Silliman's Blog

All weekend I’ve been thinking that there’s an absent third missing between Collecteds & “Books as They Happen” – it’s the case of the Selected. Sometimes even that literary act of category miscegenation, the “New & Selected” (a.k.a “Didn’t write enough new poems for a full book, but wanted/needed to publish one anyway”).

Selecteds are notoriously problematic & there are the horror stories about different ones, such Bob Grenier’s editing of a Creeley Selected that proved too radical for its publisher & was scrapped for something that the publisher thought more of as a Greatest Hits volume. You can find Grenier’s original table of contents in the 1978 Boundary2 issue devoted to Creeley – it would have been a great book.

So I was trying to think about how you might do that. How would one approach the question of thinking it through? I’ve always thought, for example, that my own work wouldn’t lend itself to that form, that you couldn’t intelligibly “excerpt” from these booklength poems that are themselves parts of larger projects. But I wanted to think it through without that double-sided investment of editor/author, so thought about who hasn’t ever had a Selected, and how would I approach their work. Louis Zukofsky. How would I think to edit a Selected works of his poetry?

Even as I’m resistant to the idea that one could/should excerpt from my own poems, I don’t sense that same taboo with his. Is that because it’s not my own work, or because there’s something fundamentally different between his poetry & my own (well, there is, obviously, but besides all of those reasons)?

So what would I pick from “A,” for example? I tend to read “A” not as a continuous whole, but as a series movements:

• 1 through 6, the opening sequence written very much under the influence of The Cantos
• 7 through 11, the poems in which LZ first reaches his mature works
• 12 all by itself, the great WW2 poem, heavily influenced by Paterson
• 13 also by itself, “partita,” one of LZ’s finest works, as finely tuned a modernist work as exists
• 14-20, not “formally” the whole of An (that poem-within-the-poem that is a major sequence unto itself), but its gut”
• 21, “Rudens,” a text I never understood until I saw it performed last year at the Centennial Conference at Columbia, LZ’s lust for Shakespeare’s late fantasies, the weakest section in the entire work¹
• 22-23, which I think of as “the twins,” the finest writing LZ would ever do
• 24, Celia’s gift to LZ proved to be closure, or perhaps cloture

Of these, I would include the following:

• 1 through 3, a brilliant opening, it shows his roots, his indebtedness to Pound & the role of music as a template
• 6, because it is where LZ really is thinking through the problem of the form of the long poem
• 7, because it’s a great poem & where LZ really takes leave of his predecessors
• I love “A” – 8, but realistically, it's too long for a Selected & its involvement with issues of labor, Marx, the question of social movements are all handled more compactly – and more profoundly from a poetic perspective – by the great double-canzone of “A” – 9. “A” – 9 is a must
• “A” – 10 is the first WW2 poem & not nearly so long as “A” – 14, but in the compact environs of a Selected, I’m caught by the easy, careless (and never redacted) racism of lines like “No slant-eyed devil on stilts,” so I wouldn’t include it, even tho the evocation of a lost Paris is one of the most powerful images of the war from an American poet
• “A” – 11, a love poem to his wife & son, one of the clearest statements of his theme of family love, one of his finest poems
• “A” – 12 is both long & problematic from my perspective – this is the only number I would pull excerpts from: the first nine-plus pages up through the stanza on “How does the Czar sleep Nights?” – the section beginning with (big cap) “Blest” and continuing through the passage that starts (also big cap) “Ardent” – the final 11 pages or so, beginning with “These are some things I wanted / to get into a poem” –

Thus after the first 261 pages of the volume, I’ve selected just 70, and if I had to cut back, “A” – 12 would be the first to get cut. The second “half,” by which I mean “A” - 13-23, is not a whole lot longer, 302 pages, but I would include considerably more from this second half of the volume, which LZ did not begin until nine years after completing 12. The second half where Zukofsky’s greatest work lies.

• I would include all of “A” - 13 through 16, an uninterrupted swath of 114 pages.
• I love “A” - 17, the coronal for Floss & elegy for her husband William Carlos Williams, but it’s not Zukofsky’s best work, in spite of its embodiment of poetry as community (&, as such, one of the first truly post-avant works) – likewise, I wouldn’t think to include “A” – 18
• I would include “A” – 19, formally the strongest of the later portions of the 1960s work, a period when, from my reading, LZ’s work was again starting to level off – Zukofsky had a pattern of making enormous strides in his work, followed by longer fallow periods.
• For those reasons, I wouldn’t include either “A” – 20 or 21, but I would include all of “A” – 22 & 23, written in the early ‘70s after the gift of Celia’s musical montage of 24. These two pieces are Zukofsky’s very best work.

That’s a total of 265 pages taken out of a work that contains over 800 once you fold Celia’s piece in. It would of course be the core of any Selected. But would these excerpts “represent” or at the least not entirely gut “A” ? My sense is that it wouldn’t, tho I think you could argue for including others, especially 8, 10 & 17 (another 85 pages). That’s where I’d have to start thinking about just how large my Selected would be, and just how adequately I thought to represent the shorter poems.

¹ This is where it becomes clear that Olson’s uses of Shakespeare completely trumps Zukofsky’s.

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The signature on Shakespeare’s will

Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is one of those touch-point books of literary history & criticism, a volume so successful, both in terms of sales & critical recognition, that it becomes known just for being known. In fact, it’s a brilliant performance, a remarkable reconstruction of a life that about which there is surprising little direct evidence, a page-turner as narrative, always thoughtful, often provocative. Much has been made of Greenblatt’s use of new historical critical methods, the idea that, if Macbeth truly was written with an audience of one in mind, King James, then it is to the history of James’ fascination with witchcraft one should turn in order to understand the dramatic function of the “weird sisters” who set the plot into action.

Greenblatt’s methodology is open to both critique & parody. Not too long ago, a bookseller I know did a great routine on the premise that some line somewhere in Shakespeare might mention a blemish, which, he hypothesized, Greenblatt would take to imply that Shakespeare himself once may have had a zit on his nose, which would then lead to a detailed & learned discussion of skin care strategies in the 1590s. And it is true that some of Greenblatt’s assumptions are so over-the-top (Shakespeare writes King Lear because he’s thinking about retirement) that even if they’re entirely accurate, they’re also beside the point.

But if new historical critical methodology brought the devices & tactics of close reading to non-literary texts, Greenblatt in fact displays its advantages here in both directions, using Shakespeare as a lens to conjure up late 16^th & early 17^th century England into a remarkably credible diorama, while using the documentary legacy of that period to flesh out the little that is concretely known about the son of the bankrupt glove maker from Stratford. (And, happily, dismissing the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” crowd for the grassy-knoll conspiracy whack jobs that they are.)

But Greenblatt’s most powerful contribution here is his consideration of Shakespeare as a writer, positioning him against not only is closest competitors in the theater of that period, but in the larger context of Elizabethan letters, the bumpkin from the ‘burbs who dared compete with the gentile educations of the so-called university wits. It’s a characterization that reveals the open structures of Shakespeare’s drama in the sharpest contrast with the closed forms of the sonnets that I have ever read. And it’s a strategy that leads Greenblatt to view the evolution of Shakespeare’s works as a series of problem-solving decisions – exactly how the chronology of any writer is best viewed.

Thus, Greenblatt argues, halfway through his career, Shakespeare makes his most important single discovery, that which separates him out from the best of his peers of the Elizabethan period, the construction of character. From Hamlet onward, Greenblatt demonstrates repeatedly, Shakespeare consciously proposes that the most important aspect of a major character in any dramatic work is opacity. Again & again, what distinguishes Shakespeare’s plays from the various sources where he derived his tales is that the earlier sources tie up loose ends neatly, characters have clear motivation, works are balanced & contained. All the elements, I dare say, of the well-wrought urn (not to mention Billy Collins’ sense of accessibility). Shakespeare’s constant revision is to break the mold, to excise motivation, to confound expectation, rendering character (and often plot) mysterious. Thus in the previous versions of Lear, the test of the three daughters’ love for the old king is always predicated upon his having to decide who gets which lands, and how much, whereas, in Shakespeare, the test occurs after those decisions have been made, rendering it capricious & likewise forcing the King to revise his original allotments when he banishes Cordelia. The irrationality of the act becoming a defining aspect of Lear’s character as well as setting the plot into motion.

Similarly, Hamlet’s ambiguous, ambivalent nature is a Shakespearean addition. Here, having already argued that Hamlet’s name & the then-recent death of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet (which in the improvisatory spelling mode of the 1590s would on occasion have been spelled Hamlet) is far more than coincidence, Greenblatt discusses the impact of this writing strategy:

With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comfortable rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper. The key is not simply the creation of opacity, for by itself that would only create a baffling or incoherent play. Rather, Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work had long enabled him to confer on his plays. Tearing away the structure of superficial meanings, he fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions.

This conceptual breakthrough in Hamlet was technical; that is, it affected the practical choices Shakespeare made when he put plays together, starting with enigma of the prince’s suicidal melancholy and assumed madness. But it was not only a new aesthetic strategy. The excitement of motive must have arisen from something more than technical experimentation; coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed Shakespeare’s root perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled. The opacity was shaped by his experience of the world and of his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations. (324)

It is exactly – exactly! – this “untidy, damaged, and unresolved” aspect of Shakespeare’s late plays that Charles Olson recognizes in Melville’s use of King Lear as the template behind Moby Dick. Olson quotes Melville’s own words from the margins of his copy of Lear:

Tormented into desperation, Lear, the frantic king, tears off the mask and speaks the same madness of vital truth.

Later, Olson notes that

When Edmund is dying he fails to revoke his order for the death of Lear and Cordelia, only looks upon the bodies of Goneril and Regan and consoles himself:” Yet Edmund was belov’d!” This Melville heavily checks. It is a twisting ambiguity like one of his own – Evil beloved.

Melville is dumb with horror at the close, blood-stop double meaning of Shakespeare’s language in the scene of the blinding of Gloucester. His comment is an exclamation: “Terrific!” When Regan calls Gloucester “Ingrateful fox!” Melville writes:

Here’s a touch Shakespearean – Regan talks of ingratitude!

First causes were Melville’s peculiar preoccupation. He concentrates on an Edmund, a Regan – and the world of Lear, which is almost generated by such creatures, lies directly behind the creation of an Ahab, a Fedallah and the White, lovely, monstrous Whale.

Two pages later, Olson will conclude this fateful chapter, noting again (even as he lacks the vocabulary) the importance of opacity both to Shakespeare & Melville:

Shakespeare drew Lear out of what Melville called “the infinite obscure of his background.” It was most kin to Melville. He uses it as an immediate obscure around his own world of Moby-Dick.

Opacity, the infinite obscure, Greenblatt demonstrates, is the line that connects Hamlet, Lear, Othello & Macbeth, the first three primarily through the eradication of motive, the last through devices of plot. It is the same line that Olson draws directly from Shakespeare to Melville – and by implication, to a Maximus not then yet conceived.

Not everybody is comfortable with the “untidy, damaged, and unresolved” as Billy Collins reminded us just awhile back. Indeed, Nahum Tate’s rewrite of King Lear, supplying a happy ending in which Cordelia lives to marry Edgar, was the version habitually performed from the 1680s until the 1830s. This same will to neatness & clarity, and aversion to indeterminacy, opacity & difficulty is at play today in the School of Quietude. But what a great trick that Mr. Gioia’s agency is playing upon Gioia & his friends in underwriting production after production of the infinite obscure!

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Craig Allen Conrad

I made a point of not reading Gary Sullivan’s answers to Jonathan Mayhew’s questions until after I had answered them myself. But I really like his answers, even where (maybe especially where) we don’t agree. Nick Piombino had a great response to one of Jonathan’s inquiries. Allen Bramhall likewise had some interesting things to say.

As it happens, Anthony Robinson proves to be a lot more like Ron Silliman than he may think (or like). Someone who calls him- or herself Radical Druid responded as well. May I note, Rad, that the last question you would add to Jonathan’s list suggests that your use of a deep pseudonym is a contradiction. Laura Carter took her time & is very cool in showing us both her answers and the things she crossed out along the way. Michael Helsem replies in red. Even tho he was feeling lousy, Henry Gould gave the questions solid thought in his reply. Jack Kimball answered two questions, if you scroll down his page. Jordan Stempleman, Anne Boyer & Bill Marsh also took the test, albeit more whimsically.

Ш Ш Ш

Speaking of Gary Sullivan, his “open letter”/non-review of Under Albany totally made my day. And back on May 16, CA Conrad posted a note in my general defense to the Poetics List that sent shivers up my spine. When I get irritated with the pettiness of the literary world, responses like these & events like Jonathan’s questions & all the good thinking it has generated offer me a kinder, smarter & more generous view of the poetry community.

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Jonathan Mayhew, second from left in hat, with (L-R) David Shapiro,
Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner & Douglas Rothschild
Photo © 2005 by Jordan Davis

Prompted by the twelve questions currently being posed of a number of poets by Fulcrum, Jonathan Mayhew has crafted ten questions for me of his own.

1. What is your sense of the poetic tradition? How far back does your particular historical sense range?  What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture? What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?

This has certainly evolved over time. When I was young, under 30, it extended back to Pound & the high modernists, with maybe a sense that Whitman belonged there as well, but not an intuitive sense of how he fit into my sense of things. Now I would extend it at the very least back to Wordsworth, Coleridge & Blake, the first real avant-garde in English, and to Baudelaire in France, but on an expansive day, I might argue for Chaucer – who has been a personal favorite for decades – and possibly the Beowulf poet.

Having been raised in a house without books or music to speak of, at least not beyond my mother’s collection of King Cole Trio 78s, I have rather had the typical working class kid’s problem of starting relatively close to the present – with poets who were, if not of my own generation then at least that of my parents, and constructing a sense of tradition backwards out of that. So it feels more like an archaeological project than an inheritance, not something I was given but which I’ve had to go back to reconstruct. I’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately & thinking of how he fits into this as well. Stephen Greenblatt, in his biography, makes a good case for Shakespeare very much as an oppositional figure to the Official Verse Culture of the University wits such as Ben Jonson.

