<!DOCTYPE html>
<html dir='ltr' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<link href='https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/2549344219-widget_css_bundle.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content-Type'/>
<meta content='blogger' name='generator'/>
<link href='https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/favicon.ico' rel='icon' type='image/x-icon'/>
<link href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' rel='canonical'/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Silliman&#39;s Blog - Atom" href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Silliman&#39;s Blog - RSS" href="https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="Silliman&#39;s Blog - Atom" href="https://www.blogger.com/feeds/3738579/posts/default" />
<!--Can't find substitution for tag [blog.ieCssRetrofitLinks]-->
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' property='og:url'/>
<meta content='Silliman&#39;s Blog' property='og:title'/>
<meta content='A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.' property='og:description'/>
<!--[if IE]> <script> (function() { var html5 = ("abbr,article,aside,audio,canvas,datalist,details," + "figure,footer,header,hgroup,mark,menu,meter,nav,output," + "progress,section,time,video").split(','); for (var i = 0; i < html5.length; i++) { document.createElement(html5[i]); } try { document.execCommand('BackgroundImageCache', false, true); } catch(e) {} })(); </script> <![endif]-->
<title>Silliman's Blog: prose poems</title>
<style id='page-skin-1' type='text/css'><!--
/*
* Blogger Template Style
*
* Sand Dollar
* by Jason Sutter
* Updated by Blogger Team
*/
/* Variable definitions
====================
<Variable name="textcolor" description="Text Color"
type="color" default="#000">
<Variable name="bgcolor" description="Page Background Color"
type="color" default="#f6f6f6">
<Variable name="pagetitlecolor" description="Blog Title Color"
type="color" default="#F5DEB3">
<Variable name="pagetitlebgcolor" description="Blog Title Background Color"
type="color" default="#DE7008">
<Variable name="descriptionColor" description="Blog Description Color"
type="color" default="#9E5205" />
<Variable name="descbgcolor" description="Description Background Color"
type="color" default="#F5E39e">
<Variable name="titlecolor" description="Post Title Color"
type="color" default="#9E5205">
<Variable name="datecolor" description="Date Header Color"
type="color" default="#777777">
<Variable name="footercolor" description="Post Footer Color"
type="color" default="#444444">
<Variable name="linkcolor" description="Link Color"
type="color" default="#DE7008">
<Variable name="footerlinkcolor" description="Post Footer Link Color"
type="color" default="#968a0a">
<Variable name="visitedlinkcolor" description="Visited Link Color"
type="color" default="#DE7008">
<Variable name="sidebarcolor" description="Sidebar Title Color"
type="color" default="#B8A80D">
<Variable name="sidebarlinkcolor" description="Sidebar Link Color"
type="color" default="#999999">
<Variable name="bordercolor" description="Border Color"
type="color" default="#e0ad12">
<Variable name="bodyfont" description="Text Font"
type="font"
default="normal normal 100% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Verdana,Sans-Serif">
<Variable name="headerfont" description="Sidebar Title Font"
type="font"
default="normal bold 150% Verdana,Sans-serif">
<Variable name="dateHeaderFont" description="Date Header Font"
type="font"
default="normal bold 105% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Verdana,Sans-serif">
<Variable name="pagetitlefont" description="Blog Title Font"
type="font" default="normal bold 300% Verdana,Sans-Serif">
<Variable name="titlefont" description="Post Title Font"
type="font" default="normal bold 160% Verdana,Sans-Serif">
<Variable name="startSide" description="Start side in blog language"
type="automatic" default="left">
<Variable name="endSide" description="End side in blog language"
type="automatic" default="right">
*/
body {
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
background:#ffffff;
color:#000000;
font-size: small;
}
#outer-wrapper {
font:normal normal 12px Arial, sans-serif;
}
a {
color:#666666;
}
a:hover {
color:#9E5205;
}
a img {
border-width: 0;
}
#content-wrapper {
padding-top: 0;
padding-right: 1em;
padding-bottom: 0;
padding-left: 1em;
}
@media all  {
div#main {
float:right;
width:66%;
padding-top:30px;
padding-right:0;
padding-bottom:10px;
padding-left:1em;
border-left:dotted 1px #e0ad12;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden;     /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
div#sidebar {
margin-top:20px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0;
padding:0px;
text-align:left;
float: left;
width: 31%;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden;     /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
}
@media handheld  {
div#main {
float:none;
width:90%;
}
div#sidebar {
padding-top:30px;
padding-right:7%;
padding-bottom:10px;
padding-left:3%;
}
}
#header {
padding-top:0px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:0px;
padding-left:0px;
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0px;
border-bottom:dotted 1px #e0ad12;
background:#000000;
}
h1 a:link  {
text-decoration:none;
color:#ffffff
}
h1 a:visited  {
text-decoration:none;
color:#ffffff
}
h1,h2,h3 {
margin: 0;
}
h1 {
padding-top:25px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:10px;
padding-left:5%;
color:#ffffff;
background:#940f04;
font:normal bold 80px Verdana,Sans-Serif;
letter-spacing:-2px;
}
h3.post-title {
color:#9E5205;
font:normal bold 150% Arial, sans-serif;
letter-spacing:-1px;
}
h3.post-title a,
h3.post-title a:visited {
color: #9E5205;
}
h2.date-header  {
margin-top:10px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0px;
color:#ffffff;
font: normal bold 104% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Verdana,Sans-serif;
}
h4 {
color:#aa0033;
}
#sidebar h2 {
color:#cc0000;
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
font:normal bold 120% Arial, sans-serif;
}
#sidebar .widget {
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:33px;
margin-left:0px;
padding-top:0px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:0px;
padding-left:0px;
font-size:120%;
}
#sidebar ul {
list-style-type:none;
padding-left: 0;
margin-top: 0;
}
#sidebar li {
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-left:0px;
padding-top:0px;
padding-right:0px;
padding-bottom:0px;
padding-left:0px;
list-style-type:none;
font-size:95%;
}
.description {
padding:0px;
margin-top:7px;
margin-right:12%;
margin-bottom:7px;
margin-left:5%;
color:#cc0000;
background:transparent;
font:bold 100% Verdana,Sans-Serif;
}
.post {
margin-top:0px;
margin-right:0px;
margin-bottom:30px;
margin-left:0px;
}
.post strong {
color:#000000;
font-weight:bold;
}
pre,code {
color:#000000;
}
strike {
color:#000000;
}
.post-footer  {
padding:0px;
margin:0px;
color:#ffffff;
font-size:80%;
}
.post-footer a {
border:none;
color:#968a0a;
text-decoration:none;
}
.post-footer a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
}
#comments {
padding:0px;
font-size:110%;
font-weight:bold;
}
.comment-author {
margin-top: 10px;
}
.comment-body {
font-size:100%;
font-weight:normal;
color:black;
}
.comment-footer {
padding-bottom:20px;
color:#ffffff;
font-size:80%;
font-weight:normal;
display:inline;
margin-right:10px
}
.deleted-comment  {
font-style:italic;
color:gray;
}
.comment-link  {
margin-left:.6em;
}
.profile-textblock {
clear: both;
margin-left: 0;
}
.profile-img {
float: left;
margin-top: 0;
margin-right: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
margin-left: 0;
border: 2px solid #940f04;
}
#sidebar a:link  {
color:#000000;
text-decoration:none;
}
#sidebar a:active  {
color:#ff0000;
text-decoration:none;
}
#sidebar a:visited  {
color:sidebarlinkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
#sidebar a:hover {
color:#cc0000;
text-decoration:none;
}
.feed-links {
clear: both;
line-height: 2.5em;
}
#blog-pager-newer-link {
float: left;
}
#blog-pager-older-link {
float: right;
}
#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
}
.clear {
clear: both;
}
.widget-content {
margin-top: 0.5em;
}
/** Tweaks for layout editor preview */
body#layout #outer-wrapper {
margin-top: 0;
}
body#layout #main,
body#layout #sidebar {
margin-top: 10px;
padding-top: 0;
}

--></style>
<link href='https://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=3738579&amp;zx=a1164a5b-94f7-434c-afab-b49aa5a29e3f' media='none' onload='if(media!=&#39;all&#39;)media=&#39;all&#39;' rel='stylesheet'/><noscript><link href='https://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=3738579&amp;zx=a1164a5b-94f7-434c-afab-b49aa5a29e3f' rel='stylesheet'/></noscript>

</head>
<body>
<div class='navbar section' id='navbar'><div class='widget Navbar' data-version='1' id='Navbar1'><script type="text/javascript">
    function setAttributeOnload(object, attribute, val) {
      if(window.addEventListener) {
        window.addEventListener('load',
          function(){ object[attribute] = val; }, false);
      } else {
        window.attachEvent('onload', function(){ object[attribute] = val; });
      }
    }
  </script>
<div id="navbar-iframe-container"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
      gapi.load("gapi.iframes:gapi.iframes.style.bubble", function() {
        if (gapi.iframes && gapi.iframes.getContext) {
          gapi.iframes.getContext().openChild({
              url: 'https://www.blogger.com/navbar.g?targetBlogID\x3d3738579\x26blogName\x3dSilliman\x27s+Blog\x26publishMode\x3dPUBLISH_MODE_BLOGSPOT\x26navbarType\x3dBLUE\x26layoutType\x3dLAYOUTS\x26searchRoot\x3dhttps://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search\x26blogLocale\x3den\x26v\x3d2\x26homepageUrl\x3dhttps://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/\x26vt\x3d-6983219020609693114',
              where: document.getElementById("navbar-iframe-container"),
              id: "navbar-iframe"
          });
        }
      });
    </script><script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.src = '//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/google_top_exp.js';
var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
if (head) {
head.appendChild(script);
}})();
</script>
</div></div>
<div id='outer-wrapper'><div id='wrap2'>
<!-- skip links for text browsers -->
<span id='skiplinks' style='display:none;'>
<a href='#main'>skip to main </a> |
      <a href='#sidebar'>skip to sidebar</a>
</span>
<div id='header-wrapper'>
<div class='header section' id='header'><div class='widget Header' data-version='1' id='Header1'>
<div id='header-inner'>
<div class='titlewrapper'>
<h1 class='title'>
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/'>
Silliman's Blog
</a>
</h1>
</div>
<div class='descriptionwrapper'>
<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
</div>
</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div id='content-wrapper'>
<div id='crosscol-wrapper' style='text-align:center'>
<div class='crosscol no-items section' id='crosscol'></div>
</div>
<div id='main-wrapper'>
<div class='main section' id='main'><div class='widget Blog' data-version='1' id='Blog1'>
<div class='blog-posts hfeed'>
<div class='status-msg-wrap'>
<div class='status-msg-body'>
Showing posts with label <b>prose poems</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
</div>
<div class='status-msg-border'>
<div class='status-msg-bg'>
<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>prose poems</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, August 10, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1267/1062041212_0a065e23ed.jpg' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='8807834052933952673' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='8807834052933952673'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-8807834052933952673' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><img height="356" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/JVNSYQW9WY2mAJ7SeeYAUftHBwijw1vsSlM5aD5J0D7Y-MZ00VAdS-SXrq9TZz0OnzphroaEoY98thnXixkkVUyyjtAPMDuPMoucXnP3QTY3%3Ds0-d" width="342"><br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Photo by Amy King</span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>To ask what makes John Ashbery a New American Poet is to ask the implicit question of what made the New American Poetry (NAP) distinct, not just from various tendencies 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'> but also from the traditions out of which it emerged in the decade after the Second World War. For one thing, the NAP wasn&#8217;t one thing &#8211; it was several. In addition to the Beats, the Projectivists, the Spicer Circle &amp; the New York School, there was (and still is) the question of the San Francisco Renaissance, which was never more than whoever Robert Duncan wasn&#8217;t feuding with that week, and that quirky still unacknowledged tendency that rose up out of the Reed Three (Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch) and then Jim <span class=SpellE>Koller&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Coyote&#8217;s Journal </i>to embrace a poetics that was at least loosely aligned with Zen Buddhism, an interest in the American west, both as landscape &amp; tradition, and a poetics that was not innately urban &#8211; I call these poets New Western or Zen Cowboy &amp; would include Koller, Bobby Byrd, Jack Collom, John Oliver Simon, Simon Ortiz, Keith Wilson, Drum Hadley, Bill Deemer, Clifford Burke &amp; of course Joanne Kyger. Actually, I&#8217;m sure that list is omitting way too many people in places like </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Idaho</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Arkansas</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> (where Besmilr Brigham would surely qualify). What is it that Denise Levertov, Drum Hadley, John Ashbery &amp;, say, Amiri Baraka had in common that would permit anyone to identify them as part of a larger literary movement? