John Ashbery isn’t the only influence to pop up in the “Early Poems” section of Jack Collom’s giant Red Car Goes By volume. And the influences aren’t always whom one might expect, either. One poem, “Bauch,” suggests that Collom must have been such German poets of the period as Helmut Heissenbüttel or Eugen Gomringer. One senses also both the Beats & the Projectivists as people whom the young Coloradoan must have then been absorbing.

 

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of that early section in Red Car is that Collom – perhaps because of his great geographical distance from any manifestation of The Scene (the bio at Teachers & Writers notes that he did not meet another poet until he had been writing for eight years) – seems never to have felt any need to pick & choose between various New American tendencies – he could & did absorb a little from everybody & in such a fashion that it was never anybody’s poetry but his very own.

 

This in many ways is radically different from what I found as a young poet in the mid-1960s, coming along really just after the period represented by Collom’s “Early Poems.” The world I ran into was in fact deeply partisan – a young Projectivist – which is more less what I must have been between 1966, say, & coming under the heady influence of Bob Grenier in 1970 – a young Projectivist might be interested in, say, the New York School or the Beats, but really only as a friendly backdrop to the so-called real debate of that period, which was What to make of Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger, seen by more than a few people at the time as a form of revolt against Projectivist principles. Where you a ‘Slinger person or a North Atlantic Turbine person, that was the question, Turbine being the apotheosis of ‘50s style Projectivist writing? Did you include Duncan in your sense of Projectivism &, if so, which one? How did you account for his relationship with the likes of Jack Spicer, who seemed so at odds with Olson’s sense of language? & if you were a hardcore Projectivist, did you think of yourself as expansive & inclusive of history & sources, a la Olson & Pound, or did you find “book learning” to be inauthentic compared with the personal & thus prefer the far narrower intimate focus of a Creeley? & what did you do with Zukofsky, who – like Olson – seemed very much to come out of the most radical aspects of Williams & Pound, but in whom Olson obviously had no interest (&, so far as I could tell, vice versa)? Oppen was just starting to show up in print, Bunting likewise, & folks like Rakosi & Reznikoff were still principally rumors. Niedecker was unknown, even by the poets I knew in Milwaukee. Thus when Kay Boyle handed me a manuscript by somebody I’d never even heard of – Joe Ceravolo’s Ho Ho Caribou – & announced that it was going to win the first “Frank O’Hara” award & be published by a New York trade press, one had a sense that powerful political forces were ganging up to push one tendency forward at the expense of one’s own. & it was a world in which Creeley’s Pieces came as a resounding jolt – it was as radically different from Projectivist assumptions as Slinger had been, just in a different fashion.*

 

If all this seems more than a little icky, well, it was. But this hyper-partisanship also explains, at least in part, why the poetry wars of the 1970s proved to be so terribly intense.** Part of what is so very interesting reading these earliest poems by Jack Collom is that he seems to have already figured out what it seems to have taken so many other poets another twenty years to get straight – it’s not a zero sum competition. Liking the New York School need not preclude an interest in the Beats, the Projectivists nor anything else for that matter. In that sense, Collom is writing – these poems date from 1955 to 1964 – very much like a poet of the 1980s. The man literally was a quarter century ahead of his time.

 

One wonders – especially if one c’est moi – how other poets of his time must have interpreted Collom’s eclecticism. As a wishy-washy failure to declare allegiances? Or as having already gone beyond the stumbling blocks that other poets were only then starting to pick their way through? That Collom had books from Tim Longville’s Grosseteste Review Press – whose interest in U.S. poetry combined Projectivism & Objectivism – in 1972 & United Artists Books, virtually an official outpost of 2^nd Gen. NY School poetry, in 1981, suggests that Collom’s poetry was connecting with some diverse audiences. It may also suggest that Collom’s writing, by its very independence, can be read by an aesthetically committed reader as being part of whichever literary tradition one happens to like best.

 

I find this interesting in part because it is so consistent with much later attitudes & approaches to writing. & Collom has himself been a very consistent & productive poet – even in the 1950s, he has the sharpest eye for (& greatest knowledge about) birds of any American poet. In a world in which many poets think “hawk” is terribly descriptive, this is a man who knows a harrier from a kestrel & that you don’t look for burrowing owls in a tree.

 

 

 

 

* One that made it possible to imagine how Zukofsky fit into the evolving tradition.

 

** The wars were, in part, an extension of a situation that had existed for over a decade, hardened in part by the fact that younger poets often took the divisions in the Allen anthology far more seriously than did that anthology’s contributors. The most vigorous & vicious attacks against langpo, it is worth noting, came from wannabe New Americans who felt they had “signed up” for the world projected in The New American Poetry & that anything that suggested ongoing evolution directly threatened the petrified tableaux of their worldview.

 

 

 

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Jordan Davis tries to keep me honest. When I wrote on Tuesday that “Red Car Goes By is the first collection of Collom’s work ever to be widely available, its nearest competitors for that honor being a 300-copy edition published by Grosseteste in the U.K. & a stapled book from Lewis Warsh’s United Artists,” he sent me a series of notes, one of which indicated that The Fox was (a) perfect bound, not stapled, (b) published in an edition of 750 copies & that (c) United Artists was Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer. Davis even adds that it was typeset by Skeezo & printed by McNaughton & Gunn.

 

I stand corrected on all accounts. I was operating from a description I’d seen from a rare book dealer – I’ve never seen the book itself.