Wednesday, May 31, 2006
But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing the – what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the “Single Intelligence.” And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending – where its breathing, shall come to, termination.
Last Tuesday I noted that whenever I sense a hinge in Charles Olson’s critical writing, I pay close heed. Just as, in “Projective Verse,” Olson’s discussion of breath takes him to the syllable, a unit of language that he then describes as coming not from the breath, the play of air in vowels or the stops & slides of consonants, but to the ear & explicitly the ear’s proximity to the human brain: I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous… it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born. The paragraph cited above is what comes immediately next. Here we have a second definition of poetry, to go with A poem is energy transferred. Now we find the syllable and the line, they make a poem.
What I find most interesting here is Olson’s lack of bona fides for his claim that the line comes (I swear it) from the breath. Of all the literary devices that will become associated with Olson over the next 20 years, none will have the power of his equation of the line with breath – it dictates not only much that will go in projectivist poetics, but even the likes of Allen Ginsberg & Frank O’Hara were known to at least nod in its direction when discussing their own use of the line. By the time I was in college, in the latter half of the 1960s, having an identifiable line was tantamount to finding your voice, that elusive creative writing program quest. Your line was your brand. So it is fascinating here to think that Olson’s first argument for this equation comes down to a parenthetical I swear it. Talk about taking someone at his word!
And what is it that is so privileged here? That only he, the man who writes, can declare…where its breathing, shall come to, termination. The line is defined not by what goes on, but by how it ends.
What Olson preaches & what Olson practices, even here, maybe especially here, in a prose note he was intending to send off to a journal that had no particular reason to favor his stylistic quirks, is quite different. The use of “ungrammatical” commas in where its breathing, shall come to, termination can be accommodated only as pauses within the prose line, a mode of internal organization that any Olson reader will recognize as characteristic, at least up until the final notational poems with which Maximus concludes.
At this moment Olson is able to articulate his double-sided aesthetics, in which one (the syllable) represents freedom, the other (the line) responsibility:
The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say, Chaucer’s Troilus or S’s Lear, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.
Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
And the joker? that it is in the 1st half of the proposition that, in composing, one lets-it-rip; and that it is in the 2nd half, surprise, it is the LINE that’s the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going.
Thus it is breath, the heart, that must be the responsible half, not at all the Freudian model of ego, id, superego here.
“Projective Verse” has a two-part structure, first part poetics, second part philosophy, yet it is here, just halfway through the piece’s two numbered sections, that Olson has already fully articulated his poetics, as such. One might say that what has preceded up to this point has been strategic – the remainder of part I starts off as if tactical. For example:
The descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second, in projective verse, because of their easiness, and thus their drain on the energy which composition by field allows into a poem.
But this is more than just a warning that story as such too easily turns into vulgar narrative. The problem ultimately is ontological. Consider the broader picture:
Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand at the moment, under the reader’s eye, in his moment. Observation of any kind is, like argument in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content toward its form.
Form may never be more than an extension of content. But the two have very different relations to the poem itself. One is the poem. The other mostly threatens to get in the way. It is, Olson writes,
a matter, finally, of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used…. The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made to hold, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being.
For someone who never showed much, if any, interest in the Objectivists (he will prove this at the start of part II), Olson certainly sounds like an Objectivist here.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Eliot Weinberger responds to Andrew Schelling (and, secondarily, to Curtis Faville) in a new email on the subject of New Directions. I should note that I take the history of New Directions to be of total relevance to many of the social issues surrounding poetry, if only because this is the one press that has kept Pound and Williams in print, however badly, for some seven decades. Weinberger’s assertion that it was a mistake for Robert Creeley to leave New Directions for UC Press is at least a plausible interpretation, even for someone, like myself, who thinks that Creeley’s decision was clearly a no-brainer. The bureaucratic structure of a large university press has its pros and cons, no doubt, but I have a lot more faith in UC Press being here in 20 years, and in keeping the likes of Creeley & Olson in print, than I do New Directions. When we consider how much change is upon with regards to publishers, one index just might be bookstores. The main trade association of independent book sellers has lost two-thirds of its membership in the past 20 years precisely because so many have not adjusted to the dynamics of the new world. As someone will no doubt point out, poetry is only indirectly related to the publishing industry, as say the ad manager of the New York Times Book Review thinks of it. New Directions is the one small press to have survived since the 1930s in anything even remotely approximating its original form. And some on its list have been among the very most influential poets of the past century. Which is why these questions are not idle gossip. The ellipses are Eliot’s.
Dear Ron –
I thought I should respond to Andrew and some of the other correspondents...
Women: My original list was impromptu, and mainly limited to those ND published regularly. There were also various women published during this period, but they tended to be non-avants given single books (Deborah Larsen, Carol Bangs, Stevie Smith, Mary Karr, and others). Laughlin's last wild enthusiasm was for Anne Carson, but after her first book of poetry she decamped for Knopf.
I don't see the usefulness of retro-demographics, but it cannot be said that if Black Sparrow (and later North Point) inherited the mantle from ND, this had anything to do with gender. BS had, as I remember, two women poets (Wakoski and Wanda Coleman) and they were publishing many more books of contemporary US poetry than ND. North Point had Scalapino, did a small posthumous Niedecker, and had – who else?
I'm surprised no one mentioned race. Until their commitment to Brathwaite in the 80's and, recently, Mackey, ND had published only three books by black writers: two by Bob Kaufman and one by John Keene. BS had one black writer: Coleman. Did North Point have any?
I omitted many others from the period, including Jimmy Baca, Toby Olson, various Irish, Scots, and Brits, and single books by Thomas Lax, Emmett Williams (a very thick and fancy selected), Bronk (in the 60's), and Paul Hoover, to name some.
Nearly everything that your correspondent Curtis Faville writes is untrue. His essential narrative – Laughlin was a "gentleman publisher" who lost interest circa 1960, and everything, even the quality of the books, went downhill-- seems to be derived from a New Yorker profile that was written by a young neo-formalist poet who had no interest in any ND poets after Delmore Schwartz, and who was completely bamboozled by Laughlin's old-fashioned WASP patrician self-deprecation.
In his later years, Laughlin was less involved in the day-to-day operations of ND, and no longer read all the fiction manuscripts being seriously considered by the staff. But he personally initiated or approved every poetry book until a year or so before his death in 1997. To say that he was "almost certainly unfamiliar" with Palmer, Antin, Rosmarie Waldrop, etc., is completely false: he chose them. To say that if he were alive today, he'd be publishing Billy Collins and Ted Kooser, is ludicrous: old Modernists like Laughlin were hardly, shall we say, populists.
Before 1960, ND published beautiful books (with Valdonega, Stinehour, and others) and many cheap books. After 1960, they published beautiful books (with Valdonega, Stinehour, and others) and many cheap books.
ND did not publish Oppen, Rakosi, and Snyder when they were already well-known. Oppen's "The Materials" (1962): first book since "Discrete Series" (1934) and his famous silence. Rakosi's "Amulet" (1967): first book since "Selected Poems" (1941 - and published by ND) and his long, less famous silence. By the time of Snyder's "The Back Country" (1968), it's true that he wasn't obscure, but that was his first trade edition (previous chapbooks by Origin, Four Seasons, etc.).
Other factoids: People recommended by Rexroth included: Everson, Snyder, Tarn, McClure, Rothenberg, Antin. Dubravka Ugresic is Croatian and not Moslem. Antonio Tabucchi is an Italian who lived in Portugal for many years and wrote only two of his many books in Portuguese (one on Pessoa and a great novella, "Requiem: An Hallucination).
It should also be said that among the foreign poets published by ND during this period are: Neruda, Montale, Dunya Mikhail, Christensen, Paz, Lorca, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shabtai, Jaccottet, Guillevic, Bobrowski, Pacheco, Parra, Lihn, Aygi, Eugenio de Andrade, Supervielle, Lleshanaku, Bosquet, Char, Faverey, Gustafsson, Kusano, Shiraishi, Michaux, Valery, Cendrars, Chinese translations by David Hinton, Greek translations by Guy Davenport, and so on. No other publisher comes close. (I think Black Sparrow had one poetry translation chapbook.)
Finally, Creeley: Regardless of what one thinks of ND, it is undeniable that they are very good at handling estates: keeping the books in print, bringing out new editions and spin-offs, dealing with permissions, etc. If one is thinking of posterity, as Creeley reputedly was, there's no better publisher. UC Press is a giant bureaucracy where editors come and go. There's no guarantee that the inevitable successor to the editor who persuaded Creeley to switch will be equally enthusiastic about his work. It's nobody's business, but most people I know who've mentioned it think it was a terrible mistake.
Apologies for going one so long, but misinformation on the internet has a way of replicating.
all best –
Eliot
Monday, May 29, 2006
Now that I’m a subscriber to the Chicago Review, I can whine that I haven’t gotten my copy yet of the latest issue. Timothy Yu has a significant think-piece in it, posing as a review of Victoria Chang’s Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, a gathering of 28 poets in 194 pages from the
Eileen Tabios has republished Yu’s essay (in what a note says is a slightly different version) online in Galatea Resurrects #2. You should read it, rather than deal with my clumsy précis. What called my attention to this in the first place is a series of intense notes Pamela Lu posted to her own blog on the questions raised not only by the anthology, but by Yu’s response to it & her response to all of the above. Including the issues implicit in the ideas of these three different tendencies, especially as Lu found them embodied during her student days at the University of California.
Between Yu & Lu, there’s enough here to think about for days. And I feel certain that these are not (will not be) the final words on this topic.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Margaret Rockwell Finch & her daughter Annie
§
§
A great 5-CD set of
Derek Walcott’s selected poems
that doesn’t exist
§
Not yet “Famous Seamus”
on visiting Hugh MacDiarmid
§
Good news for bloggers.
The First Amendment is in effect.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Democracy for America is the organization that originally began as the Howard Dean presidential campaign in 2004. With Governor Dean off running the Democratic Party & providing a balance to the centrist impulses of Nancy Pelosi et al, DFA’s chair is now Jim Dean, Howard’s brother. Tom Hughes, a one-time aide to Al Gore & longtime Democratic operative, is the executive director, running an organization that still reflects its roots as the first major national political campaign to find its most powerful expression on the web.
One thing that DFA does that I think makes tremendous sense is pull together a list of candidates that it endorses and for whom it raises funds. There are other Democratic groups out doing the same thing these days but… but DFA’s group is clearly the most progressive, and its DFA-List is the first I’ve seen where a donor can pick the individual campaigns he or she likes and make donations to several of them all at once. There are some Democratic groups that will channel your money to the likes of Bob Casey, a pro-war, pro-NRA candidate who says he wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned & has no place for stem cell research while he’s at it. Not the DFA-List.
Some of the candidates whose campaigns I’ve contributed to include:
Ned Lamont, who is challenging Joe Lieberman for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate in
Francine Busby, running in a special election to replace jailed GOP congressman Duke Cunningham. Busby finished first in the initial special election and has an excellent opportunity to convert this seat from the far right to the progressive left next month.
