In the breath-taking context of Yosemite Falls & Half Dome, long hikes & a little river rafting, I've also been doing some reading on my vacation. Sometimes the combination of what one takes to read fits perfectly, but other times it can be quite incongruous. In the latter category for me this year has been a copy of the Paris Review interview with the late David Ignatow.
This isn't the best interview in the Paris Review series, in part because Gerard Malanga isn't (or wasn't back in 1979) the strongest of interlocutors. He's obviously done his homework on Ignatow's writing (and the critical writing about him), but lacks the touch to follow up some of Ignatow's less-than-forthcoming answers with follow-on questions that might have opened Ignatow up further. For the real problem here is Ignatow himself, who comes across as angry, even bitter, in part because his own lack of understanding of American poetry gives him too narrow a view.
One of Ignatow's major complaints in the piece is that he has always had to fight against what he characterizes as the "genteel tradition" in American letters, complaining that the likes of Richard Howard and John Hollander (and John Ashbery!) "are once more reasserting a kind of quietism into American poetry." This quietism - sure sounds like the School o' Quietude to me - Ignatow equates with intellectualism, which he in turn contrasts with William Carlos Williams & Charles Olson as examples of anti-intellectualism. To read this interview, you would think Ignatow was much closer to Olson than to most other American poets, tho he seems to have no clear picture of the New American Poetry in his head at all.
Further, Ignatow in 1979 is silent on the Objectivists, never once asking why it should be that a follower of Williams like himself should come along in the 1940s with no nurturing environment, as if the Pound/Williams tradition had not only not disappeared (or been disappeared) during the years of World War 2, but had never even existed.
It seems weird to see Ignatow so clearly portray himself as the victim of a particular school of letters, but to have no historical understanding of his situation. Calling Williams & Olson anti-intellectuals is deeply inaccurate, and yolking Ashbery together with Howard, Hollander and Harold Bloom (Ignatow's primary villains) suggests that he was not able to see the degree of satire in Ashbery's "award-winning" period.
Hearing this one-time APR editor complain about the School of Quietude is instructive, tho, in that it shows just how deeply divisive that school's poetics have been. Ignatow dismisses the Boston Brahmins as a failed coterie of the 1940s and Malanga goads him a little further by quoting Robert Bly, an Ignatow ally, as saying "We can let the academic imagination regain control over American poetry that it had during the time of the New Critics or we can fight." Bizarrely, Ignatow appears to misunderstand Bly's statement altogether as recommending the reinstatement of the New Critics in order to provide a more perfect target for oppositional poetics.
Anyone who had read Ignatow on the language poets will know that he did not always see the possibility of alignment with others who might have strong roots also in the Williams/Olson heritage, especially if those others acknowledged the ability of Williams & Olson to think in their poems. Here it is fascinating, but depressing, to see just how closed off and isolated Ignatow seems to feel. In a way, had the Objectivists not been driven out of print during the 1940s, Ignatow would have found a scene awaiting him where his own inclinations as a poet might have been well received, one that would have put him into a more intelligible relationship to the New Americans who would come along a decade later. Lacking this at the very beginning of his career, the David Ignatow interviewed by Gerard Malanga in 1979 seems never to have found it later instead. An American tragedy.