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The traditional, historic answer has generally been that as the NAP<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>has emerged in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> and </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>San   Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Boston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>, </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Black</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Mountain</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> and </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>New York City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>, it has shown one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities of academic verse. Following the practice and precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, it has built on their achievements and gone on to evolve new conceptions of the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Thus <span class=SpellE>sayeth</span> Donald M. Allen, right there in the second paragraph to the &#8220;Preface&#8221; to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry. </i>But what then about poets like John Ashbery &amp; Jack Spicer, neither of whom followed &#8220;the practice and precepts&#8221; of Pound or Williams? One could make the social argument for Spicer of course &#8211; his circle, including everyone from George Stanley, Joanne Kyger, John Wieners &amp; Steve Jonas (albeit briefly), Harold Dull, Larry Fagin, Stan Persky &amp; even Robin Blaser &amp; Jack Gilbert, was crucially at the heart of Bay Area poetics for a decade, at least once you got more than ten feet outside of City Lights Books. <span class=GramE>But during that same crucial decade from the mid-1950s through the mid-&#8216;60s, John Ashbery was not in </span></span><st1:State><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></span></st1:place></st1:State><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> The most you can say about him during this decade was that Ashbery was in touch with other </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'> poets and took part in some publication projects that tended to incorporate them from afar. Some of them had jobs that kept them around the burgeoning visual arts industry, as did he, only elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ashbery&#8217;s first book had been released without much distribution by <span class=SpellE>Tibor</span> de Nagy, the same gallery that brought out work by Frank O&#8217;Hara. But Ashbery&#8217;s second book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees, </i>had been the 1956 Yale Younger Poets volume selected by Wystan Auden, hardly a camp follower of the Pound-Williams tradition, indeed the most significant figure in the School of Quietude (SoQ) not aligned with either the Boston Brahmin crowd around Lowell or the somewhat older Fugitive poets about Warren, Ransom &amp; Jarrell.&#185; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tennis Court Oath, </i>Ashbery&#8217;s next volume, came out from Wesleyan at a time when that university house still published only SoQ poets, while <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>came out from Holt, Rinehart Winston, one of the lesser New York trade presses. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Double Dream of Spring </i>came out from E.P. Dutton in its American Poets series. It was only after Wesleyan reprinted the British <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected Poems, </i>first published by Jonathan Cape, letting <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees </i>go out of print, that Ted &amp; Eli <span class=SpellE>Wilentz</span>, owners of the Eighth Street Bookshop, republished the Yale edition under their own Corinth imprint in 1970. Which means, in fact, that it is not until 1975, when Black Sparrow releases <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Vermont Notebook, </i>the most under-appreciated of Ashbery&#8217;s One-Off volumes, that a major NAP-related press actually first publishes one of his books &#8211; 19 years after <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Is Ashbery a New American Poet then strictly by friendship &amp; accident? I think he comes by it legitimately, which is to say <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>formally</i>, as does Spicer. I do think that there are some poets in the Allen anthology in particular about whom you might make an argument that they don&#8217;t necessarily belong to the NAP tradition even if they were also outside 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'> as well:<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Brother Antoninus, Madeline Gleason, James Broughton, even Helen Adam. These were not poets who looked much to the Pound-Williams tradition, but whereas Spicer &amp; Ashbery are doing things in their work that is in consort the New American Poetics, the most one might say about this other quartet is that you could trace their anti-academicism in general back to the same source where Pound found it, in the work of Yeats.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Until recently &#8211; maybe last week &#8211; I would have said that Spicer &amp; Ashbery are much closer to the New American Poetry because their work also focuses the <span class=GramE>readers</span> attention on the materiality of the signifier, precisely what the School o&#8217; Quietude attempts to efface. Spicer was the one person among the 44 Allen gathered to have actually studied language, working as a professional linguist. As such, he didn&#8217;t buy the mythological <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>line = <span class=GramE>breath</span> unit</i> Piltdown <span class=SpellE>personism</span> Charles Olson was promoting &amp; said so frankly. His own counter position, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>radio dictation from Mars</i>, was no less metaphoric but in its functional process the idea severed the simplistic <span class=SpellE>psychologism</span> that actually underlies much NAP neo-romanticism, whether that of Olson or Ginsberg or O&#8217;Hara. If you&#8217;re taking dictation, then this text isn&#8217;t about you. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What all New American Poetry tendencies have in common, or so I might have said just one week ago, is this general emphasis on the materiality of language. Whether it&#8217;s in the compositional strategies of the Black Mountain poets, ever seeking a more accurate method of scoring the page for sound, in the oracular excesses of a Beat poet going &#8220;overboard&#8221; verbally, via spontaneous bop prosody, as Kerouac put it, or in the densely crafted imagery of Ginsberg&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>hydrogen jukebox </i>or Michael McClure&#8217;s ecstatic lion roars<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>or in the softer &amp; more ironic variant offered up by O&#8217;Hara et al, every one of these poetries comes alive precisely because it resists the conception of a transparent referential language, something only a few of the SoQ poets seemed to be capable of doing (most notably in the 1950s Theodore Roethke &amp; John Berryman).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The group that really brought this home for me is the Zen Cowboy poets, the tendency that borrowed from every one of their peers &amp; discounted any pretense of a theorized style. But what you see in the best work of this group &#8211; Whalen, Collom, Welch, <span class=SpellE>Brautigan&#8217;s</span> poetry (and at least the early novels), the later Kyger &amp; occasionally even Snyder &#8211; is a focus on focus, on presence, immanence. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Be here now </i>is very much a poetic program. Its motivation may be different, but its practice varies hardly at all from the in-the-moment / of-the-moment poetics that could generate a classic called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lunch Poems </i>or a series like Ted Berrigan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sonnets. </i>Among the Projectivists, this emphasis is the essence of Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces, </i>or of the phenomenological mobiles of Larry Eigner. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Really with the exception of Stein &amp; Zukofsky, I don&#8217;t think the materiality of the signifier was the intention of the modernists &#8211; it&#8217;s an area where, for example, George Oppen is far stronger in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Discrete Series, </i>his supposed juvenilia of the 1930s, than in the award-winning <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Of Being Numerous </i>thirty years hence. <span class=GramE>It&#8217;s</span> part &#8211; but not all &#8211; of the program of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All. </i>And you might say that it&#8217;s what remains of Pound&#8217;s layered densities of reference in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cantos </i>once you throw the bogus scholarship overboard &amp; just read what&#8217;s on the page. Ditto the 19<sup>th</sup> century philology at the heart of <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Finnegans</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'> Wake. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Indeed, one might make the case of the New Americans generally that they read what the modernists wrote, rather than what the modernists thought they wrote. <span class=GramE>Which is how a Robert Creeley could profess to be stunned that William Carlos Williams did not voice his line breaks as such, once he&#8217;d heard Williams read.</span> It was so obvious if you just looked at the page. Just not to Williams. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But how then square this underlying first principle of the material signifier, the immanent word, with something like this?<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>There is no staying here<br> 
Except a pause for breath on the peak<br>
That night fences in<br>
As though the spark might be extinguished.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;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-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>He thought he  had never seen anything quite so beautiful as that crystallization into a mountain of statistics: out of the rapid movement to and from that abraded individual personalities into a channel of possibilities, remote from each other and even remoter from the eye that tried to contain them: out of that river of humanity comprised of individuals each no better than he should be and doubtless more solicitous of his own personal welfare than of the general good, a tonal quality detached itself that partook of the motley intense hues of the whole gathering but yet remained itself, firm and all-inclusive, scrupulously fixed equidistant between earth and heaven, as far above the tallest point on the earth&#8217;s surface as it was beneath the lowest outcropping of cumulus in the cornflower-blue empyrean. Thus everything and everybody were included after all, and any thought that might ever be entertained about them; the irritating drawbacks each possessed along with certain good qualities were dissolved in the enthusiasm of the whole, yet individuality was not lost for all that, but persisted in the definition of the urge to proceed higher and further as well as in the counter-urge to amalgamate into the broadest and widest kind of uniform continuum. The effect was as magnificent as it was unexpected, not even beyond his wildest dreams since he had never had any, content as he had been to let the process reason itself out. &#8220;You born today,&#8221; he could not resist murmuring although there was no one within earshot, &#8220;a life of incredulity and magnanimity opens out around you, incredulity at the greatness of your designs and magnanimity that turns back to support these projects as they flag and fail, as inevitably happens. &#8230;&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>At first, this seems to be the antithesis of a poetics of immanence &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>be anywhere but here </i>would seem to be the message, both at the level of content &amp; in practice. &#8220;The New Spirit&#8221; is the only poem I know of that includes a sentence that contains the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>magnanimity</i> not once but twice with but a dozen words between occurrences. Trying to pin down Ashbery&#8217;s argument, as such, is the proverbial scooping up mercury with a pitchfork. You simply can&#8217;t do it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>If, however, you read Ashbery the same way you do Larry Eigner, as a model of consciousness itself, the place of presence refocuses in a new way. Ashbery in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems  </i>reminds me, more than anything, of the Buddhist adage that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>You are not your thoughts, </i>and with the underlying idea that thinking itself represents a form of anxiety. The whole purpose in meditation of focusing on breathing is precisely to make the individual conscious of the degree to which thinking goes on, even when one pays it no mind. Meditators never fully banish thoughts &#8211; it&#8217;s not even clear if that would be doable &#8211; but rather get distance from them, so that when thoughts rise up &amp; intrude on the meditation one can simply turn them aside. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>replicates this process better than any work of literature I&#8217;ve ever read, before or since. As experience, the poem&#8217;s mode is one of continually refocusing, then drifting, then refocusing again, then drifting further. If it never settles, this is because there is, as Stein once characterized her hometown of Oakland, &#8220;no there <span class=SpellE>there</span>,&#8221; no topic sentence, no secret center, no monad &#8220;I&#8221; or &#8220;eye&#8221; at the work&#8217;s heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ashbery telegraphs this in any number of ways. One of the most effective, for me at least, is his occasional breaking up of a paragraph literally midline as tho one might have a stanza break with no other vestige of traditional verse devices. Thus, for example,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>For I care nothing about apparitions, neither do you, scrutinizing the air only to ask, &#8220;Is it giving?&#8221; but not so dependent on the answer as not to have our hopes and dreams, our very personal idea of how to live and go on living. It does not matter, then,<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><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:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>but there always comes a time when the spectator needs reassurance, to be touched on the arm so he can be sure he is not dreaming.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This is not an epic challenge between solipsism &amp; phenomenology, but rather a poetics that wants to include both the real <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and</i> all of our difficulties getting in touch with that plane. It&#8217;s not that Eigner or O&#8217;Hara propose to be here now &amp; Ashbery does not, only that Ashbery wants us to be conscious that both <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>here</i> &amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>now</i> are concepts that need to be unpacked, that neither is quite what it seems. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Years ago, somebody in an interview tried to provoke Allen Ginsberg into dismissing language poetry, which was only then coming into prominence. For a generation, Ginsberg replied, poets point at the moon, <span class=GramE>then</span> poets notice they&#8217;re pointing. In a period during which Robert Creeley could &#8211; and did &#8211; write<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Here <span class=SpellE>here</span><br> 
