Silliman's Blog

Orange Alert

On Monday, February 28, New Yorkers will begin to see what Central Park looks like without The Gates, the 7532 bright orange (“saffron” say Christo & Jeanne-Claude, tho tangerine would seem to be more accurate) structures, essentially door-frames sans doors, the top third of whose openings are taken up with industrial strength banners that are neither curtains nor flags. I suspect that for some, especially those who live in close proximity to the park, it will take some doing.

Was The Gates great art? I suspect not, tho the actual answer to that question requires an extended contemplation as to what art is or should be & how a work like this does or does not meet the necessary conditions. It was, unquestionably, a great gift to the city of New York, the best thing that has happened to Manhattan in some time. And, if you look at all closely, it stands up remarkably well in many of the areas that one would get to in that extended contemplation.

But lets begin by noting what this art was not about, which was itself. The utter redundancy of the material object replicated over & over essentially obliterates what Benjamin once called the aura of the original. That is certainly no accident, any more than it is an accident that one cannot see the whole of the project from any vantage point short of a helicopter – a feature that was true also of Running Fence in California in 1976, the other one ajor Christo project I’ve had the pleasure of seeing up close and personal.

In fact, the comparisons & contrasts with Running Fence leap out at one almost instantly. Both require considerable movement on the part of a spectator. Both serve functionally as framing devices for the landscapes in which they were set. Yet Running Fence was an act of late modernism in its aesthetics, a long single pale line that ran through the fields of Sonoma County. The Gates is gaudy to look at, goes off in all directions, leads you to areas where you expect to find more & don’t – Strawberry Fields, for example – then come upon two or even three rows of them running side by side along other paths. The difference reminded me of the aesthetics of Frank Stella as they evolved over a similar three decade span. Running Fence is the early Stella of the continuous gray line. The Gates is late Stella, with wild colors & expressiveness running off in all directions. One could make the same analogy with the music of Steve Reich, I suspect.

The Gates is a framing device before it is anything else. What Christo & Jeanne-Claude want you to see is the park. In the cold monochromatic tones of winter, these bursts of orange pop up everywhere – you see them up close as you walk through them, you see them up high on bluffs here & there, you see them curling into the distance & down in the lower reaches of the park. If ever there was a project to make people acknowledge how unflat Central Park is, this was it. It was, in that sense, an homage to Fredrick Law Olmstead & Calvert Vaux, the park’s creators. I was reminded, walking through the park on an afternoon that started off gloomy & then turned sunny, with splotches of the previous day’s snow softening the backgrounds behind all this tangerine, that Olmstead claimed that one of his goals as a designer of environments was to prepare the citizenry for socialism. One way to do that is to orient the individual to his or her position in the natural world – and a framing device is a perfect mechanism for underscoring that point.

Invisibility was a major component of The Gates, even though they were not all the same size. For example, the most important structural element of each gate was not the three orange beams, nor the curtain, nor the ten rivets that held all these together, but the plain black feet under each vertical beam that provided the necessary stability for these large & frankly dangerous objects to withstand the elements. The black feet disappear into the park, the background, immediately. I challenge you to find a single photo on Google that highlights this key critical element. Yet on some of the paths, the verticals angled into these base structures in order to keep the gate steady on an uneven plane – they are not incidental, not unart in the way that a wire that enable a canvas to hang might be.

Walking through the park, I noted that the banners were remarkably sturdy looking, the sort of synthetic material you might find in a modern sail or parachute, densely stitched with orange thread to provide a tiny grid texture. They seemed remarkable with the sun behind them or when they billowed in the wind. I never once saw an instance of graffiti on any of the structural supports – and I was looking for tagging, expecting it actually. I don’t know if the supports were specially treated to make it impossible, if graffiti was wiped away as quickly as it was put on or if people were too stunned by the work itself to imagine such interventions. I wondered – I still do – if there was any order to the plan itself, or if, as seems most likely, it was carefully done in reaction to existing peaks & valleys & paths of the park, so that the plan is the park itself.

And I like the way in which this project does not take itself seriously. There were a number of parodies of The Gates up on the web almost instantly – cheese crackers, little flags leading to somebody’s bathroom, etc. – and every one of these ribald knock-offs seemed to me to confirm the essential rightness of Christo’s & Jeanne-Claude’s original impulse. Look, these alternatives seemed to say. This is exactly the point.

If William Gibson is the Wordsworth of cyberpunk fiction, Bruce Sterling is the Coleridge.¹ It was in fact Sterling who coined the term cyberpunk, some years back & it’s clear that he remains the phenomenon’s most serious intellectual thinker. Given the traditional atomization of novelists by the trade publishing industry, the idea of something akin to a movement of same – even if it amounted only acknowledging mutual interest in one another’s work – was an effective means of focusing attention on what makes this group of writers different. Tho they often use the speculative devices associated with sci-fi, they aren’t sci-fi writers in the traditional sense at all. Rather, they’re interested in exploring the possibilities of society, history & technology, broad categories of concern that can go in a lot of different directions. Sterling’s Islands in the Net remains my favorite example of the phenomenon, set as it is amid a world in which voracious pirate corporations operate in a post-state world.

Zeitgeist is the most recent Sterling book I’ve read & it’s pretty indicative of what’s often great, but also often frustrating, about his projects. The novel was published originally in hardback in November of 2000, with the paperback having been issued in August 2001. Zeitgeist probably should have been published even earlier than that – aspects of the reading experience would have been heightened, if not actually different, if this book were read, say, mid-1999. As it is, it’s a sign of Sterling’s general attention to the world that even having missed the Millennium & having gotten into print in advance of the 9/11 attacks, this is a book that actually includes Osama bin Laden (complete with calypso jokes about the Taliban), albeit at its periphery. One premise overall is that the new century will be radically different from the old, and that the “American century” just past will be supplanted by something quite different, fairly deadly, & far more apt to be centered not in New York or Washington, but in that swath of landscape that stretches from the Middle East to South Asia & reaches northward in to the peripheral republics of the late, unlamented U.S.S.R. In this sense, Zeitgeist joins James Sherry’s Our Nuclear Heritage as an example of prophetic writing – the difference being that Sherry saw this a dozen years ahead of the attack on the Trade Center & Pentagon, while Sterling got his in just under the wire.

The story, such as it is, concerns one Leggy Starlitz, a cheesy hustler who manages a Spice-girls knock-off band called G-7, which has one girl from each country then participating in the economic cartel. Singing & dancing skills not required. The plan is to have the group tour through a series of countries starting with Cyprus & heading east. This gets complicated when the band gets basically taken over by rogue Turkish intelligence agents & Starlitz ex-wife, now a lesbian hippie beansprout communard in Oregon, shows up to drop off the 11-year-old daughter, Zeta, whom Starlitz has never met. But along the way more things happen than one might imagine, including a narrative interlude in Hawaii & a trip across the Mexican-US border to conjure up a sort-of-virtual grandfather who speaks only in palindromes.

As is so often the case in life, Sterling’s greatest strength – his rapid-fire, free-associating imagination – is the book’s primary weakness as well. The plot roars right along, but not so much in any one direction. It ends, but to call the conclusion satisfying or even a conclusion is overstating the case. In that sense, Sterling is not unlike Pynchon’s later work, filled with the devices of narrative motion but absent any strong sense of direction.

Sterling likes to complicate these narratives by having the characters struggle with ordinary aspects of family living, even as assassins are showing up & the body-count starts to mount. In this book, it’s the relationship with Zeta, who’s constant refrain, “Hey Dad,” virtually sets up the syncopation of the book. In Islands of the Net, one of the key characters had to do her thing while pregnant (not unlike the sheriff in Fargo).

It’s fun, fast, furious, full of things to think about with regards to the future configuration of forces in this world, and yet in the end it’s a literary cookie as well, digestible more than memorable. Oddly enough, given all its dystopic warnings & quick shoot-from-the-hip sociology, it’s both accurate in one sense – this century is already patently different from the previous one – and far more optimistic than events since 9/11 would lead anyone to believe.

¹ It’s easy to push this analogy too far. Lucius Shepard becomes the Blake & Neal Stephenson becomes what? The Shelley?

It is my duty to report that Lyn Hejinian is writing the best poetry of her career right now. The bizarre thing is, I’ve been able to report that virtually continuously for nearly 30 straight years. Before that, I just didn’t know her work well enough.

I will offer as evidence Hejinian’s reading at Kelly Writers House on this past Monday. That link will take you to both streaming & downloadable versions of the event.¹

After reading from My Life in the Nineties, a sequel of sorts to her signature work, My Life, Hejinian turned to what she characterized as pages from The Book of a Thousand Eyes, a “night poem in many parts and an homage to Scheherazade,” followed by poems from a series Hejinian says she is calling The Unfollowed “currently,” a series of elegies for Charlotte Ellertson, the late women’s health activist who was Hejinian’s daughter-in-law.

