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Showing posts with label <b>Alan Curnow</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Alan Curnow</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, September 17, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Against the orgy of
unrelievably bad public poetry commemorating the first anniversary of the
September 11<sup>th</sup> attacks, I had the occasion to read Allen Curnow&#8217;s &#8220;A
Framed Photograph&#8221; from his 1972 serial poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects</i>, in which the assassinations of the
brothers Kennedy is posed against the consequences of their own actions
elsewhere in the world, as in this stanza:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Act
one, scene one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">of
the bloody melodrama. Everyone listened<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">while
everyone read their poems. BANG! BANG!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">and
we cried all the way to My Lai.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Which in turn brought me
back to the poems concerning JFK&#8217;s assassination that were written by Jack
Spicer and Louis Zukofsky and beyond that, the anti-Vietnam War poems by Robert
Duncan and Allen Ginsberg. While none of these were explicitly written for
&#8220;command performance&#8221; occasions, all show the range of what might be possible
within this genre that I might characterize as shared public emotion &#8211; from the
most personal (Zukofsky&#8217;s &#8220;A&#8221;-23) to the most declamatory (Ginsberg&#8217;s &#8220;Wichita
Vortex Sutra, Part II&#8221; or Duncan&#8217;s &#8220;The Fire, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Passages </i>13&#8221;). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spicer&#8217;s JFK poem appears in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Language</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Smoke signals<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the
earthquake hit<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be
insane.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spicer&#8217;s poem replicates the
process of grieving in the way that grief turns everything, no matter how
remote &#8211; here a description of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake &#8211; into a commentary
on its obsessive object. It&#8217;s no coincidence that two phrases &#8211; &#8220;Smoke signals&#8221;
and &#8220;Bang, snap, crack&#8221; &#8211; apply equally to the devastation in Anchorage &amp;
the shots ringing out over Elm Street in Dallas. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Spicer&#8217;s ambivalence over
public language is on record. His very last poem, concluding <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of Magazine Verse</i>, takes an unnamed
Ginsberg to task for allowing himself to be chosen <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kraj Majales</i> in a Prague May Day celebration. One poem earlier,
Spicer makes the claim that<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">They&#8217;ve (the leaders of our country) have become
involved in a network of lies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We (the poets) have also become in network of lies by
opposing them.*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s a position that Spicer
knows is untenable. Indeed, irresolvable conflict is the primary Spicerian
theme. Spicer himself wrote obliquely about the Vietnam War earlier in that same
book. And the final poem to Ginsberg concedes that &#8220;we both know how shitty the
world is,&#8221; refusing to place Spicer above the very same behavior he is about to
criticize. Yet, while it is possible to argue that, at least in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Magazine Verse</i>, Spicer chooses
individual human relations over social ones (which thus would be the point of
his announced solidarity with the Prague police rather than the
counter-cultural demonstrators with whom Ginsberg was parading), the JFK poem
clearly places Spicer on the other side of that line. This is ambivalence in
the most literal sense. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of this harkens back to
Wordsworthian homilies concerning emotion recollected in tranquility when
tranquility is precisely what is lacking if the poem is to be taken as a
possible transcript of consciousness (as Wordsworth himself does in the
Crossing the Alps section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prelude</i>),
a category that is as inclusive of emotion as it is of thought. Add to this the
impulse to &#8220;even out&#8221; rough edges until the product shines with that glazed
state of crockery called the well-wrought urn** and you have a prescription for
literary disaster of titanic &#8211; and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titanic</i>
&#8211; proportions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*I have
always wondered whether to assign the &#8220;missing&#8221; words in that second line to
Spicer&#8217;s alcoholism, which would kill him only weeks after this was written, or
if in fact the absence of &#8220;involved&#8221; in particular signaled a deeper level of
meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** See my
comments for September 5.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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at
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<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002/09/against-orgy-of-unrelievably-bad.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2002-09-17T05:56:00-04:00'>Tuesday, September 17, 2002</abbr></a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, September 13, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of course Allen Curnow and
Gary Snyder are not precisely generational equivalents. Snyder&#8217;s first
publication, in the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Reed</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">College</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> student publication <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Janus</i>, doesn&#8217;t occur until 1950, a point at which Curnow has already
brought out at least three books. But one of the things the comparison does is
to highlight that discrepancy. The reality is that there were few innovative
American poets of significance who emerged during the 1940s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The largest exception is Robert
Duncan, who in fact first started publishing at the end of the 1930s
(precocious teenager that he was). The two other major movers of literary form
who were born during that decade between 1910 and 20 &#8211; Charles Olson and the
novelist William Burroughs &#8211; were both late bloomers. Glancing over Hayden
Carruth&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Voice That is Great <span class="GramE">Within</span> Us</i>, a surprisingly decent anthology of the first
60 years of the 20<sup>th</sup> century that organizes its poets by birth date
&#8211; now there&#8217;s a narrative! &#8211; you can&#8217;t help but notice that between the first
poet born in that decade (Olson) and the last (May Swenson), the poets who
predominate in that period &#8211; Schwartz, Berryman, Jarrell, <span class="SpellE">Kees</span>,
</span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Stafford</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Weiss and </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; represent the core of what was the academic
tradition of American poetry. The more innovative poets of that decade,
Antoninus/Everson<span class="GramE">,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>Patchen</span>, Merton, McGrath, were all pronounced loners as writers.
