Between his New Direction volumes, Robert Creeley has developed a pattern of issuing one or more small chapbooks in the interim – they engage his long-standing commitment to the small press scene and are often a relief against the bland uniform packaging that is the ND trademark. None of these chapbooks has been simpler, nor more elegant or delightful than Yesterdays, Creeley’s latest from Chax Press. Charles Alexander, who learned the book arts directly from Walter Hamady, the Yoda of fine press printing, is himself a master craftsman with a rare sense of just when to assert himself in the process. With Yesterdays, Alexander has taken the lowest key approach, letting Creeley’s text do all the heavy lifting.

 

As well it does. These pieces are among the very best of Creeley’s recent work, which means that as a reader I’m virtually hopping up & down with excitement at each new poem. Viz:

 

As I rode out one morning

just at break of day

a pain came upon me

unexpectedly –

 

As I thought one day

not to think anymore,

I thought again,

caught, and could not stop –

 

Were I the horse I rode,

were I the bridge I crossed,

were I a tree

unable to move,

 

the lake would have

no reflections,

the sweet, soft air

no sounds.

 

So I hear, I see,

tell still the echoing story

of all that lives in a forest,

all that surrounds me.

 

Like John Ashbery – the other poet forced to put up with “greatest living poet” expectations – Creeley has sometimes been criticized in recent years for failing to continue to revolutionize poetry in all the ways he did during his first 30 years of publishing. As I’ve noted with regard to Ashbery, I think this is a bum rap, in that it makes his writing about us, rather than seeing it for what it is, his writing. Spicer’s model of the poem as a tool for investigation for the poet is exactly on point here. Having spent 30 or so years creating a space in which to do his work – a process that just incidentally revolutionized poetry – Creeley continues to demonstrate the extraordinary agility & acuity with which he still explores this terrain.

 

The poem above, the tenth section of a sequence entitled “Pictures,” makes the point perfectly. Like his old Black Mountain colleague, Robert Duncan, Creeley in many ways is the most traditional of poets – he continues to hear the suppleness available to traditional form, more so than most so-called formalists. He sets up the quatrain in this work with the precision of a heart surgeon – the off-rhyme between the second & fourth lines of the first stanza are just clear enough to set the measure of these lines, so that one hears the following ones as if they rhymed when in fact they never do.

 

All of which sets up the remarkable effect of the last line, when the mind waits in anticipation to hear the rhyme of the previous stanza’s sounds only to discover that it turns up embedded in the next-to-last word surrounds, which either recedes if the reader hears the line as a whole or else bumps noisily onto that final disruptive me. Yet this is in fact exactly the self-involved, compulsive process that is described with great care in the second stanza of the poem. Far from slamming the door of the poem shut with the total closure of a terminal rhyme, Creeley has set the form up as a lesson to us all, that it doesn’t close & that it never ends.

 

The poem at one level is a little Zen parable. At another, being brought to self-perception through a sudden pain – common enough experience that that is – is virtually the definition of proprioception, a term with extraordinary history & implications for Projectivist poetics. I find myself thinking – as so often I do when confronting Creeley’s texts* -- how does he do that much & make it look so simple? I’m simply grateful that he has.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Oddly enough, I first really connected with Creeley’s poetry not through the Allen anthology, nor even the Kelly-Leary Controversy of Poets, though by then I owned both books, but rather through a single poem of his that was used both as epigraph & for a title in Jeremy Larner’s ‘60s campus novel, Drive, He Said. The simplicity of Creeley’s poetry can be quite deceptive &, at first, I was among the deceived.  

No blog today. It’s my anniversary & I’m doing other things.

Robert Duncan began publishing poetry when he was just out of his teens in 1939. Yet during the last twenty-five years of his life – not to mention the 15 years since his death – the primary poetry that people were permitted to see was largely restricted to writing that began in the late 1950s with The Opening of the Field. That book, Roots and Branches and Bending the Bow were the trio of volumes that were widely available during most of the last period of his life as he abstained from publishing a book of new poetry for 15 years after Bow.

