Silliman's Blog

Thinking about how Structure of Rime sort of peters out in Bending the Bow (there is an exception, a piece that turns up right at the end of Duncan’s career, in Ground Work II, but it is just that, visibly an exception) precisely as Robert Duncan’s other long project Passages gets under way, I’m reminded as to how different Bending the Bow is both from Robert’s earlier books and from the two volumes of Ground Work that were to follow Bow after the 15-year hiatus. Bending the Bow is Duncan’s one book that a reader could characterize as topical, and it is especially the sections of Passages in it that most completely fulfill that role. “The Fire, Passages 13” & “The Multiversity, Passages 21” are two of the great political poems of a decade that was filled with great political poems, & one could make a case for “The Fire” as conceivably the finest antiwar poem ever written.

Yet, in the two volumes of Ground Work, only one poem, “Santa Cruz Propositions,” could be characterized as similarly related to events in the “real” world. Dated 1968 in Ground Work II, “Propositions” begins as a series of meditations on the relationship of sea to land, composed while Duncan was teaching at the then-newly-built UC Santa Cruz, before it turns to a series of events that occurred not in 1968, but in 1970, the murder of Victor Ohta, a prominent Santa Cruz ophthalmologist, his wife and children, and his secretary, by one John Linley Frazier, a local crazy who had been living in a shack uphill from the Ohta family home. As I recall, Frazier had been upset about the encroachment of suburban development into the “virginal” mountains. Where the Manson Family murders a year earlier had left behind simplistic messages on their crime scenes (and on their victims), e.g., “Piggy,” Frazier left behind a note stuck in the windshield wiper of the Ohta family Rolls Royce. Duncan quotes from the note in “Propositions.”

Some four years later, I found myself working as a casework at the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice, where, as the new kid in the office, I was assigned the cases nobody else wanted to handle. Which is how I found myself that year corresponding with Frazier & Charlie Manson, both of whom the media had dubbed as “hippie murderers.” The only thing the two had in common was that neither ever used the first person in their correspondence, Manson always referring to himself in the third person as “Little Manson,” Frazier simply drawing the smile of a Cheshire cat where an “I” normally would have gone.

In 1972 & ’73, Santa Cruz was also struck by two other serial killers who, between them, murdered a total of 21 people before they were caught. The combination of three mass murders over such a short period of time caught the media’s attention even in those pre-Geraldo, pre-Fox News days. This sleepy surfing town had, at least on a per capita basis, become the murder capital of North America.

It may seem odd to imagine Duncan turning his attention to such tabloid fodder, even though it was occurring close to home, so to speak. But the fact that it turns up as Duncan’s final focus on the topical, and that it should be dated 1968, is perhaps even odder. Of course the poem could have been begun that year, with the Frazier material added later. And there’s nothing about the other poems in the book to suggest that it’s presence is out of the largely chronological order Duncan was now practicing. Indeed, it appears that the book took 12 or 13 years to write, for all of its 175 pages, suggesting that Duncan’s poetry during this period had slowed to a trickle.

This is the other aspect of The H.D. Book that I haven’t thus far mentioned, that it may have run not only into a series of internal conflicts as Duncan’s dream ran headfirst against the brick wall of the real, but also that Duncan, like so many other authors before him, especially poets, may well have had a slowing down as he aged. Consider, for example, the oeuvres of Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, other members of the same loosely defined generation who died fairly young. If you look at the complete poems of each, the first thing that strikes you is that they produced very little indeed over the last two years of their lives. Indeed, several of the surviving New Americans have been silent for years, even decades. It is the Robert Creeleys & John Ashberys who are the great exceptions, not the other way round.

When Ground Work Before the War was first published in 1984, it had almost none of the impact of his earlier books. The world – including the world of poetry – had changed dramatically since 1968, but there was little evidence that Duncan’s own poetry had evolved during that same period. If anything, the disastrous decision to produce the book’s type on an IBM Selectric typewriter not only made the texts difficult to read, but the attempt to faithfully reproduce the author’s own process & page seemed now remarkably antiquarian. When The New York Times finally got around to reviewing it in August, 1985, it turned to new formalist Mark Rudman, who gave it a thumbs up for all of its pre- and anti-modern gestures.

This is not to suggest that some of the poems from that book, such as “Seventeenth Century Suite” or “Dante Études” are not important poems in the career of Robert Duncan – they are easily that. But as both their titles suggest, they are the projects of a man who is no longer concerned with extending the world of the poem, whether or not one thinks of it in terms of Pound’s dictum to “make it new.”

There are now a number of accounts (plus comments upon accounts) of the Zukfosky 100 conference on the web. For detailed & accurate reporting, I seriously recommend Josh Corey. More oblique in their relationship to the event itself are Steve Vincent’s notes. Not particularly related to the conference, tho you might think it was, is the little flame war that has grown up in viral mode among the comments to my Tuesday, September 21^st blognote.

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Not quite a blog, but in parallel mode is 1-Year Plan, a web project initiated this month by Barrett Watten. He states his intentions as follows:

I have been planning over the past year to develop a writing project that would take place in time, on a regular basis, and that would publish its findings on the internet. The writing would be a record of the time in which it was written, and would act on and change that time—if only as a matter of understanding. The writing would hope to change itself, as writing, within the time it was written. I wanted to specify a duration for the writing of one year, and a frequency of roughly one text per week. If all goes well, at the end of the year there will be an index of about fifty texts, with commentary and links.

Given that Watten has the best critical mind of my generation, you know this is going to be quite a ride. I’ve added it to the blogroll even if it isn’t quite a blog.

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Even further afield is Lanny Quarles’ new Boppo Blog, literally named for the term coined by my mother – when she was a toddler – for potholders. My mother will be appalled.

If she still had her eyesight, tho, she would think that first boppo looked very cool.

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I’m going to be in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days. I may blog while I’m there, but then again I may not.

While Alan Golding, Norman Finkelstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Bob Perelman covered Louis Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry from a wide range of perspectives, I was struck that not one of them addressed what has always seemed to me to be its most visible formal feature – the presence of a low dash, an underscore at the head of every example. Thus:

23a______

Hedge-crickets sing;

Zukofsky himself addresses it only in a footnote, albeit the lone footnote in Test:

This space may be used by the reader who enjoys marking up his copy for evaluating the compared examples of similar object matter under each cardinal number in some such way as great, good, fair, poor.

Flinching as we note the gendered language that is so 1940s, this smirking footnote suggests that this line is a kind of joke. This makes some sense on the first page, perhaps, with two poems, but the device is carried through for each of the anthology’s 186 pieces. That suggests that Test might be read as a kind of parody of a textbook, and at some very distant level, that also may be an element here, but it’s important to keep in mind that this form of satire is in fact far more commonplace today that it was 56 years ago – let alone 70 years ago, when much of Test appears to have been put together.

