Silliman's Blog

Robert Duncan, in writing to H.D. during the last two years of her life, sought to connect himself to the generation of Imagism (which was, as Duncan would note in The H.D. Book, "not a lost generation," those writers who came into prominence in Paris in the 1920s, precisely because Imagism had been the last pre-Great War poetic tendency*) to help him craft his own master work, a project that, in The H.D. Book, he repeatedly associates with the major late poems of Pound, Williams and H.D.

Yet Duncan’s own writing from this point onward cannot honestly be said to echo the strategies taken by any of the trio of elder poets to whom he continually returns – there is no Patterson, no Trilogy, no Pisan Cantos, as such. One can read Duncan’s major work, beginning with The Opening of the Field in a couple of different ways. In one, all five books might be read & understood as a single project. In another, the fifteen year hiatus between Bending the Bow & the first volume of Ground Work figures a break – placing the trio of volumes from the sixties & seventies into one group, the two volumes of Ground Work into a second. While that may be a major issue for Duncan scholarship in general, it doesn’t, I think, impact a great deal on this work’s relationship to The H.D. Book as currently available – either in the journals of its original publication nor in the pirated "Frontier Press" edition that pops up periodically on the internet. The H.D. Book as we have it was written almost entirely in the 1960s, prior to the hiatus – and the latest actual reference I can find internally to another publication is 1969. While Duncan is known to have had notes to a third "book," to accompany the two sections already available, there is apparently no such additional manuscript extant. All of which suggests to me that we should focus our concentration on the relationship of the Book to the trio of projects Duncan was writing before and during its composition – The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, & Bending the Bow.

Opening was written before Duncan’s correspondence with H.D. got serious. He had sent a few letters earlier, as early as 1950 – a time when his earlier attempts to connect with Pound (a visit to St. Elizabeth’s in 1947, followed by correspondence) had, by Duncan’s own account, become entropic, tapering into silence. The Field, as Duncan called it when he sent Doolittle a copy of the manuscript, was written thus also before Duncan undertook his "study" of the elder poet.

Duncan had been working on this first book of his new unnamed project for some time. Peter O’Leary, in an email, places the first draft of Opening’s initial poem, "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," as from "a trip to London in 1953." The care with which the volume was not only composed, but prepared for public acceptance, as well as Duncan’s own down playing of his earlier works, suggest the considerable importance that Duncan assigned to this project. Indeed, there was much back and forth over whether to self-publish the book or to place it with a press such as Macmillan – which would ensure a broader readership and force more of a response from the 1960s School of Quietude set. In the end, the book came out from Barney Rosset’s Grove Press, a press that had one foot in the New York trade scene, while the other published the likes of Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.

Within the trio of Opening, Roots & Bow, there exist not one but two long poems – The Structure of Rime & Passages – numbered sequences that might well have been written and published as independent works, much like the Pisan Cantos or Olson’s Maximus. That Duncan never published them that way is telling – the two projects treated independently might well have greatly enhanced Duncan’s reputation and, I believe, Structure’s revolutionary nature – it was in the 1960s the most radical instance of the prose poem in English after William’s Kora in Hell & the works of Gertrude Stein – is more clearly visible when set apart. But Duncan’s view of poetry, much like Duncan’s view of the world, is that it needed to be understood as organic, that there is a structure, larger, more detailed, more complex than we can can derive from details alone. As he will say (writing of Olson) in The H.D. Book, "Structure is not satisfied in the molecule, is not additive; but is fulfilled only in the whole work." If one burning question concerning the American longpoem during its modernist period lay precisely in the crux of the part:whole relationship – with Pound, Williams & even H.D. (tho here we might come back to note differences) all writing numbered works that largely flow one into the other, with Zukofsky envisioned here as the Great Dissenter, at least after the opening six sections of "A, " insisting instead a part:whole relationship that stresses the integrity of the part, Duncan offers instead a third way, reminiscent almost of Whitman’s ongoing growth of Leaves of Grass through perpetual revision across multiple editions. In Opening, Roots & Bow, we find individual named poems commingled with these two long poems to form a continuous writing, a Life Work, to employ Duncan’s phrase (and his caps). It is within this commingled flow that we first find The Structure of Rime. Indeed, the structure of The Field forces us to focus on its critical role. After an initial trio of poems, "Meadow," "The Dance," and "The Law I Love is Major Mover," come the first two sections of Rime. Then follows by no accident "A Poem Slow Beginning," followed in turn by five more sections of Rime.

