benefit of just four percent of the world’s population. The problem with globalism isn’t that it’s happening, but rather how it’s being done: for every dollar that is being shipped overseas, something like 30 cents is dropping to the bottom line (in the form of profits, executive pay & bonuses) & virtually nothing is being done to mitigate the impact on workers impacted by what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”

When we watched Bowling for Columbine, we discussed how Michael Moore points out the stunning detail that gun control advocates never explain adequately – which is that Canada, with the same level of gun ownership as the United States & a culture that is more similar than different, has only a fraction of the gun deaths per capita that afflicts its neighbor to the south. But Moore doesn’t explore this anomaly at all. Instead he focuses on the gun lobby, which frankly is low hanging fruit. Possibly the topic is too large, or perhaps when Moore & the kids from Columbine provoked K-Mart to change its policy on selling bullets he found himself with a different story than the one he’d anticipated. But Bowling for Columbine strikes me as a major missed opportunity, going for laughs by focusing on the NRA rather than trying for an insight into why Canada & the U.S. have such different experiences under roughly parallel circumstances. For that matter, Moore doesn’t do a good job in explaining how the NRA has gotten to be the largest membership organization in the United States. They aren’t all psychotic fascists, even if that’s what the leadership wants to project.

So I approached Fahrenheit 9/11 with some trepidation. And what surprised me the most wasn’t that Moore spins an imperfect narrative – the topic is far too vast for any film shorter than The Godfather, if not Berlin Alexanderplatz. No, given everything that I’d read online or in the papers, plus everything I’d heard on TV, what most amazed me was how fair Moore is. Fair & ultimately balanced. Bill O'Reilly had not prepared me for that. But neither had Roger Ebert.

Consider the impossibility of the project, and how Moore in turn responded. In order to set the context – the “before” part of the tale – he chose to focus on how Bush got into office & what he did once he got there, which frankly was not much. In the “after” portion of the film, Moore makes three major arguments:

·         The Bush family dynasty cannot be extricated from its relationship to the triangle of oil, the intelligence community and the Saudi elite.

·         Wars are not fought by elites, but by kids who are swept up into the military for want of other economic alternatives in their lives.

·         The loss of a loved one in war is overwhelming.

The first of those points has been detailed in far greater detail by none other than Kevin Phillips, the man who first gave Richard Nixon’s Republican Party the Southern Strategy it follows to this day, in his anti-Bush tome, American Dynasty. It may be a bit much to suggest, as some viewers see Moore doing, that Bush’ primary goal in invading Iraq may have been profit – there are other reasons* why the far right might well want to be in Iraq – but the problematics created by our entanglement with the Saudis are hard to underestimate. The difficulty in unpacking the problem of Islamic fundamentalism when your “best friends” are just such fundamentalists is the trick that has to be solved if the West, and especially the United States, is ever to extricate itself from the jihad against modernism.

Moore’s second point, tho hardly new or original, is really this film’s great contribution to the debate over Iraq. He outlines in the clearest possible terms the great secret of the American military – that it is, especially now that it is all voluntary, the GOP form of welfare state. It does precisely what welfare has always done: provides for those who cannot provide for themselves, connects them to opportunities, education & security. Only it does so without admitting that this is what it’s all about, and its one major requirement is that beneficiaries aren’t supposed to complain just because they’re being asked to kill & be killed. Furthermore, as Republicans have known for generations, it cannot be attacked on these terms, precisely because to do so can be characterized as “unpatriotic.”**

Moore’s third point, Lila Lipscomb’s extraordinary story within the film, functions as the synthesis or conclusion in the director’s narrative syllogism: elites make war; the underclass fights wars; it is hell for the underclass. I’ve been surprised, frankly, that there haven’t been more complaints on the left about this being emotionally manipulative, given the left’s preference for complexity, for a tale not just in black & white, but with the grays left in. Moore’s great talent, his unique contribution to the left, has been his ability to make entertaining progressive films that are not at all subtle. Unlike, say, Jim Hightower (on the humorous side) or Alexander Cockburn & Naom Chomsky (on the ponderous end of the scale), Moore doesn’t scratch against the blackboard of the soul with his oversimplifications & just-plain-got-it-wrongs, even tho he has just as many.

In the battle for political hegemony, the American left has always been hamstrung by the fact that it usually has to fight not over any given political point, but over the issue of depth & complexity simultaneously. The moral absolutism & simple-minded arguments of the right – say, over abstinence instead of sex education in schools or over needle exchange programs to prevent AIDS, or that support of our troops necessarily means support of the war – are not just endearing quirks of the right, but in fact an important political dimension to their argument, one that plays itself out powerfully along class lines. When Lila Lipscomb describes how she felt about anti-war protestors against the first Iraq war, she is saying a lot about the inability of the left to communicate to anyone other than itself. It’s the same point that Bill Clinton has made repeatedly when he says that the American voters would rather have a leader who is strong, but wrong, in times of crisis. And it is also precisely the risk that John Kerry runs whenever he responds to any question in a way that looks too cautious – which is mostly all the time.