But these seem like uncharacteristically broad strokes for a poet so attentive to particulars that he would send typesetters individual instructions on the number of dots to use for each ellipsis (thus the occasional two-dot ellipsis is neither a typo nor an antiquarian convention but an instance of ellipsis interuptus). I think we need to look instead at where these lines are and what they in face do, formally. Boldfaced and in a larger san serif type than the “body text” of these poems, these lines transform the numbering of these texts from functioning as separators into serving instead as surrogate titles.

What after all is a title? What is its relation to the body of a text? Zukofsky after all is a poet whose major work “A” has a title in quotation marks because it quotes the first word of the poem itself, a strategy Zukofsky employed in his earliest acknowledged work, “Poem beginning ‘The’”.*

The poems in display in A Test of Poetry are unidentified in the first & third sections of the anthology, but even in the second, where Zukofsky names poet & poem & comments after each grouping, the work’s author & title are appended after the body text, essentially as a kind of textual “tail” at its lower right.

Yet our eyes are attuned to see, feel titles even when, as is so often the case for me, we mostly read them after we read the text, particularly for texts of the size included in this anthology, most of which are sonnet length or less – that Keats excerpt above is complete.

Titles, as Walter Benjamin has noted, operate in one of two ways – they name the work as a whole or else they function as a caption, foregrounding a single internal element within the text (think, for example, of David Ignatow, an obsessive captionist, most often farming his last line for a title word or phrase). These curious lines of Zukofsky’s, however, suspend the title as a name or caption, while retaining its role as a graphic weight at the head of a text, leaving the numbering system for the most part to generate groupings.

So that line at the top of the poem is a title . . . performing the role the eye expects a title to play. This acknowledges that titles have functions that are extra-linguistic & that the graphic elements of the printed text themselves carry a kind of meaning. Grouped with their numbers, these lines fulfill one part of the social contract of the printed text.

Think, for instance of all those poems entitled “Untitled,” or where editors have, as often they do with Emily Dickinson, imposed titles or simply boldfaced first lines. Each is an acknowledgement of this same line as we find in A Test of Poetry, the dark brow of the poem.

* There are, we learned from Tim Woods, even earlier poems published in student journals at Columbia under the ironic pseudonym, Dunn Wyth.

The first panel at the LZ / 100 conference was a superb affair on the topic of A Test of Poetry, Zukofsky’s curious – and relatively brief – anthology of exemplars, groups of poems clustered together, anonymously in two of its three sections, tho with a pedagogical grid at the rear. It was an all-star panel, with Alan Golding, Norman Finkelstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Bob Perelman. All four talks were excellent, but two fundamentally transformed my understanding of this cryptic book originally published in 1948, but largely constructed during the 1930s – two very different moments in the history of American & world politics for this most political of late modernists.

First, Golding, as often he is want to do (and a feature of his critical writing that I admire & have mimicked in my own work more than once), went back to counting specifics, in this case books, literally copies, both of Test & other volumes Golding argued were in some sense comparable. Thus, for example, Golding recounted the history of editions of Brooks & Warren’s market making Understanding Poetry, first issued in 1938, but traceable in terms of sales only from 1949 to 1976, a period during which some 294,000 copies were released.

Golding reads A Test of Poetry – and indeed Pound’s ABC of Reading (first published in 1934 but which by 1967 had resulted in editions totaling less than 30,000 copies) as competitors in an academic textual market, one created & saturated by Understanding Poetry. I wonder, if only because in my life, coming into the writing of poetic theory in & around 1965, an alternative non- or even anti-academic tradition already existed, including not just these books, but D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Human Universe & The Mayan Letters, the critical works of Gertrude Stein & Laura Riding. The idea – implicit in Golding’s comparison – that the target audience envisioned for these books was so many undergraduates seems to me problematic, more so especially for those volumes that were written or at least begun before Brooks & Warren functionally created the academic market segment.

My test simply is this: would these books still have been written if the academic market never existed? In every case, the answer is a resounding Yes. Indeed, without exception, all the works of poetics that I would consider of primary value were composed without one eye – let alone both – fixated on the textbook marketplace. An example just beyond the boundaries of critical composition, per se, would be the late Don Allen’s The New American Poetry, aimed at reaching & influencing an audience of poets. A counter example, though, just to demonstrate the impact of target audiences, would be Allen’s own later collection (co-edited with George Butterick), The Postmoderns, intended for undergraduates but more useful as a demonstration of how the same writing that once turned the world of poetry on its ear can be presented as lifeless, simply through its desire everywhere to be representative rather than polemic.

Even if, as Golding notes, the first draft of Test was constructed by Zukofsky in a series of 16 blue examination books, it doesn’t follow that that this work was gathered – or published – for undergraduates.

One question here that I would take back to Golding & to his own intellectual project is precisely this division between polemic & pedagogic writing. Polemic writing presumes its reader is a peer, an equal, someone to be persuaded the way one persuades a neighbor in an election. Pedagogic writing, however, presumes just the opposite, that there is a hierarchy of knowledge, information & meaning and that expository writing is fundamentally the transmission of proprietary data to an audience of blank slates.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ talk unveiled the constructedness of the examples used by Louis Zukofsky in A Test of Poetry. Rather than being complete texts or even complete quotations from extended passages of longer works, Zukofsky often built these lyrics, at times using ellipses to indicate gaps of entire pages are two or more passages are yoked out of context in order to foreground elements that may not have been prominent in the original.

Thus, for example, political rage & class resentment become major themes in what appears to be “classic literature,” an act of turning the courtly constraints of literary history on their head. Indeed, at one point in the 1930s, Zukofsky was working on two parallel anthologies, the other being A Worker’s Anthology. While this second project was abandoned – its existence is documented in a 54-page manuscript in the Basil Bunting archives – 35 of its 38 poems ultimately find their way into Test, 33 of them in exactly the form they took in the Worker’s manuscript.

This, for me, was one of those wonderful moments when doing one’s homework – which DuPlessis executes impeccably – yields whole new layers of the work at hand. The result is revelatory – I’ll never look at A Test of Poetry the same way again.

From the perspective of its organizers, the Louis Zukofsky / 100 – it sounds like an auto race, or possibly a mass arrest (“Free the LZ 100!”) – was wildly successful, drawing 250 attendees when 70 would have been considered a very respectable turnout. Indeed, the conference closed registration several days in advance because the numbers had reached the physical limits of the rooms involved at Columbia & Barnard.

Yet of the 250 attendees, no more than 30 appeared to be women — & hardly a random selection. Marjorie Perloff, Lee Ann Brown, Joan Retallack, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Madeline Gins, Anne Waldman, Barbara Cole, Marjorie Welish, Jennifer Ashton, Erica Hunt, Ulla Dydo, Susan Wheeler, Jessica Smith, Ruth Jennison, Meredith Quartermain, Tonya Foster, Helene Aji, Jena Osman, Diane Rosenberg, Brenda Iijima, all poets & scholars who practice, with no hesitation or apology, their role as intellectuals.   

