William Carlos Williams
I had just met Ian Keenan, sometime contributor to this blog’s comments stream, and Jack Krick & I were descending the stairs of Philadelphia’s International House after the Anthony Braxton Sextet concert Friday night as I explained my general idea about what I might write in this space in the coming week – a piece or two on soft enjambment, one on the Braxton concert, another on the reading by Rodrigo Toscano & Divya Victor at Temple last Thursday, and of the role of humor as a governor of pacing in the text I sensed in Rodrigo’s work, when Krick – whose work you may know as the hand behind many of the more recent web pages at the Electronic Poetry Center – says to me, “Sooner or later, you always come back to the line.” I realized, of course, that this was true – and he wasn’t the first person to make that observation. Some of the folks who’ve made that comment in the past have said it with a sound of puzzlement in their voices, probably because my first big books, Ketjak & Tjanting, are both perceived as prose poems, and because the title talk in The New Sentence explicitly addresses the history of the prose poem, and specifically its formal possibilities (largely unnoticed since nobody after Baudelaire seems to have actually counted sentences).
Yet as should be obvious to anyone who has read this blog for any length of time, my own roots as a poet lie very much in my identification in the late 1960s with the Projectivist poets – Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Blackburn, Jonathan Williams et al – most of them related at some point to Black Mountain College, but geographically dispersed after the school’s implosion during Olson’s tenure in a way that neither the New York School & the San Francisco Renaissance, so called, were, while being at the same time much more formally invested than, say, the Beats. As much as I loved Zukofsky’s “A,” Bunting’s Briggflats & Oppen’s Discrete Series, I couldn’t quite see how to directly employ in any present sense a poetics that had evolved among folks who were – let’s face it – considerably older than my parents.¹ There was certainly a period in the late 1960s where I felt as if Olson’s theoretical work had “solved” all questions concerning the line once & for all. It was in that spirit that I read Williams & Pound as leading to Olson, on the one hand, and all their contemporaries who failed to practice the line-as-a-unit-of-speech at least nominally (as did Ginsberg, for example, as well as O’Hara, Snyder & Whalen) as hopeless folks who simply did not get it, and whom history would treat with short shrift. It was during this period that I tended to leave writers like Alan Dugan, whose poetry was clearly speech, but whose line was configured so as to border on prose, behind. The nearly allergic reaction I got from Quietest mags when I started sending work with aspects of a Projectivist line only served to make my sense of the divide even more severe. So this was the bubble that burst when I first confronted the work of Bob Grenier & Clark Coolidge.
It certainly didn’t hurt that Grenier had been close to Robert Creeley (tho, to be quite honest, he’s never, even now, dissociated himself from his earlier work as a student of Robert Lowell’s & it was through the efforts of Richard Tillinghast & James Tate that Grenier first came to Berkeley). Nor did it hurt, from my perspective at least, that one could see the visible influence of Jonathan Williams & Phil Whalen in Coolidge’s early work much more readily than one could the 2nd & 3rd generation
One of the inherent problems with the Olsonian program was that it promised, after the first few heroic efforts by the New American Fathers, to turn into a form of anthropological research, interesting, but minor almost by definition. I was talking with Drum Hadley the other day, who sees his poetry on one level as just such documentation of the ranching industry – I think I tend to hear it more as voices of the Southwest – speculating that you could do the same project for every one of the major trades. That surely was the possibility – but for a lot of 2nd & 3rd generation poets with that bent, it was the threat as well.
Early langpo emphasized the prose poem in ways that had not been done before. Instead of the Max Jacob appropriations that characterized the Americans in an anthology like Michael Benedikt’s The Prose Poem, the prosoid work that showed up especially during the 1970s opened up the possibilities of what might done in the form, in terms of length, in terms of effect, in terms of language. But for me at least – I can’t really speak to the motives of others – this was never a rejection of the line, so much as it was an attempt to see if one could bring the level of rigor that Olson had used with the line on the sentence & paragraph. In this way, it was not a break with the Projectivists nearly so much as it was steering the same vehicle down a slightly different path.
