Black Sparrow is back. John Martin’s deservedly famous small press imprint, which from 1966 until Martin’s retirement in 2003, published many great books of poetry, fiction, memoirs & correspondence, had been relegated to the netherworld of backlist distribution on the part of David R. Godine, who took over the largest portion of the catalog – the exceptions being a trio authors, Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles & John Fante, who were picked up by Harper Collins, & Wyndham Lewis, whose work was taken by Marshall McLuhan’s publisher, Ginko Press. While Godine, for the most part, got the best books – he has the voluminous Robert Creeley-Charles Olson correspondence, several volumes by Larry Eigner, David Bromige, Robert Kelly, Tom Clark, John Yau, Eileen Myles, Jimmy Schuyler, Paul Goodman, Edward Dorn, Kenneth Burke, Jane Bowles, Andrei Codrescu, Mary Oppen, Wright Morris, Carl Rakosi, John Wieners et al – his only commitment was to sell the copies he had literally trucked back from Black Sparrow’s warehouse in Santa Rosa. On his website, still surprisingly primitive for a trade publisher with decent enough distribution, Godine admitted that, once gone, most titles would not be reprinted. “Only a select few will be — and they will be joined by judiciously selected new titles published under Godine’s Black Sparrow Books imprint.”

 

Now that is starting to happen. Godine has reprinted Diane Wakoski’s early selected poems, Emerald Ice, in an edition as well produced as any Martin ever did, its gloss cover a good step up from the matte finish of the earlier books. In addition, Godine has just published new books by two poets closely identified with the Black Sparrow brand, Clayton Eshleman’s My Devotion & Robert Kelly’s Lapis. Volumes by Beat fellow traveler Janine Pommy Vega & the dean of Los Angeles poets, Wanda Coleman, may already be out. And new volumes by Lyn Lifshin, Kenneth Burke, Alfred Chester and others have been announced. Perhaps the most important title this year will in fact be a collected short poems by Charles Reznikoff, something the world has needed for decades.

 

I have never quite figured out David Godine’s editorial taste – it seems to combine some of the world’s most interesting authors, like Ron Padgett, Georges Perec & Christa Wolf with the likes of William Logan or Albert Goldbarth. Thus I have been wary of the idea of Godine trying to shape a second imprint with a separate personality. Or, as we marketing types put it, brand identity.

 

So this first flurry is definitely an encouraging sign. Not only are the first poets ones already closely aligned with Black Sparrow, all three books are genuinely worth reading on their own & make great sense together. Kelly & Wakoski, after all, were two of the poets most closely associated with Eshleman’s literary journals, starting with Caterpillar & continuing through the life of Sulfur.

 

One could make a case that all three of these poets are underappreciated, that we generally don’t acknowledge just how important they have been to the creation of the current poetry scene, even Kelly whose volume here, Lapis, is his 63^rd book to date. Certainly this is true of Diane Wakoski. She first came of age as a poet right at the moment when Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, was setting up the landscape for the next two decades of writing in America. And while she was clearly on the side of the New Americans (NAPs), she was also female during a period when that was not easy. Indeed, one of the first things one notices of the many younger poets who followed in the wake of the Allen anthology, is just how many of them were not male. Like Wakoski, some of these younger poets have persevered & done well – Diane DiPrima, Joanne Kyger & Beverly Dahlen come immediately to mind – but if Ed Foster’s Talisman House hadn’t published the collected works of Madeline Gleason – one of only four women included in the Allen anthology – her poetry today would be as difficult to locate as that of Gail Dusenberry, Mary Norbert Körte, ruth weiss or Barbara Moraff.

 

I will always think of Diane Wakoski as a western poet because she grew up in California & attended U.C. Berkeley, where she worked on the literary magazine Occident, as had Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer earlier on (and as, circa 1970, would David Melnick & myself). If her sense of the line comes very directly out of projective verse, it had an almost matter-of-fact directness, radically unlike such enjambed, even halting New England voices as Olson or Creeley. Of the other westerners attracted to this kind of line, only Duncan really exceeds Wakoski in their interest in long, complex (& in Duncan’s case, convoluted) sentences. Her use of larger structures – narrative, dialog, the employment of personae – separates her out from writers like Phil Whalen or Gary Snyder. In some respects the poet she most reminds me of is someone whom I don’t know whether or not she ever even met – Lew Welch. He’s the only other one who combines that sense of line & that tone of discourse in anything like a similar fashion. Like Wakoski, tho, he also counterbalanced a life between the Midwest (in his case Chicago) and the West Coast. Wakoski has been in Michigan since at least 1975.

 

When I first was reading Wakoski in the 1960s, she was really the first poet in the New American tradition to be an out front feminist – it was a tone, a focus, and a content I had not heard before, certainly not in Levertov (who came to it not all that much later) or, at that moment, in either DiPrima or Guest. It gave her work an edginess that enabled her to establish herself as a poet on a national scale very quickly, yet at the same time it separated her out from all the other poets in her own aesthetic neck of the woods, at least until Caterpillar, where her emotional rawness fit in very well with a similar sense of electric inner life that one finds in Clayton Eshleman as well.