To be at a conference in 2004 in which the attendees are over 80 percent male is unsettling. An absolute majority of poets writing & publishing today are women, & the academy – this was after all a professional conference of scholars even more than it was a gathering of poets, tho it was also always a collaboration of both sides of the community. Even the academy, at least the human sciences, hasn’t been 80 percent male since the 1960s. I was told that the imbalance would have been worse had not the organizers done some active outreach to several women speakers on the agenda.

All I can conclude is that there is something about Louis Zukofsky &/or his work to account for this gendered response. But what?

Sharing a cab with Marjorie Perloff Friday night, we discussed this. It is not, she reassures me, that women don’t choose to present or attend academic conferences. Zukofsky, she suggests, is not only a sexist – a man of his generation, born in 1904 – but also ideally suited to be taken as a “man’s poet.” (I envision Robert Bly doing his Iron John routine & try to imagine LZ likewise – it’s a preposterous image, tho it’s also clearly not what Perloff was suggesting.) One possible reading of this is that the tight-nit family represented in his poems is hardly the valorized ideal Zukofsky himself portrays it as. The wife types the poems, makes possible the careers of husband & son alike. She even finishes LZ’s long poem for him!  

Harder to fathom is whether or how LZ’s difficulty in his poetry is, or may be, more “male” in some sense than, say, the uses of difficulty in the poetry & prose of Gertrude Stein. Does Zukofsky’s use of number as a method for inbuilding opacity differ materially from Stein’s more improvisational interventions into linguistic and grammatic surfaces? Is it a question of methodology?

I don’t know and I’m pretty sure I’m not the right person to try and answer that question. Barbara Cole gave a talk that I didn’t hear at the conference on just this topic, or rather on the “dim tide” of feminist criticism and gendered readings of his work. Her abstract is online at the LZ / 100 website, but I wish I’d heard the entire talk.

While I was off on a 60-hour trip to New York City for the LZ / 100 . . .

·        My office at home was flooded by the remnants of Ivan as it passed through Pennsylvania (tho apparently not nearly as badly as John Taggart’s house)

·        I saw Harvey Shapiro &Hugh Seidman read for the first time ever

·        I realized just how much Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-21 was faux Shakespeare

·        As a result, I realized that the 24-book scheme of “A” was derived from Joyce’s Ulysses

·        Burton Hatlen & I found ourselves in the same hotel, the austere Riverside Towers, & had breakfast together twice, once at Zabar’s & once up at the Pinnacle Deli just off the Columbia campus (advantage Zabar’s)

·        The New York City subway was shut down due to flooding, compliments of Ivan

·        I saw the best minds of my generation arrive drenched at the conference – Don Wellman & Charles Alexander appeared to have swum

·        One of  the most highly anticipated talks of the conference – Peter Whalen’s “Literary Paternity and the Psychological Residue of Abortion: Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky” – failed to materialize

·        So the audience discussed it anyway

·        Robert Kelly described how the Zukofskys wrapped each and every book & magazine in their apartment on Willow Street in Brooklyn in the 1958 equivalent of plastic baggies & how their ashtrays would be emptied after every cigarette, so that they could chain-smoke all day and still have spotless ashtrays

·        Much was made of the pronunciation of “A” – ā or ă (with lots of regional variants for the latter) – there was a lot of sentiment for the latter, given that the title is a quotation of the poem’s first word (hence the quotation marks)

·        The Guardian, the progressive British daily paper, ran a very positive review of Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems

·        I received copies of the following works:

o       Born 2 by Allison Cobb

o       A Reading Spicer & 18 Sonnets by Beverly Dahlen

o       TV Eye by Todd Baron

o       Slowly but Dearly by Norman Fischer

o       Chantry by Elizabeth Treadwell

o       While Sleeping by Bill Lavender

o       Architecture Against Death / Architecture Contre la Mort, a two-volume (plus CD) double issue of the journal Interfaces devoted to the work of Arakawa & Madeline Gins

o       The Labor of Division in Society by Joshua Schuster

·        I returned home to discover that Krishna & Colin had taken care of the flood entirely by themselves (Big Thanks!)

·        A stack of books had arrived in the Saturday post & were awaiting me:

o       Instrumentality by Ravi Shankar

o       Up and Up by Ted Greenwald

o       Shut Up and Shut Down by Mark Nowak

o       The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos

o       plus the latest Rain Taxi, aptly named this month

Tom Pickard is a poet from the north of England who may be best known over here as the former bookseller who once tracked down Basil Bunting & got him reinvolved with the literary world, an event that not only brought the old spy back for public readings, but caused him to write Briggflats, the work many think of as Bunting’s finest. That was a long time ago & Pickard has spent the ensuing decades writing a quiet precise poetry that at times feels like the perfect conjunction of Objectivism, the Beats & some third thing I can’t quite identify (but which I hesitate to call “the North”):

Ancient Stone Dressed With Lichen

now the mushroom season is here

I remember – she has the basket

but I have the knife.

Or

Your Recent Chill

cold Atlantic blasts

make warmer company than you

these recent months

asleep in a nest of icy

inquisitorial winds

I turn to cover you

and wake alone

Now Flood Editions has published The Dark Months of May, part of its ongoing efforts to become the most well focused independent press in the United States.

Not all Pickard poems are as spare as the ones above – indeed the center of this dark book* is a long prose series entitled “Fragments from an Archaeological Dig in Gallowgate” – but all have this same intense sense of focus & precision even when Pickard’s being boisterous, as in the excerpts from his libretto on the outlaw musician Jamie Allen.

Like Tom Raworth, Pickard has an ear that enables his work to move easily across the Atlantic. With a book that’s readily available, at least by poetry standards, and a reading tour coming up across the U.S., hopefully more folks in these environs will come to know & appreciate this work.

Pickard’s schedule:

·        October 20: Brown University, Providence.

·         October 22: SUNY-Buffalo.

·         October 26: Harvard University, Boston.

·         October 28: University of California, San Diego.

·         October 30: San Francisco State.

·         November 4-5th. University of Colorado, Boulder.

·         November 8: Drake University, Des Moines.

·         November 9: University of Chicago.

·         November 10: Woodland Pattern Bookstore, Milwaukee.

·         November 11: Lake Forest College, Illinois.

·         November 13: Chicago Poetry Project, Chicago Public Library.

·        November 15: Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

·         November 17: St. Mark's Poetry Project, New York.

·         November 18: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston.

* Its cover follows the spirit of the title to such a degree that reading the blurbs by Fanny Howe & Annie Lennox will cause eye strain.

Robert Duncan’s concept of the Elder Poem – of the poet who prepares him or herself to embark at a reasonably advanced age – 60 and above for his modernist icons, 37 for himself – on a major project that will not just create a poem of lasting importance, but also force readers (and especially critics) to rethink the poet’s oeuvre may be the most original and important idea put forward in The H.D. Book. It’s consistent with – indeed predicated upon the parallel concept – not unique to Duncan – that one’s writing forms a Life Work and that individual poems must be viewed rather as excerpts or samples of this larger ongoing thing. The result is an implicit narrative to the poet’s life, which one might argue must inevitably form a narrative of progress, or at least of conscious development, but which I suspect Duncan would counter is really a narrative not of progress, but of struggle. Some writers do follow this evolution – Duncan proposes Pound, H.D. and Williams as instances, although the trajectories and specifics of each one is quite different – but other writers might suggest very different results – Wordsworth, for example, or even Stein. What if you’re a poet like W.S. Merwin who hasn’t produced anything of import since The Lice? Or where the history of the poem, the history of the poet and the history of reception are extraordinarily complex, as in the case of Judy Grahn – or for that matter Allen Ginsberg.

