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Showing posts with label <b>Robert Duncan</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, September 28, 2004</span></h2>

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<i><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10;"><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">The H.D. Book</span></i></span></span><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;"> was not the only major critical project that occupied Robert Duncan&#8217;s attention in the 1960-63 timeframe, a period in which he was both in touch with Hilda Doolittle up until her death in the fall of 1961 and writing <i>Roots and Branches, </i>especially its second half "Windings." As had been the case with <i>The Opening of the Field, </i>which had undergone title and publisher changes prior to being issued, Duncan contemplated issuing this new<i> </i>as two shorter volumes, one with the <i>Roots and Branches </i>title, the second as <i>Windings. </i>Duncan was also working on what he took to be a major statement of poetics for <i>The Nation, </i>whose poetry editor at the time, Denise Levertov, had become one of his closest confidants. It&#8217;s not clear to me whether or not Levertov herself felt the article was too foggy-headed for <i>The Nation </i>or, more likely, that she couldn&#8217;t convince the old lefties who dominated its editorial board then as now, but "Ideas of the Meaning of Form" was never to appear in that magazine&#8217;s pages. Instead, it first showed up in mimeograph format for Warren Tallman&#8217;s classes at UBC in 1961, with a revised version appearing finally in <i>Kulchur </i>4 that year.</span></p>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10;"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">"Ideas of the Meaning of Form," which now can be found in <i>A Selected Prose </i>(New Directions, 1995), reflects its roots as a piece intended for <i>The Nation, </i>as Duncan takes care to work in discussion of two poets &#8211; Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore &#8211; who had been close to that journal&#8217;s sense of itself as an aesthetic &#8211; as well as political &#8211; project over the years. Indeed, H.D. appears in it only in passing on its first page. </span></p>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Instead of addressing "the problem" of H.D. &#8211; nobody much was taking her seriously in 1960 &#8211; Duncan attempts to make a tactical argument joined between two figures against whom he is anxious to stake out his opposition:</span></p>


<ul>

<ul>
<li><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">An otherwise unidentified "Miss Drew (selected by me at random from a library recommended-currents shelf to represent up-to-date academic opinion about form in poetry)" &#8211; this presumably is Elizabeth Drew (1887-1965), author of <i>Poetry: A Modern Guide to its Understanding </i>& <i>Discovering Poetry, </i>as well as a study of T.S. Eliot and several other books. During her life, Drew taught at Smith and contributed to </span><i><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">The New Yorker.</span></li>
</i>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Cecil Hemley, whom Duncan dismisses casually as "a Cecil Hemley wishes that Donald Allen&#8217;s anthology had shown better taste&#8230;." Better known as the American translator for Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hemley did publish some books of his own poetry and was loosely associated with the Hall-Pack-Simpson crowd. The Poetry Society of America gives an annual award in his name. Hemley&#8217;s review appeared in <i>The Hudson Review </i>&amp; was responded to by other New Americans, such as LeRoi Jones&#8217; editorial in the second issue of </span><i><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10;color:#000000;">Floating Bear. </span></ul>
</ul></i>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">The argument Duncan wishes to make is this: <b>poetry fails when it seeks only to include the rational</b>. By extension, this also suggests that the criticism of poetry must also fail that solely operates on a rational plane. Thus &#8211; although he doesn&#8217;t say this explicitly &#8211; his use of dream material, including dream dialogs with H.D. need to be understood as necessary components of a full study of her life & work. </span></p>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Duncan is very much taking on the School of Quietude of his time here. His analysis that it fails not because the likes of Drew &amp; Hemley are bad writers or lovers of mawkish verse, but that they live only by their conscious wits, and thus are only half alive. Thus Drew&#8217;s prescriptions for form are mechanistic and her ability to appreciate the best in modernism is incapacitated. He quotes her as follows:</span></p>
<dir>
<dir>

<li><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10;"><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">"Pound&#8217;s cult of <i>Imagism," </i>Miss Drew goes on, "demanded no rhythmical stress at all, only a clear visual image in lines alleged to be in the pattern of the musical phrase. When read aloud, these pattern&#8217;s couldn&#8217;t possibly be distinguished from prose. The result was a flood of poems such as William Carlos Williams&#8217; &#8216;The Red Wheelbarrow,&#8217; which proves perhaps only that words can&#8217;t take the place of paint."</span></li>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10;"></dir>
</dir></span></span>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Duncan&#8217;s immediate response is that "It is of the essence of the rationalist persuasion that we be protected by the magic of what reasonable men agree is right, against unreasonable or upsetting information." He goes on to perform a close reading of "Wheelbarrows," proving her factually wrong in addition to her failures of spirit, then segues into his readings of Moore and Lowell, showing Moore represents the best of what is possible in a rationalist writing*, but that both also incorporate elements beyond reason in what Duncan terms to be their finest work. Negative capability is precisely the capacity to incorporate the extra-rational. </span></p>
<dir>
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<span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10;"><li><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Fact and reason are creations of man&#8217;s genius to secure a point of view protected against a vision of life where information and intelligence invade us, where what we know shapes us and we become creatures, not rulers, of what is. Where, more, we are part of the creative process, not its goal. It was against such intolerable realizations that these men took thought. The rationalist gardener&#8217;s art is his control over nature, and beauty is conceived as the imposed order visible in the pruned hedgerow and the ultimate tree compelled into geometric globe or pyramid that gives certainty of effect.</span></li>
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<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Against Hemley, Duncan adds:</span></p>
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<span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10;"><li><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">What form is to the conventional mind is just what can be imposed, the rest is thought of as lacking in form. Taste can be imposed, but love and knowledge are conditions that life imposes upon us if we would come into her meldoies. It is taste that holds out against feeling, originality that tries to hold out against origins. For taste is all original all individual arbitration.</span></li>
