Silliman's Blog

John Bloomberg-Rissman asks some interesting (and complex) questions:

I’m reading John Xiros Cooper’s Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge, 2004), which has knotted somehow with topics you touch upon in your blog. I keep on picturing myself asking you these questions. So I thought, why not?

 First, on the off chance you haven’t read this book (you seem to be pretty omnivorous), let me summarize Cooper’s argument. I’ll quote the abstract: “... the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. ... the modernist avant-garde epitomized the impact of capitalism ... [Cooper himself distinguishes between capitalism and “market society”, capitalism being merely the after-the-fact theory that tries to come to grips with a fait {better, a process) accompli, and would probably have written “market society” here rather than capitalism]. [Modernism] aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterizing techniques, styles and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. ...”.

The suggestion here seems to be that a) “cultural values” (moral, religious, gendered, racial, aesthetic) arose in a pre-market-dominated society and are no longer what they were (no longer hold the place they held) in a market society; and b) the market can commodify anything. I’m sorry if this is old hat to you. Or worse (it wouldn’t be the first time I was a dollar short and a day late, as my dad used to say). But here are my questions.

– Is it possible to argue that a major problem with what you (and Poe, I believe you said) call the School of Quietude is that it appears to not recognize that “cultural values” no longer hold the place they held, no longer function as they did, and it therefore assumes certain inter- and intra-personal relations that no longer have anything to do with the world in which we actually find ourselves living?

– If non-School of Quietude poetry does come from the world in which we actually find ourselves, or will shortly find ourselves, living, what values, what kind of values, does it embody? I know it’s not a fair question, in a way, at least in the sense that there’s no such monolith as “non-School of Quietude poetry”. But I can’t think of any other succinct way to ask the question, which I think makes sense anyway. What kind of social object is being made here?

– How long do you expect it to be before the market has caught up to the non-School of Quietude, transvalued its values, and subsumed its strategies? Or has this already happened?

I have not, in fact, read Cooper’s work. Cambridge University Press charges obscene prices for its books & I rather systematically try not to buy them. Presses like Cambridge – the linguistics publishers are even worse, routinely charging over $100 for books that appear to have had no editing, not even professional typesetting – strike me as deliberately trying to undermine the concept of public intellectuals by drawing a boundary around audiences. These are books for university libraries, not readers, & those of us unattached to such institutions tend literally to be left out of the discussion. Cooper is a fan of Geoffrey Hill who has written that The New Criterion is “one of the few reviews that still takes poetry seriously.” Both aspects of that make me question Cooper’s ability to read, albeit I can understand an argument that could be made for Hill. So I’ll just respond to the structure of the thesis as presented here.

As represented– and both Cooper’s website & the Cambridge P.R. materials are consistent with Broomfield-Rissman’s characterization of the book – Cooper’s argument offers a variation on Peter Burger’s attempts to align historic change in the arts with social change in the world. Its hidden premise would seem to be that there is a relationship between the two that would be articulatable, a dream that has existed since (and which owes a great deal of its force to) the old model of base & superstructure, in which the economy is perceived as the engine of history, and culture is more like the design features of the locomotive itself.

To which one wants always to say yes & no simultaneously. It is the doubleness of that answer that is, I think, the true response. At one level, it would seem historically to be anything but an accident that avant-garde tradition as we know can be dated back to the work of Charles Baudelaire, even to his preface to his poems in prose, is historically close (in some sense almost parallel) to the first edition of Leaves of Grass in the U.S. and to the deepest, most passionate love letter that capitalism has ever received, The Communist Manifesto. The middle of the 19^th century was an interesting moment in world history.

A century and one-half later, the flaws in the Marxian program, especially as practiced by what were once termed “actually existing” Communist parties, seem apparent enough. Marx’ depiction of the general operating principles of capital, both in the Manifesto & in his later writing, seem reasonably sound, in & of themselves. Marx’ prescription of how to proceed seems, in retrospect, deeply problematic in two critical areas. Both, I suspect, can be traced to Marx’ view of the world, which was always already that of the Eurocentric white man. Marx understood – and Engels later underscored – that anything approximating socialism was not remotely possible unless & until a unified world market system – today we might call that globalization – was achieved. That much, to the enormous frustration of Stalinists throughout the 20^th century, Marx got right. He presumed, wrongly, however, that the latter half of the 19^th century was quite close to arriving at that moment. This meant that globalization – a precondition for socialism – would be achieved just as the stage of world development was technologically reaching industrialism. In fact, we may still be a century or two from truly getting to a global economy. Which in turn means that the dynamics of capital would – and will – plow right through industrialism and the next few stages of technological development beyond that before the kind of worker resistance Marx envisaged could ever be anything other than a short-term defensive stop-gap. Remember, Marx anticipated the revolt to occur from within the most developed countries essentially as the winners of the race to globalization found themselves being transformed into losers at the next stage and once they held the capacity to generate worldwide political actions in response. Instead, Stalinism brutally modernized the most backward nations making them ready for capitalism. There’s irony enough there for millions of lifetimes.

One argument that seems implicit in the depictions of Cooper’s work is that Marx underestimated the power of markets. Rather, I would argue instead that he may have overestimated them, having presumed them to have arrived at a level of development in the 1880s or thereabouts that we may not get to before 2200 A.D. Along the way, unfortunately, those who took on the claim to Marx’ legacy, but only a part of his program, appear to have effectively – perhaps permanently – discredited the broader arcs of his work. I certainly won’t live to see if it can or will revive a century or more from now under another name, although that is one distinct possibility.

During the past 150 years, tho, the avant-garde has been politically all over the map. It has seen Communists like Eluard & even Mayakovsky, it has seen outright fascists like Pound & Céline. It has had poets & artists who reveled in the violence of war, such as the Italian Futurists, as well as others who were appalled by it, ranging from H.D. to Jackson Mac Low. We have had modern & postmodern painters who were great craftsmen of painting – Picasso, Matisse, Dalí, Gerhard Richter – and others who, with Tzara & Duchamp, argued against the dead hand of an ancient institutional genre.

There has been no one thing that the avant-garde has agreed upon, not even the need, in Pound’s great coinage, to make it new. Making it new, ostrananie, defamiliarization, Brecht’s alienation or “A-effect” are all conceived as being consistent with – and indeed reflecting – the fundamental drive at the heart of capitalism according to an argument such as this. Just as capitalism creates an inexorable drive to overturn whatever the current state of technology is with new tools that will revolutionize industries and markets, so the avant-garde creates an inexorable need to be the “next thing,” as if we can each be the It Girl (or Boy) of poetry for about 90 seconds before giving up the baton to that which overturns us (but only so that it too can overturned some 85 seconds later).

There is, it seems to me, no question that this is one dynamic that may be active in the arts in general – it’s what, if I understand him properly, Barrett Watten calls negativity in The Constructivist Moment – for my money the best theoretical investigation of modern & contemporary arts ever written – and it operates much as does capital’s process of technological (and process) innovation, by breaking phenomena down into their constituent elements & then looking at how they can be recast to arrive at the new, principally by addressing obvious flaws with whatever is (or was recently) current. This operates, tho, as a double movement, mimicking what goes on in capitalist markets on the one hand, yet absolutely necessary if the arts themselves are to address (whether or not we look at this as a reflection or other mimetic process, or even as an analytical one) the current – but always increasingly rapidly changing – life on this planet. There is always some grind in the gears as one recognizes that one’s elders either didn’t get it right or that their vision is now outmoded for whatever reason, and it drives younger poets (& other artists) to update what they are doing.

Not every poet has always bought into this scheme, even in the avant-garde. Robert Duncan’s arguments against originality can be read in exactly these terms, as a critique of this dynamic. That he did so within the framework of the avant-garde tradition makes his contribution here especially important, but it is harder to get to because of his own complicated relationship to critical theory, which I’ve laid out before & is best articulated in the interaction of his books of poetry with his great critical tome, The H.D. Book.

I really need to note here that one should not look, as it is evident Cooper does, at the avant-garde as furthering a specific or overarching argument, even if there prove to be larger tendencies in the work. I think it confuses what actually is at work here, which is why I repeatedly use the phrase “avant-garde tradition” (and, for artists after mid-century, even prefer post-avant, as in the great cry of Jim Behrle’s Ron is Ron comics, “Post-avants, wash your hands!”), a phrase that some have argued is internally self-contradicting. Because I do think it represents a larger social phenomenon for which, at least for the moment, no better term than tradition appears to exist. The avant-garde in its largest historical frame encompasses two dimensions, one that synchronous – community -- & the other that reaches across time – tradition. Baudelaire’s preface to his prose poems can be read as an act very much in kind with Kenny Goldsmith’s more recent provocations with uncreative writing. Both challenge existing formations in remarkably parallel ways.

The “scandal” of the idea that all forms of avant-garde poetry at some level engage the same dynamics of history as does capital (or, if you prefer, as do markets) is, I think, a canard fostered by a certain type of purist who cannot stand complex relationships. Engaging does not necessarily mean approving any more than it does condemning. One can find poets all along that continuum of possibilities, just as one once could find Marxists with any number of possible relations to the question of property & production, up to & including the successful capitalist Engels. Thus one would not expect Gary Snyder’s relationship to these questions to be the same as Christian Bők’s, even tho they might agree on many specifics. Certainly, within the avant-garde tradition there exists a strain of fundamentalists who would argue, as did Dada, that art that participates in historic genres is fatally flawed. The incorporation of Dada into the market economy simply demonstrates that one’s analytical position is not necessarily identical with the history of one’s own art. Pound’s five-foot bookshelf collapses under the same contradiction, merely in a different direction.

Let us then posit the avant-garde tradition as that phenomenon that at least engages the engine of history, however critically, from whatever part of the political spectrum, however successfully (or not) it may seem. What then of the School of Quietude? It has exactly the same range of political reactions – all the way from writers actively on the right, such as William Logan, to poets who legitimately think of themselves as dedicated progressives, such as Marilyn Hacker. Each of its succeeding movements, from the institutional & gentile old formalism of the late 19^th century through to the Boston Brahmins & agrarians of the 1930s through the ‘50s, the APR school (which somebody last week proposed should be called the AWP school, for its relationship to the rapid expansion of creative writing programs in the 1960s thru the ‘80s), to the new formalists today, these poets would themselves appear to share very little besides a profound distaste for the avant-garde tradition. But what is that tradition other a community with an active engagement with the engine of history? Their explanations are many, but invariably it is that engagement – and its consequences – that most deeply binds these writers against that which they oppose.

In general, this creates in them a preference for conservative moves – the avant-garde is often conflated as one of the problems of history (and hence of capitalism). That is what is at the heart of Alfred Corn’s infamous declaration in The Nation¹ that his version of the new formalism was, in fact, post-modern: “

I mean ‘postmodern’ in the sense of returning to narrative transparence in place of Modernism’s hermetic and allusive texture.