Bernie Sanders for the Senate in
Lois Murphy for Congress in my own district here in
Those are just four of the 26 candidates you can support in a single internet transaction, if you so choose. You could do a lot of good with a $215.34 or thereabouts. To reach the DFA-List, click on the link, click on the logo. This Memorial Day weekend, do what you can.
Friday, May 26, 2006
Andrew Schelling replies today to Eliot Weinberger, noting the gender issues evident in the New Directions catalog.
Hi Eliot,
Looking at your ND list I see they didn't really miss a generation Focusing closer, I'd suggest though, they came rather late to people like Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe, and Nate Mackey, who all were in their late fifties or even their sixties before joining the list. Aside from their antipathy for language poetry, it's evident that they missed the shift in gender balance that became noticeable through the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Of ND's eleven new poets in these two decades — from your list — only two are women, with HD dead in 1962.
Your suggestion that without Rexroth around, there was nobody to advise Laughlin — this sounds right.
Adding only a few poets a decade, ND could have chosen women such as Scalapino, Hejinian, S. Howe, F. Howe, Bev Dahlen, Kathleen Fraser, Rachel DuPlessis. There were also Niedecker, Kyger, di Prima, who were knocking around the small press world with no single publisher committing to any of them. This is probably the gap I sensed when I went through books on my shelf. From 1960-1990 (thirty years) it appears ND only took up three women: HD, Levertov, and R. Waldrop.
Another way to put it: you couldn't imagine the Beat decades or
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Eliot Weinberger, who has himself attempted to persuade New Directions to publish William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All as a separate edition; wrote to Andrew Schelling after I ran Andrew’s meditation on the role of New Directions as a post-avant publisher (and Andrew’s assertion that one could, in fact, base a bookstore’s poetry collection on New Directions, at least a couple of decades ago). Eliot cc’d me and the two of them eventually gave me permission to run Eliot’s email here. All ellipses are Eliot’s, and I corrected just one date, that of
Hi Andrew —
I read your letter about New Directions on Silliman’s blog, which got me wondering whether there really is a 20-year "gap" in ND’s commitment to "EP/WCW/HD" tradition. So off the top of my head, I made a list...
Bearing in mind that they only publish about 40 books a year, mainly prose (they are not primarily a poetry press) and that they were publishing a lot of poetry in translation — the list seems pretty impressive.
One problem was that it was difficult to take on new people while still keeping up with new books by their old people. In the 60's they added quite a few people — probably too many (in terms of ND’s size, not the worthiness of the individual poets) and a bunch of them ended up going to Black Sparrow.
It’s safe to say they had no interest in the NY School and subsequent generations (Berrigan, Padgett, etc) — until Bernadette in the 90's. And they had no particular interest in Langpo — but let Messerli do that (pretty bad) anthology in the 80's.
But what I don’t see is your idea that they neglected an entire generation. Certainly there are individuals they missed over the decades. Sometimes because they simply didn’t have the opportunity; sometimes because of a mix-up (Bunting, notably); sometimes because of personal animosity toward Laughlin, or vice-versa (Zukofsky) It would be interesting to know who they actually rejected. (The only poetry book Laughlin told me he made a mistake in rejecting was
It’s true that the list loses steam in the 80's, in terms of new people. Perhaps this was because Rexroth was dead and Laughlin didn’t have anyone he really trusted to talk with about the new poetry. (Most of the new people in the 60's and 70's were Rexroth enthusiasms.) And of course he was getting old, and less receptive.
So here’s the list. I’ve kept it to "EP/WCW/HD trad"and New Americans, ignoring some one-shots, and some odd regulars like Edwin Brock in the 60's and 70's, and Allen Grossman and John Allman later on. And I’ve probably forgotten some....
1960's:
Continuing: Pound (d. 1972), Williams (d. 1963), Rexroth, Levertov, Ferlinghetti, Merton (d. 1968).
New people: Oppen, Rakosi,
1970's:
Continuing: Rexroth (d. 1982), Levertov, Ferlinghetti, Everson, Oppen (d.1984), Snyder, Corso, Carruth.
New people: Creeley, Rothenberg, Antin, HD (d. 1961, pub by ND posthumously), McClure, Corman.
[Rakosi, Reznikoff, Everson, and
1980's:
Continuing: Creeley, Rothenberg, Antin, Duncan (returns from silence; d. 1988), Levertov, Ferlinghetti, McClure.
New people: Sobin, Weinberger (since you mentioned me, though hardly a poet), R. Waldrop, David Hinton (as translator), Peter Dale Scott.
[Snyder goes with his friend Shoemaker to North Point. ]
1990's:
Continuing: Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Rothenberg, Antin, Levertov, R. Waldrop, Weinberger, Sobin, Hinton, McClure, Peter Dale Scott. [Plus one book by Corman.]
New people: Palmer, S. Howe,
[Sobin is dropped after three books; d. 2005]
2000's:
Continuing: Creeley (d. 2006), Ferlinghetti, Rothenberg, Palmer, S. Howe,
New people: Mackey, Thalia Field.
Continuing posthumous publications: Pound, WCW, Rexroth, Oppen, Duncan, Levertov, HD, Merton. [Creeley, just before his death, bizarrely decided to go to
Adding the non-avants, and various strange one-shots, in any given decade they published about 15 living English-language poets, as well as unpublished/uncollected books by the dead, and many foreign poets. In the 60's there were maybe half a dozen more — but of course books were cheaper then. So it's hard to say that a "generation" is missing. Regardless of what one thinks of the individual choices, the living poets on the list right now are in their 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, and (Ferlinghetti) 80's.
Well, that kept me up! Hope you saw the anthology ("World Beat") I just did of all the foreign and some of the Americans ND has been publishing in the last 15 years...
all best —
Eliot
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
When I began the project of this weblog back in 2002, I had multiple models abstractly in my mind of what I might want to do. My nephew, Dan Silliman, had shown me the possibility by posting his philosophy papers on his blog, or at least making them accessible through it. And there were at least three different models of critical writing that floated about in my head. One was Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, another the short essays of Robert Creeley’s first collection of prose, A Quick Graph, and the third the reviews of Gilbert Sorrentino, collected into Something Said.
The number of poets from the New American generation & the one following who could reliably write poetry, fiction and criticism are exceptionally few: Creeley, Kerouac, Kelly, some folks would say Dorn. But hardly anyone seemed as completely ambidextrous – if that’s the word – as did this guy from
Not that Sorrentino loved those works uniformly. While the first five authors all were associated with journal Caterpillar, Clayton Eshleman’s journal that shared Sorrentino’s post-Projectivist/NYC perspective, Sorrentino didn’t much have time for the
Not much to say about Living with Chris, because it’s a picture-poem; a few lines of verse to a page, each page also containing a drawing, comic-strip genre, by Joe Brainard. Berrigan is a second-generation “
It’s worth underscoring here that, yes, Poetry magazine did call The Sonnets “a notable book” as early as 1968, by virtue of this passage. And that may be why Sorrentino thought to include that pamphlet.
Even in the works Sorrentino ultimately dismissed, he often took the time to ask what the poet was trying to accomplish, considering it on its own terms, rather than simply his. His passage here on Magowan’s Voyages recognizes that Magowan is an inherently uneven poet – something I’ve always thought was the consequence of not taking a position as to where he stood with poetry & its schools & histories – citing some of the very strongest lines in the book, acknowledging them as such. His section on Dodd here may well be the most serious consideration that poet’s writing ever received in print.
Many of the essays or chapters in Something Said aren’t essays, as such, but rather bundles of multiple shorter pieces published in different magazines. It gives his consideration of Paul Blackburn & Jack Spicer – he was one of the first reviewers to take both seriously & actively promote their work, writing an elegiac remembrance for Poetry for Spicer in 1965 – the feel of blog notes, except more carefully crafted. That, I think, is exactly what I was imagining when I was wandering around the foggy environs of
Sorrentino never got the big ticket acknowledgement for his accomplishments that he deserved. His fiction has too many layers for an age that thinks Philip Roth is serious writing, and he himself generally avoided the poetry scene. In all the years he was at Stanford, I never once saw him up at an event in
¹ Indeed, in Barry Alpert’s interview in Jacket 29, Sorrentino suggests that if he had to do it all over again, he might not write criticism at all.
Labels: Sorrentino
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
There is a hinge of sorts in Charles Olson’s argument in “Projective Verse,” and I’ve learned over time that one should pay close heed to these moments. When Olson, having laid out his three simplicities and his claim for the importance of breath, concludes
I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.
Olson then moves, instanter as he would say, to this:
Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem.
What Olson does not say here is that breath – that which flows in vowels & abrupts or grinds in every consonant – leads to, causes, or otherwise inscribes the syllable. Indeed, that isn’t where Olson is going in “Projective Verse” at all. In the final phrase of that previous paragraph – the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath – it is the ear to which Olson will pin the syllable, not the breath.
King and pin of versification: it is worth keeping in mind that Olson does not appear, here or elsewhere, to have seriously studied linguistics, for the syllable hardly is the “smallest particle of all,” but rather is a construction – one whose architecture is always evident – out of such truly smallest particles, phonemes. One-syllable words are themselves most often marvelous schemes of conjoined phonemes, so that it is rare to find one – I, oh, possibly you – that is coterminous with a lone phoneme. Be, after all, contains two.
Olson’s perception of the syllable has a historical dimension –
verse here and in
– but it is not the historical that principally concerns Olson here, so much as the dynamics of the syllable in sounding the poem:
It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity of words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on.
Leading the harmony on, because
In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. The fineness and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech.
This is an argument for melopoeia over logo- and phano-, Pound’s old troika, and worth considering, especially when one thinks of that branch of Olsonian post-Projectivists (Paul Metcalf, say) who envisioned The Big O as permission for a logopoetics of the archives. Again, tho, we note that return to the idea of syllable as “the minimum” and – this is new and troubling – “source of speech.”
But to those who would let the syllable lead the harmony on, Olson issues
this warning, to those who would try: to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless – and least logical.
The idea that the least careless should also, at the same moment, be the least logical is worth thinking about. Even as he clumsily wades through his homegrown linguistics, Olson here echoes Jack Spicer’s Martian radio, insisting on the importance – and formal inclusion – of some aspect of the irrational:
For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance:
After which colon, Olson inserts an unattributed quotation identifying etymological sources for common English one-syllable words that propose more weighty philosophic dimensions, such as “’Is’ comes from the Aryan root, as, to breathe.” From folk etymology, Olson moves very rapidly to folk physiology (the ellipses in what follows are Olson’s):
I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed . . .
it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . .
it is from the union of the mind and ear that the syllable is born.
The mind chooses what the ear hears – that seems to be gist, that there should always be this privilege. But what is most fascinating here is the metaphoric family invoked by Olson in which the king is born of brother & sister. Which in turn makes me very curious about that list at the end of that second paragraph: the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . . To my mind, that is perhaps the most mysterious single sequence in all of Olson’s writing. Trying to figure out not only how ear & mind are siblings & equals (having thus to resist my own instinct that what Olson calls the ear is always already a part of mind, just as is recognition of shapes & objects in sight – there are no innocent senses beyond the age of what? three?), but also how those three cognitive domains include one another or at least overlap.