Listening to Hejinian read these latter works aloud, which I’ve not yet seen on the page, I flashed for a moment on Chaucer, or on what I might call the inclusiveness of Chaucer’s language. The sense I have of Chaucer’s writing, especially in the original Middle English is “how can I not sit down & just listen?” One is drawn right in. Hejinian’s work has some of these same inviting qualities – it does a better job of bringing readers in than almost any post-avant writing I know. At the heart of this is not just Hejinian’s fascinating sense of the line – I could read her texts forever just to watch how & where she breaks lines (her mode is cognitive & a reader can watch her think in these breaks), yet that’s precisely one of the things you don’t get, can’t fully intuit, from a reading. Also at play, even more so when you are hearing it before seeing it, is Hejinian’s sense of the sentence, which is a very particular sentence, one that comes first from the age of classic English prose – that period that extends from Dickens through to Henry James. Which is to say that the grammar is straightforward, that there is pleasure taken in the ability to extend & capture the aside of a dependent clause, & that completion is something not only promised but delivered.

This also means that certain kinds of content enter into the work – the family is a passionate & ongoing theme, whereas contemporary jargon, politics, technology are hardly present at all. Or at least they’re not discussed in the heavily inflected vocabularies that attach to these discourses on the cable news stations.

Yet nothing about Hejinian’s writing feels even the slightest bit retro. She described the elegies as being composed entirely in non sequiturs to register her sense that “death is not acceptable.” The result is a combination of the familiar with the new that is unique entirely to Hejinian and it’s powerful in its capacity to take us as readers or listeners to places we’ve never before visited even as we feel entirely at home.

¹ The introductions to the event take nearly 15 minutes, followed by a reading of just under 40 minutes, complete with encore, so if you’re the anxious sort who can’t wait to hear Lyn herself read, use the downloadable version of the RealAudio file and go straight to the reading.

I was saddened, but not surprised, by the suicide on Sunday of Hunter S. Thompson. You can only play around with rum, hard drugs and guns for so long before the logic of that catches up with you. And Thompson, like Richard Brautigan, clearly bought into the Hemingway myth. Hemingway’s father Clarence committed suicide in 1928, the same year Farewell to Arms was published. His son the novelist died in 1961. Brautigan shot himself in 1984. Ernest’s oldest granddaughter Margaux committed suicide in 1996, tho at least she took pills. Who says this isn’t contagious?

I was never a big fan of Thompson’s writing. It struck me as too undisciplined, the wrong lesson to have taken from the work & life of William S. Burroughs, Thompson’s other obvious source of inspiration. Yet I felt that Thompson, more than any other single individual, was responsible for Jimmy Carter becoming president in 1976. Thompson was covering the campaign for Rolling Stone back when Rolling Stone still mattered. It was obvious that Thompson felt that all the other Democratic candidates were professional weasels, or worse. And yet here was this one-term Georgia governor who seemed to be the squarest human being on the face of the planet. That was the person who struck Thompson as an honest human being. Thompson’s reporting catapulted Carter into becoming something like the Howard Dean of his day in an era when the combination of “early capital” and cable news didn’t exist to overwhelm any outsider candidacy the instant the candidate made one mistake. What a weird model of Diogenes Thompson made.

In 1979, one of my two best friends, Elliot Helfer, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. I recall at the time being struck at the emotional devastation his death left in its wake, on his wife & mother & friends. The idea that this was a victimless crime, a concept that was sometimes bandied about in the media, was patently a joke. Since then, I’ve had too many other occasions to relearn that same lesson.

I’ve noted here before, tho maybe only in the Squawkbox tool, that I think depression is the most under-diagnosed & untreated disease in America. This in spite of all the pills that the pharmaceutical industry throws at the problem, now augmented with ever so much television advertising. I still think that. I think we’re going about it entirely the wrong way. And this is the result.

Mark Tursi proposes what he calls a final question:

We’ve talked a lot about past poetic movements and current poetry, as well as your own poetic process. And this is, of course, the primary subject of your blog. But, I was wondering if you could speculate and conjecture a bit about the future of poetry in America – imaginatively, intellectually, critically—in whatever way you want. That is, where do you see us in 10 or 20 years? What will the poetry look like then? Where are we headed?

I’ve been wrong about this before, and in a big way too. When I was the editor of the Socialist Review, we published a feature of new poets & poetry which I prefaced with a note that remarked, in passing, that one reason why, in the late 1980s, so few poets of color had become involved with what I now think of as the post-avant was both social & historical. That economic & social marginalization placed people of color into a position in which it was more important to hear their stories told, even if they were the same old stories that had been told before for decades by other groups, the Irish, say, or the Jews of the Lower East Side, than it was for them to explore what story itself meant, what identity meant, etc. That was, I think, generally accurate in a crude way, but what I did not understand then was the degree to which a middle class of color had already risen in the United States & the impact that affirmative action was already having in educating a new generation of writers. For whatever I said circa 1987 was completely erased as a set of concerns one decade hence. And if I look around, I see that for every young post-avant poet of color who comes out of a class background not unlike my own – Linh Dinh or Rodrigo Toscano, for example – there are quite a few others who are the children of professionals, doctors, ambassadors. And the identity politics for people with that kind of family setting are extraordinarily complicated. Complexity around one’s own identity is, I think, the greatest predictor of what kind of poet one is likely to become, or at least sensitivity to that complexity. What I was suggesting then was already becoming obsolete & irrelevant at a rate much faster than I could ever have imagined. That makes me approach this question from a humbled position.

So rather than say what poetry two decades from now will be like, I think it makes much more sense to suggest the dynamics that I think will go into creating the new poetry, at least in the United States. Because it is clear that certain forces will have some kind of impact. The most obvious one is the absolute number of poets – and I mean competent, often brilliant writers – we live in a time of unequaled riches when it comes to poetry in the United States & the demographics are such that this should only expand. But there is a tipping point here, one that we may already have reached, where abundance transforms itself from being a good thing to something far more problematic.

I have at this point a good half century’s view on the history of poetry up close & personal, & the changes that have been wrought as a result of the sheer increase in the number of poets are several. In the 1950s – a time when the absolute number of books published in this society was only one-twentieth of what it is today – the number of poets was relatively minimal. I know I’ve remarked many times on Anselm Hollo’s comment that you could buy any small press book published in the United States in that decade in London, in good part because there were so very few. The Allen anthology represented the first major non-School of Quietude collection since Zukofsky had brought out the Objectivist Anthology nearly 30 years before. The 44 poets of the Allen anthology changed poetry forever – the benign neglect with which the SoQ had simply bypassed the likes of Pound, Williams, Stein et al for decades was now countered by an engaged position for which there was a substantive response among readers. This split was a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1840s, when the Knickerbockers of New York dished Edgar Allan Poe because of his proximity to a group then known as the Young Americans, with the former attempting to replicate British models & the latter seeking something intrinsically new. And while there was continual potshots over the border over the years – think of Pound, for example – the first substantive, collective response doesn’t occur until 1960. We owe the poets of the Allen anthology an enormous debt for standing up to the status quo & changing it. Yet, of that group of 44, there are maybe a dozen who either did not go on to have substantial literary careers, or who only became very niche players. Bruce Boyd, Kirby Doyle, Richard Duerden, Ebbe Borregaard, Stuart Z. Perkoff, Edward Marshall. This is not a criticism of their poetry, necessarily, some of them just made life choices that took them away from publishing, if not writing altogether. Yet it gives you a sense of exactly how deep the roster was from which Allen had to choose. I mean there were obviously poets one could have argued should have been included & were not, but they tended to at the extremes with regards to age, either older & already more well known (Rexroth, Zukofsky, Rukeyser, Williams) or younger & just getting going (Joanne Kyger, Kathleen Fraser, George Stanley, James Koller, Bev Dahlen, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett). But if you accept Allen’s rationale for excluding the older writers on the grounds that, being already established, they were not by definition “new,” and that the younger ones hadn’t really started to assert themselves as much as yet as would happen a few years hence (Berrigan was a major presence at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, for example), then you realize that that revolution of the 1950s was really brought about by somewhat less than three dozen people. Three dozen, top to bottom. It’s an amazing number. On my weblog today, I have links to over 450 other poets, most of them American, most of them associated in some fashion with the post-avant world that grew out of the New American framework of the 1950s. And for every poet with a weblog, there are at least ten without. In one half century we have gone from less than 40 to several thousand practicing post-avant poets – not to even mention the School of Quietude, which itself has grown over the past fifty years, tho not I think quite to the same degree.

For a young poet, having a life or career in writing – for me at least those terms are really indistinguishable – is something very different if you plan to be one in one hundred, not one in five thousand. And if the rate of growth over the next two decades is anything like what it has been over the past three, then the problem is going to be far worse circa 2025 than it is today. You’re going to be a young poet looking at being one in 15,000. The chances of your work finding its best possible audience in such circumstances will be reduced to chance – or worse, to who you know, not what you can do. That tells me that this dynamic simply has to give.

Now obviously if you read around for awhile among today’s younger poets – those still under 40 – they are patently not all doing the same thing. Any possible combination of influences out of the New Americans & every other phenomenon since then is going on, in a variety of different ways. But it tends to be rather undifferentiated overall. You don’t find, for example, a collective like the poets who publish as Subpress advocating a particular aesthetic position. They’re by no means alone in this. And partly, because this particular cluster of folks represents an older subsegment of “younger” poetry, that may be a reaction to the bitterness that played itself out as the poetry wars of the late 1970s & early ‘80s, when the idea that change was constant came as a psychic body blow to a lot of then-younger post-New Americans. But it’s a stance that, long term, will not serve any of the writers who adopt it well, tho it may be a generational trait they’re just going to have to live with.