This kind of “the future is the past” argument echoes other aspects of the contemporary period, unfortunately, such as the Bush administration’s war is peace claims. But the real irony is not that an aesthetic conservative/political progressive should have to tie himself into such verbal knots as this, but the fact that the sequential history of the School of Quietude itself, proceeding from the Brahmins & agrarians with their formal lyric poems – in lock step with the critical regime of New Criticism – was itself “overturned” in the late ‘50s & early ‘60s by many equally conservative poets who opted instead for a free verse form and a wider range of content. That’s the context in which someone like Phil Levine actually is, or at least was, an aesthetic progressive. By the early 1970s, it was almost impossible to find a formalist poet born in the 1930s (Anne Stevenson is the major exception), simply because the engine of history & historic change is as operative on the SoQ side of the equation as it is in the avant-garde/post-avant sector. One could virtually predicted the New Formalists, whose reaction was that the AWP/APR poets were themselves hopelessly infected with the disease of modernism.

So if one follows the thesis ascribed here to Cooper, one discovers that both sides were equally operating under the same regime – as if anybody anywhere could actually escape the history of their times – and that the difference between the SoQ & what Bill Knott recently called the School of Noisiness is not a different relationship to capital, but to the understanding of history, which I would characterize here as a distinction between engagement and something closer to denial.

This doesn’t make necessarily make any poet right or wrong. Pound’s comments on Mussolini & Baraka’s comments on Mao are equal opportunities for cringing. The School of Quietude is equally at home in The Nation & The New Criterion. But one approach, it seems to me, is much more active in its engagement with the dynamics of change in the world. It is not an accident that William Carlos Williams defined poetry not simply as a “machine made of words” – how retro does that sound in 2005? – but as “inventions of form as additions to nature,” a process old as the first creation of tools out of stone & as new as nanotechnology & genetically engineered cattle.

One might go back even further than the beginnings of modernism – Stephen Greenblatt sees foreshadowing of this same division in the end of the 16^th century, after all, one group determined to keep the benefits of literacy & authorship – literally authority – to those of inherited wealth & the “proper” educations, the other rising up out of small merchants & craftspeople (whom, we might note, were precisely the future of capitalism). So we have a dynamic nearly half a millennium long, one side always trying to stave off tomorrow, the other actively trying to engage it, both sides capable of the full range of tactical political reactions to the process. Do I think that post-avants are any more free of history than the School of Quietude? Hardly. But I do think they face it differently. And that makes all the difference in the world.

¹ August 9/16, 1999. Marilyn Hacker once told me that Corn could not possibly have meant what he wrote, but the larger context of that article shows no irony whatsoever.

It was Gabe Gudding who made me stop to think twice about Poet's Bookshelf, Peter Davis’ collection of poets’ lists of the books that have been, in the words of the editor’s invitation to its contributors “most ‘essential’ to you, as a poet.” Davis asked each contributor to list 5-10 such books, and to “write some comments about the list.” These questions went out to a wide range of poets, some 81 of whom replied, almost all American & mostly mid-career or older:

Ai, Nin Andrews, Antler, Rae Armantrout, Angela Ball, Marvin Bell, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Eavan Boland, Catherine Bowman, Alan Catlin, Henri Cole, Wanda Coleman, Clark Coolidge, Jim Daniels, Denise Duhamel, Stephen Dunn, Russell Edson, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, B. H. Fairchild, Annie Finch, Alice Friman, Amy Gerstler, Albert Goldbarth, Gabriel Gudding, Thom Gunn, Sam Hamill, Joy Harjo, Michael S. Harper, Lola Haskins, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Paul Hoover, Fanny Howe, Andrew Hudgins, Lisa Jarnot, Peter Johnson, X. J. Kennedy, David Kirby, Maxine Kumin, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Lyn Lifshin, Timothy Liu, Gerald Locklin, Thomas Lux, J. D. McClatchy, Peter Meinke, E. Ethelbert Miller, Thylias Moss, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ed Ochester, Molly Peacock, Lucia Perillo, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Charles Potts, Donald Revell, Adrienne Rich, Harvey Shapiro, Ron Silliman, W. D. Snodgrass, Juliana Spahr, Elizabeth Spires, Gerald Stern, David St. John, Virgil Suarez, David Trinidad, Paul Violi, Karen Volkman, David Wagoner, Charles Harper Webb, Dara Weir, Richard Wilbur, C. K. Williams, C. D. Wright, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, Dean Young, and Paul Zimmer.

That is an intriguing, if not entirely representative, list. For one thing – and I think this is a function of the age of the contributors as much as anything else – the ratio of male to female respondents is two to one, literally 54 to 27. More glaringly, tho, just seven contributors were born in 1960 or later, less than ten percent of the book. Just one poet – Anselm Berrigan – was born in the 1970s. Another way to put this is that, if you are in this anthology, you are as likely to have won a Pulitzer (also seven contributors) as you are be under the age of 45.

In terms of aesthetic tendencies, Davis has bent over to represent the entire range of contemporary poetry, so you will find post-Beat writers like Antler & Charlie Potts alongside of the quietest of the school thereof, along with langpos & other post-avants. If I note that I don’t find a single contributor to the New American Poetry here, I suspect that it was not because Davis failed to try. For one thing, there just aren’t that many of its contributors left, tho I’m saddened particularly not to see Creeley or Ashbery. The age range & this lack of the New American generation of post-avants means in practice that Poet’s Bookshelf is probably a more conservative cross-section of what is actually influencing poets today than really is the case.

Thus I was surprised to find my name among the 13 living poets listed among the roster of “most frequently listed authors.”¹ Gabe lists the thirteen as Ashbery, Edward Field, Charles Simic, James Tate, Louise Glück, W.S. Merwin, Carolyn Forché, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Galway Kinnell, Michael Ondaatje, and yours truly. That’s an interesting mix, divided as it is almost down the middle, with six post-avants & seven more conventional poets. Had the book been issued a month earlier, when Robert Creeley was still alive, it would have been precisely an even break. One can only wonder what kind of breakdown might have occurred had Davis had broadened the age range of his respondents.

Gabe has some insightful things to say about some of the proclivities of the School o’ Q folks who participated. The tendency to

(1) cast the canonic as the public and (2) cast the things poets really like to read and that were influential as (a) private, (b) individual

is completely consistent with a larger program to their choices seem not like choices at all, but inevitable (to the degree that they reinforce the canon) & individual only insofar as they serve to differentiate the poet him- or herself. Duplicitous? You bet. Standard operating procedure? Ditto. I’ll wager that the culprits (Gudding names names) don’t even recognize that this is what they’re doing.

Not every quiet poet responded that way, however. The late Thom Gunn, a superb poet whom one probably shouldn’t include in the School of Q roster, since, like Auden, he comes by his Anglo-centrism honestly, lists only two twentieth century poets: William Carlos Williams & Basil Bunting. Of Bunting’s Briggflats, he writes “For me it is the greatest poem of the last century.” Marvin Bell lists Pound, Creeley, Ginsberg & two books by Williams to his list – and I was especially happy to see John Logan on his list of quieter poets as well. Several of the SoQ folks mention Williams and/or Frank O’Hara.

This actually points to a curious phenomenon that pops up in the book – one that I suspect is “real,” i.e. true of a broader spectrum of poet/readers than one can find in this book. SoQ poets are often apt to include one – sometimes more – post-avant types in their reading lists of “essential books.” But post-avant poets virtually never list SoQ poets in theirs.

That can be interpreted variously, all the way from “SoQ poets are forced to concede that post-avant writing includes some of the most compelling poetry composed in the past century” to “post-avant poets are far more cliquish & closed-off to a wide range of writing than are SoQ folks.” But what if the real answer is more both/and rather than either/or?

You can find my own responses to this survey sprinkled through this blog’s archives in late August and early September, 2003.

¹ Seeing that made my day. I’m the optimistic sort who is easily encouraged. If a raving drunk accosted me on the street &, in the midst of a long string of mumbled obscenities, said “nice poems,” I’d be humming a tune all afternoon. Happily, the people who listed my name (and who mentioned three different books in doing so) are all poets whose opinions have long mattered to me.

Do me a favor. If you are on the blogroll – see the left column – can you double check your link and let me know if it’s out of date? Since I got this back up & running, I’ve come across at least a half dozen sites where the URL had changed – often for reasons that I don’t comprehend, since the blog continues to be hosted by the same provider. When I add a new blog, I make a note in a Word file, but sometimes, if the URL changes, I get lazy and update it only on the Blogger template. Now that’s come back to haunt me. Maybe haunt is too strong a word . . . .

And if you have a weblog you want added to the list, you have to actually tell me the URL..

Feeding a bird on the head of Charles Olson

If the current regime in Washington appears to be the most hostile to intellectuals since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when the People’s Republic of China sent a generation of them out to collective farms in the hinterlands for education – if they were lucky – one of the little ironies of the present historical moment is that an administration that thinks nothing of tossing overboard the last century of diplomacy in order to bring democracy to the Arab world at gunpoint, and which would happily deconstruct Social Security in order to send more of our dollars into the coffers of its contributors, has actually been good to the National Endowment of the Arts. It has not be eradicated, which had been a non-negotiable demand of a lot of conservatives heretofore. It has even had its budget expanded, albeit modestly.

There is something bordering on universal agreement that no small measure of the credit for this counter-intuitive trend can rightfully be assigned to its current chair, poet Dana Gioia. Gioia, a Republican businessman who writes poetry, has demonstrated to his peers in D.C. that there is nothing inherently un- or anti-American about the arts & has even engineered something of a rapprochement between the two constituencies.

Two programs in particular have stood out in Gioia’s attempt to return the NEA to credibility with his fellow conservatives. The first is a series of creative writing courses being taught to U.S. troops; the second, developed actually in advance of Gioia’s arrival at the NEA but so heartily taken in hand by him that it has become his signature effort, is Shakespeare in American Communities, underwriting some 1200 performances of the bard’s plays in 550 U.S. locations, mostly focusing on areas traditionally untouched by Shakespeare in the Park productions in New York City. For example, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival brought its version of Macbeth – an interesting choice given the short cuts George W took in claiming the throne in 2000 – to 13 military bases. And got $1 million in Defense Department funding to help pay for the effort. The program also has produced 25,000 education resource kits for use in schools. Shakespeare, as it turns out, is to be a unifying element for American culture, or so envisions the NEA.

Shakespeare, to my mind, is an interesting choice. One can imagine, for example, what might have happened had some other foreign playwright been imported & underwritten on a similar level. Such as Bertolt Brecht or Dario Fo. Even, I dare say, an attempt to underwrite 1200 performances of African dance or Indonesian gamelan might have had the xenophobes who populate capitol hill slicing away at the artery of federal funding that makes all this possible. Shakespeare, on the other hand, gets a pass. Nobody seems to notice, for example, that the dude never set foot in this hemisphere.

I have argued – even this week – that one of the defining elements of the School of Quietude is its sense of American art as a tributary of British culture & a national program to immerse the American psyche in the works of the glove maker’s son from Stratford sure sounds like the apotheosis of that worldview. One can only wonder what the Americans whose ancestors can’t be tracked back to the British Isles must think of this attempt to insinuate this perspective into our culture at this late date. “The thought of what America,” as the old Pound poem puts it, “would be like if the classics had a wide circulation, well it troubles my sleep.” Of the 6,379,157,361 people on this planet as of last July – the estimate is the CIA’s – just 51 million come from Great Britain, Scotland included. Roughly twice the size of Canada, but less than that of the two most populous states.