Labels: Charles Olson, New American Poetry
Monday, May 22, 2006
Breathe, say all manner of meditators. Tho he was obviously interested in the work of Carl Jung, it’s hard – impossible – to envision Charles Olson, all chain smoking, chain drinking six-foot-nine of him, sitting Zazen. Olson is nothing if not the antithesis of the stereotype of the mellow Zen acolyte dressed in natural fibers, nibbling tofu with chopsticks or else engulfed in the presentness of inhaling, then exhaling, with no further agenda than being here now.
Yet no other poet of his generation – or any other, for that matter – has so directly connected poetry to the physiological process of breathing itself. Listen to him, in 1950, writing in his most famous essay, ”Projective Verse”:
If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and head. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.
It’s worth keeping in mind where precisely this fits into the logic of Olson’s poetics. He’s concerned here with defining what he alternately calls Projective or Open verse or Composition by Field, “as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the ‘old’ base of the non-projective.” Which is to say that Olson is very much proposing this as a poetics of all that is alternative to the School of Quietude, a claim that both empowers and limits his argument, ultimately (e.g. Olson will thus write prose poetry out of his picture, regardless that it is equally opposed to “inherited line, stanza, over-all form”).
From which foundational claim – this will account for all that is anti-SoQ – Olson then proceeds to stake out what he calls “simplicities that a man learns” – his language is hopelessly sexist – “if he works in OPEN,” this phrase never to join up with an ultimate noun. The “simplicities” are, as I read them, three underlying dynamics, true of all poetry (or so he claims), the second being the most famous, Creeley’s dictum: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.” But the first, what Olson calls “the kinetics of the thing,” includes an actual definition of the poem:
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself, must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy discharge.
This is one of the most overlooked claims in the recent history of poetry, given just how much attention has gone to other parts of Olson’s project, and to all the work by others (not just Creeley & Duncan, say, but virtually everyone who came in contact with any of the three Projectivist musketeers). The most important single word here, I swear, is the simplest: Okay. Olson’s prose, not unlike his verse, perpetually twists & turns, rushing propulsively forward, often sounding quite breathless in the process. This one word interjection is exactly not that. It’s a pause, a punctuation, an emphasis. He wants us to take that claim in: A poem is energy transferred.
What does he mean? Why must the poem, at all points, be an energy discharge? This is a far cry, actually, from Pound’s dichtung = condensare. Until you consider that condensare just might be a necessary compacting process required to amp up the voltage so that energy is maximized through pressure. Olson very carefully declines to define this energy – we know only that it will have some several causations – nor to tell us, here at least, how this pseudo-electrical current gets from writer to reader.
Then, after Creeley’s dictum, comes the third “simplicity,”
And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.
This, it is important to note, is antithetical to the traditional rules of exposition. Olson is not only arguing for a particular mode of writing, but against another, in this instance the sort of thing that could be crafted into an outline, converted into a series of topic sentences, then laid out in an orderly, but definitely hierarchical structure. Olson’s argument is the absolute opposite of such hierarchy. The only moment to consider is neither the proposition at the start of the argument, nor the conclusion at its end, but rather now. In this way, Olson again anticipates the present-centered strategy of a whole host of Eastern practices, even tho, the advice he then gives, as consequence & example, sound about as unholistic as one might get:
get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split-second acts, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.
That sense of constant & frenetic motion is a characteristic of Olson’s writing, even as, with that articulation of the third simplicity, the adverbial phrase IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY keep Olson’s key verb phrase from immediately & directly completing itself. One might think of this, as David Saffo suggests in the latest issue of H_NGM_N, as a rhetoric for phenomenologists.
It is impossible, to my ear at least, to see that term, simplicities, without hearing Olson’s words elsewhere, in “Maximus, to himself”:
I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
Olson actually calls his “simplicities,” “the dogma.” This is the set up for the first of his claims “inside the machinery, now, 1950, of how projective verse is made,” which leads us directly to Olson’s claim for breath.
Labels: Charles Olson
Sunday, May 21, 2006
The latest book from Jawat Haidar, a Lebanese poet two years older than the late Stanley Kunitz.
§
A two-sentence article in the Washington Post today on the subject of backwards books, or, as the subtitle has it, “skoob sdrawkcab.” § Turbulence: the house Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Richard Tuttle had built for them by Steven Holl. And the problems they’ve encountered. § Click on the pic
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Pam Rosenthal / Molly Weatherford
Thanks only partly to the New York Times Book Review, people have lists on their minds. Beth Quittman, whose blog is called Book of the Day, is building an alternative “top 25 list” of recent American fiction. You can submit your lists to her via email or in the comments section to her blog. Ted Pelton has compiled a list of 113 plausible alternatives to the Philip Roth-centric Times list.
Meanwhile, Pam Rosenthal writes to note that Molly Weatherford (Pam’s porn pseudonym) has her first novel, Carrie’s Story, on Playboy’s list of the “25 Sexiest Novels Every Written,” situated at number 12 right between Lolita & Fear of Flying. Harry Matthews’ Singular Pleasures is also included on a roster that contains everything from Georges Bataille’s
Story of the Eye to
The new notoriety thus far not reflected in Amazon sales. Feel free to fulminate on the ridiculousness of the list – in fact, I'm hoping somebody fumes and fulminates loudly and publicly; it's not really a book best-of list unless it meets with shrieks of contempt and hoots of derision.
We note that a list of the 25 sexiest novels ever written that includes not one by Kathy Acker does indeed deserve “shrieks of contempt and hoots of derision.” No Dodie Bellamy? No Dennis Cooper? No John Rechy or Hubert Selby, Jr.? No William Burroughs? No Samuel R. Delany? But to get instead Harold Robbins, Erica Jong, Grace Metalious, and Norman Mailer at his very worst? Heff must have worked on this list personally – it certainly has that octogenarian touch. How Weatherford & Matthews managed to make it onto this list is an utter mystery.
Friday, May 19, 2006
On Wednesday, Andrew Schelling noted the importance of the Christmas broadsides that Moe’s Books published during his days (1982-90) working in the store. This is one tradition that may continue to this day, although Andrew also noted the poetry reading series Owen Hill has started in the store, which has grown in a relatively short time into being one of the two major reading series in the East Bay (the other being the 21 Grand series in downtown Oakland).
Broadsides, chapbooks, memorable reading posters are indeed all excellent re-enforcers of any marketing effort to get readers to grasp your commitment both to poetry and to quality. In recent years, quite a few reading series – and at least two different talk series that I can think off – have begun to add some kind of material companion to the event itself. I’ve had several wonderful broadsides done for readings that I’ve given over the years. One – a letterpress version of
Commemorative materials need not represent the high end of fine press printing, as both of those projects do, to show ambition & have an impact. One of the most impressive programs of such reading-related work in the
Fetch contains six poems, nine pages of actual work – right within the range of six to twenty pages favored by the Belladonna series. Here is the title poem:
1
Was it a flaming mouse
that burned Mares' house down
or was it just the wind?
On Tuesday Mares and his nephew
stood by the original version.
Is this plausible?
Fire Chief Chavez said Tuesday
that he thought so.
2
Let's see
your itty-
bitten specificity
fetish,
your mom's phantasmic
what's-it
held conspicuously
under threat.
Day hoists its mesh
of near
approximations,
(its bright
skein of pores.)
Eyes fetch thrown
shadows
Readers of this blog will know already that Armantrout is one of my half dozen favorite poets of all time & this poem is full of evidence as to just why this should be so. The first section is descriptive with that clean, hard edge one associates with the likes of Williams & Oppen at their very best, tho what is here depicted might as easily be the plot for an episode of the X-Files. The image of the flaming mouse is hard to shake once you’ve read it & impossible to see as just setting up that internal rhyme of the second line. The poem’s second section has the familiarity of a
Fetch was released last week, when Armantrout read in the Belladonna series with Laynie Brown and Marjorie Welish, both of whom also have new chapbooks out in this series (tho I’ve seen neither). Overall, the Belladonna series is, and has been, a who’s-who of post-avant women poets: Fanny Howe, Eleni Sikelianos, Kathleen Fraser, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norma Cole, Carla Harryman, Tina Darragh, Chris Tysh, Jennifer Moxley, Alice Notely, Eileen Myles, Lydia Davis, Elaine Equi, Maggie Nelson, Summi Kaipa, Anne Tardos, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Leslie Scalapino, Nada Gordon, Catherine Daly – the list just goes on and on. It’s not an accident that American poetry in my lifetime has made the transition from being a male dominated art form (think of the Allen anthology in 1960, with just four women among its 44 contributors) to one in which women hold up more than half of the sky (think of the new Bay Poetics anthology, 59 of whose 110 poets are women). A series like the Belladonna has been both instigator and beneficiary of this transformation. Its chapbooks are small editions – there are just 126 copies of Fetch – and yet 74 of its first 93 books remain available.
It’s also been an excellent week for Armantrout overall, who became, I do believe, the first contributor to In the American Tree to have a poem in the New Yorker, of all places. I take that as a sign, not unlike the fact that my district, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by roughly two to one, just elected its first Democrat to the Pennsylvania State Senate in over a century. Spring really has arrived.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
New Directions founder James Laughlin in his office, 1941
One day later, I got a second note from Andrew Schelling, which, in addition to giving me permission to run the first email here on the blog, included this meditation on the history of New Directions.
I went into a sidetrack this morning and thought further about New Directions. Their almost single-handed support of the Pound-Williams-HD lineage (I don't know what else to call it) & New Americans ended in the crucial years from 1968-1975. I don't know the details (is Bill Corbett still working on his ND history?) but they let go a number of writers in the early seventies.
Last titles ND published by these poets:
Pound's Drafts & Fragments 1968.
(Williams and HD are dead by now, also Patchen, & Pound in '72)
Everson 1968.
Rakosi 1971.
Snyder 1974.
Oppen 1975.
You could also say that Levertov begins to represent something quite different after the mid-seventies, and is decreasingly read by experimental poets. Black Sparrow picks up some of the ND cast-offs: Everson, Rakosi, Oppen.
1968-75 seems a turning point in history & emergence of a recognizable new generation of writers. It takes ND twenty years to see how things have changed. So after a gap of two decades ND resumes with D. Hinton's translations ('89), E. Weinberger, B. Mayer, S. Howe ('90), M. Palmer ('95).
One could go deeper into the opportunities New Directions has missed over the years – the one has always boggled me is the failure to bring out Spring & All as a separate volume, perfect for students to carry around in their pockets – it would still be the single best book of poetics ever published (also the single best book of poetry). That’s not only failing in your commitment to authors and readers, it’s leaving serious money on the table.
The one poet who seems clearly to run counter to this history is Robert Creeley, whom New Directions began to publish in 1978, with Hello, a relationship it has continued to this day.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
My comments regarding the forthcoming closing of Cody’s on
Dear Ron,
Thanks for the news about Cody's closing. And for the good, & very true comment that
Moe's continues to have a terrific selection of poetry. When I worked there with Michael Malcolm, it was I who worked the transformation in poetry. Michael was really the guy on the third floor, devoted to Eastern Religions. He and I both had worked at Shambhala Books next door, in the seventies. Now that Shambhala has had to close – same reasons as Cody's – Phillip Barry who owned Shambhala for the last ten years or so of its existence carries on the Eastern section at Moe's.