But I expect younger poets – the ones who are now only ten years old, who don’t even know they’re going to be poets yet – not to prove so passive in terms of their fate. Somebody – and somebody fairly soon – is going to have to stick a stake in the ground that has a terrific polarizing effect. It will reconfigure everybody’s sense of what it is that they’re doing & how this person’s work relates to that person’s, & how both of these poets relate to their own work, etc. I really have no idea what this polarizing event is likely to be, nor where it might be coming, tho it certainly won’t be coming from anybody born in the 1940s like myself. Will it be a new lyricism? Will it be a new anti-lyricism? I have no idea.

For what, really, is the alternative? If this doesn’t come about, then what we have is an increasing balkanization of poetry. The rise from 30 post-avant poets to 3,000 has been accompanied by a huge increase in the number of readers of poetry, but not, however, in the number of readers per book. It may be a post-geographic balkanization – the internet really changes the role of geography, so we may not only have a gazillion little local scenes, tho we certainly shall have a lot – but it will be a balkanization nonetheless. Everybody will have their one hundred readers & for some that will be just fine. But that kind of scenario really will cast the role of poetry in a person’s life in a very different way. That would be a far more private, almost conspiratorial kind of poetics. It will be hard if not impossible for a younger writer to come along & take from the best of a lot of different kinds of poetry, simply because it will be almost impossible to find out about most of them.

Now I have a bias in all this, towards a tradition the Provençal poets called trobar clus, the idea of a poetry that spoke to the very best in poets & readers alike, that was composed with the idea that readers are no less sophisticated than are other writers, a writing that never ever dumbs itself down in the name of communicability. This gets trashed from time to time by outsiders as a mode of deliberate difficulty, but obviously – at least I hope it’s obvious! – difficulty for the sake of difficulty is ultimately not what it’s about. That sort of intellectual preening is really a form of vanity & is characteristic neither of the best, nor even the most complex, modes of writing. Such poetry tends to be entirely on the surface, where I think the best work always involves every possible layer of writing, which is why, say, Frank O’Hara turns out to have been a far better poet than Gerald Burns.

From my perspective, the best writing in any generation is always that which most clearly adopts the stance of trobar clus. Zukofsky & Olson & Ashbery & Hejinian all have this in common, tho they share very little elsewise between them. I don’t think that you can have a trobar clus in a world of infinite balkanization, so I tend to think that the polarizing moment in poetry – when it comes – is most likely to come from exactly that perspective. Which doesn’t mean that’s necessarily where we will see it first – Ginsberg had a broad readership in the 1950s long before Olson or Creeley, for example – but if you look at Ginsberg’s writing during that decade, the cross fertilization between Williams, Whitman, Burroughs & even Olson during that period is really fascinating. A trobar clus is a collective phenomenon, first & foremost.

So my gut tells me: look for the trobar clus, look for the polarizing moment. And try to be open to this when it shows up.

Now I should mention one other important element, which is that this cannot happen in a social vacuum. The phenomenon the New Americans in the 1950s & language poetry twenty years later were very specifically reflective of larger transformations going on in society. A major reason why we have not had this sort of transformative moment in poetry over the twenty years, tho, can be traced directly to the long rightward movement of North American society over that time. Richard Nixon, we must remember, was well to the left even of Howard Dean – we have come a long way since Nixon was driven from office, very little of it good. The right is counting on the idea that this can go on forever, but even the most cursory examination of history suggests that this is bunk & that we’re going to have some very interesting times ahead. It’s related to that where I expect to find the next new polarizing moment in poetry. I hope I’m still around to see it.

The cover is felt. The binding is one large rubber band. The page would be square except that it’s not four-sided at all, with a substantial diagonal notch taken off the upper outside corner. To reinforce the idea that that notch is not accidental, authors’ names are printed along it inside. Finally, the cover has no title to speak of – but rather a large number 9 over which is printed:

becomes

impossibly,

stupidly

hard

This can only be Six by Six, No. 9 – not, profoundly not, to be confused with Philly’s own former 6ix. The theory of Six by Six is that six poets will have six pages each – six poems for some, fewer for others. As if to tease us poor readers, the pages themselves would have been seven inches by seven inches were it not for that notch, Notchka.

This time around, the six poets are Erica Weitzman, Jon Cone, Dorothea Lasky, Phil Cordelli, Julie Ritter & Laura Sims. A couple of these are names I’ve seen before, but I can’t say that I’m familiar with the poetry of any of them. Do they all come, as does the magazine, from the great borough of Brooklyn? Nope – Jacket has a review of James Wagner by a Laura Sims of Madison, WI, in its 26^th issue & it’s the same person – but wherever they come from, I like each of the poets’ work here, a surprisingly solid track record even for such a small endeavor as this zine.

The poet who actually got me to sit down & read this publication more closely was, as it happened, the last, Sims. I was flipping through & my eye landed on “Lake”:

“Girl Walks Home Over Water”

Under whose gaze, in what desert, etc.

*

She is glistening plain.

Lovely, returning her dead

In the spotless car

That completely got my attention. I had to sit down & read all of her work, all of which come from a series called Practice, Restraint, several of which are numbered pieces entitled “Bank.” Here is “Bank Fifteen”:

In every backyard

A peacock

Or some green nonsense

Refuting

What rifles report from her far-flung states

Also really worth noting is “Bank Seventeen”:

At the east branch –

one empty room

And another

Abandoned

By Spaniards

There is a spareness to these poems that does not, as a result, surrender anything in its ability to reach beyond the obvious or referential. There is also, as I think all three of these samples demonstrate, a wry, shaded wit that is just a pleasure to read.

Flipping backward, I come across a poem by Jon Cone whose title is a delicious send-up of the dry Midwestern surrealism that was practiced at one moment in history by Robert Bly & James Wright (& more recently as maudlin farce by Franz Wright): “Thinking of Chekov on a Snowy Day in Iowa City, Iowa.” The poem that follows, tho, isn’t strictly parody – it hovers on becoming a tart homage. My favorite piece by Cone is the poem that comes immediately in front of this, “Figuring”:

I got seven today, yesterday I got three and the day before it was five.

I think it was five, or maybe it was two. It was two, for sure.

A guy I know married a chick with a face like a saint she had fourteen

in one day. Fourteen! And then get this she had seventeen the next and

thirty-one three days later. But now she manages one or two a day.

They divorced.

My uncle would get seven every day for nearly all his adult life,

but that was forty years ago. He’s dead. Died of cancer of the brain.

My brother usually does good, ten or eleven. Like everyone else

he has his bad days: one or two.

I pray sometimes. How phosphorescent it would be if I could get

seventy-seven in two days or one hundred and ten over three days.

But I know it won’t happen. It just won’t.

I don’t remember what my mother got.

I know my father never got much

even on the best day of his life.

This poem is a demonstration of how the absent referent can torque a poem right up. It reminds me of the importance, once again, of the lost or hidden, something Robert Duncan has had me thinking about all week. It’s the same principle, really, that gives Sims’ ”Spaniards” its twist above as well. If Cone rushes into this space head on, Erica Weitzman (a Brooklynite, I believe, as well as a grad student at the New School) takes a position that manages to be at once both more in-your-face that Cone (because less coy) & more oblique than Sims. The first of her untitled ten-line pieces from “Break” also turns out to begin with the line (notched, so to speak, like the magazine itself) that is given that graphic treatment on the magazine’s cover:

becomes impossibly, stupidly hard

skin of the thighs, like a bitch hunger

this is what I am for, it says

the black space around that describes the un-

what. Derneath. Derstood. Speakable, saying, we have come

a long way just to come back again

and evade as quickly. I’d like, now

to shoot an arrow through something’s heart please

quivering, the quarry

it also

As should be apparent here, the poems of Six by Six don’t fit any uniform aesthetic stance. Phil Cordelli’s poems echo a stance that would be somewhere between late second-gen projectivism (think Jim Koller, Harvey Bialy, Chuck Stein, early George Quasha) & the Oppen side of Objectivism. Yet it is Julie Ritter who practices the finely balanced, exact free verse line. And Dorothea Lasky’s “Red Rose Girls” may allude directly to the modernists, but it sounds almost Beat in its rhythms & with its use of a thematic image, invoked in the first line of each section.

With a literal rubber band for its binding, Six by Six is not designed for mass distribution, nor for that matter for a long life on any bookshelf. To subscribe – or to check out any of Ugly Duckling’s other projects – link over to www.uglyducklingpresse.org.

