Yellow Cloth

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A POETICS—6

“Anthology Wars” (II)

Donald M. Allen was the first editor of Grove Press, the publishing company purchased in the early 1950s by Barney Rosset from a couple who “lived on Grove Street in the Village” in New York City and who together, as “some therapy for a young husband,” had “published a few books—mostly reprints of classics or semi-classics, all bound in yellow cloth.” So Allen remembers it in conversation with S. E. Gontarski in a recent issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. An odd and ironic fact revealed in the interview is this: Grove shared office space early on in New York with Noonday Press, whose subsequent paperback line called Meridian Books eventually published the Hall anthology. (Another irony: an extraordinary number of the principles in the “anthology wars” were undergraduates at Harvard together in the late 1940s, so many that it seems the roots of the split might be traced back to Harvard clubbiness and competitiveness. As Hall has said of that time (in Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara): “Koch and Ashbery and O’Hara loved Auden . . . while Bly and I loved Yeats and Robert Lowell.”) Allen also edited the first handful of issues of Evergreen Review and suggests in the interview that the influential anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, “evolved out of the Review.” That the Allen anthology was influential and far-reaching (both directly to the young poets coming of age in the early 1960s and indirectly to succeeding generations like my own) is clear. (I think of Ted Berrigan remembering how he first encountered O’Hara’s poems therein; I look at my own scuffed and thumbed copy—bought in the early 1970s, “Twenty-first Printing” noticeable on the copyright page.) Here, I would merely like to quote remarks that Gilbert Sorrentino—one of the poets (now perhaps better known for fiction) included in the anthology—makes in a 1990 interview. He is speaking of both the anthology itself and the San Francisco issue of the Evergreen Review:

Simply put, these two publications performed at least two very
important functions: they served to alert people to the fact that there
were writers, out of the “mainstream,” who were doing interesting
and valuable and often first-rate work; and that there was a publisher
convinced of that, to the extent that he brought that work to the
general public. The anthology was, I think, more important than the
San Francisco issue of Evergreen, simply because it deployed more
writers and attempted a kind of useful, if arbitrary,
compartmentalization of them. The anthology was enormously
influential for many years, and even now . . . I’m taken with the
striking catholicity of its contents . . . [I]t was the general spirit of
the anthology which was of such moment, the simple fact of its
sudden presence which gave the poets included, as well as the entire
poetry world, something to feel good about, or, conversely, some-
thing to lament as yet another indication of the barbarians at the
gates . . . I doubt if anything, at the present time, could so enrage
and delight and polarize the cultural world.

The polarization of the “cultural world” that follows the publication of The New American Poetry, as seen in reviews appearing in the well-entrenched newspapers and journals of the time, is rather one-sided: rage, lament, denial, condescension, and hostility are the most common responses. One of the more balanced reviews is Harvey Shapiro’s in the New York Times Book Review. Shapiro manages to mention the Hall anthology (where “poets working in the kitchen of the ‘cooked’ school are best sampled”), thus perhaps triggering the direct confrontation between the two anthologies. Shapiro also, and more importantly, is able (mostly) to examine the grounds for the disagreement and to take seriously what he calls the “noteworthy event” of the Allen anthology’s publication. Shapiro: “After the war, American poetry, under the influence of the New Criticism and its critic-poets, became increasingly formal, and the young poets beginning to appear in the quarterlies increasingly sophisticated. While some observers began to decry the loss of energy and attack involved, poets who for one reason or another felt themselves out of this official poetic culture—official because it is the culture of the academies and the major literary journals—began to publish, discuss and publicize their work in their own little magazines.” This is an astute diagnosis of the situation, I think, and one perhaps best available to a young poet and journalist who belonged to neither camp. Shapiro is also an informed (and sympathetic) reader of the poets of the Allen anthology’s poetic forefathers, noting that the “farewell to pentameter” is “a continuation of the crusade against the English tradition begun years ago by Pound and Williams.” He calls particular attention to the poets of the New York School, noting James Schuyler’s insistence on “the connection between the New Poetry and the ideas behind abstract-expressionist art”: the canvas / page as a space “in which to act,” the painting / poem as (he is quoting from Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters”) an “act inseparable from the biography of the artist.” Shapiro also says (accurately, I think): “That way of looking at art and poetry is surely behind Frank O’Hara’s interesting work.” Not all the reviews of The New American Poetry are so measured, nor are they so astute as this.

Louise Bogan, in the New Yorker, also sees historical precedence for the poetics of the Allen anthology poets; however, trapped within one tradition, she reads the poetry as largely a repetition of an early aberration, or revolt, against that dominant tradition, while refusing to read that tradition’s own “heap” of history. She begins: “History seems to have fallen in a heap upon the minds and sensibilities of many members of the latest American ‘school’ of poetry.” What she means becomes clear later when she asks if this poetry is “a late and peculiarly American development of the post-Symbolist revolt, which brought in, very nearly fifty years ago, Dada and Surrealism.” A fair enough question perhaps, but Bogan makes it unfair by ignoring the reassertion of the mannerisms (at least) of the Symbolists by the “academics” in the intervening fifty years. Her review more or less ends with an extravaganza of wild rhetoric, as if the language she has just read in the anthology is subverting her own. Here she speaks of “wild talents,” of “violence stem[ming] from a deliberate attempt to extend consciousness,” and asks “are many of them actually out of control?” She also identifies “two ‘naturals,’ who express themselves with uninhibited childish glee” and can only bring herself to pick out “sardonic wit” and “coldly contrived shock” as (somewhat positive) “effects” in “the midst of the hitting, smashing, struggle, hallucination, and disorder.” This, then, is her real concern: “What degree of anarchy can be projected in poetry?” And her answer is unsurprising: the two (anarchy and poetry) are antithetical in a New Critical poetic that looks to reconcile diverse impulses in language. Bogan: “For when its [poetry’s] principal tenets and accepted formal procedures are assaulted with utter vigor, this art of language does not merely change, it totally disappears.”

In a short (and less hostile) review in Harper’s Stanley Kunitz echoes Bogan’s sense of the poem’s disappearance in the work of the poets of the “avant-garde,” as Kunitz calls them. Kunitz rightly sees that, in many of the poems in question, “the concept of process is the central one, the verse conceived as projecting the very motion of the mind, the poem conceived as a way of breathing in words.” Kunitz is perceptive regarding these notions, but claims to fail to see how they are either “revolutionary” or “the exclusive property of the writers anthologized,” noting that even “the despised ‘academics’” (along with Hopkins, Coleridge, and “Milton in part”) would accept them. Kunitz’s paean to process is not one, however. Process is only in service to the familiar verbal object it results in—in Kunitz’s words: “A thing, a whole, an entity.” Kunitz ends standing squarely in New Critical territory: “Most of the poets of this anthology give all to process; the thing escapes them.”

The New York Herald Tribune Book Review treated The New American Poetry to a front page review by Marianne Moore, the text flanked by two columns of eight photographs of the poets, most of them Beats. (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Schuyler, Ferlinghetti, Levertov, Welch, Duncan, and Corso are pictured.) Moore rather fussily goes through a large selection of excerpts, praising most (an Olson poem has a “good climax,” Duncan has “imagination and is careful about cadence,” Levertov has “her own way of saying things,” Spicer is “not indifferent to T. S. Eliot and is not hackneyed”) and gently scolding others on matters ranging from punctuation (“to insert an apostrophe could scarcely slow Richard Duerden’s word ‘seas’ too much in his apt lines about ‘the seas dark face’”) to content (“Kerouac is not for prudish persons,” and “Ginsberg . . . can foul the nest in a way to marvel at.”) She then proceeds to examine the implications of the various “Statements on Poetics,” here proceeding mostly by innuendo and opposing quotations. To Olson’s advocacy of “open form” she replies with lines by Kenneth Burke: “a work may be said to have form in so far as one part leads a reader to anticipate another part and be gratified by the result.” That anticipation and (more particularly) that gratification, in this context, seem to point toward the high literary value placed on something like “theme” and the desirable tensions inherent in achieving it offered up as doctrine by New Criticism. The emphasis on the poem as product and not process is reiterated by Moore, again underlining her concern with matters of formal correctness, in her insistence on craft: “punctuation aids precision, and precision is the glory of the craftsman.” The language of the dominant critical and poetic tradition outs clearly when Moore remarks: “Intentional ambiguity and inadvertent ambiguity, need it be said, are not the same.” And an adherence to what Barthes calls the “readerly” text, the securely determined, “authorial” text, is evident when Moore praises the writer who “is able to compel the reader to put the accent where the writer wishes it put.” Moore manages mostly to avoid the hysteria of some other reviewers until the penultimate paragraph where she speaks of content rather than technique (ignoring, apparently, the New Critical dictum regarding “organic unity,” the poem’s structure and verbal meaning inseparably entwined). Here she speaks of “poets specializing in ‘organs and feelings’—severed from culture and literature, dogged by redundance and stench” and “exhibitionistic content—invaded by the diction of drug-vendors and victims, sex addicts and civic parasites.”

Such is the dominant tenor of most of the reviews of The New American Poetry, with little variation. The poems are formless and anarchic; the poets are unwashed, solipsistic and unlearned. If there is recognition of learning at all it is to fault it, as Cecil Hemley does in the Hudson Review. Comparing (rightly) Charles Olson’s work to that of Pound, he writes: “many of Olson’s longer poems seem to me to fragment, and he, like his master before him, is somewhat compulsively learned; I am happiest with him when he eludes the references and sticks to the business in hand.” What, I want to ask, “business” is that? (Hemley also attacks Frank O’Hara, whom he calls “gifted,” saying of his poems, however, that “not one is successful.” He writes: “it is apparent from O’Hara’s stated aesthetic that he is not interested in writing good poetry in the usual sense. He has committed himself to the somewhat dubious task of tracing his ‘experience’ in all its solipsistic grandeur. Since most of his experience, like everyone else’s, is disjointed and incoherent, the better he follows his theory, the worse his poems become.” This is lamentable for a couple of reasons: first, Hemley has missed completely the rather complicated “camp” tone of O’Hara’s statement on poetics in The New American Poetry. The fact that O’Hara asserts “What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems” in the same breath as “My formal ‘stance’ is found at the crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred” should be a clue to Hemley. This is a non-statement, a send-up of the idea of “theory,” just as many of the poems are self-conscious send-ups of the notion of “good poetry in the usual sense.” Second, Hemley is judging the poems from his own “stance,” one considerably less nuanced than O’Hara’s. O’Hara is writing—humorously and in a fullness of contradiction—a non-statement that, nevertheless, “states” an “allowable” lie that one must “avoid.”)