But The H.D. Book is hardly the demonstration of a thesis. Duncan, in fact, makes the point more than once that he is not, by professional standards, a scholar:

For I am not a literary scholar nor an historian, not a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions or an occultist. I am a student of, I am searching out, a poetics. There are times when my primary work here, my initiation of self as poet in the ground of the poet H.D. and also my working of what is now a “matter of Poetry” (as the Arthurian lore is called the matter of Britain) and in turn an element in the great matter of the Creation of Man, there are times when my work has given way to literary persuasions and arguments, as if I might plead the cause of my life experience before the authorities at Nicaea and have my way, no longer heretical, taken over by those food bishops who control appointments and advancements as established dogma, a place won for H.D. in the orthodox taste and opinion of literary convensions.(sic)

But just here I would admit those crossed lines, mixed purposes, almost of a literary scholar, an historian, a psychologist, a professor of comparative religions, overwriting the poet and the figure before us that we are striving to realize.

Where now we have only this one way to go, to the knotting and the untying of knots, moving along the line of our moving, the sometimes multiphasic sentence, we follow, trace of this coveted animal or animating power we address, crossing and recrossing its charm as if we could so bring in over into our human lot the form it is of a book we are writing or of a life we are leading, is the nucleus itself of our work which we feel as an impending lure, the turning point where we are, leading us on. (66)

Duncan wants to find the terms for his own Elder Epic and, in the same act, he wants to rescue H.D. from those critics who, as late as 1960 – and considerably later as well – took her for a poet who produced her finest writing, possibly even her only writing of note, in the London crucible of Imagism in the period 1912-1915. It’s a project he compares in the passage above to heresy, and there is no question that it was, circa 1960, a major undertaking, especially for someone who appears to have had no foretelling of the second wave of feminism that would soon sweep Western cultures, bringing H.D., Stein and oh so many others along with it.

But Duncan has other purposes here that are also important.

·        He wishes to establish a solid personal connection with a major high modernist, something that has eluded him up to the time.

·        He wants to articulate a critical writing – a method if you will – antithetical to the dry territorialism of the New Critics, to establish himself alongside Olson & Pound as an alternative in thinking seriously about the poem.

·        He wishes to argue for a particular vision of Organic Form, one in which every element of the poem is defined by the whole, never the part – this differs materially from the work of some of Duncan’s closest peers.

·        He wants to unite two discourses, theosophy and psychology, to create the grounds for a critical discourse for the poem.

There are other more local goals as well – for example, Duncan wants to rescue the mystic in Ezra Pound – but these are, by comparison, relatively minor in nature. As Leon Surette has demonstrated in The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult, English-speaking intellectuals during the first decades of the past century were certainly comfortable with the discourses surrounding world religions, mysticism and the paranormal. But it is one thing to be able to employ that vocabulary, the way a contemporary poet might employ technical jargon, and quite another to propagate what Lenny Bruce once characterized as “unscheduled theologies.” That Duncan uses Pound to build a bridge to the various experiences in H.D.’s life, from her childhood in the Moravian Church founded by Count Zinzindorf that first came to America in the 1730s – an instance of William Penn’s decision to seek out religious minorities in Europe to settle in his new colony across the Atlantic (hence the Quakers, Amish and Mennonites all abundant in Pennsylvania to this day – the towns of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Lititz all began as Moravian settlements) – to the “Writing on the Wall” episode in which Doolittle experienced some kind of psychotic break while in Greece, an event explored by the poet when Bryher arranged for her to be treated by Dr. Freud in Vienna, to her use of Greek & Egyptian materials in her work – that Duncan uses Pound really demonstrates that in 1960 Duncan feels a need to build that bridge.

I’ve written before of the dramatic decline in the presence of mysticism as a strain in American poetry between the 1960s and the present – it’s most visible in what a poet like Robert Kelly, for example, chooses to reprint from his early books in later selected editions, and in the fact that publications that used to include significant amounts of writing related to the wisdom traditions – from Coyote’s Journal & Io to Caterpillar, Alcheringa & George Quasha’sActive Anthology – not only no longer exist, but have as a category more or less never been replaced. This in part was the “scandal” that Apex of the M attempted to call attention to during its brief moment of notoriety circa 1990.

One can point to a number of causes for this process of resecularization (if, in fact, that is what it was) of American poetry, but two in particular strike me as important here. The first is the death of Charles Olson in 1970 at the relatively early age of 60. The degree to which many of the poets who investigated such alternative discourses did so out of a sense of encouragement by Olson, or even out of a desire to in some fashion be Olson, cannot be underestimated. Without his oversized presence, that entire strain of Black Mountain poetics went silent very quickly and very completely.

The other was the rise of theory, starting around 1966, right about the moment when structuralism in the human sciences was giving way to post-structuralism. It’s ironic perhaps that it was at that moment many younger poets began to find theory, and especially to find structuralist theory and its antecedents in Russia such as formalism & futurism. Theory had a relevance that the wisdom traditions did not precisely because some aspects of it came out of, engaged with, and attempted to explain the very profound events that were then taking place in the US, Europe, Mexico and Southeast Asia. Whether one followed the Habermas-Benjamin-Gramsci-Althusser line or the Barthes-Greimas-Jakobson tradition, or the newer contrarians led by Kristeva, Lacan & Derrida, all modes of theory also offered one of the primary phenomena that had been associated previously with modes of mysticism – a difficult, convoluted linguistic tradition in which verification often mattered less than authority and prestige.

Not coincidentally, chapters of The H.D. Book appeared in publications associated with that earlier trend – one part Olson, one part shamanism, lots of young poets – which so rapidly dissolved. It is perhaps not surprising that of the fifteen journals which carried individual sections of the book, only four – all associated with universities – still exist. But it is also the case that all of the later chapters appeared in journals with less and less of a wisdom tradition subtext – Montemora, Ironwood, Chicago Review, Sagetrieb.

It was blogging that finally brought me to Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. Or perhaps it was the other way around. I was spending a couple of weeks in a cabin off an unmarked trail on the far side of Brier Island off the southwest coast of Nova Scotia. Because I was on vacation, I didn’t have a laptop with me, although I had some periodic access to email & the web through the Westport library, the little three-street town that makes up what this island knows of civilization, or through a PC made available through Canada’s federal computer access program at the whale watching station across from lone store and just down the street from the fish processing plant.