here. Here.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>John Ashbery is responding literally in kind &#8211; one can palpably feel the nod to Creeley in the generosity of Ashbery&#8217;s phrasing &#8211; when he begins the most important of his poems<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Three Poems </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>is not merely John Ashbery&#8217;s best and most important book, one that American literature is still working to fully incorporate, it is a demonstration that the principles underlying the New American Poetry can be arrived at from a completely different direction than that employed by 99 percent of his peers in the late sixties, early seventies. As such, it represents one of the most intellectually ambitious literary projects ever written. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; Indeed, one could write a history of the  School of Quietude that focused on <span class=SpellE>Auden&#8217;s</span> impact in America as the most explosive force other than the sudden emergence of the NAP in causing the SoQ to begin its own steady devolution into a variety of sometimes quite mutually hostile tendencies, so that the crowd around FSG, the trade presses, and the Eastern foundations became quite a target both for bad-boy Brahmins like Robert Bly &amp; the more western &amp; less urban (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and less urbane</i>) poets out in Iowa City. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/08/photo-by-amy-king-to-ask-what-makes.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/08/photo-by-amy-king-to-ask-what-makes.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-08-10T05:38:00-04:00'>Friday, August 10, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=8807834052933952673' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/John%2520Ashbery' rel='tag'>John Ashbery</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' rel='tag'>prose poems</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, August 06, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1052/997372775_3b9bd78eba.jpg' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='1179746410449484186' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='1179746410449484186'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-1179746410449484186' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><img height="401" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/LDh1p41abRy7e8_GnZfWMx-tuqPx-IwQPpWj3sefymsMwl_ayPOe9-P4oUTOHwSXA44Iip1vCo6hW2q10IWcu-nNAuaZ3LO3Tus-gtKET8M%3Ds0-d" width="500"><br>
</i><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Frank O&#8217;Hara (left) &amp; John Ashbery, 1953<span style='mso-tab-count:2'>    &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp;    &nbsp;                  </span>(photo by Kenneth Koch)</span><o:p></o:p></i></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Back when Robert Duncan &amp; Jerome Rothenberg were just about the only poets actively advocating for the work of Gertrude Stein &#8211; Richard Kostelanetz, somewhat younger, came later, bringing with him the energy to get a lot of her work back into print &#8211; the one poet who seems to have actually grasped the implications of her literary interventions &amp; to have brought them over into his own poetry is John Ashbery. What I&#8217;m thinking of, specifically, is the coloration of words &amp; the impact this has on the affect of any given textual surface. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One sees it, of course, early on in Stein &#8211; it&#8217;s almost the point of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons. </i>As she writes at the start of &#8220;Breakfast,&#8221;<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-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any <span class=GramE>fellow.</span><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;text-indent:.3in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.<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;text-indent:.3in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>A  sudden slide changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.3in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>An imitation, more imitation, <span class=GramE>imitation succeed</span> imitations.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Stein&#8217;s work recognizes what Robert Creeley would only much later be able to articulate theoretically as <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>A poem denies its end in any descriptive <span class=GramE>act,</span> I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. (1953)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>In other words, poems are not referential, or at least not importantly so. (1963)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Yet if nouns don&#8217;t name objects that exist outside the poem, what is it they do? As <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons </i>suggests &amp; Ashbery will spend a lifetime demonstrating, they color the text. After all, as Stein says in &#8220;Poetry and Grammar,&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Poetry has to do with vocabulary just as prose has not.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Today, there are many clear instances of this &#8211; the way Clark Coolidge drains referential terms from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Maintains </i>(This Press, 1974) only to bring them back again in that book&#8217;s companion work, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Polaroid </i>(Big Sky, 1975), or how Larry Eigner would use the most generic of nouns &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>tree, sky, cloud, bird </i>&#8211; almost architecturally in his poems. But certainly the poem where I first noticed this is in Ashbery&#8217;s &#8220;Into the Dusk-Charged Air,&#8221; one of the great poems in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains. </i>Although it is not the title work of that book &#8211; a brilliant gesture, given its focus precisely on the names of rivers throughout the world &#8211; nor the &#8220;long poem&#8221; masterwork (&#8220;The Skaters&#8221;) that in some ways makes this volume a rehearsal for Ashbery&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>books, the function of names in &#8220;Dusk-Charged Air&#8221; is unmistakable:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Far from the </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Rappahannock</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>, the silent<br>
</span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Danube</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> moves along toward the sea.<br>
The brown and green </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nile</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> rolls slowly<br>
Like the Niagara&#8217;s welling descent.<br>
Tractors stood on the green banks of the </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Loire</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br> Near where it joined the </span><st1:place><span class=SpellE><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Cher</span></span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>.<br> The St. Lawrence prods among the black stones<br>
And mud. But the </span><st1:place><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Arno</span></span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> is all stones.<br>
Wind ruffles the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hudson</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s<br>
Surface. The <span class=SpellE>Irawaddy</span> is overflowing.<br>
But the yellowish, gray </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tiber</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
is contained within steep banks. The <span class=SpellE>Isar</span><br>
Flows too fast to swim in <span class=SpellE>in</span>, the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Jordan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s water<br>
Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats<br>
Were dark blue. The <span class=SpellE>Moskowa</span> is<br>
Gray boats. The <span class=SpellE>Amstel</span> flows slowly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And so forth for another 3.5 pages. I&#8217;ve always thought of &#8220;Dusk-Charged Air&#8221; as being the next step for Ashbery after &#8220;</span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>,&#8221; the brilliantly disjoint poem at the center of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The  </i></span><st1:Street><st1:address><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tennis Court</span></i></st1:address></st1:Street><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Oath. </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In &#8220;</span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>,&#8221; with all its little snatches of found language, <span class=SpellE>decontextualized</span> as they are, all nouns &#8211; indeed, one could almost say &#8220;all words&#8221; &#8211; function purely as the names of rivers do here. I read the opening of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three  Poems </i>as though Ashbery were, in fact, addressing precisely the question of what &#8220;</span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8221; is &amp; how it functions, both as poem and as a stage in the process of his own evolution:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.8in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>clean-washed sea<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:right'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The  flowers were. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something some comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but &#8211; yourself. If is you who made this, therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.8in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:right'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>to divide all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Against the radical disruption of leaving all out, as in &#8220;Europe,&#8221; poems like &#8220;Into the Dusk-Charged Air&#8221; or, say, &#8220;Farm Instruments and Rutabagas in a Landscape,&#8221; the famous sestina that lies at the heart of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream of Spring </i>with its own landscape populated by the characters of Popeye, seem to offer the same lesson from a very different angle. The use of names in each was, at the time these poems were first written, so atypical as to burst out at one not unlike the image of a <span class=SpellE>Brillo</span> box or a <span class=SpellE>Cambell</span> soup can or Jasper Johns&#8217; use of the American flag. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Thus if poetry is about vocabulary &amp; poems themselves are <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>referential, we have &#8211; no one is more clear about this than Ashbery &#8211; a hierarchy of vocabulary. At the pinnacle are the three great orienting pronouns, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I, you </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>we, </i>followed very closely by proper names &#8211; Rappahannock or Wimpy or whatever &#8211; followed by nouns, as such, then adverbs &amp; verbs and then all other words. It is worth noting that what puts the three pronouns at the pinnacle is their implication of presence, these invariably are the pronouns of immanence, as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>he, she </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>they </i>are not. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Because he is so attuned to the implications of this hierarchy, one might in turn order all of Ashbery&#8217;s poems by how they utilize it. A poem like &#8220;Into the Dusk-Charged Air&#8221; focuses in at the level of the name, but <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>is a book almost entirely lacking in them. The absence of is so pronounced that when one does turn up &#8211; &#8220;dull Acheron&#8221; on<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>page 21 for example &#8211; it comes as a jolt even when, as here, the point is precisely its non-jolting nature. This, in turn, elevates the role of the three pronouns, all of which appear on the first page, and <span class=GramE>in a sequences</span> that seems not accidental or even casual &#8211; at least not here where Ashbery is setting up the project as a whole. The privileged pronoun, at least in &#8220;The New Spirit," and the earlier stages of this book, exactly as Ashbery suggests on, is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>you, </i>a term that is decidedly slipperier than either <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>we, </i>because, as here, it can &#8211; but doesn&#8217;t have to &#8211; imply writer as well as reader:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>You are my calm world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>You were always a living<br>
