Against the orgy of unrelievably bad public poetry commemorating the first anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, I had the occasion to read Allen Curnow’s “A Framed Photograph” from his 1972 serial poem Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, in which the assassinations of the brothers Kennedy is posed against the consequences of their own actions elsewhere in the world, as in this stanza:

Act one, scene one

of the bloody melodrama. Everyone listened

while everyone read their poems. BANG! BANG!

and we cried all the way to My Lai. 

Which in turn brought me back to the poems concerning JFK’s assassination that were written by Jack Spicer and Louis Zukofsky and beyond that, the anti-Vietnam War poems by Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg. While none of these were explicitly written for “command performance” occasions, all show the range of what might be possible within this genre that I might characterize as shared public emotion – from the most personal (Zukofsky’s “A”-23) to the most declamatory (Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra, Part II” or Duncan’s “The Fire, Passages 13”).

Spicer’s JFK poem appears in Language:

Smoke signals

Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the earthquake hit

Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them

On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be insane.

This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.

Spicer’s poem replicates the process of grieving in the way that grief turns everything, no matter how remote – here a description of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake – into a commentary on its obsessive object. It’s no coincidence that two phrases – “Smoke signals” and “Bang, snap, crack” – apply equally to the devastation in Anchorage & the shots ringing out over Elm Street in Dallas.

Spicer’s ambivalence over public language is on record. His very last poem, concluding Book of Magazine Verse, takes an unnamed Ginsberg to task for allowing himself to be chosen Kraj Majales in a Prague May Day celebration. One poem earlier, Spicer makes the claim that

They’ve (the leaders of our country) have become involved in a network of lies.

We (the poets) have also become in network of lies by opposing them.*

It’s a position that Spicer knows is untenable. Indeed, irresolvable conflict is the primary Spicerian theme. Spicer himself wrote obliquely about the Vietnam War earlier in that same book. And the final poem to Ginsberg concedes that “we both know how shitty the world is,” refusing to place Spicer above the very same behavior he is about to criticize. Yet, while it is possible to argue that, at least in Magazine Verse, Spicer chooses individual human relations over social ones (which thus would be the point of his announced solidarity with the Prague police rather than the counter-cultural demonstrators with whom Ginsberg was parading), the JFK poem clearly places Spicer on the other side of that line. This is ambivalence in the most literal sense.

All of this harkens back to Wordsworthian homilies concerning emotion recollected in tranquility when tranquility is precisely what is lacking if the poem is to be taken as a possible transcript of consciousness (as Wordsworth himself does in the Crossing the Alps section of The Prelude), a category that is as inclusive of emotion as it is of thought. Add to this the impulse to “even out” rough edges until the product shines with that glazed state of crockery called the well-wrought urn** and you have a prescription for literary disaster of titanic – and Titanic – proportions.

*I have always wondered whether to assign the “missing” words in that second line to Spicer’s alcoholism, which would kill him only weeks after this was written, or if in fact the absence of “involved” in particular signaled a deeper level of meaning.

** See my comments for September 5.

Of course Allen Curnow and Gary Snyder are not precisely generational equivalents. Snyder’s first publication, in the Reed College student publication Janus, doesn’t occur until 1950, a point at which Curnow has already brought out at least three books. But one of the things the comparison does is to highlight that discrepancy. The reality is that there were few innovative American poets of significance who emerged during the 1940s.

The largest exception is Robert Duncan, who in fact first started publishing at the end of the 1930s (precocious teenager that he was). The two other major movers of literary form who were born during that decade between 1910 and 20 – Charles Olson and the novelist William Burroughs – were both late bloomers. Glancing over Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, a surprisingly decent anthology of the first 60 years of the 20^th century that organizes its poets by birth date – now there’s a narrative! – you can’t help but notice that between the first poet born in that decade (Olson) and the last (May Swenson), the poets who predominate in that period – Schwartz, Berryman, Jarrell, Kees, Stafford, Weiss and Lowell – represent the core of what was the academic tradition of American poetry. The more innovative poets of that decade, Antoninus/Everson,  Patchen, Merton, McGrath, were all pronounced loners as writers. Two were monks, no less.

Certainly, the Second World War created a great schism in American writing, by cutting off the expatriates and the international influences that had been so very important to the high modernists. One might also blame the war, at least in part, for the failure of the Objectivists to move beyond their first youthful burst of publishing in the 1930s. For a talented young poet during the war years, the conservative tradition of American letters – that version of history that sees U.S. poetry as a tributary of British letters – was very close to the only game in town.

Five poets who are interesting to look at in this regard are David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro on the one hand – Shapiro is slightly younger, having been born in 1924 – and, on the other, Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser.

The first two have often been paired, and I admit to reading them as though they were examples of what the Williams influence would have led to had Objectivism not shown its potential for greater breadth, depth and evolution. When the New Americans came along, Ignatow and Shapiro could easily have recognized the shared sympathies for Williams, but seem instead to have been isolated by the sudden appearance of all this new writing. Except for Shapiro’s first book The Eye, published by Alan Swallow (as far from the New York publishing world as one could get in the 1950s), the two did not begin bringing out books until the 1960s. The trajectory of their isolation was to lead both into becoming profound conservatives, as is evident from Shapiro’s work at the New York Times Book Review and Ignatow’s comments at the “What is a Poet?” symposium at the University of Alabama in 1984. (See Hank Lazer’s What is a Poet?)

The three women poets have often been claimed by the conservative literary tradition and to some degree at least they must have needed to relate to that world simply to get their work into print, not unlike Williams. But it is worth noting how all three can easily be read quite differently: Swenson (who worked at New Directions) as another Williams-influenced writer of innovative forms, Bishop for her visible influence on some of the New York School poets, Rukeyser’s political work aligning her with a tradition that would bridge McGrath and, say, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. One can only imagine what might have happened to American poetry had the three worked together to create a woman-centered poetic tendency decades before Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Susan Griffin and Adrienne Rich came along.

Thinking more about the role of narrative – literally the unfolding of meaning over time – one of the fascinating aspects of the late great New Zealand poet Allen Curnow’s Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-1997 (Auckland University Press, 1997) is Curnow’s insistence in ordering his book in reverse chronological order. One begins in the present, as it were, and proceeds back toward the days of World War 2.

So many collected or selected editions take just the opposite tack – inevitably treating the work as a journey through one’s life with all the predictable stations along the way. It’s a modestly useful approach, although often the poor reader has to slog through unrepresentative (and relatively unrewarding) juvenilia before the writer begins to arrive at his or her mature work (think of all those Keatsian concoctions at the start of William Carlos Williams’ career – the doctor didn’t start to write the poems for which we remember and value him until his was in his late 30s). Writers whose careers contain one extraordinary project amid much work that is far less focused (think of Merwin’s Lice or Tomlinson’s American Scenes) also aren’t served by a narrative of time as an organizing principle for their works. 

Curnow’s strategy insists on his present relevance to the scene of writing. Contrast this with the bizarrely posthumous avant-la-lettre Gary Snyder Reader (Counterpoint, 2000), in which Snyder’s poetry does not begin until page 399. If there is a message to the Reader’s narrative, it is a statement about the “man of wisdom” for whom the poem is an appropriate but ultimately secondary expression. The book seems designed to barricade Snyder from any consideration of his poetry as pertinent to what writing is now, which is perpetually in a state of “becoming.”

Because Curnow’s approach is just the opposite, the experience of reading Early Days Yet is the inverse of a biological narrative. It is very nearly archaeological: each succeeding section peels away the present to reveal its sources.