Elsewhere in the reviews there is this same failure to recognize the humor that serves many of the poets of The New American Poetry. Katherine Garrison Chapin, mentioning the “biographical notes and esthetic theories” that conclude the volume, notes that “The poets . . . are highly self-conscious and articulate, humorless and a little portentous.” Chapin, like some others though, fails even to see the comic thrust of a poem like Kenneth Koch’s “Fresh Air,” labeling as simple “bombast” the following (often-cited) lines:

Who are the great poets of our time, and what are their names?
Yeats of the baleful influence, Auden of the baleful influence, Eliot of the baleful influence.

Other reviewers include James Dickey in the Sewanee Review and X. J. Kennedy in Poetry. Dickey pretends to try liking the poets of the Allen anthology—“to an era weary of over-refined, university-pale subtleties they look interesting; at least they look different”—but his animosity gets the better of him: “Nothing on God’s earth can shut them up.” Dickey’s complaint is against the formlessness of the poetry; he calls it “stream of consciousness (and unconsciousness)”—“the source of all good things . . . [and] all bad things.” He, too, distrusts a poetry of pure process: “Abandoned to that stream, and with all kinds of subterranean creatures thrusting words into your mouth by the bucketful, it is hard not to ride thus forever, singing and shouting whatever comes to mind.” The rhetoric here is that of a kind of nightmarish fantasy—an underground world of gluttony and addiction and endless uncontrollable ecstasy. Dickey reins in his seeming attraction to it with a reminder: this “song” is only “a kind of monstrousness that has to be understood and ordered according to some principle to be meaningful.” As to what that “principle” is, Dickey can only turn to “what W. H. Auden calls ‘the censor’: the faculty or indwelling being which determines what shall and what shall not come into a poem, and which has the final say as to how the admitted material shall be used. It is basically the same as Coleridge’s ‘architectonic’ faculty: that which builds the good details into coherent wholes.” This string of deferred meanings is saying essentially nothing—about “principle,” about “the censor,” or about “‘architectonic’ faculty.” What it is saying is that “coherency” and “wholeness” mark a good poem, and that Dickey feels capable of recognizing the presence or absence of those qualities in any poem.

X. J. Kennedy expends much energy in Poetry trying to be humorous about the Allen anthology, condescendingly. He reports on trying to read Olson’s poems according to Olson’s instructions on the use of space to indicate breath in “Projective Verse” and concludes: “I kept getting blue in the face.” He also echoes Dickey’s talk of “creatures” (though without Dickey’s ambiguous attraction / repulsion) by treating the anthology as a circus parade: “Decked in its red-white-and-blue cover, stripes unfurled, the bandwagon of Allen’s American Poetry rolls along . . . (But isn’t the steam-organ grand? And look at all those elephants).” Like Dickey, too, he sees no form, or little: “the feeling that obtains throughout a major portion of The New American Poetry is that of listening to a stream of talk—like a party at which each guest, variously high, engages himself alone in conversation.”

§

Thunderstorm late Sunday. Indian food. A day of yard work: digging out the stump of the yew we cut last summer. Putting in a rhododendron. Of darkest red. Knocking with wildest mighty swings of shovel a winter-fell’d branch “caught up on the way down” out of the shagbark hickory. Tiny spate of writing whilst G. and J. went to violin lesson. Four pieces of the ms. puzzle to find, I think. Letting some repetitions stand. Echoic.

~

Late nights with Kerouac’sVanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46. Which bursts into lyricism, bravely defying its own somber bitterness: “I was coming back home to Lowell. It was November, it was cold, it was woodsmoke, it was swift waters in the wink of silver glare with its rose headband out yander where Eve Star (some call it Venus, some call it Lucifer) stoppered up her drooling propensities and tried to contain itself in one delimited throb of boiling light.”

And you know Kerouac just stepped out of himself and time for a moment there. (As he admits, chagrin’d, new paragraph: “Ah poetic.” Why the American propensity to thwart that outburst, to mistrust it?

Question for a doomy day.

~

Into the systematic chop of one of the many ideological state apparati and its way of betraying “my” “own” “bad” “self.”

~

Odd Rush

~

Odd to rush home a couple hours early in order to fetch G. at school. Hoofing it there with the C-dog. Surround’d by kids. —Does that dog have teeth? —Is that dog your dog? —What kind is that dog?

Sketch’d in three poems to near finesse and finish: “Xenon and Kin,” “Ziggurat and Lurch,” and “Integument and Pill.” Why do I think of David McAleavey back in Ithaca (after a Berkeley spell, early ’seventies) reading at the Temple of Zeus coffeehouse several ineluctably smarmy (well, self-deridingly goofy) things, “writ out there,” and David looking up with a big grin: “Terrible, isn’t it.” In on the joke of’s own making.

There are no rules. There are only rulemakers.

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A POETICS—5

“ANTHOLOGY WARS” AND AFTERMATH: A “NEW CRITICAL” / “POSTMODERN” RIFT

Aftermath and Introduction

I am reading series editor David Lehman’s “Foreword” to The Best American Poetry 1993, the sixth volume of the annual collection of “poems of immediate interest and enduring value” culled from magazines of the previous year. I am looking for traces of the rift that divided the poetry world in the late 1950s into two camps, variously identified (in Harvey Shapiro’s “Rebellious Mythmakers”) as the “cooked” and the “raw” (after Robert Lowell’s description of the two “competing” poetries: “The cooked, marvelously expert . . . laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge, blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experiences dished up for midnight listeners”), the “academics” and the “Beats,” or, in Philip Rahv’s formulation, dividing all American writers, “palefaces” and “redskins.” I am interested to know what fallout remains today of that split in the body poetic. I know that as early as 1969 Mark Strand in the preface to another anthology, The Contemporary American Poets, was claiming that “it is part of the character of American poetry since 1940 to have made friends with everyone” and, discussing the hubbub attending the split, stating that “many different sorts of poetry seem to have co-existed more or less peacefully except for a brief skirmish at the end of the 1950s when we experienced what has been glamorously called ‘the war of the anthologies’ and when it seemed that only two kinds of poetry were being written.” And in what I read in this 1993 collection, traces of something instructive appear: despite the breezy optimism of lines like “the climate for poetry in 1992 was more lovely and more temperate than the fickle weather of Florida in August,” there are hints of apprehension in the house of Lehman, hints of a fear mixed with longing that, once again, the barbarians might be approaching the gates. Lehman reports, approvingly, how John Ashbery, on being awarded the $25,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize “told the Times reporter when she called him for a quote: ‘Not that many people in this country like poetry . . . and in fact, many people hate it.’” Against this, Lehman oddly juxtaposes, in the language of pure condescension, the story of a rising popular poetry:

At funkier-than-thou bars and cafes . . . teams of scruffy versifiers are
slugging it out in mock-competitions known as poetry “slams.” The
poems aren’t so much read as performed, like acts in a variety show,
and the poet may be a bad-boy rapper, or a bad-girl tap dancer, or an
unkempt bard with a goatee and a black turtleneck sweater playing the
bass and howling . . . It is easy to mock the literary efforts on display. . .
But the whole “downtown” poetry phenomenon has felt a little like
the gust of fresh air that turned into the blizzard . . . a lot of noise, a
lot of excitement, a lot of hype, and some rattling of the windows in
stuffy rooms where another high-minded symposium on the future of
poetry had been threatening to kill Pegasus and then beat the winged
horse all over again.

I quote Lehman’s words at such length in order to savor the contempt they divulge—toward those “scruffy versifiers” and toward the participants in that “high-minded symposium” both. The language is clearly reminiscent of the diatribes and polemics of the opposing camps of the “anthology wars.” The difference is this: now the insider (Lehman) is wise enough to position himself as outsider, beyond the reaches of the fray, in some supposedly pure realm where “American poetry [that poetry represented by the anthology in the reader’s hand, that is]” is “in a state of high vitality,” though “it may never be fashionable [reaffirming outsider status] to admit this.” This is indicative of the stance of the poet in academia in 1993. (Lehman is “in” academia to the extent that he is a graduate of Columbia and Cambridge universities, has taught at Hamilton College, and has had two volumes of poetry published by Princeton University Press—despite the fact that he is perhaps best known for his book-reviewing for Newsweek and his writing against deconstruction in Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man.) The common species of poet in academia is (I am convinced), like Lehman, still making the “aggressive claim” made by the title of the anthology. That is, he or she is, through having, as a result of the “anthology wars,” submitted to an enlargement of the number and kinds of acceptable poetries (see, for example, Louise Glück, editor of The Best American Poetry 1993, claiming that “where the flat white of the page was, a field of energy emerges”—Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” notion now become a kind of buzzword) stuck in a reverie of pure aesthetics, beyond theory. What makes a poem “good” or “best” is beyond questions of “school” or “movement” or “camp”; it is from outside those narrow constrictions that the new insider works, from a position of presumed superiority. This is neatly familiar: it is the old New Critical dream of the poem as isolated verbal object, something judicable, aesthetically, on its own terms alone.