I think the reason the USED poetry selection got so good was that by developing a smart, well stocked NEW selection we proved a commitment to poetry. This brought many poets (& students &c.) in, who swapped their good titles. The used selection can only be as good as the intelligence of the bookstore's customers.
It was fairly easy to develop the poetry section. I should also note that its location in the store was what in terms of marketing psychology is a choice spot – in other hands it would have been dominated by crappy bestsellers. Dead center on the first floor, where everyone who walks in the door drifts. Another way of putting it is that you can't help walking direct to the poetry section. By contrast, in Cody's if you don't know where the section is you'll probably need to ask a worker to point the way.
When I got to Moe's, 1982, it had the familiar hopeless little shelf of new titles. Here's the formula I used, good in the eighties & probably instructive for booksellers still:
New Directions first of all. You keep in stock all titles by the poets. Bookstores fail by thinking one Pound title, one of Williams enough. But you stock everything by: Pound, Williams, HD, Rexroth, Oppen, Creeley, Levertov, Snyder,
Book People then gave you Black Sparrow, so you add: Reznikoff, Rakosi, Dorn, Bukowski, Wakoski, Eshleman,
Consortium in those days handled
A trip every two weeks to SPD (which carried Sun & Moon as well as most City Lights poetry titles) and you had virtually everything else you could want: Roof, Tuumba, This, Potes & Poets, & 400 more. From them also journals: Sulfur, Temblor, Hills, Poetics Journal, ACTS.
In the eighties this was all you needed to bring poets into the store every time they walked past.
The other important touch was the free Christmas season broadsides, so on my watch you could get (printed by Wesley Tanner, most of them) Duncan, Whalen, Niedecker, Oppen, Rexroth, Alice Walker, Pat Reed, Palmer (worth noting the generosity here of New Directions which never asked any money).
To create this kind of friendliness for good poetry required two things. The first is easy: an enthusiast or poet on the staff. The other is rarer: an owner, Moe Moskowitz, who trusted & loved his employees, respected their interests, paid them well, gave them free reign, & cared for the interests of his customers, his city, and its citizens.
When I left in 1990 Owen Hill took over the poetry. Our tastes vary at points, which is as it should be. He has continued to respect my understanding of poetry – leaving the basic feel of the selection much as it was when I was there – augmenting it with his own intelligence. He has added a regular reading series for poetry in the small press world.
I have seen only one or two selections of poetry that rivals Moe's in over twenty years. Most bookstores are hopeless in their poetry offerings.
People outside the book world may think Cody's closure is good news for Moe's. It is not. People came from all over the world to that stretch of
Hope this is of interest to you!
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
I’m intrigued by the fact that Allen Ginsberg’s interest in what he identifies rightly as the gap of meaning that can open up between words occurs, at least partly, as a result of his interest in Cézanne, a fascination Ginsberg dates to 1949 & which certainly lasted with him through the composition of Howl in 1955. At the very same time – and in the very same town – as college student Allen Ginsberg was looking to impressionism for a means of breaking through in his writing, painters were instead discarding the referential folderol of depiction in favor of a more direct looking at the world, one in which what one sees on a canvas is paint. The disjunct between the two practices reminds me very much of a response that Ginsberg once gave to an interviewer who was trying to provoke him into saying something dismissive about language poetry. “One generation points at the moon,” Ginsberg replied, or words approximately to that effect, “The next generation notices that they’re pointing.” In fact, Ginsberg’s comments quoted here yesterday, and the gist of that long reply to Tom Clark in the Paris Review interview back in 1966 shows Ginsberg himself very much noticing that he’s pointing, very consciously tearing that process apart & “reconstituting” it, as Ginsberg quotes Cézanne saying, in Howl.
Today, we understand a phrase such as “hydrogen jukebox” very much in the light of Mark Turner’s theory of cognitive blending, a standard process of conceptual integration. In the diagram below,
hydrogen represents the first input, jukebox the second. The process is no different whether the phrase is hydrogen jukebox or green tree or, for that matter, green furiously. What Ginsberg is interested in here – and associates with Cézanne, Shakespeare & Blake (all of whom he mentions in this regard in the Paris Review interview) – is the point at which the domains of the two inputs are sufficiently dissimilar as to set up what he calls a “gap between the two words that the mind would fill in with the sensation of existence.”
That “sensation of existence” sounds to my ear one hell of a lot like what you hear when you listen to John Cage’s notorious 4’33” – whether it’s literally the sounds of the local environment plus the constant two rhythms of one’s own body (the low pulse of the blood, the high whine of synapses firing in the brain), or whatever. What Ginsberg is trying to do is to get through whatever blocks this perception, so that one sees completely the world as it really is, without entanglements, without even history or knowledge. Ditto Cage.
To get you to see this, Ginsberg attempts to get you not only to see with language, but understand where it ends & the referential world beyond begins. Thus Howl is filled with such phrases as negro streets, angry fix or starry dynamo in the machinery of night. But this widening of the gaps – and understanding, at least intuitively, the right
cognitive schema to juxtapose against one another – isn’t the only mechanism Ginsberg uses to make this palpable to the reader. Take for example the larger segment of
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz
the use of the word poverty at the start of the second line deliberately tilts the syntax away from grammaticality – impoverished and in tatters – showing us the schema, rather than the normative application of it. It’s an instance where the pointing at the moon & the process of pointing are allowed each to become visible. And it’s infinitely more powerful, more real even, than the same phrase would be in standardized grammar. Indeed, a secondary effect is to mimic a speaker so excited as to be stumbling over words as he tries to convey his message – a definite feature of Howl & something that differentiates it from almost all prior American poetry.
Ginsberg is so often treated as the hippy guru, part wise man, part clown, that we tend to forget just what a meticulous craftsman he was, how deeply schooled in classic verse – I once saw him teach a class on Herrick at Naropa – and how conscious he was of everything he was doing. It’s no accident that on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Howl, newspapers across the nation have taken notice of the impact of this simple little book. For many Americans, unaware of how deeply poetry had changed over the previous century, Howl was a wake up call, showing them what a contemporary verse might be.
Monday, May 15, 2006
A device that is often associated with language poetry – and with surrealism – the conjoining of words from dissonant discursive schema is something that shows up as well in the work of Allen Ginsberg, right from the beginning. The phrase “hydrogen jukebox,” from the 15th line of the first section of Howl is a case in point. The line itself reads:
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after
The phrase has been used for everything from Peter Schjeldahl’s selected art writings to an opera by Philip Glass that incorporates many of Ginsberg’s writings as its libretto. The phrase has its own page on Wikipedia. It’s the name of a rock band in Philly, a poetry series in the
In his Paris Review interview – conducted by Tom Clark fresh out of the
What actually triggers the discussion is a question –
The last part of “Howl” was really an homage to … Cézanne’s method, in a sense I adapted what I could to writing…. [J]ust as Cézanne doesn’t use perspective lines to create space, but it’s a juxtaposition of one color against another color (that’s one element of his space), so, I had the idea, perhaps overrefined, that by the … juxtaposition of one word against another, a gap between the two words – like the space gap in the canvas – there’d be a gap between the two words that the mind would fill in with the sensation of existence….
I was trying to do similar things with juxtapositions like “hydrogen jukebox.”
This makes great sense, at least from a certain angle, and should serve as a reminder of just how much someone like Clark Coolidge actually was able to get from Ginsberg, that the origin of Coolidge’s practice – which Robert Sward once infamously characterized as “psychedelic word salad” – was not derived entirely from Dada or surrealism. This question of a gap, of course, takes on new dimensions with language poetry – primarily through the extension of this use of disparate juxtapositions & between statements in the “new sentence.” It is precisely the cognitive dissonance between the schema hydrogen (science, bomb, technology, etc.) and jukebox (style, youth culture, music, sexuality) that Ginsberg is ultimately writing. Underneath is the implication – I’m not even sure that Ginsberg himself sees this – that these two phenomena are expressions not of two realms that have nothing to do with one another, but of a third common schema of which each is but an part, that the youth culture of the jukebox is predicated upon the power of the hydrogen atom. Ginsberg is writing in 1956 what will become explicit in the work of social theorists like Herbert Marcuse & others a decade later.
¹ Still going at that point, 1966, by his
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Henry Theodore Tuckerman –
“Tuckermanities” live on
I continue to get asked, primarily by newbies to this blog, about the phrase,
No, I did not invent the concept of a “
If Mr. Tuckerman persists in his quietude, he will put a quietus on the magazine of which Messrs. Bradbury and Soden have been so stupid as to give him control.
Elsewhere, Poe dismisses “Tuckermanities” as an “arrant / Bubble.”
I first used the phrase in a discussion of the Robert Kelly/Paris Leary anthology, A Controversy of Poets, on October 9, 2002. The Kelly/Leary anthology was valuable in acknowledging the ongoing presence of this division in American letters in the 1960s, with Kelly selecting poets from the New American tradition, Leary those from the SoQ. Just last week, I quoted Louise Bogan (one-time poetry editor of the New Yorker) praising Marianne Moore’s work with The Dial, for making clear ““the obvious division between American avant-garde and American conventional writing.” This “obvious division” has been deeply engrained in America’s literary heritage & persists to this day – as a look at the publication lists of the Gang of Six major trade publishers, or of awards like the Pulitzer or National Book Critics Circle, or of the annual lists of “most notable books” of poetry in the New York Times will confirm, where Louise Bogan is far more apt to be represented than other women poets of her time, whether Lorine Niedecker or H.D. or Besmilr Brigham or Barbara Guest.
A good discussion of what I think the phrase implies appeared here on January 5, 2004.
One of the primary mechanisms of institutional power that the SoQ employs is the claim that it represents poetry – some tell-tale journal titles: Poetry, American Poetry Review – and everybody else just represents some niche poetics: Beat, Avant-garde, Postmodern, Language, Black, Women’s, Leftwing, etc. If that were true, then presenting the world of poetry as tho it were largely SoQ, with a sprinkling of others, would seem fair, reasonable, logical, rather than merely partisan.
Poetry magazine may have been inclusive and broadly focused during the last seven years of Henry Rago’s tenure as editor (1962-9), but it has since become a movement journal most closely identified with New Formalism, a literary tendency whose obsession with inherited patterns obscures a much deeper lack of interest in form itself. Given $100 million by a pharmaceutical heiress, the Poetry Foundation recently funded a survey that had nothing to do with the needs of poets & everything to do with the publishing interests of the Gang of Six.
