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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, July 03, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Yesterday,
I noted the degree to which the reception of Robert Lowell&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poems</i> constitutes an act of
literary CPR, an attempt to return the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> (SoQ) back to the imaginary
hegemony it once fantasized as its birthright.<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><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s advocates are not unaware of the
odds they face, or the difficulties involved in resurrecting something quite
this moribund. They themselves have problems with a lot of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s writing: &#8220;if the equivalent of
Uncle Artie had written &#8216;Day by Day,' published shortly before </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> died, it would have seemed slack
and listless,&#8221; writes Pritchard in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New
York Times.</i> These partisans are also skeptical as to whether the historical
moment will allow their genie to be squeezed back into the lamp. <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Times </i>Book Review editor McGrath writes<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'>If someone of Lowell-like talent and Lowell-like ambition
were to come along now, it's not a given that poetry would be his or her No. 1
career choice. If you had a literary bent and really wanted to become famous
and leave a stamp on your generation, you would write novels or screenplays.
Or, better yet, you would set your verses to a bass line and become a rap
artist.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:
Arial'><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'>Leave to
the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Times </i>not to notice, since its
advertisers still have budgets, that the normative adult novel as an art form
is far deader than even the poetry of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; that </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Hollywood</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s idea of a screenplay is,
literally, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0329028">Dumb and <span class=SpellE>Dumberer</span></a>.
</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'>Part of the
great frustration one senses from Lowell&#8217;s acolytes has to do with the fact
that his generation in general &amp; Lowell in particular failed to quash the
rabble &#8211; the <span class=SpellE>Olsons</span> &amp; <span class=SpellE>Ginsbergs</span>
&amp; <span class=SpellE>O&#8217;Haras</span> &#8211; in his day, thus enabling all manner
of post-avant nonsense to come tumbling after. By the time </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> died, the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was completely outnumbered. While
they may be able to keep the representation of post-avant poets in the <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Norton </i>to a few, the existence of a <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/backlist/031090.htm">Norton Postmodern</a>
</i>just demonstrates how complete the revolution has been. McGrath bemoans a
world in which &#8220;poetry has become an art form with more practitioners than
actual readers.&#8221; Not dealing with the contradiction that such an actual
renaissance of practicing poets suggests &#8211; &amp; apparently ignorant of the
role <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>trobar clus </i>has had in writing
for at least 600 years &#8211; McGrath opines that this may be because &#8220;Lowell may
have belonged to the last generation to believe seriously in the poetic
vocation.&#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><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The
implication just beneath the surface of all these texts is that Lowell et al
didn&#8217;t deal these threats from outside because Lowell &amp; more than a few of
his comrades &#8211; Berryman, Sexton, Plath, Schwartz, Jarrell &#8211; were bonkers. &#8220;They
were all a little nuts,&#8221; as McGrath puts it, &amp;, &#8220;except for the teetotaling
Jarrell, they were all alcoholic.&#8221; (These are the &#8220;horrific odds&#8221; that Caroline
Fraser finds </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> pitted against in her fawning <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>LA Times </i>review.) <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>
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<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
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at
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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But I think
the reality of the situation is different. For one thing, Lowell himself was
never so hostile to the New American poetry &amp;, after a reading series on
the West Coast in 1957 introduced him to readers who placed greater demands on
poetry than he was used to in Boston (or at least the Boston <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>he knew</i>), Lowell&#8217;s own poetry changed.
Indeed, reading the reviews as they come out now, it&#8217;s always important to see
where the reviewer stands with regards to the Early vs. Late Lowell question.
Lowell himself never rejected the idea of &#8220;confessional poetry,&#8221; M. L.
Rosenthal&#8217;s hokey attempt to link </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> up with the writing of Ginsberg
&amp; the Beats in an attempt to render </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> interesting by association. <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'>Where
younger writers &#8211; Bly, Merwin, <span class=GramE>Rich</span> &#8211; brought up
essentially in the same tradition as </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> were able to form a new aesthetics
once they dropped the crabbed, metered works of their youth, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s rather endless late sonnets show
a poet unable to break fully free. It&#8217;s no wonder he idolized Hart Crane, the
SoQ practitioner from his parents&#8217; generation who also glimpsed the implications
of modernism (&amp; its descendants), &amp; who similarly struggled to identify
a &#8220;third way&#8221; between the School of Quietude &amp; the broad tradition of avant
writing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The poems
in Hank Lazer&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.roofbooks.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=93780100623700"><span
class=SpellE>Doublespace</span></a> &#8211; </i>and especially Lazer&#8217;s later writing
&#8211; demonstrate that there really is no third way. The closest thing we have to
it in contemporary American poetry is ellipticism, the tendency that one might
cobble together from, say, the work of Jorie Graham, C. D. Wright, Ann
Lauterbach, Forrest Gander &amp; their peers, seems more of a decision deferred
than a uniting of opposites. That most of the poets who come to ellipticism do
so as refugees from the broader SoQ tradition suggests further that the problem
both Crane &amp; Lowell confronted &#8211; what should an intelligent poet do when
they realize that they&#8217;ve been writing within a tradition that no longer has
any compelling reason to exist? &#8211; has not gone away.<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, July 02, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Whenever I
feel too completely dismissive of Robert Lowell, I think of Bob Grenier.
