What my kids know about Paul Goodman is that their father regales them with a few lines of “The Lordly Hudson” every time we cross the Tappan Zee Bridge – one more reason not to live in Nyack. I can’t say that I know nearly as much about the man as I’d like – I read Growing Up Absurd when I was in high school but didn’t retain very much of it. And for all of his other social roles – novelist, psychologist, professor at Black Mountain College, essayist and urban planner – it’s the poetry that I think of when I hear his name. In my imagination, he and Kenneth Rexroth were the two poet-radicals who might be said to have anticipated the New American Poetry without having ever been fully invited inside by the writers who then emerged in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Unlike, for example, the Objectivists.

 

Yet I have personal evidence that the New Americans took Goodman seriously. In 1965, during the Berkeley Poetry Conference, one of the largest and most well-attended parties – my memory tells me that it occurred the same night that Ginsberg gave his reading of Kral Majales in Dwinelle Hall – was an affair given in  honor not of Ginsberg, but of Goodman, who was not a participant of the conference at all, but happened merely to be in San Francisco and Berkeley that week on some other business. As a hanger on at the fringes around Ginsberg, I dutifully trooped off with the King of the May and maybe 50 other souls from the campus to the nearby Victorian – the party as I recall spilled over through multiple units in the house and into the “in-law” cottage in the rear as well. I was frankly puzzled at the idea that this older guy was somehow more of a big deal than Ginsberg, but that certainly was what I picked up from Allen’s deference to him.

 

That turned out to be the only time I ever saw Goodman and the question of his relationship to these younger writers – Ginsberg was born the same year as my parents, so he didn’t seem that young, although until least 1970 everybody in that whole scene was being valorized in the media for their very youth – hasn’t crept up that often since. Michael Magee appears to be out to change that.

 

Since I never read Magee, poetry or criticism, without learning something of value, I pay attention. In the new No, he has a short essay entitled “Personal Poems: Pragmatism from Paul Goodman to Frank O’Hara.”  In it, the argument Magee makes is that O’Hara’s Personism joins the peripatetic lunch poet’s interest in black culture to the history of American pragmatism and that, thereby, the coy manifesto “Personism” is in fact “an unrecognized ‘classic’ of American pragmatism.” That is a large claim to make for a document that is all of six paragraphs long. Strategically, it’s a somewhat circuitous argument, in that Magee uses comments O’Hara made about Goodman in order to justify his thesis for O’Hara as a philosophic mind, even while what Magee is really doing – particularly in the context of No – is using O’Hara as a mechanism for relegitimating the relatively neglected Goodman.

 

It’s worth examining the text in question. One could characterize “Personism: A Manifesto” as four paragraphs debunking the theories of meaning and literature that underpinned modernism, one paragraph mostly debunking abstraction* and one that serves as a swift getaway. As in O’Hara’s poetry, the brilliance lies far less in what he’s doing than in the way, in the most immediate sense, that he does it. Certainly the poem that O’Hara is describing in the manifesto is itself far from his own best work, not the sort of thing you would normally think to build your most important critical statement around:

 

     we don’t like Lionel Trilling

we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like

Henry James so much we like Herman Melville

 

Not the most unusual lunch gab to share with a friend, perhaps, but, as a critical process, actually existing Personism seems a lot like the gate keeping one used to associate with Studio 54.

 

Magee makes the case for Goodman’s impact on O’Hara forcefully. The number of out-of-the-closet intellectuals, especially during the 1950s, was still in single digits, a significant number of them poets, such as Ginsberg and Duncan. And one can surely hear the echo of the New Americans in some of Goodman’s poems, such as “April, 1962”:

 

My countrymen have now become too base,

I give them up. I cannot speak with men

not my equals. I was an American,

where now to drag my days out and erase

this awful memory of the United States?

how can I work? I hired out my pen

to make my country practical, but I can

no longer serve these people, they are worthless.

 

“Resign! resign!” the word rings in my soul

-- is it for me? or shall I make a sign

and picket the White House blindly in the rain,

or hold it up on Madison Avenue

until I vomit, or trudge to and fro

gloomily in front of the public school?

 

Draw a Venn diagram around the various poetic impulses in O’Hara, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg and something like this might in fact emerge.

 

Less clear in Magee’s overall schema is the role of black culture. Both O’Hara’s essay and “Personal Poem” take as their point of origin a lunch that O’Hara had with the then-LeRoi Jones at Moriarty’s on Third Avenue on August 27, 1959, a Thursday. Magee parlays this into an approximation of O’Hara’s poetry with jazz – not an unreasonable association given how deeply some of O’Hara’s peers (notably Creeley) were impacted by bebop and after – in which the stability of framework, really of address, that is the hallmark of modernist work becomes a far more improvisational act, predicated on the concept that the “you” of the poem is specific and therefore must change from reader to reader. It’s an interesting idea and one I’m going to have to think through – not so much the influence of jazz culture on O’Hara and the NY School,** but rather the relation of the two with regards to what Magee characterizes as the Pragmatic tradition.

 

 

 

 

* O’Hara’s example seems almost deliberately aimed at the work of Barbara Guest.

 

** The impact of post-war jazz does seem pretty minimal in Ashbery and Schuyler and Ted Berrigan’s collection of Arthur Godfrey records hardly demonstrates an ear for the nuances of Mingus or Monk.