Here I am reminded of Jane Gallop’s depiction of the academy: “The Literary academy takes as its central purpose the transmission of a culture superior to ‘popular’ culture. Literary criticism has traditionally tried to determine what is superior and to help the general reader, the student, appreciate those higher things to be found in literature. A central piece of the ideology of the literary academy is the belief that the artist is not only a craftsman but wise, a superior human being.” As Lehman puts it, one of the “several subsidiary purposes” of The Best American Poetry volumes is “the desire to feed the interest that readers of poetry are bound to have in the taste and judgment of our leading poets” (emphasis added). Gallop continues: “When New Criticism held sway in the literary academy, the reigning values were aesthetic. By the mid-1980s the dominant discourse in the literary academy is poststructuralist and the reigning values are theoretical.” This, for me, in view of the positioning and claims (as detailed here) of one of our most visible anthologists of poetry, brings up several questions: What is the position of poets and poetries descending from the “anthology wars” in the academy today? Did a shift in the “dominant discourse” change the poetic canon perceptibly in the academy? Did the “anthology wars” contribute to the discourse shift in any way? If, as I suggest here, Lehman is one who clings tenaciously to the New Critical apparatuses in refusing to delineate differences in the variety of poetic discourses beyond mere value judgments, are there others who read and write those differences? Are there other poets whose work is closer in spirit to the now “dominant discourse” of poststructuralism (I’m thinking in particular of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others of the New York School) or whose work is nurtured by the (predominantly French) discourses of poststructuralist theory? Can we identify the “anthology wars” as a crucial “moment” in the emergence of a postmodern poetic? And, how do I place my own writing of poetry, historically and presently, against or alongside, this clamor of discourses? [—My, that sounds grand, don’t it, Penrod?]

“Anthology Wars” (I)

The “anthology wars” begin, it seems, even before both of the two contending anthologies are published—New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, in 1957, and The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald M. Allen, in 1960. Paul Carroll, in The Poem in Its Skin, speaking of a group of poets he labels “the generation of 1962” (including, with an impeccable sense of variety, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Isabella Gardner, Allen Ginsberg, John Logan, W. S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, W. D. Snodgrass, and James Wright), notes: “this generation, more than any previous one, could be divided into two distinct and hostile camps. Even before . . . Allen’s anthology . . . appeared in 1960, it had become a stock-in-trade among literary journalists and some of the poets themselves to pit the Black Mountain / Beat writers represented in the Allen collection against those whose work had become prominent three years earlier [in the Hall anthology].” There is evidence elsewhere of rumblings and divisions prior to the publication of the anthologies themselves. X. J. Kennedy, for example, in a review in Poetry of The New American Poetry asks: “in the case of those whom Allen brackets together as the Beat Generation . . . is there a hamlet in the Ozarks that hasn’t heard of them since ’56?” Kennedy is presumably referring to the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, the subsequent seizure of the book by United States customs officials and the San Francisco police, the court trial on charges of obscenity, and the coverage of these and other Beat activities in the pages of magazines like Time and Life. Donald Hall himself, in the “Introduction” to a later anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, refers to an “orthodoxy” that “ruled American Poetry” for thirty years, “that prevailed from, say, 1925 to 1955.” Hall specifically identifies this poetry as “derived from the authority of T. S. Eliot and the new critics” and says “it exerted itself through the literary quarterlies and the universities.” And he identifies the attack on this ruling orthodoxy as coming (presumably circa 1955) from sources “like Time and the publicists of the Beat Generation,” as deft a way as any of linking the Beats’ visibility to a talent for self-promotion rather than a talent for poetry.

In examining the climate for poetry just prior to the “anthology wars,” it is interesting, also, to note how Louise Bogan treats the Hall anthology in a 1958 review in the New Yorker. Early in the review she writes: “Nowadays there is a widespread belief that close contact with academic life is dangerous for the creative artist; he is warned, on all sides, that any relationship with institutions of learning will cause his gifts to dwindle, if not totally to disappear. In spite of such warnings, poets of the younger generation have taken to the teaching profession in numbers, and some of the results of this association are coming to light.” Bogan examines those results in her review, noting that all of the poets “write in form,” and that the collection is “notably free of the coldly elaborate, the foolishly excited, and the gloomily bardic.” She does, however, also (approvingly) remark that “few rebellious notes are openly struck,” as if aware, at least, of the turmoil that is beginning in American poetry.

Other reviews of New Poets of England and America also tend to call attention to the anthology’s conservatism and quietness, if only to sanction those qualities. Geoffrey Moore, in a piece published in the New York Times Book Review entitled “They Speak in Quiet Tones,” begins: “Although pleasing, the glossy pyrotechnic cover . . . given this original anthology scarcely represents the spirit of the poets inside. There are no really bright sparks among the ‘new poets,’ no Pounds or Cummingses.” He continues, however, “if they are quiet in tone, they are none the worse for that.” Moore, a British academic, and as such perhaps forgivably unknowledgeable regarding the American poetry scene, remarks that “on the American side the editors seem to have made a pretty complete haul.” He also notes what could, perhaps, be read as the beginning of a shift away from New Critical influences: “In the forties . . . the American [poets] were metaphysical or ‘Cavalier.’ Now . . . the Americans tend to be romantic.” (Moore’s observation is given credence by works like M. L. Rosenthal’s 1967 book, The New Poets, wherein Rosenthal traces the connections whereby much contemporary American poetry in the “confessional” vein is an offshoot and new growth of the Romantic tradition, or like A. Poulin, Jr.’s essay “Contemporary American Poetry: The Radical Tradition,” wherein Poulin argues that “the presence and vitality of the personal element” in contemporary American poetry is what links it to earlier [Romantic] models and distinguishes it from its immediate predecessors.) Janet Fiscalini, in a lengthy review of the Hall anthology in Commonweal, focuses on some “representative” individual poets, after having remarked that the anthology “offers a broad selection from more or less conservative contemporary poetry.” Her observations and tone often border on pure ridicule: she notes poems “made of soft rhymes, soft rhythms, nice plants and animals,” work that proceeds “agreeably through sunlight, wasp wings, and so forth [and] gets to easy, irrelevant, even dewy conclusions,” and pieces that are “neat and bland.” She concludes with the notice that concerns in the poems are “presented with practiced caution,” suggesting, too, that that caution has reasons that are “social and academic,” before ending with the salient poke: “it looks like the gentlest generation of all.”

~

If I page through New Poets of England and America now, more than three and a half decades after it appeared, what can make me halt, in exasperation or wonderment? I’m struck by the sincerity and sameness of its pages, its plodding formalism. I can open the book randomly, anywhere, and read lines like these (the opening lines to “Tiresias’ Lament” by Ellen de Young Kay):

I touch and recollect
Less than the shape and shade
Of formal colonnade.
Unwilling architect

Of the uncloistered mind,
I compass touch and time,
Trace lines on the sublime.

Or these (the opening lines to “Variations: The Air Is Sweetest That a Thistle Guards” by James Merrill):

The air is sweetest that a thistle guards
And purple thistles in our blue air burn
And spiny leaves hold close the light we share.
The loose tides sprawl and turn and overturn
(Distant pearl-eaters gorging) on the shore. . .

Mythology (“Tiresias”), irony, paradox (that “architect” whose building is an “uncloistering” and that thistle that “guards” air in “light we share” creating what M. H. Abrams, author of A Glossary of Literary Terms, might conceivably call a kind of “play and counterplay of ‘thematic imagery’”), figures of speech (waves as “pearl-eaters gorging”) and symbols (Tiresias as blind architect, as prophet)—all the marks of New Critical strategies and understandings can be ticked off here.

At the risk of sounding like a New Critical devotee myself, I must note that there are a number of poems in the anthology that I respond favorably to: I’m thinking of things like Donald Justice’s “Sestina” or Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” My point is only that, on the whole, the poems appear to be designed (written) with New Critical formulae somewhere in the vicinity of the writing. As Paul Carroll has written, in a recollection of the “war of the anthologies” (and also falling, I think, in the final phrase, into a New Critical understanding of the poem as “verbal object”): “the war of the anthologies seemed largely a cardboard affair in which I found I had little lasting interest because poems in both collections had moved me deeply. Moreover, I mistrust attempts to corral poets into movements or schools. All this accomplishes . . . is the manufacture of subtle but rigid preconceptions which limit or damage one’s ability to face an individual poem on its own terms” (emphasis added).

The editors of New Poets of England and America are noted (in biographical information on each provided on the copyright page) as all having university affiliations—Hall at Michigan, Pack at The New School for Social Research and Barnard, and Simpson at Columbia. The volume contains work by fifty-two poets—sixteen of them English and thirty-six American. (Only six of the total are women.) The editors provide a short introduction wherein they note that they “have attempted to present selections from the poetry of a generation” and, as such, “have included poets who are under forty,” poets, it turns out, “born between 1917 and 1935.” They make one disclaimer that is interesting in light of the “wars” that follow: the selection of English poets “may not be representative,” for (they write), “we cannot claim to be familiar with all the work being done in England today. Nor can we be confident that our judgment of English poetry is as sure as it might be if we were living in England.” The implication is clear: the surety lies in the (larger) selection of American poets, a “generation”-defining selection the “representative” completeness regarding which the editors have no doubts.

There remains one document concerning the Hall anthology that needs to be examined: the introduction entitled “Maturity No Object” by Robert Frost. It is a curious statement, “delightfully shrewd” (as Louise Bogan notes), to the point of seeming opaque. Frost begins by saying: “Maturity is no object except perhaps in education where you might think from all the talk the aim and end of everything was to get sophisticated before educated,” a statement that seems poised to reject the easy and false sophistications of the academy. But later, Frost admits: “it is not schools in general I reflect on, only bad schools which something should be done about before they get much larger. My excuse is that school and poetry come so near being one thing.” What are these “bad schools”? Is this an oblique reference to the Black Mountain “school” or the Beats? Or does the statement want to attach itself to that kind of school wherein “the aim and end of everything” is to “get sophisticated”? And how is it that “school” and “poetry” are nearly “one thing”? Later, Frost warns against knowledge—the danger to the scholar of “thoroughness . . . dredging to the dregs.” He says “the poet’s instinct is to shun or shed more knowledge than he can swing or sing. [And I remember clearly A. R. Ammons, years ago, telling me: “I think a poet ought to keep himself just a little stupid, John.”] His most available knowledge is acquired unconsciously. Something warns him dogged determination however profound can only result in doggerel. His danger is rhyming trivia.” These lines have, to my ears, the ring of a kind of warning to the young—more pointedly, to the young academic poets in the anthology. Read this way, Frost’s later remarks seem hardly to recommend the anthology, seem, in fact, a damning of the enterprise, its poets, and the academy that produced them:

The reader is more on trial here than [the poets] are. He is given his
chance to see if he can tell all by himself without critical instruction
the difference between the poets who wrote because they thought it
would be a good idea to write and those who couldn’t help writing . . .
If school is going to proclaim a policy of maturing boys and girls
ultimately it might become necessary for us to stay away from
school . . . to season slowly out of doors . . .