Probably what defines my sense of tradition more than anything is an attitude towards form & creativity, that it must be ever-questing, attempting to evolve, and looking coldly at the material conditions of its time for how its relationship to that social strata is changing. I believe in a poetics of constant change, always informed by engagement. That’s not a sense of “progress,” for example, so much as it is one of continuing alertness & literal responsibility.

With regards to “my closest poetic collaborators,” which I’ll define here (overly simplistically) as the poets included in the anthology In the American Tree, I always think that the “secret” differentiator between us all often has to do with one’s relationship toward the New American Poetry that dominated avant poetics in the 1950s & ‘60s. One aspect of the New American Poetry that proved to be extremely generative for the next several generations was that it was rich with possibilities – New York School poets were different from Projectivist poets were different from the Spicer Circle were different from the Beats, etc. Of the poets included in The Tree, I sometimes think only David Bromige had a deeper engagement with Projectivist poetics than I had as a young writer. You can sense elements of that same engagement in the work of Rae Armantrout, Barrett Watten, David Melnick & even Ray DiPalma, but for various reasons all of these writers seemed to have stayed more independent in that relation than did Bromige or I. And there are so many other langpos whose engagement was with the New York School rather than Projectivism, and somebody like Melnick can reflect engagements with both, but I don’t think that I do. But I don’t think it’s any accident that some of the langpos whose poetry I have felt closest to, and learned the most from, have been precisely people like Armantrout, Watten, Melnick & Bromige. I see/feel/hear, can almost taste, so many layers of deep resonance in their work that at times it feels spooky.

2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alongside one of your in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above?  Does poetry of the "past" (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?

I’m not sure that I would define contemporary poetic practice. That, to my mind, is one of its issues, very possibly also one of its attractions. I have, as you must have guessed, a strong mental map of the history of poetry up to, say, my own generation – all of whom are now in their 50s & 60s – but after the language poets & the poetry wars of the 1970s & early ‘80s, the American literary map has felt far more atomized – in the negative sense that Sartre gave to that term – which amounts to “every poet for him- or herself.” There have been a few attempts at movement formation, most notably the Apex of the M thrust circa 1990 (which also incorporated much of the editing of work that was presented at the New Coast conference in Buffalo then, published as a double issue of O•blēk) that argued that the previous generation (my own) had failed to incorporate a spiritual dimension into its/our poetics. That didn’t go anywhere, largely because it wasn’t accurate as a diagnosis, but it was the last serious move of that kind we’ve had. The more recent New Brutalism scene out of Oakland has been a more parodic gesture toward movement formation. Ellipsism, by which I mean the poetry one might ascribe to the work of C.D. Wright, Jorie Graham, Forrest Gander, Ann Lauterbach & others, seems to me not to be a self-organizing phenomenon at all, but an attempt by individuals to write a middle path between the post-avant & school of quietude worlds. It’s not an accident that that term was coined critically by an outsider to that phenomenon, not by one of its poets. So the one real attempt I do see in this regard is Geof Huth’s work at creating & developing a serious intellectual underpinning for visual poetics. Because of him, I think anyone working in that general vein is going to either have a much sharper sense of what it is they are doing, or else they are going to have to operate in a far deeper well of denial pretending that they don’t.

3. Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet?

That’s a tough one, in part because that category has been ever changing in my head. There was a time, 35 years ago or so, when I would answered “Clark Coolidge,” but it was precisely learning to see the humor in Clark’s work that offered me the road in to its great depth & charms. Right now, I don’t feel that there is anyone who seems fully opaque to me, more that there are aspects of people’s practice I wish that I understood better. For example, I am completely in love with what Leslie Scalapino does with syntax & the sentence & the role of time in/with meaning, but I wish I had more insight into her theory of genre. I wish I had a better sense of the inner workings of Will Alexander’s longer pieces – are they really as improvisatory as they feel to me? Taylor Brady’s work is something that I feel I really need to learn & understand, even tho I think it’s evolving rapidly still, so that maybe he feels the same way right now.

In historic terms, tho, I might respond Wallace Stevens. His work is the hardest thing for me to quite get & pin down. But – and I know some folks will think this heresy – I’m not sure that I really need to do so.

4. Are we over-invested in poetic "hero worship"?  Is it necessary to have a poetic "pantheon"? How does the poetic pantheon relate to the notion of an academic "canon"? Are they mirror opposites, rivals?

Heroes & a pantheon is just a mechanism for valorizing one’s mental map. We each have our own private canon, quite apart from the alternate social ones that also exist – the academic canon, the “poetic” canon & the institutional canon – the books that get treated as “serious” by the daily press (because they’re published by the trade publishers who are significant advertisers) – may overlap, tho not as much as we tend to think. Louis Zukofsky has gone from being a marginal figure to a canonic one in my lifetime because so many poets found in his work a means of furthering their own thinking. Such mental maps are constantly shifting.

And open to question. The howls that went up at the publication of Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2, really had to do with the fact that the volume was implicitly arguing for a reading of poetic history in which Fluxus was the central literary event of the 1950s & ‘60s, not the New American Poetry. You can see where that argument could be made – tho it’s awfully easy to disprove – but it’s not an argument that Rothenberg in particular had created the grounds for previously, even in a publication like Alcheringa. So instead of being taken as a bold attempt at a redefinition of the literary map, people perceived Millennium 2 instead as a failed attempt to counter the School of Quietude anthologies.

Are the various canons rivals? If you go back far enough, the answer tends to be no. The School of Quietude is in the curious position of constantly having to promote its relationship to poets like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, even Shakespeare, who, if anything, really belong to the counter-tradition. That tends to make SoQ historical writing sound incoherent or else leads them to mischaracterize all of the above. Random House has a series of CDs of poets reading that includes both William Carlos Williams & Frank O’Hara, each of whose accompanying paperback volume is introduced by series editor J.D. McClatchy. While I’m glad that McClatchy chose those poets to include in the series, and his introductions are well-meaning, all they really tell us is that he doesn’t much get the work of either writer. Imagine having a volume of McClatchy’s work with an intro by Charles Bukowski.

5. Is "total absorption in poetry" benign? How about "poetry as a way of life"?

I can’t even envision what “total absorption” would mean. I do think that poetry can be – almost has to be for a practicing poet – a way of life. Yet I don’t think that excuses the poet from living in the world. Think of Williams’ work as a pediatrician, for example. Poets who argue that they can’t – or shouldn’t – have “real jobs” because it would take away from their writing are really just using that as an excuse to cover over other kinds of social disabilities. Some of these folks grow up eventually, others do not. One peculiar thing about poetry, tho, is that it won’t punish you – it’s one of the few media in which a person can be a schizophrenic or profoundly physically disabled & perform perfectly well. It’s extremely democratic in that regard.

6. Do you see poetry as a part of a larger "literature," or is poetry itself the more capacious category?

Poetry is one of the few “universal” art forms, practiced orally in pre-literate cultures and throughout the written world. Historically, poetry predates even drama & every other literary medium has emerged as an outgrowth of poetry, or of a genre that was itself an outgrowth of poetry. There were 25,000 novels published in the United States last year – roughly double the number of books of poetry, if we include chapbooks – and yet in 500 years, I wonder if the novel will have survived. It was an outgrowth driven by the need for a focus on narrative & character, social needs that have subsequently shifted to cinema. Unlike poetry, the novel has almost no relationship to communities – the one serious exception might be the cyberpunk authors, especially around Austin – and it is obvious that the economics don’t exist for the sustained printing of 25,000 titles in which less than 100 will prove profitable from the vantage of a publisher.

7. Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non?  Or conversely, is humor a defense mechanism that more often than not protects us from what we really want to say?

I’m not certain what’s really being asked here. Absolutely, humor is an important part of the toolkit of any writer – we still get most of Shakespeare’s jokes 400 years later – and yet hardly any serious poet strives to be a comedian, as such. It’s an easy mode for a young poet to slip into, especially if one is part of a scene driven by public readings, the poet as standup comic. I actually went through a period in the late 1960s where I refused to do any readings for a couple of years because I felt that that was a trap. And the history of Actualism shows that it can be.

8. Is the poem the thing, or the larger poetic project?

I’m interested in poetry far more than in poems, but I’m less convinced that this is a universal truth, tho it certainly is me.

9. What is the single most significant thing anyone has ever said about poetry?

How about all of William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All? That is the most accurate portrayal of the role & life of the poem ever written. If I had to encapsulate just one statement out of a work that, in its Frontier Press edition, is 98 pages long, I’d pick this line from page 70:

poetry : new form dealt with as a reality in itself.

10. Which of these questions asks you to define yourself along lines of division not of your own making, in the most irksome way? How close do these questions come to the way in which you habitually think about poetry?  What other question would you add to this list?

The question about humor, number 7. These questions do come reasonably close to some ways in which I think about poetry. The fact that I took anthropology seriously as an undergraduate – it was the only subject I ever served as a reader for (the junior college equivalent of a T.A.), at Merritt College in Oakland, between my stints at SF State & Berkeley – has always led me to thinking of poetry sociologically as well as “simply” aesthetically. I don’t think you can have one without the other.

The question I would ask – and if I could answer, I would, since a good answer would help lead to the next shaping or defining literary movement (or moment) – is: what is poetry currently missing?

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Grave of William Carlos Williams
Hillside Cemetery, Lyndhurst, NJ

Tuscaloosa-bound Jeremy Hawkins, whom I met for the first briefly in New York a couple of weeks back, made a comment in response to my note on Jonathan Williams that has had me thinking, and writing about Radi Os yesterday redoubled the process:

People speak often of the politics of anthologies, but I'm curious about the effects of the formats you are discussing here: selected & collected works. For Jacket 27, Brian Henry wrote a terrific critique of Harold Bloom's selection of John Kinsella's poetry, really marking out how an editor can mottle the individual project in the process of selection. I think it follows that selection by other means, either when the author is able to pick from the entire catalogue, or when forced to only choose from what is available, has similar spin on the work. If we take it far enough, it gets political just in the publishing of volumes in general, never mind the selected & collected editions.

It seems obvious here that you favor the idea of a poet's Collected Works. I'm not sure that the format is necessarily helpful or inherently good. Do I have a better understanding of Wallace Stevens for having worked through his collected poems? Perhaps. I might have a better idea of the career, but depending on how the work is arranged and indexed, it could rob context from the individual volumes. I think that any Collection of Ashbery in the future will inherently strip away the independent continuity of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Why will a Collected volume maintain Spicer or even Duncan in the consciousness more than reissues of the original volumes? Having volumes in print certainly maintains the relevance of a poet to an extent, but I'm not sure that collecting the work into a single volume advances that relevance in any way.

- Jeremy Hawkins

Actually, I myself have argued that neither the Collected Poems nor Imaginations justifies not having William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All in print as a separate volume. I feel the same about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons &, with less justification I suspect, Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-22 & “A”-23, a pocket-sized volume from Viking Compass / Cape Editions that came out in 1975. Each of these works, when viewed separately, has an impact that cannot be assessed – indeed, can barely be imagined – when sunk deep into the context of a larger volume.

Robert Creeley, for example, used to note how important Williams’ The Wedge proved to him. Yet there is no way that seeing that volume embedded in the second volume of the Collected Poems can really give you a sense of it as a book. Similarly, I have made a point of buying The Desert Music in the same hardback edition which I first found it – or it found me, changing my life forever – in the Albany Public Library so many decades ago.

So I can certainly understand the value of having the individual books available – in many instances, they’re utterly indispensable. And yet I think that comprehensive collected editions are necessary as well. The situation I described yesterday, trying to cobble together a collected Ronald Johnson out of a series of small press books, knowing that at least five “volumes” of Johnson’s Milton (Radi Os) have never reached print, plus who knows just how much else, is the more unfortunate and common circumstance. Johnson had two books with Norton at the very beginning of his career, thanks to Denise Levertov (who got Louis Zukofsky & Joel Sloman & some others published there as well). But Sand Dollar, the press that published the first edition of Radi Os, went out of print as that press shut down after its publisher, Jack Shoemaker, moved on, first to North Point, eventually to Shoemaker & Hoard, an imprint of the Avalon Publishing Group. There are exactly three copies of that first edition available current in rare book shops according to Abebooks.com, the very cheapest of which is priced at $50. Without a collected Ronald Johnson, it will be difficult 15 or 20 years from now for a young writer to find a number of the works we have even now. That’s the risk. That’s why it’s not an either/or question, the Collected vs. The Books that X published in his/her lifetime.

And even collected volumes are not immune from this – Lew Welch’s Ring of Bone will go out of print once its current supply is exhausted. So will Frank O’Hara’s Poems Retrieved, two volumes published by Donald Allen’s Grey Fox Press. Johnson already has that problem with the death of Gus Blaisdell of Living Batch. The Black Sparrow Collected Books of Jack Spicer is already out of print.

Maybe someday PDF files – or whatever succeeds that format – will enable a permanent treasury to exist of such books. Right now, the system is as haphazard as the one that determines which readings get preserved on tape & which tapes become CDs or MP3 files. If you have an interest, or maybe just a curiosity, in some out of the way movement of the past, you had better hope that a Ben Mazer will come along and document it the way he seems to be doing for the Berkeley Renaissance. The Actualists of the 1970s, a larger group that even had a couple of anthologies during that decade, has virtually vanished from the face of the earth, tho real live actualists, from Allen Kornblum of Coffee House Press to poet, memoirist & NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, still abound.