The most useful thing any outsider can do about such tactics is simply to name them, to make them visible, to make their literary tendencies perceptible as such. There are, after all, some fairly major differences – the American Poetry Review has a different aesthetic than does Poetry or The New Criterion or Ploughshares – but we’ll never fully understand that if we pretend that they’re the unmarked case. Ironically, SoQ poets are far more likely to have a lasting influence on letters if they treated more accurately than is now the case. Today, the death of an SoQ poet is a virtual guarantee that in 20 years he or she will have receded from memory. Remember James Dickey? Recall when he was treated as the most significant of American poets? That was within the last half century. SoQ poets virtually all get to be neglectorinos, to use Larry Fagin’s word. They all end up as famous as Tuckerman. Whether that is because their poetry has no lasting value without the institutional power that foregrounds their work while they’re alive, or is an inadvertent consequence of approaching the world as if they have no real poetics, no inherent clustering tendencies or literary shape, that they’re “just poetry,” is open to debate. But they’re the ones who stand to benefit most from becoming identified, if not with the SoQ as such, then with literary tendencies that have names of their own choosing.
So I will continue to use the phrase in order to give militant conservatives like William Logan, Christian Wiman, Dana Gioia, Billy Collins & Ted Kooser what they need most: a label.
Friday, May 12, 2006
A couple of people have pointed out that the Times has posted a list of “the writers, critics and editors the Book Review asked” – a total of 124 names, fewer than A.O. Scott says replied. Of the 124, 37 are women. One question I had not thought of before is the age of the judges - there are more than a couple here old enough to be my parents.
On Sunday, the New York Times Book Review will publish a survey of “a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” as to the “best work of American fiction” of the past 25 years. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the winner, but she also is one of just two women to have published a book that received multiple votes in the survey, the other being Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Housekeeping, it’s worth noting, is the one novel on the list never to have been reviewed by the Times.
In all, just 14 authors have novels listed by multiple respondents to the survey, tho Philip Roth has six books listed among the 22 to receive multiple votes. Don DeLillo has three, Cormac McCarthy has two (tho one is his Blood Trilogy). John Updike’s quartet of novels, Rabbit Angstrom is also listed. Nobody seems to have thought that short stories counted. Here, in alphabetical order, is the list.
- Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From
- Don DeLillo, White Noise
- Don DeLillo, Libra
- Don DeLillo, Underworld
- Richard Ford, Independence Day
- Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
- Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
- Edward P. Jones, The Known World
- Cormac McCarthy, Border Trilogy
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
- Philip Roth, American Pastoral
- Philip Roth, The Human Stain
- Philip Roth, The Plot Against
- Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater
- Philip Roth, Operation Shylock
- Philip Roth, The Counterlife
- Norman Rush, Mating
- John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
- John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
Do we really think that more than one fourth of all the important novels over the past quarter century were written by one man? If so, do we honestly think they were written by Philip Roth? I’d poke my eyes out before I’d live on that planet.
Time Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus doesn’t list his sages, let alone their gender or ethnic breakdown, but this list suggests that he & they should both get out more, venturing further north than
A.O. Scott makes an effort of sorts to throw some context around this mess, noting that just 125 of the Tanenhaus’ experts responded, that Morrison’s first place finish was predicated on all of 15 votes, that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest received no votes at all, that nobody voted for William T. Vollman. Scott does note the concentration of writers born in the 1930s in this list, but appears not to have noticed the proportion of women here is worse than it is in Congress. In fact, the real story about this list isn’t who is on it, but rather who the Times chose to make its selection. Who does Sam Tanenhaus consider to be experts? On that point, Scott & Tenanhaus are mute.
To those sages, I have just a few words of advice: Kathy Acker, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Joseph Torra, Bruce Sterling, Pamela Lu, Mary Burger, Bob Glück, Carla Harryman, Nathaniel Mackey, Sarah Schulman, Lucius Shepard, Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephanson, Paul Auster, Harry Matthews, Dennis Cooper, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Markson, Douglas Woolf, Walter Mosley dot dot dot
Thursday, May 11, 2006
When George Oppen & his wife returned from exile, they drove up from
The business strip that ran up Telegraph Avenue in those days – still a two-way street that led right through Sather Gate before curving right just past Dwinelle Hall, heading down to exit on Oxford at the West entrance to the campus – had no terrific book stores, indeed hardly any bookstores at all. There was one that specialized in texts for UC classes, and a small general bookstore at the corner of Durant and Telegraph. But the four corners of Telegraph and Haste included a Lucky’s Supermarket on the southeast corner, the Berkeley Hotel on the northeast corner, on the northwest a complex of shops that included a restaurant, a small market and the first movie multi-plex I ever saw, the tiny Studio Guild, two theaters, neither of which had more than 100 or so seats, owned by one Pauline Kael, a friend of Robert Duncan’s who turned her skill at writing blurbs for the films that were to show at the Guild into a long-running career as the film reviewer for the New Yorker. On the southwest corner was a gas station.
A couple of years later, I would start visiting Telegraph Avenue – at first to buy books for resale in the Albany High School library, one of my duties as president of the library club – then later to hang out and look cool at the Café Med, just down the street from Lucky’s. Which is where I would regularly see this blond fellow, a few years my senior, writing thoughtfully into a notebook, nursing a latte. He was, I was told, a poet named Ken Irby &, for a long time, that was my only “live sighting” of an actual writer of poems. What I knew about poets was that they spent their afternoons in cafés, writing in notebooks. But I was far too timid to go up and actually talk to the man – that would take me years.
Sometime around 1963 or so, Moe & company moved up to the corner of Telegraph and Dwight, opening a shop called The Rambam. Across the street, just down from the gas station, right where Moe’s currently is, moved Cody’s. At the same time, Lucky’s was in trouble with the community because it would not hire people of color to work as cashiers. After a lengthy series of political protests, the store actually shut down and was replaced by a second coffee house, this one called The Forum.
But the political protests of the Free Speech Movement in 1964 – really the first major on-campus rebellion of the 1960s – is what transformed the street. The gas station shut down business and by the fall of 1965, every kid who thought (or whose parents thought) that political protest in behalf of free speech was a dreadful idea had decided to attend college elsewhere. Every kid who thought that the political activity of
The Rambam started having open readings, which is where (with one exception) I first gave readings in public, learning how that felt, deciding, finally, to stop after a year or so largely because I didn’t want to fall into the trap of building jokes into poems just to get laughs, and it seemed to me that the venue rewarded poetry-as-standup comedy most of all. Some of the other regulars of that series included Pat Parker, Gerard Van der Luen, John Oliver Simon & his then wife Alta, Charlie Potts & Keith Abbott. One day in early 1966, they cancelled the open reading to hold a memorial “birthday” reading for a recently passed poet by the name of Jack Spicer. I’d never heard of him before, but the reading by his friend (of whom I’d also never heard, at that time), Robin Blaser, got me reading both of their work, something I still do 40 years later.
Cody’s flourished across the street from the Rambam and eventually bought the lot that housed the gas station in order to construct the two-story book emporium pictured above¹, at the time easily the best new book store I’d ever seen. Moe & his partners split, with Moe taking over the old Cody’s location, using his own name finally, while the Rambam reverted back to the Shakespeare & Co. moniker it had had before coming to Telegraph.
And, for over 40 years, that has been the nexus of the best book buying block in
The other factor, which I haven’t seen mentioned in either the Contra Costa Times or on the Shelf Awareness email letter that first apprised me of this sad circumstance, is the relationship of the
Cody’s always had a large section of poetry, tho it tended to get one shipment of small press books by any given local author, picked almost randomly, & only consistently restock trade press editions. Moe’s, which has always had an excellent selection of used poetry – dating back to the days when Michael Malcom & Andrew Schelling worked there – has in recent years had a more well thought out selection of new books as well, which one suspects it may expand once Cody’s departs.
I recall how my grandfather used to resent the University – he was still very much on the town side of any given town/gown distinction – as it had rendered the city of his childhood virtually unrecognizable. But it’s been 35 years since he died & the city that was there in 1971 is itself morphing at an ever faster rate. The Cody’s on
So here’s a tip of the rhetorical hat to the ghosts of the men, Fred Cody & Moe Moskowitz (& to Pat Cody, who is still going strong), who once made
¹ When, having sold my early archives to UC San Diego, I was finally able to buy a house in Berkeley, eight blocks from the one in which I’d grown up, the seller was the owner of the flower stand that has stood outside Cody’s now for decades.
² At one point during that event, I found myself in an English Department classroom in Wheeler Hall, watching the sheriffs, widely known in the 1960s as the Blue Meanies, firing shotguns into opaque windows of the Bancroft Library – there were no protesters at the library & anyone could have been standing behind those frosted glass windows.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Stephanie Young’s description of how she put together her anthology is worth looking at more closely:
I started with my friends, and then the writers important to my friends. I followed lines of personal relationship because I was curious what formal or tonal connection might emerge between those who share their affection. I tried to include both the known and the unknown, pairings and groups whose interrelationships are wildly complicated.
It sounds at first like a prescription for a closed – possibly even elitist – conception of what is currently going on in Bay Area poetry. And, as I suggested rather indirectly on Monday, the gathering of 110 current poets seems to have missed the School of Quietude (SoQ), almost entirely, as well as the neo- (or perhaps retro-) Beat scene. Interestingly, the book leads off with an untitled poem by Brenda Hillman, a poet who has sometimes been associated with the SoQ:
The lord is its shepherd and i
am its color captive
its color color color captive
in the tree that
has no
inside
One could hardly call that a traditional anglophile verse form, not even with that twist of prayer in the first line. If anything, the poem points toward a post-division poetics, neither SoQ nor post-avant, something more than a few of the younger post-avant poets have called for in recent years. Putting this poem first is perhaps this book’s most polemic moment, a call for the conception that Bay Poetics is also a new poetics altogether. Similarly, I take it as no accident that the collection ends with Kathleen Fraser’s work, using typefaces as large as 60 points, visually the most striking (most “experimental”¹) in the entire book.
Older poets working in newer forms, younger poets – like Stephanie Young, whose poem I cited on Monday – using combinations that haven’t been conjoined previously, a key element in Bay Poetics – indeed, the reason why it’s called Poetics and not Poetry – is an assertion, never fully voiced critically, that poetry in the Bay Area has arrived at (is arriving at) a new place altogether. When one looks at the influences that are visible among the 110 – New York School (multiple generations), langpo, New Narrative, echoes of the New Coast moment in Buffalo, the indelible (but distant) presence of Chain, the always surprising (and surprisingly gentle) after-image of New Brutalism – one confronts American poetry as it has evolved over the past 20 years, only here it’s got this dual focus of the Bay as well, which accounts for the stereoptic effect.
Earlier collections of Bay Area writing often begin with a myth of origin that usually dates the scene to the day Kenneth Rexroth arrived from
I should say that the greatest American that we know about, if not George Sterling, was Edgar Allan Poe.
Bierce’s logic was that the work of Sterling & Poe would outlast that of Lincoln & Washington. It’s a sign of the School of Quietude’s near total amnesia of anything even remotely outside of the box that Sterling, whom one might read as an antecedent, say, of James Merrill, has been almost entirely forgotten over the past eight decades.
While there are a handful of critical pieces – by such folks as Bob Glück, Elizabeth Robinson & Eileen Tabios in addition to Caples & Joron – there isn’t any sense of a party line here. In fact, except for the fact that Caples & Joron are both touching on the history, almost the prehistory, of Bay Area poetry, there’s not nearly as much of a sense of a shared project in the critical writing as there is in the poetry, tho that also presents a wide range of generally post-avant possibilities.
