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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, May 31, 2005</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><img height="328" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/54UQT9aK_s6fg6iP2tRkQ0kl6sSrluEXoizsyYsaU97smEySc8SGCZ7QQw_Hk66lj3BBMI6-3yuPhCopi4jHGSS5iH5_WLVLelVtJ703C6sa1Z0ZLQ%3Ds0-d" width="300"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>All weekend I&#8217;ve been thinking that there&#8217;s an absent third missing between <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/05/grave-of-william-carlos-williams.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Collecteds</span></span><span style='color:black'> &amp; &#8220;Books as They Happen&#8221;</span></a> &#8211; it&#8217;s the case of the Selected. Sometimes even that literary act of category miscegenation, the &#8220;New &amp; Selected&#8221; (<span class=SpellE>a.k.a</span> &#8220;Didn&#8217;t write enough new poems for a full book, but wanted/needed to publish one anyway&#8221;). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Selecteds</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> are notoriously problematic &amp; there are the horror stories about different ones, such Bob Grenier&#8217;s editing of a Creeley Selected that proved too radical for its publisher &amp; was scrapped for something that the publisher thought more of as a Greatest Hits volume. You can find Grenier&#8217;s original table of contents in the 1978 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Boundary2 </i>issue devoted to Creeley &#8211; it would have been a great book. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So I was trying to think about how you might do that. How would one approach the question of thinking it through? I&#8217;ve always thought, for example, that my own work wouldn&#8217;t lend itself to that form, that you couldn&#8217;t intelligibly &#8220;excerpt&#8221; from these booklength poems that are themselves parts of larger projects. But I wanted to think it through without that double-sided investment of editor/author, so thought about who hasn&#8217;t ever had a Selected, and how would I approach their work. <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>Louis Zukofsky</b>. How would I think to edit a Selected works of his poetry?<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Even as I&#8217;m resistant to the idea that one could/should excerpt from my own poems, I don&#8217;t sense that same taboo with his. Is that because it&#8217;s not my own work, or because there&#8217;s something fundamentally different between his poetry &amp; my own (well, there is, obviously, but besides all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>those </i>reasons)? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So what would I pick from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A,&#8221; </i>for example? I tend to read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>not as a continuous whole, but <span class=GramE>as a series movements</span>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc> 
<li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;   tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>1 through 6, the opening sequence written very much under the influence of <i      style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos<o:p></o:p></i></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>7 through 11, the poems in which LZ first reaches his mature works<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>12 all by itself, the great WW2 poem, heavily influenced by </span><st1:City><st1:place><i        style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Paterson</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><span       style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></li> <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>13 also by itself, &#8220;partita,&#8221; one of <span class=SpellE>LZ&#8217;s</span> finest works, as finely tuned a modernist work as exists<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>14-20, not &#8220;formally&#8221; the whole of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>An </i>(that      poem-within-the-poem that is a major sequence unto itself), but its gut&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></li> 
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>21, &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Rudens</span>,&#8221; a text I never understood until I saw it performed last year at the Centennial Conference at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span        style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Columbia</span></st1:place></st1:City><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, <span class=SpellE>LZ&#8217;s</span> lust for Shakespeare&#8217;s late fantasies, the weakest section in the entire     work&#185;<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>22-23, which I think of as &#8220;the twins,&#8221; the finest writing LZ would ever do<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>24, Celia&#8217;s gift to LZ proved to be closure, or perhaps cloture<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of these, I would include the following:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>1 through 3, a brilliant opening, it shows his roots, his indebtedness to Pound &amp; the role of music as a template<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>6, because it is where LZ really is thinking through the problem of the form of the long poem <o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>7, because it&#8217;s a great poem &amp; where LZ really takes leave of his    predecessors<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I love <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 8, but realistically, it's too long for a Selected &amp; its involvement with issues of labor, Marx, the question of social movements are all handled more compactly &#8211; and more profoundly from a poetic perspective &#8211; by the great double-canzone of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 9. <i      style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i><span      style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>&#8211; 9 is a must<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;A&#8221; </span></i><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8211; 10 is the first WW2 poem &amp; not nearly so long as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 14, but in the compact environs of a Selected, I&#8217;m caught by the easy, careless (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and never redacted</i>) racism of lines like &#8220;No slant-eyed devil on stilts,&#8221; so I wouldn&#8217;t include it, even tho the evocation of a lost Paris is one of the most powerful images of the war from an American poet<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;A&#8221; &#8211;</span></i><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> 11, a love poem to his wife &amp; son, one of the clearest statements of his theme of family love, one of his finest poems<o:p></o:p></span></li> 