But a secret person<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Such particulars you mouthed, all leading back into the underlying question: was it you?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>And yet you see yourself growing up around the other, posited life, afraid for its inertness and afraid for yourself, intimidated and defensive. And you lacerate yourself so as to say, These wounds are me. I cannot let you live your life this way, and at the same time I am slurped into it, falling on top of you and falling with you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>You know that emptiness that was the only way you could express a thing?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>To you:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I could still put everything in and have it come out even, that is <span class=GramE>have</span> it come out so you and I would be equal at the end of our lives, which would have been lived fully and without strain. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Is it correct for me to use you to demonstrate all this?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>You private person.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>And so a new you takes shape. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>These are just a smattering of <span class=GramE>the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>you</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>statements that appear over the first twenty pages of &#8220;The New Spirit,&#8221; so that when the speaker of the poem proclaims<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>we remain separate forever<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>we just don&#8217;t believe it, particularly when this self-same sentence continues after a comma,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>and this confers an admittedly somewhat wistful beauty on the polarity that is our firm contact and uneven stage of development at this moment which threatens to be the last, unless the bottle with the genie squealing inside be again miraculously stumbled on, or a roc, its abrasive eye scouring the endless expanses of the plateau, appear at first like a black dot in the distance that little by little gets larger, beating its wings in purposeful and level flight. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Reading this text for who knows how many times over the 35 years I&#8217;ve owned this book, I find it hard not to laugh at the passage that follows, given the directness of its statement about the referentiality of the poem:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I urge you one last time to reconsider. You can feel the wind in the room, the curtains are moving in the draft and a door slowly closes. Think of what it must be outside.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you can hear in that passage the allusion to Creeley, to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hamlet, </i>even to Faulkner&#8217;s own use of the arras veil, all the better.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> For a text that literally, deliberately, goes nowhere &#8211; and does so again &amp; again &#8211; &#8220;The New Spirit&#8221; and all of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>is filled with such magical moments that are, as I read it, the point. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This is not a point that can be made through exposition as a hierarchic argument, a flow chart of consequences, syllogisms locking into place. It demands instead a process-centric approach to meaning. There is a reason that Ashbery&#8217;s poems, even the contained lyrics of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>books, resist, as I wrote the other day, &#8220;going anywhere.&#8221; Nowhere is this resistance more fully enacted than in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/08/frank-ohara-left-john-ashbery-1953.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/08/frank-ohara-left-john-ashbery-1953.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-08-06T06:14:00-04:00'>Monday, August 06, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=1179746410449484186' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/John%2520Ashbery' rel='tag'>John Ashbery</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' rel='tag'>prose poems</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, August 03, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1318/946256224_c77af4b004.jpg' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='2542735892577070834' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='2542735892577070834'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-2542735892577070834' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><img height="404" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/81tdoAp4k8Snn149e2guzDndIY7NTPCglHfV0M15evcrVuUp7Z0xQ8B_c5n9C8ohyJTZ6dU4dpanLGe5d-GsdGgQtZjn6XFy1nN32VN1ppY%3Ds0-d" width="260"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The only part of writing that is literally organic is the way in which the rhythms of production fit into the life of an author. This is something that can vary dramatically from poet to poet &#8211; was there ever a year in which Robert Kelly did <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not</i> write more than the entire collected works of Basil Bunting? &#8211; and it doesn&#8217;t seem to be anything that can be very readily dictated from the outside. Surely there is no right or wrong way with this, any more than there is to the color of our skin or our height or even sexual orientation. Any teacher in an MFA program will have the experience of watching one student struggle with creating a manuscript of acceptable length to qualify for the degree while for another student the real question is how best to whittle down from a stack of writing
hundreds of pages thick into something that makes sense as a short  book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This does not mean that a poet can&#8217;t change, <span class=GramE>nor</span> that poets don&#8217;t go through periods in their writing during which this process might be quite different. When I first began corresponding with Tom Meyer, he was still a student at Bard writing a massive, decidedly Poundian epic that he was tentatively calling <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Technographic Typography </i>(I published <a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS4/html/pictures/009.shtml"><span style='color:black'>two</span></a> <a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS6/html/pictures/012.shtml"><span style='color:black'>excerpts</span></a> of the 42<sup>nd</sup> &#8220;graph&#8221; in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tottel&#8217;s</i> in 1971). This isn&#8217;t who he turned out to be as a poet at all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This question runs quite a bit deeper than the just the size and number of the poems someone writes. I&#8217;ve commented recently on my blog on the dramatic differences in the poetry of Edward Dorn, pre- and post-&#8216;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Slinger, </i>but Dorn was hardly the only member of the New American Poets to have had this experience. Amiri Baraka&#8217;s output and style changed drastically once he abandoned his persona as LeRoi Jones. Denise Levertov did likewise, tho not with such flair. Frank O&#8217;Hara hardly wrote anything during the last two years of his life. Ted Berrigan likewise. Robert Duncan&#8217;s production drops rapidly once he announces his 15-year &#8220;hiatus&#8221; from publishing &#8211; and some would argue that the work does as well. George Oppen, Carl Rakosi &amp; even Louis Zukofsky went through long silent periods. Pound has his pre-modernist period, when he wrote <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Persona, </i>often cited by our Quietist (and quietest) friends as evidence that they also like this 20<sup>th</sup> century innovator &#8211; it&#8217;s just the innovations they hate. With Stein, it&#8217;s just the other way around. From <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas </i>onward, she becomes a memoirist of the avant-garde more than an instance of it. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you read Robert Creeley, you have to be struck with the degree to which his early work, through <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces, Mabel </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Day Book, </i>constantly pushes change. No two books are alike. As with Pound, there are poets who love the author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces</i> and those who love the author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love, </i>but it&#8217;s rare to meet someone who feels equally passionate about both volumes. Then around 1975, Creeley settles in &amp; moves gradually into what is now recognizable as his late style, which he continues pretty much without interruption for the next 30 years. I certainly know poets who insist that this is Creeley&#8217;s <span class=GramE>dotage, that</span> basically he&#8217;d given up. That&#8217;s not my perception, but the narrative of decline they impose on what turns out to be more than half of Creeley&#8217;s life&#8217;s work follows the same general path I&#8217;d suggest for Dorn (or, for that matter, Levertov). And there is no question that the two volumes of Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poetry </i>are profoundly different reading experiences. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>John Ashbery, by comparison, presents a much more complicated situation. When <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>appears in 1972, he has already been publishing for 19 years, going back to <span class=SpellE>Tibor</span> de Nagy&#8217;s publication of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot and Other Poems. </i>Yet, including <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot, Three Poems </i>is only Ashbery&#8217;s sixth book. In the 35 years since, Ashbery has dramatically picked up his pace, issuing 19 additional volumes of new poetry. Let me put this in even more stark turns. In 1966, when Frank O&#8217;Hara died, John Ashbery had just published <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains, </i>his fourth book. Eighty-four percent of Ashbery&#8217;s career &#8211; to 2007 &#8211; had yet to be written. The writer whom FOH so affectionately dubs as Ashes basically had just begun to emerge. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Yet Ashbery was already quite famous, at least in the ways a poet might be. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tennis Court Oath </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>had assured that he would be one of the defining figures for an American avant-garde for the next 50 years. Yet <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Double Dream of Spring </i>had been a confusing work, extending what Ashbery had been doing in the juvenilia of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees, </i>but really more consolidating this style of the pop-art surreal lyric that resists going anywhere. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream of Spring </i>is a fine book, maybe even a great one, but it was also the first book that Ashbery produced that did not in some fashion change poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Twenty books later, it becomes apparent that Ashbery was settling into what I take to be his mature rhythm as a poet: the steady production of books that are all, in one form or another, patterned upon <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream</i>, a collection of short lyrics &#8211; relatively few that are longer than a page or two, save for one longer piece &#8211; seldom adding to more than 110 pages in print, even with fairly sizeable type. These lyric collections are punctuated with a series of other books that are very different from one <span class=GramE>another,</span> and basically different from the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>series of volumes as well. These include<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The </span></i><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tennis</span></i></st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><st1:PlaceType><i   style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Court</span></i></st1:PlaceType><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><st1:PlaceName><i   style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Oath</span></i></st1:PlaceName><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
 </span></i><st1:PlaceType><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Rivers</span></i></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> and Mountains<br>
Three Poems<br>
</span></i><st1:State><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Vermont</span></i></st1:place></st1:State><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Notebook<br>
</span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>possibly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>As We Know<br>
Flow Chart<br>Girls on the Run</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I use the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>possibly </i>with regards to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>As We Know </i>because I think this is the one volume that genuinely deserves to be on both lists &#8211; it&#8217;s overall composition matches the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>schema, but the long two-column poem &#8221;Litany&#8221; warrants being placed in this second group. Unlike the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>series, whose volumes blend rather seamlessly one into the other, the books in this second list are deliberately  motley &#8211; you cannot generalize from any individual volume to the group as a whole. If I term the first group the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>series, I think of this second set as the One Offs, unrepeated, potentially even unrepeatable projects. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;m prepared to argue than in a century, most of the poems we (or our grandchildren) will still be reading and learning of John Ashbery&#8217;s belong to this second list, that of the One Offs. Partly, this is the fate of any great innovator &#8211; the poems that change poetry, that become the most canonic, are (one could reasonably argue) &#8220;the most important,&#8221; are seldom the best, or the most polished of a given writer. People read, say, Stein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons </i>more than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stanzas in Meditation </i>not because they are &#8220;easier&#8221; (if by easier we mean shorter)<span class=GramE>,</span> tho that never hurts, but because they were the poems that first taught her audience how to read in a different fashion. Similarly, it is the very first <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus </i>poems one remembers of Olson&#8217;s most clearly, again because they changed poetry. <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sonnets </i>really is</span> Ted Berrigan&#8217;s first work &#8211; it is still his most famous. So too <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tennis Court Oath </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>changed poetry<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>whereas <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Flow Chart </i>is a poem that exists in a world these earlier books made possible. One could similarly argue that William Carlos Williams never wrote better than in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Spring &amp; All, </i>tho it is his first mature work. Or that Allen Ginsberg&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Howl </i>is certain to be read in 200 years, while his finest writing &#8211; &#8220;Wichita Vortex Sutra&#8221; or &#8220;Wales Visitation,&#8221; say &#8211; are much more up for grabs. One might say the same with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stanzas for Iris <span class=SpellE>Lezak</span> </i>and Jackson Mac Low, a work that seems almost brutal in its machinations compared with the subtle deft works he composed toward the end of his life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The history of poetry is always the history of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>change </i>in poetry, almost never the record of &#8220;all that is best.&#8221; One might, for example, argue that a study of the dramatic monolog ought to lead ineluctably to modern masters such as Richard Howard or Frank Bidart, capable of seeding the form with everything culled from a history of 20<sup>th</sup> century psychology, but the genre&#8217;s actual importance is that it was one of the three great innovations of the 19<sup>th</sup> century &#8211; along with the prose poem &amp; free verse. The fact that dramatic monolog has grown mostly more nuanced where the two other genres have transformed themselves several times over in the past 120 years or so &#8211; the one great exception to this would be <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maximus </i>&#8211; suggests that the monolog&#8217;s history is as the stunted genre of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, precisely because it was the one least dependent on form as such. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But what interests me most today is that, when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>first appeared in 1972, the rhythm of Ashbery&#8217;s work was not &#8211; at least as seen from the perspective of 2007 &#8211; yet apparent. Indeed, today we might see a steady drone &#8211; in the sense of a tanpura in Indian music, perhaps &#8211; of collections modeled on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream</i>. The foreground of the <span class=SpellE>tabla</span>, the great South Asian drum, which in this analogy would be the One Offs, has never been steady. This is consistent with the basic fact that each has been invented entirely anew. But in 1972, Ashbery had not yet established the regular rhythm of lyrics on the model of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>or (more likely) wasn&#8217;t releasing them to the world, leading readers to imagine a potentially infinite string of One Offs extending limitlessly into the future. That was, after all, the same general model Creeley was using, more or less (Creeley&#8217;s model of &#8220;the book&#8221; was never <span class=GramE>so</span> hard-edged as Ashbery&#8217;s in those early years), right through to, say, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>London</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>.</span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> In Creeley, it is as tho he reaches a point &amp; can go no further, but settles in to develop a poetry befitting a much more settled life than the one proposed by the young man with a rep as a drunken brawler &amp; seducer that was Creeley in the fifties &amp; sixties. For Ashbery, the One Offs, the poetics of deep change, has never turned off entirely, even if individual works come more slowly now. <span class=GramE>Even if they don&#8217;t change poetry now when they occur.</span> What appears in Creeley&#8217;s career as his &#8220;late style&#8221; is something that Ashbery has demonstrated as possible as early as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Turandot </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees, </i>tho it doesn&#8217;t become a steady mode of production &#8211; or at least of publication &#8211; until <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream. </i>And even though it is the One Offs, especially &#8220;Europe&#8221; and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems, </i>that changed American poetry forever, there are now so many books on the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>model, some of them so fully feted with ribbons &amp; trophies, that what we now think of as &#8220;the Ashbery way&#8221; is precisely these <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>lyrics, effortless &amp; brilliant, subtle &amp; still campy, remarkably attentive to the nuances of daily life, that to understand the context &amp; importance of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems, </i>one has to imagine an Ashbery completely different from the one we have now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/08/only-part-of-writing-that-is-literally.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/08/only-part-of-writing-that-is-literally.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-08-03T06:59:00-04:00'>Friday, August 03, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=2542735892577070834' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/John%2520Ashbery' rel='tag'>John Ashbery</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' rel='tag'>prose poems</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, July 31, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://www.plethora.net/~gypsy/daybreak.jpg' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='3560735177802879774' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='3560735177802879774'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-3560735177802879774' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="347" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/qZ0CcZ4_AFWTbnKmmT6gU6cIKFcRT2-Sw6Ne1hRAF0HFP3Y0TDCmK1nyYZZdVtR6n82ukaTmhC15S3KiknO_%3Ds0-d" width="500"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Think about John Ashbery&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems </i>from the perspective of readers in 1972 when it first appeared as a Viking Compass volume, a photo of a trim mustachioed Ashbery standing somewhere on a farm with movie-star good looks peering back at the reader. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Double Dream of Spring, </i>Ashbery&#8217;s 1970 collection,<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>had been<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>the first book about which any Ashbery fan of the period could justifiably complain, as some did, that it offered little that was formally new or different from his earlier work. Previously, the one thing that had appeared certain about Ashbery, who followed <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Some Trees </i>with<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> The Tennis Court Oath </i>and that in turn with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains, </i>was that you couldn&#8217;t predict what the next volume might look like based on whatever you thought about the most recent. One argument that I did hear made about <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>was that, well, you certainly couldn&#8217;t have predicted <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that.&#185; </i>In narrowly extending, consolidating really, aspects of Ashbery&#8217;s poetry that went all the way back to the early 1950s, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double Dream </i>seemed to want to demonstrate the effortless excellence of Ashbery&#8217;s craft as he moved into his forties. The implication, at least according to optimists, was that readers should be patient &#8211; the next book would be a <span class=SpellE>doozy</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s worth keeping in mind the role of the modern prose poem within American poetry in 1972. Hayden <span class=SpellE>Carruth&#8217;s</span> omnibus 1970 anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Voice That Is Great Within Us, </i>containing 136 poets representing &#8220;American Poetry of the Twentieth Century,&#8221; 722 pages long, has exactly zero prose poems. It&#8217;s not that prose poems were not being written. Robert Bly and his fellow contributors in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sixties </i>had been actively pursuing the genre, as had George Hitchcock&#8217;s ancillary deep-image journal, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kayak. </i>At </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kayak </i>had already triggered a student-run imitation, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cloud Marauder. </i>None of this was visible in the Carruth anthology<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>even though Bly, James Wright and George Hitchcock are all included. One poet who does not appear is Gertrude Stein.&#178; Another who is not present is Russell Edson, whose first collection had been published in 1964. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If <span class=SpellE>Edson&#8217;s</span> model of the prose poem was the short fable of Kafka, <span class=SpellE>Bly&#8217;s</span> paradigm was borrowed from the work of French poet Max Jacob, author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Dice Cup: </i>a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to &#8220;distract&#8221; the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem. Readers of modern French literature knew, of course, that there was much more to the prose poem than this, but until the very late 1960s, the only readily available alternative translated into English were the works of St.-John Perse. Perse had won the Nobel Prize in 1960, but had begun publishing over a half century earlier and with a style that has always reminded me of the art of Maxfield Parish. Here is the opening of the fifth section of &#8220;Strophe,&#8221; a part of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Seamarks, </i>translated here by Wallace <span class=SpellE>Fowlie</span>:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Language which was the Poetess:<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;text-indent:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;Bitterness, O <span class=SpellE>favour</span>!</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> Where now burns the aromatic herb? . . . The poppy seed buried, we turn at least towards you, sleepless Sea of the living. And you to us are something sleepless and grave, as is incest under the veil. And we say<span class=GramE>,</span> we have seen it, the Sea for women more beautiful than adversity. And now we know only you that are great and worthy of praise,<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>O Sea which swells in our dreams as in endless disparagement and in sacred malignancy, O you who weigh on our great childhood walls and our terraces like an obscene <span class=SpellE>tumour</span> and like a divine malady!</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Perse&#8217;s</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> overly humid prose seemed so far removed from the proliferating Jacob-Bly &amp; Kafka-Edson editions of the prose poem, predicated as those strains were upon brevity, that it&#8217;s not clear that anyone, at least in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, knew quite what to do with his work. Plus <span class=SpellE>Perse&#8217;s</span> translators, such as <span class=SpellE>Fowlie</span> &amp; T.S. Eliot, were hardly paragons of avant-garde practice. Robert Duncan may have been equally capable of elevated language, but there&#8217;s an inner decadence here &#8211; the sheer predictability of such <span class=SpellE>impossibles</span> as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sacred malignancy </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>divine malady</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8211; </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>that would have made  </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> shudder. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In 1969, however, </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Jonathan</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Cape</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> published Lane Dunlop&#8217;s translation Francis <span class=SpellE>Ponge&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Soap </i>while Unicorn Press in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Santa Barbara</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>California</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, brought out Nathaniel Tarn&#8217;s edition of Victor <span class=SpellE>Segalen&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Stelae.&#179; </i>From Japan, Cid Corman had already been publishing his own versions of Ponge in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Origin, </i>leading up to his selections, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Things, </i>which appeared in 1971. American readers were beginning to get hints of the broader landscape for poetic prose that Europeans had known already for several decades. John Ashbery, having spent roughly a decade in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Paris</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> from the middle 1950s onward, was perfectly positioned to know this. One might even say &#8220;to exploit this,&#8221; introducing into American poetry something that had not previously existed here: the prose poem as a serious &#8211; and extended &#8211; work of art. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

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

<p class=MsoFootnoteText style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#185; </span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I  am not including Ashbery&#8217;s first <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected Poems, </i>which appeared between <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rivers and Mountains </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Double  Dream.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoFootnoteText style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#178; </span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This was not atypical in 1970, a moment when perhaps only Robert Duncan &amp; Jerome Rothenberg were seriously arguing for her inclusion in any consideration of American poetry. Patricia <span class=SpellE>Meyerowitz</span>&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, </i>the volume through which many poets of my generation first became aware of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons, </i>was originally published by Peter Owen in 1967, but not reissued in the Penguin edition that finally gave it broad U.S. distribution until 1971. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#179; </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Tarn</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> had worked at </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cape</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, which was then undergoing a defensive merger with <span class=SpellE>Chatto</span>, and may well have produced the Segalen for the famous </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cape</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Goliard</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> / Grossman series. </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Tarn</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was the editor of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Soap.</i></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/07/think-about-john-ashberys-three-poems.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/07/think-about-john-ashberys-three-poems.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-07-31T09:02:00-04:00'>Tuesday, July 31, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=3560735177802879774' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/John%2520Ashbery' rel='tag'>John Ashbery</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' rel='tag'>prose poems</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, July 20, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='http://farm1.static.flickr.com/248/520203706_ac14c47fcf.jpg' itemprop='image_url'/>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='1748172893486326898' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='1748172893486326898'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-1748172893486326898' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="342" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/y5Kqu0r1s3eBTyGvKzw30wbRNZ8t-UqpiA-MgqKYpAHg1fk2GrJCewLdtyx_j09HFKqa0q38tmZUAmHh2xzy8Qxj_vDC5-VZt13I5QwBFA%3Ds0-d" width="456"><br>
