More entries for Peter Davis’ Barnwood Press anthology on “Essential Titles” in contemporary poetry. Again the order is chronological in terms of when these books had their impact on me as a reader & in this instance the anomaly of Williams is significant.

 

Jack Spicer, Book of Magazine Verse and Language

I discovered the work of Jack Spicer when Shakespeare & Co. Books in Berkeley, where I’d been participating in a weekly open reading series, decided instead to devote one Sunday afternoon in early 1966 to a memorial reading for this poet around what would have been his 41^st birthday. The reader was someone of whom I’d never heard before either, Robin Blaser. But the work connected with me in ways I could not account for just from listening, so I went hunting for Spicer’s books. In 1966 (and for much of the ensuing decade), there were really just two that were readily available and each was profoundly unsettling.

 

Language, first published in 1964, was a book that at first felt impossible within the world of the New American poet. To begin with, it insisted on a concept of language for the poem that was not ignorant of linguistics. This meant that all the claims that Olson in particular & the projectivists in general were making about the ear & breath suddenly sounded quaint, romantic, even mystical. Yet in its arms-open-wide embrace of loss & despair, Spicer sounded a completely different note, one that demanded a larger emotional palette for the poem than was being used by the New Americans. In Book of Magazine Verse, published right after his death, Spicer made explicit the degree to which he understood his poetry as an active intervention of the literary scene, figuring the book as a book of “typical” (sometimes comically so) poems that might appear in various periodicals, ranging from The Nation to Downbeat to The St. Louis Sporting News to Poetry Chicago. Book of Magazine Verse is the forerunner of all the critical poetries now being written, from the work of Bruce Andrews to that of Brian Kim Stefans.

 

Robert Creeley, Pieces

In the creative writing program at San Francisco State in the late 1960s, the students were almost all passionate followers of the New American Poetry, differing only in which of its identified trends they considered the “correct” path for poetry. The bulk of the students I knew seemed devoted to various modes of Black Mountain poetry – Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Levertov, Blackburn, Eigner, Dorn et al. As students, we took the theoretical pronouncements made by Olson & Duncan very seriously. So when Edward Dorn & LeRoi Jones both made breaks – Dorn with his comic opera pseudo-epic philosophical tome Gunslinger, Jones with his immersion into black nationalism via (this was always the hard part to figure out) Maoism, they were perceived by many as prodigals. But when Creeley took just as a radical a turn in Pieces, one could not explain the process away so easily. Here was a major New American demonstrating that Olson’s dictum that “What does not change / is the will to change” must also be a personal commitment.

I & my friends should have seen it coming. Already, Creeley’s previous book, Words, had moved away from the romantic neo-Beat lyrics of For Love towards a poetic that was more formal & looking directly to Zukofsky in its sense as to what form might mean for the poem. But the poems in Words still basically looked like poems, or close enough to what we knew as poetry, to fool us into seeing continuities rather than development & departures. With Pieces, however, you could not make the same mistake:

 

Here, there,
every-
where

 

As early as the 1950s, Creeley had written on the question of referentiality, but it was not until Pieces that his work began to demonstrate what a post-referential work might mean.

 

William Carlos Williams, Spring & All

In 1970, Harvey Brown’s Frontier Press published what may have been a pirate edition of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 book, Spring and All, a work that embeds some of Williams’ most famous early poems, including “red wheel barrow” and “The pure products of America,” within a booklength theoretical manifesto, one that defines poetry as “new form dealt with as a reality in itself.” That remains, 80 years after its initial publication, the most concise & accurate definition of the poem I have ever read. The book reveals Williams to have been more than equal to the critical challenges of modernism & shows him to be operating on a level at which among his peers only Pound or Stein could even hope to aspire.

 

Yet in 1970, Spring & All had been out of print for more than 40 years, having barely received any distribution or notice at the time of its original publication. Its reissue literally stunned the community of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. Overnight, Olson’s theoretical writing no longer seemed the latest thinking. But it was especially appalling to discover that somebody had gone beyond Projective Verse decades before Olson had written it. More than any other volume, this book convinced many poets in my generation that we had to go back & look at the early modernists all over again and that we couldn’t trust the general wisdom.