So I think about the fact that Larry Fagin, of all people, has not had a big book out since I’ll Be Seeing You & Rhymes of a Jerk. It’s been 22 years since Nuclear Neighborhood, the most recent collection of any size that I’m aware of, has been published. It would be great if all these works were in print again & available, but it’s just unrealistic. The absolute logic of an epoch in which each generation produces more poets than the last is that the “invisible hand” of the market is going to whittle everything down, at an accelerating pace. The idea that we can keep all of Robert Kelly’s 62 books in print just makes presumptions about available resources that don’t compute in an economy of scarcity. But someday, a really good series of his collected works will enable a generation that is not yet alive to read & enjoy his writing. And that to me makes sense.

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Gravitations! reads Ronald Johnson’s one-word message inked – he had gorgeous penmanship, bordering on calligraphy – on the inside cover of my copy of Radi Os, a book that I realize is now 28 years old. Long out of print, it has just been reissued by Flood, a publication that is at once something to celebrate & a bit of a mystery.

A bit of a mystery because this wasn’t the book I was expecting. This edition typographically resets, but does not fundamentally revise (save for some changes Guy Davenport made to his afterword in 1981), the Sand Dollar Press volume of ’77, containing the same works, representing Johnson’s transformations of the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost, literally Paradise Lost. A note on the text at the end indicates that Jeff Clark retained “the orthography and spacing of the original,” though with a page that is one centimeter wider than the Sand Dollar Press edition, a retention, to call it thus, that Clark accomplishes by kicking the font size up one-half point to 9.5.¹

Yet Johnson, as Peter O’Leary noted in a letter printed here in 2003, drafted a total of nine sections of Radi Os, the opening portion of a larger sequence originally conceived to have been the final canopy or dome over the architectural project that became Ark – a book that itself has become hard if not impossible to locate since publisher Gus Blaisdell’s passing two years ago. When Johnson decided not to complete the transformation of Milton, he may – it would appear – have decided just to go with these four that Sand Dollar had already released. But the decision to cut the project short was, so far as I can tell, made after the publication of the Sand Dollar volume, so it’s impossible, at least from this distance, to tell whether or not Johnson meant the other five to disappear forever. Hopefully not.

To add to the mystery, the volume O’Leary wrote about in ’03 wasn’t Radi Os at all, but

The Outworks, which includes RADI OS & some later poems, including his incredible monument to the victims of AIDS, "Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid," is in the works with Flood Editions. This book will include the republication of RADI OS (which, regrettably?, before he passed away, RJ retitled, "Poem Excised Paradise Lost").

I agree with O’Leary that “Blocks” is indeed incredible, possibly the finest work Johnson ever completed. And I’m afraid I agree as well that retitling Radi Os “Poem Excised etc.” demonstrates a remarkably tin ear to the resonance of Johnson’s own poetry. What could he have been thinking of? Well, that’s a sentence that’s run through my mind when contemplating Ron & his work more than once before. Ark as a whole strikes me as a unique combination of over-reaching & reluctant compromises. Of the major longpoems of the last century, it is the one whose seams most resemble duct-tape, which is saying something given how The Cantos peter out & Zukofsky lets Celia’s “A”-24 come to that work’s formal rescue. A completed “excised Paradise Lost,” at least in the format presented here, would have run to 2,250 pages, more than five times the length of the rest of Ark. Some dome. Johnson may have favored architecture as a metaphor for his poetic structures, but the resulting works often most resemble the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

What I suspect must have happened – this is pure speculation – is that the editors of Flood Editions may have come up against the formal difficulties imposed by Johnson’s poetry, as such. With “Blocks” for example – you can glimpse an excerpt here – should the conversion from poster-sized broadside proceed left to right, or top down? Even if you think that it’s uncontroversially the former, you have to admit something is lost in flattening out the spatial relationships between individual stanzas. Releasing Radio Os as is, so to speak, at least positions them to come back with a new edition that includes both “Blocks” and the five lost books from Paradise Lost.

Having said all this, I should note, absolutely, that Radi Os is a great book – it’s one of those “must-have” volumes for any contemporary poetry collection & it’s great fun read aloud. I do think that we need to have all of Johnson’s work readily at hand, ideally from a publisher who can (a) keep it in print and (b) do a decent job with distribution. When I think of all the New American Poets – the generation immediately preceding Johnson’s – who have yet to arrive at such a state, this seems a Herculean task to ask of a small press. That Flood has taken on this much is a sign of terrific devotion.

¹ Notably easier on the eye, which I applaud.

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Jordan Davis, somewhere in the West Village

By my count, 22 of the 81 contributors to Hat are bloggers – in that they are now (or have been in the past) represented on the blogroll to the left. Slightly more than one in four – I wonder how representative that might be of poets who are currently – by which I mean right now this year, not (say) 1995 – publishing in magazines. Or is it, as I suspect, high, a consequence of Jordan Davis’s own blogging? And if so, by how much? I, for one, would be surprised if even one in ten poets were publishing a weblog. One in twenty, maybe. Of course the implication of that when aligned with the 530-plus names on the list to the left would be something on the order of 10,000 currently active poets.

Life is so full of questions when you’re the permanently curious type, as am I. For example, I suspect, but can’t prove, that a number of the younger or less widely published poets from outside of New York City appear in Hat because they’re known, or at least more widely known, as a result of blogging. Jonathan Mayhew is a case in point, but so are James Meetze & Tony Tost & CA Conrad.

Historically, younger or newer poets have achieved some initial level of broader recognition through running reading series or publishing little magazines. That’s literally a form of service work than enables you to contact whichever poets whom you happen to like and ask if they would be willing to participate in one’s series or zine. From Pound’s work with Poetry even before World War I to something as recent as My Vocabulary, the poetry program on KSDT radio, the infrastructure of poetry has been constructed on the shoulders of younger writers in just this way. Davis, one of Hat’s editors, not only blogs & is himself prolific as a poet, but also is the producer & host of the Million Poems Show, a poetry talk show (no, I don’t know what that is, exactly, tho I might guess) at the Bowery Poetry Club. With Sarah Manguso, Davis edited Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books. His collaborator on Hat, Chris Edgar, works as the publications director at the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, in addition to his own work as poet, translator, essayist, etc.

So this makes me wonder at some of the implications of blogging for poetry in general. One is that it might be easier for a newer writer outside of New York &/or San Francisco to make serious contact with publications all over – a democratizing effect that I suspect can only be positive. But a second might be that younger poets may eventually discover that they have less of a need to start their own little zines, some of which might have turned out to be the Sulfur, Chain, Shiny or Hat of tomorrow. Thus an unintended consequence might be a longer term reduction in the absolute number of possible places for a poet to publish. And it’s also possible that these two impulses might cancel one another out. Or that an increase in the number of people publishing poetry might generate more of a felt need for journals, not less.

A publication like Hat tends to evoke questions like this for me. For one thing, the journal has been constantly expanding over the years, from the 14 contributors to the first issue in 1998, to 41 for the fifth issue, which came out during Winter 2003-2004. With no visible organizing principle other than the alphabeticization of authors’ surnames, Hat’s one perceptible theme is quantity. And at its current rate of growth, number seven will come out around the end of next year with some 160 contributors, number eight some time in 2009 with over 300.

Or maybe not. I’m teasing of course, but the logic of the process seems inescapable. When you have a publication in which the average contributor gets exactly 2.37 pages, you can – as Hat does – have almost nothing but terrific work, and yet offer it in such small portions that no one author will be able to think of this as a major publication in their life. The effect for a reader is simultaneously exhilarating & frustrating, like a museum that offered one of everything, but groups of nothing whatsoever.

I can understand the resistance to organizing a periodical around stated themes – there is no journal of poetry I’m less likely to read (and less apt to like) than one in which all the poems are “about” something, regardless of how global or noble it might be. I don’t write that way myself & virtually none of the poetry I value would be characterized in this fashion either. But I don’t necessarily think that it’s an either/or kind of situation. For example, if one simply grouped together the poets in this issue who live in Brooklyn, or who live in California, you might get some sense as to how the work bounces off of its environment. And if you were doing that while actually editing the issue, then maybe you’d send off notes to people who fit one or another category & ask for work.

A more modest magazine that thus has a bigger impact might be Carve, whose current issue has literally just arrived. Carve is a particularly useful example, in that I think there’s no aesthetic discord between this mag & Hat. Carve’s editor, Aaron Tieger, appears in Hat & Jordan Davis appears in Carve.

Although Carve is just 32 pages, humbly saddle stapled, compared with Hat’s 192, dividing Carve’s number by just six contributors gives each more room to stretch out & convey a stronger sense of what they’re doing, even with a “title page” accorded all but one of the participants. I say “all but one” because two are William Corbett presenting an introduction to the poetry of the late Ric Caddel, the wonderful British poet, editor, publisher & librarian who passed away too young in 2003 from leukemia. The other contributors are Stacy Szymaszek, the Milwaukee poet whom I’ve praised here more than once, Davis of course, Guillermo Juan Parra, whom I think of as a Venezuelan poet but who is listed here as being from Boston, and Cheryl Clark, also of Boston, whose work I did not know at all prior to this issue.

Clark makes a good test case for my reaction here, in that I already know that I like the work of all the other poets involved with Carve. And the magazine’s simple enough printing format – generally on a par with Hat save for the binding – does show its ragged side here, with one line of one poem (I shan’t say which) literally excised via white paper pasteover from the end of one poem only to appear, typed & pasted on to the end of the next. Yet here is “Nearest Distance,” another of the five Clark poems in the issue:

Crushes me
to think
I will be
a part
of some
long
string
of white
faces
in a city
you
used to
live in.

Here enjambment ramps up emotion to the max & it fits what otherwise appears to be a simple, paintful statement perfectly. Cheryl Clark is someone whose work I’m going to be looking for henceforth.

It seems odd to think that, having died just two years ago, Ric Caddel lived mostly too soon to see the impact of blogging on the poetry scene. But here I note that three of the five other contributors to Carve are active bloggers: Davis, Parra & Clark. Maybe that one in twenty estimate I ventured at the head of this note isn’t as good a ballpark figure as I imagine. It’s something to think about, as I look at the literature that arrives at my door.

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Allen Ginsberg & Gregory Corso

The last time I saw Gregory Corso was in a liquor store at the corner of Columbus & Union in San Francisco. He and the clerk behind the counter were engaged in a furious tug of war over a credit card, which the clerk was attempting to wrest from Corso’s hands in order to cut it up. “I am Norman!” thundered Corso, to no avail. The clerk got the card & snipped it in twain to Corso’s howls. I exited quietly so as not to have to venture the words, “Hello, Gregory.”

Little events like that have a lot to do with why there isn’t more reasoned discourse about Corso’s poetry. Or like the time when, having been told at Naropa that he should teach what he knew, Corso offered a workshop on stealing valium. Just as Jack Spicer’s reputation seems to have benefited greatly from a generation of readers who didn’t have to wade through a problematic personality to get to the work, it may take another decade or so before people start to emerge who can sort through Corso’s work dispassionately, presumably to his benefit.

Kirby Olson has written “I wish Ron would reply to the Matt Merlino question regarding why Beats are in the post-avant group.”

It’s because the question itself struck me as preposterous. Remember, these categories are not, repeat NOT, like identifying which position on an imaginary baseball team your poet should play (In my league, Corso would be the bullpen coach, or maybe a bench coach in the mold of The Gerbil). The School of Quietude is an actual literary movement, self-selecting & ongoing now in the U.S. for at least 160 years. One of its primary features is that it doesn’t believe that it is a movement – it thinks it’s the unmarked case. Like white males who imagine they have no ethnicity, no gender. Like heterosexuals who think only gays have sexual orientation. Like any majoritarian speaker in a culture who imagines that he, or she, has no accent.

When the Beats suddenly emerged in the mid-1950s (they’d been studiously ignored previously, save for the appearance of Ginsberg as the author of a letter incorporated into William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Kerouac’s critically acclaimed, but mostly unread, first novel), the School of Quietude consisted primarily of a core group of Boston Brahmins around Robert Lowell at Harvard, with a second – and far less institutionally powerful – pole that centered around Auden & was only starting to emerge as a conscious counter-balance to the Brahmins in Iowa City. The Brahmins at that moment were still the darlings of the New Critics (most of whom were poets associated with the agrarians of the 1930s, it should be noted). And the New Critics were profoundly anti-romantic. They thought the romantics were too over-the-top to focus on the well-wrought urn, literally. Their focus was more the sonneteers of the 17^th century.

The howls of protest when the Beats arrived were loud & unmistakable – even at ten years old & still several years from really getting into poetry, I could hear the rumbles of thunder as it spilled over into Life and Time & onto the pages of the daily paper. They were unlettered, unwashed, not interested in academic (or any other, it was implied) careers. They sneared at the squares & the straights. They took their inspiration from Walt Whitman, himself a disgraceful etc. etc. This echoed in part some of the same dismissal that Pound & Stein & Joyce had received in the previous decades, from earlier SoQ types like Robert Silliman Hillyer, the sonnet hack who won the 1934 Pulitzer. The loudest and most famous protest, of course, was Norman Podhoretz’ ”The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Podhoretz & the other protestors, confident in the lasting value of their institutions, predicted that the Beats & their kind would soon disappear from view. Podhoretz was wrong about that, and his subsequent role as one of the founding fathers of neoconservativism isn’t much to be proud of, either. But at least he knew where he stood.

When Anchor Books published A Controversy of Poets, jointly edited by Paris Leary (for the SoQ) & Robert Kelly (for the New Americans), Corso was clearly on the team that today would be characterized as post-avant. In fact, it should be remembered that the two editors agreed on only one poet for their volume – and that this one poet refused to participate – Robert Duncan.

