A couple of folks, led by Kirby Olson, have suggested that I ought to talk more about my Quietist youth, and what led me to abandon that path in my writing. The idea creeps me out, which probably means that I ought to do it. But I have a limitation. Virtually all of my early work , some 11 spring binders’ worth in addition to the first twenty years of correspondence, are all housed safely in the rare books collection at UC San Diego, some 2750 miles away. One early poem I do have on hand is “Youra,” which first appeared in TriQuarterly in its spring issue, 1968. I was 21 at the time and had written the poem a year earlier. It is, I think, a worthy candidate for any “so bad it’s funny” competition:

Where the trees never dare to grow. Though I cannot know.
Where the earth begins the slow bruise
to rock. Where the water must be free of blue.
Though I cannot know.

Youra
on the far side of love.
The public side. The side where the heart beats
slow as a march in half-time.
Youra from the distance. Thin line
of an island. Though I cannot know.

What can a man know who lives in a room?
Some men live in the world.
Some men go in boats to Youra.
There, maybe they can feel the sea recede
at night, and know
I cannot know.

I have never seen the fence an island grows.
Where the sun is contained.
Where one talks his poems loudly to the gulls
to keep from going sane.
I have often seen the face that knows Youra.

Whatever sees into the deep that is not forest.
Whatever sees spiders, wild.
Memory of the earlier dead.

Though I cannot know for sure.

What will you do when Youra comes?

There is a note at the bottom of the page in TriQuarterly stating that Yannis Ritsos had been confirmed as being held at this island prison camp by the Greek junta that had just taken over in Athens & that there were fears that Nikos Gatsos was being held there as well. This poem appears in an issue that also includes work by John Berryman & Theodore Roethke, and a chapter of Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book that is available nowhere else (which, in fact, is why I still have this issue at hand). To render my humiliation complete, the poem was picked up and reprinted as the as the frontispiece to Gods and Heroes: A Modern American Writer Looks at the Greece of Yesterday and Today, by Herbert Kubly, published by Doubleday in 1969. With an honorarium from both TriQuarterly and Doubleday, this for a long time was my most financially successful poem. You can probably find even worse in my 1966-67 Poetry Northwest publications, as well as a Southern Review piece that is not even on my bibliography.¹

Realistically, “Youra” might not have been so bad read for what it really was – a study of Eliot’s poem ”Marina,” from which I took the rhetoric & reiteration. Rereading Eliot today – his poem is every bit as melodramatic, pompous & silly as mine – one could even fault him, as I do myself, for writing about something he does not know (in his case, an imagined daughter). But “Marina” is also leavened with some feats of syntax that sort of rescue it, while mine has a flatness that reminds me instead that I was then also reading Jack Spicer & George Stanley really for the first time (I certainly wasn’t aware of their lurking shadows behind this text when I wrote it, tho it seems apparent enough today). That’s an interesting effect, perhaps, but I’m not sure how appropriate it is to this sort of project.

From beginning to end, including all revisions, the poem took less than an hour to write. And that, ultimately, is the big red flag over this poem & over almost all my work prior, say, to 1970. Getting work into Poetry, TriQuarterly or Southern Review may have taken more than one submission, but the poem itself virtually never took more than an hour, often less. It’s not even clear to me, in retrospect, that I would call what I was doing even writing. More exactly, I was demonstrating mimicry, the capacity to reproduce a recognizable form. That was all that was needed to get into these publications.

There were editors who did take the time to offer me constructive feedback – Iven Lourie at Chicago Review, Clifford Burke at Hollow Orange, Clayton Eshleman at Caterpillar a little later – and my writing began to evolve in part as a result of their questions – I always found questions much more valuable than “suggestions.”

Now there are poems – and even poets – that I would characterize as first rate where the actual period of composition involved is often quite brief – Larry Eigner, for example. But in such circumstances the act of putting word to page seems more the tip of an iceberg, rather than representative of the entire process. That’s not a claim I could make of my poems of this period.

Not only were these poems of mine just too freakin’ easy to write, but when I did start to incorporate other influences & elements into my work, when my poetry began to become a little more complicated & ambiguous, these same publications closed up again instantly. Their commitment certainly wasn’t to me personally, nor to my writing, nor to writing itself, but rather to the reproduction of recognizable forms. As elastic & flexible as those might have seemed – Roethke & Berryman are not your standard School of Quietude types, even as both worked within that tradition – it was easy to go over the line & suddenly become persona non grata. Indeed, the instant that Henry Rago died & Daryl Hine took over Poetry in ’69, the shift away from a nonsectarian journal was as profound as the political Right hopes the Supreme Court will be once Alito joins Roberts, Scalia, Thomas et al. In the issue in which I appeared, just a few months before Rago died, Kenneth Koch, Anselm Hollo, Larry Eigner, Mitch Goodman & Hugh Seidman all appeared. One year later, I doubt if any of those folks could have been published there. And by then I had become one of “those folks” myself.

 

 

¹ Because I’d gotten rid of my contributor’s copy & no longer had a good record of the piece when I first cobbled that biblio together for Tom Beckett’s “Silliman issue” of The Difficulties. Written in 1967, Southern Review held onto it for several years before printing the poem. I recall getting a note about it from Ray Di Palma, wanting to know if I had a “secret life.”