</span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ed Barrett, left, with Bill Corbett<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I had the strangest experience with <a href="http://web.mit.edu/21w785/www/information.html"><span style='color:black'>Ed Barrett&#8217;s</span></a> &#8220;prose poem novel&#8221; (as it says on the rear jacket) <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kevin White. </i>I read the first half of it over two days, then got interrupted by what daily life was throwing at me, then couldn&#8217;t remember which backpack I&#8217;d put the book in so took a few more days before I picked it back up and finished it. But the experience was of two almost completely different books. During my first stint, I was definitely reading, feeling, seeing the prose poem on every page, even if it was a remarkably cohesive set of same. Here is the very first poem, from the book&#8217;s first (of nine) sets, &#8220;Kevin and John&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I saw Kevin White&#8217;s mind disappearing into heaven as he bent down to pick up a tea bag John Wieners left on I-93 Southbound to remind oncoming traffic and the Big Dig that we have been set to &#8211; Boston, a mound of curly tight shiny law in the mind of Kevin our charge &#8211; and holding it like a ribbon to give a pretty girl, he placed it on his tongue and spoke to the Virgin Mary his language of tannin.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A single sentence prose poem that incorporates the former mayor of Boston, its most iconic poet, its most infamous &#8220;improvement&#8221; project, the Boston tea party, the Catholic church &#8211; dichtung don&#8217;t get much more condensare than that as Pound might have put it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But when I returned to it, <i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kevin White </i>had indeed turned into a novel, as elegant as anything plotted out by David <span class=SpellE>Markson</span>, each page as realized, both symbolically &amp; visually, as Don DeLillo at his best. I went back &amp; started over attempting to see it as I had at first, as a &#8220;collection&#8221; of separate poems around a series of recurring motifs, but I just couldn&#8217;t. Somehow the book had actually transformed itself. It was (is) a very spooky bit of magic. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For a guy born in </span></span><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Brooklyn</span></span></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, Ed Barrett &#8220;does&#8221; </span></span><st1:City><st1:place><span class=GramE><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Boston</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> pretty thoroughly.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> In addition to Wieners and White, other folks who show up in this book&#8217;s not-quite-80 pages include Whitey &amp; Billy <span class=SpellE>Bulger</span>, <span class=SpellE>Nomar</span> <span class=SpellE>Garciaparra</span> &amp; Pedro Martinez, Bill Corbett &amp; Fanny Howe, the Virgin Mary &amp; Deborah Hussey, whom a search of Google reveals to be the &#8220;last known&#8221; murder victim of Whitey Bulger.&#185; If the book doesn&#8217;t have a plot in the usual sense of that term, it still fits together quite a bit more tightly than, say, Thomas Pynchon&#8217;s most recent effort. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Barrett has, in fact, been in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Boston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> for some time, twenty years at least, during most of which he has been associated with various MIT programs that focus on the intersection between <a href="http://web.mit.edu/humanistic/www/faculty/barrett.html"><span style='color:black'>computing &amp; writing</span></a>. Where another poet so positioned might be inclined to use that intersection to drive endless amounts of techno-centric media exploration (imagine, say, Alan Sondheim in the same job), Barrett seems to have gone rather in the opposite direction. Choosing a poetry that is taut, highly constructed, with layers of allusion &amp; irony used rather the way the painter Jess liked to heap up oil in some of his portraits. He gave a reading &amp; talk at Writers House not quite 18 months ago &amp; the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Barrett.html"><span style='color:black'>MP3s</span></a> of the two events, well worth listening to, return again &amp; again to the same two names &#8211; Bill Corbett &amp; John Ashbery &#8211; as touchstones for Barrett&#8217;s practice. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In fact, he&#8217;s not really like either, or at least this book isn&#8217;t. At first I thought of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kevin White </i>as being closer in its sensibility to the sort of booklength poem that takes advantage, say, of genre vocabulary &amp; devices, rather the way James Sherry&#8217;s 1981 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In Case </i>deployed the language of the hardboiled detective novel. But really it&#8217;s the city, not a genre, that&#8217;s the organizing principle here:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Flight Into </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Egypt</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'></b><br>
<br>
</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I saw former Red Sox <span class=GramE>pitcher Bill &quot;The Spaceman&quot; Lee take</span> something from a dumpster in front of the Corbett house. &quot;Watch it!&quot; said Lee, &quot;dreams are not hard science like colonoscopy and laser hair removal-dreams don't even know your name, Mr. Wally Cox, and therefore they come to you but could just as easily visit someone else when all you wanted was to have your head patted like a child. And I am Bill Lee, making a voodoo doll of Carl <span class=SpellE>Yazstremski</span> whose dream came to me by mistake and said <span class=SpellE>Yaz</span> was living in the Corbett house, upstairs under the eaves.&quot; &quot;Is Bill moving?&quot; I asked, &quot;What's he need a dumpster for, anyway?&quot; &quot;Ask him yourself, here he comes,&quot; shouted Bill Lee as he ran down </span><st1:Street><st1:address><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Columbus   Avenue</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>, sideways like a crab. &quot;Bill, I don't understand, what is this all about?&quot; &quot;Dreams,&quot; snarled Corbett, &quot;Who the hell is Bill Lee to talk about dreams!&quot; And we walked into his study which was filled with life-size voodoo dolls of Bill Lee, each wearing a different set of legs: deer legs, grasshopper legs, rat's feet, and still twitching in the corner, a doll with legs of a blue-claw crab taken from the Gowanus Canal when Bill was visiting Brooklyn where the crab population, long crushed under the weight of pollution, now floats and copulates in the currents around Brooklyn like a blue halo. &quot;Dreams know your name, Ed Cullen Bryant, like a real estate agent knows a price. Through my black art I torment Bill Lee with more sets of legs climbing up on him than some of the poor souls who once worked as prostitutes on </span><st1:Street><st1:address><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Columbus   Avenue</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>. But now </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Boston</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> has these dumpsters where our true past, which is unclaimed dreams, gets shoveled out each morning!&quot;<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>And Bill kicked the side of the dumpster so hard some trash spilled out revealing a child's Burger King paper crown from a lost day in the lost life of the nameless real, its gold paper glistening in the sun. Just then the soul of John Wieners stood beside us and when he picked up the Burger King crown and set it on his courtly brow, you could see it wasn't paper at all, but the live body of a blue-claw crab, its shell delicately balancing on top of John's bald spot, its legs in the air like a Boston prostitute, and in each of its <span class=SpellE>needley</span> pincers a birthday candle glowing in the blue smoke of the Virgin Mary's cigarette.</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This is the lone poem in the final section of the book (&amp;, in fact, is the final work Barrett read at Writers House as well, a good piece on which to close). The return here of John Wieners makes me realize that the deeper model in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kevin White, </i>deeper than the novel, just might be the serial poetry of Jack Spicer, especially the run of great books that began with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Heads of the Town Up to the <span class=SpellE>Aether</span> </i>&amp; ran through <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Magazine Verse. </i>That&#8217;s the kind of cohesion I sense page-to-page, section-to-section, tho with none of the acrid sarcasm that characterizes so much of Spicer&#8217;s use of public figures. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Oddly, as I write, Small Press Distribution has no copies of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kevin White </i>on hand &amp; the Pressed Wafer website hasn&#8217;t been updated even longer than that of the National Poetry Foundation, so it may well be that you can&#8217;t buy this book at the moment. <span class=GramE>Which is a shame.</span> Hopefully this will be corrected shortly. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

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

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Tho I note her body was buried where <span class=SpellE>Bulger</span> had already stocked two other bodies, one of them a drug trafficker &amp; jewel thief by the name of Arthur &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Bucky</span>&#8221; Barrett. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/07/ed-barrett-left-with-bill-corbett-i-had.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/07/ed-barrett-left-with-bill-corbett-i-had.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-07-20T07:32:00-04:00'>Friday, July 20, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=1748172893486326898' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Boston' rel='tag'>Boston</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Ed%2520Barrett' rel='tag'>Ed Barrett</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Fiction' rel='tag'>Fiction</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' rel='tag'>prose poems</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

          </div></div>
        

          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, June 12, 2007</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
<div class='post-outer'>
<div class='post hentry uncustomized-post-template' itemprop='blogPost' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
<meta content='3738579' itemprop='blogId'/>
<meta content='8619186105366715699' itemprop='postId'/>
<a name='8619186105366715699'></a>
<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-body entry-content' id='post-body-8619186105366715699' itemprop='description articleBody'>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A great idea badly executed can be much worse than a bad idea. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My evidence for this assertion is Michael <span class=SpellE>Benedikt&#8217;s</span> anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, </i>published as a mass market paperback, a Laurel Original, in 1976. When I first saw the little blue book, I bought it instantly, thinking <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>At last! </i>But when I got to the French section and saw that there was no Victor Segalen, no St.-John Perse, no <span class=SpellE>Marcelin</span> <span class=SpellE>Pleynet</span>, no Jacques Roubaud, my heart sank. Then I got, not quite at the very end, to the American section, which includes only the following: <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.5in;line-height:150%'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Kenneth Patchen<br> 
Karl Shapiro<br>
David Ignatow<br>
Robert Bly<br>
James Wright<br>
W.S. Merwin<br>
Anne Sexton<br>
Russell Edson<br>
Michael <span class=SpellE>Benedikt</span><br>
Jack Anderson<br>
James Tate<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>No Gertrude Stein, no William Carlos Williams, no Robert Duncan, no Robert Creeley, no John Ashbery, no Ron Padgett, not one of the language poets. It was a debacle, a book that appeared to have been edited in the worst of faith, a deliberate falsification of the record. The British selection, containing only Peter <span class=SpellE>Redgrove</span> &amp; Cecil <span class=SpellE>Helman</span>, was, if anything, worse. I felt nauseated &amp; furious all at once. I realized two things almost instantly. One was that this volume, issued in a mass market trade format, was going to crowd out the marketplace for a truly comprehensive volume. The second was that a book this self-consciously false wasn&#8217;t going to do all that well. It would seem I was right on both counts. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Prose Poem </i>appears never to have been reprinted &#8211; you can&#8217;t even find used copies on <a href="http://used.addall.com/"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>AddAll</span></span></a> or <a href="http://www.booksprice.com/"><span class=SpellE><span  style='color:black'>BooksPrice</span></span></a>, perhaps because the trade format used such cheap materials that even my own copy has to be held together now with a rubber band, its pages so acidic they&#8217;re almost smoldering their way to the illegible. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And to this date, there has never been a comprehensive anthology of the form. This one little terrible book both crowded out &amp; poisoned the market. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Later, I did meet Michael <span class=SpellE>Benedikt</span> once and he wasn&#8217;t the cynical sharpie I&#8217;d envisioned from this project at all. If anything, he seemed a well-intentioned if somewhat bumbling sort of guy. I wondered later just how much of the disaster that was <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Prose Poem </i>was literally his lack of knowledge of the materials. Could he really not have known about Gertrude Stein&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tender Buttons, </i>John Ashbery&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Three Poems, </i>William Carlos Williams&#8217; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Kora in Hell, </i>or Robert Creeley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Presences</i>? Or did he just lack the intellectual courage to step outside the confines of Robert <span  class=SpellE>Bly&#8217;s</span> infinitesimal notion of what constituted a prose poem? Was he an active agent of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s compulsive distortion of the record &#8211; his anthology certainly was &#8211; or merely its victim? He&#8217;s gone now, so I&#8217;ll never know.