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8220;A&#8221; </span></i><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8211; 12 is both long &amp; problematic from my perspective </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>&#8211; this is the only number I would pull excerpts from: the first nine-plus pages up through the stanza on &#8220;How does the Czar sleep Nights?&#8221; &#8211; the section beginning with (big cap) &#8220;</span><b      style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>B</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>lest&#8221; and continuing through the passage that starts (also big cap) &#8220;</span><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>A</span></b><span      style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:windowtext'>rdent&#8221; &#8211; the final 11 pages or so, beginning with &#8220;These are some things I wanted / to get into a poem&#8221; &#8211; </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>T</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>hus after the first 261 pages of the volume, I&#8217;ve selected just 70, and if I had to cut back, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:black'>&#8220;A&#8221; </span></i>&#8211;<span style='color:black'> 12 would be the first to get cut. The second &#8220;half,&#8221; by which I mean <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A<span class=GramE>&#8221; <span style='font-style:normal'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>-</span></span></i> 13-23, is not a whole lot longer, 302 pages, but I would include considerably more from this second half of the volume, which LZ did not begin until nine years after completing 12. The second half where Zukofsky&#8217;s greatest <span class=GramE>work</span> lies. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I would include all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A<span class=GramE>&#8221; <span style='font-style:normal'><span      style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>-</span></span></i> 13 through 16, an      uninterrupted swath of 114 pages. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I love <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i><span      style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>- 17, the coronal for Floss &amp; elegy for her husband William Carlos Williams, but it&#8217;s not Zukofsky&#8217;s best work, in spite of its embodiment of poetry as community (&amp;, as such, one of the first truly post-avant works) &#8211; likewise, I wouldn&#8217;t think to include <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 18<o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I would include <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 19, formally the strongest of the later portions of the 1960s work, a period when, from my reading, <span class=SpellE>LZ&#8217;s</span> work was again starting to level off &#8211; Zukofsky had a pattern of making enormous strides in his work, followed by longer fallow periods. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
 <li class=MsoNormal style='color:black;margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-list:l2 level1 lfo6;     tab-stops:list .5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>For those reasons, I wouldn&#8217;t include either <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 20 or 21, but I would include all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A&#8221; </i>&#8211; 22 &amp; 23, written in the early &#8216;70s after the gift of Celia&#8217;s musical montage of 24. These two pieces are Zukofsky&#8217;s very best work. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That&#8217;s a total of 265 pages taken out of a work that contains over 800 once you fold Celia&#8217;s piece in. It would of course be the core of any Selected. But would these excerpts &#8220;represent&#8221; or at the least not entirely gut <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8220;A<span class=GramE>&#8221; <span style='font-style:normal'>?</span></span></i> My sense is that it <span class=GramE>wouldn&#8217;t,</span> tho I think you could argue for including others, especially 8, 10 &amp; 17 (another 85 pages). That&#8217;s where I&#8217;d have to start thinking about just how large my Selected would be, and just how adequately I thought to represent the shorter poems. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; This is where it becomes clear that Olson&#8217;s uses of Shakespeare completely trumps Zukofsky&#8217;s.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, October 30, 2002</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi
turns 99 this week. At 7:00 PM Eastern tonight, Kelly Writers House on the Penn
campus will sponsor a webcast of a live reading and conversation with the
poet.* <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'>Rakosi is our last living
connection with the Objectivists. In far too similar a fashion, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti has emerged as the last of our Beat poets, John Ashbery the lone
remaining core member of the New York School&#8217;s first generation, Robert Creeley
the last of the great teachers at Black Mountain College, Robin Blaser the last
participant in the Berkeley Renaissance (later the San Francisco Renaissance),
