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Showing posts with label <b>New American Poetry</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, February 15, 2005</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><img height="341" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/vLlIiddAFl9MwR_L-ZP4ebEYb3XJIItL4Kb88LVwbf1i6mCOYWixMLVs-7sffYgbAkzHBTOiJefS1--bKNP7dQ8sY7s%3Ds0-d" width="420"></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The differences between Robert Duncan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Selected Prose, </i>edited after his death by Robert Bertholf, published in 1995, &amp; </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s earlier <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fictive Certainties, </i>which </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> edited just ten years earlier, are instructive. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The twenty essays included in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Selected Prose </i>are focused not just on the literary, but on a particular aspect of the literary. It is primarily a record of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> as a member of the San Francisco Renaissance. With only two exceptions, the selections either rise out of that experience as statements of poetics and/or theory, or involve a closer look at writers of interest to a New American (Whitman, Pound, Moore, H.D., Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, Levertov, Spicer, Bev Dahlen) or visual artists associated with the West Coast funk art trends of that same period (Jess, George Herms, Wallace Berman). The two exceptions are &#8220;The Homosexual in Society,&#8221; Duncan&#8217;s famous statement of 1944 that appeared in the first issue of the journal <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Politics </i>(tho the expanded version here first was published in the rather more august <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Jimmy &amp; Lucy&#8217;s House of K</i>) &#8211; historically an important text in the history of gay freedom in this society &#8211; and a late look at the work of Edmond Jabès. One might say that this is the Robert Duncan a reader might expect from the pages of the Allen anthology. Save for the piece on Jabès, all of the issues addressed in this volume were available for discussion in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in the 1950s. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The thirteen pieces </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> gathered for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fictive Certainties </i>are longer and, for the most part, more theoretical. Only three pieces appear in both books: &#8220;Towards an Open Universe,&#8221; &#8220;Ideas of the Meaning of Form&#8221; &amp; &#8220;Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman.&#8221; One might fairly say that the first two of these essays are the only theory-focused works in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Selected Prose</i>. In <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fictive Certainties, </i>they appear instead as relatively minor statements when placed up against this volumes opening work, &#8220;The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography,&#8221; which outside of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book, </i>is the longest sustained prose work Duncan was ever to write. The </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial; color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fictive Certainties </i>is actually a very different writer than that of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Selected Prose. <span class=GramE>Certainties <span style='font-style:normal'>has</span></span></i> only two reviews of poets either in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s age cohort or younger: Olson &amp; the philosophically minded John Taggart. Further, there are several pieces in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Certainties </i>that reflect an interest in the changing trends in theory itself: &#8220;Poetry Before Language,&#8221; a work that might be read both as an anticipation of Derrida <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>as a statement of language as a mystical experience; &#8220;The Self in Postmodern Poetry;&#8221; and &#8220;Kopóltuš: Notes on Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology.&#8221; This is a </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> for the Age of Theory, intellectually far broader &amp; more aggressive than the one we find in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Selected Prose. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Since I have argued that the &#8220;structure&#8221; of Duncan&#8217;s great prose poem sequence, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Structure of Rime, </i>is in fact the same term we find first in structuralism &#8211; the intellectual tendency that can be traced back through Roland Barthes, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jacobson &amp; others ultimately to the Russian Formalists, the piece on Barthes is worth examining a little more closely. Like any </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> prose work whose title includes the term &#8220;notes,&#8221; this isn&#8217;t going to be an orderly, academic march through the traditional expository stations. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The difficulties start right away, with the title, Kopóltuš. It&#8217;s not a word you have ever heard before. You can&#8217;t find it in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>OED, </i>indeed, according to Google, there is no   mention of it anywhere on the internet, with or without diacritical marks.&#185; It would appear to be a neologism. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This is followed with an epigram from Barthes&#8217; essay:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.8in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment . . . [as] systems of
signification&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>At which moment </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> begins by raising the question of naming. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Individualizing (naming) a group of three objects in a certain light, involving red, yellow and cerulean, the equilibration of the members of the group having a certain feel (this arrangement <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>feels</i> &quot;in key&quot;) reveals that other elements we do not admit to seeing are present in what we see. We call the complex association of all these (an <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>it</i>) &#8211; we call it a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>kopóltuš</i> (&#8220;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>it </i>is a kopóltuš&#8221;), or we may say of the group &#8220;it is significant.&#8221; (Jess asks if kopóltuš made me think of &#8220;poultice&#8221; or &#8220;cold poultice.&#8221;)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Indeed, naming &#8211; the rightness or inherent nature of names &#8211; is precisely &#8220;Kopóltuš&#8217;&#8221; subject. It&#8217;s an intriguing question have been invoked by somebody who was born as Edward Howard Duncan &amp; then raised by adoptive parents as Edward Howard Symmes, taking the name Robert &amp; joining it to Duncan only after he was discharged from the army in 1941.&#178;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>How do names mean? Especially complex or abstract ones:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>This is a work of art, we say. This is not a work of art. This is a kopóltuš. &#8220;Does your key feeling agree with my feeling&#8221; does not mean &#8220;Is your feeling like mine&#8221; but &#8220;Does your feel that this is a kopóltuš agree with mine?&#8221; No, it is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>a Picasso. We agree that we <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>like </i>Picasso, but he is referring to a Picasso I don&#8217;t much like; I am referring with praise to a Picasso which he thinks is poor. I am sure this is a Picasso (we can check it out as to whether Picasso actually painted it); he is sure it is not a Picasso (but does it look like a Picasso to him, where he has some knowledge that it was forged; or does he recognize that it is a Braque?). Was this forged Picasso forged by X or Y? This is a Y pseudo-Picasso. This pseudo-Picasso is a genuine Y, who is so skillful at imitating that you cannot tell it from a Picasso. I can&#8217;t tell it from a Picasso but it might be Braque. It isn&#8217;t a kopóltuš tho, tho it looks like one, it doesn&#8217;t <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>feel </i>right. A kopóltuš is not a look but the feel of a look.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>We no <span class=GramE>longer dealing</span> with Barthes here, at least not directly. Instead </span><st1:City><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> has wandered deep into the weeds of that briar patch called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Philosophical Investigations. </i>I don&#8217;t know &#8211; and it&#8217;s certainly not apparent from reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fictive Certainties, Selected Prose </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book </i>just how much 20<sup>th</sup> century philosophy Duncan read, or how widely. Dewey &amp; Whitehead are the only ones mentioned by name in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book, </i>unless one adds Walter Benjamin&#8217;s friend, Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish Mysticism. To my knowledge, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> never mentions Wittgenstein anywhere in print, let alone the tension between Wittgenstein Early &amp; Wittgenstein Late. Yet the piece on Barthes here &amp; the one on Jabès in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected Prose </i>give at least some sense that Duncan was aware of the changes in critical thinking that were occurring in the 1960s &amp; &#8216;70s, in which philosophy as a discipline, especially continental philosophy, was hardly a dispassionate bystander. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The problem for </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> is exactly that. The implicit premise of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H.D. Book, </i>its promise, at least at the outset, is that </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> will somehow be able to show how theosophy &#8211; or at least <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>his</i> theosophy, focusing on the lost &amp; the hidden now as a spiritual or mystic dimension &#8211; will somehow solve critical thought, everything that might be captured under that telling rubric Structure. <span style='color:black'>Kopóltuš, in this sense, is precisely what would give voice to that which Wittgenstein says must be passed over in silence in the seventh &amp; final master sentence of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. </i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Yet </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> returns again to Barthes directly, quoting:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.8in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>It is true that objects, images and patterns of behavior can signify, and do <span class=GramE>so on</span> a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture.&#179; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But if things &#8211; including names &#8211; are not autonomous, if they mean only differentially, if meaning itself is inherently differential, the way the phoneme <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>p </i>differs from the phoneme <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>b, </i>then the whole of the magical world &#8211; the world at the heart of all religions, including that secret religion of all religions, theosophy &#8211; disappears. </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> understands the problem at once:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The artist of the <span style='color:black'>kopóltuš said, &#8220;It spoke to me.&#8221; A theory and practice of magical art may enter into this event, or, not having existed before, may follow in its wake. The artist assembling and arranging objects towards some aesthetic satisfaction happens upon a set that &#8220;speaks to him,&#8221; a telling arrangement. What does it say? In the Book we read a Burning Bush spoke to him and said, &#8220;I <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>AM,&#8221; </i>and we read also that Yahweh, also called &#8220;God,&#8221; spoke out of the Burning Bush. The Bush did not then, autonomously, announce its own being. The &#8220;I&#8221; was some One else.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Only those who have never read Rimbaud will not hear the allusion in that last sentence. This is the moment that </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> cannot solve, at least not directly, so he turns instead to a dream in which the painter R.B. Kitaj appears. They <span class=GramE>touch,</span> temple and cheek &#8220;exactly fitted in.&#8221; This leads </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> to the following sentence (which I&#8217;m going to delineate, to air out, for the sake of readability):<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</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'>The figure of the jig-saw<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'>that is of picture,<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'>the representation of a world <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>as ours</i><br> in a complex patterning of color in light and shadows,<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'>masses with hints of densities and distances,<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'>cut across by a second, discrete pattern<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'>in which we perceive on qualities of fitting and not fitting<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'>and suggestions of rime<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'>in ways of fitting and not fitting &#8211;<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'>this jig-saw conformation of patterns<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'>of different orders,<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'>of a pattern of apparent reality<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'>in which the picture we are working to bring out appears<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'>and of a pattern of loss and of finding <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'>that so compels us that we are entirely <span class=SpellE>engrosst</span> in working it out,<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'>this picture that must be put together<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>takes over mere seeing.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The master verb phrase &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>takes over </i>&#8211; does not occur until the 117<sup>th</sup> &amp; 118<sup>th</sup> words of this serpentine sentence. Here the image </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> offers as an allegory for structure lies less in the radical distinction between deep structure &amp; surface appearance, but rather twin orders inhabiting the same space &amp; time. The leap </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> here offers is difference itself: fitting &amp; not fitting, of loss &amp; of finding, a gap we perceive not directly but through suggestions of rime. Yet once the picture itself &#8211; the referential world, the realm of signifieds, we bask &#8211; or so Duncan presents him and his dream Kitaj in the process of doing &#8211; in the pure presence of immanence itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The moment itself seems to click into place, the lines of it so perfectly joining present  contributing to but overwhelmed by the unalterable establishment of a locality in the context of the whole puzzle yet to be <span class=SpellE>workt</span> out into its picture.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This moment of taking over, of clicking into place might, in some other narrative, be presented precisely by the act of faith itself, the term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>leap </i>understood quite literally.  </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> does not do this, but rather leaves us right at the end of that sentence, the problem narratively resolved perhaps, but certainly not solved.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Even if Barthes is not the best writer on which to focus these issues &#8211; one can imagine Duncan tackling Derrida as well as Wittgenstein had he but the chance &amp; Jacobson &amp; Saussure might have been better choices through which to have attacked the concept of difference in language &#8211; Barthes is a particularly apt choice, being the one major structuralist thinker &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Elements of Semiology </i>is a text from late in that period of his work &#8211; to have become a significant post-structural thinker as well. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And therein <span class=GramE>lies</span> the rub. Robert Duncan&#8217;s critical project not only turns on the thinnest of premises &#8211; that <span class=SpellE>H.D.&#8217;s</span> brief analysis with Freud makes her an initiate of his &#8211; but that the union Duncan seeks between the mystical and critical theory is made ever so much harder by the fact that the latter proves to be a moving target. By the time that </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> finally finds <span class=GramE>himself</span> able, or at least imagines himself so, to bring theosophy into the house of theory, theory itself has moved on. </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> had called his great prose poem sequence <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Structure of Rime, </i>not <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Post-Structure of Rime. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But by the time that Duncan is coming into the realization of this, the unfinished &#8211; indeed, now unfinishable &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H.D. Book </i>has already served its other primary purpose, the one that is figured in its early title, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Day Book, </i>a means through which for Robert to test, to formulate, to articulate a critical vision that might then serve as underpinning to his own mature writing, indeed, even the imagined (if never precisely written) elder epic. Which is why, ultimately, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book </i>works more &#8211; and better &#8211; not thought of as the lost or mystery critical masterpiece of the New American Poetry so much as it does as the Ur-blog of its time. <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:
Arial'>&#185; Something</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> I have just changed.<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 class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#178; Something</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> not discussed in &#8220;Kopóltuš&#8221;<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'>&#179; I am reminded of George Lakoff&#8217;s definition of semiotics as failed linguistics. This passage &amp; indeed </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s focus overall is very much pre-cognitive linguistics. Nowhere is the problem of historical time on  </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s thinking more apparent than here.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, September 08, 2004</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of all the major projects undertaken by the New American generation of poets &#8211; which for the sake of definition lets presume consists of the 44 poets included in Donald Allen&#8217;s groundbreaking anthology that gave its name to such different tendencies of poetry as the New York School, the Black Mountain or projectivist poets, the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats &#8211; only one appears never to have been published in book form, Robert Duncan&#8217;s booklength critical volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book. </i>The reasons for this are many and complicated, but the major blame &#8211; if we are to use that word &#8211; lies with Duncan himself. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Begun in 1960, at a time when Robert Duncan was embarking &#8211; and understood that he was embarking &#8211; on his major literary project as a poet, commencing with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Opening of the Field </i>and continuing on through two additional volumes before he took a 15-year hiatus from publishing volumes of poetry, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book </i>was projected to consist of three parts:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if ! supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>An nine-chapter first part, entitled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Beginnings<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>An eleven-chapter second part, entitled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Nights and Days</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A third part, of unknown length and chapters, to consist entirely of a reading of H.D.&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Helen of Egypt<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan worked hard on the first two sections in 1960 and &#8217;61, a time when he was in frequent correspondence with Hilda Doolittle, the one member of the so-called high modernist generation with whom Duncan seems to have had a serious dialog, begun after an abortive attempt to sustain an earlier one with Ezra Pound in the late 1940s. <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span>Doolittle herself passed away in September of 1961 at the age of 75, having had both a long &amp; unusual career as a poet and a surprisingly difficult life for someone who, for the last forty years of her life, never had to worry about either work or money.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan continued to think about, and occasionally to work on, this project so far as I can tell for the remainder of his life. Dates given in the sections published in journals suggest that there was a flurry of writing in 1963 and 1964. The second section of Chapter Five of the second part gives three different years of composition &#8211; 1961, 1963 and 1975. Duncan published a selection of excerpts from the second part of this project first in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>Origin, </i>Second Series, Number 10, in 1963, but didn&#8217;t begin to publish chapters systematically until 1966, when the first chapter appeared in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal, </i>a magazine edited by James Koller &amp; a rotating band of co-editors that included at times Edward van Aelstyn, Peter Blue Cloud, Carroll Arnett, Steven <span class=SpellE>Nemirow</span>, William Wroth and William Brown. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>[I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s possible in today&#8217;s world of webzines and phenomena such as Spencer Selby&#8217;s list &#8211; which includes roughly 370 &#8220;experimental poetry/art magazines&#8221; &#8211; to fully appreciate the scarcity of publishing resources that existed in the middle 1960s, and thus to appreciate the greatness of the best little magazines of that time. In the period immediately prior to the creation of Clayton Eshleman&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Caterpillar, Coyote&#8217;s Journal </i>&#8211; on which <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Caterpillar </i>was loosely modeled &#8211; was easily the best little magazine in the United States, including everyone from Richard Brautigan to Tom Clark, Larry Eigner, Anselm Hollo, Ted Enslin, Edward Dorn, David Bromige, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, Douglas Woolf, David Meltzer, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Basil Bunting, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Ronald Johnson, Gary Snyder &amp; Phil Whalen. The exclusivity with which the journal focused only on white men was not, as they say, a differentiator in 1963. After eight issues or thereabouts in five years, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal </i>turned into an occasional project of <span class=SpellE>Koller&#8217;s</span> as he bounced around from Portland to the Bay Area and eventually east to Maine.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan published that first chapter of part one in 1966, the second one the following year (again in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal</i>) plus the first half of the sixth chapter in the initial issue of Clayton Eshleman&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span>Caterpillar. </i>In 1968, the second issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Caterpillar </i>completed the publication of the sixth chapter, plus chapters three, four, and five. Duncan also published the first chapter of the second part that year, again in the first issue of a new magazine, this one <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sumac, </i>a publication edited by baby-food heir Dan Gerber and budding novelist Jim Harrison. <br>
<br>
Duncan published chapters two, three and four of the second part of the volume in 1969, plus the first section of chapter five. Then Duncan didn&#8217;t publish anything from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book </i>until 1975, when he published three additional pages from chapter five of the second part, plus chapters seven and eight in the second issue of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Credences</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>Chapter nine appeared in 1979, chapter 11 in 1981, and chapter ten in 1983. In 1986, Duncan published a reworked version of part two, chapter five in a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sagetrieb </i>issue devoted to his work and chapter six of the second part in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Southern Review.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A note that Duncan published in 1983 suggests that at one time there were to have been three additional chapters in the first part, plus a twelfth chapter of the second part:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:MetaPlusNormal-Roman;color:black'>Chapter 5, which addresses the matter of the State and War, remains in large part <span class=SpellE>unpublisht</span>. Chapter 6, which has to do with the transmutations of genital and poetic experience, has not been <span class=SpellE>publisht</span> at all (contrary to the impression given by the checklist in </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:MetaPlusNormal-Italic;color:black'>Scales of the Marvelous </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:MetaPlusNormal-Roman;color:black'>[New Directions, 1979].<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
Both this note, and a second one that is appended to the PDF version, suggest that some or all of the unwritten chapters were to have been composed <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>after </i>the completion of the third section, the reading of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Helen of Egypt. </i>Presumably because of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Southern Review </i>publication, <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span>Chapter Six is included in the PDF. <br>
<br>