Two were monks, no less.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Certainly, the Second World
War created a great schism in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">n writing, by cutting off the expatriates and the
international influences that had been so very important to the high
modernists. One might also blame the war, at least in part, for the failure of
the </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Ob</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">jectivists to move beyond their first youthful burst
of publishing in the 1930s. For a talented young poet during the war years, the
conservative tradition of American letters &#8211; that version of history that sees </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> poetry as a tributary of British letters &#8211; was very
close to the only game in town. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Five poets who are interesting
to look at in this regard are David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro on the one hand
&#8211; Shapiro is slightly younger, having been born in 1924 &#8211; and, on the other,
Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The first two have often
been paired, and I admit to reading them as though they were examples of what
the Williams influence would have led to had Objectivism not shown its
potential for greater breadth, depth and evolution. When the New Americans came
along, Ignatow and Shapiro could easily have recognized the shared sympathies
for Williams, but seem instead to have been isolated by the sudden appearance
of all this new writing. Except for Shapiro&#8217;s first book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Eye, </i>published by Alan Swallow (as far from the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"> publishing world as one could get in the 1950s), the
two did not begin bringing out books until the 1960s. The trajectory of their
isolation was to lead both into becoming profound conservatives, as is evident
from Shapiro&#8217;s work at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times
Book Review</i> and Ignatow&#8217;s comments at the &#8220;What is a Poet?&#8221; symposium at
the </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">University</span></st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Alabama</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1984. (See Hank Lazer&#8217;s <span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> is a Poet?</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The three women poets have
often been claimed by the conservative literary tradition and to some degree at
least they must have needed to relate to that world simply to get their work
into print, not unlike Williams. But it is worth noting how all three can
easily be read quite differently: Swenson (who worked at New Directions) as
another Williams-influenced writer of innovative forms, Bishop for her visible
influence on some of the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> poets, Rukeyser&#8217;s political work aligning her with a tradition that
would bridge McGrath and, say, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. One can only imagine
what might have happened to American poetry had the three worked together to
create a woman-centered poetic tendency decades before Judy Grahn, Pat Parker,
Susan Griffin and Adrienne Rich came along. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, September 12, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking more about the role
of narrative &#8211; literally the unfolding of meaning over time &#8211; one of the fascinating
aspects of the late great </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">New Zealand</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> poet Allen Curnow&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-1997 </i>(Auckland
University Press, 1997) is Curnow&#8217;s insistence in ordering his book in reverse
chronological order. One begins in the present, as it were, and proceeds back
toward the days of </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">World</span></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wa</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">r 2.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So many collected or
selected editions take just the opposite tack &#8211; inevitably treating the work as
a journey through one&#8217;s life with all the predictable stations along the way.
It&#8217;s a modestly useful approach, although often the poor reader has to slog
through unrepresentative (and relatively unrewarding) juvenilia before the
writer begins to arrive at his or her mature work (think of all those <span class="SpellE">Keatsian</span> concoctions at the start of William Carlos
Williams&#8217; career &#8211; the doctor didn&#8217;t start to write the poems for which we
remember and value him until his was in his late 30s). Writers whose careers
contain one extraordinary project amid much work that is far less focused
(think of <span class="SpellE">Merwin&#8217;s</span> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lice</i> or Tomlinson&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Scenes</i>) also aren&#8217;t served by a narrative of time as an organizing
principle for their works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Curnow&#8217;s strategy insists on
his present relevance to the scene of writing. Contrast this with the bizarrely
posthumous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">avant-la-<span class="SpellE">lettre</span>
Gary Snyder Reader</i> (Counterpoint, 2000), in which Snyder&#8217;s poetry does not
begin until page 399. If there is a message to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reader&#8217;s </i>narrative, it is a statement about the &#8220;man of wisdom&#8221; for
whom the poem is an appropriate but ultimately secondary expression. The book
seems designed to barricade Snyder from any consideration of his poetry as
pertinent to what writing is now, which is perpetually in a state of
&#8220;becoming.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Because Curnow&#8217;s approach is
just the opposite, the experience of reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Early Days Yet</i> is the inverse of a biological narrative. It is very
nearly archaeological: each succeeding section peels away the present to reveal
its sources. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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