So Bay Poetics falls into a middle ground – too broad & democratic to be representing a movement, Nouveau Brutalism or whatever, but not “all things to all people” either. In a sense, I think the situation, or scene, as presented by Young, is much harder for an individual poet than it was circa 1970 when you had just two regular reading series – one at SF State, the other at Intersection on Union Street – for the whole scene. If there are 110 interesting post-avant poets now active between Sebastopol & Monterey & as far east as Vallejo if not Davis – and I think a realistic number would be more like 250, especially if we included the neo-Beat scene & a broader swath of the Quietists – having one’s work stand out is a genuinely daunting project. In that populous – I want to resist calling it crowded – scene, the absence of more rigorously self-defined tendencies pretty much reduces the challenge to “every man & women for themselves.” That still feels like an interregnum to me, a waiting until the Next Thing shows up. But the grounds sure are fertile.
¹ Only in the narrow sense that vispo, or any poetry with a visual component, is historically “experimental.” I think that Fraser knows exactly what she is doing, and in that sense this work is the product of a master craftsperson, not an experimenter.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
A read-through of Bay Poetics, Stephanie Young’s new anthology of Bay Area poetry, leaves one with a distinct impression that one possible impact of online typesetting is that the next generation in poetry is becoming much more hesitant about leaving the safe anchor of the left margin. While there are clearly exceptions to this – Chris Chen, Logan Ryan Smith & Dennis Somera stand out – most of the poets here who treat the left-hand margin as an option rather than a requirement are the likes of Joanne Kyger, Nate Mackey, Kathleen Fraser (working now also in variable type sizes as well), Larry Kearney, Susan Gevirtz.
One wonders what the longer term implication of all this might be. It’s conceivable that in ten years’ time the web will prove as resilient and easy to set type with the sort of point-by-point variations that Paul Blackburn adapted for his late work, but right now, frankly, it’s a pain & one cannot guarantee that what looks good in Firefox will look the same in Internet Explorer or Opera or what else have you. So younger poets are doing what seems obvious enough, which is returning to the margin or else never thinking really about departing therefrom. I sometimes have the sense of a generation of swimming students, afraid to let go of the edge of the pool.
But I’m clearly of the age of the typewriter. Ezra Pound was the first U.S. poet to make this machine – which evolved from an experimental piece of machinery to a much more standardized piece of equipment during the Civil War because it made reports from the field more readable and reliable (and no accident here that Remington, major manufacturer of rifles, was likewise one of the first major producers of this military product) – his normal mode of composition. Nor that Pound was the one who led American poets away from the left-hand margin. Make what you will of the fact that his finest single work, The Pisan Cantos, was written by hand on scraps of paper in a wire cage in the mud of a prison camp in
The New American poets – from Olson to Ginsberg to
I first learned to write poetry on a heavy manual
When I got my first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, I immediately went out and bought a $800 IBM Selectric, a machine I had coveted for some time. This, I was sure, was going to last me for decades. I made a point of getting a three-year service contract and carefully selected three font-balls of type. Within four years, I had stopped using it for my poetry (tho I continued to do so for correspondence), heading in to my office at the California Institute of Integral Studies to use a PC there. When I finally got my own PC in 1986, I held on to the Selectric for awhile, tho I found myself using it only to fill out grant forms once a year or so. At last I gave the Selectric to my mother, until a combination of her failing eyesight and some necessary repairs caused her to junk it.
I don’t think of myself as a poet-of-the-typewriter, tho there are clearly sections of The Alphabet, in particular, that reflect the impact of the New Americans on my own sense of the verse stanza. But I can escape what I see in Bay Poetics: poets who treat the lefthand margin as an option are almost always “of a certain age.” And I wonder what the Norton anthologies of two hundred years from now will look like – will poets have all moved back to the margin? Or will the idea of writing for two-dimensional surfaces have become obsolete? The possibilities are worth contemplating.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics is a stunning achievement. The attempt to put together any kind of representative collection of Bay Area poets is inevitably doomed at the outset. It simply isn’t physically possible. Even with the 110 poets contained in these 500 pages, there are more currently active, publishing poets in the roughly nine county region that makes up the metropolitan region who are not included here than poets who are. For example, not one of
To her great credit, Young tackles this problem head on in her (too) brief introduction:
[S]ome people are missing. Older poets who have kept (not necessarily pedagogical) contact with younger writers are represented to a greater measure than those who have not. Even a preliminary list of those not represented here would exceed the bounds of a paragraph – today I am thinking particularly of Beverly Dahlen, Jean Day, Bob Grenier, Etal Adnan, Alan Bernheimer. The same is true of my peers, so much so that I won’t even begin a list.
So we find Joanne Kyger & Larry Kearney here, but not Tom Clark, nor Maxine Chernoff or Paul Hoover or Michael Rothenberg or David Meltzer. We find Brenda Hillman, but not Bob Hass. Yedda Morrison, but not David Buuck. Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson & Laura Moriarty, but not David Bromige nor Michael Palmer. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Truong Tran, Alice Jones, D.A. Powell, Edward Smallfield & Rusty Morrison all are missing. So are Judy Grahn & Aaron Shurin. Renee Gladman is not here, nor is Norman Fischer, nor Gail Sher, nor for that matter Curtis Faville. And virtually the entire local
It is, literally, an impossible task.
And Stephanie Young has tackled it very well indeed. Her description of her method is quite straightforward:
I emailed poets with my idea of taking a picture. I started with my friends, and then the writers important to my friends. I followed lines of personal relationship because I was curious what formal or tonal connection might emerge between those who share their affection. I tried to include both the known and the unknown, pairings and groups whose interrelationships are wildly complicated. They are roommates, collaborators, classmates, teachers, co-publishers. Some are married to each other. Others have worked together in offices or in the Bay Area’s many writing programs. And yet, among all this entanglement, I’m sure there are contributors who never have met one another.
The term picture is an interesting one. At one level, Young sought to, in her words,
take a photograph. Who is here now, and what are they writing?
But it carries a second layer as well:
I asked for poems but also maps, essays, lists, short fiction, poetic statements, neighborhood or walking tour reports, reading reports, manifestos, letters, diagrams, blog excerpts: notes towards the local expression of poets living in the Bay Area.
For what it’s worth, there are hardly any visual elements to this very text-centric book. Someone who seems to have taken Young’s request literally, such as Dana Teen Lomax, is the exception, rather than the rule. Tho one hears echoes of the idea in a title like Keith Shein’s “Rumors of Buildings to Live in” or in Young’s own “Poem for Small Press Traffic’s 30th Anniversary Reading”:
It’s 1974, quick, you are
getting born, also Leonardo di Caprio
and Jewel. Floppy disk drives, People Magazine,
Dungeons & Dragons, Happy Days, internet
Institute of Physics Library, Super Pong, Chinatown, Sterling Bank
Kate Moss, supermodel! Nobody gets the Pulitzer
for fiction or drama but Robert Lowell does.
Anne Sexton dies on October 4.
Karen Silkwood dies on November 12.
Nixon resigns.
George W. Bush is discharged from
the US Air Force Reserve. They’re putting
carnations in their guns in
go off in pubs,
underground,
It’s all happening now
Patty Hearst with a rifle in her hands
John Lennon is still alive
the oil embargo is over
Sonny and Cher are over
but the Talking Heads are getting together.
The Grateful Dead unleash the wall of sound
the UN grants observer status to the PLO
Rover Thomas and the Krill Krill songs
UPC codes
it all started way back in 1974:
walking for exercise
pipeline construction
over 12 million donuts
the barrier
the project
King Crimson
Sears Tower
the Australian Forum for Textile Arts
my Queen collection
the International WONCA news
grass Oil for Men by Javan
the NewMath, where one must be
wary of empty formalism,
be, being, multiplactors.
It’s worth quoting this poem, if for no other reason, than because Young’s methodology of selection through a rhizomatic network of friends & acquaintances almost by definition has to find ground zero in her own poetry. This is a poem whose spirit is easily traced back to the notational pieces by Frank O’Hara in the 1950s (&, ultimately, to Dr. Williams back into the 1920s), but the exact, even encyclopedic use of popular references isn’t something O’Hara himself would have done – that’s a Ted Berrigan effect, carried forward here through research¹ – something Ted never did – since Young herself either wasn’t here or at least isn’t old enough to remember any of 1974, the year Barrett Watten & I shared a flat on Missouri Street on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill & I wrote Ketjak. So Young’s poem looks very traditional, tho in fact it’s a hybrid of multiple tendencies & influences, a poem that could not have been written in ’74. Today it seems very much at home in these pages.
I think it makes sense to think of this poem as the book’s gravitational point, because Bay Poetics is very much a text of what’s happening in San Francisco & environs in 2006, not 1996 or ’86 (or the era that is the focal point for SF’s poet laureate program, rooted firmly in the sixties & seventies). Because Young is herself one of poetry’s foremost bloggers, it’s not at all surprising to find many writers here who likewise have (or have had) blogs: Del Ray Cross, Rodney Koeneke, Patrick Durgin, Brent Cunningham, Cassie Lewis, Tonya Brolaski, David Larsen, Pamela Lu, Magdalena Zurawski, Geoffrey Dyer, Eileen Tabios, Joshua Clover, Logan Ryan Smith, James Meetze, Catherine Meng, kari edwards, Barbara Jane Reyes, Stephen Vincent, K. Silem Mohammad, Alli Warren & Chris Sullivan. An even larger group of folks are those who were active in the SF scene even before I headed east in ’95: Brenda Hillman, Leslie Scalapino, Keith Shein, Larry Kearney, Joanne Kyger, Stephen Ratcliffe, Bill Berkson, Elizabeth Treadwell, Susan Gevirtz, Norma Cole, Laura Moriarty, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Andrew Joron, Lyn Hejinian, Juliana Spahr, Bill Luoma, Kit Robinson, Travis Ortiz, Stacy Doris, Elizabeth Robinson, Avery Burns, Bob Glück, Camille Roy, Vincent, Nate Mackey & Kathleen Fraser. To this, add the people who have come & made a big bang with terrific work in recent years – Mary Burger, Taylor Brady, Catalina Cariaga, Chris Stroffolino or Garrett Caples, for example – and you have the heart of an impeccably solid presentation.
Some of my favorite pieces here come from some of the “older” poets, people whose work I’ve lost touch with & am terrifically glad to see it again, looking so strong. One good case in point is the selection by Keith Shein, a tennis pro who was teaching at Dominican College last I heard (tho that may be many years out of date), living in the northern reaches of Marin County. Here is the fourth poem from the sequence I mentioned previously, “Rumors of Buildings to Live In.” It’s the first of his pieces in Bay Poetics:
The first time the hand goes out it’s only a hand,
when it comes back it’s only empty,
but when the hand goes out again, it’s an animal, hunted,.
and when drawn back, it’s the hunter himself.
She beats the child because she fears for him
and he won’t cry.
He takes the blows lifelessly though he hears her pleading.
He thinks, soon she’ll tire, then it will be my turn, and I won’t beg.
The street follows everyone home, even the homeless,
into rooms when doors open, beats on doors when they stay locked.