I’d loaded The H.D. Book in the “Frontier Press” PDF file format onto my Palm Pilot. And if I had any time left on my turn at the PC once I finished my email, I turned to the Blogger site, where I’d begun fiddling around with a format that looked like it might feasible. In my memory – and even at the time – the two projects feel inseparable.

In 2002, when this occurred, it had been some 36 years since I’d first come across a selection of Robert Duncan’s critical prose in Origin, Second Series, No. 1, where it was entitled The Day Book. While I’d begun reading Duncan seriously, perhaps even obsessively, by then, I found this work off-putting. Its density as prose was heightened (if not largely generated, at least as a surface effect) by my own lack of resources at the age of 20 to come to terms with this work. As new chapters of the project came out over the next few years – two in The Southern Review, for example, which called the project H.D., another in Caterpillar 7, using the name finally of The H.D. Book – I was never able to get with the program. Not only were they dense, but their order of publication was jumbled. After the selection from the second part appeared in 1963, Aion published the fifth chapter of the first section in 1964 – a poetry journal taking its name from a work by Carl Jung was very 1964 – then two years later, the first chapter appeared, this time in Coyote’s Journal.

It was at about this point that I discovered the Origin issue in the library at San Francisco State – and I was devoted reader of Coyote’s Journal, which I would have not hesitated to characterize as the best poetry publication around – but these disparate and disjointed excerpts gave me a sense of the work’s difficulty that, in 2004, seems hard to defend.

Duncan’s prose was nowhere nearly so convoluted or idiosyncratic as the critical writing of Charles Olson or the later Ezra Pound, two of my favorite poet-critics at the time. If Duncan’s tone struck me as personal, even private, it was nowhere nearly so intimate, say, as that of Robert Creeley’s critical prose – this during a period when Creeley short notes in journals were appearing with some regularity, tho nobody I knew at the time seemed to understand (as I most assuredly did not) just how substantial a critical oeuvre Creeley was putting together in those years – when Don Allen published A Quick Graph in 1970, it and Williams’ Spring & All (reissued after being out of print for four dozen years) transformed the critical environment surrounding the New American Poetry.

My own problem with The H.D. Book was mostly that I was unread at the time, trying to follow the prose of a polymath on a subject that occasionally – tho not consistently – seemed to be about a modernist poet whose work I didn’t know well – and whose aesthetic bond to Duncan I did not comprehend. There are roughly ten references, ranging from allusions to direct quotation, per page, some 5,000 in all, give or take. In the middle 1960s, it was fair to suggest that I didn’t recognize, know, or understand perhaps 80 percent of them.

For Duncan had not one, but several simultaneous agendas in writing this book. What makes Hilda Doolittle unique is that, at least in the eyes of Duncan, she is that part of the great Venn diagram of influences where such things as modernism, mysticism, homosexuality, and a concept that I will call The Elder Poem all come together. Gertrude Stein, who is curiously absent from this project, fails for want of an epic composed as an older writer. Pound was dangerously heterosexual, or maybe just dangerous, though Duncan did make an attempt in the late 1940s to establish a connection to him and does his best to yoke Pound to mysticism, mostly through his apprenticeship to Yeats. Crane didn’t live long enough. Duncan seems not have approached Williams & expresses to Denise Levertov that what he had found – and publicly advocated – in the later work of Williams had “not felt as a way opening for me in form.”* Zukofsky and the Objectivists were peers, not masters, particularly during that long period between World War 2 and the early 1960s when they had mostly dropped from sight.

Thus multiple agendas in units presented in good part out of order – presuming that the order of the actual book would have made its argument, its internal logic, somehow more clear, which as it turns out is only half true – focused around a poet whose work I didn’t know well and bringing in a seemingly infinite cast of obscure references. At some point, I must have decided, “Oh hell, I’ll just wait for the book.” And so I did.

Duncan himself made an effort in the late 1960s to bring individual chapters out more or less in their order of appearance, with only a reworked version of Part One, Chapter 5 and “Rites of Participation,” Part One, Chapter 6, appearing noticeably out of order as he brought forward six chapters of the first part, and five of the second.

Then there is nothing for another six years. At this point – and up until at least 1983 – Duncan is telling people that ultimately Part One will have nine chapters, Part Two twelve chapters, and that there will be a Part Three, a reading of H.D.’s final long poem, Helen of Egypt. At this point also, Duncan has begun a publicly announced – there is some question as whether this was planned or accidental – 15 year hiatus from publishing books of new poetry.

In 1975, Duncan publishes three additional pages to Part Two, Chapter 5 and adds the next two chapters in the magazine Credences. Then another silence of four years. In 1979, Duncan publishes the next chapter in of all places The Chicago Review. Two years later, Part Two, Chapter 11 appears from Montemora. Two years later, Ironwood brings out Chapter 10. Finally, in 1985, Duncan brings out a revised version of Part Two, Chapter 5 in Sagetrieb.

The H.D. Book is unfinished, even after at least 25 years of work. At around 500 pages total – using the Frontier Press format, which flows 187,000 words into 421 pages, inserting instead the correct fourth chapter for the first part in lieu of the one that is erroneously used for both the first and second parts of the PDF file, and adding the pages that exist in Duncan’s notes from the third section, none of which has yet to appear in print – that’s just 20 pages per year. The scale is not vast. Rather, one has a sense that Duncan worked hard on it for a time – 1961 through ’63 – then in bursts thereafter, the bursts at least partly involved in plowing through old ground, adding new elements – such as dream sequences in 1964 & ’65.

So I envision Duncan even during his most concentrated years producing roughly 60,000 words per year. A significant amount, but not necessarily a lot as a daily activity when alongside what will mount up for a dedicated blogger – in the first year of my own web log, I wrote over 330,000 words, in the second 240,000. Duncan’s production, as a daily writing practice, averages just 164 words. But what I see – I think what I saw at the very beginning – and why that first alternate title, The Day Book – resonated with me so, is the concept of a critical writing project as a means of thinking through the issues in one’s poetry, whatever they might be.

Since the book itself never actually appeared, as such, The H.D. Book over the years became more and more an object not of criticism (Duncan’s), but of memory (my own). So it was this concept of the function of a critical project that lasted with me more, in some ways, than the project itself, especially as time went by and I lost track of the original magazine issues in which it appeared. (I had, I believe, at one time or another owned all but the original Origin issue, the Aion number and the 1985 issue of The Southern Review; I’m not sure that I ever even saw these latter two.)  In my memory – and to some degree in the book itself – Duncan’s critical prose comes as close to Viktor Shklovsky’s utopia of a plotless prose as any I can think of by an American poet in the Pound/Stein/Williams-Objectivist-New American-Langpo tradition.

So when I began to think seriously about the idea of blogging, it felt like the most obvious thing to me to do to finally attempt to read – seriously read – The H.D. Book.

* Williams had in fact been a point of contention between himself and Madeline Gleason. He quotes her as saying, circa 1950, “do you really think anyone will be reading him ten years from now?”

