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Showing posts with label <b>Influence</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, March 03, 2009</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="336" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/-abnl1AIzBAjrEn1iTjQFqyOL6Pkd-d1Vr6nPapfp08LEbrqyt5YbirEyX7fwkXbzer5-crqKks0KD3bJj8FxDBssocJJto%3Ds0-d" width="250"><br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Henry <span class=SpellE>Rago</span> in the 1950s<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is <span style='color:black'>a meme going round &#8211; identify the 20 books that first caused you to fall in love with poetry. I first ran into it on <a href="http://unitedstatesean.blogspot.com/2009/02/20-poetry-books-that-made-me-fall-in.html"><span style='color:black'>Javier Huerta&#8217;s blog</span></a> &amp; have since seen it several other times. That&#8217;s an interesting, nagging proposition. It&#8217;s quite different, actually, from the question posed by Peter Davis in his <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poets&#8217; Bookshelf </i>series, which asks about those books that have most influenced you, although obviously there is going to be overlap. But the question here seems more to be what got you here in the first place, what work made poetry the art you love. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I tried to come up with a list of twenty, and as you can see below, couldn&#8217;t really do it. Any item off the list below would fundamentally falsify the list. It has 31 lines and since one line consists of three items, my roster comes to 33. These aren&#8217;t the first books of poetry I read (Lawrence <span class=SpellE>Ferlinghetti</span>, Robert Frost, Oscar Williams &amp; Alan Dugan would be on that list &#8211; Dugan is the only one of the four I still read with interest today). And I could do another circle around this of other books from this same time period &#8211; basically 1960s into the earliest part of the &#8216;70s &#8211; that certainly did not hurt, including volumes by Roger Shattuck, Donald Finkel, George Starbuck or Robert Sward that might surprise you. <span class=GramE>David <span class=SpellE>Ossman&#8217;s</span> collection of interviews, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sullen Art, </i>Ed Dorn&#8217;s </span></span><st1:place><span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>North Atlantic</span></i></span></st1:place><span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Turbine.</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I thought long and hard about adding the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Genesis West </i>issue partly devoted to Jack Gilbert (it is still his best publication) or a second Oppen book (in this order: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Discrete Series&#185;, <span class=GramE>The</span> Materials, Of Being Numerous</i>), but such volumes are really ancillary to the list below. If I added one more name, I&#8217;d suddenly have to let in a whole bunch of the New York School (Starting in this order: <span class=SpellE>Ashbery&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains, </i><span class=SpellE>Ceravolo&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, </i>O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lunch Poems </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Meditations in an Emergency</i>, David Shapiro <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poems from Deal</i>), and the first books of my immediate peers, beginning in this instance with David <span class=SpellE>Melnick&#8217;s</span> <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Eclogs</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>&amp; Barrett <span class=SpellE>Watten&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Radio Day in Soma City. </i>So I will keep my list of 20 just to the 33 volumes below, listed here in alphabetical order. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Donald Allen (editor), <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry</i> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Paul Blackburn, <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Cities<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Robert Creeley, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Robert Creeley, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Words<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Creeley, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Duncan, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Roots and Branches<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Duncan, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bending the Bow<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Jack Gilbert, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Views of Jeopardy <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Allen Ginsberg, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Howl<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Allen Ginsberg, <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Fall of </i></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><i   style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:  Arial'>America</span></i></st1:place></st1:country-region><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ronald Johnson, <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Book of the Green Man<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ronald Johnson, <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Kelly, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Finding the Measure<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Kelly, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Axon <span class=SpellE>Dendron</span> Tree<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Kelly, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Twenty Poems<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Kelly &amp; Paris Leary (editors), <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Controversy of Poets</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>George Oppen, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This in Which<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Charles Olson, <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Distances<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ezra Pound, <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Cantos<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Henry <span class=SpellE>Rago</span> (editor), <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry </i>double issues (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fiftieth Anniversary</i>, Oct.