As I noted yesterday, Diane Wakoski’s question wasn’t just about the importance of our early social networks in creating the grounds for our work as poets – offering us publishers, readers, feedback – but, in her own words,

So much cross pollination that when received innocently can be used to its best purpose – to allow us to find our unique and richest voices.

Voices is the word that stopped me. This is, I suspect, the point where Wakoski is, at some deep level, still a projectivist, closer to Ed Dorn & Charles Olson & even Amiri Baraka, than, say, to Bruce Andrews or Charles Bernstein. I, on the other, hand reverse those dynamics.

Over the years, I have spelled out my objections to the concept of voice, save in the sense that music theorist Peter Yates once proposed, that of aesthetic consistency. But I know what Wakoski is driving at here, and in fact her point is not necessarily at odds with my sense of aesthetic consistency, so lets try to tease out a little what it suggests or implies.

What it might mean – if she or I were Billy Collins – would be an aesthetic consistency that resolves simply into a single psychological entity: you could give it a name & put a hat on it. Wakoski does make use of persona & character, but with an edginess & depth you’ll never find in one of those poems Ted Kooser vetted through his secretary to ensure that she "understood" it. Charles Olson used persona as well – Maximus is all persona, as elaborate & fascinating as any in 20^th century literature. But that’s not what Wakoski – nor really even Olson beyond her – means by voice.

Voice rather is the instinctual palette of devices through which a poet hears, feels & thinks through his or her work. Earlier in that same paragraph, Wakoski calls it a poetics:

how our poetics really are shaped by the people who are our friends when we are young writers. I think it's putting together the aesthetics/poetics of our friends and making some connection with our own, the we shape ourselves.

The four people she cites for her own example – Jackson Mac Low, Thom Gunn, Jack Spicer & Jack Gilbert – are all radically different from one another, and from Diane Wakoski. If there is anything they have in common beyond using English in which to write, it’s that each was an uncompromising writer, perfectly comfortable as the only example of whatever it was they were doing, regardless of trends throughout the rest of literature. Indeed, the pair of Jacks in this hand have each become quite regarded as cranks for their obstinate refusal to participate in the politer games of the writing scene.

I never knew Spicer – the Killian/Ellingham bio suggests that we were at the same party once during the 1965 Berkeley poetry conference, but I was the utterly clueless teenager in Allen Ginsberg’s posse at that point, unaware that the big guy in the room must have been Charles Olson, while Spicer was only a few weeks from his death from alcoholism – but Gilbert would show up on my own list as well. In my case, what I took from Gilbert – especially important in my having grown up with virtually no male model for how to be an adult – was his passionate commitment to poetry. There is also in the best of Jack’s early poetry a radical commitment to the materiality of language. As I’ve noted here before, that is still the only way I can account for lines such as:

Helot for what time there is
In the baptist hegemony of death.
For what time there is summer,
Island, cornice.

This is, Google tells me, the fifth time I’ve quoted at least those first two lines in this blog – it’s a passage I’ve returned to again & again, as or even more often than any equivalent passage I can think of in Creeley or Spicer. Between the use of unexpected terms in the first sentence & the logic of that list in the second, this passage seemed as clear a demonstration as one could want as to why “accessibility” is almost never preferable in poetry to opacity. It was an “Aha” experience for me, but not one that I really could use for a few years, until I got to know Bob Grenier at Berkeley. Even then, I remember being slow to generalize from what I could see Grenier doing – his writing in those days was quite public, he would literally sit down at a party and start writing, reading aloud as he scribbled. I was aware of Clark Coolidge’s early books, Space & Ing, but my sense was that Bob was focused on language, Clark more on sound patterns, bop prosody, etc., until another friend, Barrett Watten, literally sat me down & pointed out the humor in Coolidge’s work, something that Clark in turn got from Jonathan Williams & Phil Whalen. At which point, Coolidge’s poetry suddenly opened up for me.

How much of that is (or is not) visible/audible in my own “voice”? Another factor for me – one that lies beyond the terrain of personal connections – was Faulkner’s prose. I remember that literally for years I would work in blank “sketch pad” notebooks attempts at figuring out what was so compelling for me about the opening of The Sound and the Fury:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

Much of The Sound and the Fury strikes me as an imitation of Joyce’s Ulysses, but not the section that is told from the perspective of Ben, the developmentally disabled – Faulkner doesn’t use that phrase – brother. It’s precisely because the character cannot distinguish what is or is not meaningful in any given scene that he tells it as he sees it. It’s a fascinating presentation – and from the perspective of literary trompe loeil, something that cannot be replicated in any other medium. Grammatically, the sentence pans from a close focus on the frame to the golfers who the young man observes. To carry it on for a sentence or paragraph or page is hard enough, but Faulkner manages it for 92 pages in my Vintage paperback.

One serious difference between the poets I was talking to – David Bromige, Rochelle Nameroff, David Melnick were all centrally important to me during these years – and my interest in Faulkner was that there was almost nowhere for me to go with that obsession. It wasn’t as if these writers hadn’t read Faulkner, or didn’t think about his work, but there was nothing like the community of discussion one could find for the work of Creeley or Zukofsky or Clark Coolidge. I was just beginning to realize that prose & poetry were not only formally different, but that they were socially different as well.

Yet the question for me, reading Faulkner, was never how to write novels or even fiction, but rather how to bring into the poem what I sensed there in his prose, and in that of very few other fiction writers. That felt like an unanswered question for nearly five years. Having studied with George Hitchcock at San Francisco State, I was aware of the tradition of the prose poem that was being propounded in his journal Kayak & elsewhere, the Max Jacob-inflected prose poem as whimsical miniature, which always felt like the cheap side of surrealism to me. That was obviously not a solution.

The keys to answering my question came from a very different direction, three other friends – Barrett Watten, Bob Grenier & Kathy Acker – each of whom had distinctly different things to teach me. Watten, more than anything, showed me how a commitment to poetry as passionate as Gilbert’s made much more sense if only one understood it as an intellectual project. Where Jack’s work struck me as stuck on the surface, captured in his rhetoric of truth & beauty, romantic “truths” that are in fact fatal attractions, it was Watten who demonstrated, in his poems & in his person, the depth of possibility that lie in the poem.

Grenier & Acker, in very different (but complementary) ways, showed me that one’s work could force one into a position where one had – absolutely compulsory – had to write that which had not been done before. And that you needed not to worry if it looked weird or bizarre just because it was unfamiliar territory, to you as well as to any possible readers.

Which I did not get to, in my own poetry, until that day in 1974 – I was waiting for Rochelle Nameroff to come have lunch in some diner near then world-headquarters of Bank of America, watching that building’s workers pour out through its revolving doors – that I began to set things down in prose, but not a traditionally narrative prose. The sensation was quite instantaneous – I was 28 at the time & had been publishing for nine years, but I suddenly felt as if I had begun to do my own writing, my writing, for the very first time. The poem evolved into Ketjak.

That, I think, is what Diane Wakoski is driving after when she uses the phrase “our unique and richest voices,” and while I would never choose those words – I still have an aversion to the metaphor of voice – can hear that. And I can’t argue with her about the role of friends – there is no way I can discuss the evolution of my own poetry without them – this sketch just skims the surface of a far deeper debt than I ever can acknowledge. I thank them all.