Part of the way through Roy Kiyooka’s Pacific Windows, I went to bed wondering to myself if a major reason why there did not seem to be more of a visible, audible post-projectivist presence in American writing these days didn’t have to do with the fact that the Black Mountain poets, so called, never really had an urban center from which to operate. Then, the next morning, as I was driving myself to the doctor’s, Pacific Windows sitting on the car seat next to me, I realized that I was asking the wrong question. Because if I think about publications as different in tone as the late Sulfur or the more recent Skanky Possum, it certainly isn’t the case that such poetry doesn’t exist any more, much of it excellent – Graham Foust for example, who may be one of the best poets we now have, or Eleni Sikelianos, about whom ditto, or even, I think, Jennifer Moxley, Dale Smith, Devin Johnston or Lisa Jarnot, as diverse & talented a group of poets now alive. Although I doubt very much if any of them think of themselves as associated in any sense with one another. Tho they do have in common precisely the characteristic I think of as being most “projective,” which is to say that each has arrived at a radically distinct & personally defined style as a poet.

 

Projectivism’s obsessive focus – most apparent in Olson, Blackburn & early Creeley, but visible also in such divergent hands as Lew Welch & Jonathan Williams, Steve Jonas & Denise Levertov, Phil Whalen & Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner & Edward Dorn – with using the space of the page & especially the line to elaborate & articulate a personal voice made it the most complex of the 1950s New American modes, even as, at times, it could also appear to be the most casual. Olson & Whalen were perfectly capable of poems that seemed like the most contingent jottings, notes more than finished works. Even so, this concept of the line as a poet’s signature gesture, the key to Olson’s program, proved so powerful in the 1950s & ‘60s that it can be seen reflected in the writing strategies of virtually all of the New Americans – the two notable exceptions are John Ashbery & Jack Spicer.

 

Yet, save for the last three years or so of Olson’s tenure at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s, there never really was any there there for the Projectivist poets. That meant that, especially after Olson himself turned his own attentions elsewhere & stopped promoting it as a program, as such, that the extraordinary influence all of these poets had on the next three or four generations – right up to the present – found itself decentralized & increasingly unnamed. There were, and still are, poets deeply influenced by Ed Dorn who could not imagine being influenced by Larry Eigner. And vice versa – definitely vice versa.

 

So while we hear of second, third & fourth generations of the NY School, the influence of the Projectivists, tho it may have been far stronger overall, proved to be more diffuse in its character. Indeed, the one major distinction that quickly came to be made between different sorts of NY Schoolers in the next few generations proved to be between the downtown wild bunch, led by Ted Berrigan & the gang at the church, and the far more formal uptown poets who patterned themselves deliberately after Ashbery.

 

When the langpos first showed up around 1970, it’s worth noting that the only other aesthetically distinct groupings were the NY School 3^rd gen folks & the Actualists, whom one might have characterized as “the NY School west of the Hudson.” In fact, if one reads Grenier’s epochal essays in the first issue of This, it’s worth noting that the one term he wants to lay claim to is, in fact, Projectivism: “’Projective Verse’ is Pieces on,” Grenier writes of Creeley. But that genie was already out of the bottle & no amount of magic was putting it back.¹

 

There are two sides to this coin. The upside is that no poet has ever been harmed by being associated with the New York School, regardless of how meaningless the term became over time. The downside is that some people won’t recognize common interests if, in fact, they aren’t named as such. Roy Kiyooka isn’t nearly as famous as, say, I think he should be. And there are more than a few other next gen New Americans who have disappeared from view altogether – Seymour Faust, Harold Dull, d alexander to name three – who would likewise benefit greatly if a Roy Miki would come & gather together a collected works for somebody to publish. Kirby Olson has been trying to track Faust down now for months & does seem to have found some former high school students of his. Dull at least is still around, tho not publishing poetry, but as the foremost practitioner of watsu, a water therapy he pioneered in the 1980s. alexander, possibly the first poet to work in the computer industry back in the 1960s, appears to have died young. All that remain are the poems & they’re increasingly hard to find.

 

 

¹ This 1 commemorated Olson’s passing through a series of photos of Olson & his desk by Elsa Dorfman, including her notes on the funeral itself. The first of Grenier’s four major essays in the issue is not the manifesto “On Speech,” but a review of A Quick Graph, Creeley’s selected essays.