One might argue, as does Harold Bloom, that Shakespeare creates the modern psyche, regardless of nationality. Or merely that he was the greatest of playwrights or poets, a position more than a few credentialed people here & elsewhere are prepared to advocate. But the fact remains, whatever else one might wish to say about him, there is nothing American, nothing even remotely “national,” about William Shakespeare. Save perhaps for his influence always already on American writing.

When the Royal Shakespeare Company filmed its minimalist version of Macbeth for the BBC in 1979, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, the rest of the 12-person cast & the accompanying production crew got together to simply count the number of different versions of the play they had worked on or in during the course of their careers. The total went into the hundreds. In a society the size of Britain, this obviously could have some impact. By comparison, even the ambitious program of the NEA must seem like a token effort, a drop in an ocean of just under 300 million people. Further, the context is radically different. The idea that Shakespeare in America could have the same meaning or import, even on a far smaller scale, is a fantasy.

I do see Shakespeare as a decisive influence in the work of two major American writers, Herman Melville, especially in Moby Dick, & Melville’s most direct literary descendant, Charles Olson of Gloucester. Indeed what makes Melville’s novel about the whale unique, in Melville’s own writing as well as in 19^th century American letters, is the degree to which its author’s diction & imagination have been bathed, completely immersed, in the diction & drift of the Shakespearean tongue. That even accounts, I would suggest, for the book’s crash-and-burn reception when it was first published, a reaction so brutal it functionally undermined Melville’s career. No one, at least in the U.S., in the latter half of the 19^th century, was prepared for a work that would not only short-cut fiction’s long march toward a pictorial (and, in some instances, psychological) realism, bypassing modernism entirely, on its route to what might now be recognizable as pomo literature. Even in the United Kingdom, writers needed to go through the realist crucible of Joyce’s “The Dead” to begin the modernist revolution in prose with Ulysses.

The echo of Shakespeare is everywhere in Olson, from Call Me Ishmael, which explicitly reads the impact of Lear on Moby Dick to Olson’s sense of quantity in verse, which he traces back to the last decade of the bard’s plays. But where I really hear it, constantly, is directly in Olson’s verse. As in this opening strophe, from a poem named for its first line:

As the dead prey upon us,

they are the dead in ourselves,

awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,

disentangle the nets of being!

Or, to take another first stanza, this time from “In Cold Hell, in Thicket”:

In cold hell, in thicket, how

abstract (as high mid, as not lust, as love is) how

strong (as strut or wing, as polytope, as things are

constellated) how

strung, how cold

can a man stay (can men) confronted

thus?

So much of Olson reads as tho it were written to be shouted out over a heath, or else to be whispered to an audience, a stage whisper capable of reaching hundreds of ears at once. It is not so much dramatic monolog – tho Maximus is a persona – as it is soliloquy. Olson’s sense of how a sentence interacts with the line – something I suspect an entire generation or two has internalized so deeply we don’t even recognize it – has always struck me as coming right out of Shakespeare, far more than from Melville or Pound. This feel for the materiality of the relationship between the two is apparent, right there on the surface, in Olson, & through his influence it radiates outward. I can hear echoes in Creeley, in Duncan or Levertov, in O’Hara & Whalen & even in Ginsberg. And it ripples again, just a little more faintly, through every one of us influenced by any of them.

So the idea of all these people reading, seeing, hearing Shakespeare is, I suspect, much more of a wild card than the NEA’s leaders may comprehend. Because where it won’t lead is back to is either the homogenous retro-utopia of so many a Congressman’s dream nor to the same ol’ stuff the School of Quietude has been shoveling. Inseminating Shakespeare into the American literary landscape is far more apt to generate a bunch of wild men & wyrd sisters instead. As Olson himself most certainly was.

My own reaction to all this has been to return to Shakespeare – I’m midway through the Greenblatt biography, Will in the World, I’ve watched the Royal Shakespeare Company’s DVD of Macbeth, & I’m halfway now through a rereading of Lear. While I probably see one Shakespeare production maybe every 15 months or thereabouts anyway, I haven’t visited this body of work in this concentrated a fashion since I was a student of Jonas Barish at Berkeley some 35 years ago. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Black Sparrow is back. John Martin’s deservedly famous small press imprint, which from 1966 until Martin’s retirement in 2003, published many great books of poetry, fiction, memoirs & correspondence, had been relegated to the netherworld of backlist distribution on the part of David R. Godine, who took over the largest portion of the catalog – the exceptions being a trio authors, Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles & John Fante, who were picked up by Harper Collins, & Wyndham Lewis, whose work was taken by Marshall McLuhan’s publisher, Ginko Press. While Godine, for the most part, got the best books – he has the voluminous Robert Creeley-Charles Olson correspondence, several volumes by Larry Eigner, David Bromige, Robert Kelly, Tom Clark, John Yau, Eileen Myles, Jimmy Schuyler, Paul Goodman, Edward Dorn, Kenneth Burke, Jane Bowles, Andrei Codrescu, Mary Oppen, Wright Morris, Carl Rakosi, John Wieners et al – his only commitment was to sell the copies he had literally trucked back from Black Sparrow’s warehouse in Santa Rosa. On his website, still surprisingly primitive for a trade publisher with decent enough distribution, Godine admitted that, once gone, most titles would not be reprinted. “Only a select few will be — and they will be joined by judiciously selected new titles published under Godine’s Black Sparrow Books imprint.”

Now that is starting to happen. Godine has reprinted Diane Wakoski’s early selected poems, Emerald Ice, in an edition as well produced as any Martin ever did, its gloss cover a good step up from the matte finish of the earlier books. In addition, Godine has just published new books by two poets closely identified with the Black Sparrow brand, Clayton Eshleman’s My Devotion & Robert Kelly’s Lapis. Volumes by Beat fellow traveler Janine Pommy Vega & the dean of Los Angeles poets, Wanda Coleman, may already be out. And new volumes by Lyn Lifshin, Kenneth Burke, Alfred Chester and others have been announced. Perhaps the most important title this year will in fact be a collected short poems by Charles Reznikoff, something the world has needed for decades.

I have never quite figured out David Godine’s editorial taste – it seems to combine some of the world’s most interesting authors, like Ron Padgett, Georges Perec & Christa Wolf with the likes of William Logan or Albert Goldbarth. Thus I have been wary of the idea of Godine trying to shape a second imprint with a separate personality. Or, as we marketing types put it, brand identity.

So this first flurry is definitely an encouraging sign. Not only are the first poets ones already closely aligned with Black Sparrow, all three books are genuinely worth reading on their own & make great sense together. Kelly & Wakoski, after all, were two of the poets most closely associated with Eshleman’s literary journals, starting with Caterpillar & continuing through the life of Sulfur.

One could make a case that all three of these poets are underappreciated, that we generally don’t acknowledge just how important they have been to the creation of the current poetry scene, even Kelly whose volume here, Lapis, is his 63^rd book to date. Certainly this is true of Diane Wakoski. She first came of age as a poet right at the moment when Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, was setting up the landscape for the next two decades of writing in America. And while she was clearly on the side of the New Americans (NAPs), she was also female during a period when that was not easy. Indeed, one of the first things one notices of the many younger poets who followed in the wake of the Allen anthology, is just how many of them were not male. Like Wakoski, some of these younger poets have persevered & done well – Diane DiPrima, Joanne Kyger & Beverly Dahlen come immediately to mind – but if Ed Foster’s Talisman House hadn’t published the collected works of Madeline Gleason – one of only four women included in the Allen anthology – her poetry today would be as difficult to locate as that of Gail Dusenberry, Mary Norbert Körte, ruth weiss or Barbara Moraff.

I will always think of Diane Wakoski as a western poet because she grew up in California & attended U.C. Berkeley, where she worked on the literary magazine Occident, as had Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer earlier on (and as, circa 1970, would David Melnick & myself). If her sense of the line comes very directly out of projective verse, it had an almost matter-of-fact directness, radically unlike such enjambed, even halting New England voices as Olson or Creeley. Of the other westerners attracted to this kind of line, only Duncan really exceeds Wakoski in their interest in long, complex (& in Duncan’s case, convoluted) sentences. Her use of larger structures – narrative, dialog, the employment of personae – separates her out from writers like Phil Whalen or Gary Snyder. In some respects the poet she most reminds me of is someone whom I don’t know whether or not she ever even met – Lew Welch. He’s the only other one who combines that sense of line & that tone of discourse in anything like a similar fashion. Like Wakoski, tho, he also counterbalanced a life between the Midwest (in his case Chicago) and the West Coast. Wakoski has been in Michigan since at least 1975.

When I first was reading Wakoski in the 1960s, she was really the first poet in the New American tradition to be an out front feminist – it was a tone, a focus, and a content I had not heard before, certainly not in Levertov (who came to it not all that much later) or, at that moment, in either DiPrima or Guest. It gave her work an edginess that enabled her to establish herself as a poet on a national scale very quickly, yet at the same time it separated her out from all the other poets in her own aesthetic neck of the woods, at least until Caterpillar, where her emotional rawness fit in very well with a similar sense of electric inner life that one finds in Clayton Eshleman as well.

At her best, Wakoski is as good as it gets. Consider, for example, the opening lines of the 1966 poem, “Poet at the Carpenter’s Beach”:

Building up

in any way,

a structure that will permit you to say

no,

a structure that will permit you to say

yes,

as the thin small poet stood on the beach

in the light of the torch and was

run down and immediately killed

that night, on the beach, the sand

soft and cool, like his breath, just a few

minutes before.

Being around when somebody dies

requires a leap of imagination,

this reality too complete to comprehend,

as when you left me

and after that you were not in my life,

though just the day before you had kissed me and touched my mouth

with your large sculpturing fingers.

The weight of the line here is argumentative & dramatic, the better to foreground specifics & evoke the psychic devastation that is being described.

Emotional directness, as I suggested, is a signature element of Clayton Eshleman’s poetry as well. My Devotion is his first collection of poems since 1998 &, not unlike Roger Clemens, Eshleman still knows how “bring heat” to the page. Here are two examples from different works. The first is a stanza from a poem entitled “Animals Out of the Snow”:

Caryl and I were visiting the young poet Stephen Smith

in the world of 3 AM,

I was generating organs for a new book.

We were invited, as if for a cottage

or mountain cabin stay, but the beds were uneven,

things were tilting, for hours it seemed

I worried about my throat and

the corpse of John Logan

putting itself into my throat.

The second is the first paragraph of the prose poem, “A Yonic Shrine”:

When I piss into your blood (paper decomposing, pink furls, red under-risings), I feel an aimless goodness, a fascination with deconstruction – then a new spurt, making a new pattern, sinks me back, joyfully, into the childhood sandbox.

No poet depicts the logic of dream with greater care or precision than does Eshleman. His works often suggest a level of violence – and a discursive authority – that I think must put some readers off. It surely can overwhelm the unsuspecting. The way, for example, the reiteration of the word throat in that first stanza (just the sort of thing a bad MFA instructor would tell you is redundant) is what drives the sense of panic in the last line.

The paragraph from the prose poem works in exactly the opposite direction – from an image of violence or violation back toward the dreamtime of childhood. As is so often the case, the most important word here is the one that at first looks like it doesn’t belong, as if it wandered in from some other text or discourse: deconstruction. It sets up every other phrase in the paragraph to mean something other than what it claims to say. Also visible here – in both excerpts actually – is Eshleman’s grasp of the phrase as a locomotive element of prosody. I would call it muscular, tho Clayton might prefer the term peristaltic. Eshleman, Peter Seaton, Leslie Scalapino are all poets I could read endlessly just to think through how the phrase operates as a mode of music.