etc. We are, it would seem, in a curious interregnum, an epoch of lasts.<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'>There are of course an
infinite number of problems with all such easy definitions. Perhaps it is
impossible to find any other living participant from the Objectivist issue of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry </i>&#8211; the age of 99 will put some
distance between you &amp; others &#8211; but what about Barbara Guest &amp; the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'>, what about Snyder, McClure or Meltzer among the Beats? Or, conversely,
what about the ways in which Ginsberg &amp; Kerouac seem to have kept
Ferlinghetti at arm&#8217;s length, at least in the 1950s? He was a publisher before
he was their comrade. <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'>Literary formations are
intellectual constructs that live in time. If Objectivism lives today, it does
so first in the memory of Carl Rakosi, a poet who apparently did not meet most
of his fellow Objectivists in person until the 1960s, and then in our own sense
of what that collective term represents. Before February, 1931, when the
Zukofsky-edited special issue of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry</i>
first appeared, it is safe to say that hardly anyone beyond Zukofsky had any
idea of what that term might entail. <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'>Among the appendices to <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Collected Books of Jack Spicer</i>,
editor Robin Blaser includes Robert Duncan&#8217;s questionnaire for his 1958
&#8220;Workshop in Basic Techniques,&#8221; as well as Spicer&#8217;s whimsical subversions in
response<span class=GramE>.*</span>* Under the third section &#8211; &#8220;Tradition&#8221; &#8211; </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> asks the respondent to choose one of two figures,
alternative he refers to as &#8220;the tree or constellation,&#8221; the former being a
straight-forward genealogical abstraction. Duncan instructs the applicant to
&#8220;conceive of yourself as poet (that is, the spirit of your work) in the
position marked with an x; then list as many poets . . . of your genius as you
can numbering them according to their position in the design.&#8221;<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'>The tree identifies &#8220;x&#8221; as
the off-spring of 1 &amp; 2. Positions 3 through 6 represent the &#8220;parents&#8221; of 1
&amp; 2, with 7 &amp; 8 standing for a sibling of each. Figures 9 through 12
are siblings or equals of &#8216;x.&#8221; The constellation offers no lines connecting
figures. Rather some are closer, some </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>furth</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>er, some larger, some smaller. In this figure, &#8220;x&#8221; is
near an unfilled center. Spicer in fact chose the constellation as his form,
placing himself (&#8220;x&#8221;) into the lower-right hand sector of a rectangular
quadrant that has now been moved directly into the center. The other three
sectors are labeled variously, &#8220;Robin,&#8221; &#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>,&#8221; &amp; &#8220;To be found.&#8221; Spicer adds two items to his
constellation, enabling him to array six figures relatively near to this bound
quadrant: Pound, Cocteau, Dada, Yeats, <span class=SpellE>Lorca</span>, &amp; &#8220;<span
class=SpellE>Vachael</span>&#8221; (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sic</i><span
class=GramE>)<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Lindsay</span>. Above and
below are two more distant figures &#8211; Miles, meaning Josephine Miles, the
dominant poet at UC Berkeley in the 1940s and &#8216;50s, and &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Untermeyer&#8217;s</span>
Anthology.&#8221; Notably more distant, because &#8220;beyond&#8221; the array of six nearer
influences, Spicer places two final figures, &#8220;The English Dept&#8221; and &#8220;The
Place,&#8221; the latter being a North Beach bar associated with the Beats (and not,
pointedly, with Jack&#8217;s crowd at Gino &amp; Carlo&#8217;s). <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'>How would Carl Rakosi
respond to this questionnaire? <span class=GramE>Or Allen Ginsberg?</span> Jack
Kerouac? Frank O&#8217;Hara? <span class=SpellE>Harryette</span> Mullen? Anselm
Berrigan?<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Gil <span class=SpellE>Ott</span>?
</span><st1:City><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>Jena</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span
class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'> Osman?</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> Dale Smith? </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Linh Dinh</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'>? Dodie Bellamy? Regardless of the formation you
select, or the modifications you might make (a la Spicer) to one of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s figures, the process requires you to <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>position yourself</i> within the terrain of
a poetics. All any literary formation is<span class=GramE>,</span> in one
sense, is just such a process carried out consciously, collectively &amp; in
public. <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'>But this hardly means that
such formations are fixed or frozen in time. To see that, one need only look at
the three broad phases of Objectivism &#8211; <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: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 1930s,
interactivity, optimism, joint publishing projects, critical statements,
recruiting (Niedecker)<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 1940s &amp;
&#8216;50s, almost totally receding, with several Objectivists either not publishing
and even not writing for long periods of time<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'>1960s onward,
the emergence &amp; success of these writers precisely as a literary formation<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>In 2002, one might argue
that Objectivism must be whatever Carl Rakosi says it is, even if he did not
meet most of his collaborators until the third phase itself was under way.