§

~

Morning notes.

The radickal thump of memory. The way the understory gets play’d, and play’d out. Root hooliganism. A de-fleshing. One stem is always the brain-stem.

A burrowing insect call’d the “goner bee.” Its mystificatory relation with the “gonna bee.” Which hovers throughout its short life-span, alighting only to die.

Allegory speaking up from the dead.

~

To the barricades.

~

New Funnies

~

Received:

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein, translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky (Eastern European Poets Series, 4) (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004)

“61 Now where did this come from?

62 Where, for example, did the lame crow in the dirty snow come from?

63 And where, I wonder, did the toppled fence and icy porch come from?

64 And the swallow’s dried dung on the haft of the spade?

65 And the wrinkled wiener on the bottom step of the escalator?”

Lev Rubinstein (written in 1996): “In the mid ’70s, I created my own genre—a genre of note cards, corresponding to my aspiration, at the time, to overcome inertia and the gravitation of the flat page.”

“A stack of cards can be treated as a visually manipulable object. Interacting with this object through rhythmic leafing, successively peeling back its layers (resembling an archeological excavation), literally plunging into the depths of the text—this is a material metaphor for the process of reading as game, spectacle, and labor.”

“The inherent quasi-quotability of this discourse is caused by the fact that other texts are the characters of my texts.”

The Robert Grenier connection is noted. The attempt to overcome “the gravitation of the flat page” turns “one” to painterly constructions of space, and Frank Stella’s “depths” and “projections.” Somehow thoughts of Raymond Queneau (turning the cut lines of the page to manufacture the Cent Mille Milliards (100,000,000,000,000) of sonnets) get into the miscible whorl, along with various dervish-whirl and point methods (Blaise Cendrars? Benjamin Peret?) for selecting ready-made pieces (phrase, sentence) to add to the bigger “piece.” (More thinking need’d.)

§

A POETICS—4

IMPASSE, DAWDLING, COMPLEXITIES

I reach an impasse. I dawdle. I fossick through books, ensconced in alarming complexities. Susan Sontag (in A Barthes Reader): “Like all great aesthetes, Barthes was an expert at having it both ways . . . For Barthes, liberty is a state that consists in remaining plural, fluid, vibrating with doctrine; whose price is being indecisive, apprehensive, fearful of being taken for an impostor.” The Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa, he of the heteronyms: “Be plural like the universe!” O’Hara (“Dialogues”): “You find me tentative and frivolous, don’t you? / and I don’t own anything.” Or again (“Meditations in an Emergency”): “My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.” Or again. In an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith in Standing Still and Walking in New York, O’Hara talks of “confections”: “someone . . . making themselves more elegant, more stupid, more appealing, more affectionate or more sincere than the words will allow them to be. Now I know I do it myself.” Again, the fear of being “taken for an impostor.” The recognition that words, paradoxically, allow an excess of, say, “elegance,” while seeming to “disallow” it. Of such plurality is the poem and the “someone” (self) made.

~

HEARSAY

“Alarming complexities.” The “fossick among books.” Is every text in the late twentieth century merely hearsay? The recognition that, possibly, “nothing is left to say,” that “there’s nothing to call one’s own,” leaves us suspect to ourselves (impostors) or makes us go giddy with appropriation and its indistinguishable counterpart, misappropriation. Evidence: in Frank O’Hara’s Art Chronicles are printed the goings-on of “5 Participants in a Hearsay Panel,” a script “conceived and recorded by Elaine de Kooning after three evenings of private discussion by Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, Mike Goldberg, and Norman Bluhm of the panel, with careful attention to misattribution and misquotation in keeping with the spirit of the art world.” It is noted, too: “(Some of the quotes, however, are accurate.)” The opening question—“Is style hearsay?”—is succeeded by such hearsay remarks as follow:

NORMAN: Frank says: Style at its lowest ebb is method. Style at
its highest ebb is personality.
. . .
FRANK: Harold Rosenberg says that artists read paintings and look
at books.
. . .
FRANK: Ernestine Lassaw told Franz Kline and Tom Young that
Bob Rauschenburg told her that Joseph Cornell saw a beautiful girl
in a box, a cashier’s box, outside a movie house and he used to ride
past the movie house on his bike every day to look at the girl in the
box. Then, one day, Ernestine said Bob said, he—Cornell—picked
a little bouquet of blue wild flowers and carried them up and down
on his bicycle in front of the movie house before he finally screwed
up his courage and thrust the flowers through the hole in the box at
the girl. She screamed for the manager who called the police but the
police let Cornell go.
. . .
FRANK: Speaking of chair designs, Harold Rosenberg says the only
way to criticize a chair is with your bottom.

More “alarming complexities.” Charles Bernstein, too, is apt to make hearsay a style. In the poem “Of Time and the Line” (in Hoover’s anthology), he begins—“George Burns likes to insist that he always / takes the straight lines”—and ends—“as / they say in math, it takes two lines to make / an angle but only one lime to make / a Margarita.” Interestingly, Bernstein provides an unattributed near quote of O’Hara in the middle of the poem: “you can often spot a work / of poetry by whether it’s in lines / or no; if it’s in prose, there’s a good chance / it’s a poem.” The lines recall unmistakably O’Hara’s in “Why I Am Not a Painter”: “I write a line / about orange. Pretty soon it is a / whole page of words, not lines. / Then another page. . . / . . . / It is even in / prose, I am a real poet.”

~

A WAY OUT

If the Barthes lines under consideration are useful for rummaging out some particular concerns about the nature of language, it is largely the result of my decontextualizing those lines in the interest of doing so. Language lies in pieces. I am walking a tightrope of fragments, knotting new lengths of rope to the lengths I am balancing on, pointing a trajectory towards a distant anchoring pillar I cannot “myself” “now” “properly” see. I will never get there. In “Myth Today” (in Mythologies) Barthes presents an argument that embeds pure language (in which the sign is arbitrary, unmotivated) into a “second-order semiological system” he calls “myth” (“stolen language,” “a language-robbery,” “never arbitrary . . . always in part motivated.”) The mechanisms of the shift are complex; the principle of myth is less so: as “a type of speech chosen by history[,] . . . it [myth] cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things”; however, “it transforms history into nature.” It is here that the struggle for language begins, the struggle played out with seeming endlessness in the history of (for my purposes) American poetry.

The poem (that is, image, language, discourse) aspires to object-status, the zero-degree, “pure matter,” and is always appropriated by myth which “wants to see in [writing, that material] only a sum of signs.” The movement, taking, appropriation, is akin to what Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition calls a “metanarrative,” an “apparatus of legitimation,” or to what Jean Baudrillard (quoted in Retallack) calls the final “phase” of the “image”: “its own pure simulacrum” bearing “no relation to any reality whatever.” (Barthes’s idea of “myth” could also be related to Jacques Lacan’s notion of the self’s movement through the imaginaire into the symbolic stage, a linguistically acculturated stage of selfhood wherein the prior self is irrecoverable, unknowable outside of language. Or to Fredric Jameson’s notion of “pastiche,” or “blank parody,” wherein, again, knowledge and expressiveness of the individual self is lost to “the imitation of dead styles.”) Here, O’Hara’s “confection” is the result of myth—as is Barthes’s own fear of fraudulence. Expression is possible and is impossible. Or as Jacques Derrida (Retallack again) puts it “All is narrative account and nothing is: . . . and we shall not know whether the relationship between these two propositions—the strange conjunction of the account and the accountless—belongs to the account itself.” The “strange conjunction” haunts the postmodern moment

~

QUANTUM THEORY

Just as it haunts contemporary physics. In a recent Scientific American article, John Horgan discusses the implications of quantum theory on philosophy in light of recent “thought” experiments. Noting Albert Einstein’s unease before “the vagaries of quantum mechanics” and Einstein’s famous retort to quantum theory’s “unreasonableness”—“God does not play dice”—Horgan writes:

So far the experiments are confirming Einstein’s worst fears. Photons,
neutrons and even whole atoms act sometimes like waves, sometimes
like particles, but they actually have no definite form until they are
measured. Measurements, once made, can also be erased, altering the
outcome of an experiment that has already occurred. A measurement
of one quantum entity can instantaneously influence another far away.
This odd behavior can occur not only in the microscopic realm but
even in objects large enough to be seen with the naked eye.

And Horgan adds:

In a sense, the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley was right when
he asserted two centuries ago that “to be is to be perceived.”

This is, of course, reminiscent of that writing that becomes so (text) only in the presence (perception, reading, performance) of a reader.

~

—it is seen in the rapid alternating flip between figure and ground (in Barthes’s version: “the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language-object and a metalanguage .) The “strange conjunction” is seen, too, in Barthes’s riff on common speech:

There is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about
things. A tree is a tree . . . But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet
is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a
certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence,
revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added
to pure matter.

The modernist dream of a “natural,” “everyday,” “ordinary,” “common” (Eliot), “accurate,” “clear,” (Pound) language thus drifts away . . . Or is the thing that simple? What of William Carlos Williams’s claim that “A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words”? How correlate that to Pound’s demand for a “direct treatment of the ‘thing’”? What of Eliot’s decidedly “indirect” notion of the “objective correlative”? What of Wallace Stevens’s line “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame” or such decidedly “uncommon” patter as “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!” What of Pound’s own disjunctures, juxtapositions, fragmentations and collage in the Cantos? My point is that modernism tells no single story, it is already marked by a crisis of stories and what follows those glory years of the early part of this century is a continual vying (continuous crisis) between two modernist stories—one, perhaps, looking longingly back to the English Romantics, one, perhaps, turned fondly to the French Symbolists and nineteenth century Aestheticism. Marjorie Perloff, in Radical Artifice, handily marks the two “strains” “natural or transparent” (claiming this as “the cornerstone of modernism”) and “artifice” (something, she claims, “one associates, not with a robust modernism, but with the nineteenth-century fin de siècle.”) I would argue that artifice is clearly, despite some loud disclaimers, a significant inherited feature of modernism.