The PDF file is worth noting because it is the only version of this project that is readily available in 2004, and thus is the edition most contemporary readers are likely to have come across. It&#8217;s not clear just who produced this version &#8211; the credit to Frontier Press is an allusion to Harvey Brown&#8217;s Buffalo press that, in 1970, brought out the lost classic original version of William Carlos Williams <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All, </i>seemingly in a pirated edition. The success of that project &#8211; easily the most influential critical text of the early 1970s, if not at the moment of its original publication in 1923, when it more or less sank like a rock from view &#8211; was thought by many readers to have forced New Directions to return the great early prose works of Williams the high modernist to print. So this &#8220;Frontier Press&#8221; edition is rather something of a similar prod, in this instance to the University of California, which must eventually publish <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book </i>in some version in its collected works of Robert Duncan, and to that series&#8217; general editor, Robert Bertholf. The PDF file has circulated through a number of different sites on the net over the past four or five years, and can currently be found at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ccca.ca/history/ozz/english/books/"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>OneZeroZero</span></span></a>, </i>a virtual library of English Canadian Small Presses. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The PDF file is little more than a reprinting of the chapters that had appeared in little magazines prior to 1983 and even on that score it has flubbed the job, publishing the fourth chapter of the second part both in its correct position within the manuscript AND as the fourth chapter in the first part as well. (One can still find an occasional issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>TriQuarterly </i>number 12, in which the real fourth chapter of the first part appeared in 1968 &#8211; I have a poem in that same edition.) <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span>It&#8217;s worth noting that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>TriQuarterly </i>calls the book as a whole just <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H.D., </i>not <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book. </i>Duncan also called it <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Day Book </i>in its initial appearance in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Origin</i>. In short, this was a project that never fully came together. <br> 
<br>
Duncan&#8217;s second note in the PDF file largely concedes this point:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:MetaPlusNormal-Roman'>Note: The last three chapters of Part I and the remaining chapter of Part II I think to be dependent upon what happens in Part III, of which no sentence has yet been ventured. The first draft of the Book was done
in 1961, considerable over-lays were written in 1964, with dream material entering into the Book as late as 1964. It had been commissioned by Norman Holmes Pearson as a Book for H.D.&#8217;s Birthday, but at the time of the commission I had <span class=SpellE>warnd</span> him that I saw H.D. as the matrix of my finding my work in Poetry itself. &#8220;I <span class=SpellE>askt</span> him for an H.D. book,&#8221; Norman Holmes Pearson said sometime in the 1960s, &#8220;and he&#8217;s writing an LSD book.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;
margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:right;
mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:MetaPlusNormal-Roman'>&#8211; RD<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>By the time Duncan died, some 70 handwritten pages of the third section existed and the first part was now complete at six chapters. But the final chapter of the second part appears never to have been written. What we have, then, if we turn to the PDF as the best widely available resource is a document that is missing two published chapters, plus all that exists of the third section. At best, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The H.D. Book </i>we have is shards of a working that Duncan himself was not able to complete even though he worked on it, off and on, for over a quarter of a century. When the UC Press edition comes out, perhaps as early as the end of this year, it will be interesting to see if we can now answer the question as to why a project to which Duncan appears to have given such importance was ultimately left undone. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, July 05, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The first
time I saw &#8220;Biotherm,&#8221; my impulse was to squint. As published in <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Controversy of Poets</i>, the 1965
anthology edited by Paris Leary &amp; </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Robert Kelly</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> that attempted to put School of
Quietude poets (selected by Leary) alongside New Americans (chosen by Kelly)
side by side, Frank O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s &#8220;long&#8221; poem for Bill Berkson appears in 6 point
type. Six points is really what graphic designers call &#8220;mouse type,&#8221; a font
size used for material in an ad you are compelled to print (usually for
regulatory reasons) but which you really don&#8217;t want anyone to read. The width
of O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s page when slotted into the volume&#8217;s mass market paperback format is
no doubt what forced the issue &#8211; Olson&#8217;s &#8221;Letter to Melville 1951,&#8221; which <span
class=SpellE>immediatly</span> follows O&#8217;Hara, manages to function perfectly
well at 8&#189; points, the standard &#8220;body text&#8221; font for the volume, requiring only
a few hanging indents. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The result
is that on the first page of O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s poem, the title itself &#8211; &#8220;Biotherm (for
Bill Berkson)&#8221; &#8211; looks huge in its standard 9 point font, O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s name, at 9&#189;
points, looks like a billboard. Contrasted with these, the body of O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s
text produces a sort of vertigo, as though one were looking down from a great
height. As I&#8217;ve noted before, I didn&#8217;t really connect with Frank O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s work
until I saw him in Richard Moore&#8217;s brilliant USA Poetry PBS documentary in
1966, in which O&#8217;Hara is something akin to the Tasmanian Devil cartoon
character, writing, drinking, smoking, talking to the camera, to friends in the
room &amp; to someone on the phone <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>simultaneously</i>
with an ease &amp; grace that was jaw-dropping, the typewriter keys clattering
on at an almost alarming rate. I bought the Kelly/Leary anthology at Cody&#8217;s as
a result of seeing Louis Zukofsky in the same series &#8211; it was the only volume
in Cody&#8217;s that had <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any </i>work by
Zukofsky at all. But I don&#8217;t remember if that was before <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>or </i>after the O&#8217;Hara show. I already had seen O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s work in the
Allen anthology, but it didn&#8217;t click with me there &#8211; I suspect that it must
have looked too &#8220;easy&#8221; or casual &amp; I was a very serious teenager indeed. So
&#8220;Biotherm,&#8221; even in that itty-bitty type (or just possibly because it required
that itty-bitty type), was really the work through which I began to first take
O&#8217;Hara as a poet seriously.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>All of
which is just to note that there is a terrific essay on the poem in <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sal Mimeo </i>#3 by none other than Bill
Berkson himself. Part memoir, part close reading, part meditation on the
aspects of genre, with an exceptional seven-page glossary of references to the
topical &amp; situational references in O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s poem (itself only twelve pages
in original manuscript), Berkson&#8217;s piece originally was composed<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span>&#8220;for a booklet accompanying the deluxe <a
href="http://www.arionpress.com/">Arion Press</a> edition of &#8216;<i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.arionpress.com/catalog/032.htm">Biotherm&#8217;</a></i>,&#8221; published
in 1990. With 42 lithographs by Jim Dine, that volume is still available new at
a mere $2,750. (A second suite of eight Dine lithographs selected from the
illustrations to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Biotherm</i> goes for
ten grand.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Larry
Fagin&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sal Mimeo</i> &#8211; which looks
photocopied to me, in spite of its title &#8211; presents Berkson&#8217;s material in a
more workmanlike setting. It&#8217;s one of several &#8220;historic&#8221; pieces in the current issue.
Others include a 1988 interview with the late John Wieners, poems by Richard <span
class=SpellE>Kolmar</span> from the 1960s &amp; others by Alan Fuchs from his
1971 chapbook, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Before Starting. </i>Part
of what makes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sal Mimeo</i> so much fun
is that it balances not only the historical with the new, but also the widely
known with the still emerging. Some of the poets certainly are 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'> folks with whom Fagin traditionally
has been associated: Berkson, Ron Padgett, Tony Towle, <span class=GramE>Bernadette</span>
Mayer. But, as with </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
 font-family:Arial'>Carla Harryman</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s work discussed here on Tuesday,
Fagin goes further <span class=SpellE>afield</span> than one might expect.
