Intellectual fashions tend to wash over poetry. Robert Duncan, in The H.D. Book, marvels at the secular imagination of the Imagists even as he prepares to undermine it:

The immediate persuasion of Imagist poets was against the fantastic and fictional as it was for the clear-seeing, even the clairvoyant, and the actual, for percept against concept. The Image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in time” or “the local conditions’’ could open out along lines of the poet’s actual feeling. The poem could be erotic and contain evocations of actual sexual experience as I have suggested in the poem Orchards. And then, the image was also something actually seen in the process of the poem, not something pretended or made up. It was the particular image evoked in the magic operation of the poet itself—whatever its source, and it usually had many sources. In reviewing Fletcher’s poetry in 1916, H.D. may be speaking too of her own art: “He uses the direct image, it is true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer images—a pebble, as it were, dropped in a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of sound.”

H.D., of course, turns out to be anything but a proto-Objectivist. Between Freud & her imagined classic landscapes, she creates a world that is perfect for a young man committed to the idea that “the authors are in eternity.” & it is to Ms. Doolittle that Duncan focuses the gaze of his “Day Book,” proto-blog that it is, plotless prose as critical meditation. Of all the high modernists, H.D. is the one whose orbit Duncan shows no desire whatsoever to attempt to escape. Not Pound & certainly not-Eliot, that perfect middle-brow tucked under all those layers of pretension. Nor Stein, though Duncan had more to do with her resurrection than any other poet of his generation. Nor Zukofsky, though – again – Duncan had more to do with his resurrection than any other poet of his generation.

Given that Duncan himself is not so widely perused these days – there are few Duncan clones manqué out there, not a one under the age of 60 – it is interesting how much of our own literary landscape today proves to be the one that Duncan willed: Spicer, Stein, Zukofsky: all are much more widely influential now than in the 1960s. H.D., Helen Adam – Duncan’s enthusiasms have proven to be contagious. And if not all of his enthusiasms have succeeded equally – the impact of Lenore Kandel is not easy to discern – his overall track record stands up well. Combine Duncan’s vision of poetry with that of Ted Berrigan & accommodate for shifts in demography & technology and you get a world of poetry that seems remarkably like the one we all inhabit today.

I’ve commented before on the decline of mysticism, those “other and vaguer images,” as an active element in poetry. Not that it has entirely disappeared; merely that it is not the omnipresent phenomenon that one saw in the 1960s. Its presence in anthology’s like George Quasha’s Active Anthology or in magazines such as Coyote’s Journal or Caterpillar was unmistakable. What intrigues me at the moment, still basking in the wake of the Social Mark Poetry Symposium as well as Brian Kim Stefans’ Creep anti-manifesto, is the question of what might now be filling that social role in poetry, what might constitute the wisdom discourse of otherness for younger poets now.

That’s a tricky question. One can certainly talk about discourses that appear important to writers in the 21^st century – technology & the anti-globalization movement are two obvious ones, with some interesting interrelationships. But neither discourse as discourse – with the possible exception of something like the remarkably fuzzy-headed Empire by Hardt & Negri – seems overly prone to the most problematic aspect of mysticism as practiced in the poetry of the 1960s: as a domain in which the poet held special knowledge that was then being revealed to (& likewise concealed from) the reader. Such a discourse has less to do with its content, which could, frankly, be anything, and more to do with the unequal distribution of power between writer & reader that it enacts. Today such a one-sided discourse would seem wildly anachronistic. That to me feels like one of the best aspects of contemporary poetry.

An interesting variant – a doctoral dissertation for someone combining literature & a social science, whether history or sociology or even psychology – might be to take a closer look at those poets over the years whose approach to some given discourse to some degree overwhelmed their poetics:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Eli Siegel taking what would later generations would have called the guru path, becoming a “healer” who focused on “curing” homosexuality under the rubric of Aesthetic Realism

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Trim Bissell going from the pages of Poetry to the Weather Underground & the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in the 1960s

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Robert Sward & Richard Tillinghast each taking some years out from their careers to follow spiritual journeys

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Perhaps the most extreme instance ever of this last path, the writing of L. Ron Hubbard, whose spare poems from the 1930s reflect a reading that certainly must have included Williams, cummings & Langston Hughes but which never got the attention of his sci-fi novels before the founding of Scientology

There were, of course, others who never volunteered for such journeys, but were invited into them, usually by the state, such as Margaret Randall’s having to flee to Cuba after rescuing her children back from the Mexican police who were after her for her support of the 1968 anti-Olympic games demonstrations there, or John Sinclair’s adventure with the authorities, ostensibly over cannabis sativa but really more for his support of various elements of the Detroit rebellion in the 1960s, a phenomenon that joined everything from street riots & the White Panther Party (not a typo) to the music of the MC-5.

The question of music itself might well be raised – one might add another bullet to this list for Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith & Jim Carroll.

I would distinguish all of these folks from writers such as Thomas Merton or Norman Fischer or Phil Whalen or Gail Sher or Brother Antoninus/William Everson who take a distinct – in their cases, spiritual – life path & combine it with poetry. This is where the question of the path overwhelming the poetry comes in. I would similarly distinguish someone like Amiri Baraka from those on my list, even though it is apparent in his poetry how dramatically powerful the impact of his political evolution has been. Ditto Diane DiPrima, although you can see in her Revolutionary Letters precisely the dynamics of special discourse as proprietary wisdom.

And I would also distinguish this phenomenon from those writers – especially thick around the music industry – who suddenly come forth with poetry, from Jewel to Henry Rollins to the late Jim Morrison.

If/when the serious shooting begins – we’re already sporadically bombing some Iraqi defensive positions – in America’s next imperial war, and all does not go just swimmingly & very quickly for Rummy, W & the gang, significant threads in the social fabric are going to unravel. I would love to think that younger poets today are smarter than they were in the 1960s, because the risks involved are so extreme.