While John Taggart, Michael Heller, Rachel Blau <span class=SpellE>Du</span> <span
class=SpellE>Plessis</span> or I might include Objectivism somewhere in
whatever configurations we ended up drawing in response to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s question, only Rakosi might be apt to place it at
or near &#8220;x.&#8221;<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'>Even within formations,
individual elements vary dramatically. Spicer, Duncan &amp; Blaser had three
very different relationships with Charles Olson, for example. Among langpos,
one can find several people who have found Russian futurism &amp; its critical
front, Russian formalism, to be of great value. But one can find more who seem
to have paid it only cursory attention, if any. Further, no two poets came to
what we might call Russian modernism <span class=GramE>from exactly the same
direction nor</span> with the same set of concerns. Thus one can&#8217;t say that the
relation of Russian futurism to language poetry is X or Y or whatever unless
one specifies it down to the individual. Rather, it is &#8220;part of the mix,&#8221; as
are (or were) any number of other disparate elements, from the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'> to surrealism to Stein to Projectivism to Zukofsky to the Bolinas Mesa
phenomenon of the early 1970s<span class=GramE>.*</span>** <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>If ever there were an
instance of the map not being the territory, such subjective positionings as
these models suggest would be it. Spicer&#8217;s filled-out questionnaire is a
perfect case in point, even if we concede that Spicer is playing with the
document. Beyond </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> &amp; Blaser, the New American Poetry is entirely
absent from this 1958 document. Those two &amp; Josephine Miles are the only
poets even born in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century. While Spicer&#8217;s constellation is
notable for its internationalism, the choice of Vachel Lindsay (whose first
name Spicer misspells), that old premodernist <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>post le <span class=SpellE>lettre</span></i>, as his instance of Yankee
nativism seems premeditatedly daft, given the absence, say, of Williams,
Whitman, Dickinson, Crane or Stein. In a parallel mode, &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Untermeyer&#8217;s</span>
anthology&#8221; (either <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Pocket Book of
American Poems </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Modern American
Poetry, </i>both of which were &#8220;best sellers&#8221;) seems calculated to invoke the
low-brow &amp; decadent side of verse. <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'>But what is most remarkable
about Spicer&#8217;s 1958 map is what a resolutely <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>static</i></span> <span style='font-family:Arial'>view of poetry it offers
&#8211; two friends, one professor, one poet locked up in an insane asylum, as such
hospitals were styled in those days, and everybody else basically is dead,
anthologized, relegated to the English Department. The only inscrutable
possibility &#8211; and it&#8217;s positioned on the outermost ring of Spicer&#8217;s
constellation, as distant as the English Department &#8211; is the Beat scene at The
Place.<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'>Contrast this with the
extraordinarily active sense of poetry, place &amp; position to be found in
Spicer&#8217;s final work, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Magazine
Verse,</i> published posthumously in 1966. There we find poems consciously
written &#8220;for&#8221; &#8211; Spicer&#8217;s sense of preposition is especially barbed; not one of
the named journals would ever print anything from this volume &#8211; <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Nation,</i> whose poetry was then being
edited by Denise Levertov; for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry
Chicago</i>, then in the hands of Henry <span class=SpellE>Rago</span>+; for
the Canadian little magazine <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Tish</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>; </i>for <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ramparts,</i> a Catholic journal that was at
that point transforming itself into a muckraking antiwar publication, a
leftwing publication that might have attracted Spicer precisely because it was
published in San Francisco, a rare thing for a national publication in those
days; for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The St. Louis Sporting News</i>,
the bible of baseball in 1965; for the Vancouver Festival, not a magazine at
all; and finally for the jazz journal, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Downbeat.
</i>Spicer&#8217;s choices here are as clear a map as the 1958 questionnaire, but the
world they address is radically changed. One might see <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Poetry Chicago </i>as an equivalent, say, for either the English
Department (especially given Spicer&#8217;s paranoia about his exclusion) or even &#8220;<span
class=SpellE>Untermeyer&#8217;s</span> anthology&#8221; &#8211; advertised no less in that grand
50<sup>th</sup> anniversary issue. Inside, the poems are full of pop culture
references: the Beatles, Ginsberg&#8217;s bust in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Prague</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, the Vietnam war<span class=GramE>,<span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Peter</span>, Paul &amp; Mary. In 1966, when <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Magazine Verse </i>came out, it
never occurred to me that as a 19 year old, I was a regular reader of four of
the publications Spicer references. But in retrospect, that&#8217;s a remarkable
statement about Spicer. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>One could argue that Spicer
had changed dramatically, both as person and as a poet between 1958, when he
had just finished writing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>After <span
class=SpellE>Lorca</span>,</i> and 1965, when he died. But whether one fixes
one&#8217;s lens on the </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>ind</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-family:Arial'>ividual or on the social matters relatively little.