There are collaborations by Lyn Hejinian &amp; Jack Collom, a marvelous suite
of poems by Michael McClure, work from Bolinas poet Larry Kearney. There are
also poets whose work I frankly don&#8217;t know, such as <a
href="http://www.hchs.hunter.cuny.edu/departments/english_and_communications_theatre/teachers/richard_roundy.html">Richard
Roundy</a>, Daniel <span class=SpellE>Nohejl</span>, Chris Edgar, Eileen
Hennessey and more. It&#8217;s definitely worth a read or, better yet, a
subscription. Fagin can be reached at </span><st1:address><st1:Street><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>437 E. 12<sup>th</sup> St., # 18</span></st1:Street><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, </span><st1:City><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>NYC</span></st1:City><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PostalCode><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>10009</span></st1:PostalCode></st1:address><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, March 04, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Rob Stanton
has some follow-up questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Dear
Ron,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Huge
thanks for your thorough and thoughtful <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2389637288">blog-response</a>
to my query about Engines. I think I was hoping that you might say something
more about collaboration in general, just as you did - the proliferation of
poet/poet and poet/artist collaborations in the current poetic climate is
something I find particularly fascinating (just thinking about examples you
mention, I recently read - and loved - <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.mercuryhouse.org/leningrad.html">Leningrad</a></i>, and the
idea behind <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Grand Piano</i> seems
both interesting in itself and strangely inevitable). I was intrigued that you
picked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i>-24 as a possible
precedent - I too feel distinctly ambivalent about whether it really does 'cap'
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i> (and whether that sort
of 'terminal' idea was tenable in the first place). In a sort of sentimental
way, I think it does - making semi-actual the scene envisioned in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i>-11: music, words and
performance. Apart from that, the nature of the collaboration in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"A"</i>-24 seems particularly
complicated: firstly, there is Celia Zukofsky's work in setting Zukofsky's
words to music, then there is the actual presence of Handel's music (suggesting
a Handel/Zukofsky interaction, mediated by Celia), and then there's the
question of whether the four 'voices' of Zukofsky presented actual represent a
unified 'whole' (one of the joys of that <a href="http://factoryschool.org/content/sounds/poetry/frontenac.html">Factory
School</a> site is the recording of the 'live' version organised by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana;">*).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Given
your point about how collaboration provides an opportunity to sidestep and/or interrogate
the 'raging control freak' aspect inherent in an individual 'style', I was also
interested in your mention of 'the metabolism of one's own processes'. I'm not
sure to what degree you intended the biological inference, but this immediately
put me in mind of Olson's repeated emphasis on the physicality of the poet/m.
I've always felt that his talk about the individual 'breath' of the poet was
strangely close to mainstream <span class="SpellE">whitterings</span> about the
necessity of 'individual voice' etc., despite the very different poetic 'ends'
advocated. Is 'self' inevitable in poetry? Does the inevitable communality of
collaboration offer a real alternative, or does it simply place the problem at
one remove (I hate to admit it, but despite the efforts toward some kind of
group expression in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leningrad</i> , I
found it hard not to 'see' differing styles in the separate passages)? Or, to
put it another way, if the problem with most mainstream poetry is the
foregrounding of 'unified self' as end rather than mean, is all poetry simply
somewhere along a sliding style of degrees-of-leaning-on-personal-experience?
(I've been reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/145/wordchrono.html">The Prelude</a> </i>recently
and have been intrigued by the incredibly arbitrary and piecemeal nature of the
<span class="SpellE">Wordsworthian</span> 'epiphany' on a larger canvas.) You've
written of <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2383955338">'the
abstract lyric</a>' before in your blog in relation to the work of Barbara
Guest, but <span class="GramE">is</span> such a thing 100% possible?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Anyway,
this has been a horribly rambling email. Apologies in advance, and thanks
again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">All
the best,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Rob
Stanton<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
question of the person, in Olson or in collaboration, is invariably a difficult
topic, precisely because works are written by individuals, either singly or in
groups, &amp; yet we know that &#8220;the individual&#8221; itself is a complex &amp;
internally contradictory construction. If we follow the cognitive scientists
and neurobiologists, one of the first things we will discover is that, even
within the human being, there is no &#8220;monad,&#8221; no single site of thought or
language. Rather, different portions of the brain work in conjunction to
apprehend our world &amp; build responses to it &#8211; many of these occur below the
level of consciousness &amp; outside of our waking life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">When Olson
first began to produce the poems for which we remember him today in the late
1940s, he actually appears to have been almost the only poet in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;"> to demonstrate any awareness &#8211; more
anticipation than knowledge, really &#8211; of these issues. In his &#8220;Bibliography on </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;"> for Ed Dorn,&#8221; first written in
1955, one year ahead of Ginsberg&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Howl,</i>
Olson notes that &#8220;millennia . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>&amp;
. . . person&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">are</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> not the same as either<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">time</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> as history or as the<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">individual</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> as single<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">The first
three pages of &#8220;Proprioception,&#8221; written six years later &amp; easily Olson&#8217;s
most ambitious &amp; successful critical project, show O working through this
problem, this question, at great length. He is so concerned with place that he
is driven to find such, somewhere. Proprioception itself, kinesthesia, one&#8217;s
awareness of the actual physical rubbing together of one&#8217;s inner organs, the
growl of the stomach &amp; peristaltic pulse of the bowels, is for Olson a key,
an awareness that precedes any other mode of knowing &#8211; &#8220;I am I because my
little gut knows me.&#8221; The body for Olson is the place of the unconscious. The
&#8220;soul,&#8221; an entity with which Olson was much obsessed, proved to be profoundly
physical. Projection &#8211; the meat of his practice as a writer, a (literally)
Projectivist poet &#8211; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">is</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
discrimination (of the object from the subject) and the unconscious is the
universe flowing-in, inside. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Maximus,
this great comic persona that both is &amp; is not Olson &#8211; and most certainly is
not Russell Crowe &#8211; represents O&#8217;s attempt to have it all ways. And while Olson
is most certainly not the only poet among the New Americans to push the person
beyond its traditional boundaries &amp; unveil the constructedness of such
&#8220;natural&#8221; categories &#8211; think of Kerouac&#8217;s &#8220;Imitation of the Tape&#8221; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Visions of Cody</i>, Burroughs&#8217; use of
cut-ups in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Naked Lunch</i> &amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ticket that Exploded, </i>Spicer&#8217;s
theory of Martian radio &#8211; Olson appears to have been the only one to have had a
critical understanding of the question, as such. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">So, sure,
there is a fair amount of persona floating about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maximus</i> that is not so terribly different in its own way from the
imaginary blue-collar worker Phil Levine posits in his &#8220;I.&#8221; The self in such
poetry is largely a type, &amp; I always think of the stereotypical signals