Ron Silliman
Forthcoming Readings & Talks

New York
Friday-Sunday, September 17-19, times vary, Zukofsky /100, celebration of the LZ centennial, at Columbia & Barnard. Other participants are listed here. I’m reading Sunday afternoon along with Charles Alexander, Bruce Andrews, Ben Friedlander, Michael Heller, Erica Hunt, Ken Irby, Robert Kelly, Hank Lazar, Steve McCaffery, Geoffrey O'Brien, Meredith Quartermain, Hugh Seidman, Harvey Shapiro, John Taggart, Anne Waldman, and Susan Wheeler

Philadelphia
Tuesday, September 21, 7:00 PM, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk

Lawrence, KS
Monday, October 4, 1:30 PM: Seminar Room of the Hall Center for the Humanities, a talk on Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book

Lawrence, KS
Monday, October 4, 7:00 PM in the English Room of the Kansas Union, reading

San Francisco
Thursday, October 7, 3:30 PM, San Francisco State University, The Poetry Center (Hum 512), talk on Robert Duncan’s HD Book

San Francisco
Thursday, October 7, 7:30 PM, Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin @ Geary, reading with Judith Goldman

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

Berkeley
Monday, January 24, Moe’s Books, Telegraph Avenue, reading

Washington, DC
Thursday, February 3 (2005), Georgetown University, a “short talk,” plus a reading with Leslie Scalapino

Pieces of the past arise out of the rubble.  Which evokes Eliot and
then evokes Suspicion. Ghosts all of them. Doers of no good.

The past around us is deeper than.

Present events defy us, the past

Has no such scruples. No funeral processions for him. He died
in agony.   The cock under the thumb.

Rest us as corpses

We poets

Vain words.

For a funeral (as I live and breathe and speak)

Of good

And impossible

Dimensions.

Jack Spicer

First poem for The Nation,

Second poem for Poetry Chicago

Book of Magazine Verse

© 1966 by Robin Blaser

Newsweek journalist learns about the New York trade presses the hard way. Terry Teachout chews her out for it.

I first enrolled in the Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State in the fall of 1966. It was something I did almost at the last minute, having been persuaded by my first wife, Rochelle Nameroff, that student loans and food stamps would make school economically viable, and that colleges were going to be the center of whatever was happening in society for the next several years. But because I enrolled so late – and because Leonard Wolf rejected my manuscript application into his poetry class – I found myself with a minimum of courses that first term, the only one of which I remember 38 years later being an omnibus Intro to Creative Writing course team taught by George Price, Wright Morris and George Hitchcock.

So I had a lot of time on my hands that autumn and spent most of it in the San Francisco State Library, reading the American poetry collection, basically A to Z. In addition to all the obvious texts, the SF State Library in those days had a really comprehensive poetry collection – the consequence I would learn later of having had Robin Blaser as its poetry buyer. I filled out what I already knew of American poetry – mostly the New Americans and a few of the moderns – and found several lesser known poets whose work I would come to appreciate, such as Kirby Congdon, Tram Coombs and Roger Shattuck. There were several books by SF State alum Tracy Thompson, whose jacket material made note of the fact that he was the most widely published poet in America in the early 1960s. And there were little magazines, some of which I had only heard about before. I recall quite distinctly carefully reading issue after issue of Origin, Second Series. I don’t think the library had the first series. So it must have been there, in the tenth issue of that run, where I first came upon a long prose work by Robert Duncan, then called The Day Book.

At the time I knew who Duncan was, but had not met him. I didn’t know, for example, that he had once been the assistant director of the Poetry Center. Indeed, it was hard for me to imagine just how this character I’d seen on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, usually at a poetry event, always surrounded by a group of older women I’d heard referred to as “Robert’s Theosophists,” with wildly crossed eyes and, in those days, the first signs of mutton chop sideburns, made any sort of living. He didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen in an office. And he certainly was too debonair to be a beat or hippy. Maybe because he was always the center of attention, but Duncan seemed quite extravagant and that was before he began sporting the purple cape and wide-brimmed hat that became calling cards for him later on. 

I met Duncan briefly the next spring when he came to speak to Jack Gilbert’s poetry class. I don’t recall what he talked about, other than that it was vaguely about the relationship of knowledge to poetry. Every time he made a point, Duncan literally made a point, with a blunt piece of chalk on the blackboard. By the time he finished talking, the board was virtually white with dots. It had been as much theater as lecture and I will concede to having been enchanted. It was very much like having been visited by a creature from another dimension. Lisa Jarnot’s phrase, Ambassador from Venus, is surprisingly accurate and not at all hyperbolic.

My time at SF State was curtailed after that first year when my wife became ill and I ended up working full-time in the U.S. Postal Service, limiting my studies to what could be cobbled together at night for the next 18 months. I recall at the time that there were two books I was reading constantly during that period, trying to fathom their implications not just for poetry but for my poetry & indeed my life: The Cantos by Ezra Pound and Roots and Branches, by Robert Duncan. I read & reread both books constantly, noting their similarities as well as their differences, not yet able to sort out generational distinctions let alone political nuances. I got none of the references in either – which in fact convinced me at the time that reading for references wasn’t reading at all.

Some time during 1967 I had a run-in with Duncan of sorts, the first, but certainly not the last. The San Francisco Police Department in a vain attempt to stake a ground in the culture wars of that decade made a raid on the Psychedelic Shop, a bookstore & poster palace on Haight Street, where they confiscated several publication, including Jack Fowler'sGrist, in which I had a poem, but in which the full front nudity of Gerard Malanga with a heroically backlit erect cock was more what the cops had in mind. They finally settled on prosecuting one book, Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book, which they later followed up with a prosecution of Michael McClure’s The Beard, ostensibly for the act of cunnilingus that occurs in the play’s final pages.

As local literary figures began to marshal up a defense for Kandel’s book, which was a rather two-dimensional derivation of Walt Whitman and possibly Ray Bremser celebrating the physical act of fornication, I found myself at first bemused and then somewhat alarmed by the overstatements that were being made in the press and on TV about how Kandel had discovered a new language for love. So I wrote a flippant note to the Chronicle suggesting that the book had more important First Amendment implications than one might imagine. Up to that moment, every defense of allegedly obscene material had depended on a claim of the work’s literary importance, from Joyce’s Ulysses to Ginsberg’s Howl & William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The Love Book, I suggested, presented an opportunity to defend the right of mediocre writing to engage in erotic discourse as well. It was, I thought, a curious world in which only great books could get away with being obscene.

Duncan, I soon learned, thought of himself as Kandel’s discoverer or patron and had a deeply vested interest in the idea that she was embarking on a new feminine – the word feminist was not used – language for lust. He wrote a lengthy letter denouncing this Babbitt Silliman, reading it aloud at a rally at San Francisco State and later on a TV show on KQED, the PBS station.Gilbert and some of my friends were ecstatic – they thought it was great fun watching Robert get his knickers all twisted on account of some callow schoolboy – and frankly they agreed with my assessment that Kandel’s poetry wasn’t about to change literature. I, however, was appalled. In 1967, Robert Duncan represented everything I wanted to be as a poet. But Robert Duncan had met the enemy, and he thought it was me.