Grenier studied with </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> at Harvard &amp;, I believe, it was
Lowell who helped Grenier get into the Writers Workshop at </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Iowa City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> even as the triumvirate of Creeley,
Zukofsky &amp; Stein were beginning to render Grenier opaque to the Brahmin
crowd back in the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Bay</span></st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
 font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>State</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. You can still find vestiges of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s influence, though, in Grenier&#8217;s
first book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dusk Road Games: Poems
1960-66, </i>published by Pym-Randall Press of </span><st1:place><st1:City><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cambridge</span></st1:City><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, </span><st1:State><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Mass.</span></st1:State></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>:<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-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>On the lawns before the brown
House<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>on</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> the
hill above the city<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>the</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>
wheeled sick sit still in the sunshine &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><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'>Lowell
turns up again as an influence in the &#8220;conservative&#8221; portion of Hank Lazer&#8217;s
remarkable <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.roofbooks.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=93780100623700"><span
class=SpellE>Doublespace</span>: Poems 1971-1989</a></i>, his attempt to bridge
the gulf between Le School d&#8217; Quietude &amp; post avant poetics. One of
Marjorie Perloff&#8217;s first books was her 1973 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The
Poetic Art of Robert Lowell</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'>But what
always gets in the way of any possible admiration I might have for </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> is his poetry. When it was first
published in 1946, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lord <span
class=SpellE>Weary&#8217;s</span> Castle </i>&#8211; that title alone tells you everything
about literary allegiances &#8211; was read, rightly, as a turn away from any poetics
of direct speech, not only anti-Williams &amp; the polyglot circus of Pound&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cantos</i>, but even anti-Frost &amp;
anti-Auden. For the New Critics, the conservative agrarian poets who were at
that same moment consolidating their hold on English departments across the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; beginning to wonder about
their legacy, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was an affirmation of their larger
program. It didn&#8217;t hurt that he was a </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, either. By the time he was 30, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> had already won the Pulitzer Prize and
had a photo spread in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Life Magazine.</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'>Yet Lowell,
especially the early </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, is seldom a good poet for more
than two or three lines at a time, which invariably are buried in larger
lugubrious monologs that do little more than show a man unable to actually get
to his own writing through his presumptions about &#8220;what poetry should be.&#8221; It
is precisely that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>should be</i>, the
sense of obligation to a dead aesthetic inherited from a mostly imaginary
British Literary Heritage, that I take to be behind David Antin&#8217;s famous line
&#8220;if <span class=SpellE>robert</span> <span class=SpellE>lowell</span> is a poet
<span class=SpellE>i</span> don&#8217;t want to be a poet,&#8221; a sentiment that was
virtually universal among the poets I knew in the 1960s &amp; &#8216;70s. Still, in
1964, on a week when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Time </i>magazine
could have focused on the aftermath &amp; implications of the first </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Harlem</span></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> riots of the decade, it chose
instead to feature </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> on its cover. <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>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In a sense,
it was on </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
  Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s watch as the Guardian of High Literary Value that the
barbarians, led by Olson, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Levertov, Ashbery, Duncan,
Creeley, O&#8217;Hara &amp; LeRoi Jones, overthrew at last any residual pretense of a
cohesive literary tradition extending outward from a &#8220;center&#8221; built around the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> (SoQ). Much of the reaction this
past week to the release of an 1,186 page <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected
Poems, </i>published by the SoQ house press, Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, has I
think to do with reactions to this phenomenon. <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'>On the one
hand, you would expect the SoQ to be beating the drums, proclaiming this to be
the literary event of the year. &amp; there has been some of that. The subhead
to Peter Davison&#8217;s review in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Atlantic
Monthly,</i> a journal founded by James Russell Lowell, reads &#8220;<span
style='color:black;mso-bidi-font-style:italic'>The new collection of Robert
Lowell's poems will doubtless stand from now on as The Work.&#8221; Similarly, the
subhead to a review A. O. Scott, the <i>New York Times</i> film critic, in <i>Slate</i>,
calls Lowell &#8221;America&#8217;s most important career poet.&#8221; <i>The Los Angeles Times, </i>which
chose a woman who wrote a book on &#8220;living and dying&#8221; in the Christian Science
church to review Lowell&#8217;s <i>Collected, </i>says that &#8220;</span>the magnitude of
Lowell's achievement &#8212; an achievement won against horrific odds &#8212; can now <span
class=GramE>come</span> fully and magnificently into view.&#8221; That at least
deserves some sort of award for overwriting.<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'>At the same
time there has been a lot of ambivalence expressed in the reviews as well, not
so much at the poetry as at the career &amp; faded reputation, suggesting a
deeper (and not overtly expressed) anxiety about what his life &amp; work say
about the SoQ in general. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New York
Times </i><span class=GramE>ran</span> a Sunday Magazine piece on &#8220;The
Vicissitudes of Literary Reputation,&#8221; by Charles McGrath, editor of that
journal&#8217;s Book Review. W. H. Pritchard&#8217;s review in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Times </i>notes that &#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> had no place to go but down.&#8221; <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Newsday </i>ran a review under the subhead
&#8220;Robert Lowell was revered in his lifetime but is largely forgotten today.&#8221;
Caroline Fraser in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>LA Times</i>
quotes </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Don</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>ald Hall from a <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Boston Globe </i>article, &#8220;You don&#8217;t hear his name much.&#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><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But you
shall. The <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected</i> represents in
many ways one final chance for the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> to resuscitate any residual life
left in the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Lowell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> heritage. A parallel project ten or
fifteen years from now on behalf of Richard Wilbur certainly won&#8217;t do it. So
it&#8217;s now or never. If this act of literary CPR doesn&#8217;t work, the Brahmin
sub-sect of the SoQ will be stuck forever continuing to make do with its
imported poets from the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>U.K.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ireland</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, June 14, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>So what do poets from the
school of quietude mean when they say that they&#8217;re &#8220;more traditional,&#8221; if in
fact their tradition is no longer, &amp; may even be shorter, than that of
post-avant poetries? I think that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>traditional
</i>in this sense means this: <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>always already familiar</i></b><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>What these poetries have in
common, with a very few exceptions (virtually all from the vicinity of
ellipticism), is consistency of viewpoint, narrative or expository lines that
are treated as unproblematic, language that integrates upwards to meta-levels such
as character, plot or theme. Most of these poetries are set up to avoid at all
costs that which the Russian Formalists called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'><a href="http://www.geocities.com/~lezard/lexicon/o/ostranen.html">ostranenie</a>
</i>&amp; Brecht later characterized as the <a
href="http://www.btinternet.com/~ianjgrant/Brecht/Theories/alien.htm">alienation-
or A-effect</a>, the admonition to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>make
it new, make it strange</i>. As Shklovsky put it in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Art as Technique </i>back in 1917<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>,
</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The technique of art is to make
objects &#8220;unfamiliar,&#8221; to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and
length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in
itself and must be prolonged.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Post-avant poetries, whether
happy-go-lucky Actualism, furrowed brow langpo, or the post-Oulipo linguistic
pyrotechnics of a Christian Bök, all have this in common. It was true of Emily
Dickinson &amp; William Blake &amp; it&#8217;s true today of Jim Behrle &amp; Mary
Burger. To the school of quietude, however, this approach is virtually the Sign
of the Beast. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Thus Daisy Fried
characterized post-avant poetics as &#8220;<a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385425197">anti-coherency</a>&#8221;
when in fact this tendency has a consistently more rigorous approach to the
question of coherence than does its opposite, which simply presumes it. <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2395544321"></a><span
class=MsoHyperlink>Chris Lott characterizes the Other as<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>indicative of a sense that only
what is new and experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the
idea is clear enough) can be any good.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Lott&#8217;s ability to insert <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>clarity </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>precision</i> as though they were the opposites of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>new and experimental</i> is an especially adept touch. </span><span
class=MsoHyperlink><span style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;
text-underline:none'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Of Noah Eli Gordon&#8217;s
exclusion from an anti-war reading in Amherst, <span class=MsoHyperlink><span
style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span><a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2390644634">Matthew
Zapruder wrote</a>,</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal 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'>I guess it just comes down to whether
or not one is willing to grant that the notion of &#8220;difficulty&#8221; has any place at
all in poetry. That&#8217;s an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and
elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that
reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely
thought that Noah&#8217;s poem was too difficult to work effectively in that
situation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span class=MsoHyperlink><span style='color:windowtext;
text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Zapruder&#8217;s characterization
of the situation is most compelling, precisely because what he finds troubling
is exactly that which Shklovsky &#8211; whose influence on linguistics through Roman
Jacobson &amp;, through Jacobson, the Prague School of Linguistics &amp; later
the New School for Social Research, on everything from New Criticism through
Structuralism, was profound &#8211; identifies as the fundamental dynamic of art. In
short, the problem that the organizers&#8217; of that particular reading had with <a
href="http://humanverb.blogspot.com/">Gordon&#8217;s poetry</a> was that<i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> it was poetry. </i>They wanted to ensure an
experience of something else altogether. </span><span class=MsoHyperlink><span
style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Lott&#8217;s conception of poetry
as a pure spectrum, with &#8220;experimentation&#8221; at one end &amp; maybe the old new
formalism at the other, is a world without history. His music analogy presumes
that one could switch seamlessly between poets the way one might between the
jazz of John Zorn, the country music of Dolly Parton, Eminmem&#8217;s white boy rap
&amp; some arias from Tosca by Placido Domingo. In point of fact, if you really
appreciate David Pavelich&#8217;s poetry, the verse of Philip Levine is going to appear
bloated &amp; full of posturing, brimming with bad faith &amp; false
consciousness. Ray Carver won&#8217;t fare a whole lot better, though Bob Hass &amp;
Marie Ponsot will. I&#8217;ve argued before &amp; will happily do so again that the
general aesthetics of the school of quietude are so ass backwards that whenever
somebody from that context does write well, they virtually have to be a genius.