It is true that the SoQ has generally been characterized by an anglophilia that can seem a tad pathological, but historically it hasn’t been just any Brit whose writing they happened to like. People like Basil Bunting, David Jones & Shelley tended not to show up on their list. Today, Tom Raworth, J.H. Prynne, Allen Fisher, Tom Pickard, Lee Harwood, and the late Douglas Oliver tend not to appear on SoQ reading lists.¹ Instead it’s Geoffrey Hill, Andrew Motion (whose nickname, were he ever to be drafted by a fantasy baseball team, would have to be “Slow”), Simon Armitage, Glyn Maxwell & any of several Irish conservatives. The distinction is a phenomenon that extends beyond U.S. shores. Its class & political implications may be clearer in the United Kingdom than here, tho Podhoretz’ role amid the neocons seems perfectly consistent with the emergence of a rag like The New Criterion.

Characterizing the Beats as SoQ because they represented a return to romanticism in American letters, and because some used traditional forms on occasion, is like calling Chomsky a Republican because he teaches at a science school. It makes me want to twitch with its ahistoricity.

I’m going to let Corso have the last word, with his poem “I am 25”:

With a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton       Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
            has gone from ear to ear:
            I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying: – I did those then
              but that was then
              than was then –
O I would quiet old men
say to them: – I am your friend
                 what you once were, thru me
                 you’ll be again –
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
                 and steal their poems.

¹ Which is why Thom Gunn’s championing of Briggflats as the finest poem ever written is so noteworthy. Gunn may have been a Brit who trained in the New Critical stronghold of Stanford, but he integrated himself mostly into the lifestyle of San Francisco’s gay community, and continued teaching at Berkeley even after Louis Simpson’s well-publicized resignation from that school on the grounds that the local scene’s fascination with all things New American made it impossible for an SoQ poet to continue.

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Matt Hart, second from right, in the band Squirtgun

After my piece on Matt Hart, I heard from both. The following letter, run here with its author’s permission, is from the Matt Hart with whom I read in New York.

Dear Mr. Silliman,

Imagine my surprise to find, upon arriving home from work the other day, that I (and my doppelganger) had been mentioned in your blog-posting for the day. How strange. But also, as it turns out, how terrific.

As it turns out, I have been aware of your Matt Hart for some time. A few years ago, when I was introduced to Dana Ward, the poet and editor of Cy Press, he immediately started going on and on about how much he liked some very astute sounding article I had written. Sadly, I had to tell him, he had the wrong Matt Hart. Thus, when Thomas said that you were very happy to be reading with ME and Anselm Berrigan, I just assumed (because you live in Philly) that you thought he meant YOUR Matt Hart. Very confusing. Of course, at the actual event I was far too nervous and in awe of you to mention it. And I’m glad you didn’t mention it either, as I would’ve been even more terrified than I was already. I had never read in New York before, and as goofy as it probably seems, it was a big deal to me.

In any case, I appreciated very much your thoughtful comments about my work, though I must say I’m not at all certain what you’re talking about when you say School of Quietude, nor do I know anything about Actualism. Forgive me. I’m neither well read nor particularly articulate in terms of the detailed history of poetry. I am, however, like everybody else who’s serious about something, always looking to both the past and present for new input, new words, new ideas. With that in mind, I plan to research some of the poets you mentioned in your post, and I would be grateful for any other suggestions you may have for further reading. Of course, I do know Ted Berrigan’s work quite well, and Dean Young was briefly a teacher of mine. In the early 90’s, when I was a grad student in philosophy (horror of horrors), I studied the later Wittgenstein pretty intensely, and thankfully it cured me of any desire I had to understand the world absolutely (though not my desire to pine for the possibility of an absolute)—I bought his whole “philosophy is a mental illness” shtick—but also the idea that “meaning is use,” which opened up huge possibilities for me in poetry.

Still, for me poetry has to be about saying something and making it stick—that is, I want to move people in the old sense—and also, of course, I want to be moved myself. Expressiveness, beauty and contact with other human beings are what I value, and I’m willing to do that by any means necessary. These are old values to be sure, but by my lights I’ll take even old (dead) values in the face of no values any day. This is, I think, the Corso connection. For all his cantankerous, outsider ferocity, his work has heart, which is manifest by turns as a) an all too human on-the-go sloppiness, b) a willingness to believe in something (by any means necessary) in the face of believing that there’s nothing to believe in, and c) in a relentless (and hyper-romantic) pursuit of beauty in the face of no beauty, no value, no future. Bomb.

My experience in poetry thus far (that is, the poetry world—yikes!) is that my work is too talky and “weird” for the conventional academic poets and too boringly heartfelt for the post-avant hipsters—which is only to explain or account for where I’ve published my poems. The Ploughshares thing was a total fluke. Heather McHugh guest edited that issue, and she was one of my teachers. Otherwise, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. In general, it seems that the LUNGFULL!s and Pom2s (hell, even the Fences and Verses) of the world think my work is idiotic (plus none of their friends know me), and the Virginia Quarterlys, etc. think my work is really OUT THERE (plus their friends don’t like any of my former teachers). Anyway, I’m not particularly interested in being a member of any single camp. I believe that the things that connect us, even (esp.?) as poets, are both numerous and far more important than the things that divide us. Your post from today about community is just what all the doctors NEED. As for me, I’ll keep sending my work to everybody, and hopefully they’ll find something in it to like - as I find things to like in almost everybody else. High aims? You bet.

Again, I appreciated so much your blog comments. I thought the reading was fantastic, and it was a huge thrill to get to open for you and Anselm.. Perhaps we’ll meet again under less surprising circumstances. I certainly hope so.

Sincerely,

(the other) Matt Hart

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At Colin’s behest, we were watching Julius Caesar, and the kids were responding to one of the great little games kids can play with Shakespeare, namely the “Oh, that’s where that came from” reaction to famous quotations. They were not moved by “Beware the Ides of March!” or “Et tu, Brute,” but they lit right up with Casca’s comment to Cassius, describing an overheard conversation not conducted in Latin: “It’s Greek to me.”

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A quick note: I’ve toggled the Blogger settings to require that anyone making comments be registered. The civility (or lack thereof) of the Comments section today has been distressing. I deleted one remark that was nothing more than a link to a porn site.

Almost any halfway careful reader will note that I seldom, if ever, respond to anonymous comments. The idea that a response can be cogent or pointed when it exists outside of any relationship to a source is self-defeating at best.

Registering only takes a minute and one always retains the ability to use a creative (or other) pseudonym. Hopefully, this will generate enough self-reflection for people to act as if they themselves would appreciate some respect.

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I got a questionnaire from Fulcrum asking some very basic questions.

1. What is and what isn't poetry? What is poetry's essential nature (if any)?

Poetry is the art form that uses language as its medium. That’s a very broad statement & doesn’t tell you a lot. But, beyond that, any discussion of “essential nature” has to be about the old & tired problems of essentialism in general, not poetry.

2. What is the most important poetry? Who are the greatest poets? What do they accomplish?

The best art in any medium is that which expands our understanding of the possibilities of the medium itself. This can be done in many different ways & any history of American painting of the last century that doesn’t put Warhol on the same plane ultimately with Pollock isn’t credible, I would think, just as one that tried to place Rothko or Rauschenberg on that same plateau would not be credible. If you look at poetry dispassionately, it becomes very clear who moved the art forward, or at least in a new direction, over time. This is not necessarily “progress,” in the modernist sense of that term, but it is always movement, evolution.

3. What is the relationship between poetry and truth? Is there such a thing as poetic truth?

A poet who directly understands & confronts his or her medium has an opportunity to address questions such as truth. One who uses language instrumentally, as a second-order mechanism to get at some “truths” that lie elsewhere is not only a bad writer, but a dishonest one.

4. How does poetry relate to the human condition?

Each of the major arts corresponds to one of our basic media, literally our senses. Poetry – the art of language – literally is the only one that rises out of a media uniquely possessed by the human species. Other species have sight & sound & respond to mass & texture. But unless you think that the whales are chatting down there in that human cesspool we have made of the oceans, only humans truly have language.

5. Is there (or can there be) a meaningful philosophy of poetry?

This is a trick question, sort of a linguistic Moebius strip. Poetry is the active side of the coin of which philosophy is the opposing face.

6. Does the fundamental nature of poetry change over time?

Only slightly. The last “fundamental” change came with the emergence of the book in the 1500s. At the same time, poetry is – and should always be – as sensitive to the cultural and social environment as any art form. The idea of writing poetry in the same forms as were used in the 1890s is exactly the same as the idea of writing music in the same forms & arrangements as were used in the 1890s.

7. Is there one "poetry" or are there "poetries"?

It depends on how you define it. If you mean poetry literally, as the art of language, then even the novel is a (degraded) part of poetry. But if you try mapping this art against the complex topology of social & linguistic groups that are forever in contention in the world, you will never stop counting poetries.

8. What makes a genuinely great poem?

This is the second question all over again, asked in functional terms. But the answer is the same – any poem that expands our experience of & insight into the medium of poetry qualifies.

9. What is the relationship between tradition and innovation in poetry?

Change in poetry really is how we sense the friction of social contexts against the medium of language. A poem must make itself new every day. Poets who write as if this were still the 1950s are the equivalent of lounge singers belting out the hits of Johnny Ray or Nat King Cole. Poets who write as if this were still the 1850s are simply pathological.

10. Is a particular poetic method (e.g. the "lyricist," "formalist," "free verse," "experimental," or any other approach) preferable?

No. Any method that enables a poet to confront and expand their relationship to the medium is adequate, and that can be understood in more than one way.

11. Are there deep associations between poetics and politics? Please give some evidence.

I think most poets would love it if this were true, but the history of literature suggests that the medium is amoral. It’s what poets do with it that matters.

12. What fundamental misconceptions about poetry annoy you most, and how would you correct or refute them?

Most of the questions in this survey would qualify, as they attempt to connect poetry up to a discourse of “timeless truths,” “essentials,” “fundamentals” and “greatness” that was laughable when Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D. & Marianne Moore were still students in Philadelphia. So here is my counter question: what would it take to make these questions interesting?

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My publicist & fantasy biographer, Jim Behrle, is writing a series of works entitled Why I Am Not Post Avant. In the process, he proves himself wrong once again. Bill Corbett’s Pressed Wafer has been good enough to publish a selection of seven of these works. You should get hold of a copy.

Jim – or Jimmy as everyone calls him – is so well known for his weblog (Daisy Fried waxed ecstatic over it in her piece on poetry on the web for the online section of Poetry magazine, of all venues), his cartoons, his antics (jumping, Jackass-style, from a rooftop onto a trampoline is the current banner sequence on the blog), his lovelorn persona & periodic quarrels with other poets, that people lose sight of the fact that he’s a pretty fair practitioner of the North American post-avant lyric poem. Dig “Detecting Flash Version”:

bring me the head of the Energizer bunny
can’t year you through the bedsheets
no touches nada, ese
I can only stand to heckle myself
you have just been married in a green shirt
and I am standing in front of your painting
and there is so much green in it
Eddie, can I be the fetus in the heart
in service of the most vicious of masters
ash raining down off the volcano today
right down to you, amino acids
no horn blowing except for danger
coming soon: laundromat

Here we have all the tell-tale signs of post-avant writing: found language, lines treated as new sentences but with a consciously anti-systematic stance, vamping on Frank O’Hara’s stylistics, plus Behrle’s own patented (and very Catholic) sense of humor. Indeed, the title of this entire series, alluding to O’Hara & yours truly simultaneously, is a deft little P-A gesture, if ever there were one.

Post-avant, after all, is precisely what happens to avant-garde writing the instant that it gets it that the old master narrative of progress is bunk & that the role of the avant-garde has naught to do with the military metaphor implicit in that term, but with a literary tradition that stretches back at least as far as Wordsworth & Coleridge & Blake, & that this tradition is understood best as a diachronic view of an ever evolving world literary community. And if you look at Behrle’s website, you can’t possibly miss just how important community is to Jim Behrle, nor how passionate he is about the subject, regardless (or perhaps because) of the rude ways through which he expresses this love. Linking O’Hara & Silliman in the title of his project without ever naming either is precisely a mechanism for specifying a sense of community across generations while maintaining a critical distance. Not that O’Hara & Silliman have all that much in common, but that’s just the tension that Behrle seems to find so compelling & wants to point to whenever he uses the first person singular.

Behrle’s wit & omnivorous approach to pop culture are his greatest assets as a poet. Here’s another sample where these are just as visible as in the poem above. This is “Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Blue is the Color of Your Baby,” a title that suggests both marketing & rigor mortis:

that arrow was meant for Natalie Portman, meow
The Taco Bell on Delancey St.
is a portal to another dimension
Winkler Grateful for the Role of “The Fonz”
which is not the purpose of this letter
sorry the culture war didn’t go your way
so who’s writhing now? if it was up to you
the heavy suitcase might contain a single cherry
emerge from missile lock, audition for reality TV
I don’t see no badge and I ain’t your mama
somehow, sadly, everything ends up
*right* where you left it

Why I Am Not Post Avant is a folded broadside & has no price listed, but I suspect that a couple of bucks posted to Press Wafer at 9 Columbus Square, Boston, MA 02116 could get you a copy.

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Two of the oldest – and most cherished – volumes in my library are Amen, Huzzah, Selah and Elegies and Celebrations, technically volumes 13(a) and 13(b) of Jargon magazine, before it fully conceded that it was, indeed, a press more than a journal. These books, published in 1960 & ’62, are the work of Jonathan Williams, the most cantankerous & unique contributor to the New American Poetry. One of the most important publishers of the 20^th century & one of the best photographers of the past fifty years, Williams tends to have been the exception to every rule of thumb one could make about the New Americans in general & the Projectivists in particular. They were urban – he stayed on in Highlands, N.C., not far from his birthplace in Ashville. They were serious – he is the ultimate poet of the wisecrack. More than a few of them were practitioners of the Wounded Buffalo school, a testosterone heavy approach to the world & personal relations – Williams turned out to be a domestic poet, whose life has been spent in two major relationships, first with Ronald Johnson & then, and for far longer, with Tom Meyer.