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;d forgotten that whole deep sick-to-my-stomach feeling of a book that should be a great event but turns out just to be a mess until I acquired <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, </i>co-edited by Denise <span class=SpellE>Duhamel</span>, Maureen Seaton &amp; David Trinidad, just released by Soft Skull Press. It&#8217;s a disaster, not on the scale of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Prose Poem, </i>but a disaster nonetheless. If <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Prose Poem </i>warrants an F, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Saints of Hysteria </i>is more of a D+ affair. It&#8217;s not a malevolent book, but more in the tradition of Doug <span class=SpellE>Messerli&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Language Poetries </i>or Eliot Weinberger&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, </i>or, for that matter, Donald Allen&#8217;s attempt to &#8220;update&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry, The Postmoderns, </i>all of them examples of how you can make a bad book using only good poetry. That, for the most part, is the story here too. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Called by its publisher &#8220;first definitive collection of American collaborative poetry,&#8221; it&#8217;s anything but definitive. This volume is functionally incompetent as a historical record of the genre, and tho that may be the greatest of its sins, it&#8217;s not its biggest problem as   a book. The three editors missed large swaths of collaborative work, yes, particularly among the language poets, the Actualists and among contemporary writers, but the volume&#8217;s largest hurdle &#8211; the one that makes it essentially unreadable as a book and unusable as a classroom text &#8211; is that it&#8217;s presented incoherently. With over 200 poets spread out over less than 400 pages, there is no index of authors anywhere save for an alphabetical list that mercifully takes up the rear cover. Presenting the material in what the <span class=GramE>editors</span> claim is a &#8220;loose chronological order,&#8221; they&#8217;ve dated absolutely nothing. Allen Ginsberg turns up on page 3 alongside Neal <span class=SpellE>Cassady</span> &amp; Jack Kerouac, then not again until page  59 when he collaborates with Kenneth Koch, then on page 75 with Ron Padgett, then on page 102 when he and Bob Rosenthal are working with an entire MFA class from Brooklyn College, then literally on the next page where he turns up with <span class=SpellE>Lita</span> <span class=SpellE>Hornick</span> &amp; Peter <span class=SpellE>Orlovsky</span>. <span class=SpellE>Hornick</span> turns up again on the next page collaborating with Ron Padgett &#8211; it&#8217;s his first appearance since the Ginsberg <span class=SpellE>collab</span> &amp; fourth in the book overall. An author&#8217;s index <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>end notes after each text listing any other pages each author appears on would have gone a long way toward making this book usable, but its present format renders it unintelligible. There are  some interesting combinations here, but you&#8217;re on your own trying to find them. The occasional &#8220;process notes&#8221; serve to clutter, rather than clarify, what is already a mess. They should have been given their own separate section. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That overstatement from the book&#8217;s publisher that I quoted above continues, as follows: &#8220;ranging through the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, the Beats, Language poetry, to the present.&#8221; But when I search out the area I know best, langpo, I can find only three of the forty contributors to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In the American Tree</i>: Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer &amp; Bernadette Mayer. And Bernadette appears here for her work with other NY School poets. Considering that language poetry uses collaborative methods so extensively that the process was used to call language poets &#8220;Stalinists&#8221; in venues from the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Partisan Review </i>to the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>San Francisco Chronicle, </i>I&#8217;m startled not to find any excerpt from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/LEGEND/html/contents.shtml"><span style='color:black'>Legend</span></a>, </i>the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>first booklength collaborative poem in America </i>outside of the New York School. Not only is it not present, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not one of its five authors </i>turn up anywhere. No Bruce Andrews, no Charles Bernstein? <span class=GramE>None of Ray <span class=SpellE>DiPalma&#8217;s</span> work with Paul Vangelisti?</span> Rae Armantrout is another poet whom this anthology disappears &#8211; her poem &#8220;Engines&#8221; is a collaboration with yours truly (making her technically a co-author of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Alphabet</i>). Also missing is any evidence of Hejinian&#8217;s booklength collaboration with Carla Harryman. The same is true for the extensive collaborations done by Alan Bernheimer &amp; Kit Robinson. And there&#8217;s no evidence here of any collaborative work by Steve Benson. This book includes just enough to say that it&#8217;s not overtly excluding langpo, but the reality is that if it had thought even halfway seriously (and one percent politically) about this volume&#8217;s content, it would have recognized that language poetry&#8217;s use of collaborative tools is often quite different from the NY School standard that is dominant here, and that it would have been interesting, even important to explore those tensions. But there&#8217;s no way to even glimpse that from this volume. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Contemporary <span class=SpellE>flarfists</span> will I think have an almost identical complaint, tho with some different names (the token inclusion is Rod Smith). All forms of conceptual poetics are missing, such as the work Hannah Weiner did with John <span class=SpellE>Perrault</span>. Save for Keith Abbott &amp; Pat Nolan, the Actualists &#8211; another Berrigan-inflected literary community of the 1970s &#8211; is completely absent. No Darrell Gray, no G. P. Skratz, no Dave Morice. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>It&#8217;s bizarre</i>. No sign of Michael <span class=SpellE>Lally</span> anywhere. Is it really true that <span class=GramE>neither Jena Osman or</span> Juliana Spahr have ever written collaborations? Sheila E. Murphy or <span class=SpellE>Miekal</span> And? <span class=GramE>Susan Schultz or Maria Damon?</span> If they have, you can&#8217;t find out about it here. The editors have been careful enough to include smatterings of Robert Bly, Marilyn Hacker, Jim Harrison, Jane Miller, Reginald Shepherd, but it&#8217;s tokenism and easily identifiable as such. The result is that an unfamiliar or uneducated reader will come away from this book confirmed in the belief that the history of collaboration can be read as radiating outward from the writing of the three primary poets who dominate this volume and presumably the last half century of American poetry: Ted Berrigan, Joanna Fuhrman and David Lehman. That certainly is an interesting &amp; curious history. I&#8217;m only buying one third of it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So far as I can tell the title of this book must refer to its editors, given that what they have offered us is maybe half of an unedited manuscript. Actually, the cutesiness of the title is a way of deflecting attention from the actual proposition of the book &#8211; it&#8217;s a confession on the part of the editors that they know this book isn&#8217;t what it claims to be. The editors all have, or had until now, good reputations as poets &amp; people. I can&#8217;t imagine why they didn&#8217;t do their homework, but it&#8217;s so manifestly absent throughout this misbegotten venture that this book easily is the disappointment of the year. Plus, as the example of the Michael <span class=SpellE>Benedikt</span> anthology demonstrates, what <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Saints of Hysteria</i> means above all else is that we&#8217;re <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>not</b> likely to have a <span class=GramE>comprehensive</span> or competent collection of American collaborative poetry for another thirty years at least. That&#8217;s tragic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer'>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author vcard'>
Posted by
<span class='fn' itemprop='author' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
<span itemprop='name'>Ron</span>
</span>
</span>
<span class='post-timestamp'>
at
<meta content='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-idea-badly-executed-can-be-much.html' itemprop='url'/>
<a class='timestamp-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-idea-badly-executed-can-be-much.html' rel='bookmark' title='permanent link'><abbr class='published' itemprop='datePublished' title='2007-06-12T04:57:00-04:00'>Tuesday, June 12, 2007</abbr></a>
</span>
<span class='reaction-buttons'>
</span>
<span class='post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-backlinks post-comment-link'>
</span>
<span class='post-icons'>
<span class='item-action'>
<a href='https://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=3738579&postID=8619186105366715699' title='Email Post'>
<img alt='' class='icon-action' height='13' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_email.gif' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='post-share-buttons goog-inline-block'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
Labels:
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/anthologies' rel='tag'>anthologies</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/collaborations' rel='tag'>collaborations</a>,
<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems' rel='tag'>prose poems</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
<span class='post-location'>
</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

        </div></div>
      
</div>
<div class='blog-pager' id='blog-pager'>
<span id='blog-pager-older-link'>
<a class='blog-pager-older-link' href='https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%20poems?updated-max=2007-06-12T04:57:00-04:00&amp;max-results=20&amp;start=6&amp;by-date=false' id='Blog1_blog-pager-older-link' title='Older Posts'>Older Posts</a>
</span>
<a class='home-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/'>Home</a>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<div class='blog-feeds'>
<div class='feed-links'>
Subscribe to:
<a class='feed-link' href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default' target='_blank' type='application/atom+xml'>Posts (Atom)</a>
</div>
</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div id='sidebar-wrapper'>
<div class='sidebar section' id='sidebar'><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text4'>
<h2 class='title'>Upcoming</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text4&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text4"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText4' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget TextList' data-version='1' id='TextList1'>
<h2>Email</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<ul>
<li>silliman AT gmail DOT com</li>
</ul>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=TextList&widgetId=TextList1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("TextList1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configTextList1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div>
</div><div class='widget LinkList' data-version='1' id='LinkList1'>
<h2>Silliman Sites</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<ul>
<li><a href='http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1544'>Academy of American Poets</a></li>
<li><a href='http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/silliman'>Electronic Poetry Center</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.facebook.com/ron.silliman'>Facebook</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.goodreads.com/search/search%3Fsearch_type%3Dbooks%26search%5Bquery%5D%3Dron%2Bsilliman'>GoodReads</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/silliman.htm'>Modern American Poetry</a></li>
<li><a href='http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Silliman.php'>PennSound</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.pcah.us/the-center/grants-awarded/grantees-1998-ron-silliman/'>Pew Fellowships in the Arts</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6323'>Poetry Foundation</a></li>
<li><a href='http://ronsillimanbibliography.blogspot.com/'>Silliman's Bibliography</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?AuthorName=Ron+Silliman'>Small Press Distribution</a></li>
<li><a href='http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS/'>Tottel's</a></li>
<li><a href='http://twitter.com/ronsilliman'>Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.ubu.com/contemp/silliman/index.html'>Ubuweb</a></li>
<li><a href='https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0075.html'>UC San Diego Archives</a></li>
<li><a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Silliman'>Wikipedia</a></li>
</ul>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=LinkList&widgetId=LinkList1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("LinkList1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configLinkList1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div>
</div><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text1'>
<h2 class='title'>Ketjak</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text3'>
<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
<div class='widget-content'>
<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 />
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text3&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text3"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText3' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget Image' data-version='1' id='Image1'>
<div class='widget-content'>
<img alt='' height='163' id='Image1_img' src='//3.bp.blogspot.com/_TEBx9oYcXio/S9oGYEaetqI/AAAAAAAABDs/UI7l5u8GwcA/S230/redron.jpg' width='230'/>
<br/>
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Image&widgetId=Image1&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Image1"));' rel='nofollow' target='configImage1' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div><div class='widget Text' data-version='1' id='Text2'>
<div class='widget-content'>
<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.
