Next weekend I will be participating in a retreat with some 34 other poets, having conversations around a variety of topics in a setting freed of the performance criteria of conferences & seminars. I have some experience with retreats, having been to quite a few job-related ones over the decades, my favorite being those at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a grad school in San Francisco where I served as the director of development in the early 1980s. We might go to Wilbur Hot Springs, a most funky resort up a long dirt road on the Southeastern rim of the Napa Valley and just sit around nekkid in extremely hot water all weekend. I don’t recall that we made any momentous decisions, although a couple of marriages got reswizzled by that process.

 

This being poets, it promises to be a far tamer affair. Participants have been invited to address a series of six questions (some of which are in fact multiple questions). I’m not sure that I have any answers, but I thought I at least would pose them aloud here over the next few days & see what surfaces.

 

The first question or set of questions was given as follows:

 

What can a poem do? What is the sphere of consequence for poems today? Are those consequences limited to established community circuits? Is public poetic language an oxymoron?

 

Poems can do what poems do, as Gertrude Stein might put it. Which is to say that the one rule is that they each are responsible for their own rules. Or, to restore the myth of agency from the poem back to the poet, each poet with every text is responsible for its rules. And thereby any possible consequence.

 

There are many instances of poetry written in a consciously public language. I think you can find some exceptionally interesting examples in the work of two quite underrated poets, albeit underrated for somewhat different reasons, Allen Ginsberg & Judy Grahn. Interesting precisely because, as I read their work, their sense of what they were doing vis-à-vis public discourse shifts over the course of their careers, not always for the good.

 

At one level, Ginsberg & Grahn went through a parallel process of becoming, over a relatively short period of time, quite famous, going from being relative unknowns to being taken as oracles by their relative communities. In the process, the writing of each was transformed. The discursive mode of Allen Ginsberg, the unknown author of Howl, differs radically from that of Allen Ginsberg, the world famous author of Kaddish. In parallel fashion, the author of A Woman is Talking to Death or The Common Woman Poems is nowhere nearly as oracular as the writer of The Queen of Wands.

 

I have no doubt that fame must be experienced, at least at first, as stress. For a poet, there is a sudden recognition that one has many readers and that, unlike the vast majority of poets, one will know relatively few of these people even casually. Conversely, the “knowledge” of this new broad array of readers is quite different from that which a poet’s audience can be have within most poetry scenes or communities.

 

There were, and are, multiple important differences between the Ginsberg of Kaddish & the Grahn of The Queen of Wands. Perhaps the most visible is that Grahn was by 1982 a far more mature poet than the Ginsberg of the late 1950s. Ginsberg’s fame came at first less from the poem or collection Howl than it did from the trial over the book’s alleged obscenity. In short, Ginsberg became famous exceptionally quickly. Grahn, on the other hand, had been working for two decades to invent what amounted to a new mode of writing, explicitly by and for women.

 

The best way to see this, I think, is to contrast the language each poet uses in some of their early work. If we might draw a connection between the use of parallel constructions in the second “Moloch” section of Ginsberg’s Howl or the “I’m with you in Rockland” third section to Grahn’s use of the same device in She Who, there is nothing in Ginsberg’s writing before The Fall of America that can come close to A Woman is Talking to Death, one of the most complex & subtle works of the early 1970s. In it, Grahn demonstrates a unique ability to employ a public discourse using what is clearly personal language starting with a tale of a fatal motorcycle accident on the Bay Bridge.

 

Kaddish can I think be read as an attempt to achieve something very similar, but to my mind it is not successful. Ginsberg deploys exactly the same devices he used previously in Howl to confront the many issues of his own mother’s troubled life. This is not to say that the work is not filled with compassion and some beautiful moments of writing, but it also reaches a level of overwriting, particularly in section IV, that makes me cringe. It’s the clearest example of using an inappropriate strategy in writing I can recall.

 

Ginsberg’s next two books identify travel as a key issue in their subtitles: Planet News: To Europe in Asia, and King of the May: America to Europe. While Ginsberg was making a transition from the Beat oracle of the 1950s into something akin to the father figure of the hippie movement in the 1960s, he did so while being away much of the time. Even if he was periodically feted, for example as Kral Majales, the King of the May, much of this travel was away from the public eye & proved an opportunity for Ginsberg to reestablish a sense of personal writing. It is this voice that we hear in what will be his finest poem & certainly his finest “public” poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” 

 

One can trace this dynamic out in the work of other poets from the same period – Olson, for example, or Duncan in the antiwar sections of Passages. And while it may be a voice that is absent altogether from some tendencies of the New American poetry, such as the New York School*, as well as individual poets such as Robert Creeley, it does seem to be a possibility for some writing some of the time. One of the most powerful recent examples would be “The Dust,” Michael Gottlieb’s catalog of the component elements of the ash that fell from the World Trade Center.

 

 

 

* Anne Waldman’s Fast Speaking Woman owes far more to her interest in the Beat scene & the work of Mary Sabina than in the work, say, of Ashbery or O’Hara.