thereof worn by the &#8216;70s rock group The Village People: you can tell which one
Levine would have been, though I fear that may be Olson under the feathered
headdress. <span class="SpellE">Bly&#8217;s</span> serape, </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Blackburn</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">&#8217;s cowboy hat &amp; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">&#8217;s purple cape were hardly more
subtle. Yet it&#8217;s Olson, among all of these, who understands not only that it&#8217;s
funny, but that there are issues here, &amp; as such worth exploring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">That &#8220;worth
exploring&#8221; is, I think, the answer to the question of whether or not &#8220;self&#8221; is
finally inescapable. It will always be, like &#8220;the social,&#8221; one possible horizon
among several, regardless of how nuanced our understanding of its composition
might become. After all, how far have we advanced in this regard from
Shakespeare&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/lear/full.html">Lear</a></i>,
responding with a quartet of words that operate like a series of concentric
circles, moving from the outer inward: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edgar
I nothing <span class="GramE">am</span></i>?<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
</i>The same response &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">worth exploring </i>&#8211;
is, I suspect, also the underlying principle beneath the continued attraction
of the abstract lyric, even if I personally find the issue less compelling. The
answer to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Stanton</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">&#8217;s <span class="GramE">question&#8217;s</span> isn&#8217;t ultimately so
much <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why </i>as it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why not?<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>* For some reason, the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Factory</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;"> site fails to credit </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Bob Perelman</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
though my understanding is that it was Bob who initiated this collective
process in the first place as well as substituting his piano for Handel&#8217;s
harpsichord. In my video copy of the November 15, 1978 San Francisco State
performance, it is Perelman whom Poetry Center director </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Tom Mandel</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> has introduce the event in addition to his
performance therein.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, December 12, 2002</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Turning to George Stanley&#8217;s
&#8220;Vancouver, Book One&#8221; in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Poker </i>this
morning, I realize several things:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-family:Wingdings;
mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:Wingdings'><span
style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
style='font-family:Arial'>The Poker&#8217;s</span></i><span style='font-family:Arial'>
table of contents is alphabetical by first name &#8211; good fortune for Chris
Stroffolino, not so good for Tom Devaney &amp; it takes me awhile to find the
page number again for George.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-family:Wingdings;
mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:Wingdings'><span
style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-family:Arial'>The section published
here is not all of </span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
  normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Vancouver</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>, Book One</span></i><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, but rather just section 8.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-family:Wingdings;
mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:Wingdings'><span
style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-family:Arial'>The work
partakes of not one, but two distinct (though related) genres: the poem as
journal &amp; the poem written on transit.<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 class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>An epic in
the form of a journal?</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'> It&#8217;s an
interesting concept, problematic from the outset (which I suspect is </span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>del</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-family:Arial'>iberate). </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Kevin Davies</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'> &#8211; one of the editors of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s forthcoming selected, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'><a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385049898">A
Tall, Serious Girl</a> </i>&#8211; recently sent me a note that mutual friend Ben
Friedlander had posted to another list on the subject of journals. It read in
part:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'>[Paul] <st1:place>Blackburn</st1:place>
is incredible; he and [Joanne] Kyger are to my mind the most underrated poets
of their generation. Both of them take the journal as their basic form, and
both are geniuses at naturalizing peculiar verbal gestures by fixing them in
narrative structures. I suspect that similarity has something to do with the
lack of respect they get: the journal form looks dated, I guess, and the
naturalizing leads people to take them as simple. Otherwise, they&#8217;re very
different. Kyger uses the journal as a way of investigating the nature of space
and time. <st1:place>Blackburn</st1:place> is a social historian. </p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>This
recalled what I&#8217;d written about </span><st1:place><span style='font-family:
 Arial'>Blackburn</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Journals</i> in the <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385147325">blog</a>:
&#8220;even a fine poet does not necessarily make for great reading when writing
becomes all but dissociated from intention.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>But
</span><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Blackburn</span></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial'> clearly distinguished between journals &amp; poems &#8211;
you have to go 474 pages into <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The
Collected Poems </i>before you find the first piece identified as a journal
entry, dating from 1967, when </span><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Blackburn</span></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial'> was already 40 and a significant figure in American
poetry. Kyger likewise makes the distinction. Many of her poems may seem
occasional &amp;, as with </span><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Blackburn</span></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, they&#8217;re often dated, either at the foot of the poem
or in its title. But these works are radically different from <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The </i></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Japan</span></i></st1:place></st1:country-region><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'> and </span></i><st1:country-region><st1:place><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>India</span></i></st1:place></st1:country-region><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'> Journals 1960-1964.
</span></i><span style='font-family:Arial'>In this way, Blackburn &amp; Kyger
are both like Larry Eigner or Ted Berrigan, two other great poets who used the
form of the occasional poem, literally the poem as the register of an occasion.
It&#8217;s not, I would argue with Ben, quite the same. The occasional poem &#8211; a genre
far too neglected critically &#8211; utilizes its originating or motivating event as
both instigator &amp; determinant of boundary for the poem, but that <span
class=SpellE>boundedness</span>, that sense of a defined edge, is precisely
what journals lack. Journals have a tendency to be formless in their outer
exoskeletal concerns &amp; often proceed merely chronologically. So while I
agree with Friedlander&#8217;s assessment of </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Blackburn</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'> &amp; especially of Kyger, for my money the most significant woman
writing from the late 1950s until the 1970s &amp; always a wonderful poet, I
don&#8217;t see either as taking &#8220;the journal as their basic form.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>So
the idea of a longpoem in the mode of a journal &#8211; it was </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Kevin Davies</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'> who first used the term &#8220;epic&#8221; to characterize </span><st1:City><st1:place><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Vancouver</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> &#8211; strikes me as a consciously challenging project.
