Henry Rago in the 1950s

There is a meme going round – identify the 20 books that first caused you to fall in love with poetry. I first ran into it on Javier Huerta’s blog & have since seen it several other times. That’s an interesting, nagging proposition. It’s quite different, actually, from the question posed by Peter Davis in his Poets’ Bookshelf series, which asks about those books that have most influenced you, although obviously there is going to be overlap. But the question here seems more to be what got you here in the first place, what work made poetry the art you love.

I tried to come up with a list of twenty, and as you can see below, couldn’t really do it. Any item off the list below would fundamentally falsify the list. It has 31 lines and since one line consists of three items, my roster comes to 33. These aren’t the first books of poetry I read (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Oscar Williams & Alan Dugan would be on that list – Dugan is the only one of the four I still read with interest today). And I could do another circle around this of other books from this same time period – basically 1960s into the earliest part of the ‘70s – that certainly did not hurt, including volumes by Roger Shattuck, Donald Finkel, George Starbuck or Robert Sward that might surprise you. David Ossman’s collection of interviews, The Sullen Art, Ed Dorn’s North Atlantic Turbine. I thought long and hard about adding the Genesis West issue partly devoted to Jack Gilbert (it is still his best publication) or a second Oppen book (in this order: Discrete Series¹, The Materials, Of Being Numerous), but such volumes are really ancillary to the list below. If I added one more name, I’d suddenly have to let in a whole bunch of the New York School (Starting in this order: Ashbery’s Rivers and Mountains, Ceravolo’s Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, O’Hara’s Lunch Poems & Meditations in an Emergency, David Shapiro Poems from Deal), and the first books of my immediate peers, beginning in this instance with David Melnick’s Eclogs & Barrett Watten’s Radio Day in Soma City. So I will keep my list of 20 just to the 33 volumes below, listed here in alphabetical order.

Donald Allen (editor), The New American Poetry

Paul Blackburn, The Cities

Robert Creeley, For Love

Robert Creeley, Words

Robert Creeley, Pieces

Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches

Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow

Jack Gilbert, Views of Jeopardy

Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America

Ronald Johnson, The Book of the Green Man

Ronald Johnson, The Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses

Robert Kelly, Finding the Measure

Robert Kelly, Axon Dendron Tree

Robert Kelly, Twenty Poems

Robert Kelly & Paris Leary (editors), A Controversy of Poets

George Oppen, This in Which

Charles Olson, The Distances

Ezra Pound, The Cantos

Henry Rago (editor), Poetry double issues (Fiftieth Anniversary, Oct.-Nov. 1962; Works in Progress – Long Poems – Sequences, Oct.-Nov. 1963, Works in Progress – Long Poems – Sequences, April-May 1965)

Jack Spicer, Book of Magazine Verse

Jack Spicer, Language

Gertrude Stein, Writing and Lectures 1909 – 1945 (esp. Tender Buttons)

Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation

Philip Whalen, On Bear’s Head

Jonathan Williams, Amen, Huzzah, Selah

William Carlos Williams, The Desert Music

William Carlos Williams, Spring & All

Louis Zukofsky, “A” 1-12

Louis Zukofsky, “A” 22-23

Louis Zukofsky (editor), Poetry (The “Objectivist” issue, February 1931)

I’m very conscious just how very white and very male this list is. My argument would be that it was the time. I had hoped that meeting Denise Levertov when she came to Berkeley would cause me to get over my resistance to her poetry, but instead it showed me why I was better off trusting my instincts. Joanne Kyger’s The Tapestry and the Web isn’t my favorite volume of her poetry, and Bev Dahlen wasn’t yet bringing out books. This list I think shows just how profound & radical the impact of HOW(ever) has been, but that journal didn’t start until 1983 when I was already 37 years old. Similarly, the first two poets of color whose work I genuinely would love – Erica Hunt & Lorenzo Thomas – were really unknown to me at the time. Erica may still have been in high school.

The situation of Bev Dahlen also points to another feature of this list – it’s book-centric. Poets like George Stanley & David Gitin had a profound impact on me in my early years, but not because of any specific books of theirs that were available then. Ditto John Gorham & I don’t know that this once-upon-a-time student of Robert Kelly’s ever had a book published.

Looking at that list today, I don’t think there’s one bad book on it. I still think those two Norton volumes are Ronald Johnson’s best work, even though they aren’t the ones people focus on most today. And it’s interesting to me to realize that only one collection by Charles Olson – and not of Maximus – would be on this list. I have a deep interest in Olson, but until the complete Maximus was in print, that volume seemed scattered. Another very conspicuous absence is Larry Eigner – I loved his work wherever I read it, but that was as apt to be in journals as books (or, for that matter, on postcards), and even if he’s one of my half-dozen favorite poets, I don’t have anything like a favorite book.

