Reading Eleni Sikelianos’
poem, an excerpt from a longer text entitled “California ,” in the new issue of Radical
Society, I had a strange experience. I felt the presence of Michael McClure. Not the
McClure of the Ghost Tantras,
the plays or the ecstatic howls of the should-have-been ineffable, but
rather the cosmological McClure, the PBS pop science McClure, casting into
centered texts meditations based on things he’s seen or read about the natural
world in the popular media. For example, this piece, entitled “For the Death of
100 Whales”:
Hung midsea
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers
Brains the size of a teacup
Mouths the size of a door
Mouths the size of a door
The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.
Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.
Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.
This poem, which McClure
read at the Six Gallery reading in 1955 that helped to spark the so-called Beat
Revolution – & not co-incidentally first pointed out to the world at large
that San Francisco was as vital a center for American letters as New York – is predicated on an April 1954 story in Time magazine about, in McClure’s
own words,
seventy-nine
bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland
murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers,
armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales
to death.
Although this is not the
kind of poem that McClure is typically represented by in the anthologies, it is
a type of poem that he has written his entire life. Its value lies not in
McClure’s research – none is involved – but rather in the way he imbues the
topic with emotion & narrative figuration. In a sense, this is the opposite
of the “research poem,” whether of the Pound-Olson variation with their
unintentional parodies of the scholar fumbling around in the archives or of the
more journalistic “investigative poetry” approach advocated in recent decades
by Ed Sanders. Another poet who literally made use of PBS and other mainstream
media not only for ideas, but for layers of content thus displayed, was Larry
Eigner.
When I was growing up as a
poet in the 1970s, I used to hear other writers comment negatively – sometimes
emphatically so – about this side of McClure’s poetry, as though it were a kind
of debased product & that, in working from sources in everyday media,
McClure was essentially revealing a kind of laziness that was at the heart of
his project, not unlike the equally scandalous process of allowing other people
type up his holographic manuscripts & perform what in the age of the
typewriter was not an inconsequential function: the centering of his lines.
Somewhere along the line I
decided that this was a bad rap. In an age where Andy Warhol & others –
this was still pre-Jeff Koons – were utilizing assistants to help construct the
work of art*, any insistence on doing your own research struck me as a kind
defensive measure on the part of writers who felt that, if such aid &
delegation were possible, then perhaps readers might not appropriately
appreciate their own devotion to all the ancillary tasks that might envelop the
act of writing. The work that struck me as the decisive argument for the
permissibility of appropriated materials as a source for literature was Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony.
The primary differences
between Reznikoff’s approach & McClure’s are (1) Reznikoff’s focus was the
social while McClure has been more drawn to the natural world & (2)
Reznikoff’s approach to these materials has been one of minimal overt
commentary, almost a deadpan transparency, while McClure’s has been one of a
drum-beating & hollering display of empathy. Empathy, of course, has ever
been “uncool” & “unhip”
& I suspect McClure had to deal with that prejudice back in the 1950s every
bit as much as in the 1970s & ‘80s.**
Sikelianos’ poem skips the
drum-beating & ALL CAPS HOLLERING, but in fact is an act of empathic
inhabitation of a milieu inhabitable today only in the imagination:
There
was still the problem
of the mystery of regenerative forces here on Earth.
My
early California ns
might have been prowlers & plunderers, lover of the
lower orders of intelligence
They
might have had a fortunate notes or eyes or horns
of surprising size. They
were
4-handed
animals or omnivorous quadrupeds or
My
early Californians might have been 8-feet tall stomping around in the glacial
ice
Ages-extinct
fires nearly tiny dragon-headed lakes
Chasing
the America n
camel, chewing the fat fireside & touching up a wooly mammoth,
mini-horses, imitation
bison four times the weight
of buffaloes, ground sloths the size of tanks,
giant shining armadillo roll over, silver
wheels crushing tender grasse s,
Edentata
belonging to the (inhabited) Earth,
edacious at the tooth
of Time, nibbling some sweet thing, fiery
Hymenoptera
edulcorated by their history with men
Shades of Forrest Gander ! This text itself has been edulcorated – that c can be pronounced either hard or soft
according to the OED – by
polysyllables a-babble. What we have here –the quotation above constitutes
maybe one-fifth of the Radical Society
excerpt – is poem as nature museum diorama.
Writing of Earliest Worlds last
September,
I noted how Sikelianos’ work there included lines that were “among the most
thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly heard (&, not coincidentally, felt) since Charles Olson was a young man.” Almost by its nature
& certainly by its genre, “California ” is a more relaxed piece of writing. It’s probably
accessible to a broader range of readers, albeit at the cost being less
exhilarating to that core who’ve seen what Sikelianos
at her most intense can do.
Which
brings my back to Michael McClure & the question of choices in writing. The very qualities – empathy & narrative
figuration – that I suspect enabled the Radical
Society editorial board to include this work in the first issue of the
journal’s new life are those which are most apt to divide poetry’s primary
group of readers, who may well find it all too “inauthentic.” Since this is an
excerpt, it will be interesting to see how “California ” develops & also how it’s received.
* If Sol Lewitt actually drew all those lines on art museum walls
himself, he’d end up in the American Visionary
Art Museum.
** Thus,
for example, I don’t recall ever having seen an article that fully explored
what I take to be McClure’s greatest contribution to poetry – his exquisite
sense of the pacing of detail. It’s a side of his writing that shows up most
sharply delineated in the cosmology poems.