Its secret underbelly, of course, is the reality that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>every epic is at some level a journal</i>. It is not an accident, I
think, that the most studied &amp; revered portion of Pound&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cantos </i>are <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Pisan</span> Cantos</i>, very much Pound&#8217;s
journal of imprisonment in the cages at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Pisa</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. All the fog &amp; pretense of writing about Van
Buren&#8217;s </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>admin</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'>istration, for example, is revealed by contrast to
have been just that: fog &amp; pretense. Rather, the great epic quest of
bringing together these disparate historic particulars simply gave Pound
something to write &#8220;about&#8221; while writing, just as a translation is itself a way
for a person to write without having anything of their own to say. In both
senses, the process of writing is almost entirely apart from any question of
content. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>We write because we write </i>is
the secret motto of every poet. Having &#8220;something to say&#8221; is nice, but hardly
necessary. Are you really interested in the history of a fishing village
northeast of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Boston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>? Can anyone tell even remotely what the &#8220;subject&#8221; of
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>might be? Far from damning, the
answers to these questions tell us something very important about poetry, its
relation to the self-valuable signifier &amp; the importance of process. Thus I
think that the great challenge of any &amp; every longpoem has always been how <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not</i> to be &#8220;just a journal.&#8221; </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, it would appear, has decided to turn that question
on its head &amp; tackle it straight on.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>The
poem of public transit, as you might imagine, is another genre very close to my
heart, having written books both explicitly (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>BART</i>) and implicitly (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sitting
Up, Standing, Taking Steps </i>or, say, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>What</i>)
entirely while riding around on buses &amp; trains. There is even a section of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Alphabet, </i>in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect,</i> in which I take the process of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>BART</i>, riding around the entire course of
an urban transit system, &amp; apply it to the comparable system in a city that
I barely know at all, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>Atlanta</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial'>.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>For
me the great poets of transit have always been Robert Duncan &amp; Phil Whalen
&amp; while Whalen&#8217;s poetry also edges up against that concept of the journal
that Friedlander is trying to get at, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> is certainly the furthest poet imaginable from that
mode. Yet </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> once told me that he could not have written &#8220;This
Place <span class=SpellE>Rumord</span> to Have Been Sodom&#8221; &#8211; the very poem that
</span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> takes direct aim at in his own early great work &#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8221; &#8211; without having been on the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> <span class=SpellE>Muni</span> &amp; that that poem
carried within it the rhythms of <span class=SpellE>Muni&#8217;s</span> tracks.*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley
himself has used transit <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>in </i>his poems,
even if not as a process <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>for </i>the
poems, before. In fact, when going through the manuscript for <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Tall, Serious Girl</i>, I&#8217;d misremembered
one of his early </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>San
  Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial'>
works, &#8220;Flesh Eating Poem,&#8221; as being about the </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>N Judah</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'> because there is a reference to that streetcar, as well as to the 22
Fillmore line. Since in reality that&#8217;s a serious misreading (or rather
misremembering, the mind revising as it does, constantly), I was surprised not
to find what I recalled as the &#8220;</span><st1:place><span style='font-family:
 Arial'>N Judah</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8221; poem in the
manuscript. In fact, &#8220;Flesh Eating Poem&#8221; &#8211; that title gives you just a taste &#8211;
is included. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Now,
in </span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Vancouver</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>,</span></i><span
style='font-family:Arial'> we are very much getting on the bus or off the bus &#8211;
the <span class=SpellE>SeaBus</span> included &#8211; &#8220;Writing in the dark &#8211; outside
the college &#8211; in the sodium glare through the bus window.&#8221; Perhaps the poem of
transit is a genre within a genre here &#8211; &amp; I know that I&#8217;m more deeply
attracted to it as a model for writing than <s>almost</s> anyone I&#8217;ve ever met
&#8211; but it makes me especially pleased, gleeful even, to see it rise up again at
the start of a new longpoem.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>* Some of my very best discussions with </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> came on the &#8220;F&#8221; bus between the
original <span class=GramE>location</span> of Serendipity Books on Shattuck
&amp; San Francisco. </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> went to Serendipity almost every
Wednesday afternoon &amp; then would walk over to the Shattuck Co-op to shop
for groceries before catching the bus &amp; an attentive person who also lived
in the City could sometimes make this same journey &#8211; I still think of those
trips as my Symposium of the Bus. I rue the day, moving back to the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>East</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Bay</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> in 1987, when I realized that
politicians had devastated the AC Transit system since I&#8217;d headed to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> in 1972 (I&#8217;d also lived in SF in
1966-67). It meant that I had no choice at that point but to learn to drive. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>I want to
note also that </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> shopped at the Co-op not because he
liked carting groceries 10 miles in his lap &amp; then via the <span
class=SpellE>Muni</span> to his home in the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Mission</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, but because the Co-op&#8217;s attendant
credit union, Twin Pines Federal Savings, had &#8220;not blinked an eye&#8221; (Duncan&#8217;s
phrase) at the idea of issuing a mortgage loan to two men in the early &amp;
deeply homophobic 1950s. One more vote for a socialist bank.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, November 29, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
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<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-85251975' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Parceled,
not parceled, ever the light.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:3'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span><span class=SpellE>Trismegistus</span> to
Tat: our bones<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>will</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'>
want velvet,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:2'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>line</span> decays, root
your gods<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>in</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'>
flesh &amp; stock your flesh in<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:4'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
class=GramE>flame</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>(Giordano
given over<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:3'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>&#8211;<span
class=SpellE><span class=GramE>ubi</span></span> <span class=SpellE>peccavit</span>&#8211;
he sinned in fire<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>tongue</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>word-thorn<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:3'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
class=GramE>into</span> fire,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:4'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160; </span></span><st1:date Month="2" Day="17"
Year="1600"><span style='font-family:Arial'>17 February 1600</span></st1:date><span
style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&amp;
the beam of light<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:2'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>that</span> is
defining measure<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8211;<span
class=SpellE>metre</span>, the palladium<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:3'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span><span class=GramE>yardstick</span> only a
curio<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>or</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'>
orifice of<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>measure</span> a
controlled radiance,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=SpellE><span
class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>ångstrom</span></span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;
</span><span class=GramE>an</span> infinity &#8216;longer than point&#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=SpellE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>Punctum</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'>
in <span class=SpellE>Nihilo</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:2'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>from</span> which<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>It