Now Copper Canyon, of all presses, has seen fit to issue a big, juicy “new & selected poems,” entitled Jubilant Thicket. It is just that, a volume far larger than its 301 pages suggests, maybe 500 or 600 poems in all – out of an oeuvre of some 1,450 – as raucous as anything in recent writing. At the same time, sans index, there are poems of Williams’ not just from these two early books, but even from his earlier selected volumes, An Ear in Bartram’s Tree & The Loco Logo-Daedalist in Situ (just possibly the best book title ever), that I cannot find here. Indeed, the only earlier publication that appears to have made it into this collection in toto is Mahler, Williams’ one extended suite of poems. This is not atypical for a poet like Williams who, like Phil Whalen or John Wieners – just to pick among the Ws in the New American vein – never has had a consistent publisher. The volumes, when they emerge, tend to represent what was possible at the time to get into print. So if you own one Williams’ selected, you still need all the others, and the smaller, earlier volumes as well. Hopefully, at some point, each of these writers will be gathered into a large Collected. Yet, among the New Americans, that hasn’t even happened as yet for Robert Duncan & the four-volume Spicer collected is still just something that we can salivate at the idea of – who knows exactly when that will emerge? So Jubilant Thicket is a wonderful event – far larger than any previous volume. But it will leave Williams’ older fans sighing, wanting & waiting for more.

The dozens, the wisecrack, the sardonic aphorism have a heritage in poetry that is as old as Catullus, at the very least. In our time, hardly anyone has done more to plumb this rich vein of possibility than Jonathan Williams. He is, easily, our most obscene – and yet our most fastidious – poet. Thus, alluding to the former first lady all in caps, we read:

NANCY:

“TOGETHER
WE CAN LICK
CRACK”

or, from the series of “Meta-Fours” that opens the book, mostly untitled poems printed several to a page whose only formal requirement is that their lines should have exactly four words each:

O.J. IN SOUTH FLORIDA
i met this girl
once and she tells
me she only dates
guys with ten inches
i said baby i
ain’t cuttin’ off two
inches not for nobody

And yet from the same series we find a one-liner worthy of Robert Grenier:

bucket of blue smoke

Or this, from the selection of homages, elegies & valedictions that concludes the book:

COMPANIONS FOR THE DARK SLATE HEADSTONE OF CHARLES JOHN OLSON JR.

small,
yellow

flower
heads

of
tansy

Tansy,
fr. Gr. athanasia
(deathlessness)

because of
the characteristic
permanent possession
it takes of
the soil

he takes of
the soul

That last piece works so carefully via its use of words per line – the three three-worders are key to it all – and its use of imagery & enjambment is so perfectly tuned to Olson’s own way with the language – that Williams approaches a kind of perfection that objects made of words seldom attain.

Jubilant Thicket is one of those absolute must-have books of poetry. I just hope we don’t have to wait another 30 or 50 years to have a collected in hand.

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My Matt Hart

I had a full-on Yogi Berra experience when I went up to New York last week to read with Anselm Berrigan & Matt Hart at the 11^th Street Bar in the East Village: déjà vu all over again. The reason being Matt Hart.

Matt Hart is a critic, poet, musician &, betwixt 1997 & 2004, a grad student at Penn (having already gotten masters degrees from both the University of Sussex & Edinburgh University), very active in & around the Philly Talks scene & Writers House. He hails from Manchester, U.K, &, PhD in hand, he eventually decamped to an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois – Urbana – Champaign. So when Thomas Heise told me that he’d lined up Anselm Berrigan & Matt Hart as co-readers, I was completely pleased.

Once I arrived at the 11^th Street Bar – your standard New York tavern, with something of an alcove in back where readings take place behind drawn curtains with just a little more light than the old Double Happiness – I looked around for the tall guy with the Manchester accent, when Heise proceeds to introduce me to a shorter fellow – also dirty blond with glasses – whose accent I’d wager is distinctly Midwestern. When Thomas said this was Matt Hart, my eyes must have dilated.

This Matt Hart, as it turns out, is likewise a poet, musician, teacher (Art Academy of Cincinnati) & editor (Forklift, Ohio). He has an undergraduate degree from Ball State University & did some grad time in philosophy at Ohio University before getting the MFA at Warren Wilson College. He’s the one on the right with the bow tie in the photos above, my Matt Hart being on the left. This Matt Hart has published a fair amount, tho a lot has been in School of Quietude (SoQ) type magazines like Ploughshares. Until I shook his hand in the 11^th Street Bar, I had never even heard of this Matt Hart.

I was so stunned by this that I said not a word. I just sat & listened. And frankly liked what I heard. This Matt Hart is sharp, funny, full of pop references & allusions – twice he noted Gregory Corso, both times with approval – and hardly at all what one might expect out of a context like Ploughshares, one of the most somnambulant of all SoQ venues. If anything, this Matt Hart took me back some 30 years to the heyday of Actualism, which is to say the verse that rose up out of Iowa City in response to the energetic teaching of Ted Berrigan there – poets like Darrell Gray, Pat Nolan, George Mattingly, Alan Kornblum, Keith Abbott, Jim Gustafson, Andrei Codrescu, Dave Morice, G.P. Skratz & Victoria Rathbun. Just like Actualism, much of this Matt Hart sounds a lot like maybe third generation New York School poetry – a tone, it is worth noting, that is entirely absent from the work of Anselm Berrigan, a more serious & subtle soul than people seem to have yet recognized.

Unlike Dean Young, say, who always strikes me as an experiment to see what would happen if you crossed James Tate with Bob Perelman, this Matt Hart isn’t simply an echo of Ron Padgett or Kenneth Koch, tho the reverberations are unmistakable in his poems. But it did strike me that, like Dean Young, Matt Hart may see his project as – if he should think about it in larger historical terms – making that side of the New American poetry “safe” for the SoQ going forward. If the ellipsism of Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright & Ann Lauterbach can be understood as one tendency where impulses of both SoQ & post-avant traditions are woven together as tho there were not deep fissures & contradictions in the project, just possibly Hart & Young could be seen as another such attempt, along somewhat different fault lines.

The trick in all this is that one has to be more than a little good to get away with it. Wright & Lauterbach would be fabulous poets regardless of which tradition & tendency they involved themselves in & it wouldn’t surprise me, ten years hence, if I didn’t think the same here with this Matt Hart.

But the event I most want to hear, obviously, would be Matt Hart with Matt Hart.

Θ Φ Θ

Drew Gardner has a review of sorts of my part of the reading. It was only reading Drew’s piece that I realized that it was Murat Nemet-Nejat who was sitting at my table. I can be so dense when I’m in an unfamiliar setting, especially when the people I know aren’t whom I expect them to be . . . .

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Perhaps the single best example of the ways in which the web has emerged as a more powerful publishing solution for progressive arts than traditional print forms is How2, the onsite zine that has evolved from the relatively simple newsletter HOW(ever) originally founded by Kathleen Fraser, Bev Dahlen & Frances Jaffer 22 years ago. Whereas the original publication never grew large enough to warrant perfect binding, the current online zine has evolved into a rich gathering of diverse materials & resources from all over the world. If How2 couldn’t be captured in perfect binding today, that’s because some of its content literally requires the web as a platform.

HOW(ever)’s original project was straightforward enough, to be:

A vehicle for experimentalist poetry – post-modern if you will, to be thought of seriously as an appropriate poetry for women and feminists.

Today, when women make up an absolute majority of post-avant writing, Frances Jaffer’s words sound almost banal. In 1983, these same words represented the jarring coming together of what many had imagined to be radically disjunct vocabularies. HOW(ever) & How2 have an awful lot to do with that transformation. They offer the textbook example of how the right idea, simply done in a modest format, can absolutely change the world. If a future literary historian wants to identify the moment when avant-garde tradition took the leap forward into becoming post-avant – which is to say incorporating that 200-year-old tradition while moving it beyond the elitist presumptions of modernism & toward a sense of formally progressive tradition as community – you could make a very good case for HOW(ever) as the key event.

The present manifestation of this same institution has become one of the two or three richest & most varied resources on the web, not just for women writing “experimentally,” but for all writing, period. The current number, just up, has no less than seven major features in addition to the usual riches one finds in each issue:

• An in-depth feature on Nicole Brossard, the great Québécois writer, that includes pieces by her in French, translated into English (and one even translated via BabelFish), a discussion with Susan Rudy and Anne-Marie Wheeler, plus four critical pieces.
• One feature on contemporary Japanese poetry
• One feature on modern Singapore poetry – I don’t need to stress here, do I, just how rarely we get to read contemporary poetry from Asian countries?
• Four papers – plus an account by Andrea Brady – from a conference on writing and environment. The papers included here have as their topics the work of Rae Armantrout, Jack Spicer, Madeline Gins & Arakawa, plus migrant poetics in New Zealand.
• A feature on new media pieces edited by How2 managing editor Redell Olsen. Links for downloading QuickTime, Flash Player or Windows Media Player are all on the introductory page. Troglodyte that I am, the one that interests me most is Brigid Mc Leer’s In Place of a Page, which documents a series of works & thinking about the relation of architecture to writing. This is the one that uses the fewest whizbangs & thus relies the most on its interaction between visuals & language.
• A pair of pieces on Alice Duer Miller, a member of the Algonquin Round Table who has largely been neglected in recent decades. Miller gets dismissed in part because she was a satirist – read “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women” to get a sense of this side of her work.
• “The Upside Down Door,” a portfolio of 14 poets, including two of my most favorites, Jenn McCreary & Laura Sims. Also included are Jane Sprague, Rachel Moritz, Corinne Lee, Anne Blonstein, Julia Cohen, Carol Ciavonne, Nicole Mauro, Marianne Morris, Laura Solomon, Claire Barbetti, Jennifer Bartlett & Wendy S. Walters.

Any one of these would qualify the issue as warranting special notice – the issue is, instantly, the best source of materials available in English on Brossard on the web, for example – but together, it’s really overwhelming. Reading something like Bridget-Rose Lee’s “The Last Bus” from the Singapore poetry portfolio is to glimpse into a world that is both very like & very different from my own:

in the event you must die in a crash I want me there, best if you want me too. in the event you prefer another I have been living with this. you’d rather end relations than to mention possibilities. it is hard to love you but harder to not love you because there is no chance. roots grow in this strange familiar way and it is an earthquake every day only you don’t know. how many people part this way I don’t know but they do and death parts pain from forever. so I can’t say when I’ll get to say I love to marry you as even death will fall short of its part. each time I send you away I wait for the time again for you to say you don’t want me to wait anyway. I wave as I’ve waved, don’t need to mind about forever when forever is mine.

Or consider Yoko Isaka’s “Boxed Panthers” from the Japanese portfolio:

The hallway extends to either side
A patient headed for surgery passes by us on a stretcher
“I left it behind. I left one behind. Don’t know where it went. I went
    to the dentist”
The boy sitting on the couch leans on the old man
His small hands are wrapped tight around the small box on his lap
The old man sleeps
In this place, where even the light is bandaged
A woman single-mindedly eating a bag of candy, uninclined to talk
Is on the edge of the couch
    - Is that me
A painting of women crossing from thicket to thicket
Becoming white veils and white trains
Hangs on the wall behind

I once went to go look at the gallows near the gates of the city  back when I was little they would hang people now the gallows still remain but only in form, to signal the city’s enforcement of the peace to foreigners who enter that day I stayed there all night the sun shone brightly on the pedestal the blue paint flying off  like the gray color seeping out the colors of the earth well up from the lump of flesh, neither face nor body as the sun shone I continued to gaze up at the hung man as he slept   everyone but the man was vaguely aware of me sitting on the ground, waiting for him to come back to life
I become a tongue  inner ear   skin  in order to know the subject and learn my position as measured by the subject  it is easy to think of myself as a long series of organs  taking something in and out is accompanied by pleasure  pain and emotion  a spirituality  it is too easy to think of the man as a long drawn-out series of organs   rather the man is a hanging bell  and wishes to be struck  the man would resonate gently on the inside  boaubouarun  boaubouarun  and the colors of the earth well up   impeached by the light that says  Agitator!

The boy looks up this way with the expression of the old man

(What is inside the box)
Inside is a tunnel   very long
Solemnly creaking at the joints

(Is it impossible to exit)
Well
A black panther had babies
The box is packed with them
Their eyes shining, lighting the way

(Is it possible to walk)
Yes, anywhere
However   they get chewed apart
And just the bones remain laying around
The probably lose sight of which, among the many eyeballs,
Is the exit

“I’ve got teeth in here. My teeth”
The boy
Leans on the old man
The old man opens his eyes wide and says
“Any act originating from an innocent place is violent”
The woman with the candy gets up
And enters the painting on the wall
As a bell rings

A distant will   seeps into the ears of the sleeping man
Live,   it may have whispered

Another patient headed for surgery
Passes by us on a stretcher

In addition to the usual news & notes, there are eight books in the issue as well. Of particular interest is Mairéad Byrne’s preview of Open Field, an anthology of Canadian poetry edited by Sina Queyras, which makes me anxious to see this new collection from Persea.

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Only a few weeks left before the School of Quietude’s most hushed event of the year – the annual fest at West Chester University. Christian Wiman, Timothy Steele, Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman – the list goes on. It’s almost too delicious. Given that it’s all of 10.7 miles from my house, I did attend this one year, briefly. I wish I could tell you that it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds, but the truth is that it’s worse. One could tear a retina from all the eye-rolling this event evokes.

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Ben Mazer, editor of the Berkeley Renaissance feature in Fulcrum 3 and the Landis Everson feature in Jacket, and Landis Everson himself, have added comments to my note last Wednesday, that are absolutely worth going back & reading. That’s Ben in the tie in the photo above.