What is amazing is not that Lapis is Robert Kelly’s 63^rd book. What is amazing the vast range of poetry with which Kelly is completely adept. Unlike, say, Larry Eigner, who also produced literally thousands of poems but did so within a relatively uniform aesthetic framework that enabled him to use his form as a method of thinking, Kelly is the closest thing we have to a literary chameleon. He can produce long, indeterminate, post-projectivist texts in which line & phrase are every bit as much the locomotive governing the poem’s energy & he can produce lyrics as simple & powerful as “Light”:

The chastity of light

is a torment to the damned

who want to sully it

with our nature

want to give it skin

and suck the skin

want to penetrate the light

force our way

into everything.

Nothing yields.

Nothing can be broken,

everything intact

and light is the skin of it.

We howl around the campfire of each fact.

Constructed from just four sentences – the length of each is essential to the balance of the whole – with relatively few nouns, this poem is a close spiritual kin to the work of Rae Armantrout.¹ The way Kelly operates is that each book of poetry tends to focus on a specific aspect or side of his writing. The poems in Lapis one could call short, at least in contrast to some of Kelly’s writing, but they’re hardly all lyrics. There is a “Political Poem” named exactly that here that looks to, and acknowledges, Alan Gilbert & Kristin Prevallet. A prose memoir turns the act of asking one’s father to ask one a question into a vertical (& vertigo-ridden) descent into hell. And, as will happen in any book I read of Kelly’s, there are terms here on which texts depend that will have me reaching for the dictionary: ar-Ruk, cantelina, Caillebotte. Kelly knows exactly what he is doing. Who else, after all, would start a poem entitled “Gary Gaetti Retires” with “Recentior D H Red Soxorum?”

So maybe this new home for Black Sparrow is going to work after all. It would be great to see the press keep the most important books – the Olson-Creeley correspondence, the Eigner, the Bromige – in print forever. But it will be just as critical that Black Sparrow's next generation of texts make sense in terms of the great history of John Martin’s press. So far, so good.

¹ Tho I doubt that Armantrout would ever write that last line – her howls are inner & silent.

Wendell Berry receives a lifetime services award
from the Kentucky Environmental Quality Commission,
Earth Day 2004

Wendell Berry may well be the finest conservative poet now writing. I mean that both formally and politically – Berry is that rare poet who will write in opposition to a woman’s right to choose not to carry a pregnancy to term as well as he is a constant advocate for the preservation of America’s remnants of agrarian culture. That may seem like a complicated position, but Berry is not at all unthoughtful. It’s that he takes the word conserve very literally.

This month, Shoemaker & Hoard will issue Given, Berry’s first volume of poetry in a decade. As with all his poetry, it is absolutely worth reading. The book opens with two introductory sections composed of the kind of short, often occasional poems one associates with Berry, as in “They”:

I see you down there, white haired

among the green leaves,

picking the ripe raspberries,

and I think “Forty-two years!”

We are the you and I who were

they whom we remember.

This is as effective a love lyric as I have read in a long time. For a poet who is not afraid of rhyme, it is interesting to note here how carefully the prosody of this piece is set up, with each of the first four lines containing an odd number of syllables, just enough variation to shake the gait of the language toward prose, setting up the glide of the metrically even final sentence. It’s a pleasure to read someone so fully in control of his craft.

The third section of Given is a short verse play entitled “Sonata at Payne Hollow,” issued previously as a chapbook. The play invokes the lives of painters Harland and Anne Hubbard, of whom Berry has written previously. I say “invokes” because in the play the two characters carry forward literally from the beyond the grave, set up through a foundational dialog between a man and a boy. It’s a complex little piece, just 12 pages long, but one that I think demonstrates both what can be so attractive about Berry’s poetry as well as problematic with the vision that motivates it.

But the final section of Given is the real news here, taking up as it does two-thirds of the volume. Berry has been writing poems he calls “Sabbaths” since 1979 and the selection here carries that project forward from 1998 through 2004, continuing the work already collected in his last collection, A Timbered Choir. More personal than the mostly short pieces of the two opening sections, “Sabbaths” is the work for which I think Berry will ultimately be known. In general – there are exceptions, including one elegy here for Denise Levertov that would have fit better elsewhere – Berry’s focus in this ongoing series tends to be the natural world, especially that around his farm in Kentucky. This offers his writing a level of specificity that is often lost in other works, especially those that tend toward the polemic. My favorite work in the book is a poem from 2002 that, on the face of it, appears to have no purpose whatsoever:

The Acadian flycatcher, not

a spectacular bird, not a great

singer, is seen only when

alertly watched for. His call

is hardly a song –

a two-syllable squeak you hear

only when you listen for it.

His back is the color of a leaf

in shadow, his belly that

of a leaf in light. He is here

when the leaves are here, belonging

as the leaves belong, is gone when

they go. His is the voice

of this deep place among

the tiers of summer foliage

where three streams come together.

You sit and listen to the voice

of the water, and then you hear

the voice of the bird. He is saying

to his mate, to himself, to whoever

may need to know: “I’m here!”

Even in Berry’s “Sabbaths” tho, description often turns to parable &, regardless of how well written it might be, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the contradictions that are at the heart of his vision. I have the same problem with his view, ultimately, that I have when watching the films, say, of Michael Moore. To construct their respective world views, they’re required to omit far too many of the details, many of which simply cancel out their reasoning. In Moore’s case, telling what happens to the city of Flint when a factory moves presents a cross-section of a detail taken from a larger, far greater process. Moore’s utopia is the industrial segment of the American Midwest while Berry’s is somewhat closer to an early agrarian view – and the political conclusions they draw are for the most part quite different.¹ But each is largely bemoaning the movement of the world away from what they perceive to have been its optimum moment. Both are telling narratives of decline.

Berry’s a utopian poet, but utopias can exist only outside of history. Berry’s idea of a self-sustaining local economy was already fatally passé even before the growth in the population of nomadic hunter-gatherers led to the rise of agriculture &, with agriculture, property, cities, divisions of labor, armies, and all the rest, up to & including nuclear pollution & genetically modified crops. When he rails against science and medicine, as he does in “Some Further Words,” a credo from which the book’s second section takes its name, it’s not because these methodologies help people, but because they ultimately force change, tipping the world off of its axis into a spiral of decay & despair. Yet the only communities historically that have ever been to survive for extensive periods in the kind of suspended animation Berry seeks have been those, mostly in the South Pacific, that have evolved in isolation on islands, with substantially lower levels of agriculture than that figured in Berry’s imagination. Even there, it was historical change – migration – that populated those nations in the first place. There is no such thing as an “indigenous” population, nor any such thing as a local economy, which is just a Prairie Home Companion version of Stalin’s Socialism in One Country model. It didn’t work for Stalin & it won’t work for Berry. It’s not clear whether or not he actually knows this, but all the ways in which the world fails to adhere to his vision of the possible will no doubt continue to fuel some of the saddest, sweetest verse we can get.

¹ They would, I suspect, agree on the stupidity at heart of the war on Iraq & at the idea that we can dictate democracy & modernism to the Middle East at gun point.

I was in Austin for 22 hours last week, did a quick spot on Bloomberg TV (not about blogging or poetry), then headed back out again only to get caught up in Canceled Flight Blues at Dallas-Fort Worth, my least favorite of airports. While I was doing all this, I got the first email I’ve received since starting this venture two-plus years ago that felt more than a little like hate mail:

Our "one moment in history" will be remembered long after your wooden lightless writing or whatever it is has been superceded by that of other arrogant and envious groovy robots of the next instantaneously obsolete avant-garde as must be pretty obvious by now even to you. (I will grant that you briefly had an invigorating effect on a few real poets, you should get credit for that, except you won't, because only emotion endures and you won't be remembered.)

That’s the whole letter, save for the signature. Its author is a relatively recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize. My sense is that his poetry isn’t much better than his prose, a case of the overwrought urn. If he had a better sense of literary history, he might know that School of Quietude (SoQ) poets such as himself have a very poor track record for being kept alive in the memory of readers, largely because they’re not the Blakes or Wordsworths or Whitmans or Melvilles, but rather the Jones Verys & Robert Silliman Hillyers of history. It’s not an accident that his last line quotes Pound. As Marjorie Perloff has noted, if one were writing out of some desire to be remembered, the avant-garde tradition is clearly the way to go.¹ If my correspondent wishes to gauge my envy, I suggest that he do a search on our names on Google.

But I was glad to see that he cared. It’s a sign that he’s not writing badly only to gain the approval of boors, a feeling I do sometimes get in the presence of SoQ poetics. And his verbal brick came through my email window just as Kirby Olson & several other voices in the Squawkbox commentaries were clamoring for me to sketch out a history or schema of the School of Quietude itself.

The term, as I like to remind folks, was coined not by me, but by Edgar Allen Poe, responding in the 1840s to criticism that his work needed to be a tad more quiet. Back then, the literary world was already caught up in a dispute between one cluster of writers (the Knickerbockers) who felt that American literature needed to pattern itself after English & European tradition. Literature in that sense was viewed as index of how America was becoming refined & sophisticated. Opposed to the Knickerbockers were the Young Americans who felt that the writing of the New World needed to be taken on its own terms. Both sides courted Poe, tho it seems clear that his heart was mostly in the camp of the Young Americans. And, ironically, he was the first American author to have a substantial influence overseas. Six years after Poe died, Whitman showed up with the first edition of Leaves of Grass & the debate has only intensified ever since.

I first used the phrase to suggest a sense of how old this dispute is. There is no question – absolutely none – that a tradition in American letters existed that sought mightily to quash the reputation of the New American poets when they first began publishing in the 1950s. Hillyer – not a blood relation of mine, I’m relieved to say – actively sought to have the works of Pound banned after the Second World War. The exclusion of Pound, Stein, Williams & all the Objectivists – the exclusion of modernism in general, in fact – was consistently practiced by these more conservative poets throughout the first half of the 20^th century. A lot of this was over-the-top & embarrassing in retrospect, such as Louis Simpson’s angry resignation from UC Berkeley after the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, fleeing back to the culturally safe environs of the Eastern seaboard. Before he became a founding member of the neoconservatives, Norman Podhoretz’ tract against Jack Kerouac & the Beats, the “Know-Nothing Bohemians,” represented a fellow traveler’s attempt to support the very same authors who already had close to a monopoly on the trade publishing houses – more of whom printed poetry in those days. The militancy that one sometimes finds in the writing of (or in support of) the New American Poets in the 1950s was itself largely a reaction of the militancy of conservatives like Podhoretz who tended to treat the New Americans as if they were the Barbarians at the Gates. A concept like M.L. Rosenthal’s silly Confessional Poetry was a slightly later (& inadvertent) admission that (a) the NAPs were not going away, (b) they represented the most exciting poetry of the 1950s and (c) the surest way to rescue a moderately interesting SoQ poet like Lowell was to find a way in which he could be argued to be doing “the same thing” as Allen Ginsberg. As a moment in intellectual history – let alone intellectual honesty – this was not a high point.