The street never ends.
He keeps his hands in his pockets. Not for the cold
though it is cold, for the dark where they might sleep.
Because I’ve known Shein slightly over the years, I see in his choice of the serial poem the influence of Gilbert Sorrentino (just as, in Sorrentino, I see the hand of Spicer). Yet here there is something that feels a lot like the kind of surrealism one gets in watery versions in Charles Simic or Andrei Codrescu. The edge in Shein’s work here feels so much sharper. Here is 14:
The TV is the national book, without pages or end,
which won’t close when you’re tired,
that reads itself to you while you sleep.
The TV is your own story told to you, for you.
The dog that growls, that’s you when you’re a dog,
which is often this hour.
But now you’re the man the dog chases, snapping at your legs.
You run, but are your equal, just as fast.
Before you die there’s a commercial:
you are a care owner, dabbing perfume, drinking a beer.
You’re thirsty, quenched, screaming as your paws scratch
you down, you growl, your jaws open for your neck.
Now you’re the doctor sewing your wound.
”You’re lucky,” you say, “lucky to be alive.”
You thank him, yourself.
Bay Poetics is a big honking book of fine work by some of the best writers around. It also just happens to be a possible portrait of one of the
¹ Echoing just possibly Juliana Spahr & Jena Osman &, behind them, diverse sources that would include C.S. Giscombe, Peter Dale Scott, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
For the second time in three years, a
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Daniel Green does some counting and comes to an obvious conclusion:
Niche Markets
From a Business Week article on small presses:
Eschewing the large press penchant for concentrating on the hits with huge print runs like The Da Vinci Code. . .or the latest James Patterson novel. . . small presses are championing new voices, focusing on niche markets or subjects and genres that have either been ignored by the big houses or simply deemed unprofitable – such as poetry and foreign authors. They are creating whole businesses by reissuing out-of-print classics and maintaining the tradition of printing literary fiction.
Moreover, while the big publishing companies have been merging, the number of small presses has been increasing, creating a commercial critical mass. According to a survey by the Book Industry Study in 2005, Under the Radar, there are some 63,000 small presses generating $14.2 billion in sales. By comparison, as a result of industry consolidation there are about six large publishers today. And according to the Association of American Publishers, based in
$14.2 billion out a total volume of $23.7 billion. That's more than half. Isn't it thus time that a majority of book coverage – and book reviews – concentrates on small and independent presses rather than the big six?
Link provided via Bookninja.
Amen to that.
I guess I should stop calling the big trades The Gang of Eight. From now on, the Gang of Six it is. And thanks to Herb Levy, for directing my attention to Green’s blog.
Friday, May 05, 2006
I’ve been reading – rereading mostly – interviews with poets from the early days of the Paris Review¹. Creeley, Kerouac, Olson, Williams, Marianne Moore. I’m just starting the one with Auden at the moment. I download the PDF file onto my Palm TX & carry it around with me wherever I go.
When I first read these interviews, in the libraries at SF State and UC Berkeley in the 1960s & in the journal itself pretty much up to the time when Tom Clark got fired as poetry editor & one no longer needed to read the Paris Review to find out what was going on any more – mostly because reading it no longer could tell you – I was still a pup insofar as poetry goes, trying to make sense of the tradition as it then existed, when the likes of Creeley & Ginsberg where the “new, young” poets according to more journals than just the Paris Review. I always knew that that couldn’t be true – they were both born the same year as my mother, a year before my dad. Nobody my parents’ age could possibly be “young.”
Reading the early interviews, in particular – Pound’s was published in 1962, Williams’ in ’64 – one is reminded of just how recent the form of the interview itself is, and how rapidly it’s evolved. Creeley’s 1968 interview, patched together from a session with Lewis Mac
We are now as far from the election of JFK as that event was from the start of the First World War. In 1914, Ezra Pound was still working for William Butler Yeats in London, H.D. had not yet met Bryher, Williams was still imitating Keats, James Joyce was just publishing Dubliners, Faulkner was a teenager, Zukofsky just 10, Moore was teaching at the Carlisle Indian School in South Central Pennsylvania, making faux Europeans out of children taken from their tribes, Russia was still ruled by the czar.
I think it’s hard for anyone in my generation to fathom just exactly how far we have come, as a species, as a nation, as a poetry community over the last 90 years. You can sense it in the interviews of the modernists especially: their idea of American literature is a scene about the size of the one we have in
Louise Bogan said that The Dial made clear “the obvious division between American avant-garde and American conventional writing.” Do you think this kind of division continues or has continued? Was this in any way a deliberate policy?
As I read this, Hall is hoping Moore will challenge that division – the same impulse that later led him to recommend Tom Clark as his successor at the journal – but Moore, knowing New Yorker poetry editor Bogan’s commitments in this “obvious division,” dodges the question:
I think that individuality was the great thing. We were not conforming to anything. We certainly didn’t have a policy, except I remember hearing the word “intensity” very often. A thing must have “intensity.” That seemed to be the criterion.
That’s a response that echoes very differently, post-Althusser.
The Review is starting with its first decades and intends gradually to work its way to the present. Whether the present stands up to these interviews from the past may well depend on whether you think J.D. McClatchy, Geoffrey Hill, Richard Howard or Robert Bly to be the equals of Pound or Williams. In fact, it’s all information, part of the landscape & at least partly how American poetry got to where it is now. One thing that surely has changed, tho, is that poets today understand better what they’re getting into when they say yes to an interview. Kerouac’s alcoholic stupor, Auden’s ample self-regard or Olson caught between the bottle and the cancer that eventually would kill him, all are pretty much laid bare for all to see. The interviews are free (tho not all authors or estates have yet agreed to make them available online) & certainly worth a look.
¹ The site has been up & down the past few days.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Turning the corner and suddenly coming into its space, I had the sensation of meeting an old friend. It is, in fact, the least impressive of the four Robert Smithson pieces on display at Dia:Beacon, Dia’s factory-sized museum located just off the Hudson River in southern Duchess County, New York. Gravel Mirrors with Cracks and Dust consists of a dozen mirrors roughly a one yard square each. Half of these are laid side-by-side on the floor right at the edge of the gallery wall, with the remaining six are fixed to the wall right at ground level, so that without anything else being present, it might appear to be some sort of mirrored hinge. However, atop each of the six mirrors on the floor is a small mound of gravel.
I had first met this work, one of Smithson’s Site/Nonsite series, decades ago at a retrospective of the late earthwork artist at the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley. It looked every bit as humble there as it does here. You have to actually sit on the concrete floor to really get a decent view of the thing, otherwise you might not notice it at all, save to check out the reflection of your shoes from its mirrors. Many of Smithson’s indoor works make use of some combination of earth, variously defined, and mirrors. Such is the case, sort of, at Dia.
Leaning Mirror, which was created in 1969, the year after Gravel Mirrors, consists of a large mirror, maybe six feet square, jutting out of a mound of dirt at something like a 60º angle. It looks, in a sense like a wing, or perhaps a crash (anticipating, ironically, the sense of jutting from Ant Farm’s iconic Cadillac Ranch).
Closed Mirror Square (Cayuga Salt Mine Project) consists of a mirrored box – with a clear glass roof – set into a mound of rock salt from the Cargill mine in Pennsylvania.
Depending on your height, you can see a part of your reflection inverted & reflected on the walls of the interior box.
Map of Broken Glass differs from the other three projects only insofar as the “mirror” has morphed into glass and is the material being used in a gravel like mound itself, everything from large shards to relatively small slivers (although, I should note, the glass itself is fairly thick, what I would think of as an “industrial window” grade – the barefoot viewer is less apt to get glass in one’s feet than they are to deal with flecks of dirt from Leaning Mirror or rock salt from Closed Mirror Square, both of which had specks starting to travel along the gallery floor).
In the Dia:Beacon galleries, this is the piece that looks spectacular, although I must say that it doesn’t really need to in order to create its impact.
Peter Schjeldahl, trying to prod me a little, once asked me if I didn’t think that the only serious thinking in the arts “these days” (this was the mid-1980s) occurred in the visual arts. While I understood what Peter was getting at – we’d spent the day visiting galleries & were back in his kitchen – I responded in kind, saying that I sometimes felt relieved when I saw a piece of visual work that had any ideas at all.
With Smithson, who died in his mid-30s in 1973 when a plane he was using to view the ongoing construction of Amarillo Ramp crashed, you never have any question about this at all. He is perhaps the clearest,. and deepest, thinker of any of that generation of conceptually oriented artists. And I find that I respond to his work not unlike the way I do when I’m Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello – I feel I’m viscerally in the presence of a great questing mind.
It’s interesting to have this reaction – it’s positioning within the 300,000 square-foot recesses of the converted box printing factory that is the Dia facility is off to one side and in back (not unlike the location where most bookstores hide poetry) – yet Smithson’s work resonates with more critical intelligence than much of its collection overall.
The cohesiveness of the collection is remarkable. Basically, it’s the work of major artists in abstract modes between 1960 and the present. Even an Andy Warhol, who is represented by a large sequence of paintings, virtually identical but for their various neon colors, is here unveiled as a formalist of abstractions – the core image for the sequence, entitled “Shadows,” is exactly that, a shadow impossible to project backwards to an object. Indeed, the work suggests that Warhol is as intense a thinker about the role of color as any of the abstract expressionists, possibly even more so.
But when you look at artists who lack the rigor and formal imagination of a Smithson or a Warhol – Blinky Palermo, for example, looking for all the world like the love child of Josef Albers and
Ellsworth Kelly, or Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights – all shine & no illumination – you realize what the real constraints on this generation proved to be: how to think when the palette is reduced neoformalist variations on minimal materials. If the result is good, as it is with Sol Lewitt or Donald Judd’s wonderful wooden boxes – the best work of his I’ve ever seen – it can be extremely powerful. But when it’s not, it just sits there. Fred Sandback’s string pieces, framing large rectangular spaces in “canvas-like” positions actually reiterate a project I did for a show in Seattle some 34 years ago. Seeing such a narrow concept literally spun into a career ultimately is depressing. It suggests that art is little more than identifying possible brand positions within a market economy.
I was struck by a couple of artists whose work I’d never looked at that closely before. One was Walter De Maria, whose uniform pieces, a circle & a square on the floor, in his Equal Area Series demonstrate a commitment that modest variations of a Sandback or ersatz glitz of a Flavin just doesn’t get. For some reason, I’d never realized that De Maria was born in Albany, California, my home town.
Another very-close-to-homie turns out to be Michael Heizer, born in Berkeley. Heizer has what I saw as two very disparate projects here. One is a series of geometrical shapes on the floor – Ellsworth Kelly gone to boards or whatever – that is extremely predictable. Click on the link on his name and you’ll see. But Negative Monolith #5, a gigantic – like 20 foot high – stone tightly wedged into a vertical rectangular slot in a wall is brooding and powerful. I found myself liking the fact that it doesn’t all work for him, as indeed it doesn’t for John Chamberlain. His signature piece here, The Privet (again, click that link), is a sculpture of metal that appears to have escape from a humongous shredder. It is a solid wall all its own, yet incredibly delicate, as if auto bodies could be reduced to confetti. But next to it, many of his smaller projects look like sketches, sculptural doodling.
