Reading Eleni Sikelianos’ poem, an excerpt from a longer text entitled “California,” in the new issue of Radical Society, I had a strange experience. I felt the presence of Michael McClure. Not the McClure of the Ghost Tantras, the plays or the ecstatic howls of the should-have-been ineffable, but rather the cosmological McClure, the PBS pop science McClure, casting into centered texts meditations based on things he’s seen or read about the natural world in the popular media. For example, this piece, entitled “For the Death of 100 Whales”:

Hung midsea
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers

Brains the size of a teacup
Mouths the size of a door

The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.

Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.

Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.

This poem, which McClure read at the Six Gallery reading in 1955 that helped to spark the so-called Beat Revolution – & not co-incidentally first pointed out to the world at large that San Francisco was as vital a center for American letters as New York – is predicated on an April 1954 story in Time magazine about, in McClure’s own words,

seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.

Although this is not the kind of poem that McClure is typically represented by in the anthologies, it is a type of poem that he has written his entire life. Its value lies not in McClure’s research – none is involved – but rather in the way he imbues the topic with emotion & narrative figuration. In a sense, this is the opposite of the “research poem,” whether of the Pound-Olson variation with their unintentional parodies of the scholar fumbling around in the archives or of the more journalistic “investigative poetry” approach advocated in recent decades by Ed Sanders. Another poet who literally made use of PBS and other mainstream media not only for ideas, but for layers of content thus displayed, was Larry Eigner.

When I was growing up as a poet in the 1970s, I used to hear other writers comment negatively – sometimes emphatically so – about this side of McClure’s poetry, as though it were a kind of debased product & that, in working from sources in everyday media, McClure was essentially revealing a kind of laziness that was at the heart of his project, not unlike the equally scandalous process of allowing other people type up his holographic manuscripts & perform what in the age of the typewriter was not an inconsequential function: the centering of his lines.

Somewhere along the line I decided that this was a bad rap. In an age where Andy Warhol & others – this was still pre-Jeff Koons – were utilizing assistants to help construct the work of art*, any insistence on doing your own research struck me as a kind defensive measure on the part of writers who felt that, if such aid & delegation were possible, then perhaps readers might not appropriately appreciate their own devotion to all the ancillary tasks that might envelop the act of writing. The work that struck me as the decisive argument for the permissibility of appropriated materials as a source for literature was Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony.

The primary differences between Reznikoff’s approach & McClure’s are (1) Reznikoff’s focus was the social while McClure has been more drawn to the natural world & (2) Reznikoff’s approach to these materials has been one of minimal overt commentary, almost a deadpan transparency, while McClure’s has been one of a drum-beating & hollering display of empathy. Empathy, of course, has ever been “uncool” & “unhip” & I suspect McClure had to deal with that prejudice back in the 1950s every bit as much as in the 1970s & ‘80s.**

Sikelianos’ poem skips the drum-beating & ALL CAPS HOLLERING, but in fact is an act of empathic inhabitation of a milieu inhabitable today only in the imagination:

There was still the problem

of the mystery of regenerative forces here on Earth.

My early Californians

might have been prowlers & plunderers, lover of the lower orders of intelligence

They might have had a fortunate notes or eyes or horns

of surprising size.      They were

4-handed animals or omnivorous quadrupeds or

My early Californians might have been 8-feet tall stomping around in the glacial ice

Ages-extinct fires nearly tiny dragon-headed lakes

Chasing the American camel, chewing the fat fireside & touching up a wooly mammoth,

mini-horses, imitation

bison four times the weight

of buffaloes, ground sloths the size of tanks,

giant shining armadillo roll over, silver

wheels crushing tender grasses,

Edentata belonging to the (inhabited) Earth,

edacious at the tooth

of Time, nibbling some sweet thing, fiery

Hymenoptera edulcorated by their history with men

Shades of Forrest Gander! This text itself has been edulcorated – that c can be pronounced either hard or soft according to the OED – by polysyllables a-babble. What we have here –the quotation above constitutes maybe one-fifth of the Radical Society excerpt – is poem as nature museum diorama.