They really are making a silk purse out of a sow&#8217;s ear &amp; all the more power
to them for that.</span><span class=MsoHyperlink><span style='color:windowtext;
text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>But it has been the school
of quietude&#8217;s near stranglehold on certain <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>economic</i>
institutions, particularly of the small press scene that poses as trade
publishing in America, secondarily of a number of the awards programs, finally
of all too many university curricula, that transforms these antimodernists from
merely being the verse equivalent of the Harlequin novel into something more
heavy handed &amp; sinister. The requirement of kitsch that is at the heart of
the poetry programs of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Atlantic, the
New Yorker, The Nation </i>&amp; like-minded organizations is one thing. But
the school of quietude&#8217;s insistence that this &#8220;part of the spectrum&#8221; then be
taken seriously reminds me of something far more like the garden party scene in
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0056218">The Manchurian Candidate</a></i> than
anything else. Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is not a good model for a
critical reader, but he has the school of quietude routine down pat. The
behavior that Ange Mlinko complained of on Thursday, which has been documented
so many times that it goes beyond the ridiculous &#8211; begin with Jed Rasula&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The American Poetry Wax Museum </i>&amp;
proceed to Hank Lazer&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Opposing
Poetries, </i>especially vol. one &#8211; has all the characteristics of cultural
genocide. What is curious is that Lott seems surprised that people have
emotions about this sort of behavior. </span><span class=MsoHyperlink><span
style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Finally, the school of
quietude claiming any heritage from the likes of Emily Dickinson &amp; Walt
Whitman is not merely disingenuous &amp; silly, it raises to the level of
consciousness just what these antimodernists would most like to forget &#8211; that
only period specialists in the academy still read the likes of Whittier,
Holmes, Bryant, Sidney Lanier &amp; James Russell Lowell, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>their real tradition.</i> How exactly do these poets imagine that their
fate will be any different?</span><span class=MsoHyperlink><span
style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, June 13, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>For the past couple of days,
ever since I got Chris Lott&#8217;s email, I&#8217;ve been drafting &amp; redrafting a
response. I haven&#8217;t been happy with any of them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;m not unsympathetic with
Lott&#8217;s quandary. <span class=GramE>Certainly not by comparison with Ange Mlinko
yesterday.</span> It&#8217;s apparent to anybody who reads <a
href="http://www.chrislott.org/">Lott&#8217;s blog</a> that he&#8217;s serious, well
intentioned &amp; open to a wider than usual range of writing. I believe him
completely when he writes that <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>it is downright disheartening to feel as if that which one
loves is not just being supplemented by another kind of beauty, but being
downright beset as a relic of tradition that is holding the art back.</span></tt><span
style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Lott&#8217;s desire for a
completely ecumenical approach to poetry in which one might read David
Pavelich, then Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, then </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Annie Finch</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, echoes at one level what Juliana Spahr wrote here <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385009080">last
November</a>:<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>Yet, now the note of sadness, what has happened is a
peculiar myopia. I say this over and over, but one of the strangest, saddest?,
things that is the result of this wealth is not that it is hard for readers,
but that so few of these poetries talk to each other. So language poets and
Nation language / </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
 Verdana'>Caribbean</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Verdana'> poets and pidgin / Bamboo Ridge poets and Scots poets and etc. all
have these arguments against <span class=GramE>standard</span> English. They
are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet the poets so
rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost opportunity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Yet there are two aspects of
Lott&#8217;s complaint that strike me as troubling. One is its assumption that one
poetry is &#8220;more traditional&#8221; than another &#8211; Lott&#8217;s problem being that this is
taken by some post-avant poets as a pejorative. Rereading the same exchange
with </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>Daisy Fried</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'> from <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385425197">December
3</a> that Lott cites<span class=GramE>,</span> I realize that she makes this
same equation. I don&#8217;t buy it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>In the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, at least, post-avant poets can trace their heritage
back to Emily Dickinson &amp; Walt Whitman &amp; often to the likes of Blake,
the young Wordsworth, or Aloysius Bertrand. To go back as far, most school of
quietude poets would have to turn Tennyson, the core Romantics and the later
work of Wordsworth. Both broad traditions in American verse reflect significant
influences from foreign poetries, albeit <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>different</i>
poets &amp; aspects. The most visible difference in terms of literary heritage
between the two tendencies is that the schools of quietude (SoQ) are more apt
to reflect an interest in certain traditions from the British Isles &#8211; and,
indeed, there is a wave of conservative British &amp; Irish poets who have done
quite well for themselves in the U.S., job &amp; publication-wise, of late,
taking spots that would otherwise have gone to home-grown SoQ poets.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;m more intrigued at the
idea that one often gets from school of quietude poets that their work also
extends back in American letters to Dickinson or Whitman, when their own poetry
so often appears to have been written at least one century earlier than either
of these masters. One way to fully appreciate just how radical Dickinson is as
a poet, even within the post-avant framework, is to read Michael Magee&#8217;s
brilliant ongoing work, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://myangiedickinson.blogspot.com/">My Angie Dickinson</a>, </i>which
appropriates Emily&#8217;s forms for a contemporary content. The way I read this work
is that Magee is doing the same sort of &#8220;parallelogram&#8221; with </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Dickinson</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s poems that </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Meredith Quartermain</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'> does with Robin Blaser&#8217;s in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Wanders.</i> It&#8217;s an amazing &amp; still evolving project &#8211; I know I&#8217;m
not the first to have noticed &#8211; &amp; confirms my impression that E.D. would
never get into print in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Prairie Schooner,
Poetry, <span class=GramE>The</span> </i></span><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
 normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Atlantic</span></i></st1:place><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>, The </span></i><st1:State><st1:place><i
  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'>New York</span></i></st1:place></st1:State><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial'> </span></i><span
style='font-family:Arial'>or even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The
Nation</i>, were she alive today. Indeed, she wouldn&#8217;t be allowed to <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2390644634">participate