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Hugh Steinberg’s response in the comments log to Monday’s note triggered a thought. He was surprised that I hadn’t gotten into Taylor Brady’s work previously – “He's been an important figure in Bay Area poetics for awhile.” I had heard something along those lines when I was in the Bay Area last fall & in January, which is what motivated me to buy the book when I saw it on the SPD list. But it reminded me that, although I’m often associated with the SF writing scene, it’s now been ten years since I last lived there.

Given that I tend to count everything & note all manner of anniversaries, it struck me as odd, or at least noteworthy, that I hadn’t marked that date here with a note when it occurred on May 1. In part, that’s because it’s an ambiguous date. I began working in Pennsylvania on May 1, 1995, when I was hired by a Technology Service Solutions, a joint venture then owned by IBM & Kodak. But my family didn’t follow along for another month – I spent a good part of the first few weeks not only as the guest of Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw while getting to know my new job, but also running around looking at every three & four bedroom rental out in the western suburbs that had some kind of yard suitable for toddlers. Krishna got to see my four of my top five choices – one had already been snapped up – on Mother’s Day weekend, and we moved in two weeks later into a duplex just four blocks from where we ended up buying at the end of the year. I’ve actually owned my current house longer than I’ve lived anywhere since I got out of highschool in 1964.

I’ve long since stopped thinking of myself as a Bay Area Poet, tho I don’t always feel entirely integrated into the Philadelphia scene either. When I note that I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, I mean that very literally – I have access to, but not immersion in, the Philly scene. For example, I suspect that I spend far less time in the city limits than do either Samuel R. Delany or Charles Bernstein – and they both live in New York City, commuting as needed to their jobs at Temple & Penn. There are also a number of poets who have grown up in Chester County – Pattie McCarthy, Jenn McCreary, Ange Mlinko – but it’s also worth noting that none live here now.

When we lived in the Bay Area, Krishna & I noted that many young poets follow a pattern of spending a few years – sometimes as many as 20 – in one of the two major literary centers of the U.S., NY or SF, but then dispersing outward again, either to an immediate suburb (hence Bolinas, suburb of poets) or further, either to where they originally grew up (Ken Irby & Ron Johnson back in Kansas) or else following a career, especially if that career should be teaching. Perhaps because I’d grown up in the Bay Area, it hadn’t occurred to us that we would be part of this same gathering-and-diaspora process that perpetually renews both literary communities, but sometimes can leave the ex-pats feeling a little stranded.

The economics behind such moves are pretty much unassailable. New York – even Brooklyn – is one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. San Francisco is even worse. Not that DC or Boston are notably better, necessarily, but in Philadelphia one sees younger poets actually buying homes without coming from significant inherited wealth &, over time, that’s going to have a shaping impact of the continuity of the literary community.

I’ve noted before that I’m not certain I would have accepted the job here if it hadn’t already been clear that the web was transforming the geographic equation for literary networks in the U.S. quite dramatically. In 1995, that meant the Poetics List, the much maligned ur-listserv of the post-avant world. (Indeed, many of that list’s well-documented shortcomings can be traced back to the simple impossibility of running a listserv with more than one thousand active members – discussion beyond announcements devolves into incoherence at that level & those who do post constantly become Rorschach patterns for the rest of us.¹) Today the options are far wider & a poet in Arkansas or wherever is no longer simply stuck with whatever the local scene has to offer. The rise of an actual scene in North Carolina, for example, is something that either has rarely happened before in my lifetime, unless you include Ted Berrigan & some high school kids in Tulsa fifty years ago & maybe the folks around Frank Stanford & C.D. Wright in Arkansas, or else has happened only in settings where the local stayed local, so that hardly anybody at any distance ever got word of it.²

It’s possible over time that the web’s capacity for connecting people at a distance will erode the importance of the literary centers, tho I’m skeptical of that. I think there is enormous good to come from face-to-face feedback in a community setting, whether it’s at a bar or coffee house or over somebody’s kitchen table. That’s why readings are so important – they aren’t where literature itself happens (save maybe for all the scribblers in the front row) but they are poetry’s back office. The few poets who shun readings & reading scenes do so at great risk, not so much in terms of their social connectedness – tho that shouldn’t be underestimated – but even more so in terms of its impact on the quality of their writing. One of the things that made langpo – at least in the Bay Area – so vital during its heyday in the 1970s was how very hard on one another the poets were, tho I know that this sometimes intimidated newcomers to the scene. There’s no substitute for that on the web, not even with online zines & the rise of audio. Writers really need somebody who will look them in the eye and say, you know that second piece you did tonight, I didn’t buy that at all. Not that these people will be right all the time, but there is great value in having to defend one’s own aesthetic, and criticism from a friend or simpatico poet is very different than, say, hearing that Billy Collins can’t read you.

So I look back at the Bay Area scene with great wistfulness at times, not just because of the great views & good bookstores – which in fact are mediocre bookstores in a nation where a good one doesn’t exist – but because there can be a level of resistance in such a community as that, where this same level of push-pull is far more fragile even in a city with as lively a scene as Philadelphia. In the past decade, the closest we’ve come here – and I can claim zero credit for any of it – was PhillyTalks, Louis Cabris’ brilliant attempt to get different poets to address something in common. If it had a weakness, the series’ concept of always involving at least one out-of-towner meant that everybody was at their most polite, when that isn’t always the most useful approach.

The Bay Area scene had already evolved away from that sort of confrontational poetics long before I moved east, but simply because of the critical mass one finds in the Bay Area, it’s something that can erupt there almost at any time. In ten years here, I haven’t seen the same willingness on the part of younger poets to goad one another toward sharper self-definition, even tho I think that the underlying supportiveness for it, an absolute pre-requisite, exists in the scene. I think that must be why I value Linh Dinh so much – of all the poets associated with Philadelphia, he’s the person most willing to ask an impossible question after a reading or talk – and it’s the impossible questions that make better poets of us all.

¹ Why, for example, Alan Sondheim uses listservs rather than a blog for distribution of his texts, is beyond me, unless it is because it is harder for readers to opt out of seeing them on a list. It still doesn’t mean that they get read, but it has reduced at least one list, ImitationPoetics, to a kind of Sondheim-driven silence.

² Black Mountain College in the 1950s wasn’t the same sort of thing at all, since – with the notable exception of Jonathan Williams – it involved no local participation whatsoever. It could have happened wherever those displaced northeasterners elected to gather & could just as easily been the Ojai or Bisbee or Clovis or Marfa or Woodstock or Berkshire scene as it was that of Ashville, NC.

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Glenn Gould

Although my interest in classical piano is very close to nil, I’ve been meaning to see 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould for years &, through the miracle of Netflix, I finally did. The film, directed by François Girard in 1993 – the one film he’s completed since then was The Red Violin in ’99 – is a biopic of sorts, told not as a traditional narrative, but rather through a series of vignettes, each with its own title – “The L.A. Concert” – some of which are remarkably abstract for what is, behind the facets of this disjunct presentation, a reasonably linear tale. One is nothing other than a close shot of the strings and hammer’s of Gould’s piano – its serial number CD 318 – as he performs what will be his (unannounced) farewell concert at the age of 32. Another is an excerpt from Norman McLaren’s animation Spheres, Gould’s piano as both score & logic as the floating balls of the title subdivide, rotate, recombine – just the sort of thing that never could have been incorporated into a “straight” presentation, Hollywood style.

The film is of interest to me on two levels. One is Girard’s strategies as a film maker – I don’t have to be told that his approach is not dissimilar from the one I took in Under Albany – and the other is the question of Gould the person. At one level, there is nothing particularly Gouldesque about breaking the tale of a lonely (and relatively short-lived) savant into thirty-odd three-minute segments. If he had stopped performing at 29, would we have a shorter film? The film itself does nothing to point up the parallel between its sections & Gould’s biography.

Rather, I think the structure – which absolutely works as cinema – forced itself on the film. Not only does it enable Girard to bring in disparate elements as self-contained segments (one is nothing other than the image of a Gould soundtrack on film itself, others are interviews with Gould’s colleagues, such as Yehudi Menuhin), but it also solves the narrative problem of a film about a man who had few friends, no major relationships, and an isolative career. Gould may have been an unparalleled musician, but one doubts that he was a lot of fun to have around.

Gould is often presented as an example of how an individual with Asperger’s Syndrome, a variation of autism, can achieve great success – Einstein is another. To the film’s credit, it never addresses the issue of a diagnosis nor tries to collapse Gould’s obsessions into an extraneous explanation. It’s actually less interested in pathologizing him than The Aviator is with Howard Hughes. At the same time, 32 Short Films presents Gould as a textbook example of how a gift can be as much a curse as a blessing.

Gould’s retreat from performance is a case in point. Gould (played by Colm Feore to an almost spooky likeness) describes how much he hates the random acoustics of different venues, the barely acceptable pianos, the idea that different members of the audience will come to the event with less than adequate music backgrounds. His ideal relationship to music is a performance in which there is no audience & in which the control freak in him can pin down every aspect of what is heard. More than anything, Gould is shown not performing, but listening – playing a 78 of his just arrived record for a bewildered German chambermaid, running through a playback of a recording, conducting an invisible orchestra of the imagination, whether in his loft in Toronto or home in the north.

Indeed, the finest single scene in the film – it’s worth renting the movie for this alone – is called “Truck Stop,” in which Gould – apparently a regular at the diner in question (the waitress asks if he wants “the usual”) – does nothing but listen to other conversations all around him, as they evolve from a simple tale of a trucker picking up a female hitchhiker into a symphony of human voices & tones. It is exactly the same impulse you find in Apollinaire’s great poem, “Lundi rue Christine,” composed entirely of overheard conversation. The scene lasts only two or three minutes & isn’t done nearly as well as it should be, but you know just what the implications of this are. It’s one of only two or three scenes in the entire film – and the only one representing Gould’s adult years – in which the music on the soundtrack isn’t his, but rather Petula Clark’s jarringly upbeat Downtown. The very next scene shows Gould listening to – and “air conducting” – The Idea of North, one of his aural sound compositions for Canadian radio. Out the window, all we see is a view of ice to the horizon.

Music and Asperger’s, the film seems to argue, are not two separate things. Gould’s oeuvre as a performer may have been all the same old classics, attacked with a knowing verve that gives his sound its signature, but Gould himself was trapped in a purgatory closer to John Cage’s world – he was doomed to listen, to hear, in a world full of sound. His desire to live in the dark above the arctic circle makes utter sense in that context – he was trying to get beyond all that humming, buzzing stimulus.

The commitment any person makes to an art form necessarily entails sacrifice – it’s always a question of how much & to what end. Gould’s radio broadcasts are not Ezra Pound’s radio broadcasts, but ultimately each was an index of just how far beyond the point-of-no-return the artists had gone. Robert Grenier’s scrawl works often strike me in this same way – nobody else in my generation has ventured into writing quite that far, perhaps because there’s no guarantee you can get back again. And that may be why people who really get Grenier’s writing are so deeply devoted to it, whereas to the casual eye it can seem so obtuse.

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Writing of Ronnie Primack here last month, I kvetched yet again about the lack of an anthology of the Spicer Circle and its various off-shoots. My one comment on the Berkeley Renaissance – the pre-history, if you will, of what would become the Spicer Circle at Gino & Carlo’s in North Beach (& in the Magic Workshop at the Public Library) – was to ask “where does one situate the third member of Jack’s Berkeley Renaissance trio” – Robin Blaser being the second – “from his college days at the University of California, Robert Duncan?” This provoked a few notes in the comments box to take a look at Jacket 26 – still technically the current issue – where an extended feature on Robert Duncan includes five pieces concerning Landis Everson & the Berkeley Renaissance, including poems of Everson’s from 1960, some new poems, a portfolio of photos, an interview by Kevin Killian & a review by Killian of the Berkeley Renaissance feature in the new issue of Fulcrum. Further comments to my blog from Simon DeDeo and Mark Lamoureux resulted in that issue of Fulcrum arriving finally at my door.

It’s a big beautiful issue & over one-fifth of its 500-plus pages are given over to Ben Mazer’s work resurrecting the Berkeley Renaissance. I don’t know Mazer other than as the editor of the Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom, not a project that I would have expected to have led up to this. But, together with the feature in Jacket, Mazer has done an amazing job of recreating the outlines of a literary community that functionally has been forgotten for nearly fifty years. If the two features – Fulcrum & Jacket -- have the feel still of an archaeological dig, this may be because our own connections to that lost world have become so tenuous in the intervening half century. Landis Everson – the key in some sense to this Berkeley resurrection – stopped writing at some point in the 1960s, tho lately he has taken it up again (to good effect, if the poems in Jacket are any evidence). Mary Fabilli, who has work in Fulcrum, lives still in Berkeley, but is 89 and hasn’t been active in recent decades. And Robin Blaser – for reasons I don’t quite understand – is unrepresented in these materials save for two early poems. But Mazer hasn’t been thwarted in his efforts to sketch out the larger scene, starting with Duncan’s arrival at UC Berkeley in 1937, a point when Duncan was still using his adopted name of Robert Symmes, & fell in with a group of young poets that included Fabilli & nascent film-buff Pauline Kael. Mazer’s introduction to the Fulcrum feature is the best history of the Berkeley scene in the 1940s & early ‘50s that I’ve ever seen.

In addition, the feature includes poems from that period by all of its key participants, including an collaborative “Canto for Ezra Pound” by Spicer & Duncan with Hugh O’Neill, Jo Frankel & Fred Fredman. In addition, there are some extraordinary pieces by Spicer that include an early essay on D.H. Lawrence, poems from high school & even a letter to Ezra Pound. It also includes a Charles Olson letter to Richard Stone, a member of the Berkeley who had later moved to Boston. One of the more interesting elements of Mazer’s introductory history is his tracing out the first interactions of Olson with Duncan in the 1940s, before Black Mountain or even “Projective Verse.”