 

At her best, Wakoski is as good as it gets. Consider, for example, the opening lines of the 1966 poem, “Poet at the Carpenter’s Beach”:

 

Building up

in any way,

a structure that will permit you to say

no,

a structure that will permit you to say

yes,

as the thin small poet stood on the beach

in the light of the torch and was

run down and immediately killed

that night, on the beach, the sand

soft and cool, like his breath, just a few

minutes before.

 

Being around when somebody dies

requires a leap of imagination,

this reality too complete to comprehend,

 

as when you left me

 

and after that you were not in my life,

though just the day before you had kissed me and touched my mouth

with your large sculpturing fingers.

 

The weight of the line here is argumentative & dramatic, the better to foreground specifics & evoke the psychic devastation that is being described.

 

Emotional directness, as I suggested, is a signature element of Clayton Eshleman’s poetry as well. My Devotion is his first collection of poems since 1998 &, not unlike Roger Clemens, Eshleman still knows how “bring heat” to the page. Here are two examples from different works. The first is a stanza from a poem entitled “Animals Out of the Snow”:

 

Caryl and I were visiting the young poet Stephen Smith

in the world of 3 AM,

I was generating organs for a new book.

We were invited, as if for a cottage

or mountain cabin stay, but the beds were uneven,

things were tilting, for hours it seemed

I worried about my throat and

the corpse of John Logan

putting itself into my throat.

 

The second is the first paragraph of the prose poem, “A Yonic Shrine”:

 

When I piss into your blood (paper decomposing, pink furls, red under-risings), I feel an aimless goodness, a fascination with deconstruction – then a new spurt, making a new pattern, sinks me back, joyfully, into the childhood sandbox.

 

No poet depicts the logic of dream with greater care or precision than does Eshleman. His works often suggest a level of violence – and a discursive authority – that I think must put some readers off. It surely can overwhelm the unsuspecting. The way, for example, the reiteration of the word throat in that first stanza (just the sort of thing a bad MFA instructor would tell you is redundant) is what drives the sense of panic in the last line.

 

The paragraph from the prose poem works in exactly the opposite direction – from an image of violence or violation back toward the dreamtime of childhood. As is so often the case, the most important word here is the one that at first looks like it doesn’t belong, as if it wandered in from some other text or discourse: deconstruction. It sets up every other phrase in the paragraph to mean something other than what it claims to say. Also visible here – in both excerpts actually – is Eshleman’s grasp of the phrase as a locomotive element of prosody. I would call it muscular, tho Clayton might prefer the term peristaltic. Eshleman, Peter Seaton, Leslie Scalapino are all poets I could read endlessly just to think through how the phrase operates as a mode of music.

 

What is amazing is not that Lapis is Robert Kelly’s 63^rd book. What is amazing the vast range of poetry with which Kelly is completely adept. Unlike, say, Larry Eigner, who also produced literally thousands of poems but did so within a relatively uniform aesthetic framework that enabled him to use his form as a method of thinking, Kelly is the closest thing we have to a literary chameleon. He can produce long, indeterminate, post-projectivist texts in which line & phrase are every bit as much the locomotive governing the poem’s energy & he can produce lyrics as simple & powerful as “Light”:

 

The chastity of light

is a torment to the damned

 

who want to sully it

with our nature

 

want to give it skin

and suck the skin

 

want to penetrate the light

force our way

 

into everything.

Nothing yields.

 

Nothing can be broken,

everything intact

 

and light is the skin of it.

We howl around the campfire of each fact.

 

Constructed from just four sentences – the length of each is essential to the balance of the whole – with relatively few nouns, this poem is a close spiritual kin to the work of Rae Armantrout.¹ The way Kelly operates is that each book of poetry tends to focus on a specific aspect or side of his writing. The poems in Lapis one could call short, at least in contrast to some of Kelly’s writing, but they’re hardly all lyrics. There is a “Political Poem” named exactly that here that looks to, and acknowledges, Alan Gilbert & Kristin Prevallet. A prose memoir turns the act of asking one’s father to ask one a question into a vertical (& vertigo-ridden) descent into hell. And, as will happen in any book I read of Kelly’s, there are terms here on which texts depend that will have me reaching for the dictionary: ar-Ruk, cantelina, Caillebotte. Kelly knows exactly what he is doing. Who else, after all, would start a poem entitled “Gary Gaetti Retires” with “Recentior D H Red Soxorum?”

 

So maybe this new home for Black Sparrow is going to work after all. It would be great to see the press keep the most important books – the Olson-Creeley correspondence, the Eigner, the Bromige – in print forever. But it will be just as critical that Black Sparrow's next generation of texts make sense in terms of the great history of John Martin’s press. So far, so good.

 

 

 

 

¹ Tho I doubt that Armantrout would ever write that last line – her howls are inner & silent.