in anti-war readings</a> put on at the campuses around her own hometown of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Amherst</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>So I think there are two
things occurring when poets claim that one tendency is &#8220;more traditional&#8221; than
another. The first is a certain amount of obfuscation. School of Quietude poetry
is not traditional in the sense of fitting into <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>that</i> heritage, but rather extending from a different literary
narrative altogether, one that was for so many decades <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>opposed</i> to precisely such writing: Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, Sidney
Lanier &amp; James Russell Lowell, for starters. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8220;Traditional&#8221; in the way
it&#8217;s used by SoQ poets doesn&#8217;t in fact mean working within a tradition. Rather,
it&#8217;s a stance toward the role of change within art that is most often being
staked out by such a term. Change is not easy for anyone but in the SoQ world,
it&#8217;s positively excruciating. Remember how dramatic the writing of the young
Brahmins in the 1950s &amp; &#8216;60s who revolted &#8211; Bly, Merwin, Plath, Rich, in
particular &#8211; was perceived to have been. Adrienne Rich, for example, chose to
publish the title poem of her breakthrough <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Diving
into the Wreck </i>in Clayton Eshleman&#8217;s journal <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Caterpillar, </i>not because Eshleman has ever been considered a
paragon of feminist politics, but because the alternatives available to her at
the time were so very few. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Case in point: David Ossman,
better known these days for his work as part of the Firesign Theatre, published
a collection of interviews in 1963 entitled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The
Sullen Art</i>, taken from a series of WBAI radio interviews he had done in
1960-61. In his introduction, Ossman quotes from Gilbert Sorrentino that &#8220;the
new poets are not a bunch of illiterate, barbaric, slightly criminal types,<span
class=GramE>&#8221;<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span>&amp;</span> addresses the
issue of the two tendencies in American writing: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal 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'>It would be unfortunate,
however, to consider these writers members of a single &#8220;avant-garde&#8221; clique.
They are two individual and independent to be taken for an organized junta in
opposition to what has been variously called &#8220;The Academy&#8221; and &#8220;The
Establishment.&#8221; Not only have many of them been teachers, but their books,
published and in preparation, total some 60 volumes. It is too bad that
American poetry today appears to fall into two distinct camps. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span class=SpellE><span style='font-family:Arial'>Ossman&#8217;s</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> gathering of 14 anti-establishmentarians &#8211; 13 men
&amp; Denise Levertov &#8211; include not only Rexroth, Creeley, Ginsberg, Dorn,
LeRoi Jones, Paul Blackburn, </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:
 Arial'>Robert Kelly</span></st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>,
Jerry Rothenberg, Gilbert Sorrentino &amp; Paul Carroll, but also John Logan,
W.S. Merwin &amp; Robert Bly!! The back cover&#8217;s copy isn&#8217;t kidding when it
suggests that it&#8217;s erroneous to characterize these new poets as &#8220;beat.&#8221;*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The idea of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Logan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, Merwin &amp; Bly as aesthetic rebels is laughable
today. Yet in the context of the world in which they first arose as poets over
40 years ago, a universe in which Aiken, MacLeish, Lowell, Jarrell &amp; the
New Critics dominated the SoQ landscape, it was at least plausible to imagine
them as closer to the New Americans than really was the case. Indeed, Bly,
James Wright, </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>Robert
 Kelly</span></st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'> &amp; Jerome
Rothenberg even collaborated for awhile around the concept of a &#8220;deep image&#8221;
poetics, a new tendency that dissolved as quickly as it became apparent just
how radically dissimilar their own poetries &amp; programs really were. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>In reality, Bly, Merwin
&amp; the other rebel Brahmins were little more than a reaction formation
created by the excitement of the New American Poetry &#8211; their recognition was
that, in order to save the school of quietude, they had to change it. This they
did mostly by importing the verse of the <span class=SpellE>SoQ&#8217;s</span>
spiritual &amp; literary cousins from </span><st1:place><span style='font-family:
 Arial'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>, either
through translation or imitation. Thus was airport gate surrealism <span
class=GramE>born.</span> That the new formalists would show up a scant
generation later to attempt to take back the broader direction of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-family:
Arial'> demonstrates just how much inertia there was &amp; is in the SoQ. The
recent importing of the airport gate poets <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>themselves</i>
suggests that this has not been a successful strategy &amp; that folks are now
hoping that such transplants will move this tendency beyond its current &#8220;on
life-support&#8221; status. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I said that there were two
aspects to Lott&#8217;s plahn that bothered me. I&#8217;ll get to the other tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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

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

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* Almost as
puzzling today as the presence of Bly, Merwin &amp; Logan in <span
class=SpellE>Ossman&#8217;s</span> anthology is the absence of any </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'> poets in a series taped &amp;
broadcast in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:9.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>New York City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, June 12, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ange Mlinko
has a response to Chris Lott&#8217;s email yesterday. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-family:Verdana'>Dear
Ron,<o:p></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-family:Verdana'><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-family:Verdana'>I
have often wanted to drop you a note saying how much I liked this or that in
the blog, but the exigencies of new parenthood limit my time on web and email. I
am, however, so outraged by the letter you posted in your blog today that I
have to, well, spew. You know how it is when Republicans maintain a
pseudo-embattled stance in the face of the liberal &quot;elite&quot;? It's not
enough that the school of quietude, the school of
broken-up-plainspoken-prose-is-<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>so</i>-poetry,
the school of &quot;John </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Verdana'>Don</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Verdana'>ne would totally be writing
broken-up-plainspoken-prose today!&quot; poetry, the &quot;official verse
culture,&quot; what have you, is a behemoth that systematically vanishes great
poets like Robert Duncan or even John Ashbery (an acquaintance with an MFA from
Southwest Texas had never heard of him) and leaves writers branded
&quot;experimental&quot; with no place to publish except for a handful of
journals they don't put out themselves. And if that sounds like sour grapes,
I'll gladly be sour enough for all the excellent poets in their fifties &amp;
sixties who appear in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Shiny</i> but never
in the </span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
  style='font-family:Verdana'>Paris</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Verdana'> Review,
Harvard Review, Ploughshares</span></i><span style='font-family:Verdana'>, etc.