 

Perhaps most tellingly, Duncan did not permit Lawrence Ferlinghetti to keep his 1959 Selected Poems, published as the tenth volume of the City Lights Pocket Poets series, in print at a time when Ferlinghetti was very diligently doing just that. Duncan, who was notoriously fussy & not always wise about his volumes – his insistence on a typewriter font for Ground Work: Before the War, published in 1984, prevented that book from being anywhere nearly as influential as the three volumes of the 1960s – is almost certainly to blame for the City Lights Selected going out of print.

 

That volume had incorporated his poetry – or at least those portions he felt best about – written between 1942 and 1950. In 1966, when the Selected was already impossible to find, Duncan permitted Oyez, Graham Mackintosh’s press in Berkeley, to issue The Years As Catches, a more complete gathering of his earliest work, from 1939 through 1946. Framed very much as juvenilia – the subtitle is First Poems (1936-1946), Catches was reprinted in 1977. Jonathon Williams’ Jargon Press published a small edition of Letters, Duncan’s poetry immediately preceding the work of The Opening of the Field, in 1958. A Book of Resemblances: Poems 1950-1953, was published in an even more fugitive fine press edition – in Duncan’s handwriting – in 1966, with just 200 copies printed. Duncan’s early work became somewhat more available when Fulcrum, a small press in Britain, published Derivations, capturing the writing between 1950 & ’56, and First Decade: Selected Poems 1940-1950. But Fulcrum was never widely distributed in the United States.

 

Thus it has always seemed evident to me that Duncan saw The Opening of the Field as representing the true start of his mature writing. How Duncan arrived at this writing, what influences entered in, & in which order, has always intrigued me. Reading in The H.D. Book the other day – I was literally having dinner at the Country Kitchen in the Molly Pitcher service center on the New Jersey Turnpike, returning from a conference in Palisades, NY – I came across Duncan’s own account of the major influences during the fateful 1940s & realized that it was, in Duncan’s mind at least, the poetry of war that led him to the kind of writing that emerge in The Field and his later books.

 

Duncan accounts for it as the confluence of two events. One, his introduction to Charles Olson & Robert Creeley, is well known. The second Duncan characterizes as the recognition of the common elements of three works by his elders – Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and H.D.’s wartime trilogy, especially its final volume, The Flowering of the Rod. Duncan describes his relationship to the latter:

 

For a new generation of young writers in the early 50s, the Pisan Cantos and then Paterson had been the challenge. But for me, the War Trilogy of H.D. came earlier, for searching out those first vatic poems of Edith Sitwell that Kenneth Rexroth had shown me in Life and Letters Today I had come across H.D.’s passages from The Walls Do Not Fall. Then came “Writing on the Wall” and “Good Frend”. When the third volume of the Trilogy, The Flowering of the Rod, was published in 1946 I had found my book.

 

Sitwell, whose work Duncan had been seeking when he came across H.D., “was inspired to write in the prophetic mode of high poetry” by the Second World War. Beyond her & this trio of long poems by Pound, Williams & H.D., Duncan sees the scene of the 1940s as very bleak. There is “one lonely ghost light of poetry” in Hart Crane’s The Bridge and “one lonely acolyte of poetry” in Louis Zukofsky, “wrapped in the cocoon of an ‘objectivism’ . . . “a zaddik* hidden in a thicket of theory.”

 

These three — Pound, Williams, and H.D. — belonged in their youth to a brilliant, still brilliant generation that began writing just before the First World War . . . . They alone of their generation — and we must add D.H. Lawrence to their company — saw literature as a text of the soul in its search for fulfillment in life and took the imagination as a primary instinctual authority. The generative imagination Pound called it.

 

Against these musketeers, Duncan contrasts Stevens, Eliot and Marianne Moore, who “remain within the rational imagination and do not suffer from the creative disorders of primitive mind.”