Either way, the map itself is not static, but must be negotiated, in both the
navigational and contractual senses of that word, continually. <span
class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Periplum</i></span><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>as </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Po</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>und
called it, the ability to steer through waters in which no reference point is
fixed. <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'>All of which is to suggest
that when one refers to Carl Rakosi as an Objectivist, or of Spicer as writer
from the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>San
  Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial'> (nee </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>) Renaissance, one needs to ask further: which
Objectivism, which renaissance? The </span><st1:place><span style='font-family:
 Arial'>Ob</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>jectivism of 1931
was a far cry from that of 1945, let alone 1965 or even as recently as 1985. If
Objectivism (or modernism, or language poetry, the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'> or what have you) is perceived as a continuous &amp; relatively fixed
set of values, then it has become a map unanchored from the territory to which
it ostensibly refers. <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'>Which is
why it is not possible to write language poetry in 2002.</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>* For more information,
call 215-573-WRIT or see the special website: </span><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a href="http://www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/rakosi.html"><span
style='color:windowtext'>www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/rakosi.html</span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;
text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>**
(</span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>Los Angeles</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>: Black Sparrow, 1975), pp. 357-60. Black
Sparrow books are now an imprint of David R. Godine. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;
text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;
text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>***
In the early 1970s, Bolinas&#8217; population, never more than a few hundred,
included Robert Creeley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Joanne Kyger, Larry Kearney,
Jim Gustafson, Jim Carroll, Tom Clark, Bill <span class=SpellE>Berkson</span>,
Louis <span class=SpellE>MacAdams</span> Jr., and several other poets all
loosely affiliated with different strands of the New American Poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;
text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;
text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>+<span
class=SpellE>Rago&#8217;s</span> tenure at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry</i>
is worth examining </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial;color:black'>furth</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>er. From his arrival in
1955 through 1961 or so, he was more or less indistinguishable from the bland
academics who were to follow in his wake, but from 1962 until <span
class=SpellE>Rago&#8217;s</span> death in 1969, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poetry
</i>had a brief reawakening and was for that seven year period the <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only </i>magazine in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> to publish the New
Americans &amp; the school of quietude side by side, devoting issues to
Zukofsky, publishing a 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary issue that included Creeley,
Olson, Levertov, Koch, Pound, Mac <span class=SpellE>Diarmid</span>, Rexroth,
Williams &amp; Zukofsky as well as Aiken, Berryman, Merrill, <span
class=SpellE>Bogan</span>, <span class=SpellE>Ciardi</span>, Cummings,
Eberhart, Frost, Graves, Hecht, Jarrell, <span class=SpellE>Kunitz</span>,
Lowell, Merrill, <span class=SpellE>Merwin</span>, Moss, <span class=SpellE>Nemerov</span>,
Sexton, Spender, Wilbur, William Jay Smith &amp; James Wright. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, October 08, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The fourth issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.poetry.org/">The
Electronic Poetry Review</a></i> is now live and includes a talk that I gave a
couple of years ago at the annual confab of the Modernist Studies Association, <a href="http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue4/text/prose/silliman1.htm">&#8220;The Desert
Modernism,&#8221;</a> focusing in part on the question of why William Carlos Williams
would have chosen to write a poem in 1951 that would lead to the famous, if
somewhat abashed, affirmation of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">am a poet! </i>I<br />
am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed,
ashamed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">As I so often do when
thinking about the history of poetry, I try to articulate a social context for
Williams&#8217; sense of isolation, which I do partly in terms of Objectivism:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 5.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">The early 1950s was the nadir of Objectivism.
Zukofsky, completing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;A&#8221;</i> 12 in 1951,
would not touch the poem again until 1960. <i>Some Time</i>, Zukofsky's
gathering of his shorter works between 1940 and 1956, contains just 33 poems
for its seventeen years. In her bibliography of the composition of these works,
Zukofsky's wife Celia notes that, in 1954, the only poetry he wrote were two
sections of &#8220;Songs of Degrees,&#8221; one a nine-line valentine, the other &#8220;William /
Carlos / Williams // alive!&#8221; George Oppen hadn't written anything since 1934.