Historically, then, the SoQ could be said to be any poetry that looks to the establishmentarian traditions mostly in the U.K., but also on the continent, for validation, and who seek an American verse that largely is clone of European sophistication. By this, the SoQs do not mean Basil Bunting, Tom Raworth, Douglas Oliver or most of the French poets of the past half century, or even the earlier experimental tradition in Russia. This is why even now second-tier conservative talents from overseas are so often over-hyped here in translation. There is a doctoral dissertation to be had in watching, for example, the translations of Paul Celan. SoQ writers act as if Pierre Joris & his work does not exist. Their Celan is not an innovator of language, but the tortured, tragic soul of the Overwrought Urn, to be read breathlessly & slow. Joris’ Celan can actually write.

In 1950, the Boston Brahmin tradition largely ruled the SoQ universe, counterbalanced only somewhat by Auden, who at least came by his Anglo-centrism honestly. The Brahmin tradition had several first-rate talents – Lowell, Berryman, Plath being the most conspicuous – but there was no way its establishmentarian commitments & conformist impulses could have survived the next two decades as a serious literary force. As it broke apart from within, with notable defections on the part of Bly, Merwin, Wright, Rich & Hall², the American university was expanding dramatically with the great postwar economic expansion of 1946-64 (conspicuously identical to the Baby Boom Generation) with MFA programs springing up all over the map. Most of the early teachers in these programs came literally out of the Writers Workshop in Iowa City, which had never been a Brahmin outpost (Auden had been a far greater influence). These younger establishmentarians found themselves treated as lesser talents in part because they did not go to Harvard or Yale. And they had little in common socially with that world of inherited wealth & social customs. One can find pronouncements of Open or Naked Poetry from that period, largely from the same poets who would associate themselves with the American Poetry Review, that are every bit as much fun to read as Bly’s pronouncements in The Fifties and The Sixties. The APR innovation was to write the same establishmentarian poetry, but in free verse. Thus by the mid-60s a James Tate could come along with a smattering of surrealism & suddenly be treated as a savant by people who had never heard of Ron Padgett.

It was precisely the disintegration of the Brahmins & decentralization of the SoQ landscape in the 1960s that would lead a little later to the reformation – one can almost mean that in the old liturgical sense – of the so-called New Formalism, a group of even younger poets who were militantly anti-New and clueless about form, which they confuse with pattern. The New Formalists are interesting sociologically, because they represent an SoQ tendency that to this day remains largely outside of the academy.

I agree that there is a good history of the SoQ to be written, although I for one have no desire ever to attempt it. There is not enough time to read all of the good poetry being written. I cannot fathom wanting to devote very much of that precious commodity to an in-depth examination of a tradition I see as reactionary at best, and often pathological.

Actually, the most interesting new insight I’ve seen about all this of late can be found in Stephen Greenblatt’s brilliant speculative biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World. Greenblatt notes a serious division already among the playwrights & poets of the late 16^th & early 17^th centuries in & about London, a class division, setting apart those university-trained authors, most of whom may have written for the theater, but who did not actively participate in productions, and rough-hewn actors who wrote for their companies and did not have proper educations or family credentials, Shakespeare himself being one of the latter & actually an occasional subject for scorn on the part of these society authors for it. Greenblatt adopts Shakespeare’s term for what in the U.S. today I would call the SoQ: he called them the “university twits,” a marvelous phrase. I would be tempted to start using that phrase as well if I didn’t know a lot of poets in universities who are not, in fact, twits. But that’s what educational expansion will do for you.

Class may in fact continue to be a subtext between SoQ & post-avant poetics to this day, although I suspect it is one largely rendered illegible in all the ways American history has dealt with that touchy issue. Thus Phil Levine writes of workers & Marilyn Hacker is an articulate feminist, tho both produce work that reinforces the most conservative literary traditions in America. At least Dana Gioia & Wendell Berry are consistent in both their writing and their political commitments.

It should be obvious that many SoQ poets are talented – Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Roethke, just to keep to that generation, all qualify. But if you put them alongside of the New York School poets of that same period (the NAP tendency they were “most like”), these same Brahmins strike me as klutzy and a little sad, operating as they did within literary constraints that really functioned as blinders. Reading Life Studies is like going through Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems on Quaaludes. Lowell’s synapses in his poems are like a Jim Carrey impression of slow motion. This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t enormously gifted. But it does mean that mostly he wasted it. If only he had had a Pound to edit his work, as Ezra did a generation earlier for T.S. Eliot, the ultimate Anglophile.

Since the embarrassing disaster of the attempts at quashing Pound & the Beats in the 1950s, the SoQ has largely employed benign neglect toward the new poetries that have emerged since then – viz., Joris’ Celan. Like all hegemons, a major part of its strategy has been to pretend that it’s the unmarked case. Like white males pretending that identity politics doesn’t include them. So that today we have “poetry” and we have “language poetry” (or maybe “post-language poetry”). The Pulitzer mostly is reserved for poetry, not that other stuff. The biggest single reason to use a phrase like School of Quietude (or Brahmins or university twits or whatever) is to make it visible. The SoQ is a series of interlocking (and sometimes disputatious) literary tendencies every bit as coherent as the New American Poetry.

So I was glad, genuinely, to get an email that showed a little passion, regardless of how ill worded & misguided it might be. It would be far healthier – riskier too – if the SoQ as a whole would stand up to be counted. In general, the one segment of it that has been willing to do so have been the new formalists, who may be as appalled at the nonsense of what used to be called “APR types” as am I, but who fail to understand how that poetry came about – they would have to change their own poetry & poetics forthwith if they did.

¹ My correspondent worries about being remembered. The best response I can imagine to that anxiety is something I saw recently on Len Edgerly’s blog, which quotes Robert Creeley from an interview in the Cortland Review:

Williams says he'd rather go off and die like a sick dog than be a well-known literary person in America. A poll taken on the streets of Manhattan discovered that less than one percent could tell who Norman Mailer was. Poets write, I do believe, because they have to—it's something nothing else quite satisfies. One has to do it — compulsively. I remember Carl Rakosi saying before we were to teach at Naropa some years ago ( we were musing over just how to proceed): "Well, the last thing poets need is encouragement!" They'll do it come hell or high water. My own "acceptance and recognition" came from peers, as Olson, Duncan, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Cid Corman—and elders like Williams and Zukofsky. The company is what matters.

² Richard Tillinghast’s brief diversion off into the Sufi Choir in the late 1960s can be seen as a residual round of this (in the Marxian phrase, “this time as farce”), but he returned to the fold before too terribly long.

I’m ambivalent about most forms of poetry contests, at best. But the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Poetry Face-Off at least seems likely to expand the number of people who are apt to hear a poem being read aloud. And one of the finalists this year is Christian Bök, whose work will be familiar to many of the readers here. Follow the link above to listen and to vote.

Speaking of awards, Darren Wershler-Henry of Coach House Press was awarded first place for the design of a Canadian book of poetry, Mark Truscott’s marvelous Said Like Reeds or Things by the Alcuin Society, an organization devoted to all aspects of fine press printing.

It must be very interesting to live in a country where work on this order isn’t automatically marginalized as it is in the United States.

Henry Darger Read-a-Thon

Susan Bee notes that on April 12, there will be a Henry Darger read-a-thon at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. That link will lead you to details. The Pat Graney Company’s dance piece, The Vivian Girls, will be performed there on May 4^th.

The question came up concerning the New American Poetry. I’m always referring to it here as though everyone understands the reference. Could I give, perhaps, a reading list that would capture that phenomenal mid-century confluence of poets who changed the writing of the U.S. Here’s a list with which to start. I should note that I often prefer to get the early books themselves rather than the later collected editions (I tend to have both if I can afford it).

The Allen Anthology, the New American Poetry, is the obvious place to start. The 44 poets here offered the first clear collective alternative to the School of Quietude since the Objectivists of the 1930s. This book to some degree rescued modernism, showing that the influences of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky et al had not come to some dead end during the Second World War.

David Ossman's collection of interviews, The Sullen Art, would be my second book. Like a lot of what follows, you will need to go through a rare book service (e.g. ABEbooks.com) to find this. It’s well worth the effort. Ossman, a member of the comedy troupe, Firesign Theater, talks to Rexroth, Paul Carroll, Blackburn, Rothenberg, Kelly, Robert Bly, John Logan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Creeley, W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, LeRoi Jones, Ed Dorn & Ginsberg. This is very much “in the thick of things,” for example trying to figure out if the “Deep Image” poetry associated then with Rothenberg, Kelly, Bly & James Wright is really a literary movement or not (not was the answer).

The second issue of Evergreen Review, a "SF Renaissance" issue, which includes Rexroth, Brother Antoninus, Duncan, Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller, McClure, Josephine Miles, Spicer, Michael Rumaker, Jim Broughton, Snyder, Whalen, Kerouac (“This Railroad Earth”, one of his very best pieces), and Ginsberg (“Howl”). With some critical pieces on music (Ralph Gleason) and the visual arts (Dore Ashton), photos by Harry Redl. There were a lot of copies of this & it’s not that hard to find. Possibly the most awesome issue of any magazine ever.

The Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Don Allen & Warren Tallman (includes pieces by Blake, H.D., Lorca, Mac Low, Stein, Whitman, Williams, Zukofsky & Pound in addition to true NAPs). Published a little later, 1973, I think this was the first book I ever owned that had Poetics in its title. LeRoi Jones has become Baraka by this time. This book was an open acknowledgement of the importance of theory to the NAP, something a number of the younger ones felt quite uncomfortable with.

New American Story, edited by Allen & Creeley. Burroughs, Kerouac, Rumaker, Creeley, William Eastlake, Hubert Selby Jr., Ed Dorn, LeRoi Jones, John Rechy, Douglas Woolf. The importance of prose – and of writers like Selby, Rechy & Woolf – can’t be underestimated. Everything from the new narrative to a lot of post-1970 prose poetry can be traced back here.

A Controversy of Poets, edited by Robert Kelly & Paris Leary. An attempt to put the NAP (and by then newer poets such as Mac Low) alongside School of Quietude poets like Robert Lowell (the only poet they agreed on, Robert Duncan, refused to participate). It's a great book. Going alphabetically let it start with Ashbery, Blackburn & Blaser, then end with Zukofsky. With only one exception, the names you won’t recognize all come from the School o’ Q.

An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett & David Shapiro. This was the bible of the 2^nd generation NY School, as near as I can tell. It also was the book that put Schuyler first. It put Clark Coolidge second.

Like the above, Tom Clark’s All Stars, George Quasha’s Active Anthology and Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar Anthology all represent good collections of how this writing evolved through the 1960s. Clark’s is interesting for its joining of the NY School with Beats & some post-Black Mountain poets. It too put Clark Coolidge second, after Michael McClure.