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</dir></span></span>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">This clearly is the Duncan of <i>Derivations, </i>one whose first movement toward that meadow of the mind is figured as a <i>return, </i>as </span><i><span style="color:#000000;">permission. </span></p></i>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Duncan&#8217;s equation &#8211; that the School of Quietude = rationalism &#8211; will betray him more than a decade later when a group of younger writers, conversant in theory but without any surface rhetoric of mysticism, take up the tradition of which Duncan himself was a part. He perceives &#8211; misperceives, really &#8211; their interest in linguistics, politicals, literary history & theory as a kind of rationalist revival. This must have seemed especially galling, particularly alongside his own inability to bring <i>The H.D. Book </i>to any conclusion. </span></p>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">But if <i>The H.D. Book </i>fails precisely because Duncan cannot make his discourse &#8211; this union of theosophy, psychology &amp; poetics &#8211; equal to the evolution of theory beyond the modernist thinkers he originally posed himself against, and because he cannot erect an imagined H.D. to stand against what was not foreseen, he might have, instead, looked to this new generation with something more of the benign neglect that enabled him to work alongside the likes of Jack Spicer, a writer who, like Duncan, understood the importance & power of the extra-rational, but who, unlike Duncan the theosophist (or H.D. the Moravian), lacked an inherited vocabulary through which to imaginatively organize it &amp; so constructed one of his own out of radios, Martians & the San Francisco Giants. </span></p>

<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Nor, for that matter, did Duncan ever address, in <i>The H.D. Book </i>or elsewhere, the question once posed by Louis Zukofsky, that of a "scientific" definition of poetry. If anything, <i>The H.D. Book </i>itself appears as an argument against this possibility, yet as Duncan himself seems only occasionally to have understood &#8211; following Freud &#8211; science &amp; the irrational need not be opposed possibilities. The difficulty that Duncan seems finally unable to address is which might incorporate the other & what might happen if the process were in any way reciprocal. Unless qualified otherwise, science in <i>The H.D. Book </i>always means instrumentalism. For Duncan, the Age of Reason was, in fact, a time of forgetting:</span></p><dir>
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<span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10;"><li><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">Conventional poetics, which belongs to the Age of Reason that sought to reduce even religion to a consensus of the opinion of reasonable men, had reduced the frame of mind to exclude the supernatural from individual experience, to rationalize genius and make a metaphor of inspiration, to confine reality to what, as Dryden has it in his Preface to <i>All For Love</i>; "all reasonable men have long since concluded." In philosophy, in poetics, in science, and in politics, men strove to make and to hold a world of sense, practical knowledge, ideal relations, logical conclusions, around which what Freud calls the Super-Ego, grown enormous, built its authority, against an enemy world of the irrational &#8212;fearful, to be avoided or rendered harmless&#8212;the world of fictions (romance, supernatural, vision and dream), of "sheer madness and vagary." Howling hairy madmen and shrieking desolate virgins appeared in the imaginations of Fuseli, Blake, Goya, Hoffman, Potocki, the Marquis de Sade. </span></li>
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<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">The challenge of course to this view, from Duncan&#8217;s own perspective, had to be Freud&#8217;s <i>Future of an Illusion</i> and it is telling that in <i>The H.D. Book </i>the actual word <i>science</i> occurs most often in two discussions &#8211; the first the career of Madame Blavatsky, the second surrounding this book of Freud&#8217;s. Duncan takes pains to qualify it, to set the volume aside from the Freudian canon he otherwise wants to claim:</span></p>
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<i><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10;"><li><span span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">The Future of an Illusion </i>is the book of a haunted mind, of a man divided against himself. "Certainly this is true of the man into whom you have instilled the sweet or bitter-sweet poison from childhood on." But this man is Freud himself, the man who followed his genius, his <i>Sigmund</i>, to lay bare the incest-wish in the psyche, his life work with dream and play, his obsession with the City of God or Rome. "But what of the other, who has been brought up soberly?" he asks. This man is that other person of Freud, who lays down the conditions under which dreams and play can come into the question at all. There was truth, William James saw, in the worlds of fiction&#8212;it was the truth of religion and poetry in one. But for Freud that truth might be various was at times intolerable. It was his lasting communication that the heroic struggle for the reality principle took place in the earliest years. In the little scene some intolerable action takes place: the beloved Nurse is banished, the child surrenders childish things and undertakes his father&#8217;s ways. But the "prehistoric old woman" that Freud tells us was ugly too is still to be banished from the thoughts of the Master in his seventy-first year. It was never to be done; the father was never entirely to win over the child in Freud. He wrote to Ferenczi while <i>The Future of an Illusion </i>was still in press: "Now it already seems to me childish; fundamentally I think otherwise; I regard it as weak analytically and inadequate as a self-confession." The dramatic fiction remained, the &#8216;As If&#8217; reality could not be dismissed.</span></li>
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<p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10.0pt;color:#000000;">The irony here is unmistakable, for one might write just as easily that <i>The H.D. Book </i>is the book of a haunted mind, of a man divided against himself. In the same moment, it is the project that empowered Robert Duncan to create his finest works of poetry, especially <i>Roots and Branches </i>& <i>Bending the Bow. </i>It represents a deep meditation on the nature of poetry to person, as well as a history not just of modernism but of the intellectual tendencies that contested throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is both beautifully &amp; powerfully written, even though Duncan cannot, finally, make the splendor cohere. </span></p>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:8;"><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:8.0pt;color:#000000;">* Duncan does this again, at greater length &amp; far more effectively, in <i>The H.D. Book. </i>Moore, from his perspective is the non-pejorative example of inorganic form, yet inorganic nonetheless, even when Duncan finds her use of the stanza to be very much like the growth of crystals. </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>

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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>

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<span style="FONT: 10pt arial;color:#000000;" >Robert Duncan, in writing to H.D. during the last two years of her life, sought to connect himself to the generation of Imagism (which was, as Duncan would note in The H.D. Book, "not a lost generation," those writers who came into prominence in Paris in the 1920s, precisely because Imagism had been the last pre-Great War poetic tendency*) to help him craft his own master work, a project that, in <em>The H.D. Book</em>, he repeatedly associates with the major late poems of Pound, Williams and H.D. </span></p>

<p>
<span style="FONT: 10pt arial;color:#000000;" >Yet Duncan&#8217;s own writing from this point onward cannot honestly be said to echo the strategies taken by any of the trio of elder poets to whom he continually returns &#8211; there is no <em>Patterson</em>, no <em>Trilogy</em>, no <em>Pisan Cantos</em>, as such. One can read Duncan&#8217;s major work, beginning with <em>The Opening of the Field</em> in a couple of different ways. In one, all five books might be read & understood as a single project. In another, the fifteen year hiatus between <em>Bending the Bow</em> &amp; the first volume of <em>Ground Work</em> figures a break &#8211; placing the trio of volumes from the sixties & seventies into one group, the two volumes of <em>Ground Work</em> into a second. While that may be a major issue for Duncan scholarship in general, it doesn&#8217;t, I think, impact a great deal on this work&#8217;s relationship to <em>The H.D. Book</em> as currently available &#8211; either in the journals of its original publication nor in the pirated "Frontier Press" edition that pops up periodically on the internet. <em>The H.D. Book</em> as we have it was written almost entirely in the 1960s, prior to the hiatus &#8211; and the latest actual reference I can find internally to another publication is 1969. While Duncan is known to have had notes to a third "book," to accompany the two sections already available, there is apparently no such additional manuscript extant. All of which suggests to me that we should focus our concentration on the relationship of the Book to the trio of projects Duncan was writing before and during its composition &#8211; <em>The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches</em>, &amp; <em>Bending the Bow</em>. </span></p><p>