</div>
<div class='clear'></div>
<span class='widget-item-control'>
<span class='item-control blog-admin'>
<a class='quickedit' href='//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=3738579&widgetType=Text&widgetId=Text2&action=editWidget&sectionId=sidebar' onclick='return _WidgetManager._PopupConfig(document.getElementById("Text2"));' rel='nofollow' target='configText2' title='Edit'>
<img alt='' height='18' src='https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png' width='18'/>
</a>
</span>
</span>
<div class='clear'></div>
</div></div>
</div>
<!-- spacer for skins that want sidebar and main to be the same height-->
<div class='clear'>&#160;</div>
</div>
<!-- end content-wrapper -->
</div></div>
<!-- end outer-wrapper -->

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/1068551213-widgets.js"></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
window['__wavt'] = 'AOuZoY5_duEk9WJsuxTKt3hUpLoVXRTgzg:1574358955603';_WidgetManager._Init('//www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID\x3d3738579','//ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%20poems','3738579');
_WidgetManager._SetDataContext([{'name': 'blog', 'data': {'blogId': '3738579', 'title': 'Silliman\x27s Blog', 'url': 'https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems', 'canonicalUrl': 'https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems', 'homepageUrl': 'https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/', 'searchUrl': 'https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search', 'canonicalHomepageUrl': 'https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/', 'blogspotFaviconUrl': 'https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/favicon.ico', 'bloggerUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com', 'hasCustomDomain': false, 'httpsEnabled': true, 'enabledCommentProfileImages': true, 'gPlusViewType': 'FILTERED_POSTMOD', 'adultContent': false, 'analyticsAccountNumber': '', 'encoding': 'UTF-8', 'locale': 'en', 'localeUnderscoreDelimited': 'en', 'languageDirection': 'ltr', 'isPrivate': false, 'isMobile': false, 'isMobileRequest': false, 'mobileClass': '', 'isPrivateBlog': false, 'feedLinks': '\x3clink rel\x3d\x22alternate\x22 type\x3d\x22application/atom+xml\x22 title\x3d\x22Silliman\x26#39;s Blog - Atom\x22 href\x3d\x22https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default\x22 /\x3e\n\x3clink rel\x3d\x22alternate\x22 type\x3d\x22application/rss+xml\x22 title\x3d\x22Silliman\x26#39;s Blog - RSS\x22 href\x3d\x22https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt\x3drss\x22 /\x3e\n\x3clink rel\x3d\x22service.post\x22 type\x3d\x22application/atom+xml\x22 title\x3d\x22Silliman\x26#39;s Blog - Atom\x22 href\x3d\x22https://www.blogger.com/feeds/3738579/posts/default\x22 /\x3e\n', 'meTag': '', 'adsenseHostId': 'ca-host-pub-1556223355139109', 'adsenseHasAds': false, 'view': '', 'dynamicViewsCommentsSrc': '//www.blogblog.com/dynamicviews/4224c15c4e7c9321/js/comments.js', 'dynamicViewsScriptSrc': '//www.blogblog.com/dynamicviews/f3d926f4a203e3ca', 'plusOneApiSrc': 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', 'disableGComments': true, 'sharing': {'platforms': [{'name': 'Get link', 'key': 'link', 'shareMessage': 'Get link', 'target': ''}, {'name': 'Facebook', 'key': 'facebook', 'shareMessage': 'Share to Facebook', 'target': 'facebook'}, {'name': 'BlogThis!', 'key': 'blogThis', 'shareMessage': 'BlogThis!', 'target': 'blog'}, {'name': 'Twitter', 'key': 'twitter', 'shareMessage': 'Share to Twitter', 'target': 'twitter'}, {'name': 'Pinterest', 'key': 'pinterest', 'shareMessage': 'Share to Pinterest', 'target': 'pinterest'}, {'name': 'Email', 'key': 'email', 'shareMessage': 'Email', 'target': 'email'}], 'disableGooglePlus': true, 'googlePlusShareButtonWidth': 300, 'googlePlusBootstrap': '\x3cscript type\x3d\x22text/javascript\x22\x3ewindow.___gcfg \x3d {\x27lang\x27: \x27en\x27};\x3c/script\x3e'}, 'hasCustomJumpLinkMessage': false, 'jumpLinkMessage': 'Read more', 'pageType': 'index', 'searchLabel': 'prose poems', 'pageName': 'prose poems', 'pageTitle': 'Silliman\x27s Blog: prose poems'}}, {'name': 'features', 'data': {'sharing_get_link_dialog': 'true', 'sharing_native': 'false'}}, {'name': 'messages', 'data': {'edit': 'Edit', 'linkCopiedToClipboard': 'Link copied to clipboard!', 'ok': 'Ok', 'postLink': 'Post Link'}}, {'name': 'template', 'data': {'name': 'custom', 'localizedName': 'Custom', 'isResponsive': false, 'isAlternateRendering': false, 'isCustom': true}}, {'name': 'view', 'data': {'classic': {'name': 'classic', 'url': '?view\x3dclassic'}, 'flipcard': {'name': 'flipcard', 'url': '?view\x3dflipcard'}, 'magazine': {'name': 'magazine', 'url': '?view\x3dmagazine'}, 'mosaic': {'name': 'mosaic', 'url': '?view\x3dmosaic'}, 'sidebar': {'name': 'sidebar', 'url': '?view\x3dsidebar'}, 'snapshot': {'name': 'snapshot', 'url': '?view\x3dsnapshot'}, 'timeslide': {'name': 'timeslide', 'url': '?view\x3dtimeslide'}, 'isMobile': false, 'title': 'Silliman\x27s Blog', 'description': 'A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.', 'url': 'https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/prose%2520poems', 'type': 'feed', 'isSingleItem': false, 'isMultipleItems': true, 'isError': false, 'isPage': false, 'isPost': false, 'isHomepage': false, 'isArchive': false, 'isSearch': true, 'isLabelSearch': true, 'search': {'label': 'prose poems', 'resultsMessage': 'Showing posts with the label prose poems', 'resultsMessageHtml': 'Showing posts with the label \x3cspan class\x3d\x27search-label\x27\x3eprose poems\x3c/span\x3e'}}}]);
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_NavbarView', new _WidgetInfo('Navbar1', 'navbar', document.getElementById('Navbar1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_HeaderView', new _WidgetInfo('Header1', 'header', document.getElementById('Header1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_BlogView', new _WidgetInfo('Blog1', 'main', document.getElementById('Blog1'), {'cmtInteractionsEnabled': false, 'navMessage': 'Showing posts with label \x3cb\x3eprose poems\x3c/b\x3e. \x3ca href\x3d\x22https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/\x22\x3eShow all posts\x3c/a\x3e', 'lightboxEnabled': true, 'lightboxModuleUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/jsbin/4152225668-lbx.js', 'lightboxCssUrl': 'https://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-css/368954415-lightbox_bundle.css'}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text4', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text4'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextListView', new _WidgetInfo('TextList1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('TextList1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_LinkListView', new _WidgetInfo('LinkList1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('LinkList1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text1'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text3', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text3'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_ImageView', new _WidgetInfo('Image1', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Image1'), {'resize': false}, 'displayModeFull'));
_WidgetManager._RegisterWidget('_TextView', new _WidgetInfo('Text2', 'sidebar', document.getElementById('Text2'), {}, 'displayModeFull'));
</script>
</body>
</html>