But I'd like to save the majority of my sourness for the idea that we should
all be some happy poetry family on a &quot;spectrum.&quot; Because that's a
patent lie, and the poetry establishment is afraid of great poetry (where is </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Verdana'>Michael Palmer</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Verdana'>'s <a
href="http://www.macfound.org/programs/fel/fel_overview.htm">MacArthur</a>? <span
class=GramE>Susan Howe's?</span> <span class=GramE>Alice Notley's?</span> <span
class=GramE>just</span> to name a few names who are more widely influential),
and anyone outside the &quot;experimental&quot; &quot;club&quot; who whines
about the &quot;club&quot; can take a flying leap &#8211; in his Republican-borrowed
suit.<o:p></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-family:Verdana'><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-family:Verdana'>Thanks
for letting me rage. <o:p></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-family:Verdana'>Best,
<o:p></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-family:Verdana'>Ange<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I don&#8217;t
entirely agree with Ange (maybe it&#8217;s because I have appeared in <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Paris Review</i>)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>, </i>so I will add my own two cents tomorrow &amp; the next day.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, June 11, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span class=GramE><tt><span style='mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Chris Lott, who blogs <a
href="http://www.chrislott.org/">Ruminate</a>, and I traded emails.</span></tt></span><tt><span
style='mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial'> Here
is Chris&#8217; take on things.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>On </span></tt><st1:date Year="2003" Day="6" Month="6"><tt><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Friday, June 06, 2003</span></tt></st1:date><tt><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>, </span></tt><st1:PersonName><tt><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Ron Silliman</span></tt></st1:PersonName><tt><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> &lt;<a
href="http://us.f101.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=rsillima@yahoo.com&amp;YY=42556&amp;order=up&amp;sort=date"><span
style='mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>rsillima@yahoo.com</span></a>&gt;
<span class=SpellE>spake</span> thusly:<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.8in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Thanks for reminding me. It's been awhile since
I looked at your site. I'll post your note on my blog tomorrow. And I may
answer that &quot;more traditional&quot; comment later in the week. I actually
don't think it's possible for poets to more or less traditional, only to
respond to different traditions.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>I'd be interested to hear more about being more or less
&quot;traditional.&quot; I just posted a note to some friends about your
response to a letter from </span></tt><st1:PersonName><tt><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Daisy Fried</span></tt></st1:PersonName><tt><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> that I found reading through your
weblog (I was seeking to understand what the &quot;School of Quietude&quot;
that so many blogs kept referring to was all about, other than the Poe reference).<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>I took a pretty typical path for someone my age (early
30's) to learn about reading and writing poetry: introduced to the old masters
in high school, immediately took to writing my own poems and stories, went to
college and changed majors 100 times on the way to degrees in English Lit and
Philosophy, emphasizing &quot;contemporary&quot; poetry in the former and <span
class=SpellE>pomo</span> lit theory in the latter. As such, I have had what I
guess to be the &quot;school of quietude&quot; inculcated as part of the
curriculum.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>In this respect, poetry blogs are all that they are
supposed to be &#8211; were it not for following hints of threads through your site
and a number of others in the same constellation, I would remain relatively
unaware of a vast swath of poetry and poetics from the last 30 years.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385425197">Daisy
<span class=SpellE>Fried's</span> letter, and your response</a>, interested me
because it seemed to be the clearest articulation yet of where I find myself in
relation to a lot of this new work. It also strikes me, reading through a lot
of these logs, that there seems to be a lot of vitriol towards that which isn't
new and avant-garde. Is this just a natural consequence of feeling slighted by
the academy and the teachers who influence so many when it comes to learning
what poetry is? Or is it indicative of a sense that only what is new and
experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the idea is clear
enough) can be any good? One blogger mentioned Ray Carver and felt compelled to
write a parenthetical (get out of my weblog, Raymond Carver) as if he had
committed some avant-garde sin by acknowledging someone who simply wrote some
good work out of a different tradition.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>Whatever club there is that I am catching glimpses of
through these weblogs and journals may never want me as a member. I'm not sure
I could pass the &quot;anti-tradition&quot; check at the door, as attached as I
am to some artists that seem to receive nothing but sneering contempt at the
hands of the new elite within. I'm sure there are artists of every stripe who
want nothing to do with any work that is outside of their comfort zone &#8211; I know
I have heard the supposition that some of the poets you write about are
willfully obscure, and I have theorized myself about some artists that their
finished work is &quot;the beginning of a poem that just needs some time put in
to be crafted into something worthwhile&quot; &#8211; but then again, I have said the
same thing about poems that are as traditional as they come.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>I guess it's disconcerting to be jarred out of one's
comfort zone when it comes to the art they love. But it is downright
disheartening to feel as if that which one loves is not just being supplemented
by another kind of beauty, but being downright beset as a relic of tradition
that is holding the art back. I have this same kind of relationship with music.