Theorizing presents:

Ron Silliman

Plotless Prose:

Robert Duncan & The H.D. Book

Wednesday, February 23

6:00 PM, Kelly Writers House

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

Beyond choice of form, how does a magazine that focuses exclusively on the prose poem differ from one that focuses on haiku? Or on the sonnet? I’m not aware of any sonnet-centered magazines in recent years, but the ones devoted to haiku have largely been part of the great broad fringes of poetry where the art becomes, as much as anything else, a form of recreation. For every poet of note who has written seriously in the haiku form – Jonathan Williams & Anselm Hollo come immediately to mind – there are dozens, possibly hundreds of casual writers attracted to that genre because, on the surface, it “looks easy.” The result is that every magazine that I’ve seen devoted to exploring haiku has read like the print equivalent of open mic night down at the coffee house. One has to have almost an anthropological interest in poetry to wade in.¹

But where the haiku has very explicit rules, the prose poem’s history is rather quite the opposite. It was born reveling in its violation of categories, as if that alone might be a reason for existence. If so, then one might imagine that over time the prose poem would become that genre most open to a continual test of genre borders & their impact on texts, reading & meaning. The prose poem – especially if we head Baudelaire’s first claims for it – would thus be close kin (maybe even direct ancestor) of vispo, conceptual poetry & all manner of over-the-border literary projects.

In Europe, and especially in France, this has largely been true. Writers as diverse as Saint-John Perse, Francis Ponge, Victor Segalen & Edmond Jabès have carried the form much farther than even Rimbaud & Lautréamont could have imagined. Bizarrely, tho, the prose poem came to America not in that expansive, exploratory mode – something that might have fit right in with Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons or William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell – but rather as something quite different, very nearly as closed a mode as the sonnet itself.

The culprit of sorts would appear to be that old mad monk, Max Jacob, whose concept of art as distraction & its corollary that a poem must be “distant” from its object translated, particularly in the hands of Robert Bly & company in The Fifties & The Sixties (and those of Bly’s AAA farm-team, George Hitchcock’s Kayak), into little prose vignettes with a vaguely surreal air. The more erudite recognized an affinity with Kafka but very quickly the defining feature of the School of Quietude prose poem was that it seldom went beyond a single page, was often indistinguishable from the “short short story,” save for a certain improbability in the referential world.

Then in the 1970s, the post-New Americans (not just language poets, but also others who were often quite critical of langpo, such as Leslie Scalapino) simply blew apart the constraints on what was possible using prose within a poem. John Ashbery published Three Poems, which is still his finest book. Creeley’s prose publications of that decade – Mabel and A Day Book – challenged the borders first with fiction & then with the journal or diary.

By the end of that decade, U.S. poets had claimed at least as much freedom & flexibility of form in the prose poem as the French ever had – though you wouldn’t know this just by reading magazines like The Prose Poem, Paragraph or the first few issues of Cue. Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Cue’s editor, tells me that he hopes to expand its horizons in forthcoming issues & I’ve sent along work to help in that effort, but looking at Cue vol. 2, no. 1, reminds me that I heard similar spiels from the editors of those earlier journals as well. Which makes me wonder (a) why all the magazines devoted to the prose poem as a form have come out of the same aesthetic background when the prose poem itself so clearly does not, and (b) what it means to have a journal devoted to a single form.

Another way of asking this, of course, would be why didn’t – for example – the language poets ever devote an issue of any one of their key journals such as Hills or Poetics Journal to the question of prose? This focused on the work and generally avoided “themes” altogether. After Grenier’s famous critical pieces in its first issue in 1971, it generally stayed away from critical writing. Roof likewise. Hills had one famous issue devoted to talks, another to plays. Poetics Journal built most of its issues around specific themes, but the closest it ever got to addressing concerns related to prose in one of those themes was the Non/Narrative fifth issue. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E devoted its special issues to the politics of poetry. Even more recent post-avant journals like Temblor or Chain have steadfastly resisted the temptation. And when you think about it, you realize that Jena Osman & Juliana Spahr are exactly the editors you would want if you were doing something critical not just on the prose poem, but even haiku. They would unearth layers of nuance you hadn’t even imagined before, such as the post-colonial discourse of appropriated forms.

This isn’t to suggest that the latest issue of Cue isn’t interesting. There are a number of worthwhile works in it by writers such as A. Van Jordan, Mark Yakich & especially Matthew Thorburn. But most interesting perhaps is Schuldt’s interview with Karen Volkman². She’s gone well beyond any School of Quietude roots in her reading & thinking, & yet both she & Schuldt both seem to imagine that language poetry didn’t show up until the 1980s, if not later – in fact of that list of langpo magazines two paragraphs above, only Poetics Journal was primarily a creature of the ‘80s. When Karen Volkman, who is currently teaching the likes of Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Elizabeth Willis, says of language poets (she mentions myself & Lyn Hejinian by name here) working in prose that

already by the 80s, there were major works . . . – they just weren’t known to a larger poetic community until more recently

what she’s really documenting is the degree of isolation in which she was then working. In retrospect that seems ironic & sad, given that Volkman’s exactly the sort of lively, interesting reader one would want to have, but I suspect that it’s not at all uncommon for somebody who grew up in the School of Quietude framework.

So it’s good to imagine a journal like Cue working to overcome that isolation itself. Given that the journal is physically located in Tucson, one good place to start would be to bring in local writers who already have national reputations for their work – Charles Alexander, Lisa Cooper, Tenney Nathanson all come to mind, Sheila E. Murphy just a few miles west in Phoenix – but it would be good, even better, if they would work a little harder to get the history right.

¹ Which of course I will concede to having.

² The issue however includes none of her work, unfortunately.

Not long ago, Cameron Bass reposted my little Venn diagram of poetry, prose poetry & the concept of plotless prose under the heading of “why I don’t like to think about poetry too much.” Maybe he meant to write “too clearly” instead, but I don’t think so. He calls my own verbal noodling there “silly, pointless wonk-talk.” This is that old push-pull between folks who a “direct” relationship to poetry & language & those of us who’ve been around the block once or twice who know that the so-called direct relationship is a fool’s errand at best. It’s one reason why there is more than one kind of poetry in the world, so we should celebrate the antagonism even as it makes us cringe.

Happily, I’m not the only practitioner of what Cameron might think of as wonk-talk on the web these days. First, Geof Huth has a fine piece on Fibonacci & daily life, as viewed in the collaborations of Wendy Collins Sorin & Derek White. Meanwhile, Michael Hoerman is contemplating how language & reference transform into comprehension – warning to Cameron Bass, we have diagrams predicated on cognitive linguistics here. The irony is that Hoerman is trying to account for intuition & gestalt, aspects he groups under the term precognitive.

I’ve told this story about David Gitin a few times before. So if you already heard it once, indulge me. Back when I was a student at San Francisco State a mere 38 years ago, my linguistics professor, Edward van Aelstyn – a co-founder with Jim Koller & others, of Coyote’s Journal, easily the best little magazine of the mid-1960s – talked me into starting a little magazine of my own. “It’ll give the poets you want to see your work a reason to deal with you,” is either what van Aelstyn said, or the way that I heard it. But hear it I did. I mentioned the idea of this to the late d alexander (no caps & no period on that initial, it being his full first name) who showed up at my door with his rolodex, literally, and I began to send notes out to the likes of Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, Charles Stein, Jerry Rothenberg, Ken Irby, Armand Schwerner & Seymour Faust.

What I didn’t know at the time was how you went from having some groovy manuscripts in hand to having a finished magazine. And given that I spent most of the time between 1964 & 1977 living on something less than $300 per month for everything, including a serious book-buying addiction, the amount of disposable capital at hand to pay for printing & binding was more in my imagination than in a bank somewhere. So my little pile of manuscripts sat. And they sat. I had never heard of the concept of Messerli Time in those days, but before you knew it I was inventing the problem all on my own.

Then one day, literally a couple of years later, I received an envelope from somebody I’d never heard of before – or of whom I was only vaguely aware, is probably more like it – my first unsolicited submission – and the poems bowled me over. Whoever David Gitin was, he was superb & his own self as a writer, nobody else.

At the time, I was living even more close to the edge of economic ruin than usual, getting by on something more like $200 per month in a little interregnum between college and starting my alternative service as a conscientious objector. But I sat down at my trusty typewriter and put together a first issue – using only those older works I’d been holding onto that had not yet come out in book form (as, for example, Schwerner’s contribution already had). I literally hand-drew the title & logo for the publication, then took it down to the local copymat to print up a small run of copies. The first issue certainly wasn’t any more than 100 copies, stapled in the upper left-hand corner. Thus was Tottel’s born.

