Sometime in 1967, Jack Gilbert introduced George Stanley to his creative writing class at San Francisco State by calling Stanley, “the finest poet now writing.” That may seem like an incongruous pairing for such an elaborate compliment today, but in the late 1960s in San Francisco, there was something approaching a consensus about Stanley’s talent and promise. Having been raised in San Francisco, where Duncan, Spicer, Rexroth, all the Beats, were transplants in exile from Elsewhere, George Stanley was poetry’s home town favorite. He cut that narrative of the Golden Boy short by moving to British Columbia around 1970, a time when the border was far less permeable (& far more one-directional) in terms of literary influence than it is today. For the past 32 years, he has lived and worked in Western Canada. Once one of the most visible poets working in the New American idiom, he has all but dropped from view in the United States.*

 

This may be about to change as Qua Books prepares A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems, 1957-2000, co-edited by Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin, for publication. At 228 pages, it’s a sizable volume, although, containing just 63 poems written over 43 years, this is not yet the Collected for which we will hopefully not have to wait too many more decades.

 

Stanley was the sort of young writer who absorbs and synthesizes his influences almost effortlessly, not unlike Curtis Faville 15 years later. “Pompeii,” literally the second poem in this book, was one of the handful of works by which San Francisco poets gauged themselves in the 1960s. It situates itself almost perfectly halfway between Spicer, Stanley’s early mentor, and Robert Duncan or perhaps I should say, Duncan’s H.D. Here is the opening section:

 

When I read this poem I think of Pompeii.

 

When they dug up Pompeii the poems were gone,

flower-like and fragile in the stone,

giving nothing to the stone,

honey alloyed to the stone,

making nothing sweet.

 

The eyes of the matrons burned on the dark blue walls,

under their eyes in shallow pools,

the bell of a xylophone, silver,

bell of an ambulance,

bell of a burglar alarm,

a trying to watch the slowest of motion,

a grinding explosion,

change everything in the complexity of a second.

 

When I read this poem I know Pompeii is at hand.

 

They were unready. It came at the wrong

hour for them, the silver bell.

Some little dignity argued a minute with the enclosing,

and all that was left then was the gesture,

virginity, the little lost dog come home

leaping and leaping caught as in a cartoon.

 

When I read this poem I know Pompeii is imminent,

I know we are moving easily into frenzy,

I feel like taking off my hat to Pompeii

before running.

 

It is the Spicerian touches, the ambulance & the burglar alarm, the Buster Keaton-like gesture in that last couplet above, that keep this poem from being what, on another level, it actually is: a shadow of Duncan’s great “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom.” Yet as a shadow, it’s a curiously ambitious one. Stanley seems to have set out to deliberately out-Duncan Duncan and to some degree does. It’s a move Rimbaud would have understood.

 

Like any Spicerian monolog, “Pompeii” invokes a palpable but silenced you as it considers the paralysis of the decadent state – even if it is the state of poetry – moving through two slightly longer sections before arriving at the final two:

 

There was a time for consolation

in the morning of the state, you and me, Republicans,

read, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

That could console us. But now we cannot

get consolation from Greek maxims

when everybody is licking his lips, expectant.

 

•

 

Bell of a xylophone,

Bell of an ambulance,

Bell of a burglar alarm, silver.

Now time has fallen into our hands

out of all the clocks. You look to me

for consolation, and the hot wind

pours by unconcerned, flushing our steepled faces,

and the thick flow of death winnows down the window like grass.

 

The “Greek maxims” that are being rejected here can be read I think precisely in terms of Duncan and beyond him the modernist project, of which he represents (at least here) the last moment.

 

“Pompeii” reveals another aspect of Stanley’s art – its penchant for elegy. “Attis,” one of Stanley’s later San Francisco poems, and one that I’ve always read as a kind of deliberate farewell, is as successful an elegy as has been written in the last 50 years:

 

This is dying, to cut off a part of yourself

and let it grow.

 

The whole self

crawls at the thought of being mutilated,

even self-mutilated, as occurred to me

when you mentioned you had never looked at

the poem about Attis, and neither had I

 

nor at where in a poem feeling dries up –

A waterfall-filled Sierra canyon dammed

Hetch Hetchy of our spirit. Attis’s

cock, in some tree, in some jug of wine

or beautiful lips mouthing Who we love

growing.

 

So the fireflies go, with small lunchboxes,

mooning around trees. We cut

our conversation off, too, in sacrifice

 

Birds,

brinks, even

our whole environment, out to the farthest star

you can never reach

(because of light’s unchanging speed)

and so your dying can never reach either –

 

Blood,

not sinking into the ground, mysteriously,

but in the Roman sewers, forever, our home town.

 

There is a moment of grief in that last phrase that Spicer could never have managed, and Duncan never imagined.

 

Because Davies & Fagin generally steered from including work that is still in print, A Serious Girl offers something akin to an entropic reading in Stanley’s career, with eight poems totaling 40 pages representing Stanley’s first four years of writing, then seven poems (but only 16 pages) for two years spent in New York, followed by 13 poems for the final nine years in San Francisco, then just 35 for the final thirty years in British Columbia. But if Stanley emigrated physically from San Francisco, he appears never to have done so as poet. The streets and locales of San Francisco are as constant in the last half of the book as in the first. Indeed, the longest poem of all is entitled “San Francisco’s Gone.”

 

The elegy index hasn’t dropped much either. Stanley illuminates why in a passage of the relatively recent “At Andy’s,” one of the few pieces actually set in Canada:

 

Poetry means (a) I’m going to die – & (b) this notebook will be read by someone who will see how lacking I am – unless I destroy it – & I can’t do that – that would be worse than keeping it – that would mean thinking of it.

 

As this prose passage suggests, Stanley’s style has relaxed some in recent years – even if his obsessions haven’t – not unlike (although generally not as much as) Creeley’s later work. Yet the volume’s most taut – and best – poem is its very last, “Veracruz,” a remarkable gender-bending piece of autoerotic incest fantasy in which Stanley declares his desire to have been “a tall, serious girl.” In this poem, which I’m not going to quote so that you’ll have to go out & buy this book, all the promise of San Francisco’s Golden Boy is fulfilled.

 

 

 

 

* Even in the late 1970s, George Stanley’s star power in San Francisco was impressive. As I noted in the blog on September 22, when Stanley read with Ted Berrigan at the Grand Piano, each brought half of the overflow crowd.