 

As if “in London, in Pisa, in Paterson, there had been phases of the same revelation,” Duncan unites these three works in an algorithm by which war leads to transcendent insight. While H.D.’s surviving the bombing of London & Pound’s imprisonment in the cages at Pisa were, for each, defining experiences,** Williams in this regard seems to me a definite stretch. While the war is evident in the background for Williams, I’ve never thought of Paterson as a “war poem.” Yet Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-12, which at times seems almost an homage to Paterson, most definitely is. Perhaps one needed to be closer to the events at hand for this to be evident, or possibly I’m just sans clue.

 

None of Duncan’s poets were kids during WW2. As he notes, H.D. was 58 in 1944, the year she finished the trilogy, Pound 59, Williams 62. Although he doesn’t argue it as cogently as he might have, the premise behind Duncan’s claim for these three poets & poems is not merely that they had embraced the Romantic “Poet as Hero,” nor that they had opened themselves to influences of the irrational as part of their poetic processes, but also – and you can see why this resonates with me – that they were mature, mid-career (late mid-career at that) artists whose fundamental assumptions about the world & their art were challenged by the events of the war. The war, Duncan implies, proved a crucible in which each had to define their work anew under difficult circumstances. Pound’s situation was the most dire – he was housed literally in a cage out of doors; other prisoners were routinely being sent before the firing squad. But, of the three, it is noteworthy that Duncan looks first to H.D.

 

From the beginning then, certainly from 1947 or 1948 when I was working on Medieval Scenes and taking H.D. as my master there among the other masters, there was the War Trilogy. In smoky rooms in Berkeley, in painters’ studios in San Francisco, I read these works aloud; dreamed about them; took my life in them; studied them as my anatomy of what Poetry must be.

 

The Pisan Cantos represent a disordered mind confronting the wreckage of its presumptions – it’s less of a construction than a record. Its closest literary kin isn’t the work of Dante or Browning, but rather that of Hannah Weiner. Paterson, for all of Duncan’s claims, makes far less use of the intuitive, the “generative imagination,” than did Kora or Spring & All, written two decades earlier. So it is H.D., the esoteric, Freud’s analysand, a gay woman, who truly fits Duncan’s model. Which why this masterwork of plotless prose is called, out of all possibilities, The H.D. Book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Hebrew for miracle worker, leader, or pious man – it’s the same term that, as tzadik, John Zorn uses for his record label. Note that, especially as the H.D. Book was written a decade before Duncan began to attack langpo for its own “thicket of theory,” particularly when applied to Zukofsky, Duncan is charging LZ with the same offense!

 

** Between the bombing of Baghdad & the 600 plus prisoners in cages at Guantanamo, the parallels between the Second World War and the present are more than incidental.

Worse I fear by far than this obscene war – just yesterday the world was treated to hearing a mother’s tale of seeing her two daughters, ages 15 & 12, decapitated by U.S. firepower as it ripped through their vehicle that failed to heed what may have been an unclear warning to stop at a “U.S. checkpoint” – will be the “peace” that follows.

 

The words of Constantine Cavafy’s famous 1904 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” have been ringing in my ears a lot these past few months, especially its final lines:

 

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.
Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις.

 

The presence of “barbarians” during the long Cold War were indeed a kind of solution. I think we are only now beginning to understand what we lost when the old Soviet Union collapsed, driven into bankruptcy through military overspending, internal corruption & its lack of democracy. We no longer have any check on the power of the American state, no countervailing force whatsoever, so we are going to see just how completely absolute power corrupts. It’s an awesome & terrifying prospect.

 

Consider the present circumstances:

 

§         We have an unelected president whose appointment came at the hands of a Supreme Court whose crucial “black seat” was itself gained a few years back through perjury. Bush’s appointment could not have occurred without the electoral vandalism of the Green Party.