Writing of Earliest Worlds last September, I noted how Sikelianos’ work there included lines that were “among the most thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly heard (&, not coincidentally, felt) since Charles Olson was a young man.” Almost by its nature & certainly by its genre, “California” is a more relaxed piece of writing. It’s probably accessible to a broader range of readers, albeit at the cost being less exhilarating to that core who’ve seen what Sikelianos at her most intense can do.

Which brings my back to Michael McClure & the question of choices in writing. The very qualities – empathy & narrative figuration – that I suspect enabled the Radical Society editorial board to include this work in the first issue of the journal’s new life are those which are most apt to divide poetry’s primary group of readers, who may well find it all too “inauthentic.” Since this is an excerpt, it will be interesting to see how “California” develops & also how it’s received.

* If Sol Lewitt actually drew all those lines on art museum walls himself, he’d end up in the American Visionary Art Museum.

** Thus, for example, I don’t recall ever having seen an article that fully explored what I take to be McClure’s greatest contribution to poetry – his exquisite sense of the pacing of detail. It’s a side of his writing that shows up most sharply delineated in the cosmology poems.

Where is the center of human
suffering? A tight pit at
the pit of the city with the brighter
flesh radiating outward. Or inside
out, the dark rings around the city moving
in and in? At St. Denis? A man
by the freeway picks black-
berries, and no wood-

lot loomed without song.

Fields of wild mustard outside the sub-
division mushroom, each
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one a Flower Beneath the Foot / Sudan / cut off the hands

of my dream when waiting for such things as “Good
night” at the end of the beginning of sleep. Pledge

allegiance, he said, or the pain

starts again. I lived by my book but they asked me to move my body

through a series of movements called “work”     What is the name

that is the game, of the essences of objects of pain? I is another

name of the labels

of laughable
[detours], contents, i.e.,

Night Road Work

These lines are among the most thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly heard (&, not coincidentally, felt) since Charles Olson was a young man. The comparison is apt if only because the writer, Eleni Sikelianos, uses many, if not all, of the devices in Olson’s tool kit as she works through this passage, the first third or so of a poem called “The Brighter Flesh,” from Blue Guide, the first of the two books that make up Earliest Words (Coffee House Press, 2001). This formal vocabulary, I would argue, is carried further than Olson himself could have done – follow the “i” and “t” sounds through that first stanza, initially separated in “is” and “center” (that sibilant s sound hissing their segregation), joined in the second line, playing off the contrast between long & short vowel in  “tight pit,” then again in the third line – “pit,” “city,” “brighter” – only to foliate in the fourth within “radiating” (Sikelianos gets more emphasis out of that intervening long “a” than any poet I can recall), only to turn them around & around again through the end of this sentence nearly two lines later. As an instance of pure technical brilliance, the passage is breathtaking, but where it is propelling us as readers turns out to be even more so: to the violence of Sharia, the rule of law imposed by Islamic fundamentalists. Enjambment here governs the prosody of nightmare. 

Earliest Words (and Blue Guide in particular) is filled with such mouth-dropping moments, many of which have relatively little to share with Olson or the Pound/Williams tradition in general (there are, for example, some great prose poems here). But reading this passage & others like it for the first time this past spring made me realize just how long it had been since I had seen anybody do something profoundly useful with this set of discursive tools. You have to go back to the books of the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz from the late 1970s to see poetry achieve anything genuinely new in this vein. 

An interesting poet to contrast with Sikelianos might be Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose Drafts also sometimes carry the surface characteristics of the Pound/Olson tradition of the long poem. If you read DuPlessis chronologically, however, I think you see a rather different developmental journey from her early post-Objectivist impulses toward a work with extraordinary scope and complexity. In short, she has arrived at this outer appearance to her texts quite independently and, if you look at the individual sections closely, they don’t function anything like logical extensions of Pound’s or Olson’s uses of history and reference. Where “the guys” expound, argue and hector in their poetry, DuPlessis thinks. Not surprisingly, it is DuPlessis you meet in the text of Drafts, while Pound & Olson both used the written as though it were a wall they were building between themselves and the reader (Pound’s “great acorn of light” is, in  fact, intended to blind). The result has a radically different affect. It is this point at which DuPlessis’ poetry and that of Sikelianos meet.