Moore’s film is an argument that it need not be this way. It can, I think, be faulted for any, perhaps all, of the individual choices he makes in constructing an argument that you can reach people with a skeletal but powerful narrative far more readily than through the nuances of true debate. You might cringe at how he steals the “plastic bag in the wind” scene from American Beauty as his model for conveying the transcendant power of September 11 through pages & dust drifting in the air. But the simple fact is that Michael Moore has managed to go over the heads not just of his fellow ambiguity junkies on the left, but over the right as well, including the very same media mavens such as Bill O'Reilly & Brit Hume who effectively ganged up on & dismantled an unprepared Howard Dean campaign just three months ago. Is it any accident that the greatest master of agit-prop since at least Bertie Brecht happens to look just like a real-life Archie Bunker?

* I tend to agree with the Stratfor Group’s analysis that putting upwards of a dozen military bases in the second largest oil producing nation, thus completing the “chain” of western military presence in the Middle East from Israel to the west to Afghanistan in the East was the foremost political goal of the invasion.

** The closest we have come to having any public recognition of these dynamics has been around Clinton’s concept of a civilian service core, which should have been the other half of his own welfare “reform” program. GOP attacks on civilian service are exactly what they are not willing to make against the military, not because it serves a different function, but because it is, almost in the Mafia sense of the phrase, their thing.

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Judson Crews is a name I recognize from little magazines some 30 years ago & remember more distinctly from positive mentions of it by Robert Creeley, mostly in association with Creeley’s days in New Mexico. So when I saw Crews’ The Clock of Moss listed in the Ahsahta Press catalog awhile back, I sent for it immediately. I’m glad I did. Tho I’m a little amazed that I didn’t learn of this book until 21 years after it was originally published.

Edited by Carol Bergé, herself a poet whose work has been too little collected and reviewed, Crews’ poetry is a fine example of quality work written by somebody deeply influenced by various aspects of the New American Poetry, as well as by the same influences that shaped that 1950s generation. Born in 1917 – and still alive so far as I can tell – Crews is just two years older than Robert Duncan & writes a poem that has resemblances to the work of William Carlos Williams, Creeley, Olson, Dorn, Snyder, Blackburn & Gilbert Sorrentino. Had he “made the scene” more aggressively – rather than spending most of his adult years in Taos, save for four years in the 1970s in just barely more remote Zambia, Crews almost certainly would be a “household name poet” today.

Instead, like Bergé or Besmilr Brigham or even a fairly established San Francisco poet of that period like Harold Dull, Crews has become one of those gems you find if you’re one of us obsessive reader types. It seems to me absolutely impossible to imagine how one can envision an American poetry of those middle decades in the last century without the active context provided by such writers, without whom the names we do know would have been isolated indeed.

His poems are contained in the way so many of the shorter New American poems of that period are – not yet open-ended in quite the way poems will become once the likes of Berrigan & Whalen & the later Olson will make possible – and present a vision of the American west that is as sharply etched as anything ever written by Edward Dorn:

The day’s cock of morning

That bird is neither anonymous

nor fragile. His spurs could cut

An old gelding’s flanks sharply

if we needed to get to somewhere

In that big of a hurry.

My last pair of spurs

Had some silver on them – sold

them finally when I thought

I needed the cash the most.

When I thought – when I thought

I’m gonna need to eat again

say, three or four days

Guess it is more dignified

to shoot that old bird than

           chop his bloody head off

This poem’s shifts within its narrative frame are deft enough, but what really impresses me is its play with what, for want of a better adjective, one might call its Freudian frame – from cock through gelding through spurs to that final line, which is completely phallic. That Crews was trained professionally as a sociologist & psychologist makes total sense reading this.

Actually, in precisely this context, one thing one confronts reading Crews is an attitude towards gender which bespeaks prefeminism, or at least its second wave. Women here are figured as whores, crones, and girls just coming into puberty:

If she had spoken, if I

Had spoken – that face of evil

that had fallen upon that place

The feature that had chilled us

each. She was a faster draw

Than I, but a poorer aim –

I was oozing blood from the left

Testicle. But she was dead.

What could she have been doing

In such a place – naked with a

bandolier and a six-shooter

You would know it was out
West. You would think it was

The old days. You wouldn’t think it

was She, holding out the apple

This is not – which may be hard to imagine in a 50-page book – the only poem to recount this gunfight of the sexes, nor is this the only instance of a gal naked but for her bandolier. Like the narrative containment these poems all share, I read this as a mark of its time, carbon dating the text. Yet get past this – or not, even, maybe just focus right there upon it – and you will find some of the most well-crafted examples of a western New American text I’ve read. The one thing this book made me want to do, more than anything, is to find & read more poetry by Judson Crews.

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