I'm a lover of a certain era of jazz. But I find myself enamored of many kinds
of music. There are some listeners who are able to cope with <span class=GramE>that,</span>
and others that feel the same way. But there are some for whom it is not enough
to know what they love, they feel a need to degrade all that which is outside
of that set and in the process denigrate the people who believe otherwise. I
think it should be just fine to love David Pavelich and Philip Levine, or be
moved by the frustration and tension in a Carver poem one minute and admire the
subtle craftsmanship of </span></tt><st1:PersonName><tt><span style='font-size:
 10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>Annie Finch</span></tt></st1:PersonName><tt><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> the next. This doesn't seem to be
a majority opinion.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>If kinds of poetry form a spectrum, I'd like to think that
ideally we don't have to fall in any one place. Instead we should be visible as
an absorption spectrum is in the physical world &#8211; with affinities that can and
should fall in many different areas, some singly and delicate, others clustered
and strong, but not limited to any one place, time, or type.<o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><tt><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></tt></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span class=GramE><tt><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>c</span></tt></span><tt><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><o:p></o:p></span></tt></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, May 24, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Several bloggers (<a
href="http://equanimity.blogspot.com/">Jordan Davies</a>, <a
href="http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com/">Jonathan Mayhew</a>, <a
href="http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/">Henry Gould</a>) take exception to my <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_05_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2394679303">association</a>
of the New York School v.1.0 with Auden &amp; with that association having
conditioned their reception by certain institutions, particularly the trade
publishing houses. Hey, guys, that&#8217;s <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not</i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'> </i>an attack on the NYS, and far more of a comment on reception than
on writing. Where I sometimes think that Cal Lowell at his very best had the
potential to write like Frank O&#8217;Hara on Quaaludes*, Auden, as they say, had
serious chops. &amp; thank you, <a href="http://limetree.blogspot.com/">Kasey</a>,
for coming to the defense of my &#8220;salvageable insight.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Also, to be accurate, I
can&#8217;t &amp; don&#8217;t take credit for &#8220;school of quietude&#8221; &#8211; that phrase was coined
by <a href="http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1960/p1969303.htm">Edgar Allen Poe</a>.
In the 1840s, Poe was caught up in the very same debate over whether American
literature was British writing writ small or something altogether different
when <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/225/1207.html">Henry Theodore Tuckerman</a>
rejected &#8220;The Tell-Tale Heart&#8221; with the admonition that Poe should &#8220;condescend
to furnish more quiet articles.&#8221; That adjective did not sit so well with Poe<span
class=GramE>.*</span>* <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>Because it
was originally received as a break with the previous New American traditions,
langpo&#8217;s own interest in &amp; indebtedness to various aspects of the New
American Poetry of the 1950s and &#8216;60s has not always been acknowledged.</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> That thought runs through my head as I&#8217;m sitting
here reading a wonderful book that reminds me of nothing so much as Pomo Lunch
Poems, </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>Kit Robinson</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://users.rcn.com/tpapress/945.html">9:45</a></i>, his seventeenth
volume just now out from <a href="http://users.rcn.com/tpapress/">Post Apollo
Press</a> of Sausalito.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Not to suggest that these
poems were written during, say, lunch hours, nor even &#8211; although I suppose it <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>is </i>a possibility &#8211; at 9:45, but rather
that these works carry within themselves an attitude &amp; psychic quickness
that I associate with Frank O&#8217;Hara at his best.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>These are all short poems
&amp; all have a double dynamic. First there is a relationship &#8211; at minimum in
their titles &#8211; to number, numbers &amp; numbering<span class=GramE>.*</span>**
Second, these texts operate off of a three-line stanza. What I mean by &#8220;operate
off&#8221; is that the <span class=GramE>tercet<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;
</span>is</span> the standard logical unit throughout, but that 13 of these 31
poems &#8211; is that numeric palindrome an accident? &#8211; have a final stanza that is
either one or two lines long, because that is what the logic of the poem
demanded. The form is so cleanly &amp; powerfully defined that I have no
hesitation whatsoever at describing the poem &#8220;1.5&#8221; as a three line poem in two
lines:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Take a risk<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>with</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> one
and a half sticks<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Here, in its entirety, is &#8220;$1250&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Whether you gave her<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>first</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> and
last<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>and</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:
Arial'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>a deposit<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Or whether the last<br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>was </i>the deposit<br>
that is the question<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>This is a poem that looks
simple enough, but which is doing a couple of things at once. In addition to
bringing together two radically different realms &#8211; Hamlet &amp; the rent &#8211; the
poem functions by never using the key noun (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>rent</i>)
anywhere in the text. Each by itself is humorous, although the social situation
they depict borders on tragic. Part of what makes this poem work is the degree
of discipline in Robinson&#8217;s line: the breaks &amp; italics are each <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>exactly </i>where they need to be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Not all of the poems are as
tightly woven as that. This doesn&#8217;t make them loose, but rather frees them to
range over broad mindscapes in remarkably compact spaces. One favorite is &#8220;27,&#8221;
the significance of whose title is entirely opaque to me:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The heart itself<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>contains</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>
genetic instructions<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>to</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> like
certain things<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Pros like Jay don&#8217;t need tips<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>you</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> don&#8217;t
refuse to breathe, do you?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I leaned against the door and
breathed<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>A word of it<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>and</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> waited
for my heart<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>which</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> was
now full of new information<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The echoes of the last three
lines of Frank O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s most famous poem, &#8220;The Day Lady Died&#8221; &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>leaning</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> on the
john door in the 5 SPOT<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>while</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> she
whispered a song along the keyboard<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>to</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> Mal
Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8211; are unmistakable. And, if
one thinks about, O&#8217;Hara is a patron saint of the vocabulary of number in
poetry. Consider that same poem&#8217;s first five lines:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>It is </span><st1:time Minute="20" Hour="12"><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>12:20</span></st1:time><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> a Friday<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>three</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> days after Bastille Day, yes<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>it</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>because</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> I will get of the </span><st1:time