I’ve noted with regards to the Canadian poet Louis Dudek – a modernist of the same generation as Duncan – that his work sometimes reminds me of how Duncan’s poetry might have evolved from similar roots – one part Pound, but an even larger part Yeats – had it not been for the confrontation with Olson & the ways in which Duncan’s poetry then expanded to become what we now think of as the mature Robert Duncan. Reading the materials in both Jacket & Fulcrum – not just Duncan’s but everyone’s – Spicer’s, Blaser’s, Fabilli’s & Everson’s – remind me very much of that same sense. That these poets were involved in a modernism that had not yet connected with other strains of American writing that would soon give rise to the New American poetry. The gap, if anything, is Williams – utterly absent in these materials – and behind him the Objectivists.

Yet we know today just how important Louis Zukofsky’s work would become for Duncan (and how he in turn would lead Robert Creeley to the same enthusiasm during their period together in Majorca in the early 1950s). So these pre-LZ materials always have a curious tint for me, like seeing photos of familiar streets printed on “antique” postcards. If Mazer’s materials don’t really speak to the moment when Duncan came into contact with Zukofsky’s work – hard to find generally in the 1940s, which was the pit of the period in which Objectivism had disappeared from print – his essay does address the first moments of contact with Olson.

These are important materials, tho even by themselves they are not yet enough. Hopefully, Mazer will gather these into book form at some point, perhaps with a healthy selection from Duncan’s long-out-print The Years as Catches, and certainly with work by Sanders Russell & Virginia Admiral, neither of whom are included (save for a Russell poem quoted in Mazer’s essay) in these materials. I agree with Kevin Killian that Mazer wants to change our sense of what the Berkeley Renaissance was – putting Landis Everson right into the center of the discussion – tho I’m not entirely sure how well that fits. Fabilli’s remark that she really wasn’t a part of the Renaissance group because she was a woman needs to be heard. She was absolutely & vitally a part of Duncan’s world, yet her relation to some of the others seems far more tenuous, underscoring what is invariably the case whenever one looks at literary cabals like this – that it never was one thing, but rather was a series of overlapping social networks, which did not fit neatly together in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle.

Fulcrum 3 is available in the U.S. for $15 from Fulcrum, 334 Harvard Street, Suite D-2, Cambridge, MA 02139. Foreign subscriptions are $20. Make checks payable to Fulcrum Annual.

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Did you ever have the experience of opening up a new book by somebody you had never heard of, or maybe just barely, and in flipping through the pages for less than a minute thought, “Whoa! This person is doing something major.” That’s not an experience one has often – the association I make to that concept is how I felt seeing Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger for the very first time, before I’d even begun to read. I knew instantly that this was somebody I was going to have to take completely seriously forever.

I had this sensation again the other day, opening up Yesterday’s News by Taylor Brady. News could be called a book of poems – at 260 pages it certainly is that – but it could also be called (more properly, I think) a single work, composed of many parts during the year 2003. It’s not a diary exactly – most of the poems have titles, tho Brady hasn’t been consistent with the graphics of his titling, a strategy that is not, I think, accidental. The first poem I actually read all the way through lay deep in the book, on a page whose header contains the date October 21-22:

THE DUST CLUSTERS

Look, here’s a face, if

you lean in close you
can see congealed labor, plasma

knitting brows in concentration

that has decayed to fourteen hours’ sleep.
In the folds and flaps it smells
like peanut oil inside the head this

is the image of an elbow joint
blocked by hair.

Not so much the getting wasted
as the waste you get. Being ill-disposed

to buildup’s full, like time.

One could argue that this has all the elements of a traditional lyric – it’s constructed around a relatively coherent – if decidedly off-kilter – image – yet it really is the gyroscope of that frame that is the point here. Not only does the reader “see” the image first from the outside, then from the perspective of the figure in the poem, but it moves then not to resolution or synthesis, but rather spins off away from that – the last line’s “referents” (to call them that) is primarily to the vowel-consonant combinations of the last-half line of the previous stanza. Which is to say that it mimics in prosody what the previous lines have offered as scene. All of which in turn echoes the difficulty one has in focusing with, say, a hangover. The poem starts with a disjunct command – Look – and ends with an equally disjunct analogy, something that cannot be, of itself, seen: time.

That’s a lot to accomplish in just one dozen lines, on top of which it has a post-grunge surface texture that is quite unlike anything I can now think of being written. Five or six pages this good per year and you get to be famous, at least as far as poetry fame goes – but 260?

Let’s, just for the sake of the test, try another Brady poem at random. The hand stops flipping at page 97, which the header indicates represents May 4 – 5:

At Your Desk, a Highly Leveraged Zero

Every day is ground hog day
in the Cargill pork-processing unit.

An elite team of registration pros
can stretch your penumbra with size, snow cut
with small islands, marsh, ophitic structure
coiled about the flesh-stamps. No sweat, just twitch.

It’s written that the knife-hand often slips,

close to $50 idle protein all the long way up
to your command of standard stencils

in spilled blood and vermiform manure
over cereal monoculture in the new periphery,
to write in tiny burps and gags. Looks
as if the enemy of coordination looks like
futures, more bright winter glare on ink.

A sonnet about globalization with a slaughterhouse feel? On one level, this poem is not so radically different in approach from the close-up of the wasted person in “THE DUST CLUSTERS” – both use recognizable verse form strategies to present imagery that is completely – completely! – from outside of the received domain of literary imagery. But there the similarity stops. The rapid shifts in perspective of the first, which is all angles & fragments, is here a distant, cool objectivism, the one real bit of collage the comparison of cut flesh to mineral form. If the first poem feels like the cover image to a Kurt Cobain homage CD, this echoes the kind of literary ultra-leftism one might associate with Brian Fawcett or Kevin Magee.

Let’s try this test again, just flipping to the next page, the bottom half of which contains an untitled piece:

I’m probably more like a sand flea.

Without prehensile toes

the mathematical sublime
subtends whatever patch of skin
your post-whatever-else erosive

crabbed praxis of the gouged-out
decorative gesture on
the body of a spun

commodity can’t scratch.
Party over here, party over

there, nowhere the question
of the party. In bleached leisure
I’m all up in your skin, pus in pleasure,
salt in waistband. In English that
might rhyme. Here it’s rash, and flares.

Not, to my ear, as successful as the first two, but still superb – that long second sentence’s ever delayed pay-off has been done before, but the kick at the end still applies. If I have a hesitation, it’s that the disparate elements of this collage seem unmotivated – they don’t pull against one another strong enough. Still, the two meanings of the word party in that one incomplete sentence is something I’ll remember for a long time, that someone even wants to jar that particular set of possibilities strikes me as inherently exciting.

I can tell already that this is one of those books that I’m going to have to read slowly – it will almost inevitably take me longer to read than it did Brady to write. But that’s okay. Just as it’s okay if his sense of the line’s complexity isn’t the equal say, of Eleni Sikelianos, or the jarred juxtapositions aren’t as sharp as Graham Foust. What I see in Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News is a comprehensive intellectual ambition on a scale that I virtually haven’t seen on the part of younger poets in ages. It is completely awesome.

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Monday, May 9, 7:30 PM

11^th Street Bar

510 E. 11^th Street

(betwixt Avenues A & B)

Manhattan

Anselm Berrigan

Matt Hart

Ron Silliman

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We Knew a Man:

Robert Creeley Memorial Reading

Saturday, May 7, 4 PM

MIT

77 Mass. Ave., #10-250

Cambridge, M’ass

Joel Sloman, Dasha Lymar, David Rivard, Evan Ziporyn, Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright, Michael Gizzi, Bill Howe, Louisa Solano, Joseph Torra, Martin Espada, John Landry, Ruth Lepson, Everett Hoagland, Irene Aebi, Michael Franco, Jim Dunn, Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Willis, Clark Coolidge, Jorie Graham, Gerrit Lansing, Fanny Howe, William Corbett

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The California Department of Fish & Game describes Eureka Slough as

3 acres of tidal salt marsh. Egrets, herons, seals and sea lions are often found here. Access is by foot or boat only.

It is also the setting for one of the most subtle books of poetry I’ve come across in some time, Joseph Massey’s Eureka Slough from Austin’s ineffable Effing Press. At just 22 unnumbered pages in a 5-by-7 inch format & just 200 copies to the entire run, this is exactly what a micropress like Scott Pierce’s Effing can bring to poetry that can get there no other way.

Eureka Slough consists of eleven short poems – none is above 15 lines long – plus a longer poem or suite containing nine sections. Save for the suite, titles refer to settings, some as simple as “Alley” or “Porch.” Here is the first of two poems entitled “On Samoa Peninsula”:

Horizon
– left edge
a gray sliver
where the jetty
juts.

Notebook
propped up
by a stiff tuft
of beach grass.

You awake
within the poem.

The logic of the poem isn’t that much different from that of a syllogism or haiku: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The long view of the first stanza is balanced by the close-up of the notebook in the second – a miracle occurs & we get the realization with which the poem concludes. I say “a miracle” because the conceptual leap between the second & third stanza, between the outer world of vision & the inner one in which consciousness exists & is acknowledged, is ultimately the premise of the entire poem. Massey sets this up perfectly, making terrific use of wonderfully crunchy consonants (jetty/juts, Notebook/propped, propped up/by a stiff tuft) that flow finally into the hush of the double s in grass. The long vowels of the last strophe’s first line are foreshadowed by beach (and You’s role as the first word following a longer pause is accented not just by the lengthier than usual stanza breaks but also by the way in which each stanza has begun with a syllable containing o). The reader pauses on that hard k in awake before slipping into that last flowing line. Just how well Massey constructs this can be tested by how very little the hard p in poem in that last line is felt. Reading it aloud, one is much more conscious of the hidden Om in poem.

This is, I think, the dynamic one finds in Massey’s poetry generally. You could say that there is little here that you haven’t seen before, but you can also say – you’re virtually forced to – that you’ve never seen or heard it done this well before either. What about the poems of Cid Corman or Ted Enslin’s miniatures or even the best of Larry Eigner? Massey is practicing his craft at an extraordinarily high level:

In vines’

leaves latticed over
the sunk shed roof

gnats or bees
– both – blur.

For me, Massey raises the question of historical time in the poem in an interesting, sometimes troubling way. A poetry that isn’t seeking to evolve risks becoming merely decorative, the trap that Andy Goldsworthy’s earthworks fail to elude. Yet Massey’s attention to sonic & literal detail is so intense that it carries within itself a rigor that someone like Goldsworthy lacks. The joke in that piece above lies precisely in our recognition of how that final word mimics the sound of insect wings. Massey not only has to do it, but we have to get it for the poem to work. He makes it seem effortless.

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My idea of the relationship of mindfulness to reading & to the new sentence is not a prescription, by any means. There are – and indeed always have been – multiple possibilities here. It’s been at least three decades, for example, since Bromige first noted just how often I can be seen at a reading jotting something down into a notebook. It is rare, actually, that what I am scribbling relates directly to the reading (tho at times there will be depiction of the event itself). Rather, I find that mental space of confronting the well written word aurally is a remarkable – unsurpassed, in fact – tool for turning over the language in one’s own mind/experience/daily life as well. Thus I find myself at a reading listening to the text, observing the event & often composing something completely different all at once. Sometimes I feel that I will wander – get too far away from the reader’s text, or forget literally my own environment if I get “absorbed” into a work – but I usually can make myself return if I try. But I often think of this as the trifecta of literary environments, the best possible context in which to produce work. I have had the experience at other kinds of events from time to time – Zyxt has a description of an evening of jazz improv on Bernal Heights that took place over 30 years ago that I still think about as an exemplar of such an occasion.

In this regard, I wonder how different I am or might be from other poets. So I thought I would ask.

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Whenever I’ve been paired up at a reading alongside a poet who makes great use of memory to recite poems sans reference to any written text – Ivan Zhdanov, Jane Miller, for example – I’ve been impressed by the physical feat of it, & in Zhdanov’s case, by the rich, even luxuriant prosody that flows from his resonant baritone. But it’s an impulse I distrust.

Accordingly, I’m terrible myself at memorization of poetry – I’m sure that the longest poem I’ve ever committed to memory in its entirety must be Creeley’s “I Know a Man” – and mostly what I remember from poems, even my own, are phrases or snatches of text.

The memorized text, it strikes me, is the antithesis of what I think of – or want to think of – as the read text. To recite a poem, one is required to have the whole of it in mind, to be ever vigilant as to one’s position – the way an actor has to be on stage – with all of its past and its future right at the surface of awareness. One is perpetually other than present with the text at hand.

That is what I think has always bothered me most about referential or even argumentative texts – they have their place certainly (and this blog is one of those), but the reading experience they generate strikes me always as being radically different from what I want in my own poetry. What I want is to be present in the text right at the instant one is reading it. You can’t do that if the text is sending the mind to other places, to characters & tales, to arguments and positions.

Buddhism has a concept of mindfulness, which means paying attention, that I often think of as related to this. In the west, it’s been sort of bastardized in recent decades into a “be here now” kind of slogan, but that’s never bad advice. One of the advantages of the new sentence – indeed, perhaps its primary advantage – is that weaving together works from disparate sentences (or lines), the reader is prohibited from generalizing their experience save for in the most general ways, prosodically or through an abstract apprehension (bordering on intuition) as to the evolution of form at hand.

The genius of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life lies in its ability to both do this and play with the ultimate-Rashômon presentation of what, behind the text as a kind of perpetual tease, is really a coherent tale. In some of Peter Ganick’s more extreme works – the dense uncapitaliized prose of MATHEMATICS(s) or the visually regular tercets of <a’sattv> – one’s focus drops below that of the line or sentence, down to the phrase or word, with no other mediating second channel than the poem’s prosodic tone. Not surprisingly, I think Ganick is interested in the text as a meditative object, whereas Hejinian I don’t believe is.

