Twenty or so years ago, when I first began to seriously contemplate preparing my early archives for sale to a university library, I sought out the advice of George Minkoff, one of the premier dealers in such materials. One of my questions to him at the time was just how many letters between poets constituted a major correspondence, at least in the eyes of archivists. His answer – 30 – surprised me. Rae Armantrout and I, for example, have sent one another hundreds of letters. And in the days of email, thousands of electronic messages, often several a day. The idea of thirty letters constituting a major correspondence seems like an odd idea, at least until you to stop to consider what that much letter writing would signify – a relationship that extends over time & probably consists of more than one phase, something with an arc to it. Some important correspondences in literature – Robert Duncan’s with H.D., for example – are considerably less than thirty letters total.

Even by such modest standards, the correspondence between Jonathan Greene & Thomas Merton that is at the heart of On the Banks of Monks Pond is not a major correspondence. Jonathan Greene was a young poet, more or less fresh out of Bard College, when he met Merton after moving to Kentucky. Greene signed on as an unofficial contributing editor to Merton’s journal, Monk’s Pond – Keith Wilson & Jonathan Williams did likewise – but appears to have met Merton just three times before the Trappist monk died at the early age of 53. The correspondence as published is just eighteen letters long – ten of them by Merton – written over eleven months. Some of Merton’s are short enough to anticipate email:

Gethsemani
Friday
[June 7, 1968]

Dear Jonathan:

      Hoping this gets to you. Sat. morning. Lax is not here yet. Don’t know when – maybe next week. I’ll call you when he lets me know. We can get together then.

In haste,
      Tom

Considering just how slim this volume is – just 64 pages – it’s surprisingly satisfying, perhaps because it does such a good job of capturing a moment in time from so many different angles. Since there are just 18 surviving letters – you can sense where another half-dozen or so must have been written but have gone missing – the volume is filled out with a brief memoir by Greene, publisher of Gnomon Press and a fine poet in his own right who is now older than Merton was when he died; an introduction to the journal Monks Pond, Merton’s four-issue journal; photographs taken on the occasion of a picnic that included Greene, Merton & Robert Lax, a poet who shared Merton’s hermetic ways; the letters themselves; and finally an elegy for Merton by Greene.

Merton is one of those poets who could easily have been included in the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry – Merton’s absence, like those of Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen & Louis Zukofsky, has all kinds of literary consequences that one might regret some forty-plus years later. The first issue of Monks Pond shows Merton thoroughly embedded in the New American framework. Besides Merton, contributors included Greene, Williams and Wilson, John C. Wu, Paul Metcalf, Margaret Randall, Shen Hui, Ad Reinhardt, Lorine Niedecker, Wei-Wu-Wei, Ernest Moncrief, Simon Perchik & Alfred Starr Hamilton. One might note further that all, or almost all, of these also operated in terms that kept them from running comfortably with the larger groups amidst the New Americans. Williams was the local kid who stayed on in Ashville, and is in the area to this day. Wilson has become a poet of the Southwest – one might associate him with the New Western aesthetic. Meg Randall at this point was publishing El Corno Emplumado from Mexico City – at least until the aftermath of the riots & protests surrounding the Olympics drove her underground & eventually to Cuba. Niedecker’s cred as an isolato needs no rehearsal here. Perchik’s legal work kept him from hanging out with poets & Alfred Starr Hamilton made Niedecker look like a big city social organizer. Monks Pond, in short, was a gathering of the ungatherable.

One result is that Merton often seems to be one the least classifiable of our most influential poets. The number of anthologies he is not in – the Library of America American Poetry, which cuts off right before he was born, Cary Nelson’s Modern American Poetry, neither volume of the Rothenberg-Joris Poems for the Millennium, Hayden Carruth’s Voice that is Great Within Us – makes it seem unimaginable that this poet is the focus of multiple societies, foundations & other institutions all built around his work, as if he were only a Christian mystic, Father Louis of the Abbey of Gesthemani, a Catholic practitioner who published the best-selling Seven Storey Mountain in 1948 & was a friend of the Dali Lama, who lived in one of the strictest & most monastic of Catholic orders, and who died when he was accidentally electrocuted in 1968 in, of all places, Bangkok. What is best about On the Banks of Monks Pond is precisely the opposite – it places Merton thoroughly within the world of poetry, hoping to meet Anselm Hollo (in those days a British-based translator who worked for the BBC), thanking Greene for passing along an article on Barthes & Lacan, worrying about a contributor’s note for Wendell Berry.

Nor is Merton alone in the avant-/post-avant tradition to be directly & profoundly involved with spirituality & religion. From Brother Antoninus (William Everson) through Phil Whalen, Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Sister Mary Norbert Körte, Hozan Alan Senauke, Fanny Howe, Elizabeth Robinson & Lew Daly, there are enough poet-priests, poet-monks, poet-nuns & poets just plain on a quest all their own involving language & spirit out there to constitute a phenomenon that seriously warrants a closer look. It is not, I would suggest, any accident that the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics grew up at a school founded by a lineage holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma Buddhist traditions. But just what kind of non-accident is it?