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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>Beat Poetry</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>Beat Poetry</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, May 29, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='color:black'><img height="360" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/DZyiR4pzf5wmnTZNFSqTHIz0Ql3925CfVA7py3MP3tqytP94irp8e1WMjfMccL7LrSlb1vIJBKOOKry2NVaToCoxuqpUXNVWUoxECtm8c8Uh%3Ds0-d" width="248"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I generally despise I-95 &amp; there&#8217;s nothing about the Memorial Day Weekend that is apt to make me love it any more deeply. As it happened, I had to view the aftermath of what appeared to be a fatal accident near </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Aberdeen</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Maryland</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, on my way back from </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Falls Church</span></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>VA</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, where I had stayed with Lynne Dreyer &amp; her family after my reading at Bridge Street Books. As soon as I could, I headed off 95 &amp; took a route along two-lane roads from  </span><st1:place><st1:City><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Darlington</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Maryland</span></st1:State></st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> up through </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Parkesburg</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Pennsylvania</span></st1:State></st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, before cutting over to the 30-Bypass &amp; 202 for the last leg home. In both directions, Saturday <i>and</i> Monday, I listened to a &#8220;radio play&#8221; recording of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/2dxo6l"><span style='color:black'>Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake</span></a> </i>that </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> gave me as a present for Christmas. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As an audio-book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Doctor Sax </i>is a hoot &amp; a half, as a number of readers work their through a screenplay Kerouac wrote based on his novel, accompanied by an occasional sound-effect (balls scattering on a pool table, etc.) and a reasonably decent score by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Medeski"><span style='color:black'>John <span class=SpellE>Medeski</span></span></a>. Of the 14 voices heard on this 2-CD affair, two have considerably more than half of all the air time &#8211; the narrator, spoken by the late Robert Creeley, the one role in this project that demands (and gets) a fair amount of quiet subtlety, &amp; a variety of characters all given voice by poet-rock star Jim Carroll, who generally does a good job distinguishing between his roles &amp; pulls off an utterly spooky Peter <span class=SpellE>Lorre</span> imitation in the process. Doctor Sax is spoken by Grateful Dead lyricist &amp; poet Robert Hunter, who frankly sounds too healthy for a character that seems to have been based in part on Kerouac&#8217;s roommate during the penning of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sax</i>, William S. Burroughs. The wizard Faustus is portrayed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who plays the role as tho he <span class=GramE>were</span> the old character actor <a href="../../../../My%20Documents/Ron/The%20Work/Critical%20Writing/Blog2/Gabby%20Hayes"><span style='color:black'>Gabby Hayes</span></a>. All the players appear to be having a blast &amp; the pleasure is contagious. I was able to listen to the entire project straight through twice with only one day between sessions &amp; never once suffered a moment&#8217;s boredom. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Sax </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>is a novel that was published, like so much of Kerouac&#8217;s writing, to mixed reviews. This is especially true for those books that focus not on Kerouac&#8217;s life as <span class=GramE>an</span> wandering anti-authoritarian minstrel &amp; wastrel but his childhood. But in some sense, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sax </i>is to Kerouac&#8217;s understanding of himself what <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Prelude </i>was to Wordsworth. This is really the tale of the growth of a poet&#8217;s mind, but as a troubled kid (and one who doesn&#8217;t get it that he&#8217;s troubled). Functionally, the story operates as a series of concentric tales, each more extreme (and disturbed) than the one before. In the first, Jacky <span class=SpellE>Duluoz</span> is a kid who plays hooky in order to stay home and play fantasy games of horse racing using marbles &amp; ball-bearings. In the second, Jacky is both detective &amp; miscreant in a mystery to catch The Black Thief<span class=GramE>,.</span> <span class=GramE>a neighborhood criminal who specializes in stealing the toys of <span class=SpellE>Duluoz</span>&#8217; friends.