~

“THE TRUE TEST OF A MAN IS A BUNT” —TED BERRIGAN

Basil Bunting: “Pound has provided a box of tools . . . and a man who is not influenced by Pound in this sense of trying to use at least some of those tools, is simply not living in his own century.” Still, David Antin notes that Pound (and Eliot) were “living in American time.” Busy in Europe recovering the various pasts (Provençal troubadour songs, Noh theatre, The Book of Songs), they missed “the fundamental direction of French (or European) poetry, a growing hostility to and finally hatred of literature.” What Antin suggests is that it took the generation of “the New American poetry”—Beat, Black Mountain, New York—to recognize and make use of the European “anti-literary” tradition, welding to it (as it had welded to itself) the indigenous “anti-literary impulses embodied in the great catalogues [of Whitman] and the home-made tradition of free verse.”

What time is it here, now? The fear: that by borrowing too consistently the “tools” out of any one particular “box,” the job will only repeat the motions of that other jobber. Or, by refusing certain tools, never get done. Berrigan’s “Tambourine Life” “bunt”: a silly and unexpected maneuver, anti-heroic, “anti-baseball”—the history of baseball registers no player famous for bunting. Antin notes how the “dandyish version of the European style appeared in New York . . . [and] advanced against literature the strategy of a gay and unpredictable silliness.”

What time is it here, now? A dogged earnestness rules on the right, rules on the left. Here—“sensitive” beleaguered “expressives.” There—humorless strategists of indeterminacy’s “play” (a serious word these days). It is a too “excellent” situation. (O’Hara: “Be not obedient of the excellent.”) An excellent time to “bunt.”

And I keep thinking of this aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche (in On the Genealogy of Morals): “From what you would know and measure, you must take leave, at least for a time. Only after having left town, you see how high its towers rise above the houses.” And I think of the trajectory of John Ashbery, the poems in The Tennis Court Oath as opposed to those, say, in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or Houseboat Days. Regarding the earlier work, Ashbery—in the Paris Review interview—contends: “I never expected these poems to see the light of day. I felt at that time that I needed a change in the way I was writing, so I was kind of fooling around and trying to do something I hadn’t done before.” Now Ashbery may be being disingenuous as to expectations, but the need for a change—that constancy—and the recognition that it may well be best achieved through “fooling around”— that’s the thing, the important thing.

What time is it here, now?
(What time is it back there, then?)

§

Night walk of a ruminant. The obvious “precursor” to the Rubinstein / Grenier note-card stacks: the Julio Cortázar novel Hopscotch. The (mostly short) sections meant to be read in any order. (If I recall correctly, a couple of “suggest’d orders” are present’d in the front matter.) I read the book in Paris circa 1973-4. I think I read it “straight through” (not one of the suggest’d orders—I was being expedient, or conventional.) What is Hopscotch but a bound stack of cards . . . Surely suggest’d (partially) by Borges (borges means “one who suggests everything” in Spanish). Various forking paths to arrive (somewhere, the same somewhere). Pell-mell some other “precursors”: the Rolodex®, library card catalogues (Rubinstein work’d for years as a librarian), modular furniture, Victorian-style catalogue houses—anything present’d as temporary arrangement. Shufflable. Any ensemble allowing choice. Think clothes, think accessorizing . . .

A rabbit mid-path snapped me out of that particular uncow’d dwelling . . . (More thinking need’d.)

~

Work.

~

Sundry Poxes

~

Against the thundery pox.
Against the uncertain rebell’d swat.
Against the uncurtain’d for.
Against the saturnine Weltschmerz.
Against the risible good it’d do.
For the lambent weaknesses.
Against another Saturday swap.
Against the yea-saying mulct.

§

A POETICS—3

A TITLE

I settle on “A Poetics,” nodding in the direction of Charles Bernstein. I like its humility, its provisional drift, refusal of apodictic certainty, of one-wayism.

~

WHERE THE CHARLES MEETS THE JAMES

Odd irony to that nod, that perceived humility. I recall an encounter with Bernstein in the early 1980s. He struck me as an ideologue and a marketing man, pushy, condescending, self-satisfied. Maybe he “had the right” as Raymond Carver would say. Maybe I was a raw youth. (I wasn’t.) The encounter occurred at the 68th Street Armory in New York City. The New York Small Press Book Fair. Bernstein manning the Segue Foundation table, me the Ithaca House. The exchange had to do with Ithaca House’s failure to live up to its early promise: the unspoken implication was that we had gone “counter-revolutionary” after publishing early books by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E crew—Ray DiPalma’s Soli, Bob Perelman’s Braille, Ron Silliman’s Crow. My raw youth’d retort probably had to do with eclecticism: I was big on eclecticism in those days. Later, in an issue of Chiaroscuro, the poetry magazine I edited, I made some smart remarks about Bernstein’s crowd, namecalling (“one-note Johnnies” was the term I used, though just now it occurs to me that I likely pilfered that from Tom Clark). My other line in those days was that while the theoretical writing may have been of interest, the poems themselves were “unreadable.” I would usually compare the situation to that of minimalist art. “All theory. Negligible dull praxis.” (A “horrible thought” occurs, like that of the grandmother in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” one that is so “embarrassing” that it upsets valise, basket, Pitty Sing the cat, etc. and causes the ACCIDENT. I just now realize that maybe it wasn’t Charles Bernstein. Maybe it was James Sherry . . .)

Who’s James Sherry?
Long period of rootless thinking.
In the narrative chunk all coherency is local.

~

If there is a hesitancy inhering in these notes that announces itself by way of fragmentation, clutter, recursivity and flight, the singing reckless hodge-podge of the here-no-longer-now, the now nowhere, and the whole project seemingly blocked by the root diction buried in condition, it is because “facts to be dealt with . . . they must / be played by, said he, coldly, the / ear!” (Charles Olson, “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”) I can hear “apoetics” in “A Poetics” and it triggers a stunning disbelief that it is possible to get anywhere. We cannot map the territory of the poetic or the poem; we can only map the territory of the maps. Our metaphors will never cease, and never cease deferring to other metaphors, the vehicles of our late twentieth century discontent, (a form of desire, and of amusement), what we are stuck with, staying the onslaught of certainty with the stays (props) of our discourse, the musical bones of our wording sunk into the tight corsets of our usual peremptory texts.

The lyrical outburst (“above,” and almost certainly “below” though “below” is now an empty page—a man perceives and writes one thing before “immediately and directly” [Olson] writing another) “signifies” (I have to use words) an iconicity, a referential effect. As does the fragmentary sputter and rev of these notes. The concept of iconicity comes out of Charles Peirce’s analysis of signs (I get it out of Easthope)—”an icon, such as a painted portrait, resembles its object.” The term is perhaps only new gear for those old troubadours “sound” and “sense”—the way language’s music, the material thump and jitter of its passage, its cadence (intonational) and vocable’d shout or whimper (phonetic, phonemic) can be seen as “expressing” or “enacting” (two choices) something of its meaning. With a difference, a slant: iconicity (Easthope) “exists as it is perceived, and so is historically—that is ideologically—instituted along with the expectations surrounding aesthetic discourse generally and poetic discourse specifically.” I ask: what are the expectations or demands of this discourse I am calling “A Poetics”? Is it because I sense that I am moving against those demands (those for clarity, for progression, for an “heroic” and individual voice, for rigor, the logic of linearity, narrative thrust—a whole teleological mischief that leads us to clamor for result) that leads me to clamor against result or end, thus positioning me as affirming its power?

“A Poetics” is not a “progress report”—I am not “going” anywhere. “A Poetics” is and is not “provisional”—it enacts a process of providing itself with the wares of its discomfiture, a way of getting itself in a jam, just as it cannot see ahead of the turns and terms of its own making. “A Poetics” is and is not an occasion for “revision”—it looks back over its own shoulder as it shoulders along, just as it refuses to alter what remains as trace, reminders / remainders of a passage in, not through. “A Poetics” is “impromptu” (in readiness, reading readied me for this) and “improvisational” (unforeseeable). “A Poetics” and I am nervous as hell. Nervous: out of the Latin nervus and akin to the Greek neuron (sinew, nerve) and nen (to spin). Nerves spinning back to the “flippancy” of figure / ground, spinning out a motion that refuses to advance, spinning a tissue, a weave, a web, the spider’s nodal structure, uprooted rhizomorph, a network, all surface, and completely perturbable. Nerves and Frank O’Hara (“Personism: A Manifesto” in Collected Poems): “You just go on your nerve.”

~

“THE GREAT CRIMINAL . . . THE ACCURSED,—AND THE SUPREME SAVANT!” —ARTHUR RIMBAUD

The writing crowds out intention. In the undertow of these particular waves (unforeseen) are dragged the heavier deposits, those that begin each morning with such comforting intimations of clarity, transferable knowledge. In justifying a manner of delivering “A Poetics” I am justifying a poetry that, too, skirmishes with the possibility of saying resolutely calling attention to its way of being—showy, so fat with desire as to go fatuous. I think of two things here. One is how I once had the opportunity to read an anonymous reader’s report on a manuscript I had submitted for publication. What I recall is something about the “dangers” of my “style,” how “language here” was like “a loaded gun in the hands of a small child.” And I think how—as regards language—every poet ought to aspire (or does) to the position of criminal genius or idiot savant. As idiots, we are incapable of getting out from under language’s attentions, it constructs us and our writings and not we it or them. As savants, we are quick to recognize the futility of intention, the impossibility of any “getting out,” so we privilege not our parasitic idiot “selves” but (to alter the metaphorical “host”) the “host”—language. O’Hara (“Lisztiana, Much Later”): “there should be maelstrom where / a privileged host is smiling. / And naked in debris I there / should be.”

