Sometime back around the days of the Kennedy administration, an American poet was penning lines such as these:

 

Cetus-white flakes of boar still are sticking to my back

like dying leeches, and the aged

strata of flesh

rippled to numb

friction by dregs of Hudsonian

wind.   Shoulder-blade armor, slabs

of the ass, lock around

shaking armadillo

candy.

 

Not the psychological jargon or landscapes of surrealism, this poetry was trying on the possibility of linguistic meaning treated very much in the manner that abstract expressionists had been treating painting. This was a poetry that did not feign speech, even as it invoked elements thereof.

 

At that moment in history – say 1963 – one could count such poetic investigators of the linguistic in the United States on the fingers of one hand. While John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1962, Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On was written initially in 1953. When the Sun, however, didn’t become widely available until published by Black Sparrow in 1969. Jackson Mac Low was also about, active as were Ashbery & Koch, in New York City, but his poetry took even longer to get into print. Mac Low’s work didn’t become widely available in book form until Black Sparrow published 22 Light Poems – the first 16 of which were written in 1962 – in 1968. That work, in spite of the elaborate methods by which Mac Low determined which light went where in the text, generally followed a traditionally discursive model. As a result the true radicalism of Mac Low’s project, although evident to those who knew him or saw him perform in & around New York, wasn’t really visible to many until Dick Higgins published Stanzas for Iris Lezak in 1971. Mac Low had been writing using chance methodologies to generate texts since the final days of 1954. Mac Low & Koch in particular appear to have been models that Ted Berrigan had in mind when he first put together The Sonnets in the spring of 1963. And that was it.

 

The result is that you have parallel but different narratives for this new writing that was no longer the mimicking the spoken. In order of composition, you get the following:

 

Koch → Mac Low → Ashbery → Berrigan

 

But in terms of publication in book form, you get a very different sequence:

 

Ashbery → Berrigan → Koch → Mac Low

 

It’s even far more complicated than I’m making it, given that, to pick just one complicating factor, Clark Coolidge published Ing with Angel Hair in 1968 (that is, prior to Koch’s Sun) & Space with Harper & Row, complete with a hardback printing, in 1970. By the time Stanzas for Iris Lezak came out, This magazine & the whole langpo scene were already gathering considerable momentum. Plus, both Ashbery & Koch had largely stepped back from the formal radicalism of their works of the 1950s. Indeed, after Three Poems, Ashbery spent the 1970s issuing his savage School of Quietude parodies – for which he was awarded every prize that school could muster. Untangling a narrative of the actual evolution of innovation was virtually impossible by 1972, especially since at that time it all was too new, too close & still very fluid.

 

Yet for me the biggest problem with any of these theoretical chronologies is that each leaves out the poet I’ve quoted at the head of this blog: Jack Collom. The poem whose opening stanza I’ve just reprinted, “Spring’s First Day Ode,” didn’t appear in book form, as best I can tell, until it showed up in the “Early Poems” section of his selected works, Red Car Goes By (Selected Poems 1955-2000), published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press & edited by an all-star collective that included Hejinian, Reed Bye, Clark Coolidge, Larry Fagin & Merrill Gilfillan. The book was published in 2001. I’ve had the book since it came out, but I’ve just begun to really dive in.

 

I think I must have seen Collom’s work for the first time when David Gitin included the both of us in an issue of his journal Amphora in 1971.* I presumed that he was, like me, a poet in his early 20s, just getting going. Collom was in fact already 40. And while he published at least 16 books of his own poetry prior to this 500-page selected, most were with small presses located in Colorado or Nebraska. Outside of three textbooks published by the Teachers & Writers Collective, 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.

 

While Collom did spend some time in New York, his Poetry-in-the-Schools assignments – Colorado, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming – tell you the real reason why he has been so terribly neglected. Up until very recently – & I mean in the last half-dozen years, as the web has begun to erase the hard borders of geographical isolation – any poet living outside of the major metro areas on the two coasts confronted an especially daunting task in getting their work known. In fact, Collom in this regard was exceptionally lucky since, in 1974, New York more or less came to him in the form of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a subway stop on that old Tibet-Manhattan line right there on Arapahoe Ave. What if, I wonder, Collom were living in Mitchell, South Dakota? Or Rock Springs, Wyoming? Colorado had only a little over one million in population in 1952, the year Collom got a degree from Colorado A&M. It’s population since then has more than tripled. The population of Boulder has more than quadrupled.

 

Hollywood’s romance of the west over several decades of cowboy movies have tended to blind us to the fact that these landlocked states are in some very real ways America’s own Siberia. (Indeed, Siberia is reputed to have just as many natural wonders as the Rockies or the Grand Canyon, including the largest inland lake in the world.) Even now you can find poets – Gene Frumkin, Lisa Cooper & Keith Wilson are three examples – whose work would be much more widely read if they only lived within 300 miles of St. Marks or City Lights.

 

So Red Car Goes By is more than just a selected poems by a major poet, although it is that also. It’s an intervention into the collective amnesia that causes muddled thinking about the history of American letters. I can tell already that this is one book that is going to transform how I think about poetry & the world.

 

 

 

 

* Gitin also included Carl Rakosi, Larry Eigner, Peter Riley, Diane di Prima, Lewis Mac Adams Jr., Denise Levertov, Andrew Crozier, Clark Coolidge & Charles Amirkhanian in that same 40-page issue. With over 30 years of hindsight, Gitin’s editorial instincts seem remarkably on target.