§         The Republicans control both houses of Congress and the Democratic Party, for the most part, seems incapable of standing up to Bush: three of the “major” senatorial candidates for the presidential nomination, Kerry, Lieberman & Edwards, all support the U.S. invasion.

§         The authority of the United Nations, an institution designed in large part by the U.S. & whose Security Council rules are largely fixed so that the victors of World War II continue, nearly 60 years after the fact, to have a veto over all major policy, has been seriously eroded, perhaps permanently.

§         U.S. relations with other nations, from the members of NATO to the members of OPEC, are seriously strained.

§         The sitting attorney general is a man openly hostile to the Bill of Rights.

§         Over 600 prisoners from the war in Afghanistan are being held in Guantanamo precisely as a means of keeping them away from any of the legal protections that might – only might – be afforded them under either federal law or the Geneva Convention. At least another 44 people are being held largely incommunicado as “material witnesses” in the United States.

§         The Republican Congress has curtailed a woman’s right to control her own body – a decision to knowingly kill some women.

§         The Supreme Court is weighing the issue of overturning any form of affirmative action & is considering whether or not to overturn the Miranda decision’s protections against self-incrimination.

§         And Admiral Poindexter wants to read your email.

The list of outrages is rather endless – and there is a serious possibility that before too terribly long we may look back on this as the “good old days.”

 

The best explication of U.S. foreign policy that I’ve read to date is Joseph Cirincione’s “Origins of Regime Change in Iraq,” a report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It suggests that what we all fear – that Iraq is simply the first in what is apt to become a chain of U.S. “interventions” as it seeks to remake the world to its liking – is in fact the underlying dynamic behind this war. Cirincione, a one-time congressional aide to Tom Ridge & no leftist, identifies the origin of U.S. policy in the dissatisfaction of some neocons in the first Bush administration, most notably Paul Wolfowitz, then under-secretary of defense for policy, with the outcome of the 1991 Iraq war. In 1992, Wolfowitz redrafted a 46 page classified policy paper on U.S. priorities entitled “Defense Planning Guidance.” DPG as the document is known is the mission or values statement for the Defense Department & a version still exists today. In 1992, at the tail end of the first Bush administration, Wolfowitz penned a draft that:

 

§         Argued that the world’s last remaining superpower needed to exercise its unique geopolitical advantages for its own interest

§         Claimed that the U.S. had a right to act internationally in a unilateral fashion – a position largely foreign to the first 42 presidents

§         Called for addressing specific threats, mentioning both Iraq and North Korea

§         Sought to ensure, as a major goal, “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil”

This last point headed a list of key sources of potential conflict, even before the presence of “weapons of mass destruction.” When the New York Times & Washington Post reported the radical nature of the Wolfowitz draft, the White House ordered then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to rewrite the document.

 

The Wolfowitz DPG precedes by eight years the report by the Project for a New American Century, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which has sometimes been described as evidence that the plan to “finish what we started” in Iraq was not a consequence of the September 11^th attacks nor related to the so-called War on Terror. However, even if the attack on the Pentagon & World Trade Center was the “trigger event” that caused the old DPG to be put into action, it has little more to do with the plan itself than does Bush’s argument, one of several briefly advanced then later abandoned in the run-up to the invasion, that the United States was threatening war in order to protect the integrity of the United Nations.

 

If Cirincione is correct, the question is not whether the United States will proceed to attack Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba or any other nation that stands in its way, but rather when, at what pace & in which order. It is a foreign policy not without precedent in the history of the world – the major difference between, say, Germany’s attempt at global domination in the 1940s and this latest effort at empire was Germany’s presumption that it needed to conquer everything all at once. The Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Bush version of this same fantasy is methodologically more patient, cherry picking regional “bad guys” (Hussein is a perfect choice, having alienated himself from his neighbors), establishing a “presence” from which to govern while turning the local administration over to a client regime.