Minute="19" Hour="16"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>4:19</span></st1:time><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Easthampton</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>at</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:time Minute="15"
Hour="19"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>7:15</span></st1:time><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> and then go straight to dinner<o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>None of this &#8220;explains&#8221;
Robinson+, though it may illuminate both his project &amp; its influences. In
fact, I think of Robinson as someone whose sensibility is closer to v. 2.0 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'> than it might be to O&#8217;Hara. None of the first generation really had the
light touch for the small stanza written entirely without waste, but it&#8217;s
something you see repeatedly in Padgett, Berkson, Schjeldahl, Shapiro, Ceravolo
&amp; Fagin<span class=GramE>.+</span>+ This same touch shows up from time to
time in some interesting spots among the langpos &#8211; Ray <span class=SpellE>DiPalma</span>,
for example, as well as Alan Davies, Fanny Howe, Alan Bernheimer &amp; John
Mason. And you can see it elsewhere, also, among this same age cohort &#8211; Merrill
Gilfillan, Curtis Faville, some of the Actualists &#8211; but nobody is more adept at
it than </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial'>Kit Robinson</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='tab-stops:246.75pt'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:1'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;m not quite sure how to
characterize this capability &#8211; this sort of stanza is one of those things that
I&#8217;ve learned I&#8217;m not terribly good at &#8211; but I suspect that almost any of the
above would tell you that this aptitude for concision &amp; balance is a thing that
can only be achieved through a subjective sense very close to &#8220;feel.&#8221; Whenever
I&#8217;ve tried it &#8211; you can find a few examples hiding in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>The Alphabet </i>&#8211; I&#8217;ve felt clumsy and ham-handed. So I appreciate it
all the more when I find it, in Robinson as in the poem I quoted last Tuesday
by <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_05_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2394627116">Fanny
Howe</a>. It&#8217;s a gift. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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

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

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

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* The two
poets in the Boston Brahmin group who could really write were Berryman &amp;
Plath. Sexton is interesting for the same reasons that Jerry Springer or <span
class=GramE>reality TV are</span> &#8220;interesting.&#8221; The poet in that tendency who
deserves to be rediscovered, though, is George Starbuck. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>** The
&#8220;positive&#8221; correlate for </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, Henry, is &#8220;decorous&#8221; or perhaps
&#8220;understated&#8221; or &#8220;plain-spoken.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>*** <span
class=GramE>Whereas<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span>the</span> school of
quietude approach to this same project would, no doubt, have been numb and <span
class=SpellE>numberer</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>+ Who, for
example, is Jay &amp; what is &#8220;27?&#8221; The theme of the heart could lend itself to
an almost infinite variety of interpretations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial'>++ The closest
approximation you will find among those poets born in the 1920s turns out to be
Creeley, but Creeley&#8217;s sense of the stanza is seldom as finished or polished in
affect as this. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, March 24, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>I came across the <a
href="http://www.geocities.com/jacknowicki/years/1953.html"><span
style='color:windowtext'>short list for the 1953 National Book Award</span></a>
for poetry &amp;, a little like the <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2391054715"><span
style='color:windowtext'>1957 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Evergreen
Review</i></span></a> that I was looking at on Thursday, I find that it&#8217;s
intriguing for what it tells me about poetry as a social phenomenon. It&#8217;s a
lesson in the shifting nature of literary attention. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>Awards, almost by definition, aren&#8217;t a good
representation of the literary scene. What they register is not necessarily
who&#8217;s doing good work, but rather the relative social power of different forces
within the terrain, as filtered &#8211; always &amp; only <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>as filtered </i>&#8211; through the specific &amp; local politics of a given
award body. The Pulitzer gathers its reputation not from the quality of its
choices &#8211; which for poetry over the years have been more laughable than not &#8211;
but from the simple fact that, by giving prizes to newspapers in other
categories, Pulitzers get regularly reported by newspapers. The more recent
National Book Critics Circle Awards demonstrates principally that book critics
look to those publishers who <span class=GramE>advertise,</span> which
invariably means the trade publishers, even if somewhere above 90 percent of
all poetry is published exclusively by small presses. So looking to the short
list of 50 years ago is not the same as looking to the poetry of that time as
it is the forces at play within what </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>Charles Bernstein</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'> so loving calls <a
href="http://www.semcoop.com/interview/CBINT"><span style='color:windowtext'>Official
Verse Culture</span></a> (OVC)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>In 1953, Archibald MacLeish won the National Book
Award for poetry &#8211; he also won the Pulitzer &amp; Bollingen that year, all for
his <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poems 1917-1952.</i> Five
decades hence, it&#8217;s arguable as to whether MacLeish is read seriously by poets
any more or merely by the professional class of scholars of modernism.
MacLeish, of all the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'> poets of the 20<sup>th</sup>
century, was the furthest from being an outsider. But he also strikes me as
having been an okay poet &amp; relatively a nice guy &#8211; if your child was to
bring home <span class=GramE>a beaux</span> who was a poet, you&#8217;d probably be
happier if it was a MacLeish than an Olson, Pound, or Spicer. MacLeish,
variously an editor at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fortune</i>,
Librarian of Congress and State Department official, is remembered at least as
well for his friendships with the major modernists &#8211; helping Pound to get
released from St. Elizabeth&#8217;s Hospital, for example &#8211; as he is for his poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>MacLeish&#8217;s circumstance isn&#8217;t necessarily so
unusual. Of the 12 finalists for the award that year, only two strike me as
being read by a substantial number of poets today:* Kenneth Rexroth &amp; W.S.
Merwin. Not necessarily by the same poets, but by poets nonetheless. For
writers however marginally integrated into OVC, the news is not good &#8211; the
chances are overwhelming that in 50 years very few poets will be reading your
work. And, remember, this is the case for those fortunate enough to make the
NBA short list. <span class=SpellE>OVCers</span> who fall outside of that inner
circle of benediction can anticipate an even harder time finding audiences in
the future. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>But the nature of this integration is what strikes
me as most visible from the short list. MacLeish &amp; Merwin can both be said
to fall fully inside that framework, defined for the moment as connections to
New York trade publishers, major university presses, academic appointments
&amp; this reinforcing mechanism of the &#8220;award circuit&#8221; itself. Of the twelve
poets on the short list, only five can be truly said to fit within that
framework. In addition to MacLeish &amp; Merwin, there were Stanley Burnshaw,
something of a maverick among the New Critics in that he was active on the
left; Peter Viereck, poet, historian, longtime <span class=SpellE>UMass</span>
Amherst professor &amp; already in the 950s something of a professional
conservative intellectual; and Robert Silliman Hillyer**, the sonneteer who
actively campaigned to have Pound&#8217;s works quashed after World War 2. Merwin,
it&#8217;s worth noting, started out as a scion of the New England Brahmin formalists
&amp; would, a decade later, become one of several &#8211; Robert Bly, James Wright,
Adrienne Rich were others &#8211; who dramatically transformed their poetry away from
the cramped verse they had inherited<span class=GramE>.*</span>** Merwin&#8217;s 1952
debut volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Mask for Janus,</i> a
Yale Younger Poets volume selected by Auden, is decidedly pre-transformation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>Rexroth very pointedly was never part of that world.