</span> The Black Thief&#8217;s undoing comes as a result of leaving his taunting notes behind on the same orange paper that young <span class=SpellE>Duluoz</span> uses to practice his writing skills, literally trying to verbally sketch out commonplace physical elements of the neighborhood (50-plus years later, this is recognizable as a classic writing exercise, but it&#8217;s fascinating to see Kerouac suggest that he was compulsively working at his skills at depiction at what must have been no more than the age of ten). The third tale is <span class=SpellE>Duluoz</span>&#8217; interactions with the realms of the unknown, represented by Faustus, Count <span class=SpellE>Condu</span>, Doctor Sax, various vamps &amp; wizard wives, and of course the Great World Snake that comes to threaten the world until it is carried off by a giant bird <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>SURROUNDED BY MY DOVES! MY DOVES, MY YOUNG AND SILLY DOVES<span class=GramE>!......</span> BIRDS OF PARADISE COMING TO SAVE MANKIND!<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As Sax puts it.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Kerouac&#8217;s mythology here is a <span class=SpellE>mashup</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>avant le <span class=SpellE>lettre</span></i> of Catholicism, Central European ghost stories &amp; some over-the-top Freudian remnants that work precisely because they are such a motley combination. This is intermingled with some extraordinary instances of description, most of which comes through Creeley&#8217;s role, and a great ear for dialog. For example, what makes the above passage work is precisely the word &#8220;silly&#8221; in a context that seems so very jarring. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The production and direction of the entire project at the hands of Kerouac&#8217;s nephew <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1486389"><span style='color:black'>Jim Sampas</span></a> is rough, but serviceable. When Sampas first started taking active control of Kerouac&#8217;s archive I recall worrying that Sampas wasn&#8217;t going to get it and that he would want simply beatify his uncle whose very flaws &#8211; such as the deeply creepy sentimentalism toward Kerouac&#8217;s mother &#8211; really prove to be driving forces for Kerouac, even if what they drove him to was his much too young death from alcoholism. But in fact Sampas seems to be in touch with both the Kerouac who is appallingly crude &amp; the one who is, for better or worse, the <span class=SpellE>Jimi</span> Hendrix of fictional prose. Under Sampas' direction, you can hear this troupe of friends making it up as they go along. In <span class=GramE>this early stages</span>, for example, different characters pronounce <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Duluoz</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>quite differently. For Creeley it is <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>D&#601;-looz</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>,</i> for <span class=SpellE>Carrol</span> it is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Do-<span class=SpellE>loo-&#462;z</span></i>, with the short <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>a </i>pronounced as in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>cats. </i>But over the course of the recording most everyone comes to settle on <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>D&#601;-loo-ahz</i></span> with the stress on the second syllable. This is the sort of detail that a professional would have gotten down before committing a moment to tape, but professionalism was not Kerouac&#8217;s claim to writing &#8211; quite the opposite &#8211; and its absence here makes for texture, not problems. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, April 05, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:24.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.allenginsberg.org/"><span style='color:black'>Allen</span></a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg"><span style='color:black'>Ginsberg</span></a></span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
<br>
Gone ten years today<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/mekas.html"><span style='color:black'>Scenes from Allen&#8217;s<br>
Last Three Days on Earth<br>
as a Spirit</span></a><br>
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1997<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, April 03, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="235" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/-J0I0JDPvbngAWDMTzwPvInlCTn_bP0yDdHtD-LEzvDdgwR8eAjZImURYlGOa9DnPwuHQIkHVSmDEAsK38pmpz3p44j0Yy5yNIQuCQfvDA%3Ds0-d" width="288"><br>
</span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>(Photo by Larry Keenan)<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;ll wager that I knew who <a href="http://www.womenofthebeat.org/HettieJones/HettieJones.htm"><span style='color:black'>Hettie</span></a> <a href="http://www.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/johnsonjones.htm"><span style='color:black'>Jones</span></a> was as an editor, and as a presence on the <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:City> poetry scene, before I was 20 years old. So I find myself amazed to admit that it has actually taken me now 40 years to read a book of her poetry, the quite lively <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Doing 70, </i>published by the redoubtable <a href="http://www.hangingloosepress.com/index.html"><span style='color:black'>Hanging Loose Press</span></a>. It&#8217;s like discovering a whole new <span class=SpellE>New</span> American poet. And with my roots and interests as a poet, that&#8217;s a considerable gift.