-Nov. 1962; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Works in Progress &#8211; Long Poems &#8211; Sequences</i>, Oct.-Nov. 1963, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Works in Progress &#8211; Long Poems &#8211; Sequences, </i>April-May 1965)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Jack Spicer, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Magazine Verse<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Jack Spicer, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Language<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Gertrude Stein, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Writing and Lectures 1909 <span style='color:black'>&#8211;</span> 1945 </i>(esp.<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Tender Buttons</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Gertrude Stein, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stanzas in Meditation</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Philip Whalen, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>On Bear&#8217;s Head<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Jonathan Williams, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Amen, Huzzah, Selah<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>William Carlos Williams, <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Desert Music<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>William Carlos Williams, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Louis Zukofsky, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; 1-12</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Louis Zukofsky, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; 22-23<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Louis Zukofsky (editor), <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry </i>(<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The &#8220;Objectivist&#8221; issue, </i>February 1931)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;m very conscious just how very white and very male this list is. My argument would be that it was the time. I had hoped that meeting Denise Levertov when she came to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> would cause me to get over my resistance to her poetry, but instead it showed me why I was better off trusting my instincts. Joanne <span class=SpellE>Kyger&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tapestry and the Web </i>isn&#8217;t my favorite volume of her poetry, and <span class=SpellE>Bev</span> Dahlen wasn&#8217;t yet bringing out books. <span style='color:black'>This list I think shows just how profound &amp; radical the impact of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/index.htm"><span class=GramE><span style='color:black'>HOW(</span></span><span style='color:black'>ever)</span></a> </i>has been, but that journal didn&#8217;t start until 1983 when I was already 37 years old. </span>Similarly, the first two poets of color whose work I genuinely would love &#8211; Erica Hunt &amp; Lorenzo Thomas &#8211; were really unknown to me at the time. Erica may still have been in high school. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The situation of <span class=SpellE>Bev</span> Dahlen also points to another feature of this list &#8211; it&#8217;s book-centric. Poets like George Stanley &amp; David <span class=SpellE>Gitin</span> had a profound impact on me in my early years, but not because of any specific books of theirs that were available then. Ditto John Gorham &amp; I don&#8217;t know that this once-upon-a-time student of Robert Kelly&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>ever</i> had a book published. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Looking at that list today, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s one bad book on it. I still think those two Norton volumes are Ronald Johnson&#8217;s best work, even though they aren&#8217;t the ones people focus on most today. And it&#8217;s interesting to me to realize that only one collection by Charles Olson &#8211; and not of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus </i>&#8211; would be on this list. I have a deep interest in Olson, but until the complete <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus </i>was in print, that volume seemed scattered. Another very conspicuous absence is Larry Eigner &#8211; I loved his work wherever I read it, but that was as apt to be in journals as books (or, for that matter, on postcards), and even if he&#8217;s one of my half-dozen favorite poets, I don&#8217;t have anything like a favorite book. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Another surprise might be Jack Gilbert, whom some will read as the only </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> poet on this list. Jack&#8217;s Yale Younger Poets&#8217; volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Views of Jeopardy<span style='color:black'>, </span></i><span style='color:black'>really is the Gilbert of Jack Spicer&#8217;s Magic Workshop as much, if not more, than it is the protégé of Gerald Stern &amp; Stephen Spender. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It might also surprise people to see four separate issues of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry </i>here<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>given that I haven&#8217;t been all that wowed by the quality of that journal&#8217;s work over the 40 since <a href="http://www.henryrago.com/"><span style='color:black'>Henry <span class=SpellE>Rago</span></span></a> had a fatal heart attack while on a sabbatical. The 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary issue brought together &#8211; in alphabetical order &#8211; many of the best known poets in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>US</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, starting with Conrad Aiken &amp; Ben <span class=SpellE>Belitt</span> &amp; ending with Richard Wilbur, William Carlos Williams, James Wright &amp; Louis Zukofsky. In practice, the issue also functioned as an announcement by <span class=SpellE>Rago</span>, who had been the journal&#8217;s editor since 1955, that he no longer was going to focus exclusively on the academic poets of mid-century &amp; while the issue has Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, Stanley <span class=SpellE>Kunitz</span>, James Dickey, James Merrill, W. S. <span class=SpellE>Merwin</span>, Howard Moss, Howard <span class=SpellE>Nemerov</span>, <span class=SpellE>Delmore</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> Schwartz &amp; the other usual suspects, it also includes Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch &amp; <span class=SpellE>e.e</span>. cummings. Koch, it might be worth noting, is the only </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> poet here, and the Beats are likewise conspicuously absent. This issue had the first Berryman &#8220;Dream Songs&#8221; I believe I ever read &amp; it wouldn&#8217;t shock me to realize that I bought it for the Alan Dugan therein. By the 1965 double issue, post-avants made up exactly half of the 18 poets contained in its 172 pages, including Creeley, Duncan, Johnson, Koch, Levertov, Olson, Gary Snyder, Gale Turnbull &amp; Phil Whalen. The conservative poets included Wendell Berry, Hayden <span class=SpellE>Carruth</span>, Galway <span class=SpellE>Kinnell</span>, David Posner, Ernest <span class=SpellE>Sandeen</span>, Anne Sexton, and Theodore Weiss. One could argue either way about the last poet, Charles Tomlinson (tho these are eight poems from his <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>American Scenes </i>period, his work most deeply influenced by Creeley &amp; Williams). Am I the only one who would argue that the <span class=SpellE>posties</span> have aged much better over the last 44 years? Turnbull &#8211; a fine poet &#8211; is the only <span class=SpellE>postie</span> who has not yet achieved some sort of canonic status. Posner &amp; <span class=SpellE>Sandeen</span>, on the other hand, have disappeared entirely from view, and <span class=SpellE>Carruth</span> &amp; Weiss, whatever their relative merits, are no more widely read than Turnbull. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is a liveliness to the <span class=SpellE>Rago</span> double issues that they share with two of the other anthologies on my list, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry </i>&amp; <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Controversy of Poets. </i>Like the Kelly-Leary anthology, Rago&#8217;s <span class=SpellE>trifecta</span> does try to include all kinds of American poetry. The first &#8211; and to my thinking, still the only serious &#8211; attempt to heal the wound between the two traditions of American verse. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>When <span class=SpellE>Rago</span> died, his interim replacement, Daryl <span class=SpellE>Hine</span>, took over &#8211; this was more akin to losing Obama &amp; getting Gov. <span class=SpellE>Palin</span> in his place. <span class=SpellE>Hine</span> &amp; his successors have generally kept the coup intact. Even though the Poetry Foundation &#8211; by now the more important institution over there &#8211; has emerged as a heterogeneous site for American poetry, the verse actually printed in the journal, with a few notable exceptions (vispo!), still covers the waterfront mostly from A to B as if we were still living prior to 1962.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>When I see the other lists that are emerging on the web of people&#8217;s 20 books, I realize just radically different the world has become from what it was in my youth. There are relatively few times when I envy younger people, but the greater diversity of what any young poet was reading who came up in the 1980s or &#8216;90s strikes me as a mode of richness we should not underestimate. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Discrete Series </i>is a volume that has had a greater impact on me over time, but I never would have gotten to it without <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This</i> </span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> in Which.