Dale Smith asked me if I had any theories why “the day book, dated poems and journals became so important” to the New Americans. It’s a good question & especially fortuitous that Dale thought to include dated poems as an element in the sequence. What follows isn’t an answer so much as a series notes that I would follow up if I were to try to develop this line of thinking further. But I see the concern for the daily, or however you want to characterize it, as a specific moment in a larger sweep of changes within the poem – one that begins in the 19^th century and which continues onward well after the New Americans discovered their own versions of FiloFax and the Day-Timer.  For example, one immediate beneficiary of this phenomenon was, I would argue, Clark Coolidge, particularly with his early long poems Polaroid & The Maintains.* Let me explain.

 

The issue as I see it has to do with what the poem is about. Or, perhaps more accurately, with the problem of aboutness. It’s worth noting that the very same 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads that initiates, for English, the discussion of the role of speech in poetry – and which anticipates the prose poem** – also opens the question of what poetry should be about:

 

It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feel therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.

 

The word feeling no doubt serves crudely as an umbrella category for a wide range of meaning effects. Yet the distinction being drawn between poems that proceed from meaning & those for which meaning is imposed from the outside remains a fairly reliable demarcation between all the various alternative traditions on the one hand, which can trace their roots back to Wordsworth, Coleridge & Blake, and the all various schools of quietude that, to this day, attempt to perpetuate the 18^th century in verse.

 

This impulse arrives in America somewhat over a half century later in the twin guises of Whitman, whose cumulative project Leaves of Grass to this day challenges our definition of the book, and Dickinson with all her untitled poems. Not that, for any of these writers, the move away from meaning-giving master narratives was accomplished either entirely or all at once. One sees the same struggle repeated over & again throughout the 20^th century. The Pound of Mawberly – the Pound begrudgingly acknowledged by the American school of quietude – versus the Pound of The Cantos. Yet one can play this same scenario this way: Pound’s Cantos (&/or WCW’s Paterson) vs. Zukofsky’s “A.” & one could play different sections of “A” off one another likewise.*** Stein, living in a nation in which Lautréamont & Rimbaud had already moved at least as far as Zukofsky by the 1870s, never had trouble with this issue. She got it, day one – which is why, in part, it took so long for her to be incorporated “seriously” into American literature. More than a few parallels might be drawn to Joyce, whose Ulysses has often been interpreted as a “making heroic” of a single day of plebian life, but might just as easily be read the other way around, as a trenchant satire on the nature of heroic narrative. And whose wake could not be misread in such terms – its narrative dimension is at best a game.

 

This issue of aboutness had been roiling around in unfinished, incomplete modes for nearly a century by the time the New Americans show up in the early 1950s. If it’s most often visible in the large undertakings of the major modernists, it’s also often there in a deeply conflicted way. Thus Crane’s The Bridge can be read only as an extreme of the problem, not radically dissimilar from, say, The Cantos, The Waste Land or the later Paterson. Thus H.D. uses Grecian images & themes to “write about nothing” almost as insistently as Stein, but in such a way as to appeal constantly to a certain readerly nostalgia. With the New Americans, however, several now elements come into play more or less simultaneously:

 

§         Olson’s interest the poem as documentation of the thinking process

 

§         Kerouac’s interest in the poem as documentation of the writing process

 

§         Asian influences, at first through Rexroth & later Snyder & Whalen, introducing a tradition in which various diary-modes had long existed

 

§         An interest in modernist literary diaries through Duncan (Anaïs Nin) and the NY School (Ned Rorem)

 

§         The impact of the late stages of Pound’s Cantos & Pound’s life, the latter in particular demonstrating all too clearly why a master narrative is invariably a totalitarian one

 

§         A visible critique of ego beginning to show up in music, from Cage’s uses of chance to Harry Partch’s appropriation of hobo graffiti for texts

 

The poem of dailiness becomes the perfect – if temporary – expression of this convergence.

 

Frank O’Hara first uses a date to title a poem on October 26, 1952 – the title even gives the hour “10:30 O’clock.” Duncan follows suit starting with some of his Stein imitations in 1953. Whalen does it in 1957. Olson, whose epistolary mode of public letters in Maximus could be read as an alternate model – one to which Duncan was at least partially drawn – doesn’t use a date in the title of a Maximus until the very end of ’59.

 

The journal consolidates this interest. The first instance I can recall of a New American project that proposed itself explicitly as a journal, thus acknowledging that form as such, was Ted Enslin’s New Sharon’s Prospect and Journals, published as a special issue of Coyote’s Journal+ in 1966. Enslin’s work linked both prose & verse. As his later long poems, really meditations on the possibility of the line, would make evident – Enslin, something of a late comer among the New Americans, arrived at a point in his writing where any interest in a master narrative, an overarching meaning into which all other meanings roll up, was simply of no interest.

 

The journal presents a model for writing that borders on, if not always fully engages in, plotlessness in a format that readers will inherently recognize. That is, I think, both its strength & its curse. That’s also why it passed through a late phase of the New American movement rather in the manner of a flash flood. And why the logical next step belongs to Clark Coolidge, moving writing to a point where the question of self-actualizing meaning suddenly becomes the issue for form. Interestingly, Blackburn, whose published journals begin in 1967, as well as Coolidge, then writing much more like a young Phil Whalen, appeared in Coyote’s Journal immediately prior to Enslin’s New Sharon’s Prospect and Journals.

 

 

 

 

 

* A comic take on the phenomenon of numbering in titles can be seen in Kit Robinson’s newest book, 9:45, in which every poem has some form of numbering system for a title.

 

** ”It may safely be affirmed, that there neither is, not can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.”

 

*** Eliot’s stock among the quietus set fell demonstrably after the publication of the drafts of The Waste Land in which it became clear that – if you could excise all of “Gerontion” & still yield the larger text – TWL was not nearly so committed to any master narrative at all, but functioned rather as a series of inspired riffs

 

+ Easily the most under-documented, under-acknowledged little magazine of the 1960s. It was the model for Caterpillar , for example. Coyote’s Journal  came about, as did Big Table in Chicago, after a campus magazine in Oregon was shut down for printing the Beats. Coyote’s Journal’s editors were James Koller, Edward van Aelstyn & William Wroth.