Peter
Davis, who is editing a collection for Barnwood Press, a
collective from Ball State University in Indiana that has been operating with
surprisingly little fanfare for 25 years, recently asked me if I would
contribute to a forthcoming anthology by listing “5-10 ‘Essential titles,’ plus
a brief commentary.” That’s the sort of query guaranteed to raise all sorts of
questions, not the least of which is how – 37 years after post-structuralism
first reared its head in the U.S. at “The Languages of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man” conference at Johns Hopkins – anybody can use a phrase like
“Essential titles” without giggling. To make matters even more problematic,
As of
today, I’ve come up with a list of titles that were for me “essential” in that,
in each instance, the work forced me to rethink & redefine what I was doing
as a poet, artist & person. This does not necessarily mean that these books
were “the best” or “most important” from the perspective of a broader literary
history, although each is a superb work in & of itself. Nor are these books
necessarily my favorite writing, even by these authors. Rather, these are the
books that changed me & in so doing helped to shape who I have become. This
may have as much to do with when I
read them as anything else. Always, it has to do with what each taught me. Here are the first couple of titles, more or
less in chronological order – the chronology of my reading, that is.
William Carlos Williams, The Desert Music
I have
written about this book before. It was through The Desert Music, and especially its title poem, that I first truly
discovered poetry & understood that I would some day be a poet. I came upon
this volume quite by chance in the Albany Public Library when I was a junior in
high school, spending a weekend morning reading, avoiding the chaos of a
household with a mentally ill adult. It was, I swear, the oddity of a hardback
with pale yellow binding that first drew me to the book.
I’d been
writing fiction for six years and was beginning to recognize that I would be a
writer, although only with the foggiest & most grandiose notion of what
that might mean. I’d been unhappy with my fiction as well because what I was
interested in most in my own writing seemed to have little if anything to do
with elements of character or plot. But what I could not see was how I might at
get at this thing – I wouldn’t have called it the sensuality of language
because I simply didn’t have the vocabulary for that then.
Suddenly,
reading Williams’ words aloud, I realized that I didn’t have to struggle for
this unnamed object of desire because here
it was, absolutely clear, utterly present. Williams depicts a figure asleep
on the bridge between El Paso & Juarez and asks:
How shall we get said what must
be said?
Only
the poem.
Only the counted poem, to an
exact measure:
to
imitate, not to copy nature, not
to copy
nature
NOT, prostrate, to copy nature
but a dance! to dance
two and
two with him –
sequestered
there asleep,
right
end up!
Ironically,
it was Williams’ most narrative poem that led me to see a possibility for
writing that extended well beyond vulgar narrative. But I wasn’t seeing a lot
of what was going on in this poem when I first read it – including that playful
allusion to Karl Marx in the last line.
This is the
first of two Williams’ titles on my list & it is worth noting that neither was a New Directions book.
I attended –
more as a teen party crasher than a serious writer – the Berkeley Poetry
Conference in 1965 & spent the rest of that year & all of 1966 getting
to know the poetry that was included in
However,
because it sold over 100,000 copies, the Allen’s imperfections have had lives
of their own. The volume’s single most audacious move, which was to divide its
44 poets into five ”divisions” or “groups” – Allen uses both words in his
preface – has proven as troubled as it was inspired. One of the group’s is a
hodge-podge, a second – the so-called