</i></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, December 05, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><img height="276" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/0oBNeyRFB0VlGPnzoJHrAkZfcpNRIiJc172kXhF3_lxEQmRQWDtCAvTRM8ngz6IOfa9V7L2Wl0pCWfEjTxvtbJ3gpQwFrZ9At8aubvkYw3b3S76bD8LEvbU-pWDOqqczV1ZvaiUIumASpIaXrC0C-0ybQIUI%3Ds0-d" width="288"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The nature of influence changes over time. I have sometimes thought that the New Western poets who came along after Snyder, Whalen, Dorn et al were simply too close in age to their own masters &amp; that this, as much as the problems of poetry distribution from &#8211; for the most part &#8211; the American Southwest &#8211; had much to do with why such names as Drum Hadley, Bobby Byrd, Bill Deemer, John Brandi &amp; Jim Koller aren&#8217;t more widely known today. Similarly, I&#8217;ve felt the Actualists had the same problem of proximity to their masters, most notably Ted Berrigan &amp; Anselm Hollo, and that this had as much do to with their fate as, say, the lethal alcoholism of Darrell Gray. Even for the finest poets, too close a relationship to a present master can make it much harder to establish themselves as genuinely independent figures. Michael Palmer&#8217;s proximity to Robert Duncan, for example, proved as much a handicap as a blessing, especially during his early years. Similarly, Norma Cole&#8217;s proximity to Michael Palmer &#8211; the title of her book <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mace Hill Remap </i>is an anagram of his name &#8211; made it hard for some readers to recognize those aspects that were uniquely her own perspective (her two works in the giant <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/01/op-collage-by-helen-adam-when-i-was.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Poetry and Its Arts</span></a> </i>retrospective at the California Historical Society in January 2005 were breathtakingly original, combining poetry, installation art and, in the case of the &#8220;room,&#8221; performance, albeit in the most casual, anti-performative manner). Another way of looking at this same issue is to note that the success of the second generation of the New York School was in good measure due to the distinctly different sensibility of Ted Berrigan, who guaranteed that what was to come could not possibly be read merely as &#8220;the acolytes of Frank, John &amp; Kenneth.&#8221; A little distance does a world of good. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The name Michael Palmer also percolates up repeatedly from the work of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Lerner"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ben Lerner</span></a> in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/catalog/dsp_bookDetail.cfm?Book_ID=1263"><span style='color:windowtext'>Angle of Yaw</span></a>, </i>published by </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Copper</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Canyon</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>From the organization of the book itself, the multiple sections that have the same title as the volume, to individual stanzas, such as the opening passage of &#8220;Didactic Elegy&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Intention draws a bold, black line across and otherwise white field.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Speculation establishes gradation of darkness<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>where there are none, allowing the critic to posit narrative time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I posit the critic to distance myself from intention, a despicable affect.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Yet intention is necessary if the field is to be understood as an economy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The only major difference between a passage like this, which seems committed to a referential terrain that, like Palmer&#8217;s, one wants to call philosophical geometry, or perhaps geometric philosophy, that plane that in painting underscores so much of the landscape of the surrealists,  is that Palmer&#8217;s commitment to beauty as decadence invariably leads him toward a lushness of sound this passage seems to avoid. But that is a telling distinction, which looms up large in other works, such as many prose passages in the twin &#8220;Angle of Yaw&#8221; sections. Consider:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.8in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>THE AUTHOR EXPOSES HIMSELF IN PUBLIC like film. Every surface secretly desires to be ruled. A faint hazy cone in the plane of the ecliptic precedes the tabulation of a body by a train. Read only to resist the temptation to write. Skew lines and <span class=SpellE>slickensides</span> in an era of polarized light. The zip disk of snuff films your son defends as research has divided the community into infinite <span class=SpellE>subdistances</span>. Born losers born ready to be born again, we await the mayor&#8217;s address in metal chairs. Then it hits me: I&#8217;m the mayor.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Humor in Palmer&#8217;s work ranges between dry and droll, and appears sparingly, like a silver thread of scandal. It&#8217;s frankly goofier &amp; closer to the surface in Lerner&#8217;s work, a heritage possibly of that same second generation of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. Further, Lerner is willing to expose the issue of polished surfaces as a formal dimension of the work of art, as such. Literally on the facing page preceding the work above is this, also quoted in its entirety:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.8in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>THE PHENOMENA OF EXPERIENCE have been translated into understanding. Plug the exposed voids in the veneer cores to eliminate nesting. We live in the best of all possible worlds. Stain the compound to match the plywood finish.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This poem offers a marvelously daft recasting of the history of literary devices. The third sentence &#8211; a generalization  that sweeps the particulars of the foregoing away &#8211; is a deep echo of <span class=SpellE>Rilke&#8217;s</span> last line to the torso of young Apollo, undercut here precisely by its anticlimactic position. The last sentence underscores what is merely implicit in the second: that the found material here comes from some do-it-yourself woodworking manual. Now it becomes evident that the first and third sentences might themselves be derived from external materials, including just perhaps <span class=GramE>an</span> Rilke-for-Dummies close reading guide. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is a confidence here that one almost never finds in Palmer&#8217;s work &amp;, interestingly enough, it&#8217;s the one thing that gets Lerner in trouble, as in:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.8in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>NO MATTER HOW BIG YOU MAKE A TOY, a child will find a way to put it in his mouth. There is scarcely a piece of playground equipment that has not been inside a child&#8217;s mouth. However, the object responsible for the greatest number of choking deaths, for adults as well  as children, is the red balloon. Last year alone, every American choked to death on a red balloon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Here, the joke overcomes the use of the joke and the poem collapses into a one dimensional plane we may associate, say, with  Russell Edson. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>But it&#8217;s done so well </i>is the obvious rejoinder, and there&#8217;s no question that it is. All the more reason it should have been left out. What in Lerner&#8217;s best pieces functions as a disruption of the poetic here simply lies flat. Lerner&#8217;s best work comes at the other extreme, when the frame of reference appears to change on an almost sentence-by-sentence basis:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.8in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>THE SMUGNESS MASKS A HIGHER SADNESS. We are unaware of the patterns we generate. In the carpet grass, the snow crust. When we don&#8217;t know a word, we say, Look it up. Up? And the Lord withdrew his thumb, trailing delicate, <span class=SpellE>rootlike</span> filaments, leaving a hole in my chest the size of a polis. From which I address you, <span class=SpellE>Hamsun</span>. If you dig deep enough, you hit water, then hell, then </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>China</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>. So why not fly? Getting there is half the fun; the other half: not getting there. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>And Lerner shows that he can do this also in a way where disparate threads weave almost seamlessly:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.8in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>AN IMAGE OF ULTIMACY in an age of polarized light. Will you marry me, skywrites the <span class=GramE>uncle.</span> <span class=GramE>A pill to induce awe with a side effect of labor.</span> A lateral inward tilting and the aircraft <span class=GramE>pushes</span> its envelope. A minor innovation in steering outdates a branch of literature. Envelopes push back. The way a wake turns to ice, then vapor, then paper, uniting our analogues in error, intimacy&#8217;s highest form. Jet engines are  designed to sublimate stray birds. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>No </i>appears in the corn.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>That probably is my favorite piece in the entire book because so much is going on here, and at such finely tuned points of precision. The word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>awe </i>thus rhymes with a word that doesn&#8217;t appear in the piece at all (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>yaw</i>), tho it is immediately (and obliquely) described. The word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>uncle </i>rends the whole sense of romance implicit in the first half of its own sentence &#8211; and is that final sentence a reply? Or the second, more overt rhyme: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>vapor, paper</i>. And what is the relationship being staked out here between error and incest? As the diagram at the top of this note (from Wikipedia&#8217;s definition of the yaw angle) suggests, this is in some ways the title poem of this book. Tho Yaw also is the Levantine god of chaos. <span class=GramE>And rivers.</span> So I hear the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>labor </i>at the end of that second sentence principally around the denotation of childbirth &#8211; maybe that&#8217;s the echo from all the references to pushing. But one senses, reading &amp; rereading this <span class=GramE>poem, that</span> it may not have been written in exactly this form. Rather it feels that it began deep inside &#8211; maybe with the sentence <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Envelopes push back </i>&#8211; and then moved outward in both directions, as tho there were concentric circles of connotation rippling outward.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So ultimately Michael Palmer is just one of many influences visibly threaded here throughout the text, as this book attempts many things Palmer would never think to do and fails to take up battles that are central to Michael &amp; his work. The difference between Lerner&#8217;s relationship to Palmer &amp; that of Cole seems mostly to be one of time. Much like the New Western poets in their relation to the New Americans, Cole is only a couple of years younger than Palmer, who was born in 1943. Lerner, however, was born in 1979. Lerner&#8217;s mother, the well-known psychologist <a href="http://premierespeakers.com/1117/index.cfm"><span style='color:windowtext'>Harriet Lerner</span></a>, actually is younger than Palmer. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom"><span style='color:windowtext'>Harold Bloom</span></a> has rather poisoned the well of influence in recent poetic discourse, partly because his theory of strong &amp; weak <span class=SpellE>misreadings</span> equating to strong &amp; weaker poets is wrong &#8211; both Cole &amp; Lerner are by any test strong poets &#8211; but even more because, like the very New Critics against whom Bloom&#8217;s work was a reaction, he has misused his critical position too often to promote and defend minor or marginal characters &#8211; Geoffrey Hill, A.R. Ammons &#8211; largely missing out (the exception&#8217;s would be Ashbery &amp; Duncan) on the major poets of his own time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It&#8217;s true that there will always be acolytes and poets who are but pale photocopies of their heroes, who take their attendant master as limit rather than as suggestion of possibility. But the difference between Norma Cole &amp; Ben Lerner is not that one is a strong poet, the  other not, but rather a factor of time. Cole had to win her critical distance and, because she&#8217;s good artist, she did. But Lerner I suspect just finds it easier at the outset to have such distance with a poet who is roughly the age of his parents. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Indeed, someone like Jack Spicer might have had his career aided somewhat by being mostly out of print for a decade after his death in <span class=GramE>1965,</span> many of closest compatriots scattered about </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>British  Columbia</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, rather than concentrated around the scene in </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>North</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Beach</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. Particularly given his reputation as a difficult personality, a little distance here may well have been the difference between utter disregard (cf. Ferlinghetti&#8217;s relatively recent &#8220;Do people still read him?&#8221;) and the recognition of Spicer as a major figure of the mid-century period that is in fact now becoming common. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>All of which is to say, perhaps, that, yes, I do see/hear Michael Palmer&#8217;s hand floating not so far from some of the work of Ben Lerner. But it&#8217;s not something Ben Lerner has to worry about, &#8220;get over,&#8221; or &#8220;go beyond.&#8221; In some ways, he was born already having done so.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>John Ashbery isn&#8217;t the only
influence to pop up in the &#8220;Early Poems&#8221; section of <a
href="http://www.twc.org/writers/pp_jcollom.htm">Jack Collom&#8217;s</a> giant <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.durationpress.com/tuumba/collom.htm">Red Car Goes By</a> </i>volume.
And the influences aren&#8217;t always whom one might expect, either. One poem, &#8220;<span
class=SpellE>Bauch</span>,&#8221; suggests that Collom must have been such German
poets of the period as Helmut Heissenbüttel or Eugen <span class=SpellE>Gomringer</span>.
One senses also both the Beats &amp; the Projectivists as people whom the young
Coloradoan must have then been absorbing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>In fact, one of the most
interesting aspects of that early section in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Red Car </i>is that Collom &#8211; perhaps because of his great geographical
distance from any manifestation of The Scene (the bio at Teachers &amp; Writers
notes that he did not meet another poet until he had been writing for eight
years) &#8211; seems never to have felt any need to pick &amp; choose between various
New American tendencies &#8211; he could &amp; did absorb a little from everybody
&amp; in such a fashion that it was never anybody&#8217;s poetry but his very own. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>This in many ways is
radically different from what I found as a young poet in the mid-1960s, coming
along really just after the period represented by Collom&#8217;s &#8220;Early Poems.&#8221; The
world I ran into was in fact deeply partisan &#8211; a young Projectivist &#8211; which is
more less what I must have been between 1966, say, &amp; coming under the heady
influence of Bob Grenier in 1970 &#8211; a young Projectivist might be interested in,
say, the New York School or the Beats, but really only as a friendly backdrop
to the so-called real debate of that period, which was <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>What to make of Edward Dorn&#8217;s Gunslinger</i>, seen by more than a few
people at the time as a form of revolt against Projectivist principles. Where
you a &#8216;Slinger person or a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>North Atlantic
Turbine </i>person, that was the question, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turbine
</i>being the apotheosis of &#8216;50s style Projectivist writing? Did you include </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> in your sense of Projectivism &amp;, if so, which
one? How did you account for his relationship with the likes of Jack Spicer,
who seemed so at odds with Olson&#8217;s sense of language? &amp; if you were a
hardcore Projectivist, did you think of yourself as expansive &amp; inclusive
of history &amp; sources, a la Olson &amp; Pound, or did you find &#8220;book learning&#8221;
to be inauthentic compared with the personal &amp; thus prefer the far narrower
intimate focus of a Creeley? &amp; what did you do with Zukofsky, who &#8211; like
Olson &#8211; seemed very much to come out of the most radical aspects of Williams
&amp; Pound, but in whom Olson obviously had no interest (&amp;, so far as I
could tell, vice versa)? Oppen was just starting to show up in print, Bunting
likewise, &amp; folks like Rakosi &amp; Reznikoff were still principally
rumors. Niedecker was unknown, even by the poets I knew in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Milwaukee</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. Thus when Kay Boyle handed me a manuscript by