I included four of Gitin’s poems in the second issue, one of which – in a revised version – appears now in Passing Through, the largest collection of his poetry publicly available since George Mattingly’s Blue Wind Press published This Once back in 1979. Gitin as always is at once the most precise writer imaginable & a very restless imagination, a great combination. These poems push-pull on the reader in ways that are as unpredictable as writing as they are as real-world experiences. Thus, for example, “Kyoto”:

in the company

all night

of a horesefly

Exactly. That’s a word that comes to mind a lot as I read & reread these poems. Gitin’s poetry occupies a territory that suggests his interest in any number of Objectivists & New Americans (Oppen, Rakosi, Whalen, Eigner were the ones that jumped up for me today, but there have been other times when Creeley & Blackburn seemed every bit as powerful), poets for whom the precision of perception seems very often the point of pleasure in it all. Yet there is a second aspect of Gitin’s work that I hear today, one that is largely absent from those older writers (with the one real exception here being Creeley) & which Gitin acknowledges ever so lightly in his choice of an epigram for the book from Clark Coolidge: “of roads to clouds as spoke of dreams.” I hear that as content, of course, & there is an aspect to these poems that suggests if not a Zen poet in the formal sense of a Phil Whalen or Norman Fischer, a poet very much in tune with Zen’s gentle insistence on attention as valuable in itself. But I hear also Coolidge the jazz drummer in the syncopation of that line – and it reminds me just how much Gitin’s work likewise proceeds by ear to thought, or perhaps I should say thinking. This is very much the case in how Gitin works a line break:

red

behind

a bit

white

hot

fit

That’s from a poem entitled “Sex” that concludes just six words later with “apples.” Like Creeley or Eigner in particular – especially in this collection where all but two of the 34 poems head out from the left hand margin, working their way not only down but rightward across the page – Gitin’s poems can be deceivingly simple. The whole book can be read in less than an hour. Yet this is also some 30 years of careful attention & I’m reminded just how difficult it is for a poet to stay sharp for that long – there is that way in which being a writer is (not is like) being an athlete. Some of Gitin’s finest poems here are the most recent, which makes me hope not only for the next book but also some day a larger collection of the whole. Looking back at Tottel’s 2, there are not only just three good poems that are not incorporated here, but the second section of the original version of “Related to the Sea.” That section reads:

blue bridge

redeye sun

white waves on sand

a city

automobile fish

in a welter of coral

The differences between Robert Duncan’s A Selected Prose, edited after his death by Robert Bertholf, published in 1995, & Duncan’s earlier Fictive Certainties, which Duncan edited just ten years earlier, are instructive.

The twenty essays included in A Selected Prose are focused not just on the literary, but on a particular aspect of the literary. It is primarily a record of Duncan as a member of the San Francisco Renaissance. With only two exceptions, the selections either rise out of that experience as statements of poetics and/or theory, or involve a closer look at writers of interest to a New American (Whitman, Pound, Moore, H.D., Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, Levertov, Spicer, Bev Dahlen) or visual artists associated with the West Coast funk art trends of that same period (Jess, George Herms, Wallace Berman). The two exceptions are “The Homosexual in Society,” Duncan’s famous statement of 1944 that appeared in the first issue of the journal Politics (tho the expanded version here first was published in the rather more august Jimmy & Lucy’s House of K) – historically an important text in the history of gay freedom in this society – and a late look at the work of Edmond Jabès. One might say that this is the Robert Duncan a reader might expect from the pages of the Allen anthology. Save for the piece on Jabès, all of the issues addressed in this volume were available for discussion in the U.S. in the 1950s.

The thirteen pieces Duncan gathered for Fictive Certainties are longer and, for the most part, more theoretical. Only three pieces appear in both books: “Towards an Open Universe,” “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” & “Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman.” One might fairly say that the first two of these essays are the only theory-focused works in A Selected Prose. In Fictive Certainties, they appear instead as relatively minor statements when placed up against this volumes opening work, “The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography,” which outside of The H.D. Book, is the longest sustained prose work Duncan was ever to write. The Duncan of Fictive Certainties is actually a very different writer than that of A Selected Prose. Certainties has only two reviews of poets either in Duncan’s age cohort or younger: Olson & the philosophically minded John Taggart. Further, there are several pieces in Certainties that reflect an interest in the changing trends in theory itself: “Poetry Before Language,” a work that might be read both as an anticipation of Derrida and as a statement of language as a mystical experience; “The Self in Postmodern Poetry;” and “Kopóltuš: Notes on Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology.” This is a Duncan for the Age of Theory, intellectually far broader & more aggressive than the one we find in A Selected Prose.

Since I have argued that the “structure” of Duncan’s great prose poem sequence, The Structure of Rime, is in fact the same term we find first in structuralism – the intellectual tendency that can be traced back through Roland Barthes, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jacobson & others ultimately to the Russian Formalists, the piece on Barthes is worth examining a little more closely. Like any Duncan prose work whose title includes the term “notes,” this isn’t going to be an orderly, academic march through the traditional expository stations.

The difficulties start right away, with the title, Kopóltuš. It’s not a word you have ever heard before. You can’t find it in the OED, indeed, according to Google, there is no mention of it anywhere on the internet, with or without diacritical marks.¹ It would appear to be a neologism.

This is followed with an epigram from Barthes’ essay:

“images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment . . . [as] systems of signification”

At which moment Duncan begins by raising the question of naming.

Individualizing (naming) a group of three objects in a certain light, involving red, yellow and cerulean, the equilibration of the members of the group having a certain feel (this arrangement feels "in key") reveals that other elements we do not admit to seeing are present in what we see. We call the complex association of all these (an it) – we call it a kopóltuš (“it is a kopóltuš”), or we may say of the group “it is significant.” (Jess asks if kopóltuš made me think of “poultice” or “cold poultice.”)

Indeed, naming – the rightness or inherent nature of names – is precisely “Kopóltuš’” subject. It’s an intriguing question have been invoked by somebody who was born as Edward Howard Duncan & then raised by adoptive parents as Edward Howard Symmes, taking the name Robert & joining it to Duncan only after he was discharged from the army in 1941.²

How do names mean? Especially complex or abstract ones:

This is a work of art, we say. This is not a work of art. This is a kopóltuš. “Does your key feeling agree with my feeling” does not mean “Is your feeling like mine” but “Does your feel that this is a kopóltuš agree with mine?” No, it is not a Picasso. We agree that we like Picasso, but he is referring to a Picasso I don’t much like; I am referring with praise to a Picasso which he thinks is poor. I am sure this is a Picasso (we can check it out as to whether Picasso actually painted it); he is sure it is not a Picasso (but does it look like a Picasso to him, where he has some knowledge that it was forged; or does he recognize that it is a Braque?). Was this forged Picasso forged by X or Y? This is a Y pseudo-Picasso. This pseudo-Picasso is a genuine Y, who is so skillful at imitating that you cannot tell it from a Picasso. I can’t tell it from a Picasso but it might be Braque. It isn’t a kopóltuš tho, tho it looks like one, it doesn’t feel right. A kopóltuš is not a look but the feel of a look.

We no longer dealing with Barthes here, at least not directly. Instead Duncan has wandered deep into the weeds of that briar patch called Philosophical Investigations. I don’t know – and it’s certainly not apparent from reading Fictive Certainties, Selected Prose or The H.D. Book just how much 20^th century philosophy Duncan read, or how widely. Dewey & Whitehead are the only ones mentioned by name in The H.D. Book, unless one adds Walter Benjamin’s friend, Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish Mysticism. To my knowledge, Duncan never mentions Wittgenstein anywhere in print, let alone the tension between Wittgenstein Early & Wittgenstein Late. Yet the piece on Barthes here & the one on Jabès in Selected Prose give at least some sense that Duncan was aware of the changes in critical thinking that were occurring in the 1960s & ‘70s, in which philosophy as a discipline, especially continental philosophy, was hardly a dispassionate bystander.

The problem for Duncan is exactly that. The implicit premise of the H.D. Book, its promise, at least at the outset, is that Duncan will somehow be able to show how theosophy – or at least his theosophy, focusing on the lost & the hidden now as a spiritual or mystic dimension – will somehow solve critical thought, everything that might be captured under that telling rubric Structure. Kopóltuš, in this sense, is precisely what would give voice to that which Wittgenstein says must be passed over in silence in the seventh & final master sentence of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Yet Duncan returns again to Barthes directly, quoting:

It is true that objects, images and patterns of behavior can signify, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture.³

But if things – including names – are not autonomous, if they mean only differentially, if meaning itself is inherently differential, the way the phoneme p differs from the phoneme b, then the whole of the magical world – the world at the heart of all religions, including that secret religion of all religions, theosophy – disappears. Duncan understands the problem at once:

The artist of the kopóltuš said, “It spoke to me.” A theory and practice of magical art may enter into this event, or, not having existed before, may follow in its wake. The artist assembling and arranging objects towards some aesthetic satisfaction happens upon a set that “speaks to him,” a telling arrangement. What does it say? In the Book we read a Burning Bush spoke to him and said, “I AM,” and we read also that Yahweh, also called “God,” spoke out of the Burning Bush. The Bush did not then, autonomously, announce its own being. The “I” was some One else.

Only those who have never read Rimbaud will not hear the allusion in that last sentence. This is the moment that Duncan cannot solve, at least not directly, so he turns instead to a dream in which the painter R.B. Kitaj appears. They touch, temple and cheek “exactly fitted in.” This leads Duncan to the following sentence (which I’m going to delineate, to air out, for the sake of readability):

The figure of the jig-saw

that is of picture,

the representation of a world as ours
in a complex patterning of color in light and shadows,

masses with hints of densities and distances,

cut across by a second, discrete pattern

in which we perceive on qualities of fitting and not fitting

and suggestions of rime

in ways of fitting and not fitting –

this jig-saw conformation of patterns

of different orders,

of a pattern of apparent reality

in which the picture we are working to bring out appears

and of a pattern of loss and of finding

that so compels us that we are entirely engrosst in working it out,

this picture that must be put together

takes over mere seeing.

