There is a great line right at the end of the Jack Collom interview in the October/November Poetry Project Newsletter: “I think I’ve finally learned to shut up in my poems.” One of those snap-your-head-back-make-you-say-Whoa kinds of lines. I found myself thinking about it all day.

 

What exactly was Jack thinking of when he said that? The comment came at the end of a discussion of working with short poems & changes in his editorial process that have resulted really just from aging. Here is the entire sequence, starting with a question from interviewer Marcella Durand:

 

MD: So what have you been writing lately? What projects are you working on?

 

JC: Well, I’m cleaning my room and have been for weeks and I found this huge envelope containing a lot of very short poems. For years, off and on, I’ve enjoyed writing sorties, haiku, lunes, little senryu, teeny-weenies of all kinds, usually three-liners.  Some have been published, but I have a vast collection. Part of it too was Ken and Ann Mikolowski’s postcard project, which I did 600 cards for a few years back.

 

MD: 600?

 

JC: That’s what they did. They would send you 600. Alice Notley did it twice, I believe.* So that activity involved marshalling a lot of short works into examination. Then I stuck it away and that was years ago. I do have a habit of being organized, to an extent, of sticking things into big brown envelopes with the words “Short Pieces” on them in big marker. I get into these jags of concentrated hacking away at something and that’s what I’ve been doing, trying to mark the ones that might be possible now. I’m 71 years old and I say that because I think I’m coming to an ability to work with my own writings, better than I ever have before. Just a slight maturing of my editorial eye. In the mornings, I don’t jump up and go out to work in the factory any more, so I’ve been taking advantage of the ability to lie in bed and think about things and thinking about poems. I find it a wonderful place to just come to a very nuanced feeling about what you’re going to do with the poem once you do get out of bed. So I’m really enjoying that and am able perhaps to make good decisions with pages and pages and pages of poems. Within the last two days I typed up 50 pages of short poems and then went through and chopped some out. So now it’s got to sit there. And brew. I think I’ve finally learned to shut up in my poems. On the other hand, of course . . . .

 

That ellipsis marks the actual end of the interview, at least as printed. That passage is worth my entire year’s membership in the Poetry Project.

 

I love the idea of a writer in his 70s – where I’ll be in just 13 years – who talks about “coming to an ability” & envisions his work as changing, growing, maturing. Poets in their senior years have, in fact, always changed – Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, composed in his seventies, is one of his most sustained & brilliant projects. William Carlos Williams was in his 60s when he wrote The Desert Music, the poem & book that provoked this teenage reader into poetry. Carl Rakosi has a 29-year head start on Collom & hasn’t shut it down yet. One could argue that Jackson Mac Low, like Collom, is really in his prime.

 

Would I have said as much about senior poets 35 years ago, back when I was still exploiting the idea that I’d had work accepted by such venues as Poetry & TriQuarterly before I reached my junior year in college? I’d like to think the answer is yes – I’d had Williams as a first source, after all. But the truth is that I’ve usually had to gain my enlightenment the hard way, through specific example. I know that when Olson died at 60, I had no question in my mind that he was, in fact, an old man. Now I’m within three years of that same marker & have outlived my own father by some 20 years. And I’m just a boy. One’s sense of time does shift.

 

So Collom’s interview is a signal of great prospects, as I read it. And it will be interesting to see how a generation of older poets who have, overall, done a better job not killing themselves off through bad habits than their predecessors will impact the larger scene in the coming decades.* *

 

But what does Jack mean when he says that he has “finally learned to shut up” in his poems? My very first association, reading this, is with Jack Spicer’s poetics, which is intriguing since I don’t associate Collom at all with the paranoia & pessimism that seem inherent in the Spicerian worldview. But rather, Spicer’s idea that one doesn’t really become a writer until one gets one’s own language out of the poem, in order to – in Spicer’s terms – begin to receive dictation from “the outside.” This of course has nothing to do with taking one’s poems from the daily paper or Fox News or worse, but rather letting the world dictate – I mean this in the sense of determine more than I do, say, channel – the necessary conditions of the poem.

 

This is, I suspect, something we all struggle with as poets. Figuring out how “to shut up” is a particularly difficult challenge in a medium that is grounded, after all, in the discourse of our speaking. It’s even harder for those of us who also like to chatter – in fact, one side benefit of blogging, at least from my perspective, is that I now have a place to stick all that yackety-yak besides my poetry, definitely a good thing. But that’s still not the same, I suspect, as learning how “to shut up.”

 

It would an interesting – I’ve overused that word today – it would be a useful thing to construct an anthology of poems that “shut up” in the sense of permitting the world to speak, “on the side of things” as Francis Ponge would put it. In fact, it’s just that point in Ponge’s work that has always linked him in my mind with the Objectivists – writers from the same generation with what I take to be a very similar perspective on the role of the poem in relationship to the world at hand.*** Indeed, this is – at least as I read it (and I have no way of knowing just how much of this I’m projecting onto Jack, tho hopefully he will tell me if I’m full of it) – very close to what I take to be the original meaning of sincerity in the Zukofskian sense of things.

 

Consider, for example, the one “teeny-weenie” of Collom’s printed in the Poetry Project Newsletter &, perhaps, let’s contrast it with something from 80 Flowers, radically dissimilar project that that is.

 

Dreamed Haiku

 

Slowly the castle
draws goodies from what if,
slides off cliff.

 

 

Poppy Anemone

 

Poppy anemone chorine airy any
moan knee thinkglimpsing night wake
to short-wages no papàver world-wars
opiate bloodroot puccoon indian-dyed fragile
solitary gloss-sea powderhorn yellow-orange West
earthquake-state sun-yellow tall-khan poppy corona
airier composite eyelidless bride bridge
it uncrowned birdfoot spurs dayseye

 

Jack’s haiku differs from Louis’ lyric overload – one reads 80 Flowers the way one does tongue-twisters, it slows the process of enunciation way down – in the stance it takes toward discourse & perhaps (but only perhaps) its perspective on popular culture, but, underneath, the two poems strike me as remarkably similar in their commitment to the role of sound. Jack’s poem is organized first around the sound of terminal f sounds, then line-opening sl combinations. Louis’ poem starts in the ear & treats visual & cognitive associations as secondary frames. In Microsoft Word, the Zukofsky poem is red with unusual formations, deliberate variant spellings, conjoined words. Does it matter that I have no clue, really, how a poppy anemone differs from an ordinary poppy, that the poppy anemone can be a deep red or even blue, or how the pupaver is or is not related? No more than not being able to place a “realistic” narrative alongside the idea of a castle sliding goodies from the what if. Both poems succeed by offering the mind more than it could except as “literal.” Obviously, these are very different poems, different sensibilities. But nowhere in either does the poet’s presence intrude, even though in each the air of personality is unmistakable. Maybe that is what Jack Collom has in mind.

 

 

 

 

* Note to Penguin: So where is the book?

 

**Or maybe not so interesting if you’re a young poet waiting for these geezers to get out of the way. But the truth, of course, is that they’re never “in the way.” You have to go out & make your institutions for yourselves, each & every generation.

 

*** And a not-dissimilar sense of politics either. One can imagine Zukofsky, if not Oppen, hiding out in the woods from the Nazi’s writing the same sonnet again & again. What would you write when your  life was at risk?