Then after that, I'd be into specific texts:

• Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish (then, later, from Fall of America, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” & “Wales Visitation”)
• Wieners, the Hotel Wentley Poems – the first true out of the closet book of poems in America.
• Ferlinghetti, Coney Island of the Mind, immensely popular because it made every high school kid think “I could do that”
• Kerouac, Visions of Cody, On the Road – Cody is the masterpiece.
• McClure, Ghost Tantras; A Dark Book, A Book of Torture
• Creeley, For Love, Words, Pieces. The essays from A Quick Graph.
• Olson, The Mayan Letters, Human Universe (the early essays), the Maximus Poems, the non-Max poems first published in The Distances
• O'Hara, Lunch Poems, Meditations in an Emergency
• Joanne Kyger, The Tapestry and the Web – the one poet who fits into virtually every subgrouping one wishes to make of this period (she is the secret to the NAP jigsaw puzzle)
• Ashbery, the first 3 books (then add Three Poems, but only after reading Creeley’s Pieces)
• Ed Dorn, the pre-Gunslinger work, esp. North Atlantic Turbine
• Duncan, his trio of great books from the 1960s: Opening of the Field, Roots & Branches, Bending the Bow
• Spicer -- the Collected Books (esp. Language & Book of Magazine Verse, but keep in mind that almost nobody read that last one until after his death)
• Levertov's first couple of books, ditto Guest
• Koch's When the Sun Tries to Go On (which points directly to Berrigan’s Sonnets)
• Fielding Dawson, Krazy Kat
• Lew Welch, Ring of Bone
• Jonathan Williams, any of the early books
• Phil Whalen, On Bear’s Head (still the best collection)
• William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
• Gilbert Sorrentino’s Something Said & his early books of poetry (through The Orangerie). Sorrentino was the most prolific & intelligent reviewer of the period.

John Wieners' 707 Scott Street is worth reading as a document of the period, esp. its configuration of a Black Mountain poet hanging out at the edge of the Spicer Circle in SF.

There really is a dearth of good collective books on the NAP & we desperately need an anthology of the Spicer Circle, since people know Jack, Robin Blaser, George Stanley, Kyger, but not Harold Dull, Ronnie Primack, Steve Jonas or Jim Alexander. I'd definitely read Michael Davidson's Guys Like Us, on the role of masculinity in the poetry of the 1950s.

Pulling together this list – I keep thinking of all the books, names I’ve omitted – reminds me that by 1970, the NAP was still active (O’Hara & Spicer were the only ones who had died early, tho Olson & Blackburn were soon to follow), the NY School was already into full-blown 2^nd generation stage by then & langpo had hit the streets with This, edited by Bob Grenier & Barrett Watten. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine all three as contemporary, but they were in their overlapping ways. All of this while the Objectivists were coming back into print, feminism was starting to arrive & just as Jerry Rothenberg was beginning to role out his anthologies, a major rethinking of the whole history of verse. 1970 was also the year that Harvey Brown brought out his Frontier Press edition of Williams' Spring & All, which made everybody have to rethink everything they knew about the Dr. and his role in modernism. No wonder we were all having trouble keeping it untangled in our imaginations!

Scene from The Vivian Girls, The Pat Graney Company, 2005

After I posted my note on the Vodou shrines of Nancy Josephson, the holocaust tapestries of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz & the ceramic installation that is Richard Cleaver’s Gathering at the Latrobe Spring House, the Greco-Australian math poet П.0 sent an email asking my thoughts on

the notion of the naive poet within the context of language etc

i.e. is it possible, if so who

But I had not used the term “naïve.” There is nothing about Josephson’s shrines or Cleaver’s complex clay craft that would even suggest naiveté. Krinitz was self-taught & her tapestries dispense with pictorial conventions such as perspective, but that abandonment empowers her at times to construct more complicated narrative structures (single panels in which, for example, figures representing herself & her sister Mania appear more than once in the same scene). There is a difference between self-taught & naïve I would think.

Poetry differs from the visual – and especially the textile & ceramic arts – in that it employs technology – language – pretty much everyone uses in everyday life. That is one reason why so many people think writing poetry must be “easy.” One is, in this sense, always already self-taught even before one thinks to ask the question, Can I write?

There have always been poets who were directed by motives that seem entirely personal or outside of traditional art world concerns: John Wieners, Hannah Weiner, Will Alexander, Jack Hirschman, Julia Vinograd, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bern Porter, Bob Kaufman, Helen Adam. It would not be that hard to call any one of these an outsider artist, even when (as with Hannah Weiner or Will Alexander) they also seem completely in touch with the contemporary writing scenes of their day. Like Josephson & Cleaver, they all seem to demonstrate the distinction between being an outsider & being naïve. I never knew Frank Kuenstler, who struck me as being a street person in his own private world the one time I saw him (which, frankly, is how Kaufman always struck me as well), but it is hard to imagine that somebody who had more than a half dozen books published could have been living entirely outside of the literary scene.

A more complex case might be the work of Frank Stanford, given that his great early longpoem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, does appear to have been composed with virtually no knowledge of the existence of any literary scene. His later short lyrics, on the other hand, reflect the socialization process of MFA programs hard at work. Yet it’s his early poetry for which Stanford will be most remembered.

Leading a writers workshop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the 1970s, I worked with a number of writers who similarly were unaware of the existence, sometimes within just a few blocks of the Leavenworth Street drop-in arts program where we met, of one of the most vital & rich literary communities in this country. And some of the people were doing interesting, exciting work. Harley Kohler was a practitioner of what in those days was called gender fuck, which is to say that he typically wore both dresses & a beard. His poems were complex constructions of neologisms, tending toward pure word play. Because his lover at the time worked in the same board-and-care home where Larry Eigner first lived on moving to Berkeley, it would be wrong to suggest that Harley didn’t have some clue as to the literary world, but it was a scene that just didn’t interest him. James “Spider” Taylor (not to be confused with the guitarist from the bands Red Wedding and Smoke & Mirrors, nor with Carly Simon’s ex-) wrote long, intense fictions – a cross section between the prose of Kerouac at its most over-the-top & the sensibility of Rat Fink, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s hot-rod associated comics. While other writers associated with the Tenderloin Writers Workshop – Charles Bivens, Laura Feldman, Mary Tallmountain, Roberto Harrison – did connect up with the literary scene in one way or another, neither Kohler nor Taylor ever did. It’s my guess that there are many other people just like that around other “open reading” or “workshop” settings all across the United States (I can’t speak for other societies here). Kohler & Taylor both clearly were/are outsider artists, and Taylor I believe probably fits П’s category of naïve as well. But it’s precisely because they are writers who practiced at the margins, their work is functionally inaccessible today.

I’ve often wondered in this regard about the prose of Henry Darger. The bizarrely virginal pedophiliac graphics for which he has become posthumously famous, after all, were originally illustrations to his 15,145 page novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. One senses that his prose style may have been as unique as his understanding of female anatomy. While Darger himself has become a cult phenomenon, the subject of a Natalie Merchant song, the source for John Ashbery’s title Girls on the Run, the subject of a motion picture, and a performance/dance piece by the Pat Graney Company, The Story of the Vivian Girls has never to my knowledge been published. Indeed, a profile on the artist in the Washington Post by Phillip Kennicott on February 4, included this assessment of Darger’s prose:

The written works of Darger are so extensive, and frankly so dull, that no one has read them in their entirety. His style is filled with little Victorian asides that address the "dear reader," a perpetual inflation of excitement reminiscent of bad adventure-writing aimed at little boys, and lots of rhetorical stuffing that sounds like a child trying to imitate the style of an adult. "The accounts of the numerous stirring scenes mentioned here will, we hope, become interesting and attractive as well as fascinating reading to the people of our nation, but also highly important and valuable though unreal," reads one passage.

Here one verges on the border of writing & psychiatry. Which moves beyond the question of insider/outsider art or whether or not such a thing as “naïve poetry” can exist. But I think my answer to П’s question is that, yes, such a thing can exist, in which a writer produces work without prior or deep knowledge of the literary scene, but it is unlikely that we are apt to the know the work. To the extent that we do, it tends to be the result of a social accident – Frank Stanford’s “pre-college” work turns out to be as good or better than anything that follows; Henry Darger just happens to rent his room from an art professional, photographer Nathan Lerner. If Stanford’s work reflects a level of raw genius – that’s a completely reasonable reading of Battlefield – it’s hard even to get hold of the prose of a Darger. The writing of people like Harley Kohler & Spider James Taylor tends to be lost forever.

This is where the question of what constitutes a “naïve” writer comes in. The category is not entirely about the absence of knowledge of literary effects, at least not to the degree that it might be in media (like Esther Krinitz’ tapestry) that are not direct extensions of thinking & speaking, as such. Rather, it is also naiveté about the organization of such effects, first within a text, but always also in the social world as well. Not being aware of (or interested in) a literary scene, or how one might enter into it, is at least as important as what goes on between the margins. After all, Emily Dickinson appears to have been no more interested in an audience than Henry Darger.

Robert Smithson – Hotel Palenque

The most important – to me at least – exhibit I saw in Baltimore last week was one I wasn’t able to get enough time to explore fully, entering as I did without much expectation just an hour before the museum was about to close. The Slide Show is something of a history of slide projection installations as they have existed in art & museum spaces over the past half century. With Kodak discontinuing the production of its last slide projector last year, the definition & future of this medium has become problematic.

That is, if one’s definition of the slide show is predicated upon physical slides placed into a carousel, which may or may not rotate, which may or may not be combined with an accompanying audio track, & whose projected image may or may not be overlaid with another, ranging from a silhouette on the wall to multiple slide projections upon the same white space.

The show itself could only be characterized as a warren of such displays – one enters & is soon wandering almost completely disoriented betwixt Robert Smithson’s coy narrative accompanying slides of the crumbling Hotel Palenque, Ana Mendieta dragging her blood covered hands down a white sheet, photographs from Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, or the hysterically dry wit of James Coleman “analyzing” (or, perhaps, “analysing”) frame after identical frame of the same photograph of a busy intersection, a photograph noteworthy for its lack of a clearly defined focal object. I don’t even recall Ceal Floyer’s projection of “pure” light through a projector whose carousel was empty, but it’s in the catalog, so it must have struck me as “between” images, which is indeed how several of these works felt as I wandered rather too quickly (with two teenage boys) through 20 or so interconnecting darkened rooms that proceed in not always obvious directions. There were works that merely presented the medium of the photograph, others that documented actions¹, still others that were works in themselves & finally those that, like Coleman’s dissertation on the process of seeing, commented on the process of the slide show itself – it didn’t have to click through the carousel to the same exact image, over & over, but that’s what it did. During the evening rush hour, Louise Lawler’s External Stimulation is projected – billboard sized – on the exterior of the museum. This, however, I did not get to see, even though we departed precisely into the evening commute. What is visible on the sidewalk in front of the wall is an encased box, podium high, outside of the building, housing the projector itself.² One might recognize this as sculpture, minimalist & brutal.

In a sense, The Slide Show really is an elegy to the slide projector – the catalog even has a special section on the machine, with eight pictured examples ranging from the “lantern slide” projectors of the 1870s to the recently discontinued Kodak Ektagraphic, which standardized the 80-slide carousel. But just as writing did not come to a halt when IBM discontinued manufacturing typewriters – the division was spun off & exists now as the printer company, Lexmark – there is functionally nothing inherent in the Ektagraphic that cannot be accomplished with today’s computer projectors. The only function that implicitly disappears is the irritating auditory click between slides – an element that only James Coleman actually did anything with in the examples I’ve cited here. In spite of the tone, one suspects that the projected installation is really still in its infancy as a form.

So it’s not really clear what is being celebrated. Unlike a show of, say, nudes or even paintings in monochromatic tones, there is very little that these artists have in common save their employment of this device, which can range in its contribution to the overall work from marginal & almost accidental to being the focal point of it all. The painful earnestness of Mendieta’s work contrasts sharply with Coleman’s deadpan irony which has more in common with the comedy of Andy Kaufman.