The master verb phrase – takes over – does not occur until the 117^th & 118^th words of this serpentine sentence. Here the image Duncan offers as an allegory for structure lies less in the radical distinction between deep structure & surface appearance, but rather twin orders inhabiting the same space & time. The leap Duncan here offers is difference itself: fitting & not fitting, of loss & of finding, a gap we perceive not directly but through suggestions of rime. Yet once the picture itself – the referential world, the realm of signifieds, we bask – or so Duncan presents him and his dream Kitaj in the process of doing – in the pure presence of immanence itself.

The moment itself seems to click into place, the lines of it so perfectly joining present contributing to but overwhelmed by the unalterable establishment of a locality in the context of the whole puzzle yet to be workt out into its picture.

This moment of taking over, of clicking into place might, in some other narrative, be presented precisely by the act of faith itself, the term leap understood quite literally. Duncan does not do this, but rather leaves us right at the end of that sentence, the problem narratively resolved perhaps, but certainly not solved.

Even if Barthes is not the best writer on which to focus these issues – one can imagine Duncan tackling Derrida as well as Wittgenstein had he but the chance & Jacobson & Saussure might have been better choices through which to have attacked the concept of difference in language – Barthes is a particularly apt choice, being the one major structuralist thinker – Elements of Semiology is a text from late in that period of his work – to have become a significant post-structural thinker as well.

And therein lies the rub. Robert Duncan’s critical project not only turns on the thinnest of premises – that H.D.’s brief analysis with Freud makes her an initiate of his – but that the union Duncan seeks between the mystical and critical theory is made ever so much harder by the fact that the latter proves to be a moving target. By the time that Duncan finally finds himself able, or at least imagines himself so, to bring theosophy into the house of theory, theory itself has moved on. Duncan had called his great prose poem sequence The Structure of Rime, not The Post-Structure of Rime.

But by the time that Duncan is coming into the realization of this, the unfinished – indeed, now unfinishable – H.D. Book has already served its other primary purpose, the one that is figured in its early title, The Day Book, a means through which for Robert to test, to formulate, to articulate a critical vision that might then serve as underpinning to his own mature writing, indeed, even the imagined (if never precisely written) elder epic. Which is why, ultimately, The H.D. Book works more – and better – not thought of as the lost or mystery critical masterpiece of the New American Poetry so much as it does as the Ur-blog of its time.

¹ Something I have just changed.

² Something not discussed in “Kopóltuš”

³ I am reminded of George Lakoff’s definition of semiotics as failed linguistics. This passage & indeed Duncan’s focus overall is very much pre-cognitive linguistics. Nowhere is the problem of historical time on Duncan’s thinking more apparent than here.

Style is an en effort to exorcise or to control the magic or glamour of sound in music, stone in sculpture or evocation in words. The effort in style is to increase our awareness of the rationale of the work. Thinking now of the lure of women’s hair and dress, we see that in periods of style women cut their hair or keep it most in place, and that style in dress means the effortful projection of effect – all aims at increasing our awareness of how the thing is done what is there as a thing in itself. Sorceresses wear their hair wild and loosened, their robes flowing and with scarves and bracelets, pinpoints of jewel-light and beads, for they do and undo their hair and dress weaving their spells. Desire is the opposite of style; the sentence and thought must wander to distraction before the reader becomes hopelessly involved. And hopeless involvement is the underlying psychic need of the magician. Had magic intended power over all things it would have found power, but the deep desire the magician hides from himself is the bewilderment he seeks. Lucifer does not betray, he brings to light our secret wishes to be undone.¹

Reading “Exchanges,” the unpublished third section of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book, I am reminded just how resistant Duncan is to so many of the received “truths” of writing – there is not only no “make it new” here, the idea of originality is closely aligned with that of control or the rational. Similarly, any preference for writing’s equivalent of Occam’s razor – dichtung = condensare – is countered by the idea that “thought must wander to distraction.” If we return to Duncan’s attack on Cecil Hemley (& thus implicitly the whole Hall-Pack-Simpson crowd with which Hemley was associated) in “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” we recall that Duncan’s objection to the School of Quietude is not that they are tedious or uninteresting, but rather that they are rationalists, they believe only in a universe of verification.

What then of Duncan’s relationship to the Objectivists? What must he have thought of Zukofsky’s prediction that “Someone alive in the years 1951-2000 may attempt a scientific definition of poetry.” It is not, so far as I recall, a line he discusses anywhere. Indeed, outside of The H.D. Book, Duncan appears to have mentioned Zukofsky critically only four times & addressed his writing directly only once, in “As Testimony: Reading Zukofsky These Forty Years,” first published in Paideuma’s Zukofsky memorial issue in 1978. Oppen he appears not to have discussed at all. Nor Reznikoff, Niedecker or Rakosi. Yet of Zukofsky, Duncan writes, speaking of the early years of the 1950s, of his trip to Mallorca & days at Black Mountain College,

He was, now, for me, with Charles Olson, one of two contemporary poets whose work I knew to be clearly directive of my own attentions.

Indeed, Duncan takes credit for making “converts” of Robert Creeley & Jonathan Williams both, two poets who would prove critical in Zukofsky’s move over the next twenty years from profound obscurity to canonic status among the post-avant, a reputation that has only grown in the 27 years since Zukofsky’s death. Duncan’s own next comments in that same Paideuma piece are instructive:

In relation to each I was to be heretical – for in the face of Zukofsky’s process of stripping to essentials, I was working toward a proliferation of meanings; and in the face of Olson’s drive toward the primordial roots, I was working from interpretations of the text. The two could not read each other, but it was my sense early in the 1950s that the test of our sources in Poetry must be in the reading of them both as primaries. (Selected Prose, 138-9)

Zukofsky’s own characterization of science is worth noting here, or at least his characterization of a scientific definition of poetry:

Its value would be in a generalization based on past and present poems and always relevant to the details of their art. All future poems would verify some aspect of this definition and reflect it as an incentive to a process intended to last at least as long as men.

Later in “Poetry,” Zukofsky will write

To think clearly then about poetry it is necessary to point out that its aims and those of science are not opposed or mutually exclusive; and that only the more complicated, if not finer, tolerances of number, measure and weight that define poetry make it seem imprecise as compared to science, to quick readers of instruments. It should be said rather that the most complicated standards of science – including definitions, laws nature and theoretic constructions – are poetic, like the motion of Lorenz’ single electron and the field produced by it that cannot “make itself felt in our experiments, in which we are always concerned with immense numbers of particles, only the resultant effects produced by them are perceptible to our senses.” Aware of like tolerances the poet can realize the standards of scientific definition of poetry. (Prepositions, 7-8)

Contrast this with Duncan’s radically dystopic view of scientific method, which he gives in “The Truth and Life of Myth,” a work tellingly subtitled “An Essay in Essential Autobiography”:

Modern science, my parents believed, would come upon secrets of Nature, as science had come before in Atlantis upon such secrets, and, spiritually arrogant and ignorant, intoxicated by knowledge, destroy America – the New Atlantis – in a series of holocausts, an end of Time in my life time that would come in fireblast, as the end of Atlantean Time had come in earthquake and flood. (Fictive Certainties, 3)

Duncan never distances himself from his parents’ position & certainly this would have resonated as well with the experience of Duncan’s spouse Jess, who had worked on the Manhattan Project not knowing what the larger picture of the project itself entailed until, after Hiroshima & Nagasaki, he quit science altogether in horror & became an artist instead. Duncan in The H.D. Book can cheerfully call Madame Blavatsky a fraud &, in the same gesture, adopt elements of her theosophical worldview into his own. At bottom, Duncan’s position is a difference predicated on a concept of knowledge & the capacity of a human to know. Zukofsky is concerned with thinking clearly about poetry. Duncan, “working toward a proliferation of meanings,” isn’t concerned with thinking clearly at all. Indeed, he distrusts the idea. “Myth,” he writes

is the story of what cannot be told, as mystery is the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known.

It is worth noting, in that passage at the head of this piece, just how closely Lucifer of all figures mimes the role that elsewhere Duncan assigns to Freud. And it is Freud – or at least Freud minus The Future of an Illusion – that figures so critically in the theoretical construction he is making in The H.D. Book, linking Freud & the whole of modernist critical discourses to theosophy through Hilda Doolittle’s truncated sessions with the Viennese analyst.

Reading Lance Phillips’ HereComesEverybody interview blog, I am struck by just how many poets admit to an interest in philosophy, but primarily in philosophy as a discourse, as a source for language & on occasion as a source literary devices as well. I am likewise struck by how, for Robert Duncan & for Louis Zukofsky – and for Charles Olson as well – the relationship of philosophy to poetry was far more central. One cannot write for readers without a theory of knowing, which necessarily must entail not just the what but also the how of knowing & the limits of knowledge along both these axes. For our own poetry, we figure it out or else we simply receive it unquestioningly. Understanding this dimension of work of poets like Duncan, LZ or Olson is not just a “nice to have” aspect of reading, but an absolute prerequisite to any possible comprehension. But it does not follow that we need to agree, any more than they agreed with one another, it matters far less whether any one might be right, Duncan or Zukofsky or any third position, than that this dimension of the writing be recognized as active, questing in the language (& world) as it unveils itself before our very eyes.