And that’s perhaps why I like the Smithson pieces here best of all. In his brief life, Smithson made some of the most striking visual images of the past century – Spiral Jetty is a work worthy of a Duchamp in making you see the world completely differently – and yet the power of the image is never ever what the work is about. The tension in these four pieces – between smooth & rough, shiny & opaque, natural (poured) vs. cultural (square), beautiful & ugly – is simply unending. After three dozen years, they’re as powerful as ever. In some sense, perhaps even more so.
The other thing that struck me as I moved through this space was just how quickly this collection is going to seem frozen in time. For one thing, an enormous number of these visual artists are dead now: Smithson, Warhol, Palermo, Flavin, Sandback, Judd, Agnes Martin, Joseph Beuys. If you thought that MoMA seemed like a time capsule from the not-so-recent past, you won’t believe Dia:Beacon in ten years – someone like Kara Walker is going to seem like – indeed, be – a voice from a completely different century by comparison to this cool commitment to formalist abstraction encased in a museum that feigns being a loft space (serious fin de siècle nostalgia in that alone) alongside the Hudson, gently flowing.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
CBS News took notice of Saturday’s note here. Now if they’ll just do some good investigative reporting….
A week ago Monday, I noted what I took to be a curious claim in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry in America study, that “The Poetry Foundation’s primary concern is with the reading and listening audiences for poetry.” It is, in fact, the closest thing this report has to a topic sentence, and it appears toward the end of the discussion of key findings. The entire paragraph is worth quoting:
The Poetry Foundation’s primary concern is with the reading and listening audiences for poetry. However, stakeholders and participants in the qualitative research phase of this project felt it was important to collect information about people’s experiences writing poetry. We asked all participants about their experiences writing poetry as adults, and we asked those who wrote poetry about their experiences performing their own poetry. Their responses are summarized in Table 8. Thirty-six percent of all readers have written poetry as adults. Poetry users are significantly more likely to write poetry (45 percent) than are non-users, fewer than 1 percent of whom have written poetry as adults. Just over one-quarter of the adults who have written poetry (27 percent) have performed their own poetry in public.
This assertion explains a good deal of the 113-page report: why it asked certain questions and not others. But those relatively high percentages of poetry writers and performers suggest that the Poetry Foundation’s primary – and never fully articulated – assumption may in fact be false. With it, many of the premises surrounding not only this study, but its sponsors, the editors and publishers of Poetry magazine, dissolve pretty quickly. Indeed, it accounts for a good deal of the pathology at the heart of the Poetry magazine project.
The focus of Poetry in America is neither poetry, nor poets, but a third category it identifies as “poetry users,” a group it breaks into further subsections of readers & listeners & “former poetry users.” As the introduction states,
Poetry in
1) What are the characteristics of poetry’s current audience?
2) What factors are associated with people’s ongoing participation with poetry?
3) What are people’s perceptions of poetry, poets and poetry readers?
4) What hinders those people without a strong interest in poetry from becoming more engaged with this art form?
5) What steps might be taken to broaden the audience for poetry in the
But “participation with poetry” only incidentally means actually writing it. This study isn’t about poetry, but its “current audience.” The chapter headings set forth the primary research concerns:
* Demographic characteristics
* Understanding how people spend their time
* General reading habits
* Early experiences with poetry
* Later experiences with poetry
* Intensity of engagement with poetry
* Perceptions of poetry, poets and poetry readers
* Benefits and barriers
* Incidental exposure to poetry
* Opportunities for exposure to poetry
* Favorite and long-remembered poems
Thus when, in the chapter on later experiences with poetry, the researchers ask what kinds of poetry “users” currently read, the categories they offer are contemporary and classic, as tho they were brands of Coke. Interestingly, contemporary proves more popular than classic, as the graph below sketches out, giving possible responses and the percentages assigned to each. Some 31.7 percent read contemporary poetry, which might be Billy Collins & might be Geof Huth & might be Kari Edwards – we have no way of telling further, to just 19.2 percent who only read classic.
In fact, these numbers weren’t those given by the raw data. The
Over a third of current poetry users define the type of poetry that they read as “something else.” We asked respondents to specify what they meant by “something else.” Their responses were reviewed by project staff and the data were coded for those responses that appeared most frequently. Many of their responses did not fit into any category; however, there were four that repeatedly came up in the pool of ‘other’ responses: personal, friend’s or relatives’ poetry; modern poetry; children’s poetry; and inspirational poetry. While modern poetry could clearly be classified as contemporary poetry, the other categories and verbatim responses did not fit into either designation – classic or contemporary.
The question of how might Poetry – as distinct from “poetry” – serve “users” better isn’t one ultimately about writing, but about distribution. Nor is it just any model of distribution that is being contemplated. The report’s final section – “What Steps Might be Taken to Broaden the Audience for Poetry in the
*
* Develop programs for teachers
* Help libraries and book clubs foster participation
* Increase poetry’s presence on the internet
* Create new opportunities for incidental exposure
* Challenge people’s perceptions
* Evaluate all programs
The first three suggestions are all deeply institutional. “Develop programs” is the sort of phrase that neocons twitch at whenever they hear the words coming from the mouths of the likes of Teddy Kennedy or John Kerry. And libraries, as at least one publisher I know likes to complain, are government institutions that, by concentrating books for sharing on a serial basis, theoretically may undercut the sales of publishers.¹ Underlying the first three suggestions, and just under the surface in most of the others, is the report’s ultimate presumption:
Poetry is an expert discourse written by professionals, distributed to, and read by a larger group of non-specialists.
It seems like a reasonable premise if the question you are asking is to reaching an audience whose list of favorite poems – from a survey that began with over1,000 people – turns up just nine poems that were listed by five or more respondents each and these were (in this order):
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
Written in 1936 by a 14-year-old, Mary Stevenson’s “Footprints,” a staple of inspirational verse, is the most recent text on the list.
Similarly, the report’s recommendation to increase poetry’s presence on the internet, reads tres retro:
Adult readers have access to the Internet at rates higher than what is seen in the general population. Currently, few poetry users turn to the Internet to access poetry or to find information about poetry events. However, as the Internet evolves, ever increasing numbers of people are using it, and the Internet is increasingly becoming the source for all kinds of information. There is no reason why poetry should be the exception. Websites devoted exclusively to poetry will most likely be visited by people who already are involved with poetry. But, even if relatively few poetry users visit poetry websites, poems are shared. Surprisingly high percentages of people who do not identify as poetry readers were sent poems via email or because someone copied them out for them. The Internet can deepen participation for current poetry users who will use it to search for poetry, and their social networks will broaden participation.
The use of the Internet for poetry has broader applications beyond developing websites devoted to poetry. Poetry is already part of solemn and special occasions. Placing poetry at sites devoted to these kinds of private ceremonies can help make people more aware of poetry’s role in commemorating important events.
These paragraphs could have been written a decade ago. And while their overarching generalities keep this passage from being wrong, as such, the nod that “surprisingly high percentages of people who do not identify as readers were sent poems via email…” returns us again to a world in which Caroline Kennedy’s anthologies of poetry, and those of Garrison Keillor, seem perfectly appropriate fare.
As a one-time contributor to Poetry, I know that this doesn’t touch my world in any meaningful way. But here’s my question: does it touch the world of Christian Wiman and the current generation of old/new formalists he represents? If it does, how very sad for him. If it doesn’t, one wonders just how much money the Poetry Foundation sunk into this project. One can imagine the New York trade publishers funding this sort of research, because it really has more to do with their use of poetry as coffee table and Christmas gift-ware, what to give to that sensitive but strange niece, that sort of thing. But as a study of the sociology of poetry, what is most remarkable is just how far it misses the mark.
More than anything, this study reminds me of the one time I found myself passing the offices of Hallmark in the
¹ This is, I think, nonsense, but the point of view is worth acknowledging.
Monday, May 01, 2006
For the past few months, I’ve run a link on the blog roll to the U.S. Senate campaign of Chuck Pennacchio. Two weeks from tomorrow, Pennsylvanians will go to the polls and if Chuck gets much more than ten percent of the vote, he will be having a very good day indeed. The reason is that the state Democratic Party, led by Gov. Ed Rendell, has decided to put its troops, funds, endorsements & energy behind Bob Casey, Jr. Rendell went so far as to push much more viable alternatives like former congressman Joe Hoeffel out of the race to prepare the red carpet for Casey, who will go up this fall against incumbent Rick Santorum, who just might be the most right-wing member of the U.S. Senate. I’m appalled by all of this, and think that Rendell’s machinations just might come back to haunt him.
Casey, as they say, has name recognition. His late father, also named Bob Casey, was a conservative Democratic governor here a few decades back & the kid has used that brand identity to run successfully for a pair of lower echelon state offices, auditor general from 1997 until last year, and then last year state treasurer. Casey actually ran against Rendell in 2002 for the Democratic nomination for governor, but Rendell edged him out, in large part by being pro-choice and a liberal – the term actually fits the ample former mayor of
Rendell’s argument in pushing viable candidates aside was that Casey ran ahead of Santorum in the polls months ago, a fact based almost entirely on Santorum’s increasing visibility as a nutjob and Casey’s name recognition. It may also have been payback for Casey’s support of the governor in his general election campaign four years ago – Rendell is that rarest of creatures, a governor of
Besides Hoeffel, the other potentially significant candidate who chose not to seek the Democratic senate nomination this year was MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews. Matthews served as an aide to Tip O’Neill but has been drifting rightward for years. Matthews comes from
The catch in all of this is that Rendell, who squeaked through four years ago and has governed, with a Republican legislature, largely on the theory of do-no-harm, accomplishing little to show for his tenure, presumed that he would have an easy ride to re-election. Then TV commentator & football Hall of Famer
The only argument one ever hears made for Casey on the Democratic side is that his numbers suggest he can win. The logic is this – only 65 percent of Republicans favor Santorum, whereas polls suggest that 77 percent of Democrats favor Casey. In a state that is roughly 40 percent GOP, 30 percent Dems and 30 percent independent, that would translate to roughly a dead heat among the partisans in a year when independents are expected to swing Democratic.
But Santorum, who has twice the cash in the bank that Casey has, has won as an underdog before. He’s doing all the things you would expect a vulnerable incumbent to do to move ever so slightly toward the center, to the point that when Bush came to Philly recently, he met with Santorum behind closed doors so that Senator Rick wouldn’t have to be photographed with this very lame duck. While the Democrats are right that Bush is a huge liability to the GOP right now, it should be remembered that (a) with the very notable exception of gas prices, the economy right now is humming along, and it’s always the best predictor of electoral success, and (b) an incoherent Democratic slate is not calculated to maximize the number of Democratic voters. As bad and inexcusable as the
So this turns out to be a dispiriting election cycle in
So I’m voting for Chuck Pennacchio, a historian who has worked as an aide to Alan Cranston (ah, but long after Charles Olson did the same) & to Congressman Ron Dellums (long after I wrote a a speech or two for the man). He’s not the only good “protest” candidate on the ballot, but he’s the best and most well organized. If