Which in turn points up an inherent issue within the conceptually oriented community that is drawn to the idea of installations in the first place – there is surprisingly little in the way of a common aesthetic palette or shared discourse. The feeling one gets is that this must be a community that is terrific at talking, but which is full of terrible listeners. Very little actually builds. One could argue of course that there are ways in which some of these artists do connect – that one could draw a line between the off-centered photojournalism of Nan Goldin & her influences (Weegee, Robert Frank or Diane Arbus), as well as her contemporaries, Larry Clark & Araki Nobuyoshi. But that’s not the tale told here – the closest we’re allowed to get is Helen Levitt’s warm pictures of urban scenes & Jack Smith’s overlit drag queens.

Even if individual works of art attempt to thwart narrative, exhibitions never can – The Slide Show makes a vain attempt in setting up its world in a confusing this-way/that-way kind of path. It’s a bit like a maze, but not a terribly serious one: the curators want you to see all the work. What they don’t seem to want to do is make a strong argument for the form. The closest they get is something along the lines of Well, the first people to use slides just did, employing them instrumentally, while later on people started to notice the tool itself, which led to metacommentary & a more painterly formalism. Yet the most striking instance of the latter is Jan Dibbets’ Land/Sea, a series linked images forming a broad panorama, half being a beach scene, half a meadow – and this is one of the earlier works in the show, dating back to the early 1970s.

Yet it’s exactly the show’s confusions that made me think of this exhibition as important. The curators haven’t got their content sorted out because they’re still intellectually & emotionally in the middle of it & from their perspective it’s all still new & rapidly evolving. I’ll agree with them on this last point, if not necessarily the others.

This show will continue at the Baltimore Museum of Art until May 15. It then travels to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati for a July to September run, before heading to the Brooklyn Museum where it will be up from October until next January.

¹ Raising the inevitable question of how else does a performance or installation artist create anything that could be exchanged for value, i.e. sold? It’s all about the documentation.

² Elsewhere in the museum but not a part of this show, Kara Walker has a particularly strong piece that entails a slide projected against a wall containing a silhouette.

A student at Penn writes:

For my individual project I have been asked to assess whether the contemporary poetry avant-garde accept and embrace Adrienne Rich as part of their aesthetic, and whether these poets view Rich’s work as important – formally, aesthetically, or poetically – to their movement.  If at all possible, I would greatly appreciate hearing your opinions regarding Rich’s poetry in context of your personal artistic goals and the goals of the larger avant-garde movement. Are there any poems or essays or actions of hers that you particularly respect or disrespect, and why? What did you think about her refusal of the National Medal of the Arts, and how do you view her decision in regards to her concept  of “American” poetry? Does her concept differ with or complement your own? When you have a chance, please let me know  your opinions on these questions. I very much look forward to hearing from you.

In the grand scheme of things, Adrienne Rich has always been one of the “good guys” in American poetry, somebody who not only wrote well, but who worked to define the possibilities for audiences that had not previously existed as fully self-acknowledged communities, and who always has positioned her writing within a larger vision of the world & social justice. She is one of the very few poets of her generation who arose within the framework of the School of Quietude whose poetry I actually feel the need to own & on occasion read. She is also the only such person whose essays I also keep nearby.

Rich comes out of the Boston Brahmin tradition that we normally associate today with Robert Lowell & his closest associates – Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, George Starbuck, James Merrill, Richard Howard, John Hollander & a whole host of less compelling folks – but also with a number of poets who in the late 1960s & early ‘70s turned away from that Anglo-centric & largely establishmentarian tradition seeking new & more vigorous modes of writing. Robert Bly, James Wright, W.S. Merwin & even Donald Hall can be read as variations of this same basic narrative, driven externally by the great social upheavals of that period – the Vietnam War, for example – and aesthetically by the challenge to their writing posed by the New American Poets. One can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for well-trained “professionally” oriented poets of that period to realize that their work paled in comparison to the drug-besotted verse of a Gregory Corso, let alone the more complex writing of an Olson, an Ashbery or a Ginsberg. Or to realize just how one-dimensional their sense of form & tradition seemed when placed alongside a Zukofsky, a Creeley, an O’Hara or a Duncan.

To poets of my generation – young enough to their children (Rich is three years younger than my mother) – watching the Brahmin tradition break apart was a terrific spectator sport not unlike watching the Johnson & Nixon administrations unravel in succession, a parallel instance of “the straight world” crumbling from its own internal contradictions. A book like Bill Merwin’s 1967 The Lice – still his best (and perhaps his only “important”) volume – riveted younger poets precisely for the ways it blasted apart everything we thought we knew about the poet of The Drunk in the Furnace or A Mask for Janus, collections of rigidly regimented conformity. It was one of those volumes you kept in your book bag during those years, alongside Dorn’s Gunslinger, Creeley’s Pieces & Duncan’s Bending the Bow.

At the same time, there was a second revolution starting to happen that was – at least in 1968 & thereabouts – invisible to folks with male genitalia like myself. Women in the civil rights & antiwar movements had begun to compare their own circumstances to those people on whose behalf they were often making great sacrifices, both in the U.S. and abroad. One merely needs to look back at the anti-draft poster popular in that era that featured Joan Baez & other women pictured above a slogan that read “Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say No” to see just how unreconstructed gender relations were then. 1968, after all, was the year in which Jane Fonda starred in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella.

The rise of second-wave feminism would impact every branch of American poetics (indeed, every branch of American life). In some ways, the three most instructive examples for the world of poetry might be Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich & Denise Levertov. It was Grahn who first gave voice to this phenomenon in 1964 with a simple chapbook called Edward the Dyke and Other Poems. There is a rawness in Edward the Dyke even today that neither the Brahmin Rich nor the New American Levertov could ever approach – and that was no doubt necessary in just getting people to sit up & pay attention. It was not as tho no American poet had written of lesbian relationships before – Gertrude Stein’s crossover hit, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, after all had been published 30 years before & everybody knew that Toklas & Stein were more than (wink wink) two spinster ladies the way they were presented during that era by the likes of Time and Life. But it was Grahn who first insisted that desire had a political dimension.

Levertov, in contrast, became one of several New Americans – all associated with Black Mountain or Projectivist poetics, as it happened – who consciously turned away from that writing during this same period. LeRoi Jones went so far as to transform himself into Amiri Baraka while Ed Dorn, whose Gunslinger (it had not yet morphed into ‘Slinger) was read as a scandalous rejection of the Olsonian aesthetic, not unlike Merwin’s Lice in its relation to Lowell’s version of the Bos-town sound) put him into a position whereby, in 1973 when I put him onto a reading bill alongside Joanne Kyger & Robert Creeley, he was not even speaking to those other poets. The Projectivists I knew all thought of Levertov’s anti-war work & the writing that surrounded it as humorless & one-dimensional. I remember Robert Duncan saying, when I asked him if he was still in touch with her shortly after her departure from Berkeley circa 1972, “What would I have to say to her?” The feelings vis-à-vis Baraka were even more pained.

If Rich’s first two books, A Change of World (1951) & The Diamond-Cutters (1955) were documents of precisely the kind of conformity to the School of Quietude tradition that had marked the earliest Merwin or Bly (see his works in Poetry during the 1950s, for example), there were already undercurrents that would carry her elsewhere soon enough. Consider, for example, “An Unsaid Word” from Rich’s first book:

She who has the power to call her man

From that estranged intensity

Where his mind forages alone,

Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,

And when his thoughts to her return

Stands where he left her, still his own,

Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

One might read the trajectory of her career as a long unlearning of that “lesson.” Unlike Merwin or Dorn, however, her move away from her inherited aesthetic wasn’t voiced as a sharp rejection all at once. One can see it starting to happen as early as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law in 1963, whose title poem is a sharp indictment of then-contemporary gender relations, but envisioning really no way out of what Rich herself terms the “solitary confinement” of marriage.

If each successive book was to take Rich further away from any role as an adjunct to male ambition, the point at which I noticed her abandonment of the Brahmin world didn’t come until she published the title poem of Diving into the Wreck in Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar magazine towards the end of that journal’s run. The whole idea of Rich in a publication edited by Eshleman was, circa 1971, so radical as to be unimaginable. Caterpillar was not only the last review that could honestly be called projectivist in its commitments¹, it was still quite militant about it in ways that no New York School journal would ever have dreamed of being. The symbolism of the quiet instant of self-repression visible in “An Unsaid Word” now becomes one of coming face to face with the visage of someone who has drowned.

Rich had in fact already arrived at this moment some years earlier (look at the title poem of Leaflets or “Pierrot Le Fou” in Will to Change – probably my favorite of all of Rich’s poems – but Eshleman’s publication made this apparent now to a wider range of folks, myself included, who, still grouping her in our minds alongside Lowell & Merrill, had not been paying much attention. And as Rich had become politicized, her poetry had moved away from the reductive well-wrought urns that confined her early writing, taking on essentially a post-Williams variation of free verse.

If it was Grahn who made the emergence of a women’s poetry audience possible – and I would argue that it was – Rich & Levertov both helped enormously to make this phenomenon accessible & even safe to a broad spectrum of readers who approached this new thing from previous aesthetic understandings & commitments. That is not an insignificant accomplishment. It changed writing in America, even for troglodyte straight white males like myself.² If you look at the anthology I edited 20 years ago, In the American Tree, you can’t help but notice that the ratio of male to female poets is nowhere near the parity that reflects the world of writing today. On the other hand, it’s much better a ratio than you will find in the Allen anthology – published 20 years prior to Tree. While the women who participated in the Tree certainly had the most to do with this, it’s impossible to imagine the world in which any of this writing took place without the active examples of Judy Grahn & Adrienne Rich.

¹ Indeed, this to my mind was the fundamental difference between Caterpillar & Eshleman’s later (and more eclectic) journal Sulfur. It was not as though Eshleman broke with the Olsonian tradition, but rather that he acknowledged that a moment in literary history had passed.

² In the 1960s at least, I simply was replicating the gender roles I had learned, but what, in all honesty, was I thinking? On my mother’s side, my mother, my great-grandmother & my great-great grandmother had all been single parents (in my great-grandmother’s case, of a family with 11 surviving children). My great-great grandmother had apparently been a sex worker early in the 19^th century – at least this is how I read her late husband’s family’s attempt to wrest control of her children after his death. My grandmother, the only one in four generations to successfully hold a marriage together for half a century, was psychotic & I knew that four of her sisters had had abortions by the end of World War I. Did I really imagine that family life was portrayed accurately on Father Knows Best?

One of the great guilty pleasures over this past week of complicated emotions was seeing the New York Times print Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man” with all of its post-Poundian projectivist abbreviations of words: sd for said, yr for your, & of course my own favorite, the ampersand. Did I ever expect to see such configurations in the self-appointed “paper of record”? I did not.

The scope of Creeley’s impact as a poet can be sensed by the presence of memorial sites for him up already in both New Zealand & Finland. Brad Morrow’s web memorial for Creeley is terrific – it is currently the home page for Brad’s journal Conjunctions. That in itself tells you quite a bit.

Finally, both Joseph Massey & Charles Bernstein pointed me to the site that includes a video file of Robert’s talk at the Zukofsky centennial. It’s absolutely a must-see experience.

