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

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

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

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

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

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

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