The great high I get when I read aloud – I can’t think of a better word to describe the experience – is precisely the intersection of my breathing and that perpetually forced focus in on the sentence, the line, the phrase. At one level, that is exactly what my work is “about.” And when I read Bobby Byrd’s quotation of Robert Creeley at the head of his fine obit in The Texas Observer –

I believe in a poetry determined by the language of which it is made. I look to words, and nothing else, for my own redemption… I mean the words as opposed to content.

– my sense was that this was exactly Creeley’s sense of it as well.

It is hardly a surprise therefore that many of the poets whose poetry I’ve liked best in recent decades have had some kind of active engagement with meditation, Buddhism or, most often Zen, including Phil Whalen, a Zen monk for many decades, and Zoketsu Norman Fischer, the abbot-emeritus (if that’s the right phrase) of the San Francisco Zen Center as well as one of the finest poets of my generation. This isn’t even necessarily a Buddhist concern – I think this is the point where Fanny Howe’s Gnosticism links her right into language poetry. Nor necessarily even spiritual. I think one can talk of the poetry of Zukofsky, Stein and Watten, for example, in remarkably similar terms.

Nor does it surprise me, at this level, to discover that precisely what Billy Collins appears to find “inaccessible” about the poetry of Rae Armantrout is its requirement that the reader read. He wants that attention to go elsewhere, to a figure, a character, a tale. Accordingly his own poetry is a study in distractedness, which let’s recall is exactly what Max Jacob once argued that all poetry should be about. Collins’ verse fits that bill. Like Gertrude Stein’s home town, there is “no there there” in the most literal sense in Collins’ work. Nor in much of the School of the Q. That’s not an accident – that is what they’re after.

Jesse Crockett asked me awhile ago a trio of questions, just like those he asked Jordan Davis, including “How do you define poetry?” For me the answer to that it’s a constantly ongoing process. It’s learning to use one’s confrontation with language & the world to its fullest. Which inevitably means that one should sense oneself reading, just as the weightlifter can feel the weights – as resistance, indeed afterwards even as “burn” retained in the muscle & flesh. Reading without being aware of reading is not reading at all.

The other day I came across what I think may be the earliest historical example of the new sentence, and of language predicated on a refusal to integrate into higher, distracted mental models. It’s in the language of Edgar, Gloucester’s banished son who poses as a psychotic in King Lear. He first comes upon it in the great soliloquy that is the whole of Act 2, Scene 3:

The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod! poor Tom!
That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am.

Those last four words have always been my favorite of Shakespeare’s – they’re not so much grammatical as they are a series of concentric circles, starting with the outmost definition of self, one’s name, preceding through three other modes of being – I think it’s brilliant that nothing as a definition precedes am.

Yet it is in the following scenes that Edgar really displays a language of rapid reorientations:

Let us deal justly.
Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?
Thy sheep be in the corn;
And for one blast of thy minikin mouth,
Thy sheep shall take no harm.
Pur! the cat is gray.

This of course is only part of what Shakespeare is doing here. He contrasts the calculatedly faux folly of Edgar with Lear’s own deteriorating condition as well as the duplicitous (but superficially crystal clear) language of Lear’s older daughters, Goneril and Regan, their husbands & the would-be parricide Edmund. The whole chain of events set in motion by Cordelia’s refusal to speak untruthfully. Lear is about language, embodying a whole range of possibilities.

This of course reminded me that it is Lear that Olson spells out so brilliantly as the Ur-text behind Moby Dick in Call Me Ishmael. And that, if – to use my Zukofskyian counter-example, the other approach to Shakespeare among the late modern poets – the key lesson of Shakespeare is that love is to reason as eyes are to the mind, a key part of Lear turns on the blinding of Gloucester by Cornwall. There seems so much here to think about! Yet if there’s an earlier instance of this literary device that 370 years hence would become the new sentence, I’m not aware of it.

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Rivers and Tides is a documentary that follows British earthworks artist Andy Goldsworthy as he proceeds about his work – in Nova Scotia, where he constructs something vaguely akin to an igloo of driftwood that is carried out into the Bay of Fundy by the rising tides, at the Storm King art park in Mountainville, New York, where he arranges leaves into a circle of red & yellow, and at his home in Penpont, Scotland. Goldsworthy works with stone, twig, leaf, even ice, creating works that can last minutes or centuries, depending on the circumstances & materials used. (The piece above, which is literally hanging from a tree, collapsed before Goldsworthy could finish it, an occupational hazard in his work.) Some of these pieces – a wall at Storm King that snakes through a grove of trees, several egg-shaped mounds of stones or wood chips that one could run across in a wood or along a roadside – become site works. A few actually survive a trip to a gallery, or else are constructed (reconstructed?) there. But most are evanescent, surviving only as photographs in Goldsworthy’s many coffee table art collections or as limited edition prints in the hands of collectors.

At one level, Goldsworthy’s work is gorgeous – he knows it & he knows we know he knows we know it. On another, that’s a problem. Between the intellectually rigorous & the faux natural drop dead gorgeous, Goldsworthy will always opt for the latter. One is reminded of the austere philosophical pieces Robert Smithson used to produce, that simple cut in the lawn at the museum in Houston, the mound of earth in a gallery corner up against a small mirror leaning against the wall. The closest to that Goldsworthy can get is using a thorn to etch a curlicue line across a row of garlic leaves – a straight line would have been so much better. Goldsworthy’s success at all this is undeniable – yet one feels (I feel) that he is getting to have the career that Smithson might have had, if only he had lived.

And yet not. Goldsworthy’s work exists in a continuum that might start, at one extreme, with Robert Smithson & then continue to Christo & Jeanne-Claude, then to Goldsworthy & finally to somebody like Jim Denevan, the Bay Area chef who does “beach art.” That’s the intellectual rigor chart. Another variant, tho, might put Goldsworthy’s position second, just to the right of Smithson, with Denevan third & the Christo/Jeanne-Claude team fourth. That’s the inwardly motivated chart. One can shuffle these cards a lot of different ways, but only on some sequence that measures “warmth” or some vaguely fuzzy term like that does Smithson finish anywhere but first.

I doubt seriously that Billy Collins or Ted Kooser would agree. That Smithson could have been contemplating the historic implications of the work of Frederick Law Olmstead within his own work on Spiral Jetty would just make them scowl. That Denevan’s spirals in the beach mimics Smithson’s jetty, this time as farce, might be lost on them. But then, this is the branch of poetry that thinks promoting Shakespeare will cause people to write more like Dana Gioia or Ed Hirsch, instead of, for example, Olson or Zukofsky.

One of the great values of the austere approach is that it throws the viewer/reader back on his or her own resources. They have nothing to do but actually look, read, hear. Narrative figuration – Denevan sometimes draws fish, for example, just as Goldsworthy builds stellae in the form of eggs, or snakelike curlicues of various material – lets the viewer escape, literally, to the frame of reference. They no longer have to be in the art. Smithson for the most part avoids that & so, for that matter, do Christo & Jeanne-Claude. Think of John Cage’s 4’33” or Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, works that actually force you to confront the evidence of your senses.

Yet Smithson’s engagement with the history of landscape architecture, Cage’s with Buddhism, Brakhage’s with the history of film (or poetry, another art as temporal as film) are all also always going on. To know about them expands our understanding of the artist’s endeavor – but the reality is that they’re not necessary to look or listen. With somebody like Goldsworthy, tho, that reliance on reference to nature never ever goes away. In that sense, even tho his work – like this documentary of it – can be fascinating to look at, it will always be (“always already”) compromised.

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Of the 28 theater companies selected to receive funding from the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities program, one – People’s Light – happens to be based within 15 minutes of my house. People’s Light is a good regional theater group, with usually solid acting & crisp direction but – as is the case everywhere with regional theater – a bad case of going for the predictably safe shows. In the ten years that we’ve lived here, the best single production we’ve seen was the first – a staging of The Gospel at Colonus directed by Lee Breuer, the play’s co-creator, and utilizing singers from several of the black Baptist congregations in Coatesville, a black community in still moderately rural Chester County. The NEA funding was fortuitous, since the company produces one Shakespeare production almost every season – I think there may have been one exception in the last decade – just as it does Christmas Carol nearly every damn December.

This year’s Shakespeare was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Nick Olcutt, his first production with People’s Light. It was a good, tho not great, staging – well timed & generally well acted (only one performer audibly struggled with the 16^th century dialog), tho presenting the frame fable – the story of two men in love with the beautiful Hermia, whose father wishes her to marry Demetrius, and whose will the state, in the form of the Duke of Athens, will enforce at the penalty of death, but who instead loves Lysander & thus absconds with him into the forest, followed by Demetrius, who in turn is followed by Helena, who pines only for him – as a physical farce, so that the play-within-the-play, enacted by the “mechanicals,” town craftspeople offering amateur theater, led notably by Bottom the weaver, loses a good deal of its contrast with the more earnest problems of the star-crossed lovers, who become enmeshed in yet a third layer of plot, a dispute between Oberon, king of the fairies, & his queen, Titania. For awhile Bottom is turned into an ass, an experience that later seems like a dream, only to have Titania become enchanted with him. Lysander & Demetrius both are made to fall in love with Helena, to Hermia’s frustration, leaving it to Puck to undo most (tho not all) spells before the play’s end.

Mark Lazar, the best physical comedian in the People’s Light company, plays Bottom divinely, braying his lines when transformed & “dying” in the mechanical’s performance of Pyramus & Thisbe for a good five over-the-top minutes (brilliantly contrasted, I must say, by Ahren Potratz’ Flute, who, in drag as Thisbe, plays the role straight, underscoring, however inadvertently, just what has been lost by making the two pair of lovers in the forest into buffoons of romance).

It was the first Shakespeare play my boys had seen in person, tho they’ve been to a number of plays over the years. They were engrossed & the slapstick versions went over just fine with them. When we got home, it was Colin who noted that through his entire life we have had a print on the dining room that I’ve always described as having to do with Bottom: On Shakespeare, Louis & Celia Zukofsky’s response – that’s probably the best word – to the impetus of Shakespeare. The print is a blown up notebook page – the original was just five by nine inches – containing Zukofsky original plan for the third section of the book, “An Alphabet of Subjects.” Though it is printed maybe four times the page’s original size, the penmanship – the black is still quite legible, even given the crabbed hand, tho the red has faded in the 20 years since I first bought the print in Vancouver – is minuscule. Celia had the print made up the year after Louis died, an edition of 226 copies, of which ours in number 60. I’ve always thought of it as a talisman of Zukofsky’s thoroughness of vision – the alphabet he sketches out is remarkably close to the one finally published in a boxed hardbound two-volume edition by the Ark Press for the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. But it is one of the wonders of parenting that one gets, on occasion, to watch a child suddenly connect the dots that join together that almost invisible family iconography of what Mom & Dad put up on the wall in the dining room and how that joins to the world(s) outside our home.

So I went down to my office in the basement & brought up my copy of Bottom. I’ve read around in it a fair amount over the years, since I first bought my copy from Peter Howard’s Serendipity Books (back in the days when Small Press Distribution was just one part of the operation, so maybe 1970, maybe earlier). At the time, Bottom was certainly the most expensive book I had ever bought – I probably paid $20, back when Howl still cost 75¢. I remember that my copy of the OED, which I acquired in ’73, cost less. Yet tho I’ve read around in Bottom every year now for some 35 years, I’ve never read it front to back – and since I don’t read music, I’ll never be able to fully fathom (even partly fathom) what Celia is doing with & to Pericles in her setting of that play to music. This year, I thought, when I finish reading the Greenblatt biography & Lear (I’m alternating a chapter in the former with an act in the latter), I’ll set forth. This seems obviously to be the year for which I’ve been waiting.

Louis’ volume, after all, is really straightforward, just three chapters. The first is an attempt to define love – right on the first full page Zukofsky characterizes it as “the desire to project the mind’s peace” – as the central philosophical dimension in Shakespeare. The second, more wide-ranging, carries this forward & brings in everything from Bottom (hence the title) to healthy doses of early Wittgenstein. The third, literally, is an alphabet of subjects, beginning with A-Bomb and H-. “What does Shakespeare have to do with the A bomb?” Jesse asked. Shakespeare has to do with everything I replied, but a part of me felt that that answer was a dodge. I really need to focus on the book before I try to respond to that question again.

All of which reminded me that Zukofsky & Olson are our two great “Shakespearean poets” of the past 75 or so years, so radically at odds with the doting bourgeois everyman that the NEA hopes to insinuate into the hearts of the masses. Further, as both Creeley & Duncan made a point of noting, these two poets could barely read one another. There is an opacity from each to each that is worth contemplating. They did not share their Shakespeare, nor did they draw from the bard’s work the same conclusions. Yet they ensured, however indirectly, that an entire line of American poetry would carry it as a deep – even unconscious – resource. Time perhaps to think about bringing that aspect forward.

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It may seem paradoxical, but I was pleased to see so many people make use of the comments box to inform me that my reading of Evie Shockley was deficient. Not that anybody persuaded me, exactly – I have the book & I don’t see anything in there that stands up to any of the other readers I saw/heard that day – but sometimes the map is not the territory & there may be more than goes on between the pages of the Carolina Wren Press volume. In any event, I duly noted that Shockley’s advocates don’t all share the same aesthetic – so it wasn’t just that I upset the conservative poets – and the replies very much had the feel of members of her community speaking up. Citing specifics, in fact, not just advising me that my noggin was up my derriere. Those are all good things, and I will remember to take a closer look at her work when I come across it again in the future.

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There still may be a dead link or two – by which I mean nothing posted in the past three months – on the blogroll to the left, but I should note that “Miss Boynton” – who appears not to be a Boynton & may not even be a miss – was the blog that pushed the roll to the 500 mark last Thursday. Those devoted to poetry make up about 90 percent of the list & half of the rest are related at least obliquely to writing. If the goal is to create a public sphere in which poets can take their work, & that of others, seriously, then it’s no contest – poetry wins.

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