Charles Reznikoff was self-publishing and the collection <i>Inscriptions:
1944-1956</i> takes up only 30 pages in his <i>Complete Poems</i>. Lorine
Niedecker had published just one book and that with a publisher in <st1:place><st1:city>Prairie
  City</st1:city>, <st1:state>Illinois</st1:state></st1:place>; she would not
publish another until Ian Hamilton <span class="SpellE">Finlay</span> brought out
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Friend Tree</i> in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Scotland</st1:place></st1:country-region>
in 1961. &#8220;The Spoils,&#8221; which Basil Bunting wrote in 1951 was his first major
piece of poetry since 1935 and last until 1965. He wrote just three odes, as he
called his shorter poems, in the 1940s and none in the 1950s. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The talk in general and this
passage in particular provoked a most interesting and thoughtful email from </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Eliot Weinberger</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, which he has kindly given permission for me to
reprint here. I don&#8217;t agree with everything he says but he&#8217;s got me pondering the
need to re-vision the 1950s in particular beyond the canonic box that is </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ald Allen&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New American
Poetry. </i>Here is Weinberger&#8217;s perspective:<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; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;">
Along with the silence/invisibility of the
&#8220;objectivists,&#8221; you should add Rukeyser, who published no new books between
1948 and 1962. WCW told a depressed Reznikoff to keep writing, no matter what,
so <span class="SpellE">Rezi</span> wrote the novel &#8220;Manner Music.&#8221;</div>
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<br /></div>
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I think you underestimate the presence of Pound who,
though locked up, was writing a zillion letters a day and entertaining endless
visitors. It's also a period of the first standard editions of <span class="SpellE">Ez</span>: 1948, Cantos; 1949, Selected Poems; 1950, Letters;
1953, Translations; 1954, Literary Essays. Then in 1954 you have the Confucian
Odes and in 1955 Rock-Drill. He couldn't be more visible, however immobile.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I also wonder about WCW's isolation. If you look at
his letters and essays from the time, he's praising (and is in contact with) a
lot of poets: Lowell, Eberhart, Roethke, Rexroth, Harvey Shapiro, MacLeod,
etc-- besides the New Americans you mention (Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg) and the
honorary New American, Corman.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Also in the period you have Rexroth&#8217;s &#8220;Signature of
All Things,&#8221; &#8220;Dragon and the Unicorn&#8221; and &#8220;Beyond the Mt&#8221; (reviewed by WCW).
And Patchen had books from ND, Jargon, and the first City Lights pocket
pamphlets.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I'm as guilty as everyone else, maybe more guilty,
but I increasingly wonder whether we're all not prisoners of the <st1:personname>Don</st1:personname>
Allen taxonomy. The problem is that Allen overlooks a (small) sort-of
generation between the objectivists and the New <span class="SpellE">Amers</span>:
Rexroth, Rukeyser, Patchen, etc. And the anthology wars c. 1960 obscured
genuine affinities, at least in the early 50's. Lowell considered himself a <span class="SpellE">Poundian</span>; he loved WCW; everyone remembers his famous &#8220;raw
and the cooked&#8221; as referring to him and Ginsberg, but in fact, RL thought he
was one of the &#8220;raw,&#8221; compared to Wilbur etc. WCW and Roethke are not in
opposition, etc. It is forgotten that Origin was pitched on two poets: Olson
and Bronk, whom no one would put together any more. And the Allen obscured
genuine hostilities: Joel Oppenheimer used to tell about Beats and Black
Mountaineers getting into fistfights at the Cedar Tavern.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Is WCW in 1950-55 more isolated
aesthetically/personally than anyone else, or himself at any other time? Snyder
says somewhere that in the spiritual wasteland of the 50's one would hitchhike
a thousand miles just to have someone to talk to. Outside of a few small
groups-- like the SF <span class="SpellE">Ren</span> and the Black <span class="SpellE">Mteers</span> who were actually at Black Mt (unlike the <span class="SpellE">Blk</span> Mt group in Allen) and the inner-circle Beats-- how
much physical community was there anyway? </div>
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<br /></div>
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Could the proverbial Martian be able to sort the
poems c. 1950 of Levertov, Eberhart, Roethke, <st1:city><st1:place>Duncan</st1:place></st1:city>,
Rexroth, etc into &#8220;avant-garde&#8221; and &#8220;establishment&#8221;? Maybe there's a new
history to be written.</div>
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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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