~

THE OTHER THING

The other thing I think of is how Roland Barthes (in Writing Degree Zero) argues both for the autonomous nature of the language of poetry—“the Word in poetry can never be untrue, because it is a whole”—and for the existence of “gaps,” “absences” and “overnourishing signs” in the poetic discourse so constituted. Barthes:

[The Word] shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate
towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections. Fixed
connections being abolished, the word is left only with a vertical
project, it is like a monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality
of meanings . . . Thus under each Word in modern poetry there lies
a sort of existential geology . . . The Word is no longer guided in
advance by the general intention of a socialized discourse; the
consumer of poetry, deprived of the guide of selective connections,
encounters the Word frontally, and receives it as an absolute quantity,
accompanied by all its possible associations.

And Barthes continues the riff, defining the Word as “object,” as “category,” as “Pandora’s box” (though one containing “all the possibilities of language”) and concludes that this “Hunger of the Word . . . initiates a discourse full of gaps and full of lights, filled with absences and overnourishing signs, without foresight or stability of intention, and thereby . . . opposed to the social function of language.”

There are a number of seeming contradictions here, edifying paradoxes that seem to erect something like a house without walls, echoes that slip forth rather without origin, or return “unintentionally” altered: the writing’s code is that of the poetic discourse it founders in and founds only in order to break. (Am I being “intentionally” slippery here, pulling every punch? Or is it the case that language is in command, positing its own ineffable slippage? As Robert Duncan once noted in an interview with Ekbert Faas: the pleasure of reading Barthes is the result of Barthes’s contradictions—“the language itself [being] like a whole series of poetic events.”) Examples. The word’s “existential geology” is encountered “frontally” by the reader. The word is both thing in itself, decontextualized, no longer a “social fact,” all surface, absolute sound, immanent, embodied, pure signifier and the word is “accompanied by all its possible associations,” is what Barthes calls a “dwelling place,” is no longer absolute, aspires to (is hungry for) referentiality, goes omnivorous, multivalent, equivocal. In Mythologies, Barthes expands on this notion, claiming that poetry “clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified. The open-work structure of the concept is here maximally exploited.”

That stretch, yawning to rift, contradiction (if it is one) is in evidence everywhere in the statements of writers. In Donald Allen and Warren Tallman’s anthology, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, Robert Duncan (in “Ideas of the Meaning of Form”) approvingly quotes Thomas Carlyle, wherein, Duncan says, “imagination appears as an intuition of the real”: “All deep things are Song . . . Poetry, therefore, we call musical Thought . . . See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music.” Musicality, the sound-image of the word, its “surface” property is exactly what, as Barthes puts it, “plunges into a totality of meaning,” Carlyle’s “heart of Nature.” And again in conversation with Ekbert Faas, Duncan, echoing Barthes, claims that “All real instincts in language go toward an openness” and that “language has mysterious presences.” Duncan is adamant regarding the welter of language’s “possible associations” and how these position the writer’s “originality” (that is to say, “subjectivity”) as a paradox: the writer in language can only seek out the radical origins of words, what clings to language. In an essay on Duncan in James McCorkle’s Conversant Essays, the poet Michael Davidson quotes part of Duncan’s “unpublished preface to The Opening of the Field”: “I work toward immediacy; and I do not aim at originality. The meanings in language are not original, any more than the sounds; they accrue from all the generations of human use from the mists of the schwa and first objects to the many vowels and common universe of things today; they are radical, sending roots back along our own roots.”

Back to Barthes. Can the contradictions in the lines quoted be usefully read as positioning Barthes on the cusp of a utopian modernist dream? Certainly the notion of the Word preparing “to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections” echoes precisely one of Ezra Pound’s famous definitions of the image (in Gaudier-Brzeska) as “a radiant node or cluster . . . a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” However, the notion of the Word “without foresight or stability of intention . . . opposed to the social function of language,” while recalling, perhaps, (as I read it, intention’s instability gained through music), Pound’s insistence on melopoiea, on charging the word “by sound,” on composing in the musical phrase—“Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music,” in ABC of Reading—also signals a sliding away, a waking out of the modernist dream.

Both Pound and T. S. Eliot, in various statements, seem to go against Barthes’s claim of poetry’s attempt to oppose the “social function of language.” Pound (ABC of Reading): “Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability as WRITERS . . . Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.” And, as Perloff notes in Radical Artifice, Eliot in “The Music of Poetry” speaks of “one law of nature more powerful than any . . . the law that poetry must not stray too far from ordinary everyday language which we use and hear.” Poetry, according to Eliot, “remains . . . one person talking to another” and, moreover: “Every revolution in poetry is apt to be . . . a return to common speech.”

§

“The mists of the schwa.” I had forgotten. I love that.

~

Wittgenstein: “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.” I see Slykent is up in the miniature lime tree talking about the “perfumeries of her forkedness.” Lovely. Spenser writing in Chaucer’s language, looking to th’old (and making it new): first modernist. I love that first modernist game.

~

Combover. A laugh and a half. A lalf and a haugh.
Epitaphs. Epitaughs. Epitalfs.
Black stone. Vernix, a word I’d forgotten. Along with bilirubin. (Jaundice-related. With G. we count’d bilirubins.)

~

Warmish, blowing, low clouds doin’ some hard travelin’. Big yellow ochre moon toss’d up by black froth. Consentual buddydom. Revivalist shearwater. Boatload of borrow’d light. A myriad petals curdling off the cherry tree: flocculents aburst. One title will be “Yes and Gag.” Though I am dumping th’akademical (badge out, laid off)—I keep scribbling out my affliction. (Says he’s got a bad cough.) Pound: “the ‘string tribes.’” Translating an ode in the “classic anthology defined by Confucius,” and using the—as Donald Davie says—“Redskin ceremonial greeting familiar from Western movies”: “How!” Plying (and re-plying) everything one knows.

~

Morning. Late-blooming catalpas still behung with a few long pods. No budding signs. Yesterday a blanket cover’d a neighbor’s tiny garden patch, frost on the grass clippings. Today I see a blanket-sized zone—a minuscule slug protectorate—of mostly basil. One pale velvety sage plant thrown in. Dill.

~

To work.

~

Jury Cut

~

J. stuck with jury duty all week. So I scoot G. to school and, some days, scoot back to fetch him. Today the C-dog and I did it: I run with her to the point she cuts into a lope / gallop—then I got to rein her in. Too fast.

Continuing with the self-indulgent ‘scratchpad dump’ below. I rather think we’d all get over all the pissin’ and moanin’ about the construction of the self pretty soon, no?

§

A POETICS—2

And all this, too—perhaps: another self indulgent ramble. I want to understand and limn out here how that boy came to construct stories, how all manner of words began to prime and flash in the brain-pan, how manipulating language for its own pleasures came to seem a viable (inevitable?) concern. If I start with that Michigan boy and trouble the edges of his experience, it is because memory and myth compel me to do so. I would like to say that that Mother’s Day poem began an unstoppable flowering, dozens of heavily scrawled notebooks, a whole childhood populated with playmates pencil-pushed into existence. That’s the myth of writers, isn’t it? That boy’s mother was pleased with the poem, but she was generally pleased. Obviously “he” did not become “I” in mid-sentence. (And am I “I,” or “I” I?) He. The boy returned to a netherworld, a solitary figure in waning light throwing a baseball high above the light and standing with outstretched mitt waiting for that stitched and perfectly white ball to reappear. And because I (or “I”) am here, he stands there waiting still.

Back to Barthes and that “pretentious idea”: to write. Having discarded that boy, leaving him waiting for a baseball to come plunging white out of the darkness, I note a small chill of embarrassment. Writing is viewed as presumptuous in this culture: to claim oneself a writer is to open oneself to gentle mockery, thinly concealed derision, or its obverse, unreflective admiration. Why should language, something so natural and available to all (the argument goes) be your domain, the tool of your petty trade? Who gives you permission to name what is always already [now there’s a sad blighter’s expression I could do without, henh?] named? And the correct response, of course, is not the shrug of “I guess I did,” but the more inexplicable “ You did.” And that “you” here must needs be a whole confusing cartel of (mostly) institutional structures—backwoods schools, editorial giants and their dwarfish counterparts, publishing concerns big and small, grants committees partial and “impartial,” readers. Of course this seems so labyrinthine a “you” as to permit the reductive ease of merely naming institutions as a means of dismissal: “the complex web of forces. . .”—just so one can get on with the “business” of writing—language trotting all over the turf, nicking the surface, sending divots flying. I could make a list—a personal cartel and its representatives: the gentle Mrs. Riordan who betook to display a three-line poemlet about a raccoon (“Oh bright-eyed demon. . .”) in a glass case in the school corridor; the sad-eyed Mrs. Chaffee who taped something or other “unforgettable” to her home refrigerator; the university creative writing teacher who published a magazine and “took” this poem or that poem. . . But doesn’t such thinking lead to a kind of barking-up-the-wrong-tree Pavlovianism? Is one only structured by a series of institutional “permissions” or “denials”? Somehow I think here of language acquisition itself—lalling noises reinforced by rewards gradually becoming real imitative sounds. But is the lalling stage acquired or innate? If I’ve traced an “origin” (a false origin) to my writing in my story of the boy with no money to buy a Mother’s Day card (institutional demands of a celebrated holiday pulling writing from the boy), the question remains: why writing? Why not a recipe box covered with varnished macaroni shells or a heart cut out of plywood with a coping saw, a heart appliqué’d with chubby cupids gamboling in sunshafts?