Of all the major projects undertaken by the New American generation of poets – which for the sake of definition lets presume consists of the 44 poets included in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology that gave its name to such different tendencies of poetry as the New York School, the Black Mountain or projectivist poets, the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats – only one appears never to have been published in book form, Robert Duncan’s booklength critical volume, The H.D. Book. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but the major blame – if we are to use that word – lies with Duncan himself.

Begun in 1960, at a time when Robert Duncan was embarking – and understood that he was embarking – on his major literary project as a poet, commencing with The Opening of the Field and continuing on through two additional volumes before he took a 15-year hiatus from publishing volumes of poetry, The H.D. Book was projected to consist of three parts:

·        An nine-chapter first part, entitled Beginnings

·        An eleven-chapter second part, entitled Nights and Days

·        A third part, of unknown length and chapters, to consist entirely of a reading of H.D.’s Helen of Egypt

Duncan worked hard on the first two sections in 1960 and ’61, a time when he was in frequent correspondence with Hilda Doolittle, the one member of the so-called high modernist generation with whom Duncan seems to have had a serious dialog, begun after an abortive attempt to sustain an earlier one with Ezra Pound in the late 1940s.  Doolittle herself passed away in September of 1961 at the age of 75, having had both a long & unusual career as a poet and a surprisingly difficult life for someone who, for the last forty years of her life, never had to worry about either work or money. 

Duncan continued to think about, and occasionally to work on, this project so far as I can tell for the remainder of his life. Dates given in the sections published in journals suggest that there was a flurry of writing in 1963 and 1964. The second section of Chapter Five of the second part gives three different years of composition – 1961, 1963 and 1975. Duncan published a selection of excerpts from the second part of this project first in Origin, Second Series, Number 10, in 1963, but didn’t begin to publish chapters systematically until 1966, when the first chapter appeared in Coyote’s Journal, a magazine edited by James Koller & a rotating band of co-editors that included at times Edward van Aelstyn, Peter Blue Cloud, Carroll Arnett, Steven Nemirow, William Wroth and William Brown.

[I don’t think it’s possible in today’s world of webzines and phenomena such as Spencer Selby’s list – which includes roughly 370 “experimental poetry/art magazines” – to fully appreciate the scarcity of publishing resources that existed in the middle 1960s, and thus to appreciate the greatness of the best little magazines of that time. In the period immediately prior to the creation of Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar, Coyote’s Journal – on which Caterpillar was loosely modeled – was easily the best little magazine in the United States, including everyone from Richard Brautigan to Tom Clark, Larry Eigner, Anselm Hollo, Ted Enslin, Edward Dorn, David Bromige, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, Douglas Woolf, David Meltzer, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Basil Bunting, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Ronald Johnson, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen. The exclusivity with which the journal focused only on white men was not, as they say, a differentiator in 1963. After eight issues or thereabouts in five years, Coyote’s Journal turned into an occasional project of Koller’s as he bounced around from Portland to the Bay Area and eventually east to Maine.]

Duncan published that first chapter of part one in 1966, the second one the following year (again in Coyote’s Journal) plus the first half of the sixth chapter in the initial issue of Clayton Eshleman’s  Caterpillar. In 1968, the second issue of Caterpillar completed the publication of the sixth chapter, plus chapters three, four, and five. Duncan also published the first chapter of the second part that year, again in the first issue of a new magazine, this one Sumac, a publication edited by baby-food heir Dan Gerber and budding novelist Jim Harrison.

Duncan published chapters two, three and four of the second part of the volume in 1969, plus the first section of chapter five. Then Duncan didn’t publish anything from The H.D. Book until 1975, when he published three additional pages from chapter five of the second part, plus chapters seven and eight in the second issue of Credences. Chapter nine appeared in 1979, chapter 11 in 1981, and chapter ten in 1983. In 1986, Duncan published a reworked version of part two, chapter five in a Sagetrieb issue devoted to his work and chapter six of the second part in the Southern Review.

A note that Duncan published in 1983 suggests that at one time there were to have been three additional chapters in the first part, plus a twelfth chapter of the second part:

Chapter 5, which addresses the matter of the State and War, remains in large part unpublisht. Chapter 6, which has to do with the transmutations of genital and poetic experience, has not been publisht at all (contrary to the impression given by the checklist in Scales of the Marvelous [New Directions, 1979].

Both this note, and a second one that is appended to the PDF version, suggest that some or all of the unwritten chapters were to have been composed after the completion of the third section, the reading of Helen of Egypt. Presumably because of The Southern Review publication,  Chapter Six is included in the PDF.

The PDF file is worth noting because it is the only version of this project that is readily available in 2004, and thus is the edition most contemporary readers are likely to have come across. It’s not clear just who produced this version – the credit to Frontier Press is an allusion to Harvey Brown’s Buffalo press that, in 1970, brought out the lost classic original version of William Carlos Williams Spring & All, seemingly in a pirated edition. The success of that project – easily the most influential critical text of the early 1970s, if not at the moment of its original publication in 1923, when it more or less sank like a rock from view – was thought by many readers to have forced New Directions to return the great early prose works of Williams the high modernist to print. So this “Frontier Press” edition is rather something of a similar prod, in this instance to the University of California, which must eventually publish The H.D. Book in some version in its collected works of Robert Duncan, and to that series’ general editor, Robert Bertholf. The PDF file has circulated through a number of different sites on the net over the past four or five years, and can currently be found at OneZeroZero, a virtual library of English Canadian Small Presses.

The PDF file is little more than a reprinting of the chapters that had appeared in little magazines prior to 1983 and even on that score it has flubbed the job, publishing the fourth chapter of the second part both in its correct position within the manuscript AND as the fourth chapter in the first part as well. (One can still find an occasional issue of TriQuarterly number 12, in which the real fourth chapter of the first part appeared in 1968 – I have a poem in that same edition.)  It’s worth noting that TriQuarterly calls the book as a whole just H.D., not The H.D. Book. Duncan also called it The Day Book in its initial appearance in Origin. In short, this was a project that never fully came together.

Duncan’s second note in the PDF file largely concedes this point:

Note: The last three chapters of Part I and the remaining chapter of Part II I think to be dependent upon what happens in Part III, of which no sentence has yet been ventured. The first draft of the Book was done in 1961, considerable over-lays were written in 1964, with dream material entering into the Book as late as 1964. It had been commissioned by Norman Holmes Pearson as a Book for H.D.’s Birthday, but at the time of the commission I had warnd him that I saw H.D. as the matrix of my finding my work in Poetry itself. “I askt him for an H.D. book,” Norman Holmes Pearson said sometime in the 1960s, “and he’s writing an LSD book.”