somebody I&#8217;d never even heard of &#8211; Joe Ceravolo&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Ho <span class=SpellE>Ho</span> Caribou </i>&#8211; &amp; announced that it
was going to win the first &#8220;Frank O&#8217;Hara&#8221; award &amp; be published by a New
York trade press, one had a sense that powerful political forces were ganging
up to push one tendency forward at the expense of one&#8217;s own. &amp; it was a
world in which Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces</i> came
as a resounding jolt &#8211; it was as radically different from Projectivist
assumptions as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Slinger </i>had been, just
in a different fashion.*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>If all this seems more than
a little icky, well, it was. But this hyper-partisanship also explains, at
least in part, why the poetry wars of the 1970s proved to be so terribly
intense<span class=GramE>.*</span>* Part of what is so very interesting reading
these earliest poems by Jack Collom is that he seems to have already figured
out what it seems to have taken so many other poets another twenty years to get
straight &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>it&#8217;s not a zero sum
competition.</i> Liking 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'> need not preclude an interest in the Beats, the Projectivists nor
anything else for that matter. In that sense, Collom is writing &#8211; these poems
date from 1955 to 1964 &#8211; very much like a poet of the 1980s. The man literally
was a quarter century ahead of his time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>One wonders &#8211; especially if
one <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>c&#8217;est moi </i>&#8211; how other poets of
his time must have interpreted Collom&#8217;s eclecticism. <span class=GramE>As a
wishy-washy failure to declare allegiances?</span> Or as having already gone
beyond the stumbling blocks that other poets were only then starting to pick
their way through? That Collom had books from Tim Longville&#8217;s <span
class=SpellE>Grosseteste</span> Review Press &#8211; whose interest in </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 combined Projectivism &amp; Objectivism &#8211; in
1972 &amp; United Artists Books, virtually an official outpost of 2<sup>nd</sup>
Gen. NY School poetry, in 1981, suggests that Collom&#8217;s poetry was connecting
with some diverse audiences. It may also suggest that Collom&#8217;s writing, by its
very independence, can be read by an aesthetically committed reader as being
part of whichever literary tradition one happens to like best. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I find this interesting in
part because it is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>so </i>consistent with
much later attitudes &amp; approaches to writing. &amp; Collom has himself been
a very consistent &amp; productive poet &#8211; even in the 1950s, he has the
sharpest eye for (&amp; greatest knowledge about) birds of any American poet.
In a world in which many poets think &#8220;hawk&#8221; is terribly descriptive, this is a
man who knows a harrier from a kestrel &amp; that you don&#8217;t look for burrowing
owls in a tree. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* One that
made it possible to imagine how Zukofsky fit into the evolving tradition. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>** The wars
were, in part, an extension of a situation that had existed for over a decade,
hardened in part by the fact that younger poets often took the divisions in the
Allen anthology far more seriously than did that anthology&#8217;s contributors. The
most vigorous &amp; vicious attacks against langpo, it is worth noting, came
from wannabe New Americans who felt they had &#8220;signed up&#8221; for the world
projected in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry</i>
&amp; that anything that suggested ongoing evolution directly threatened the
petrified tableaux of their worldview. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span class=GramE><b
style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#1096;</span></b></span><b
style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>&#1096;<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>&#1096;<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>Jordan Davis</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'> tries to keep me honest. When I wrote on <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2395231548">Tuesday</a>
that &#8220;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Red Car Goes By </i>is the first
collection of Collom&#8217;s work ever to be widely available, its nearest
competitors for that honor being a 300-copy edition published by <span
class=SpellE>Grosseteste</span> in the U.K. &amp; a stapled book from Lewis
Warsh&#8217;s United Artists,&#8221; he sent me a series of notes, one of which indicated
that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Fox </i>was (a) perfect bound,
not stapled, (b) published in an edition of 750 copies &amp; that (c) United
Artists was Lewis Warsh <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and Bernadette
Mayer. </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Davis</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> even adds that it was typeset by <span class=SpellE>Skeezo</span>
&amp; printed by <span class=SpellE>McNaughton</span> &amp; Gunn. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I stand corrected on all
accounts. I was operating from a description I&#8217;d seen from a rare book dealer &#8211;
I&#8217;ve never seen the book itself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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