I have long held to a myth of supposed purity regarding “the first poem.” This is usually expressed as a longing—”Remember back, Latta, to the first poem you ever wrote”—and a return—“Try to write out of those impulses.” The feeling is that subsequent poems are muddied, are “impure,” are written with the unspoken (invisible) demands of readers (institutions) somehow sullying an imagined primordial limpidity of language and intent. “Back when I was just fooling around.” Interestingly, that “first poem” changes—is it this one of 1968 or this one of 1971 or this one of 1987? The impulse here is to resist expectations, to thwart self-caricaturing tendencies, to shake off mannerisms, to do that old Poundian cut of the rug: “make it new” (by way of the eternal return). One could well argue, of course, that the impulse is institutionally driven: the artist structured as “he-who-makes-only-to-remake,” the one who refuses to settle but re-invents self-as-artist continually. Picasso is the model (heroic) construct of the construct.

I am skirting around another possibility here: one that claims the ancient prerogative (or providence?) that is locked up in the word poet: “he who makes, akin to the Sanskrit cinoti, he who heaps up.” The notion is troubling and presumptuous: it denies that institutional structures shape the writer (or admits they do so exactly to the degree that they make this very formulation possible). The two mirrors again. The writer’s notion of self as a reflection of the notion a society holds of its writers, a notion supplied by writers’ own notions of writers, those little deaths of self autobiography supplies. A more perplexing and ludicrous situation is hard to uncover and is, frankly, liable to paralyze. I see two choices: one can accept the writer-self as constructed, constituted by language, and simply(?) pretend—writing—that this is not the case at all times, not here, not now, making local and provisional the nature of the exchange. Or one can respond with the enigma itself, the tiny chuckle that verges on / merges with the cosmic laughter (that word Nabokov notices as being buried in slaughter). Here’s what the late Joe Brainard, writer, collagist, cartoonist, friend of Ron Padgett, concocted back about the time I was writing one of my “first poems.” The statement stands in lieu of a “Note about the Author” on the final page of Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire. It pursues succinctly (unwittingly) the dilemma as I have (lengthily) tried to run it down here. Brainard:

Ron Padgett is a poet. He always has been a poet and he always will
be a poet. I don’t know how a poet becomes a poet. And I don’t think
anyone else does either. It is something deep and mysterious inside of
a person that cannot be explained. It is something that no one understands.
It is something that no one will ever understand. I asked Ron Padgett once
how it came about that he was a poet, and he said, “I don’t know. It is
something deep and mysterious inside of me that cannot be explained.”

~

that statement (declarative, in language—everything lies in language) captures what Roland Barthes (in Mythologies) calls “the essentialist ambitions of poetry.” Just as it subverts those ambitions, fettering to itself a renunciation (declarative, in language, that grand et cetera) of its own statement, of itself as statement. Just as. Meaning one cannot stop, unless stopping is considered a kind of perpetuum mobile, a hovering, a stutter-y affirmation / denial of possibilities. Think of a drawing of a goblet that is a drawing of two faces in profile pressing close to kiss, lips puckered to articulate the decorative turns and knurlings of the goblet’s stem: figure become ground, ground figure in impetuous flicker. Even though I cannot ever “see” both goblet and kiss simultaneously, even though one or the other succeeds always in declaring itself as representation, just as one or the other succeeds always in declaring itself as the artist’s “negative space,” the drawing’s instability, its “flippancy” is inexorable: it refuses signification by denying ground’s presence, it is all signifier.

Language lies in pieces. Meaning language, partial, presents untruths. Meaning language is broken, a system disassembled. Meaning piecemeal language dissembles. Meaning a layabout language, un-whole, un-summed, unwholesome. (I recognize, of course, that the homonymic signifier lies [as in the telling of untruths, as in assuming a recumbent position]—along with the sentence’s posed, artifactual isolation, its lack of context—triggers the havoc, the refusal to commit to a single signified. I am captivated by this quality, the what’s-bound-to-sound, the Saussurean parole. I go overboard. I overload. I riff.) The point is, as in the goblet / kiss drawing, language here is all signifier, aspiring to a condition of poetry. Sir Philip Sidney (quoted in Anthony Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse): “the poet . . . nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” The condition of poetry is never state or statement, never totalizes: its condition is always conditional, dependent on the “social fact” (Ferdinand de Saussure) of language (what it lies against, never lying still, always lying); it conditions (adapts, modifies, or molds itself to conform to its own environing culture—its theatre, its reader).

~

“MAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS”

The role of the reader is central to any discussion of a (possibly) postmodernist poetics. Whence: the oft-repeated story of the “death of the author.” Harold Rosenberg (in The De-definition of Art): “The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself.” The text comes into being only in the process of being read—such is its conditionality, its indeterminacy. Without a reader, “A Poetics” only lurks in a liminal, pre-existent state: marks on a page. Rosenberg again:

[The arts] have been undergoing a process of de-definition. The nature of
art has become uncertain . . . No one can say with assurance what a work
of art is—or, more important, what is not a work of art. Where an art object
is still present, as in painting, it is what I have called an anxious object: it
does not know whether it is a masterpiece or junk.

Thus, the notion of a culture of performance haunts the postmodernist moment. Every text serves as uncertain blueprint, as ambiguous trace, for a “defining” action to come. The text is fully vulnerable to the reader’s performance of it. Ihab Hassan (in The Postmodern Turn):

Indeterminacy elicits participation; gaps must be filled. The postmodern
text, verbal or nonverbal, invites performance: it wants to be written,
revised, answered, acted out. Indeed, so much of postmodern art calls
itself performance, as it transgresses genres. As performance, art (or
theory for that matter) declares its vulnerability to time, to death, to
audience, to the Other.

In its conditionality poetry aspires to the caprice of saying everything as it recognizes the futility of saying anything beyond the “sound image” (Saussure) of its own saying. As such, the language of poetry is always in a state (that is a non-state, a condition, a poised flux, a quivering stasis) of desire. Signifier courting signified. Music hounding meaning. Parole going blank with the enormity of its blandishments, cajoling langue to turn, to verse, to versify. It is a slippery business, poetry—and “A Poetics”—is. Here one is versed in turnings, where (recalling the figure / ground shift and subsequent constant and indeterminate upheavals of goblet, of kiss)

~

AMBIGUOUS FIGURES

In an essay titled “Post-Scriptum—High Modern” in Marjorie Perloff’s Postmodern Genres, Joan Retallack provides the following note: “Interestingly Niels Bohr, inventor of the particle / wave ambiguity, knew and attended the lectures of the Gestalt psychologist, Edgar Rubin, inventor of the famous vase / profile ambiguous figure [what I call here the goblet / kiss figure], during the time when he (Bohr) was developing his quantum mechanical theories.” Retallack appends the above tidbit to a discussion of a poem by P. Inman which, she allows, “has features very much like the classic ambiguous figure,” that is, “nothing but content . . . and coextensive with it . . . nothing but form.” Retallack also quotes R. L. Gregory in Eye and Brain: “Ambiguous figures put our perceptual system at a curious disadvantage; because they give no clue of which bet to make, and so it never settles for one bet. The great advantage of an active system of this kind is that it can often function in the absence of adequate information by postulating alternative realities.” I want to argue that all poetry—initially, historically, by foregrounding language as such—aspires to such a postulation, one whose concern is, first, being, ontology. As a mode of being (style) develops, a manner of reading (a system of interpretive habits) does also. In the emergence / merging of interpretation and style, being becomes knowing, process becomes product, the ambiguous figure begins to appear in the form of another in a long line of placers of merely epistemological bets. Works of the postmodern moment (illustrated, perhaps, by a writing like P. Inman’s “nimr” with lines like “sod droner / ewe ccretion. digm to result”) are, for now, available as “active system[s]” and, as such, activate our “perceptual system[s].” They are “writerly.” Rather than examining / detailing an already available world through language, they posit a world in language: a “digm” not a “paradigm.” The “writerliness” (triggering “activity,” participation) of such works will, though, eventually diminish; they will be seen to go “readerly” as our readings move to subsume new structures of being into the more comfortable and “passive” recognitions of knowing. See, for example, how claims of mimesis are liable to be made on behalf of any number of increasingly disjunct, fragmented, “exploded” texts.

~

the ludic is lucid, the lucid a ludic lie.

§

Out, my wont, my dog. Full moon cut clean, die-stamp’d out of the low-grade black steel sky. Flaws, cloud-bubbles. I’m trying to measure the size of the moon. Big as a wristwatch. No, bigger. Big as a pocket watch. Wrong. Big as a milk bucket. Vaguely rhomboid and tin-color’d result. No good. Think of the angle, the horse’s view. Cow’s p.o.v. Caravaggio. No. Big as a Franklin fifty cent piece. I pretend to hold up a coin between thumb and forefinger, arm outstretch’d. That coin’d be might small, a Roman nummus minimus, a centavo. Why do I think it’s as big as a half-dollar? Or a silver dollar? Big as a biscuit. Big as a bailiff. Big as all Byelorussia.

~

Ongoing frittery diffusion. Anchorless for three-four days. Cyclic or basal? Looking into the threads of my shirt and seeing extraordinary depths, luminosities, crosshatchings of God-tailors. Ommateum, eye of fly. Vague sense (“if it wuddint fo’ vague sinse, I woulddint have no sense at all . . .”) that it’s a poor idea to uncoil that akademickal noise in lieu of “new writing.” Which is why I’m writing now? No. Writing out my fuss and mayhem, fluvial, intricate, unstuck. My most casual failures of nerve.

~

Denton Welch? Or Donald Davie? (What’s it gonna be, boy . . .)

~

(Davie.)

~

Blunder and Wasp

~

Friday night. My sense that blunder is a better-made word than, say, wasp.

~

Saturday morning. The rose-breasted grosbeak halfway up the maple. That veritable blood-crimson splash down the breast. My father tells me Peterson says of its song: “like a robin with a sore throat.” Fat white beak. One of the bigger finches.

~

Claude Williams, Kansas City jazz violinist, dead. So the radio says. “Out west ebbebuddy want’d me t’ play “San Antone Rose,” oh, fibe, sick, time a night.” So the transcript of my memory says.