pours.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;
</span>Sentences by nature false,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8216;<span
class=GramE>opinions</span>&#8217; <span class=SpellE>momentaneous</span> murmurings<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>corpse-fat</span></span><span style='font-family:
Arial'> soft,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:2'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span><span class=SpellE><span class=GramE>saponification</span></span>
of the great poets<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>when</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'> it
is<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
</span>Delight forgot&#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:4'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
class=SpellE>Addio</span> <span class=SpellE>alla</span> <span class=SpellE>madre</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>I
take<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>this</span>
serious knife<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:3'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>where</span> Death is<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&amp;
makes<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
</span><span class=GramE>all</span> sharp again<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>wretch</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'>
of dull edge<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:2'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>his</span> knife I
fight<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>bites</span></span><span style='font-family:Arial'>
mine.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span></span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Crystals</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:3'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
class=GramE>of</span> damascene sever in air<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>:<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>this</span> silken<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:2'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span class=GramE>kerchief</span>
divides the steel.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>This passage, the first two
out of eight pages, opens Robert Kelly&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Songs
I-XXX </i>(Pym-Randall Press, 1968). Typing these lines again after all these
years &#8211; one of the real benefits of doing this blog* &#8211; I feel as riveted by
them as when I first confronted this work over thirty years ago. There is in
these lines of verse something I feel is almost entirely missing from most of
today&#8217;s poetry &#8211; the measure of the line heard &amp; understood as a mode of
music. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Melopoiea</i> as Pound once called
it. This use of sound is something that poets once took for granted as an
option &#8211; there are moments in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos </i>when
it is all that exists beyond the crackpot economics &amp; dubious readings of
American presidential history. Yet, somehow, after Robert Duncan, a master at
this mode, you find Robert Kelly, with his exquisite conception of measure, and
Kenneth Irby, with an ultimate ear for vowels, then silence. Or not silence,
exactly, but rather a shift in the manner music. <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'>It was Olson of course,
along with Creeley, who heard that other possibility in Pound&#8217;s line &amp; even
more clearly in that of Williams, the intricate prosody of the spoken, the
huffing of the line as breath &#8211; very nearly a poetics of asthma in Olson&#8217;s
case, the way so many of his poems start out with a long line only to find
themselves narrowing as the words rush, repeatedly interrupted by the need to
mark line&#8217;s limit, to a literally breathless conclusion. <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'>Thus, in the 1950s and &#8216;60s,
American poetry found itself with not one, but three different tendencies with
regards to the proactive use of sound in poetry:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-family:Arial'>the complicated
rhythms of the spoken (Olson, Creeley, </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Blackburn</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'>**), which also included a number of relatively casual practitioners,
such as Ginsberg, Whalen, Snyder &amp; O&#8217;Hara<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-family:Arial'>a poetics
predicated on measure (Duncan, Kelly, some of Irby)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;tab-stops:list 1.0in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-family:Arial'>a regularized
metrics derived from the old formalism (Berryman, Lowell)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Of course, the great
majority of poets fell into a category that could be triangulated between &#8220;a
little of this &amp; a little of that,&#8221; those who didn&#8217;t really care &amp;
those who were genuinely tone-deaf to their own writing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
style='font-family:Arial'>Songs I-XXX</span></i><span style='font-family:Arial'>
was the third book published by Kelly in a two year period of 1967-68 that to
this day remains not just a great burst of poetic productivity &#8211; Kelly has been
the Energizer Bunny of poetic production his entire life &#8211; but also a defining
moment for a particular mode of poetics, one that was grounded in sound &amp;
turned toward alternative sacred texts as a primary concern. <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'>It&#8217;s worth noting Kelly&#8217;s
trajectory in that decade &#8211; it gives some sense of how greatly the scene was
changing, as well as how greatly it has changed in the 30-odd years since. Beginning
to publish around 1960, Kelly within five years had brought out five books with
small press publishers, been the focus of an issue of Cid <span class=SpellE>Corman&#8217;s</span>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Origin,</i> and co-edited with Paris
Leary, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Controversy of Poets</i>,
published as a Doubleday Anchor paperback original. While Leary&#8217;s contributions
have largely been forgotten outside of a few obvious &#8220;Big Names&#8221; such as Robert
Lowell or the fans of Gray Burr &amp; Melvin Walker La <span class=SpellE>Follette</span>,
Kelly&#8217;s contributors expanded the roster of the Allen anthology, bringing Louis
Zukofsky, Jackson Mac Low, Jerry Rothenberg, <span class=SpellE>Gerrit</span>
Lansing &amp; Ted Enslin to a considerably broader audience than they&#8217;d
previously experienced.*** &amp; by virtue of coming five years later than the
Allen, several of Kelly&#8217;s selections, such as of &#8220;Billy the Kid&#8221; for Jack
Spicer and the complete &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Biotherm</span>&#8221; by Frank O&#8217;Hara &#8211;
literally in 5&#189; point type &#8211; were notably stronger than those included in the
Allen. <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'>So the three books that
appeared more or less immediately on the heels of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Controversy, Axon Dendron Tree </i>(Salitter Press, 1967), <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Finding the Measure </i>(Black Sparrow,
1968) &amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Songs I-XXX </i>(Pym-Randall,
1968) effectively served to solidify Kelly&#8217;s position as a major American poet,
one of the first, along with Ted Berrigan to achieve this level of recognition
within the post-avant tradition who had not been a part of the Allen anthology.<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-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* There is
nothing that compares to having the words of a poem you are thinking about
emerge from your own fingertips atop a keyboard, no matter than Robert Kelly may
have originally drafted these in pen or that, in the late 1960s, he was almost
certainly working with a manual typewriter, not a PC. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>** Whose
sense of the uses of transcription to spatially approximate aspects of speech
is perhaps the most detailed of <span class=GramE>all.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>*** I&#8217;ve
noted before that when Richard Moore&#8217;s USA Poetry PBS television series first
introduced me to the work of Zukofsky in 1966, the only volume that held any of
his poetry at Cody&#8217;s in </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'>, then as now the largest bookstore
in that town, was <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Controversy of Poets.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
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<h2>Email</h2>
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<li>silliman AT gmail DOT com</li>
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<h2>Silliman Sites</h2>
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<li><a href='http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1544'>Academy of American Poets</a></li>
<li><a href='http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/silliman'>Electronic Poetry Center</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.facebook.com/ron.silliman'>Facebook</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.goodreads.com/search/search%3Fsearch_type%3Dbooks%26search%5Bquery%5D%3Dron%2Bsilliman'>GoodReads</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/silliman.htm'>Modern American Poetry</a></li>
<li><a href='http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Silliman.php'>PennSound</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.pcah.us/the-center/grants-awarded/grantees-1998-ron-silliman/'>Pew Fellowships in the Arts</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6323'>Poetry Foundation</a></li>
<li><a href='http://ronsillimanbibliography.blogspot.com/'>Silliman's Bibliography</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?AuthorName=Ron+Silliman'>Small Press Distribution</a></li>
<li><a href='http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS/'>Tottel's</a></li>
<li><a href='http://twitter.com/ronsilliman'>Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.ubu.com/contemp/silliman/index.html'>Ubuweb</a></li>
<li><a href='https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0075.html'>UC San Diego Archives</a></li>
<li><a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Silliman'>Wikipedia</a></li>
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<h2 class='title'>Ketjak</h2>
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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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