<span style="FONT: 10pt arial;color:#000000;" >Opening was written before Duncan&#8217;s correspondence with H.D. got serious. He had sent a few letters earlier, as early as 1950 &#8211; a time when his earlier attempts to connect with Pound (a visit to St. Elizabeth&#8217;s in 1947, followed by correspondence) had, by Duncan&#8217;s own account, become entropic, tapering into silence. <em>The Field</em>, as Duncan called it when he sent Doolittle a copy of the manuscript, was written thus also before Duncan undertook his "study" of the elder poet. </span></p><p>

<span style="FONT: 10pt arial;color:#000000;" >Duncan had been working on this first book of his new unnamed project for some time. Peter O&#8217;Leary, in an email, places the first draft of <em>Opening&#8217;s</em> initial poem, "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," as from "a trip to London in 1953." The care with which the volume was not only composed, but prepared for public acceptance, as well as Duncan&#8217;s own down playing of his earlier works, suggest the considerable importance that Duncan assigned to this project. Indeed, there was much back and forth over whether to self-publish the book or to place it with a press such as Macmillan &#8211; which would ensure a broader readership and force more of a response from the 1960s School of Quietude set. In the end, the book came out from Barney Rosset&#8217;s Grove Press, a press that had one foot in the New York trade scene, while the other published the likes of Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Henry Miller and William Burroughs. </span></p><p>

<span style="FONT: 10pt arial;color:#000000;" >Within the trio of <em>Opening, Roots</em> & <em>Bow</em>, there exist not one but two long poems &#8211; <em>The Structure of Rime</em> &amp; <em>Passages</em> &#8211; numbered sequences that might well have been written and published as independent works, much like the <em>Pisan Cantos</em> or Olson&#8217;s <em>Maximus</em>. That Duncan never published them that way is telling &#8211; the two projects treated independently might well have greatly enhanced Duncan&#8217;s reputation and, I believe, <em>Structure&#8217;s</em> revolutionary nature &#8211; it was in the 1960s the most radical instance of the prose poem in English after William&#8217;s <em>Kora in Hell</em> & the works of Gertrude Stein &#8211; is more clearly visible when set apart. But Duncan&#8217;s view of poetry, much like Duncan&#8217;s view of the world, is that it needed to be understood as organic, that there is a structure, larger, more detailed, more complex than we can can derive from details alone. As he will say (writing of Olson) in <em>The H.D. Book</em>, "Structure is not satisfied in the molecule, is not additive; but is fulfilled only in the whole work." If one burning question concerning the American longpoem during its modernist period lay precisely in the crux of the part:whole relationship &#8211; with Pound, Williams & even H.D. (tho here we might come back to note differences) all writing numbered works that largely flow one into the other, with Zukofsky envisioned here as the Great Dissenter, at least after the opening six sections of "<em>A, "</em> insisting instead a part:whole relationship that stresses the integrity of the part, Duncan offers instead a third way, reminiscent almost of Whitman&#8217;s ongoing growth of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> through perpetual revision across multiple editions. In <em>Opening, Roots</em> &amp; <em>Bow</em>, we find individual named poems commingled with these two long poems to form a continuous writing, a Life Work, to employ Duncan&#8217;s phrase (and his caps). It is within this commingled flow that we first find <em>The Structure of Rime</em>. Indeed, the structure of The Field forces us to focus on its critical role. After an initial trio of poems, "Meadow," "The Dance," and "The Law I Love is Major Mover," come the first two sections of <em>Rime</em>. Then follows by no accident "A Poem Slow Beginning," followed in turn by five more sections of <em>Rime</em>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"></span></p>
<p>
<span style="font-family:arial;color:#000000;font-size:8.0pt">* Tho one might argue that William Carlos Williams, a late starter as well as <em>The One Who Did Not Move to Europe</em>, did not reach maturity as a poet until the 1920s.</span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, July 14, 2004</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Thinking of Robert Duncan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H.D. Book, </i>which I&#8217;ve been mulling over now literally for years, it seems, one of the questions that digs at me is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>why that book at that moment in Duncan&#8217;s life?</i> In 1960, when Duncan began the work, he is 41 years old &amp; has just completed the first of the three great books of his prime years, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Opening of the Field, </i>although &#8211; as Lisa Jarnot spells out in her forthcoming biography of Duncan &#8211; he had not yet found a publisher, or at least not yet settled on one, turning down Macmillan before agreeing to go with Grove. Grove in 1960 was known as a rather threadbare publisher right at the edge where the avant-garde and pornography crossed over into one another. Macmillan was the New York trade presses personified, the publisher (if memory serves me right) of such establishment bad boys as W.S. Merwin. <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><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bending the Bow </i>&#8211; I think of the three volumes as a single movement or creative arc in Duncan&#8217;s life as a poet &#8211; also represent a turning away from Duncan&#8217;s earlier writing, key poems of which were collected in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected Poems, </i>the tenth book in City Lights&#8217; great Pocket Poets series &#8211; and a book that Duncan apparently never allowed to be reprinted once the initial edition ran out. <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><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Selected Poems </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>came out in 1959, but gathers poems only up to 1950, including nothing from a manuscript that Duncan had planned to call <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Book of Resemblances, </i>poems from 1950 through &#8217;53, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Letters, </i>another planned volume, containing works from 1953 through &#8217;56 and, finally, a manuscript that, in the frontispiece to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected Poems, </i>Duncan still calls <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Field (poems 1956-59). </i>Instead, Duncan&#8217;s writing between 1950 and 1956 falls into a sort of limbo, coming out from smaller presses with limited print runs &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Letters </i>from Jargon in 1958, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Book of Resemblances </i>from Henry <span class=SpellE>Wenning</span>, a New Haven publisher, only in 1966. I&#8217;ve never actually seen either of these editions, nor <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Writing <span class=SpellE>Writing</span>, </i>published by <span class=SpellE>Sumbooks</span> in 1964, nor <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fragments of a Disordered Devotion, </i>published by Island/Gnomon also in 1966. Indeed, it is not until 1968 &#8211; the year in which Duncan completes his trio of great books with the publication of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bending the Bow </i>&#8211; that a British publisher, Fulcrum, makes all of this writing generally available in an edition called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Derivations. </i><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'>My argument, or at least my sense, is that something occurred. In choosing &#8211; or perhaps simply becoming able to publish with &#8211; a trade press, even one as marginalized as Grove, Duncan is positioning himself as Poet &#8211; it is often capitalized with him, in his mind even more than on the page &#8211; so that fugitive nature of his earlier writing actually becomes an advantage. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Field </i>thus in a very literal sense transforms into <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Opening of the Field. </i>Duncan takes up his correspondence with H.D. proper &#8211; he had sent her his suite <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Medieval Scenes, </i>written in 1947, either as a typescript or in its 1950 Caesar&#8217;s Gate edition, plus what he calls his &#8220;New Year Poem&#8221; in 1950, although it is not clear that H.D. read these or responded at that time. He is starting to compose <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Roots and Branches, </i>whose fourth work is &#8220;A Sequence of Poems for H.D.&#8217;s 73<sup>rd</sup> Birthday.&#8221;<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><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The H.D. Book </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>thus begins at a critical &#8211; possibly even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the </i>most critical &#8211; juncture in Duncan&#8217;s progress as a poet. He has had a recognition that he is now embarked upon his mature writing, and that this writing gets under way first with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Opening of the Field </i>and he is just turning 40. Jarnot is surely right when she suggests that a good part of the connection between Duncan &amp; H.D. can be traced to his sense of her upbringing as a religious minority, a Moravian, not so distant from his own childhood as the adopted son of theosophists in the harsh San Joaquin Valley farm town of Bakersfield. In addition, there is a second coincidence Duncan finds as well. His birth mother died when he was born in 1919. H.D. herself very nearly died in London in the flu epidemic of that year, in part because she too was giving birth to her daughter, Francis Perdita. H.D. however was rescued by Bryher, a young lesbian admirer of her imagist poetry, who also just happened to be the heir to one of the great fortunes in the United Kingdom. <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'>Also important, however, is that H.D. fits not just into Duncan&#8217;s pantheon of hero-poets, those he recognizes and announces as Master, again with the capital letter, but of the modernists she is one of three who, for Duncan, achieve their greatest writing not during their modernist years of the First World War or immediately thereafter, but literally during or after the Second World War &#8211; which is to say a time when Duncan himself is already a publishing poet. Duncan himself will note this in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H.D. Book</i>:<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'>In December of 1944, H.D. had finished her <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>War Trilogy</i>; she was 58. At Pisa, Pound was 60 when he finished the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pisan Cantos</i>. William Carlos Williams at 62 in 1944 was working on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Paterson I</i>. For each there was to be ahead, in the last years of their lives, a major creative phase.<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'>For Duncan, a critical feature of modernism is not simply its challenge of the habitual forms of centuries of the School of Quietude, but also &#8211; at least by 1959 &amp; &#8217;60 &#8211; for the possibility of a new model for the poet&#8217;s career, one that need not be a long narrative of decline a la Wordsworth, or of the short-wicked candles of Keats, Shelley or Rimbaud, burning out well before the age of 40. Duncan is explicitly searching for a figure of the Older Writer. Further, what is distinct about all three &#8211; at least in Duncan&#8217;s eyes &#8211; is that their later work is characterized by a deeply personal quality. The H.D. of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The War Trilogy </i>or of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Helen of Egypt </i>is something completely apart from Pound&#8217;s somewhat fictive creation, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H.D. <span class=SpellE>Imagiste</span>. </i>Pound, living in cages at Pisa not unlike their more recent kin in Guantanamo Bay, is figured here not as the writer of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos, </i>but of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Pisan Cantos, </i>notable not just for their extraordinary beauty but because, to a degree unprecedented in that epic&#8217;s earlier sections, they include Pound &#8211; his life at last becomes the focus of the poem. Williams likewise Duncan reads as coming to a new level of maturity &#8211; for Robert, it is the turn he locates in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Desert Music </i>where, for the first time really, Williams has begun to compose by the phrase &amp; is fully freed at last from counting syllables in his lines. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Paterson </i>in this reading &#8211; which is Duncan&#8217;s, not mine &#8211; makes this possible again by making the poetry personal. <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><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The H.D. Book, </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>like the poems to H.D. &amp; like his correspondence at last with his modernist hero, which fully gets underway only in July, 1959, just 27 months ahead of her death, all occur at a moment when Robert Duncan is newly conceptualizing the project of his writing, extending out from a book he has already written toward others that at some level he must already apprehend he will write. The 1960s will be Robert Duncan&#8217;s decade. Indeed, after <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bending of the Bow, </i>Duncan will take a 16 year hiatus from publishing his new work in book form, with just two volumes to account for the final two decades of his life, a sharp &amp; final contrast with the three great books that occupy this 12-year-arc. It is worth asking just what makes a poet of 40 turn to the conjunction of three writers who, in his narrative of the modernist myth, take on major projects in their late 50s or 60s. But it seems to me inescapable that this animates his poetry, but
the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>H.D. Book </i>as well. Robert Duncan is consciously seeking out how to be an older poet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, March 09, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Intellectual fashions tend
to wash over poetry. Robert Duncan, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
H.D. Book, </i>marvels at the secular imagination of the Imagists even as he
prepares to undermine it: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Roman;">The immediate
persuasion of Imagist poets was against the fantastic and fictional as it was
for the clear-seeing, even the clairvoyant, and the actual, for percept against
concept. The Image as &#8220;</span><i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Italic;">that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in time</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Roman;">&#8221; or &#8220;</span><i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Italic;">the
local conditions</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Roman;">&#8217;&#8217; could open out along lines of the
poet&#8217;s actual feeling. The poem could be erotic and contain evocations of
actual sexual experience as I have suggested in the poem </span><i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Italic;">Orchards</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Roman;">.