¹ from “Exchanges,” by Robert Duncan, no pagination. © Estate of Robert Duncan, 2005

Theorizing presents:

Ron Silliman

Plotless Prose:

Robert Duncan & The H.D. Book

Wednesday, February 23

6:00 PM, Kelly Writers House

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

C.A. Conrad has posted an interview with yours truly up on the PhillySound blog site. Partly it’s about Woundwood, of which C.A. seems to be a fan, & in part it’s about the writing process, including my pen. The site, a collective project of a number of Philly poets, is well worth exploring, as are its links.

The Paris Review board has told current editor Brigid Hughes that her contact will not be renewed when it comes up again in March. A search is on once again for a replacement who can fulfill George Plimpton’s shoes. Depending on whom one talks to & reads, this is either absolutely necessary or an utter betrayal of Plimpton’s own editorial instincts. The more pedestrian reality is that it is neither. It is instead a rather ordinary occurrence in the conjunction of money, power & poetry, not at all unlike the way in which Poetry saw its board cast the editor out after it had received an endowment in excess of $100 million not so long ago.

The Review, unfortunately, has no such endowment. Yet, at least. What it does have is a serious brand & a backlist. And a board. And quite a board it is. While the group pretty much did nothing beyond put on and attend fundraisers while Plimpton was alive, it was – and is – a board that Plimpton himself constructed as replete with money & power as any such institution in the world of letters.

Board president Thomas Guinzburg was one of the journal’s founding editors, as was novelist Peter Matthiessen. It was Matthiessen and fellow novelist Harold Hume who first thought up the review in 1951. But it was their buddy George Plimpton, installed as the editor, who really made the journal an extension of his persona, that of a flamboyant preppy posing equally as a world weary bon vivant – and in Plimpton’s particular case, as a self-deprecating amateur in any number of outlandish sports events.¹ Somebody talked Sadruddin Aga Khan into serving as their founding publisher & off they went. They couldn’t afford to pay serious money for their major contributions, which meant that they would have to focus on up-and-comers for the bulk of their content. But somebody had the ingenious thought that they could afford to interview the truly famous, since they would be paying the interviewer rather than the interviewee. Thus was the brand born.

In addition to spending two years in the Marines & receiving the Purple Heart in World War II, Guinzburg had been the editor of the Yale Daily News & was less than two years removed from his undergrad days when the Review started in 1952. Nine years later, he was the president of Viking Press, which he ran for 14 years, and then of Viking-Penguin, which he ran for another four. He subsequently served as a chair for the American book awards & as a consultant to Doubleday & to the Turner Broadcasting System. His current commitments, beyond the Review, include serving as Governor, Yale University Press; Director and Executive Committee Member, Citizens Committee for New York City; Vice-Chairman, The Dream Team, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Executive Committee and Sponsor, I Have a Dream Foundation; Vice-Chairman, Council of Branch Libraries, New York Public Library; Presidents Council, Memorial Sloan-Kettering; Founding Member, Special Projects Committee, Memorial Sloan-Kettering; and Society Nominating Committee, Memorial Sloan-Kettering. He is also the former director of the American Book Publishers Council and co-chair of the Council of the New York Public Library. It would be impossible to imagine a more established – or establishment – resume in the world of letters.

But Guinzburg is not the sole board member to have used his days at the Review wisely in launching a career. Robert Silvers left to co-found The New York Review of Books. Like Guinzburg, he is still an active member of the board. Other former Review staffers on the board include Matthiessen, Jeanne McCulloch, now an editor with Bloomsbury Publishing, and Antonio Weiss, now a partner in Lazard, the boutique banking firm. The other board member with serious editing credentials is Terry McDonnell, managing editor of Sports Illustrated & former editor of both Esquire & Rolling Stone. A more tangential editorial role belongs to Review board secretary James Goodale, former executive vice president and general counsel of The New York Times. A famous first amendment lawyer – his 1975 article in the Hastings Law Journal is seen as the first clear articulation of the concept of the reporter’s privilege – Goodale’s legal resume is as impressive & establishmentarian as Guinzburg’s publishing one.

Also on the board is Drue Heinz, for whom the Drue Heinz Literary Prize at the University of Pittsburgh Press is named. Part of the Heinz catsup family, the website “Scotland’s Top 50 Powerful Women,” notes that in addition to her giving in the U.S., she has made generous bequests to the British Museum and London Library and is “close friend of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.” She is included on that website primarily because she likes to spend every August at her castle near Edinburgh.

Rounding out the masthead on the Review’s website are Plimpton’s widow, Sarah, new age philanthropist Bokara Legendre² and Richard Fisher, Chairman Emeritus at Morgan Stanley.

This is a board for a little magazine with just 5,000 subscribers? It is really more like having your own thermonuclear missile for a home burglary prevention system. One feels sorry for Brigid Hughes, who at 32 is still twenty years younger than the Review itself & has never worked anywhere else, but just how did anyone think that this sort of board would not sooner or later assert itself? One senses that the board did what Plimpton himself would have wanted them to do in putting Hughes into his slot after his death in 2003. But sooner or later this concoction of power was going to need to do something just to feel its own governing presence. Now it’s time to find an editor that matches this very different set of requirements. A lot of the rumors point toward Bill Buford, the former editor of Granta, who took a moribund review and increased its circulation into six figures without improving the content. That has a certain sense to it.

The Paris Review is, as I noted, a serious brand. Its interviews, especially in the early years, largely defined the form as we know it today.³ Happily, one thing the Review is now doing is putting its interviews up in PDF format on its web site. Its reputation for poetry has varied widely with its poetry editors over the years – far better in Tom Clark’s hands than in Richard Howard’s – and its reputation for fiction has, in good part, had a lot to do with the publication’s close relationship to the New York trade houses that can make somebody like Matthiessen successful.

But it’s really just a little magazine – in recent years, it hasn’t been able to hold a candle to Can We Have Our Ball Back or Jacket or Shampoo. Indeed, it’s barely more lively than the mausoleum of the living dead that is Poetry. How does somebody like Guinzburg, who was himself just two years out of college – albeit an older grad, complements of the War – when the Review first started, think it can reinvent itself as relevant today? I’m wagering that this is an impossible set-up. There is no way that this board can either reinvent the spark of youth underneath all the baggage that it is bringing to the table or transform the Review into something of value but altogether different (e.g. Granta for grownups). But the inertia of any object in motion is that it tends to stay in motion. At least until it hits the brick wall that is the real world. Whoo-hoo, Paris Review, full speed ahead!

¹ Amateurism was still very much a class marker in the 1950s. The whole idea of prohibiting professional involvement in certain sports was created in order to keep out those who could not otherwise afford to participate. Plimpton’s adventures as a Detroit Lion, boxer or whatever may have spoofed the phenomenon, but they were also really the last hurrah of that era in sport.

² Full disclosure: Legendre has served on the board of trustees of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I served as the director of development in the 1980s. Our periods of involvement with the Institute, however, did not overlap & I’ve never met her. She has also served on the boards of Esalen, Threshold, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and Tibet House. I suppose I should note that I have also had poetry published in The Paris Review.

³ Anyone who thinks that the current phenomenon of email interviews is a recent debasement of the form should look at the pastiche that is Robert Creeley’s 1968 interview.

I’ve disagreed with Eliot Weinberger with so many things over the years that it is probably easier to note the few things about which I think we both agree. If I am not mistaken, we concur on the importance of what I will here call the Pound-Williams tradition – I’m less certain that he would extend it as I do to include Stein & some of the other high modernists – as well as to the importance of the Objectivists & the Black Mountain School among the New Americans. I would extend that same sense, if not always to the same degree, to the other varieties of the New American project of the 1950s. But if, as I suggested on Monday, the poets I’ve most appreciated among my peers often took the work of Louis Zukofsky as a stepping-off point (one example I cited was Eliot’s highschool classmate, Bob Perelman), Weinberger seems very much to taken the other road, treating Zukofsky as an ultimate case, the furthest out one might venture. And that has always struck me, in Weinberger as well as in others, as a fundamental misreading, not just of Zukofsky, but of the nature of life & the world. Weinberger, I’m sure, would counter that I’ve been far too U.S.-centric in my own reading habits & not nearly enough of an internationalist. On some days of the week, tho, I would agree with him there too.

So it is with a little ambivalence that I must report that Eliot has written something important – you can find it in the current issue of the London Review of Books. “What I heard about Iraq” is long – at over 10,000 words, it would run to over 23 pages as a typical Word document – 233 “I-statements” involving what has been said about the Iraq conflict, starting with

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say: ‘The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’

I heard this, I heard that – this is rather what you might expect, a lengthy litany of lies & deceit & rationalizations on the part of public officials. As a reading experience, it’s an event not unlike one’s first exposure to vomit porn – exactly how much of the obscene can a human being look at without gagging? If Weinberger wants to demonstrate exactly how pathological Bush’s war has been, “What I heard” is right up there with photos of blown-apart babies.

Is it a poem? That may be an academic question – Weinberg has long been an editor, translator & critic of poetry, pretty much ever since he baled on Yale after his first year there, but he has never actively claimed to be a poet as such. Not one of the 21 books of his listed in his profile at the Academy of American Poets is a collection of his own verse.