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s not like the emergence not so long ago of Landis Everson, who was a marginal enough member of the Berkeley renaissance a half century back, but who has returned now in his later years as more postmodern writer, full of subtle shadings nobody would even have noticed back in the early 1950s. Nor is it like the big belated book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Tall, Serious Girl </i>by George Stanley, a long overdue selected poems by a major writer of the Spicer circle who was largely out-of-print in the U.S. after having moved to Canada some 40 years ago. No, <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/444"><span style='color:black'>Hettie Jones</span></a> is writing what are patently New American poems today almost in the same way that Michael McClure or Gary Snyder could be said to be doing the same, carrying forward that aesthetic from the 1950s to the present unbroken:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Here <span class=GramE>Is</span><br>
</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
<br>
a woman who know<br>
what here is, through<br>
<br>
long years of being<br>
here<br>
<br>
by a window that offers<br>
others, there<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
here then is<br>
this woman<br>
<br>
ten thirty pm<br>
on April seven<br>
<br>
a struggling spring<br>
in two thousand six<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>These are clean, simple poems, never trying too hard, but not written out of any nostalgia for the &#8220;beat scene&#8221; of Jones&#8217; fabled youth either. When she says, in an interview given to Nancy Grace, that &#8220;</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I was much too logical and much too old fashioned and much too linear&#8221; to be a language poet, she&#8217;s not putting them or herself down, simply placing herself in the larger universe of literary possibilities. But this doesn&#8217;t mean that she&#8217;s not capable of complex statements, done with both great precision &amp; notable grace, as in the poem &#8220;About Face&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>In Ghana, in August, in<br>
the Golden Tulip&#8217;s<br>
<span class=SpellE>Demba</span> Lounge<br>
<br>
Nat Cole sings<br>
&#8220;Merry Christmas&#8221;<br>
<br>
as lone white men<br>
on cell phones listen,<br>
some with evident<br>
nostalgia, to a black man<br>
singing of home<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Some remind me actually of the short lyrics of the late Carl <span class=SpellE>Rakosi</span>, ringing out <span class=GramE>changes, that,</span> while completely predictable, can be quite satisfying simply for the precision involved, as in &#8220;Shades&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>black</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> for the season<br>
blue for oh how I need<br>
<br>
this gray afternoon<br>
when the drummer at the green<br>
subway kiosk<br>
is<br>
red hot<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Many of the poems are explicit in their feminism &#8211; an attitude that I suspect would have made The Boys of 1955 &amp; thereabouts more than a little anxious &amp; <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/31/duplessis-manhood.html"><span style='color:black'>perhaps even dismissive</span></a> &#8211; but it isn&#8217;t the simplistic finger-wagging of a Denise <span class=SpellE>Levertov</span> that Jones is after (tho one could argue that that was needed some three dozen years ago). Rather, what one notes about its presence in Jones&#8217; work is the absolute variety of possibilities that come up with this as a subtext, ranging from the utterly grim, such as a poem about a Turkish woman stoned to the edge of death for &#8220;having sex / or being raped, same shame&#8221; who hangs for three months before dying, or of a female soldier killed in one of Bush&#8217;s wars, to poems that are simply, or not so simply, celebrations. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One of the more interesting examples of this can be found in the title poem, a not-quite six page narrative of having one&#8217;s car break down on the way back from Boston&#185;, only to have the trucker from the AAA-plus card (which gets you towed back where you need to be, not just five miles to the nearest rip-off station) turn out to be an engaging boy (Jones guesses his age at 23) who&#8217;s been to New York City only a couple of times before. Of course Jones was doing 70 on the Mass Turnpike when her starter broke &#8211; and of course just turned seventy a few weeks before &#8211; so what ensues is a complete gender reversal of <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/03/venus-film-for-which-peter-otoole.html"><span style='color:black'>the dynamics I outlined awhile back</span></a> in the Peter O&#8217;Toole flick <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Venus. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So this is a case of the New American poetry doing something, with a few notable exceptions, the New American poetry itself seldom did. And it&#8217;s a pleasure to see it, because it is so clearly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>imitation anything. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I want to close with a poem of Jones&#8217; that caught my eye, &#8220;Naming Hettie Slocum,&#8221; perhaps because the house right next to the monument to Joshua Slocum on Brier Island off the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia (where Slocum was born, tho he did much of his sailing from Olson&#8217;s Gloucester) belongs to Krishna&#8217;s cousin, Dan Hunt. Given that my own side of the family has its own sailing mythology (thanks to my maternal great grandfather telling everyone that his grandfather was Sir John Franklin, which was right only insofar as that was the grand-dad&#8217;s name, tho he was an illiterate fishmonger, not the arctic explorer), this seems too good a coincidence to let pass. But I don&#8217;t think this poem needs any further comment from me. Hettie Jones does just fine:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hettie Slocum once went<br>