And then, the image was also something actually seen in the process of the
poem, not something pretended or made up. It was the particular image evoked in
the magic operation of the poet itself&#8212;whatever its source, and it usually had
many sources. In reviewing Fletcher&#8217;s poetry in 1916, H.D. may be speaking too
of her own art: &#8220;</span><i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Italic;">He uses the direct image, it is
true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer images&#8212;a
pebble, as it were, dropped in a quiet pool, in order to start across the
silent water, wave on wave of light, of <span class="SpellE">colour</span>, of
sound</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: MetaPlusNormal-Roman;">.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">H.D., of course, turns out
to be anything but a proto-Objectivist. Between Freud &amp; her imagined
classic landscapes, she creates a world that is perfect for a young man
committed to the idea that &#8220;the authors are in eternity.&#8221; &amp; it is to Ms.
Doolittle that </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> focuses the gaze of his &#8220;Day Book,&#8221; proto-blog that it
is, plotless prose as critical meditation. Of all the high modernists, H.D. is
the one whose orbit </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> shows no desire whatsoever to attempt to escape. Not
Pound &amp; certainly not-Eliot, that perfect middle-brow tucked under all
those layers of pretension. Nor Stein, though </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> had more to do with her resurrection than any other
poet of his generation. Nor Zukofsky, though &#8211; again &#8211; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> had more to do with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his </i>resurrection than any other poet of his generation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Given that Duncan himself is
not so widely perused these days &#8211; there are few Duncan clones manqué out
there, not a one under the age of 60 &#8211; it is interesting how much of our own
literary landscape today proves to be the one that Duncan willed: Spicer,
Stein, Zukofsky: all are much more widely influential now than in the 1960s.
H.D., Helen Adam &#8211; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s enthusiasms have proven to be contagious. And if
not all of his enthusiasms have succeeded equally &#8211; the impact of Lenore <span class="SpellE">Kandel</span> is not easy to discern &#8211; his overall track record
stands up well. Combine Duncan&#8217;s vision of poetry with that of Ted Berrigan
&amp; accommodate for shifts in demography &amp; technology and you get a world
of poetry that seems remarkably like the one we all inhabit today. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve commented before on <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385373034">the
decline of mysticism</a>, those &#8220;other and vaguer images,&#8221; as an active element
in poetry. Not that it has entirely disappeared; merely that it is not the omnipresent
phenomenon that one saw in the 1960s. Its presence in anthology&#8217;s like George <span class="SpellE">Quasha&#8217;s</span> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Active
Anthology </i>or in magazines such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coyote&#8217;s
Journal </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caterpillar </i>was
unmistakable. What intrigues me at the moment, still basking in the wake of the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2390044996">Social
Mark<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>Poetry Symposium</a> </i>as well as
Brian Kim Stefans&#8217; <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2389832651">Creep
anti-manifesto</a>, is the question of what might now be filling that social
role in poetry, what might constitute the wisdom discourse of otherness for
younger poets now. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That&#8217;s a tricky question.
One can certainly talk about discourses that appear important to writers in the
21<sup>st</sup> century &#8211; technology &amp; the anti-globalization movement are
two obvious ones, with some interesting interrelationships. But neither
discourse <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as discourse</i> &#8211; with the
possible exception of something like the remarkably fuzzy-headed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/pdf/HAREMI.pdf">Empire</a> </i>by Hardt &amp;
Negri &#8211; seems overly prone to the most problematic aspect of mysticism as
practiced in the poetry of the 1960s: as a domain in which the poet held
special knowledge that was then being revealed to (&amp; likewise concealed
from) the reader. Such a discourse has less to do with its content, which
could, frankly, be anything, and more to do with the unequal distribution of
power between writer &amp; reader that it enacts. Today such a one-sided
discourse would seem wildly anachronistic. That to me feels like one of the
best aspects of contemporary poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">An interesting variant &#8211; a doctoral
dissertation for someone combining literature &amp; a social science, whether
history or sociology or even psychology &#8211; might be to take a closer look at
those poets over the years whose approach to some given discourse to some
degree overwhelmed their poetics:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.elisiegelcollection.net/">Eli Siegel</a> taking what would later
generations would have called the guru path, becoming a &#8220;healer&#8221; who focused on
<a href="http://www.newchurchissues.org/homo/h89kt.htm">&#8220;curing&#8221; homosexuality</a>
under the rubric of Aesthetic Realism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.trimbissell.com/">Trim Bissell</a> going from the pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poetry</i></span> <span style="font-family: Arial;">to the Weather Underground &amp; the FBI&#8217;s Ten Most Wanted list in the 1960s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert Sward
&amp; Richard Tillinghast each taking some years out from their careers to follow
spiritual journeys<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Perhaps the most
extreme instance ever of this last path, the writing of <a href="http://www.ronthepoet.org/">L. Ron Hubbard</a>, whose spare poems from
the 1930s reflect a reading that certainly must have included Williams, cummings
&amp; Langston Hughes but which never got the attention of his sci-fi novels
before the founding of Scientology<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There were, of course,
others who never volunteered for such journeys, but were invited into them,
usually by the state, such as Margaret Randall&#8217;s having to flee to Cuba after
rescuing her children back from the Mexican police who were after her for her
support of the 1968 anti-Olympic games demonstrations there, or <a href="http://www.johnsinclair.us/">John Sinclair&#8217;s</a> adventure with the
authorities, ostensibly over cannabis sativa but really more for his support of
various elements of the Detroit rebellion in the 1960s, a phenomenon that
joined everything from street riots &amp; the White Panther Party (not a typo)
to the music of the MC-5. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The question of music itself
might well be raised &#8211; one might add another bullet to this list for Leonard
Cohen, Patti Smith &amp; Jim Carroll. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I would distinguish all of
these folks from writers such as Thomas Merton or Norman Fischer or Phil Whalen
or Gail <span class="SpellE">Sher</span> or Brother Antoninus/William Everson who
take a distinct &#8211; in their cases, spiritual &#8211; life path &amp; combine it with
poetry. This is where the question of the path overwhelming the poetry comes
in. I would similarly distinguish someone like Amiri Baraka from those on my
list, even though it is apparent in his poetry how dramatically powerful the
impact of his political evolution has been. Ditto Diane DiPrima, although you
can see in her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Revolutionary Letters</i> precisely
the dynamics of special discourse as proprietary wisdom. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And I would also distinguish
this phenomenon from those writers &#8211; especially thick around the music industry
&#8211; who suddenly come forth with poetry, from Jewel to Henry Rollins to the late Jim
Morrison. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If/when the serious shooting
begins &#8211; we&#8217;re already sporadically bombing some Iraqi defensive positions &#8211; in
</span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s next imperial war, and all does not go just
swimmingly &amp; very quickly for Rummy, W &amp; the <span class="GramE">gang, significant
threads in the social fabric are</span> going to unravel. I would love to think
that younger poets today are smarter than they were in the 1960s, because the
risks involved are so extreme. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, November 17, 2002</span></h2>

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<st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.granarybooks.com/books/angel_hair/angel_hair1.html">The Angel Hair
Anthology</a>,</i> I come upon a Robert Duncan poem I have never seen before.