But that path still made it hard for me to see something like the device I called yesterday soft enjambment, the use of linebreaks to consciously minimize the disruption of the line’s end. I wasn’t
reading Alan Dugan any more during this period and when I did come across Jimmy Schuyler, what I tended to see was how the surface imagery of his work reminded me of some elements of John Ashbery’s tamer ventures. Where had Schuyler come up with this idea of the linebreak? You don’t find it in Stevens, nor Elizabeth Bishop, nor Auden, nor in somebody like David Schubert – indeed, it is instructive to read a poem that approaches the idea of a shorter line – which seems to be precondition – like Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” and you see just how dramatically the use of capitals at the left hand margin shape the line.
The closest I can come to his idea antecedent to Schuyler & Dugan, is in certain poems of William Carlos Williams, particularly from the mid- to late 1930s, such as this first stanza of “The Crimson Cyclamen” (which Williams dedicated To the Memory of Charles Demuth):
White suffused with red
more rose than crimson
– all a color
the petals flare back
from the stooping craters
of those flowers
as from a wind rising –
And though the light
that enfolds and pierces
them discovers blues
and yellows there also –
and crimson’s a dull word
beside such play –
yet the effect against
this winter where
they stand – is crimson –
We don’t even see a period until well into the second stanza, while in the third we come across this sequence:
In
September when the first
pink pointed bud still
bowed below, all the leaves
heart-shaped
were already spread –
That is, I think, a true instance of soft enjambment at the end of that first line & very nearly another at the end of the third. Once introduced, it shows up again more frequently, as in the opening of the sixth stanza:
Under the leaf, the same
though the smooth green
is gone. Now the ribbed
design – if not
the purpose, is explained.
Yet at the end of this long stanza, the poem moves largely (tho not exclusively) into quatrains before moving back to longer stanzas again before it closes. At one level, I think it’s extraordinary that either Schuyler or Dugan – both of whom I feel certain must have gotten it from Williams – would even have noticed the device, tucked as it is so deeply inside work that is more various & ultimately not using soft enjambment for the same purposes that they sought it out. That two poets, working in fairly different social & aesthetic venues – tho both within New York City for much of this time – would build so much of their careers out of this one device (without, so far as I can tell, really reading one another).
I myself didn’t really completely discover Schuyler’s work until I found his line, quite by accident, when writing What, a section of The Alphabet. Superficially at least, What has a line that one might read as Schuyler-esque, although the effect is the consequence of a happy accident. Here is a passage, picked more or less at random:
The meter maid is a
burly guy. Mesh on
the windows of
sheriff's bus. Curly headed
blonde looks wrong,
thick dark brows.
An African man with a
hat made of beads,
beans. Now styrofoam pasta
mock snow, drugstore window
holiday display. Brown, dry
outer skin of onion.
Smell of piss in rear of bus.
"Ju-ju con Danny," thick
felt tip strokes
cover rear window's
safety glass. Drop cloth
protects the hydrangea
beneath painters' scaffold.
The jaw moves in circles
massaging itself
as if over cud – she's
chewing gum (smoking
a cigarette!). Bright
red scarf over
long black coat
skips across street.
The bicyclist, panting,
pedals uphill. The collator
on the xerox (which is not
a xerox) beeps in distress.
Like Williams, I’m not systematic at all in what I’m doing, and I’m not trying to cause the line itself to fade, at least not consciously. Instead, the rule for the composition of What was that I could only break the line at points that felt “unnatural” to me. But after ten or fifteen pages of this, I could see what was emerging. Amazingly, I would later learn that the one book of mine that Jimmy Schuyler ever seems to have read is What, a little detail that continues to give me great pleasure.
¹ My mother was born in 1926, my father in ’27, making them contemporaries with the largest group of the New Americans: Ginsberg, Creeley, Eigner, Ashbery,