halfway around the world and back<br>
in a sailboat. Then she gave up<br>
the nautical life for good<br>
and took off to farm<br>
<br>
leaving her husband, Captain Joshua<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
the well-known navigator-storyteller,<br>
to the heave and swell of that vast<br>
and wily mother, the sea.<br>
<br>
Hettie was a pretty seamstress<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
twenty-four and fresh from <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Nova   Scotia</st1:place></st1:State>;<br>
Slocum, a cousin, forty-two and lonely.<br>
His first wife, love of his life, mother<br>
of his sons, had died. It was 1886.<br>
<br>
Hettie was game; she sewed Slocum&#8217;s sails<br>
cruised with him and the boys<br>
to <st1:place w:st="on">Rio</st1:place>, bought a tall hat, survived<br>
an epidemic. He wrote a book<br>
about their adventures, called her<br>
<br>
his wife, called her &#8220;brave enough to face<br>
the worst storms&#8221; &#8211; but never once mentioned<br>
her name. Let us then remember her: Hettie!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hettie Slocum!<br>
<br>   
Now all is said and done.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Carrying with her the correspondence, no less, of the late Helene Dorn, the literal purpose of this trip.</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, October 19, 2005</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;ve written on numerous occasions that the so-called San Francisco Renaissance was largely a fiction, perpetrated in part by Donald Allen in order to give <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry </i>a section that acknowledged just how much of this phenomenon rose up out of the San Francisco Bay Area &#8211; a literary backwater prior to WW2, but now suddenly a primary locale for much that was new. The other part &#8211; and it&#8217;s not clear to me who, if anyone, could be said to have perpetrated this &#8211; was an allusion back to the earlier Berkeley Renaissance, which had been a decisive, thriving literary tendency in the late 1940s, early 1950s. If you look at Allen&#8217;s S.F. Renaissance grouping, you call still make out the vestiges of that earlier moment in the presence of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer &amp; Robin Blaser, the trio that had given rise to the Berkeley Renaissance while studying at the University of California, along with, I suppose, Helen Adam, who at the time of the anthology was something of a Duncan protégé. Yet there are also poets representing an older San Francisco scene, such as Madeline Gleason &amp; James Broughton &amp; even &#8211; tho it&#8217;s a stretch, given what a loner he was, at least when he wasn&#8217;t actively channeling Robinson Jeffers &#8211; Brother Antoninus (William Everson). Then there are a group of younger poets &#8211; Richard Duerden, Kirby Doyle, Ebbe Borregaard &amp; Bruce Boyd &#8211; whom it&#8217;s harder to place aesthetically, a fact that is still true some 45 years after the book&#8217;s initial publication, as they&#8217;ve become <span class=GramE>its</span> least published participants. That Allen placed Lawrence Ferlinghetti into this grouping, rather than with the Beats, suggests just how arbitrary these distinctions were. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Given that he was improvising &amp; fabricating in search of clustering principles in general, it&#8217;s curious that Allen completely missed one of the most interesting &amp; useful formations among the New Americans, a western poetics that may have first revealed itself at Reed College in Portland, and which didn&#8217;t fully take flight until the mid- to late-1950s in San Francisco. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch &amp; Phil Whalen in fact were just the first of a number of poets who came out of this aesthetic &#8211; one could probably put Duerden &amp; Borregaard there as well, plus three other contributors to the Allen anthology, all of whom joined Snyder &amp; Whalen in Allen&#8217;s curiously amorphous unaffiliated fifth grouping: Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn &amp; David Meltzer. Beyond the Allen anthology itself, one might add Richard Brautigan, James Koller, Joanne Kyger, David <span class=SpellE>Schaff</span>, Bill Deemer, Drummond Hadley, Clifford Burke, David Gitin, John Oliver Simon, Lowell Levant, John Brandi, Gail <span class=SpellE>Dusenberry</span> &amp; a host of others. In general, these poets were straight where the Duncan-Spicer axis was gay. Perhaps most importantly, this cluster really had no leaders as such. It was not as though some, such as Snyder or Whalen, might not have led by example, but that their personalities were not given to the constant marshalling of opinion that one could identify in such others as Olson, Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, O&#8217;Hara or even Creeley. This mode &#8211; lets call it New Western &#8211; perhaps reached its pinnacle of influence during the heyday of Jim <span class=SpellE>Koller&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal </i>during the mid-1960s. But without anything like a leader or a program, poised midway aesthetically between the Beats &amp; Olson&#8217;s <span class=GramE>vision</span> of Projectivist Verse, the phenomenon never gelled, never became A Thing &amp; by the 1970s already was entering into an entropic period from which it has yet to re-emerge.