– RD

By the time Duncan died, some 70 handwritten pages of the third section existed and the first part was now complete at six chapters. But the final chapter of the second part appears never to have been written. What we have, then, if we turn to the PDF as the best widely available resource is a document that is missing two published chapters, plus all that exists of the third section. At best, The H.D. Book we have is shards of a working that Duncan himself was not able to complete even though he worked on it, off and on, for over a quarter of a century. When the UC Press edition comes out, perhaps as early as the end of this year, it will be interesting to see if we can now answer the question as to why a project to which Duncan appears to have given such importance was ultimately left undone.

This is one of those stories that makes clear to me – if nobody else – why I’m so happy to be doing what I do. Although, as you will see, I’m only a peripheral figure in this tale.

Sue Gaughan, whom I do not know, sent me an email last week, as follows:

Dear Mr. Silliman,

 

i was hoping you may be able to help me.  i recently found a poem, or a verse from a poem credited to robert hogg.

 

The sun is mine

And the trees are mine

The light breeze is mine...

 

all the searches i have done lead me to believe he is a Canadian poet. i would appreciate some confirmation of this and the complete poem if possible.

 

i would greatly appreciate any assistance you could offer.

 

sincerely,

 

sue 

Well, I knew that Robert Hogg was a Canadian poet, but was this a poem of his? I couldn’t say. So I forwarded my missive northward to Louis Cabri, who noted that Hogg was

one of the TISH era poets from the 1960s in Vancouver, who has lived in Ottawa since I believe the early 1980s and teaches at Carleton University. (TISH was a poetry newsletter and the poets involved with the magazine were the Canadian counterpart to the New American poetries.) [RS: Jack Spicer fans will recognize the name Tish from Book of Magazine Verse]

Since Louis didn’t have any of Hogg’s books at hand, tho, he forwarded the email chain westward to Rob Manery in Vancouver. Rob indeed had answers, plus a bibliography – and a further poem for our consideration:

The lines are from Bob's first book, The Connexions (Berkeley: Oyez, 1966).The Connexions is a long poem describing a mythological rite of passage into manhood. The lines are from the last poem of the book, an envoi to the poem.

Bob Hogg's bibliography:

The Connexions(Berkeley: Oyez, 1966)
Standing Back (Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1971)
Of Light (Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1978)
Heat Lightning (Windsor, Ontario: Black Moss Press, 1986)
There is No Falling (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993)

Another poem by Bob which I've always thought was his best

Three Rooms

In the midnight
kitchen

the harvest
table

beneath the
light

defies
the essential

emptiness
of the room

into which I
come

disturbing
nothing

but the unseen
molecules

of the air
to place my

elbows on
the table

sit
with my mind

to think
the wheel

of the furnace
could be still

and not forever
circulating air

listen
for the silence

eager
with mind

and ear
for the night

sounds of the house
water

trickling through
crushed stone

conduits
laid on bedrock

networks of pipes
in their gravel

beds
mind

straining
to know

what is really
underground

 §

not water
over stones

but a curious
imitation

the mind's
flirtation

with the real
bells

ringing
words

with unique
persistence

singing through
the floorboards

profane
as my elbows

and no less
determined

to prop up
abstract

thought
its single

ambition
a fixed

proposition
a construct a

permanent
word

free at last
of ob-

durate earth
and empty

ether
it can ride

the wind
blow through

walls
enter

the furnace
circulate

as air
perform

acrobatics
of sound

and sense
tumble

down on the nets
of the inner

ear
disturb

the delicate
nerve

signal
being

unending
wave

Finally Robert Hogg himself joined in (copied on all this, I think, by Rob). His note:

Hello folks; the poem in question was printed as the last poem in my first book, The Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1966.  It was written in Buffalo in May 1965 when I had recovered from a terrible battle with hepatitis that nearly killed me during my convalescence and relapses the previous winter in Manhattan where I had been a welfare patient in St Vincent de Paul’s Hospital, and later stayed with a lover, the “Nadia” of the sequence, in an apartment on West 10^th St from the window of which I could see the barbed wire roof of the West Street Jail.  The entire text obliquely refers to the rite of passage associated with prolonged fever, jaundice, two serious relapses and the consequent proximity of death.  Of three of us who contracted the disease in Vancouver, one died.  The exuberance I felt when I recognized my health had really returned is reflected in the repossession of those natural elements celebrated in the final poem.  It came in a burst one May day when I was living on Lafayette Ave in Buffalo, the leaves fully on the trees, and the warmth of spring finally certain.  It signaled both the end of my illness and the end of the sequence of poems I had been writing since the previous December—I knew also that I had a book with a coherent theme, and that many of the poems I’d written over the previous three years did not belong in it.  Consequently, most of those early poems never saw reprinting in any of my books, though many had appeared in small mags in Canada, England and the States. The poem in question has been anthologized a few times, most often in anthologies for young readers.  While I am delighted by this, it is also somewhat ironic that the real context has never been recognized or acknowledged.  As a final note of interest, that same month I read the poem out loud in Olson’s graduate poetry class in which I was enrolled; he listened to the poem intently, then asked me to reread it to the class.  After I had done so he looked at the class in general which was populated with some exceptional peers, and said, “Now that is poetry.”  After what I had been through, and the circumstances under which I had been living and studying and teaching first year classes in English at SUNY, that was a great moment.  I had just turned 23, and was likely to see 24. The entire poem goes as follows:

Song

The sun is mine

And the trees are mine

The light breeze is mine

And the birds that inhabit the air

are mine

Their voices upon the wind

are in my ear

Philadelphia

Progressive Poetry Calendar

v. 3.1

September

8, Wednesday, 7:00 PM: Frank Sherlock & Alex Welsh, Old Christ Church, 201, North American Street, $10 (part of Philly Fringe)

10, Friday, 7:00 PM: Frank Sherlock & Alex Welsh, Old Christ Church, 201, North American Street, $10 (part of Philly Fringe)

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

16, Thursday, 5:00 PM: Jen Hofer, Ofelia Pérez Sepúlveda& Cristina Rivera-Garza, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

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

18, Saturday, 8:00 PM: Linh Dinh, Molly’s Books, 1010 S. 9^th Street, in the © of the Italian Market

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

23, Thursday, 6:30 PM: Nathalie Anderson, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

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

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

October

6, Wednesday, 8:00 PM: Linh Dihn, hassen, Ish Klein, Frank Sherlock & Kevin Varrone, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania (215 Festival presents PhillySound). With Cellist Monica McIntyre.

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

14, Thursday, 6:00 PM: Peter Gizzi & Marjorie Welish, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

20, Wednesday, 5:30 PM: Jean-Michel Espitallier, with translator Sherry Brennan, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

21, Thursday, 6:00 PM: Michael Gottlieb & Tony Lopez, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

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

29, Friday, 12:30 PM: Anne Waldman, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

November

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

10, Wednesday, 6:00 PM: Theorizing presents Mark Hansen on technesis (technology beyond writing), Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

11, Thursday, 4:30 PM: Jaap Blonk, the legendary sound poet, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

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

18, Thursday, 5:00 PM: Rae Armantrout, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

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

9, Thursday, time TBA: Kenny Goldsmith, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania

All events are in Philadelphia
unless otherwise noted