* Tho one might argue that William Carlos Williams, a late starter as well as The One Who Did Not Move to Europe, did not reach maturity as a poet until the 1920s.

Labels: Robert Duncan

Link -  1 comments

• David Perry, New Years
• Joanne Kyger, God Never Dies
• Jeanne Heuving, Incapacity
• Richard Roundy, The Other Kind of Vertigo
• Tomaž Šalamun, Poker
• Elzabeth Willis, Meteoric Flowers
• Aaron McCollough, Welkin
• Robyn Schiff, Worth
• Fanny Howe, On the Ground
• Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw, Playing Bodies

Link -  0 comments

This is quite unlike the experience one has, say, visiting the Experience Music Project (now combined with the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame), a Frank Gehry structure opened just four years ago at the foot of the Space Needle. The interior of the EMP/SFM feels like any institutional display bar, dark and dysfunctional. Not the library.

This isn't to say that everything in the new library works exactly. There are -- goldenrod & chartreuse, in keeping with the interior's "bold" use of colors -- flyers taped to nearly every surface to help users get past the far too "blended-in" signage.

The center of the new structure is the Mixing Center (as it is called) on the fifth floor, essentially a large room of public access computers with T1-line access to the web. There are 132 systems on the floor in a large grid (and another 268 or thereabouts spread around the rest of the library). The next several floors above consist of the "spirals," or stacks. You take a neon yellow escalator up and either walk or elevate down again (or proceed to the tenth floor reading room with its lovely padded linen ceiling. The Mixing Center is very I-beam, but with tons of natural light brought in by the diamond shaped windows that result from the exterior lattice structure of the walls.

While the intense chartreuse elevators or mint-green men's rooms may be a matter of taste, the one floor that dramatically doesn't work is the fourth floor meeting room space, whose corridors are a deep blood red with room numbers "constructed" out of text in a larger, darker red. Given the narrow confines and intense colors, the result is unintelligible, better suited to a punk nightclub than a civic space.

But it's instructive to see attempts being made throughout to rethink the library as such in ways that address their many different uses (this one has a gift shop and a coffee stand with the requisite Starbucks). In contrast, the two museums (musea?) at the EMP/SFM are largely the collections of a single person -- Paul Allen, the man who had the most fortunate dorm room assignment in history, getting Bill Gates. As such, it's even quirkier than the Barnes Foundation in Bala Cynwyd, PA. Yet the building appears far greater than that, and frankly the collections leave much to the curatorial eye to be desired. The one great exhibit in either -- a history of the guitar itself -- is largely unchanged from the version I saw here four years ago when the museum first opened. In fact, it had only two new exhibits, one a ho-hum presentation of the elements of songwriting (that replaced one on Gehry the architect and his work), the other a one-room affair on the Beatles' 1964 trip to the USA. While the SciFi museum & hall of fame (which includes Chip Delaney, but not Philip K. Dick) is fun because Allen has gone out and gotten either the real thing (Ann Francis' costume from Forbidden Planet, Sean Young's dress from Bladerunner, a life-size reproduction of Robby the Robot, as well as one of the alien models from Alien, etc.) feels no less idiosyncratic, undercurated really, its presence in a building that appears to offer much more than these two collections deliver, and which itself all but disappears once you are inside the structure, only heightens the sense of deflation one feels. Koolhaas' library, however, makes you want to try out new buildings for all manner of public functions. The contrast is instructive.

