I was explaining to a would-be anthologist who asked, just how I had selected works for my anthology In the American Tree, how I had set up a series of rules – writers had to have appeared in two or more contexts from a specific set of journals & book publishers – that gave me a core list from which I subtracted those who already had firmly established literary identities (such as Bill Berkson & Larry Eigner), those who were not primarily working in the United States (Steve McCaffery, Tom Raworth) & those who had either apparently stopped writing or were principally involved in another art form (Curtis Faville, David Gitin, Abigail Child). I had noted that while all of the exclusions were regrettable & some had proven controversial (as in fact were some of the inclusions), what I found myself most often regretting from the entire process was that I had not gone ahead and at least include Curtis Faville’s great poem of the 1970s, “Aubade.” It goes like this:

Light

tousle of damp hair

on the forehead

blur of leaf

and yellow sprinkling

of sun across the

window-sill – real

butter; crisp

sweet and toasted

at the edge

warming up around

the wrists

they creak slightly

and the eyes

rust; solid

functional wooden

cupboard from which

a dishtowel, red stripe

at each end, tumbles

into the light,

the rub of it

over wheezy nose;

sloshing mouth

and bowl spinning

noises, the

toilet; the tulips

beside the garbage cans,

even a black one,

coffee-grounds and

grapefruit rinds

mixed nicely with

cinnamon and

aluminum pop-top

cans, a dozen;

oatmeal flesh numb

but horny, errands

that keep us

apart; salty

shoulder, the

grovel of steamrollers

rolling sunlight

over the asphalt or

a yellow streetcleaner

with giant brushes

that rinse; the nightlight

forgotten until noon,

swapping curtains

for bathrobes or a

“blush”-towel, blue

yellow or seagreen;

delicate crush

of cellophane or packed

lunchbags; cold

gold ring, the first

thing, reaching over the

bed, the clock full

of water or dripping

with darkness; the grass

knifing up through

leaves face-down, birds

looking worried but

proud, a little frenetic,

bobbing; first

swish of vehicles over

the breathing roads,

coughing motors, scattering

at crossroads; wall

of white tiles or

pills dissolving on

the tongue; wobble of

dripping milk cartons,

soft torn webs

behind the eyes and

brassiness like a

bit behind the tongue;

shuddering whistle

blowing the top

off a factory of

grammar school; fatigue

like planned

obsolescence in the

marrow – built-in

bone-dry or allergic

to the clouds

in the sky; iris wide-eyed

but coy in its bed;

sap returning like air

to a butterfly’s

wings, slowly opening

and closing like first

breath; tropical vine

drooping like an eyelid

under the eaves, one

side of the house

still asleep in the shade,

bricks slanting

out of the ground

wet from brittle snails;

the doorknob befuddling

in its simplicity,

the door a blank; moths

flapping like bats

from mouths held open

with toothpicks; un-

foldable newspaper with

totalitarian BOLDFACE;

chainsaws bawling

over the bark;

yawns steep as mines

or wells with

shaggy moss; the stranded

frog splashed in the

street, cats

sniffing it; unplugged a

cork in the ear

floats away, a fly

stuck to the wall, drugged;

soap streams

and squeaks, a dull

razor in the trash;

white foam cool

and stiff, hushed-

up; combing the sparks

from my hair, that

bright blue arc

beside the switch in the

hallway; and then

a record, something

spiny like Scarlatti

or heavy and driving like

the Stones; that lush

static off the diamond

scratching plastic;

paint chipped, blistered

peeling or powdered,

white siding shutterless,

roomfuls of night, eating

it up; putting out

flames right from the fore-

head, a cock, crowing

from God knows where, dirty

and well-laid

scratching up fire

from hard earth; probably

not possible, I didn’t

go to sleep, sat up all

night and just

to say it a little differently,

washed-out and touchy

a whole day ahead

of me.

Twenty-eight years after this poem first floored me when it led off Ready, a mimeo & staple volume published by Adventures in Poetry, retyping it simply for the pleasure of putting her leaves me positively dancing with excitement. Of course, I am obviously the right reader for this poem: its aesthetic of plenitude, of description for the sake of detail, plays right into the poetry I was writing then. As it still plays into my own aesthetic all these many years later.

The poem reappeared two years later in Stanzas for an Evening Out, one of the best books of that decade, possibly even the best. A 203-page volume published in what was, for a generation just coming into its 30s in the mid-70s, a large edition, 950 paperback copies & 50 hard cover, Stanzas was & still is an awesome demonstration first of ambition & achievement, but also of deep ambivalence toward the poem. In some ways, the book was designed precisely as a farewell to writing.