L-R: Allen DeLoach, Tom Pickard, RS, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Bob Creeley.

Community. I use that term rather a lot & I know that it irritates a few folks who prefer to see writing as a more solitary endeavor. Yet in this past week, there have been impromptu – almost spontaneous in one case – memorial services for Robert Creeley in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas & no doubt elsewhere. At UC San Diego on Sunday, the new poetry radio program being set up by James Meetze & Matthew Shindell will devote its first hour to Bob – you can link to the show at 4:00 p.m. Pacific time here. (Remember the switch over to daily savings starts Sunday also). At least 33 media outlets have publicly noted Bob’s passing. Some of the ones that did more than simply run the Associated Press story include The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Times of London, NPR & MyWestTexas. In Boston, the Phoenix will run a piece in its next issue by Bill Corbett with a photograph by Elsa Dorfman. Lance Phillips has asked people to send him responses, stories, etc. for his Here Comes Everybody website. There will no doubt be many, many more memorials over the coming weeks, months, even decades.

As Steve Vincent noted on his own blog, such events & tales are comforting – they’re an active form of coming together. The Poetics List in particular has been filled with such tales – Harry Nudel offered an account from 1972 that I especially enjoyed, as I did many of the contributions there. My own blog received just under 1,800 visits over the last two days of March, the heaviest traffic this site has ever had.

Of course, nobody told tales better than Bob – he was an indefatigable conversationalist & could make the largest auditorium very much like an intimate space. There are some excellent sound files to be had both at his PENNsound & EPC pages. Hopefully somebody will eventually post his wonderful remembrance of Louis Zukofsky from last year’s LZ/100 conference at Columbia. Bob recounted his rather hapless trips out to Brooklyn as a young poet, not taking enough money to get the subway home again, unprepared for the heavy rain, and the ways in which Louis & Celia made the dripping, bedraggled young man at home. And I remember a session at a poetry conference in Tucson circa 1990 in which Bob literally recounted his dreams. Somewhere in The Alphabet is a fairly accurate representation of one of those, although not labeled as such.

Larry Fagin sent me a note Thursday night worth repeating here:

In the late 1980s, Teachers & Writers Collaborative received a grant for their writers-in-the-schools program, which paid for one-day visits by writers not working in the program. One year, Paul Auster accompanied me to a residency I was doing in Brooklyn. The next year (I believe it was 1988 or possibly '87), Robert Creeley came to a junior high on the Upper West Side, where I was in the third day of a twelve- day program. It being early in the residency, I didn't really know the kids well, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with Bob. But he seemed completely at ease, talking with the kids, and even doing some of the writing exercises. One of the assignments I gave was to write a poem titled "What I Know about Myself." Along with the kids, Bob turned in his poem, written in his characteristic hand on both sides of a sheet of lined, letter-size paper. I read it, xeroxed it and thought I had mailed the ms. back to Bob, along with some of the kids' versions of the poem. But today, going through a "Creeley" folder in my file cabinet, I discovered the original. I've just given a copy to Anselm Berrigan at the Poetry Project. Maybe you'd like to send it around, too.

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT MYSELF
 
 
I know I have been alive for over sixty years.
 
I know some people love me and some don’t.
 
I know I am like all other people because I have the same physical
    life – as hens are like hens, dogs like dogs.
 
I know I don’t know a lot that other people may well know more
    about but I’ve got to trust them to help me – as I need it, and
    vice versa.
 
I know what I am, a human, is more than what I can simply think
    or feel.
 
I know I love dogs, water, my family, friends, walking the streets
    when things feel easy.
 
I know this is the one life I’ll get —and it's enough.
 
                                 ONWARD!

My nephew Daniel reminded me that I posted this review here a little over a year ago. It certainly feels relevant today.

Tuesday, February 03, 2004  

It may be impossible to overstate Robert Creeley’s influence on American writing. When the New American poets came of age in the early 1950s, they were intervening into a world in which American verse was as close to moribund as it had been since the Andrew Jackson administration in the 1820s. The Objectivists were out of print & several were on extended leave between poems. The modernists were dead or in Europe, save for the notable exception of  Pound & he was in a psychiatric hospital, still eligible at that point to be tried for treason, the death penalty a distinct option. Otherwise, there was Williams & the School of Quietude (SoQ). I know that’s overstating the circumstance a little, but really only a little. Williams’ rather desperate affirmation in “The Desert Music” –

I am a poet! I
am. I am. I am a poet. I reaffirmed, ashamed.

– speaks to the circumstance. That last word rings out: to be a poet in 1950 was a hard claim to make. The number who were writing well in America at the time could be counted on your fingers. After an industrial accident.

The New Americans changed all that. The Beats got most of the press, combining as they did their open return to romanticism with a lifestyle antithetical to the “man in a gray flannel suit.” & the Allen anthology itself may only have been the tip of an iceberg by the time it arrived a decade hence. But the gauntlet flung down by Ginsberg in “Howl,” as by Olson in “Projective Verse,” to reimagine poetry’s meaning & place in the world, was a challenge taken up by literally dozens of writers intent on disentangling the nets of being that the SoQ had thrown over the possibility of vision & action in the poem.

Of the New Americans, nobody promoted good writing by example more clearly or passionately than did Robert Creeley. The relation of the clean, spare poems of his early books, gathered into For Love, to the whole of New American poetry was not dissimilar from that of imagism two generations earlier to the larger landscape that was modernism. Yet Creeley’s spare, often rhymed verses were not simply a demonstration of the elimination of any extraneous matter – tho I think sometimes these poems were taken as such, especially by SoQ types who wanted to bring him in as their token New American when discussing their blinkered view of American verse. In fact, if you read Creeley’s fiction, which he wrote quite a lot of during the 1950s, you see the very same logic that operates in the poetry to create such “clean” effects extend in prose & come across as something far more modular & convoluted. In each what is being tracked is the sensuality of thinking. In his work, it’s a physical, almost erotic presence, even when created entirely out of grammar & voiced hesitation.

Words, Creeley’s next large collection from Scribners, proved more controversial for the simplest of reasons: the poems were longer, even if the lines were somewhat leaner. As the poems extended themselves, it became hard not to notice how, like in his fiction, Creeley’s process followed thinking as a physical process. The disembodiment of pure exposition was of no interest to him.

Pieces, which followed close on Words, demonstrated once & for all how profoundly radical Creeley was as a poet – more so, actually, than any of his fellow projectivists. If Words can be said to reflect the visible influence of Louis Zukofsky, Pieces reflected two influences new to Creeley, Ted Berrigan & Gertrude Stein. Further, they were entering into his work in a different way, not simply as surface color. Instead, Creeley seemed to be distilling the underlying principles of their poetry & casting them into his own work in ways that I don’t think could have been anticipated by either writer. Perhaps even more important, in looking to Berrigan’s use of linked verse (which Ted in turn had taken from John Ashbery’s “Europe,” transforming it into something more supple), Creeley was demonstrating an ability to look to & take seriously the lessons of younger poets, an exceptionally rare quality among major poets.* Pieces proved as radical to the New American Poetry** as that literary phenomenon had been to the somnambulant scene of the 1940s.

Creeley’s later poetry coincides with his association with New Directions. Its defining feature over the years – and, realistically, this has been the actual bulk of Creeley’s production as a poet – has been a more relaxed torque to the syntax & a contentment in general with the lyric form (tho not always deployed to traditional lyric uses). At a point when most projectivists had thoroughly bought into the idea that one works toward that Major Poem – for Olson Maximus, for Duncan Passages – the third major figure of the Black Mountain Three went in a completely different direction.***

With Pieces (& its prose cousins of that period, Mabel & A Day Book), Creeley could claim to have changed poetry twice in his lifetime, something only John Ashbery among his peers could honestly have been said to have done as well.+ Which is to say that Creeley had written in such a way as to expand the possibilities of poetry for all writers, not just him alone. One consequence of this, it’s worth noting, has been that he has been held to a different, harder standard than almost any other poet or his or any generation. I’ve heard, far too often, that Creeley’s poetry has been in some form or other deficient in recent decades, when objectively I don’t think that’s the case at all. Rather, having changed poetry twice, his work since the mid-1970s has been a part of poetry rather than a radical overturning, extending, or undermining of what’s already there. In that regard, he’s been like almost every other major or minor poet. But, having set an expectation that any given book of his might, in fact, change the world, books that fall short of that particular goal are seen as being not his best work. This almost feels like some kind of curse, in the general “no good deed will go unpunished” category.

So it’s worth noting that the poetry in If I were writing this – note the particular uses of capitalization here++ – is changing. These poems, composed over the past half dozen years, seem more insistent on audible increments of form than much of Creeley’s poetry over the previous twenty years. Consider this stanza, the first in an elegy for Allen Ginsberg,

A bitter twitter,
flitter,
of birds
in evening’s
settling,
a reckoning
beckoning,
someone’s getting
some sad news,
the birds gone to nest,
to roost
in the darkness,
asking no improvident questions,
none singing,
no hark,
no lark,
nothing in the quiet dark.

Ten commas, 17 lines, a welter of sound patterns cascading through it, the primary structural elements of this 42-word sentence come down to just five tucked well into its center: someone’s getting / some sad news. It’s as if the generality of these lines is accentuated, as if to say that’s not what this is about. Indeed, I would argue that this poem is, in fact, about all the other stuff here – the sound particularly, so insistently reiterative that it works against what one might think of as rhyme’s zero degree of harmony – here it comes across as plaintive, even despairing. Indeed, with six of the lines ending on -ing, the use of sound in the remainder of the lines is magnified. I might be willing to argue, in fact, that the most important word in the stanza doesn’t appear here at all – rest. We anticipate it after nest & the alternative roost calls it further to mind (as its present/absent rhyme magnifies the -es in darkness). The absence is an interesting instance of what form can do to/with philosophy & vice versa. The whole power of the word roost lies not in the physicality of birds settling, but by the degree that our mind has to move from expectation to actuality. That palpability of absence mimics of course the elegiac experience itself. These are hardly the characteristics of a poet lightening up or coasting. If anything, one might argue that there’s a renewed intensity in these poems.

Many of these works have appeared previously, a fact that New Directions carefully avoids acknowledging on the verso. Readers, tho, who have acquired Creeley’s collaboration with Archie Rand, Drawn & Quartered, or with the great photographer Elsa Dorfman, En Famille, already own a substantial fraction of this new volume. But I’m one reader who thinks that you need a both/and strategy when it comes to the works of Robert Creeley, not an either/or. All my life, he’s been the closest thing we have had to a dean of American poetry, and our world has been & is the richer for it.

* Perhaps because it so clearly violates all three laws of Personal Literary Teleology:

1.        “The history of literature leads directly to me”

2.        “The history of literature reaches its apotheosis with me”

3.        “After me, literature has no need to evolve further”

** Note to self: write blog on how the New Americans evolved beyond the New American poetry. Viz. Dorn’s ‘Slinger, Baraka’s renunciation, Ginsberg’s harmonium, etc.

*** Note to self again (related project): contrast Maximus & Passages to ‘Slinger & Paul Blackburn’s Journals as alternate models of the longpoem.

+ First with The Tennis Court Oath, second with Three Poems.

++ Not to mention the implied presumption that maybe I’m not writing this.