My heart literally skips a beat. I skim it &amp; rush to my bookshelves to pull
down <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bending the Bow, Ground Work: Before
the War, </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ground Work II: <span class="GramE">In</span> the Dark</i>. Maybe I&#8217;m not looking carefully enough, but
I can&#8217;t find it in any of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading the poem more
closely, the reasons become immediately apparent: &#8220;At the Poetry Conference:
Berkeley <span class="GramE">After</span> the New York Style,&#8221; is in many
respects an exercise, a deliberate imitation of the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> style. Here is the third of its five sections:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">They
are crowding in the doors to hear<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ginsberg.
But </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Is
writing Sonnets from the Portuguese<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For
T. Berrigan with run-on<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Effusions
of love and lines in rime<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(<span class="GramE">which</span> I have to postpone until later)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Allen
is saying various things amusing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I
am singing Kenneth Koch even might be here<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If
they were written by John Ashbery<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So
turned on by Berrigan going off<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">towards</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
uptown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">He
didn&#8217;t know I wrote the song<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I
have choruses of the West sing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Cantos
and for Pound&#8217;s sake<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Envoys
and <span class="SpellE">aves</span> buses can have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Byron
Keats and Shelly are our boys abroad.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Sketch of a vista confronting the ocean.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The first time I ever saw
Allen Ginsberg read live was at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, in Dwinelle
Hall. The large auditorium was packed, so much so that I was able to get in
without benefit of ticket and sit on the edge of the stage. Ginsberg had just
returned from being rousted in Prague and read, as I recall, what to the
audience (including myself) were mostly new poems, including &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Kraj</span> <span class="SpellE">Majales</span>,&#8221; then only a few
weeks old. Even today, 37 years later, it is one of the three most exciting
readings I have ever attended, perhaps because it was the first for me that
opened up the idea of poetry as spectacle, an aspect of the art I&#8217;d not
imagined before. I was only 18 years old. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I wouldn&#8217;t meet Duncan for
nearly another two years, although when I did, through the auspices of Jack
Gilbert, I realized instantly that I recognized his face from poetry readings
around the Bay Area, unmistakable with his bushy sideburns and eyes that went
off in their own independent directions (this was before the purple cape made
him <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really </i>unmistakable in public).
Reading this poem now, I realize that I don&#8217;t know &amp; rather doubt that I
had yet begun to visually pick Duncan out as &#8220;one of those adults who write
poetry,&#8221; the way I already had done with Ken Irby, whom I would see almost
daily at a Telegraph Avenue coffee house, writing intently into a notebook.*
Reading this poem I realize that, yes, of course he was there that night. As
must have been Olson &amp; Spicer<span class="GramE">,*</span>* two other poets
at that conference whom I would never get to hear read live. Was O&#8217;Hara there
too? He&#8217;s mentioned in the second section &amp; again in the fourth. It&#8217;s
almost too much to imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading this poem now, I
realize something I&#8217;ve only been half conscious of all these many years. When I
attended the few sessions I could sneak into &#8211; I was more successful at the
parties than I was at the readings &#8211; back in 1965, I was as naïve a teenage
poet as one might imagine &amp; so had no sense of the various narratives &amp;
dramas that event enacted. It would be polite to suggest that I was clueless.
When Louis Simpson, one of the two poets on the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> faculty, announced soon thereafter that he was
resigning his position at the University because it was impossible to be a poet
of his kind in the Bay Area, the event was reported in the daily papers. &amp;
though I&#8217;d already read enough about the Pound-Bollingen affair to realize that
there were indeed camps in poetry, armies even, I had no sense in 1965 of their
movements, tensions or dynamics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Berkeley Poetry
Conference differed materially from the ones in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Vancouver</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in the 1960s because &#8211; Louis Cabri <span class="GramE">take</span> note &#8211; 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;"> was prominently on display, really for the first time on the West
Coast. Further, &amp; I can recall some of the younger Post-Projectivists at
the time grousing about this, members of the New York School&#8217;s second
generation &#8211; at least Ted Berrigan &#8211; were being treated as significant writers
on a par with their elders, while the youngsters of other New American
tendencies were not. The Berkeley Poetry Conference was where Lewis Warsh <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">met</i> Anne Waldman &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel Hair</i> was a direct consequence of that event. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert Duncan soon would
become for me one of the default poets, someone whose patterns &amp;
proclivities I would deeply internalize, as much as I ever did Williams, more
so than Creeley, Olson or Spicer. So when I found this poem this morning, I had
precisely the opposite experience from I have when coming across new work by
somebody I&#8217;ve never heard from before. I have to struggle with all of my
instincts &amp; biases just to read the text. My <span class="GramE">instinct is
to fall in love first, and only begin</span> to notice flaws &#8211; at least in the
geologic sense, the same ones I suspect that might cause </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> to keep the poem from his later collections &#8211; much
later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The scope of these sections,
their &#8220;not-quite <span class="SpellE">sonnetness</span>,&#8221; is as much a part of
their &#8220;NY School&#8221; style as the sprinkling of personal names, the casual use of
enjambment (as distinct of Creeley &amp; Olson&#8217;s stricter sense of it), the
presence of humor. The next to last line of the section quoted above I read as
Duncan&#8217;s own response to Ginsberg&#8217;s &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Kraj</span> <span class="SpellE">Majales</span>,&#8221; with its sense of the self-appointed ambassador
that must have made Ginsberg&#8217;s peers cringe every bit as much as Charles
Bernstein&#8217;s &#8220;Artifice of Absorption&#8221; would Bernstein&#8217;s peers at the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Vancouver Poetry Conference some 20 years
later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> had his own problematic relationships with his peers
&amp; especially toward younger writers. There is plenty of evidence to go
around that suggests just how difficult it is for older poets to get, in even
the most remote terms, what younger poets might be doing, especially if it is
not imitating their elders. &#8220;At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley <span class="GramE">After</span> the New York Style&#8221; is very much a negotiation not
just with 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;">, but with the idea that Berrigan*** will be as
powerful a determiner of what that might be as O&#8217;Hara, Ashbery or Schuyler. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here is </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s second section:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Same evening.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Can anybody.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Turning
on poetry I have not heard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ham
it up so and still get down<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">From
there he takes O&#8217;Hara<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Who
never really went <span class="GramE">there</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">where</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
he did not come. <span class="GramE">From.</span> They said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">He
did little girls reading all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This
one in a </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Black</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">Mountain</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Berrigan
imitation </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">North