 

Historically, every attempt at empire has eventually failed. The costs, both economically & in human terms, are too high. The “governed,” as France, Germany & others have already demonstrated, refuse to give consent. This process can still be slowed, if not entirely reversed, simply by electing almost anyone else to the presidency in 2004. But if the people of the United States do not put a halt to this process, the fate of far more than just this nation appears grim indeed.

The poem tells a simple enough story, one with which virtually anyone who has visited Russia over the past 15 years will identify. A man is walking down a Moscow Street when he sees a group of young men approaching, “apparently drunk, shouting a song.” His immediate response – to run – is thwarted by the logistics of the situation. Then he realizes that this is not a gang of skinheads who are about to beat him unconscious (or worse) precisely because they are singing in Yiddish. The recognition transforms the event itself as well as the broader set of implications & questions for the speaker. These young men, he imagines, are likely not to stay in Russia, but to move elsewhere – Israel, the U.S., Western Europe – leaving the streets of that nation to precisely the kinds of drunken young thugs the speaker fears most, those for whom there are no alternatives. The poem ends with a lengthy plea to the young people of Russia who might best represent its future to not abandon the country.

 

The title of the poem is “The Wasteland (A Translation)” & I found it over the weekend in At Andy’s, George Stanley’s book of poems from the late 1990s published by New Star Books. In spite of its title, I read the poem initially as a text of George Stanley’s, as surely it is. My first thought was that Stanley was presenting a parable that reflects back on the poem by T.S. Eliot, a poem whose role in American poetry was at once unique & oppressive at the time that Stanley, who will reach 70 next year, was coming into poetry in the late 1950s.

 

The title itself should have told me otherwise – Stanley would not intentionally conflate the three words of Eliot’s title into two.* Years ago, I recall a wonderful argument that Stanley had with Mark Linenthal at San Francisco State over whether or not the shift from an a to a the (or vice versa) “made a difference” in a poem. Stanley’s position, as I recall it, was that such a shift alone rendered the work a “totally different poem.” Linenthal’s position was that this wasn’t such a big deal. At least once I heard this ongoing debate carried out in raised voices in the corridor outside the Poetry Center. Students at the time took sides – as much as I’ve always liked Linenthal, a great deal indeed, then & now, I was clearly a Stanleyite. Or, more accurately, a Stanleyist.** In any event, nobody who ever took such a position is going to knowingly go hardcopy with a soggy version of Eliot’s hegemonic title.

 

Actually, I was through the poem before the title, which I merely glanced at, rather than read – an old habit I’ve discussed here before – sank in. Ignoring thus the obvious, I envisioned Stanley, a youthful looking gay man in his 60s, experiencing precisely the scenario depicted in the poem. As a narrative, it’s completely reasonable. So that it’s only when I get to the end of the poem and see it clearly marked “Adapted from the Russian of Arkadi Tcherkassov.” Slap of palm against forehead!

 

Just to exacerbate the point & to suggest just how much Stanley is not in any sense Tcherkassov, the poem was in fact translated not from the Russian as such but “through the French of Lionel Meney.” Like the samizdat version of Derrida’s Of Grammatology I once saw in Russia, translated not from the French but from Gayatri Spivak’s English, Stanley’s text functions like a literary version of Chinese whispers or telephone. I have no idea what might have been lost in this chain. Certainly any hint of the speaker as “Other” from the translator has been collapsed. “The Wasteland” is very visibly a poem by George Stanley, regardless of where & how he arrived at it.

 

I don’t know Tcherkassov as a poet &, when I hunt around for him on the Internet, trying out multiple possible variations of his names – Cyrillic doesn’t move smoothly into the Roman alphabet – I come across only a single mention, a characterization of him in French on Radio Canada from the year 2000 as a “canadologue marginalisé d’une Académie des sciences appauvrie,” a marginalized Canadoloist of an impoverished Academy of Science. The description is ironic, in that one can see Tcherkassov as a serious Russian patriot in this poem.