Link -  0 comments

Two sites worth turning your attention to:

Mini-Mag’s PhillySound feature, guest edited by CA Conrad. The typeface is the best argument against italics on the web that I’ve ever seen, but the poetry is worth plowing through the font. Greg Fuchs, Frank Sherlock, Tom Devaney, Molly Russakoff, Ethel Rackin, Ish Klein & Hassen.

Hassen shows up again in the MP3 audio archives of the Carrboro (NC) Poetry Festival held this past June, along with a lot of other folks. This is a dynamite collection of contemporary poetry of all kinds & was obviously one hell of a fest. Just a few of the participants:

Linh Dinh
Lee Ann Brown
K. Silem Mohammad
Patrick Herron
Chris Murray
Murat Nemet-Nejat
Standard Schaefer
Lou Lipsitz
Ravi Shankar
Steve Katz
Hassen
Gerald Barrax
Marc DuCharme
John Balaban
Tony Tost
Chris Vitiello
Clayton Couch
Jeffrey Beam
Judy Hogan

I don’t know whether to get more excited at all the new post-avant voices here or the presence of some poets I feel that I virtually grew up reading (Katz, Barrax, Lipsitz) who never travel enough – Barrax lived in Chester County for awhile & still never gave any readings locally that I ever found out about.

Link -  0 comments

At one level, Tenney Nathanson's One Block Over appears to represent an intersection between the more playful elements in Projectivism (the Creeley of Pieces, say, or aspects of Jonathan Williams’ work) and the New York School, but placed into a cultural context that is thoroughly southwestern & also thoroughly informed by 20th century philosophy, aesthetics & history. If there is a NY School figure this reminds me of, it wouldn’t be Koch necessarily or Padgett so much as it is the poetry of David Shapiro, another writer who is both thoroughly capable of being playful and serious in the same moment, and who is also given to longer, linked forms.

One Block Over will appear again in a forthcoming volume from Chax, entitled Erased Art, that makes this even more clear as it brings in an influence not especially visible in the earlier book – I want to characterize it as “Whitman” because formally that does appear to be the point of origin, but rather than being an act or art of nostalgia that one might anticipate, Nathanson seems to have understood that

• Whitman was the original New York poet

• Whitman, a journalist by profession, was thoroughly involved in the culture and issues of his time

So this is a Whitman viewed through a crucible that includes the likes, say, of Kafka or the Adorno of Minima Moralia. And a Whitman who’s read John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein. And one who definitely has read Joseph Kosuth and the Language Art conceptualists.

Erased Art is a big, broad collection & reads almost like a selected poems. The Rauschenberg/De Kooning allusion in its title is much more than incidental – Nathanson is perpetually making use of intertextual materials, sometimes cited at the moment of appropriation, but often not. The effect is not unlike the way the best hip hop (think of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet) or the way one those familiar faces in the murals of Diego Rivera redeploy the culture as they find it. If there is a poetic antecedent, it’s possibly the Allen Ginsberg of “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which not coincidently happens to be Ginsberg’s best poem.

Within Erased Art, “One Block Over” comes across as a very different poem than when presented free of context in the confines of its own book. Here it feels more like one of three or four poles between which Nathanson’s poetry moves, in the way (for example) that the Williams of Paterson is not precisely the Williams of Spring & All. And there are poems here that my descriptions above don’t come anywhere near even touching, such as an intense piece, ”The Wish to Steal a Baby in a Fifteen Year Old Girl,” that one might read as “post-confessional” were it not for its march through the pronouns – the first person critical to the first section, the third person more so in the second, the second person in its final movement.

Erased Art makes me wonder just how much the tip of an iceberg this book actually is. There is no telling with the individual metabolism of poetic composition. It’s almost a question of the biology of the poet – some folks, like Robert Kelly and Larry Eigner, produce thousands of pages in a lifetime. Someone like David Melnick or Alan Bernheimer seem unlikely to reach 300 pages. If one considers the long silences in the careers of George Oppen & Carl Rakosi, it gets even more complicated. Erased Art is a volume that leaves one hungry to see the entire terrain.

Link -  0 comments