The new No is now. Which is to say that the second issue of this exceptionally intelligent – but bafflingly designed* – journal has arrived. As with its first issue, there are several features that entirely warrant the $12 cover price. Three that immediately come to mind are:

 

·         In Denmark: Poems 1973-1974, by Kenneth Irby – a 66-page book (bound on gray matte pages to distinguish it from the glossy white of the main No), by the writer whom I’ve argued in these pages before may have the best ear of any American poet of my time.

 

·         An American Primitive in Paris, a sizeable portfolio of the paintings of Enrique Chagoya, whose artwork used to grace the page of Socialist Review back when I had the fortune to be its editor.

 

·         The American Rhythm, by Mary Austin, with an intro by C.D. Wright, returning to print this 1930 document** arguing for an American poetic measure predicated upon what Austin calls Amerindian languages.

 

On top of which there is a piece by Marjorie Perloff attempting to prove William Butler Yeats to be Steve McCaffery before Steve was. And very healthy selections of poets well-known (Palmer, Will Alexander, Barbara Guest, Cole Swenson, Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Robinson) and new at least to me (Molly Dorozenski, H.L. Hix, Kristin P. Bradshaw among them).

 

What is most interesting to me about Austin’s piece is not necessarily her argument per se, which depends on a racial fantasy of Native Americans, but rather its underlying premise, that the measure – I mean this in the metrical sense – of American writing, simply by virtue of not being European, would be different. It’s the same argument that has bedeviled American letters from the break between the Young Americans & the School of Quietude in the 1840s right up to today. One can, of course, mount a pseudo-linguistic argument – it’s been done more than once – claiming that iambic in particular is implicit in the English language, though to do so is simply to ignore the vast range of regional variations that occur even now after some 50 years of the influence of television and job mobility has tended to flatten out local differences.

 

In some ways, Austin’s sense of the prairie in the measure anticipates Olson’s own sense of space (or, as Olson puts it, SPACE). Implicit in both is a sense that elements other than language impinge up on it, speak through it, are in some sense themselves articulate. Olson of course returns measure to the body, literally, of the poet – meter becomes a kind of pulse, as if one’s blood pumped differently according to who & where we might be. Within 20 years of Olson’s essay on Projective Verse we find a poetics that in practice emphasizes enjambment centered in New England (Olson, Creeley), one that favors the long flat lines of the prairie (Paul Carroll most clearly, tho Lew Welch played with this possibility as well) & a verse mode that tends to be more relaxed and open, generally associated with the American West (Whalen, Snyder, Kyger, etc.). It’s this poetic atlas that Spicer appears to scoff at & what, one wonders, were we to make of the likes of Kenneth Irby & Ronald Johnson, both of whom spent substantial parts of their lives in Kansas, both of whom pay extraordinary attention to the ear, neither of whom remotely approach the aural aesthetics of the other?

 

Langpo to some degree sidestepped the issue in good part by turning to prose, but the issue lingers on even more acutely I think for younger poets. The failure to create an adequate response is partly to blame for the resurrection of patterned poetics in the guise of a New Formalism (that was – & for the most part still is – terrified of form), always already guilty premodernists that they are. And it’s what enables Thomas Fink to call me on my analysis of Brenda Iijima’s “Georgic”: I have, in his view, identified all the ways she is not like X, Y, or Z, without really being able to describe what, in fact, her line break is about. What motivates it? What is the positive principle that determines that broken word stam- / pede? But as I confessed then,

 

this is what most mystifies me – because given those words, I just couldn’t do it on my own.

 

And I’m not aware of anyone who has stepped up to attempt such a project, either with regards to this text of Iijima’s, or for that matter any other contemporary younger poet. And I sense, as I think Tom Fink must also, my own frustration here, that we find ourselves at the end of 2003 with so few choices available as to the line – either the metrically closed verse of premodernism, ranging from the hokey to the merely embarrassing, or the untheorized (& too often too slack, tho not certainly in Iijima’s work) “free verse” marriage of convenience, with maybe theories along the line of Austin’s or Olson’s to haunt us with their inadequate alternatives.*** Indeed, the absence of a good answer here sometimes has been used by critics to argue that poetry is, if not, certainly on the wane as a medium.

 

I do intuit at some level that the assumption that underwrites both Austin & Olson – that the measures of verse are contextually dependent – makes sense. But I don’t, even after writing & thinking about poetry for 40 years, feel anywhere near ready to say why or how. I would love to hear what readers of this blog think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* The only excuse for starting the first piece, an elegy by Michael Palmer for the novelist W.G. Sebald, on the left-hand page is lack of space in the issue . . . yet there are blank pages at the end. And there is no excuse for the muddle that is the table of contents qua contributors’ notes pages. If these are attempts to innovate or protest conventional design elements, they succeed only in confirming the superiority of the convention.

 

** A second edition was published posthumously in 1970.

 

*** So I read Irby’s work in this issue, written nearly 30 years ago, right at the height of the “my linebreak / my zipcode” fever, yet written in a wholly different context, having moved at that point to Denmark. And these are curiously the flattest lines of his that I know, as if that Scandinavian sound were bleeding into the English.