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Just 23 when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry </i>hit the streets, Ron Loewinsohn &amp; David Meltzer were the babies of that project (indeed, they&#8217;re just one year older than David Bromige &amp; David Melnick &amp; eight years younger than Hannah Weiner, all of whom would be associated more closely with language writing come the 1970s). Loewinsohn went on to become a literature professor &amp; novelist, but Meltzer has hung in as a poet, with a few side forays into music, jazz writing &amp; erotic fiction, all these decades. Now, with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.penguinputnam.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_0143036181,00.html"><span style='color:black'>David&#8217;s Copy</span></a> </i>just out from Penguin, Meltzer seemed poised to get the attention his work is due. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Actually, considering just how many of the Beat poets were treated like rock stars while Meltzer, fronting Serpent Power with his late wife Tina (and drums by Clark Coolidge), actually had a rock band long before Jim Carroll or Patti Smith, it&#8217;s odd that Meltzer hasn&#8217;t become much more widely known, celebrated before this. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>David&#8217;s Copy </i>is at least the fourth selected  poems he&#8217;s published, the others being <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tens, Arrows </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Name, </i>and many of his earlier books were published by Black Sparrow, one of the rare small presses to have had some volumes &#8211; mostly those by Charles Bukowski &#8211; widely distributed through the big book chains. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There are, I suspect, multiple reasons for this. One is that New Western aesthetic never really broke through, even if a few of its practitioners &#8211; Whalen, Snyder, McClure &#8211; did. A second, more important aspect is that old bugaboo of so many poets &#8211; Meltzer&#8217;s not a compulsive self-promoter. As the youngest of the New Americans, his timing was just a little behind from a marketing perspective. Indeed, as Ginsberg et al became folk icons in the 1960s, Meltzer&#8217;s first books that decade were from small Bay Area fine presses like Auerhahn &amp; Oyez &#8211; his one big trade publication prior to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>David&#8217;s Copy</i> being an anthology he edited in 1971, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/ckv3s"><span style='color:black'>The San Francisco Poets</span></a>, </i>a collection notably missing the Duncan/Spicer axis, including just Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, Welch, McClure, Brautigan &amp; Everson. Meltzer&#8217;s first sizeable collection doesn&#8217;t appear until 1969, when he brings out <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/8a8y3"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Yesod</span></span></a> </i>with the British press, Trigram. It didn&#8217;t receive much distribution stateside. Black Sparrow releases his first large collection in the states, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Luna, </i>in 1970. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Part of this neglect may also be due to the fact that Meltzer is Jewish. It&#8217;s not that there were no Jews among the New Americans &#8211; Ginsberg, <span class=SpellE>Orlovsky</span>, <span class=GramE>Eigner</span> all come instantly to mind. But the intersection between the New American poetry &amp; the New Age approach to religious experience in the 1960s (Serpent Power?) tended to mute its presence in all but Ginsberg&#8217;s writing. Indeed, I wouldn&#8217;t be at all shocked to discover that many readers of Eigner were late to discover the heritage of the bard of Swampscott. In the 1960s, the Objectivists were only gradually coming back into print. And Jerome Rothenberg didn&#8217;t really begin making the space for an active presence for a Jewish space within American poetics until late in that decade, during that interregnum betwixt the New Americans &amp; language poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Finally, Meltzer &#8211; and this I think is a sign of his youth relative, say, to Whalen or Snyder or Ginsberg or Olson or Duncan or O&#8217;Hara et al &#8211; lacked the kind of visible trademark of a differentiated literary style that one associates with all of the above, and even with someone closer to Meltzer&#8217;s age, like Michael McClure. Meltzer&#8217;s work has always been in the vicinity of New American poetics without ever being its own recognizable brand &#8211; as such, it would be difficult if not impossible for a younger poet to mimic. It&#8217;s not that Meltzer lacked the chops &amp; more as though he never saw the need per se. In this sense, Meltzer&#8217;s situation is not unlike that, say, of a Jack Collom, another terrific poet of roughly the same generation who has never really gotten the recognition he deserves. In a sense, those who were a little further outside the New American circle &#8211; like poets in New York who were visibly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>NY School, such as Rothenberg, Antin, Ed Sanders or Joel Oppenheimer &#8211; had an advantage because their circumstance forced them to define themselves <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>in opposition </i>even to poets whose work they cherished. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Indeed, if there is a defining element or signature device in Meltzer&#8217;s work, it&#8217;s that he alone among the New Westerns has an eye for the hard edges of pop culture, something one expects from the NY School. Often, as in this passage from &#8220;Hollywood Poems,&#8221; it&#8217;s accompanied by a tremendously agile ear:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>         </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span>De Chirico without <span class=SpellE>Cheracol</span><br>
saw space where its dead echo opened up<br>
a plain unbroken by the dancers.<br>
Instead<br>
a relic supermarket nobody shops at.<br>
Plaster-of-Paris bust of Augustus<br>
Claude Rains Caesar face-down beneath<br>
a <span class=SpellE>Keinholz</span> table<br>
whose top is blue with Shirley Temple&#8217;s saucers<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
pitchers. Mickey Mouse<br>
wind-up dolls in rows like </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Detroit</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>.<br>
All tilt out of the running without electricity.<br>
Veils of history<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
garments worn in movies, hung on<br>
steel racks at Costume R.K.O.<br>
R. <span class=SpellE>Karo</span> would&#8217;ve used the tower&#8217;s light.<br>
He&#8217;d wear it as a cap to re-route lost energy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So dense with details that it rides like a list (&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sounds</i> like a Clark Coolidge poem), this passage is actually a better depiction of a De Chirico landscape than those one finds in John Ashbery&#8217;s poetry. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>David&#8217;s Copy </i>is filled with such moments, which makes it a terrific read. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One might squabble with the fact that the book is not strictly chronological, or that the first 25 years of his writing gets more weight (over 150 pages) than does the last 25 (roughly 100), tho I suspect that&#8217;s because more of the recent work is still in print. On the whole, such squabbles are few. Editor Michael Rothenberg had done a first-rate job here, smartly including bibliography &amp; a decent two-page bio note from Meltzer &amp; an excellent introduction from Jerry Rothenberg. Toward the end of the introduction, Rothenberg notes:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Elsewhere, in speaking about himself, he tells us that when he was very young, he wanted to write a long poem called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The History of Everything. </i>It was an ambition shared, maybe unknowingly, with a number of other young poets &#8211; the sense of what Clayton Eshleman called &#8220;a poetry that attempts to become responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world.&#8221; Then as now it ran into a contrary directive: to think small or to write in ignorance of what had come before or in deference to critic-masters who were themselves, most often, <span class=SpellE>nonpractitioners</span> &amp; <span class=SpellE>nonseekers</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>From my perspective, it&#8217;s a shame that project never took hold, but then I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s any contradiction between such scale &amp; the desire to &#8220;think small&#8221; (or, as I might put it, to write in the present) &#8211; that&#8217;s one lesson one takes from Zukofsky&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A.&#8221; </i>Throughout, there are works that evidence an impulse to &#8220;go long,&#8221; almost in the sense of a football quarterback, but most often they come back to the compilation of shorter works that one might expect to see from the likes of Whalen, Welch or Snyder. The whole of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>David&#8217;s Copy </i>offers us a deeper link into that New Western poetics, even as it connects that world outward, toward the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> &amp; the poetics that would emerge in the 1970s &amp; &#8216;80s in a journal like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sulfur. </i>The key, as it is in New Western poetry in general, is precisely that desire to &#8220;think small&#8221; as Rothenberg puts it, to write in the complete present. Meltzer is less openly Zen-like than, say, Whalen or Joanne Kyger, but the pleasure can be every bit as deep. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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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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