  Carolina</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Lovely
needed poem for O&#8217;Hara<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">and</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
Ashbery again going towards the </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Po</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">und<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Cantos
with ashes and berries for the<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Contempt
they feel and gratitude and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">for</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> the
puns sake<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Dogs barking along another shore.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">You
</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">nev</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">er gave me my road.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What
could I do for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you? <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>a lovely piece in its way, unusual for </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in how it seems deliberately not to go anywhere, as
tho he were trying the idea of a plotless poetry for the first time. But that
last couplet seems very much a challenge. Whether you read the barking dogs as
a reference to either 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 the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Black</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">Mountain</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> poets may well have more to do with your own orientation toward those
issues than anything in this text. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* From
which I learned that what poets do is sit around coffee houses writing in
notebooks. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2197</i>, part of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Age of Huts,</i> was written almost
entirely in coffee houses some dozen years later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Spicer&#8217;s
very last poem, written before he died just a few weeks after the conference,
is a very cynical take on &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Kraj</span> <span class="SpellE">Majales</span>.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">***
Berrigan&#8217;s role as the ex-soldier who didn&#8217;t go to a &#8220;good school&#8221; &amp; was a
most out-of-the-closet heterosexual shifted the dynamics of the New York School
from the three gay princes of its first generation in ways that, say, Kenneth
Koch never did. While </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> never addresses it directly in the
poem, this shift seems never very far from the surface. I hear this most
clearly in &#8220;He did little girls reading all&#8221; in the second section.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, October 12, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Tom Bell writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<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;">
Ron,</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;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Is there
room on your blog for a consideration of &#8220;asyntactical tactics of Language poetry?&#8221;
<span class="GramE">(p. 13 in O&#8217;Leary&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gnostic
Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness</i>?).</span> This struck me
as a misapprehension that is probably common but I&#8217;m not sure why as I can&#8217;t
tell if the &#8216;<span class="GramE">a</span>&#8217; in asyntactical is to be read like the
&#8216;a&#8217; in agnostic or the &#8216;a&#8217; in atheistic. Actually, I don&#8217;t think either
applies?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I can&#8217;t say that I know Leary&#8217;s text, but I&#8217;ve heard
that charge before. It&#8217;s one of my <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Top
10 Myths about Language Poetry</b>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
is non-narrative<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
is a- (or anti-) syntactical <br />
(alternate version: language poetry = word salad)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
is academic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
is poetry written to prove a theory<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
is New Criticism with a human face<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
has no humor<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
has no interest in people<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
began in 1978<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
is anything written since 1978 <br />
(alternate versions: since 1970; since 1990)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">Language poetry
is anything &#8220;I don&#8217;t understand&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Some of these of course are simply silly. Of the 40
writers included in <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In</i></span><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;">America</span></i></st1:place></st1:country-region><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">n Tree</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, exactly eight have (or have had) tenure track
positions in college-level literature programs. Of those eight, three (Watten,
Perelman, Davidson) were hired as modernists rather than as poets, while David
Bromige was hired onto the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Sonoma</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">State</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">
faculty before anybody there had ever heard the dread phrase &#8220;language-centered
writing.&#8221; This leaves exactly four human beings who could plausibly have been
hired in part for their accomplishments as poets related to the social
phenomenon that is langpo: Bernstein at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Hejinian only very recently at Berkeley, and Susan
&amp; Fanny Howe, both now retired. More language poets work in the computer
industry, frankly.*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But to tackle the non-narrative &amp; word salad
canards, <span class="GramE">lets</span> take a look at some recent work from
Bruce Andrews&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.chbooks.com/tech/books.cgi?bk=lip_service">Lip Service</a></i>,
a &#8220;recasting&#8221; of Dante&#8217;s <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paradiso</i></span>.
This passage comes from &#8220;Moon I,&#8221; the first piece in the second section of this
book:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .4in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Charm Master, let&#8217;s say I repeat mere
outline of<br />
somehow pumps<br />
<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; </span>look I
lose in looks<br />
&#8217;to become&#8217; &amp; &#8216;to appear&#8217; are the same<br />
<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; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a <span class="SpellE">contrario</span> goof</i>,
a spell behaved<br />
souvenir pinch painted wardens<br />
scared to fake redress by projective graphic lids<br />
laid eyes on &#8211; what opals, what clovers, eye-level stress<br />
imagery sale cipher fitted to inwards as if<br />
<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;&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>into the distance:<br />
<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; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="SpellE">simulcrayon</span> <span class="SpellE">scopafidelity</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Andrews describes his process on the back cover of
the Coach House volume in very straightforward terms: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<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;">
Its &#8216;<span class="SpellE">christmases</span> of the
heart in syllables&#8217; take Dante&#8217;s thematic cues &amp; path through ten concentric
planetary bodies to <span class="SpellE">rechoreograph</span> several years&#8217;
worth of poetic raw material of mine &#8211; on love, erotic intimacy, gender
socialization &amp; the body. Dante&#8217;s topics &amp; <span class="SpellE">tercents</span>
&amp; punctuation give its 100 parts their internal shape, with a drastic constructivism
of syntax, with denotations &amp; fluidities magnetizing its word-to-word
attractions or <span class="GramE">pushes</span> &amp; pulls as &#8216;valedictory
honeymoon burns in the pagination&#8217;.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lip
Service</i> is not, then, is either free writing or a homophonic translation of
</span><st1:place><span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Para</span></i></span></st1:place><span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">diso</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">. Its actual
relation to Dante&#8217;s work is at the level of structure &#8211; akin perhaps to Joyce&#8217;s
use of Homer&#8217;s poem in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i> but
with one eye toward the exoskeletal features of the text. Without going into
the thematic correspondences between Dante&#8217;s work and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lip Service</i>, the passage above &#8211; picked primarily because I want to
think a little about that remarkable last line &#8211; seems to me perfectly
readable. It is neither <span class="SpellE">asyntactic</span> nor non-narrative.