Yet parallel construction is right up there with rhyme in terms of its antiquity as a verifiable formal device of the poetic, right smack out of the Bible. Reading What I heard, I am convinced that Weinberger wants us to hear those echoes loud & clear. This is not, after all, simply another journalistic demonstration of the duplicity of George Walker Bush. If What I heard is not a poem, it’s because – as with the paragraph or line quoted above – Eliot Weinberger has no ear. But readers of his translations already know that. His interest in Black Mountain, for example, was for its forays into logopoeia, not melopoeia – I might argue that the latter were at least as important as the former.

If it is a poem, What I heard might well be the first great poem written about the Iraq misadventure. Yet if we contrast it with the two great poems of the Vietnam War – Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra, Part II” & “The Fire Passages 13” by Robert Duncan – What I heard is rather what the Brits might call weak tea indeed. Or maybe that’s wrong. Possibly what is problematic here is that the tea is far too strong altogether, an unrelieved recitation of evil.

“Wichita Vortex Sutra” parallels What I heard in some ways – What I heard mimes the structure of an oral form, “Sutra” was in fact improvised verbally into a tape recorder as Allen & his pals tooled around in a VW minivan, transcribed after the fact (when, presumably, such things as linebreaks & spatial decisions were added). “The Fire” similarly invokes orality, opening as tho a spell were being intoned: “jump stone hand leaf shadow sun”

“Sutra” may recount many of the evils men do – or did during that period – but it does so not as a simple listing, but rather to consider the role of language:

Put it this way on the radio

Put it this way in television language

Use the words

language, language:

“A bad guess”

That last phrase in quotation marks comes from George Aiken, a GOP senator from Vermont – Ginsberg returns to the phrase again & again, as he does the invocation of language to describe not the horrors of war so much as the perversion of meaning that is inevitable whenever politicians encounter a gap between their desires & reality:

Three five zero zero is numerals

Headline language poetry¹, nine decades after Democratic Vistas

and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet

Our nation “of the fabled damned”

or else . . .

Language, language

Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth

defined as man standing by his word

Word picture:          forked creature

Man

3,500 being the body count of “Viet Cong” killed per week, or at least so said General Maxwell Taylor – ”Sutra II” was written on Valentine’s Day, 1966², not quite halfway between the Gulf of Tonkin incident that LBJ used to get Congress approve of an overt war & the 1968 Tet Offensive that effectively determined that the U.S. would never win the conflict.³

While Ginsberg never moves very far from the events of the war itself, his poem is really about the mediating aspect of language in creating not only “televised reality” but America’s self-identity. This is the poem of ideological state apparatuses, as the Althusserians might put it.

Duncan’s strategy is not that far from Ginsberg’s. After a grid of individual words – six lines, six words per line, then two lines of two words apiece, he turns to the issue:

The day at the window

the rain at the window

the night and the star at the window

Do you know the old language?

I do not know the old language.

Do you know the language of the old belief?

Duncan’s strategy differs from Ginsberg’s however, in that he actually mentions the current cast of political characters & events only once in the entire poem:

Satan looks forth from

men’s faces:

Eisenhower’s idiot grin, Nixon’s

black jaw, the sly glare of Goldwater’s eye, or

the look of Stevenson lying in the U.N. that our

Nation save face •

This is ostensibly a poem about Piero di Cosimo’s painting “The Forest Fire” – it is only the events of its time & occasion that would cause every one of its readers to associate it with the U.S. decision to drop napalm on the forest villages of Indochina. Duncan’s incorporation of lines such as the above serve to confirm what at the time would have been obvious to any reader.

Each of these poems then can be said to really bring an analysis to bear on the Vietnam War – both are concerned in great part with the use of lying by public speakers to justify the murder of innocents for no sane political purpose. Weinberger’s focus fixes on this very same point, but where they have something further to say about the problem, Eliot seems more determined to hammer us into mute horror at the degree to which such duplicity has escalated. 1984 has nothing on the newspeak of the Bush regime.

The other aspect – which may in fact account partly for the first – is that Duncan & Ginsberg can envision far more readily than Weinberger a real place for public discourse – for polis, in praxis – as a rhetoric for the poem. The flat parallelisms of Weinberger’s poem seems to me to show far less faith – in fact, the poets who strike me today as reflecting a sense of the possibility of the public would primarily be the likes of Barrett Watten or Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein or Bob Perelman, a very different set of possibilities than the paralyzing one offered by Weinberger.

But maybe it’s not a poem – that really I think must be a judgment call – perhaps it’s just a list, like a Pharaoh’s list of items with which to be entombed, or fields to be planted. Possibly it is the very absence of the poetic – which in this case would mean analysis – that Weinberger wants us to feel here.

In either case, this is a language object that needs to be confronted.

¹ So far as I know, this is the earliest occurrence of that particular phrase.

² Has anyone ever commented on the fact that “Sutra II” was written one day before “Sutra I”?

³ In retrospect, the Offensive left North Vietnamese & Viet Cong forces on the edge of collapse. But the assault on Saigon so paralyzed the Johnson administration – it made inevitable the presidential challenges of first Eugene McCarthy & then Bobby Kennedy that led to LBJ’s withdrawal as a candidate – that by the time Nixon arrived in office one year later, even attacks on Cambodia & Laos were unable to reverse the inevitability of a U.S. withdrawal.

I stopped for lunch at El Sombrero Grocery Store in Avondale, PA, a farm town west of Kennett Square where some of the Mexican families who fly in from San Diego to work the mushroom fields in the area have set down roots. It’s a funky little two-room store in a converted residence, right on Route 41, with a few tables in a side room that functions as a diner. There’s always Mexican music on the radio & it’s a breath of 24^th Street to an old San Franciscan like myself. I grabbed a couple of the books I’d put in my bag for the trip to DC and went in for a burrito & lemonade, the perfect lunch. Opening one of the books, I suddenly recognized the typeface and page design as being exactly what I’d seen and identified as the work of Robert Creeley’s in my dream the night before. Only it wasn’t Robert Creeley. The book was Michael Kelleher’s To Be Sung. The book had just come in the mail the day before I drove down to read & talk with Leslie Scalapino & I’d thumbed through it briefly before tossing it into my bag for the trip.

How weird is that, I wondered. Then, reading the book – I got two-thirds of the way through just during lunch – I realized that it wasn’t weird at all. There is a way in which To Be Sung reads very much like a Robert Creeley book. Consider “Escapism”:

On a garden

Walk a life

Coughed up
In a hand

A waking

Dream

Or urn

On which

Frozen forms

Love

To yearn.

One asks

Oneself

What is it

One knows

One knows

Only one

Knows one-

Self not

The music

At hand that

Of a bird

Or bard

In flight.

Robert Creeley wouldn’t have written this poem, largely because the sentimentalism in its final gesture is a sentimentalism of writing, the closed arc, whereas Creeley’s sentiment is addressed almost always to friends or family, never into the process of writing itself. But beyond that distinction, this poem has the feel of Words, Creeley’s brilliant 1967 volume. It’s virtually a study of how to make such use of language. Consider, for example, “The Language”:

Locate I

love you some-

where in

teeth and

eyes, bite

it but

take care not

to hurt, you

want so

much so

little. Words

say everything.

I

love you

again,

then what

is emptiness

for. To

fill, fill.

I heard words

and words full

of holes

aching. Speech

is a mouth.

Now that is Creeley, from Words. Not all of Kelleher’s work echoes that book, necessarily, and much of his writing is quite good –

I’ll fuck anything

That moves.

But everything

is still.

What History of Dance

To be written this day?

What Kings to be crowned?

I am the King of May.

Already it is December.

This all happened

Before the barricades

Went up

When I was the state

You are in.

But if the Allen Ginsberg allusion here isn’t jarring, I wouldn’t know what was. Is Kelleher actively discussing his relation to his literary ancestors here or isn’t he? I can’t decide. Similarly, I’m not certain that Kelleher is discussing his own writing in the fifth section of “Tarkovsky Suite.”

The tree planted

Near the stream

Yields no fruit.
Bitter leaves

Litter

Waters and shore.

No one gathers

These leaves.

No one gather

these leaves.

One of the enduring problems of influence of course is that historical context matters. What Robert Creeley was doing in 1956 or 1967 was one thing – it changed poetry forever, as did the writing of many of his peers. Writing works that echo these achievements 35 to 50 years later is a very different proposition. To Be Sung is eminently readable and thoroughly enjoyable, but in the same moment it makes me want to scream or shout or wash my hands. I wonder, in retrospect, how much of this I divined just flipping through its pages the other night before I put in my bag. Is this why I had that dream?

Twenty-odd years back, I recall having a similar feeling about some writers of my own immediate age cohort with regards to, say, Louis Zukofsky as an influence. There were, or so I felt, one group of poets who took Zukofsky as stepping-off place – Barrett Watten & Bob Perelman would be particularly good examples of this – and another group who seemed to take his work as an upper limit, as “far out” as one might imagine. I don’t know Kelleher’s other work – he has had some other books – so I don’t to overjudge the man. To Be Sung is a good book, but confined very much to a retrospective view of poetry. To me that would feel like chains.

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