In the light of this short list, I see him as one of four examples of
&#8220;regional&#8221; verse that were being called out in 1953 to acknowledge just this
phenomenon. In addition to the western Rexroth, Book Award nominees included
two Appalachian regionalists, Byron Herbert Reece of Georgia &amp; Jesse Stuart
of Kentucky, and Colorado&#8217;s Thomas Hornsby <span class=SpellE>Ferril</span>,
the somewhat unacknowledged founder of cowboy poetry. Reece, who committed
suicide later in the 1950s, has become something of a folk figure in his native
state where one of the <a href="http://georgiatrails.com/trails/byronh.html"><span
style='color:windowtext'>access trails</span></a> to the </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>Appalachian Trail</span></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'> has been named for him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>This leaves three other writers, two of whom seem so
distinct that it would be foolhardy to put them into a list such as
regionalists, the third being more mysterious. The first of these is Ridgeley
Torrence, a one-time </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial;
  mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>New York City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'> librarian who became known
as a writer of plays portraying African-American life. <span class=SpellE>Torrence&#8217;s</span>
work fits into a tradition of whites focusing on black culture that would
include Stein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Lives, </i>Carl Van
Vechten, and Dubose &amp; Dorothy Heyward, the creators of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Porgy and Bess</i>. The husband of ghost story writer Olivia Howard
Dunbar, Torrence died in 1950 and was being considered posthumously for the
award.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>Like Merwin, Naomi Replansky was nominated for her
first book. She was also the only woman among the twelve nominees. Replansky
continues her work as a poet to this day, although she apparently went over
thirty years between her first volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ring
Song,</i> and her next volume. A correspondent in the 1950s with poets such as
George Oppen and an out-of-the-closet lesbian during the starkly homophobic
postwar years, she&#8217;s an important (if somewhat secret) figure in the history of
women&#8217;s writing. Interestingly &#8211; and perhaps ironically &#8211; Replansky&#8217;s poem &#8220;Housing
Shortage,&#8221; taken from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ring Song,</i>
turns up on all manner of &#8220;inspirational poetry&#8221; websites, many of which seem
blithely unaware of its dimension as a poem about the personal politics of the
closet:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>I tried to live small.<br>
I took a narrow bed.<br>
I held my elbows to my sides.<br>
I tried to step carefully<br>
<span class=GramE>And</span> to think softly<br>
And to breathe shallowly<br>
In my portion of air<br>
And to disturb no one<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.<br>
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing<br>
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,<br>
All over and invading; I clutter this place<br>
With all the apparatus of living<br>
You stumble over it daily.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>And then my lungs take their fill.<br>
And then you gasp for air.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>Excuse me for living,<br>
But, since I am living,<br>
Given inches, I take yards,<br>
Given yards, dream of miles,<br>
And a landscape, unbounded<br>
And vast in abandon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>You <span class=GramE>too dreaming</span> the same.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><b><span style='font-family:
Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>I don&#8217;t know enough about Replansky&#8217;s poetry to
understand why it&#8217;s not been more widely published or read. Or perhaps it is, but
by a community about which I know far too little. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>Replansky, however, is hardly as mysterious as
Ernest Kroll, nominated in 1953 for </span><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
 normal'><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'>Cape Horn</span></i></st1:place><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:
bold'> and Other Poems. </span></i><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:
bold'>Kroll had published at least one chapbook before this volume from Dutton,
followed in 1955 by <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pauses of the Eye,</i>
from the same press. Although Kroll continues to show up in tables of contents
into the 1980s, mostly with a form he called the &#8220;<span class=SpellE>fraxiom</span>,&#8221;
or fractured axiom, &#8220;</span><span style='font-family:Arial'>the aim being to
cause the reader to believe that two things, contradictory or complementary,
have been said in almost the same time it takes to say one.&#8221; While there were
some chapbooks of <span class=SpellE>fraxioms</span> (<span class=SpellE><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>fraxia</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>?)</i> and one volume in an edition of 300 copies from the University
of Nebraska Press in 1973, Kroll&#8217;s works appear to be entirely out of print
&amp; prove almost as hard to find on the web as Ridgeley <span class=SpellE>Torrence&#8217;s</span>.
I&#8217;m unable to find out anything about the author, although I suspect he may
have been part of 1953&#8217;s &#8220;regionalist&#8221; phenomena as far as the Book Award
nominating committee might have been concerned. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial'>I
recall Andrew <span class=SpellE>Schelling</span> telling me once that he
thought it was okay that poets &#8220;disappeared&#8221; over time, that it was all part of
the composting of literary influences <span class=GramE>that results</span> in
a constant regeneration. I, as readers of this blog &amp; my other work must
know, feel much more ambivalent about that. I wonder, for example, how the
regionalism of 1953 leads to &#8211; if it does &#8211; the regionalisms of today, such as <a
href="http://www.berea.edu/BrushyFork/MP_articles/mp_diversity.html"><span
style='color:windowtext'>Afrilachian</span></a> poetry. I also wonder if the
school of quietude doesn&#8217;t need to get off its collective butt and think about
creating real institutions &amp; traditions that would enable its writers to
develop the kinds of lasting influences &amp; reciprocity that characterize the
post-avant scene&#8217;s heritage. <span class=GramE>For while the poets of quietude
may get a disproportionate share of all the institutional awards for poetry,
their work nonetheless seems largely destined to dissolve rapidly over time.</span>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Some
links to the poets on the short list for the 1953 National Book Award:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-outline-level:3'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/burcol.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Stanley
Burnshaw</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/ferril2.htm"><span
style='color:windowtext'>Thomas <span class=SpellE>Ferril</span></span></a></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://www.sonnets.org/hillyer.htm"><span style='color:windowtext'>Robert
Hillyer</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://skipper.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mcloonan/html/mmp/Creek.htm"><span
style='color:windowtext'>Ernest Kroll</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><a
href="http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=48"><span style='color:windowtext'>Archibald
MacLeish</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://www.barclayagency.com/merwin.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>W.
S. Merwin</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://athena.english.vt.edu/~appalach/readings/poetry1.htm"><span
style='color:windowtext'>Byron Reece</span></a></span><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:
bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://www.joannestle.com/diningrm/naomi.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Naomi
Replansky</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rexroth/rexroth.htm"><span
style='color:windowtext'>Kenneth Rexroth</span></a></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://athena.english.vt.edu/~appalach/readings/poetry1.htm"><span
style='color:windowtext'>Jesse Stuart</span></a></span><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:
bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://www.violetbooks.com/dunbar.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ridgeley
Torrence</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:1.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-outline-level:3;mso-list:l0 level3 lfo2;
tab-stops:list 1.5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Wingdings;mso-fareast-font-family:Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-family:
Wingdings;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#167;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><a
href="http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~hsiao/verse/kilroy.html"><span style='color:
windowtext'>Peter Viereck</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* Your
chances were just as good if you were nominated in the fiction category, as
were both May Sarton and William Carlos Williams.<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'>** If
Hillyer is a relative &#8211; most Sillimans in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> can be traced back to the arrival
of two brothers in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Connecticut</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> around 1680 &#8211; it&#8217;s a legal, rather
than genetic connection. My paternal grandfather, born a McMahon, was renamed
Silliman after being adopted. <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'>***This
1960s revolt within the school of quietude has generally been lost amid the
many other more flamboyant rebellions &amp; transformations of that decade, but
it is certainly worth studying in its own right. One question that might be
answered by such an investigation is whether or not John Berryman&#8217;s <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dream Songs </i>&amp; Sylvia <span
class=SpellE>Plath&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ariel</i>
should be viewed as part of that rebellion, or as the liveliest elements of the
tradition that remained. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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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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