 

Reminders such as this are useful – always – at the gap between the “I” of the text & that of its author, whether we envision it here as being Stanley or Tcherkassov.*** Rereading the poem, it’s full of touches, such as the breaks in this opening stanza, that are identifiably Stanley:

 

I’m going to tell you a story –

but it’s not really a story –

it’s not all in the past –

it’s happening now.

 

Finally the poem settles into what I would characterize – in a literal, rather than “new age” sense – as a transpersonal space, the “I” ultimately serving as a shell inhabited by more than one person. There’s an irony in this, given that At Andy is presented as being very much a literature of referentiality, “reflecting,” as the anonymous jacket blurb puts it, “his idea that a poem after all about something” & quoting Stanley:

 

What’s wrong is somehow

          I think there’s something to write about – instead of writing.

 

That Stanley would characterize this as “wrong” comes very close to that crowded “I” in “The Wasteland.”

 

 

 

 

 

* One of those typos one sees far too often in the world of American poetry, like the misspelling of names, Ginsburg for Ginsberg, Olsen for Olson, Zukovsky for Zukofsky.

 

** Stalinists were forever calling Trotskyists “Trotskyites.” Trots rejected the label because of its parallel with the binary “socialist/socialite.”

 

*** I’m discounting Meney here not because he didn’t play a key role in the creation of this work – he clearly did – but because he sits at neither end of the chain, neither at the front with Tcherkassov, nor at the end with Stanley. Meney teaches in the language & linguistics department of the University of Laval in Quebec.

I got a few  notes about my absences the past few days – been traveling & my access to the web has been constricted. When I was online yesterday, the Blogger “publisher” server was down.

 

Ж        Ж        Ж

 

I want to say simply today how sad I am at the sudden death yesterday of Ric Caddel at the age of 53. I never got to meet the man in person, but as editor, poet & correspondent, he was a marvel. The volume of British & Irish poetry since 1970 that he co-edited with Peter Quartermain, Other, is a monument any man could be proud of. I am told, though I’ve not been there myself, that the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at the University of Durham, which Ric co-directed, is equally magnificent.

Tim Yu credits Stephanie Young for posing a question about my blogging style: that in choosing the miniature essay form rather than, say, the pseudo-chat room blip, I’m involved in a curious (implying, I suppose, nefarious) “centering” aesthetic move. I.e., by making coherent arguments – to the extent that I do – I push poetry in the direction I want, as distinct from either the direction somebody else might see or want or even just the directionless evolution of that ever infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards.

 

Guilty as charged on the point of being deliberate in choosing a style that allows me to develop more of an argument. When I first encountered blogging a little over a year ago, the diary snippet aspect of the weblog put me off. But then my nephew, Daniel, who I think shares in the family trait of utter seriousness, started using an adjunct to his primary blog to post some of his college papers. That set my inner carillon off. It was that aspect of his blog that, as I mulled the question over on Brier Island last summer, set me to thinking.

 

If there’s a distinction between what I’m doing & the “average blog,” at least with regards to poetry, it’s not that my pieces are “centering” & others are not, but rather that mine are conscious that this function is inherent in the act of articulation, that I’m interested in exploring it, where I think some (not all) others seem more ambivalent, sometimes even embarrassed at the notion. By inherent, I mean that the immanence in any address registers exactly that, the presence of a point of view as a point. From the perspective of any writer, the act of writing / speaking / thinking invariably is one of organizing the world around that point, articulating proximities & distances – as I noted Monday, a cartography of poetics. From the perspective of the reader, the challenge is really no different. One navigates between the blogs of various poets much in the same way one does between poems or books. What totalitarians invariably forget (or pretend not to notice) is that these points differ for every individual. The world of literature is not a pyramid at whose pinnacle sits the mind of Harold Bloom, but rather an ever-changing sea of constantly moving relationships. Navigation is exactly, and only, that.