~

Saturday afternoon. Off with my brother S. (in town briefly, he lives in Tomales, California, works for PRBO) and J. and G. to John K. King’s in Detroit. Used books. It’s something of a ritual,—“Michigan’s Largest Bookstore,”—four floors of a building that seems surround’d by highways, overwhelming the way such lodes get. I pass up a Lewis Warsh Coach House Press thing call’d Part of My History for five dollars, very early ’seventies, print’d in blue ink, and think how unthinkable that would’ve been “in one era.” Such are the eras. Or such is the vagaries of the print’d word. No design or muster to what’s compelling at any particular moment. Half of everything I bought “I’d gladly give you Tuesday” for half of everything I didn’t buy today . . .

~

Bought (John K. King’s):

Pound / Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, edited and with Commentary by Forrest Read (New Directions, 1967)

“I cling to the rock of Gautier, deluding myself perhaps with the idea that he did journalism for years without becoming an absolute shit.”

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams, Introduction and Notes by Raymond Carney (Penguin, 1986)

Carney links Adams’s work with “that of Stanley Elkin, Sam Shephard (sic), and Thomas Pynchon today.” For all of whom “however critically naïve or unsophisticated they may appear to be in comparison with continental models, American alienation has stimulated a mode of imaginative mobility and performative freedom.” Which only makes me want to say: “Look, Ma, no hands.” Odd, i’n’it, American bumpkin talk in 1986? —Was that, at heart, what all that French theory was about? Effect of an ever-ongoing inferiority complex? The old dogs of Europe barking in the sunlight, kippin’ de Wolfs out de Do’r? —Qui sais, Kimosabe (“The Man Who Knows Nothing”)?

Adams: “Dates are stupidly annoying;—what we want is not dates but taste;—yet we are uncomfortable without them.”

Zwilling’s Dream, by Ross Feld (Counterpoint, 1999)

Thumbing through, thinking it looks rather pedestrian, mostly usual domestic fuss, realism mode. Believing so strongly in the merits of the essays I’ve found . . .

~

Bought (Friends of the Library)

Children and Fools, by Erich Fried, translated by Martin Chalmers (Serpent’s Tail, 1992)

“So after attentive reading of [Borges’s] works it can at most be surmised, that in this story his actual plan was perhaps to deceive his own lies to such an extent, that as a result the truth would become known in the end. But because he had long before learned, in his writings, to lie much better than he himself knew, this attempt only made his lies altogether impossible to disentangle.”

The Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody, edited with an Introduction and Commentary by Harvey Gross (Fawcett, 1966)

R. Wellek and A. Warren, I. A. Richards, R. Graves, G. Saintsbury, R. Bridges, E. Pound, O. Jespersen, Y. Winters, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. Beardsley, N. Frye, R. Sutherland, A. Stein, H. Gross, and T. Roethke. Appendix by R. M. Alden. A period piece, a snapshot point’d, in retrospect, at the cusp of a shift.

“You don’t ask an art instructor to give you a recipe for making a Leonardo da Vinci drawing.

Hence the extreme boredom caused by the usual professorial documentation or the aspiring thesis on prosody.” —Pound, E.

Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir, by Doris Grumbach (W. W. Norton, 1991)

Vignette’d, notational. “William Cullen Bryant’s idea was that death was pleasant, like a dreamless sleep, of which, upon awakening, one says: ‘It was my best night’s sleep.’”

James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton (St. Martin’s, 1974)

Aucune idée.

A Key into the Language of America, by Rosmarie Waldrop (New Directions, 1994)

R. W. meets Roger Williams, breakaway (banish’d) seeker of religious freedom who fled to “Rhode Island.” Under “On Marriage”:

“Flesh, considered as cognitive region, as opposed to undifferentiated warmth, is called woman or wife.”

The Jade Cabinet, by Rikki Ducornet (Dalkey Archive, 1993)

“Simultaneous with Tubbs’s defeat, and just as a larval worm which, when its time has come to fly, breaks through the dry crust of the earth to crawl beneath the sun and spread its wings, Baconfield, further crazed, surfaced. His beard and hair were knotted with lumps of tar, and fragments of shattered crockery had penetrated his skin.”

Also: Barthelme’s The Dead Father, Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, Great Short Works of Herman Melville, Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, and something call’d Ornithology: An Introduction, by Austin L. Rand. Which, shown to S., elicit’d the mock-sneery dismissal, “That’s a textbook.” (So go brothers, hounding along the book trail. S. land’d a large volume with extraordinary color plates, something like Birds of Florida, publish’d in the 1930s.)

~

In the tiny opticks and goatee of Charles Dickens, I hereby announce my intention to begin delivery to th’Hotel, serially, of a lengthy piece writ in the throes of academickal consolation, in one (or several) of the curious languages it offers up for accrual—and which it is later usually behooves “one” to shed, leaving it behind, dry, dispirit’d (breathless), the color and texture of a glassine envelope, something a collector (say a philatelist) might use to organize a series of tiny portraits within. The thing weaves, an ivresse stroboscopic, a flicker-stick. At a certain tempo, one “sees” it arrive looking nearly “whole.” True as a trou.

Part of my reason for “running” these pieces now—“trotting” these old Surreys (or slurries) by—is that I need to cut a makeshift shed (in time) within which to cobble a manuscript together. So. Dump in the old. It’ll either rusticate the place, or “make it new.” I make no apologies, I am curious to see what I thought ten years back. Or how crudely I thought it. I have, in th’interest of General Public (we are all military pigs nowadays), pull’d out the pins that kept up the academic hem. Otherwise, the code is unbroken. Avanti (we are all secular thugs nowadays).

§

A POETICS—1

PIECES OF A FIGURE, PIECES OF A GROUND

Language lies in pieces.

And one thinks of stopping there, thinks that that story,

~

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STORY

Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman.
—Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

What I have to say here is of necessity a story: there is no way out of that. I am a character in the story: the story-I-am is writing the story of how I became the story-I-see-myself-to-be. You see the problem: it’s as if a novel is setting out to write a novel, or a poetics a poetics. Barthes (in Roland Barthes): “I am the story which happens to me: freewheeling in language, I have nothing to compare myself to.” I want to think about how I have come to think about myself as a writer, the he-who-writes. Of necessity, I must occupy (as Robert Morgan says in a poem titled “Weed Above Snow”: “This poem the space between two mirrors”) “the space between two mirrors.” Constructed by language, curled in its shell like the meat of a walnut which is the walnut itself, I have only language itself at hand: a too weak tool for the prising open. I can no more extract the walnut whole than I can see myself without the mirror(s): I am always already mirror seeing mirror, I am walnut trying to open walnut. The metaphors are unjust: all metaphors are unjust—they assert without asserting and so nudge us toward the thing constantly deferred. This story is that kind of nudge, a fiction. Lawrence Durrell: “Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words . . . with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim . . . I wrote: ‘Once upon a time. . . .’ And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!”

Once upon a time: that’s the autobiographical gesture of the West. Singular moment, singular individual in the smear of time, in the hubbub of the crowd. Language trying to extricate a particular from “the rustle of language” (Barthes). The evidence is always fragmentary, selected through the tarnished lens of our own subjectivity, our subject position. Once upon a time a boy aged, say, nine ran aground on the rocks of a set of—what seemed to him—perfectly natural expectations. Mother’s Day, in the year nineteen hundred and, say, sixty-three. At the age of nine one imagines Mother’s Day to be as usual and natural and apt as the familiar figure of mother herself, or as the slow rotation of seasons in northern Michigan, that watery rush into spring that boy loved. This is how our constructs work: inevitably. The boy did not see nor care to see all this but he knew well enough the trappings of the Mother’s Day construct: he had been to the Rexall’s Drug Store in his tiny town, he had seen the rows of palely florid cards for purchase, he had read the swift rhymes detailing sentiments as bountiful and natural as the familiar figure of mother herself, etc. With no choice in the matter and pockets empty, he entered the institution of writing without thought, “without,” as Nabokov says of Gogol, “knocking.”

This is, perhaps, a ridiculous way to proceed. Barthes again: “to write on oneself may seem a pretentious idea; but it is also a simple idea: simple as the idea of suicide.” Autobiography as the death of self by self. In my tiny saga, “I” am lost just as that nine-year-old version of myself was lost—acting out of unseen institutional (“language’d”) imperatives. My point is this: an early connection was made between the writing and the written. Writing was imitation, but was do-it-yourself, was a commerce contrary to commerce. It was also directed both out and in: out as a giving rather than an exchange, in as a place fashioned by one’s entering. That boy spent an afternoon in the cellar carefully constructing an illustration (now wholly forgotten) for a Mother’s Day card and lettering out on lined newsprint an insert: a poem in iambic tetrameter (that driving unsentimental beat of teenage love ditties), in couplets—eight whole painstaking lines:

The forest is so big and fine,
I love to walk among the pines. . .

Six lines of little boy lost (joyfully) in the ever-friendly woods, a paradise of “Deer [who] look up at you and gaze” before they “wander off a ways.” Six lines and not another living soul to be found—no mother, no Rexall’s, no lambent declarations of love or gratitude until the boy in the cellar scribing must have felt silly and flawed and hurriedly tacked on a final limp couplet:

Now I have something I must do,
Something I must do for you.

That is, the “doing” done (the poem), the boy sought desperately to label it so. To smooth over the rhymes’ decorous uselessness with an act of accommodation (or commodification). Such words, after all, were bought and sold (in gummed pastel envelopes) for someone, that familiar someone. They were for sharing, appreciation, love, best wishes—not for constructing self-indulgent rambles through “rocks and hills and bubbling springs.” But had a discovery been made that words might (clumsily) do both? Perhaps.

§

Rain and cold. Down into the twenties overnight. Rain rain’d the remaining forsythias down in slurry yellow heaps. Rinsed the tiny green fleurettes of the maples off. Thwap’d the catkin-gobs, purplish wounds, off the walnuts. Dogwoods, few, holding tight, oh holy stigmatae of Jesus. Japanese maples, reddish, the needle-like leaves holding to a delicate, almost debonair, horizontal. Flowering crabs. Frothy pink of a Shirley Temple. Thick as tissue-mades. A bulk’d up shrub rumbustious. Cotton candy.

~

Fractures of coffee and talk (to th’ingressive continuum).
The coffee factor.
The talk factor.

~