Built out of Andrews&#8217; reservoir of &#8220;poetic raw material,&#8221; one could conceivably
argue that it is a hodge-podge of found language, jumbled together into an
aesthetically pleasing shape. <span class="GramE">But a closer reading reveals &#8211;
constantly, throughout the entire </span></span><st1:state><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></span></st1:place></st1:state><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">t &#8211; that more is going on.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The opening line of this passage is an address to a
named <span class="GramE">Other</span> &amp; addresses, in fact, the form of the
poem itself (with the articles removed a la Ginsberg). The next line appears to
shift context entirely &amp; in fact does. Doing so, the language moves away
from comment toward prosody, thus it also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pumps.</i>
But that is as much a comment on the form as was the prior line. The third line
shifts again. As it does, it invokes two other aspects of language &#8211; its role
as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">embodiment of voice</i>, thus
insinuating character, and as depicter of the visual. The line is a good
example, actually, of Andrews&#8217; sense of humor, which generally has a lighter or
<span class="GramE">more mellow</span> touch in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lip Service</i> than the biting sarcasm of his earlier writing. The
humor is couched precisely in the alliteration of the line itself: &#8220;look I like
lose in looks.&#8221; Looking here may lead to a sense of presence &#8211; we hear a voice,
perfectly identifiable with that first line to the Charm Master &#8211; but we don&#8217;t
see so much as we hear. The fourth line in the passage can be read as a direct
comment on the problem: you appear, therefore you are. The italicized phrase in
the sixth line is a metacomment on the entire passage, joining (by no
coincidence) Italian to a noun associated with Allen Ginsberg. Andrews is
invoking multiple lines of simultaneous heritage here. The phrase that is not
italicized (i.e. in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">roman</i> type) is
itself </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">furth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">er metacomment &#8211; with a soft pun echoing out from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spell</i> to an absent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spelling.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Metacommentary, the use of one line as a kind of an
equivalence with its predecessor, but composed in such a fashion as to also (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">déjà toujours)</i> further the argument, is
a fundamental poetic process, proceeding forward by operating precisely along
what Roman Jakobson used to characterize as the vertical axis of language.
While it is not identical to metaphor, the process is not far removed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The four terms of the next line &#8220;souvenir pinch
painted wardens&#8221; can be read as a single complex noun phrase <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> as four characterizations of a
writer&#8217;s relation to the use of appropriated language. A halfway attentive
reader will even hear the joke in the term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wardens</i>,
that old double meaning of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">parole</i>.
The line which follows is also a complex phrase, one that invokes multiple
approaches to contemporary writing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">as trauma
testimony (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scared</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">as sincerity (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to fake</i>), a concept that insinuates both
Zukofsky&#8217;s test of poetry as well as the mock humility of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Poetry Review</i> free verse<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">as identarian
advocacy (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">redress</i>) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">as both &#8211; and
the contradiction here is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
accidental &#8211; persona (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">by projective</i>)
and voice-as-breath-as-persona (Black mountain projectivism)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">as sight,
depiction (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">graphic</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">as object,
closed containers of content (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lids</i>),
with of course that back-pun towards sight hidden in the suggested &#8220;eyelids&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The following directly
addresses language&#8217;s relationship to sight &#8211; one of the most interesting and
still under-theorized linguistic dimensions we have &#8211; but ends it with a term (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stress</i>) that also invokes metrics &amp;
does so after bringing in the visual domain not a specifics but as categories (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what X, what Y</i>). The line after this &#8211;
&#8220;imagery sale cipher fitted to inwards as if&#8221; &#8211; is the most polemic in this
passage, suggesting as it does that visual details are in fact mechanisms by
which the language of the written pulls the reader into a mode of subjective
acceptance. The next-to-last-line here, &#8220;into the distance,&#8221; <span class="GramE">follows,</span>
suggesting that this interiority is thus projected outward as if real or
objective. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Which
brings us to our pair of neologisms: <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">simulcrayon</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <span class="SpellE">scopafidelity</span>.</i></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">The first jokingly characterizes the omnipresence of immanence&#8217;s lush <span class="SpellE">visuality</span> &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it&#8217;s just
there, everywhere.</i> The second suggests that the allegiance of the visual
world is to a state that could be characterized as psychotropic or drugged. It
projects us, and is as much an element of ideology in the <span class="SpellE">Althusserian</span>
sense of that term as any aural or vulgarly political paradigm. It constitutes
the field of our interior lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">None of this is rocket
science. I haven&#8217;t even broached the question of Dante and the layers of
meaning waiting at that level. But I&#8217;ve performed this sort of reading exercise
before with texts by writers as diverse as Charles Bernstein &amp; </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rae Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">. Andrews is using poetry to make an argument here,
quite like Dante, and the exposition is hardly impenetrable. Nor is his thesis
so revolutionary that it should cause a reader to stumble. None of it requires
the kind of mind-numbing detail that I&#8217;ve laid out here &#8211; a casual reader
should be able to sense almost all of this just perusing the text. Any college
senior, regardless of major, who can&#8217;t pick up 80 percent of it just by reading
the passage above ought to demand a refund of his or her tuition &#8211; because this
isn&#8217;t scholarship, <span class="GramE">it&#8217;s</span> literacy. And the inability to
do this suggests a pretty sad state of affairs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I am amazed, therefore,
and invariably depressed, whenever I see &#8211; as I do too often in even our most
famous literary critics &amp; in more than a few poets &#8211; that this basic level
of reading competence appears to be missing. It&#8217;s almost a form of aphasia, as
though the reader were a citizen of the cinematic city of </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Pleasantville</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> before the advent of color. Thus I take Andrews&#8217;
suggestion that the <span class="GramE">vocabulary of color itself, and all the
other linguistic minutiae of the &#8220;reality effect,&#8221; including voice, projection,
even character, are</span> a part of this conspiracy to make idiots of us all
quite seriously. How else explain how someone like <a href="http://www.ablemuse.com/poetry/rwakefield-boy.htm">Richard Wakefield</a> cannot
see what is wonderful, say, in the work of Jena Osman? How else explain the
idea that language poetry is either asyntactical or non-narrative?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Count them: Kit Robinson, Alan
Bernheimer, James Sherry, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Tom Mandel</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> and myself</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<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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