Scene from The Vivian Girls, The Pat Graney Company, 2005

 

After I posted my note on the Vodou shrines of Nancy Josephson, the holocaust tapestries of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz & the ceramic installation that is Richard Cleaver’s Gathering at the Latrobe Spring House, the Greco-Australian math poet П.0 sent an email asking my thoughts on

 

the notion of the naive poet within the context of language etc

i.e. is it possible, if so who

 

But I had not used the term “naïve.” There is nothing about Josephson’s shrines or Cleaver’s complex clay craft that would even suggest naiveté. Krinitz was self-taught & her tapestries dispense with pictorial conventions such as perspective, but that abandonment empowers her at times to construct more complicated narrative structures (single panels in which, for example, figures representing herself & her sister Mania appear more than once in the same scene). There is a difference between self-taught & naïve I would think.

 

Poetry differs from the visual – and especially the textile & ceramic arts – in that it employs technology – language – pretty much everyone uses in everyday life. That is one reason why so many people think writing poetry must be “easy.” One is, in this sense, always already self-taught even before one thinks to ask the question, Can I write?

 

There have always been poets who were directed by motives that seem entirely personal or outside of traditional art world concerns: John Wieners, Hannah Weiner, Will Alexander, Jack Hirschman, Julia Vinograd, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bern Porter, Bob Kaufman, Helen Adam. It would not be that hard to call any one of these an outsider artist, even when (as with Hannah Weiner or Will Alexander) they also seem completely in touch with the contemporary writing scenes of their day. Like Josephson & Cleaver, they all seem to demonstrate the distinction between being an outsider & being naïve. I never knew Frank Kuenstler, who struck me as being a street person in his own private world the one time I saw him (which, frankly, is how Kaufman always struck me as well), but it is hard to imagine that somebody who had more than a half dozen books published could have been living entirely outside of the literary scene.

 

A more complex case might be the work of Frank Stanford, given that his great early longpoem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, does appear to have been composed with virtually no knowledge of the existence of any literary scene. His later short lyrics, on the other hand, reflect the socialization process of MFA programs hard at work. Yet it’s his early poetry for which Stanford will be most remembered.

 

Leading a writers workshop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the 1970s, I worked with a number of writers who similarly were unaware of the existence, sometimes within just a few blocks of the Leavenworth Street drop-in arts program where we met, of one of the most vital & rich literary communities in this country. And some of the people were doing interesting, exciting work. Harley Kohler was a practitioner of what in those days was called gender fuck, which is to say that he typically wore both dresses & a beard. His poems were complex constructions of neologisms, tending toward pure word play. Because his lover at the time worked in the same board-and-care home where Larry Eigner first lived on moving to Berkeley, it would be wrong to suggest that Harley didn’t have some clue as to the literary world, but it was a scene that just didn’t interest him. James “Spider” Taylor (not to be confused with the guitarist from the bands Red Wedding and Smoke & Mirrors, nor with Carly Simon’s ex-) wrote long, intense fictions – a cross section between the prose of Kerouac at its most over-the-top & the sensibility of Rat Fink, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s hot-rod associated comics. While other writers associated with the Tenderloin Writers Workshop – Charles Bivens, Laura Feldman, Mary Tallmountain, Roberto Harrison – did connect up with the literary scene in one way or another, neither Kohler nor Taylor ever did. It’s my guess that there are many other people just like that around other “open reading” or “workshop” settings all across the United States (I can’t speak for other societies here). Kohler & Taylor both clearly were/are outsider artists, and Taylor I believe probably fits П’s category of naïve as well. But it’s precisely because they are writers who practiced at the margins, their work is functionally inaccessible today.

 

I’ve often wondered in this regard about the prose of Henry Darger. The bizarrely virginal pedophiliac graphics for which he has become posthumously famous, after all, were originally illustrations to his 15,145 page novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. One senses that his prose style may have been as unique as his understanding of female anatomy. While Darger himself has become a cult phenomenon, the subject of a Natalie Merchant song, the source for John Ashbery’s title Girls on the Run, the subject of a motion picture, and a performance/dance piece by the Pat Graney Company, The Story of the Vivian Girls has never to my knowledge been published. Indeed, a profile on the artist in the Washington Post by Phillip Kennicott on February 4, included this assessment of Darger’s prose:

 

The written works of Darger are so extensive, and frankly so dull, that no one has read them in their entirety. His style is filled with little Victorian asides that address the "dear reader," a perpetual inflation of excitement reminiscent of bad adventure-writing aimed at little boys, and lots of rhetorical stuffing that sounds like a child trying to imitate the style of an adult. "The accounts of the numerous stirring scenes mentioned here will, we hope, become interesting and attractive as well as fascinating reading to the people of our nation, but also highly important and valuable though unreal," reads one passage.

 

Here one verges on the border of writing & psychiatry. Which moves beyond the question of insider/outsider art or whether or not such a thing as “naïve poetry” can exist. But I think my answer to П’s question is that, yes, such a thing can exist, in which a writer produces work without prior or deep knowledge of the literary scene, but it is unlikely that we are apt to the know the work. To the extent that we do, it tends to be the result of a social accident – Frank Stanford’s “pre-college” work turns out to be as good or better than anything that follows; Henry Darger just happens to rent his room from an art professional, photographer Nathan Lerner. If Stanford’s work reflects a level of raw genius – that’s a completely reasonable reading of Battlefield – it’s hard even to get hold of the prose of a Darger. The writing of people like Harley Kohler & Spider James Taylor tends to be lost forever.

 

This is where the question of what constitutes a “naïve” writer comes in. The category is not entirely about the absence of knowledge of literary effects, at least not to the degree that it might be in media (like Esther Krinitz’ tapestry) that are not direct extensions of thinking & speaking, as such. Rather, it is also naiveté about the organization of such effects, first within a text, but always also in the social world as well. Not being aware of (or interested in) a literary scene, or how one might enter into it, is at least as important as what goes on between the margins. After all, Emily Dickinson appears to have been no more interested in an audience than Henry Darger.