The title of the very first poem, “Second Generation,” offers a clue as to the origin of Faville’s great discomfort with poetry. To a degree unmatched in his generation (or for that matter, since), Faville had an uncanny ear for the poetry of his time & was an almost perfect mimic of any writer’s style. Here, for example, is Faville’s version of Grenier, an untitled poem:

This morning got up saw

THE WHITE GEESE

IN THE WHITE GRASS

then went back to sleep

One that recalls the first phase of Objectivism (especially Reznikoff) is entitled “Ghosts”:

The wire wheels of the Stutz Bearcat

when time applied the brakes

I saw the sensuous manifold

breathe the fumes of another age

“The Knife in the Water,” a poem whose subtitle acknowledges that it is “(after Polanski)” also keeps an eye on Robert Creeley’s use of enjambment:

The object is

to keep the

knife between

the fingers of

the woman

spreading her

vast spaces

apart from

rain which

falls upward

through the

sail’s arc

like pick-up sticks

Bill Berkson, Larry Eigner, Louis Zukofsky, Jimmy Schuyler, Anselm Hollo & William Carlos Williams turn up again & again in these poems, often in complex duos – thus in “Aubade” I hear echoes of both Schuyler & Zukofsky, two New Yorkers not normally associated with one another. Ashbery & O’Hara & Berrigan also turn up, though less often. It’s a particularly 1970s gathering – very white male, for one thing – in part because the Creeley that turns up is the Creeley of Words & Pieces & in part because Grenier, who at that point still was close to unknown outside of a relatively tight circle of like-minded writers, is so visibly the uniting influence here, as though Faville has somehow found the Grenier in Berkson, the Grenier in Schuyler, the Grenier even in Williams:

I

hear

huge

fragments

of music an

amplified guitar

makes to sound

like –

trees in the

wind.

After Stanzas, Faville stopped writing for a while, then produced a short chapbook mostly of prose pieces called Wittgenstein’s Door, published by Tuumba in 1980. If Faville has written anything in the past 23 years, I haven’t seen it.

There are different ways one might read a volume such as Stanzas. One would be to dismiss it as a derivative project that invariably had to come to an end. This, I think, would be a serious mistake. Faville is, or was, derivative in much the same way as Robert Duncan, a self-proclaimed derivative poet*, using influences as tools, critiquing them in the same instant as he employs their devices.

One might also view the work as an instance in which a gifted student never finds his own “voice.” Again, this reading would be a mistake. If anything, Stanzas can be read as a devastating critique of the concept of voice, which was far more seriously ascendant in the politics of poetry in the 1970s than it is today.

Rather, I read this work – and I think this is both the most accurate & most fruitful approach – as if it were an argument with Grenier. Faville shares much if not all of Grenier’s analysis of the limits of a writing in which The Literary has been superimposed. What Faville doesn’t share is Grenier’s conclusion. The same set of constraints that led Grenier into language & the ultra-minimalism of Sentences – really a mode of magnification, the tiniest elements blown up under the microscope of inspection – to something beyond what most of us have traditionally thought of as writing, which comes out in Grenier’s work as drawn poems, as “scrawl,” take Faville to a position that shares more than a little with, say, Laura Riding, or with the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

* Whose influence stylistically is not in evidence in Faville’s work. Nor is Olson’s. Faville’s interest in Creeley clearly did not spread to the more ponderous Projectivists.

There is a fallacious presumption in my comments about Christian Bök: the implication that one might “improve” a poem or that a “better version” might be unearthed lurking in the published text. This fallacy of the well-wrought urn fails to acknowledge that “well-made” poems are little more than the bland pastel background against which important poetry, such as Bök’s, is written. In fact, if one were to look at the texts of, say, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Williams, Stein, Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, et al, what one notices, over & over, is that it is the rough spots as much as anything else that tells us we are in the presence of significant work. This is true of fiction also, from Melville to Joyce & Faulkner, and to Kerouac, Pynchon, Delaney & Acker. And it is what I trust about the very best poetry of new writers as they emerge on the scene. You can see it in Lee Ann Brown, Linh Dinh, Eleni Sikelianos, and Lisa Jarnot, to name four. 

This is not to suggest that any of these writers, past or present, doesn’t create the best possible works they can, but rather that obsessiveness with smoothing out the dissonance of the creative process is ultimately a destructive impulse, born of a decorative conception of literature. Yet it is precisely this process that is inscribed as the core activity of so many creative writing classes wherever they are taught, people sitting around in small circles, suggesting how this or that line break might be tweaked, this word choice “strengthened.”

In 1977, Curtis Faville self-published a brilliant & troubling collection of poems entitled Stanzas for an Evening Out. Faville (who these days runs the Compass Rose rare book operation, one of the best for modern poetry: http://www.abebooks.com/home/COMPASSROSE/) is/was an extraordinary student & mimic of contemporary style, but also someone who seems always to have felt a most charged & ambivalent relationship toward writers in his own generation as well as those who came before. (No accident here that the first poem in the book is entitled “Second Generation.”) I’ve always read that book’s title with the pun (Evening as a verb) in the foreground. So while I don’t share his cynical view of the state of writing (which may have moderated over the past quarter century), I think that title captures the problem as it confronts not only creative writing students, but so many poets today.

Evened out describes quite fairly what is wrong with poetry in the New Yorker, Nation, Atlantic Monthly and like-minded venues.