Another surprise might be Jack Gilbert, whom some will read as the only School of Quietude poet on this list. Jack’s Yale Younger Poets’ volume, Views of Jeopardy, really is the Gilbert of Jack Spicer’s Magic Workshop as much, if not more, than it is the protégé of Gerald Stern & Stephen Spender.

It might also surprise people to see four separate issues of Poetry here, given that I haven’t been all that wowed by the quality of that journal’s work over the 40 since Henry Rago had a fatal heart attack while on a sabbatical. The 50^th anniversary issue brought together – in alphabetical order – many of the best known poets in the US, starting with Conrad Aiken & Ben Belitt & ending with Richard Wilbur, William Carlos Williams, James Wright & Louis Zukofsky. In practice, the issue also functioned as an announcement by Rago, who had been the journal’s editor since 1955, that he no longer was going to focus exclusively on the academic poets of mid-century & while the issue has Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, Stanley Kunitz, James Dickey, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Howard Moss, Howard Nemerov, Delmore Schwartz & the other usual suspects, it also includes Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch & e.e. cummings. Koch, it might be worth noting, is the only New York School poet here, and the Beats are likewise conspicuously absent. This issue had the first Berryman “Dream Songs” I believe I ever read & it wouldn’t shock me to realize that I bought it for the Alan Dugan therein. By the 1965 double issue, post-avants made up exactly half of the 18 poets contained in its 172 pages, including Creeley, Duncan, Johnson, Koch, Levertov, Olson, Gary Snyder, Gale Turnbull & Phil Whalen. The conservative poets included Wendell Berry, Hayden Carruth, Galway Kinnell, David Posner, Ernest Sandeen, Anne Sexton, and Theodore Weiss. One could argue either way about the last poet, Charles Tomlinson (tho these are eight poems from his American Scenes period, his work most deeply influenced by Creeley & Williams). Am I the only one who would argue that the posties have aged much better over the last 44 years? Turnbull – a fine poet – is the only postie who has not yet achieved some sort of canonic status. Posner & Sandeen, on the other hand, have disappeared entirely from view, and Carruth & Weiss, whatever their relative merits, are no more widely read than Turnbull.

There is a liveliness to the Rago double issues that they share with two of the other anthologies on my list, The New American Poetry & A Controversy of Poets. Like the Kelly-Leary anthology, Rago’s trifecta does try to include all kinds of American poetry. The first – and to my thinking, still the only serious – attempt to heal the wound between the two traditions of American verse.

When Rago died, his interim replacement, Daryl Hine, took over – this was more akin to losing Obama & getting Gov. Palin in his place. Hine & his successors have generally kept the coup intact. Even though the Poetry Foundation – by now the more important institution over there – has emerged as a heterogeneous site for American poetry, the verse actually printed in the journal, with a few notable exceptions (vispo!), still covers the waterfront mostly from A to B as if we were still living prior to 1962.

When I see the other lists that are emerging on the web of people’s 20 books, I realize just radically different the world has become from what it was in my youth. There are relatively few times when I envy younger people, but the greater diversity of what any young poet was reading who came up in the 1980s or ‘90s strikes me as a mode of richness we should not underestimate.

 

¹ Discrete Series is a volume that has had a greater impact on me over time, but I never would have gotten to it without This in Which.

The nature of influence changes over time. I have sometimes thought that the New Western poets who came along after Snyder, Whalen, Dorn et al were simply too close in age to their own masters & that this, as much as the problems of poetry distribution from – for the most part – the American Southwest – had much to do with why such names as Drum Hadley, Bobby Byrd, Bill Deemer, John Brandi & Jim Koller aren’t more widely known today. Similarly, I’ve felt the Actualists had the same problem of proximity to their masters, most notably Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo, and that this had as much do to with their fate as, say, the lethal alcoholism of Darrell Gray. Even for the finest poets, too close a relationship to a present master can make it much harder to establish themselves as genuinely independent figures. Michael Palmer’s proximity to Robert Duncan, for example, proved as much a handicap as a blessing, especially during his early years. Similarly, Norma Cole’s proximity to Michael Palmer – the title of her book Mace Hill Remap is an anagram of his name – made it hard for some readers to recognize those aspects that were uniquely her own perspective (her two works in the giant Poetry and Its Arts retrospective at the California Historical Society in January 2005 were breathtakingly original, combining poetry, installation art and, in the case of the “room,” performance, albeit in the most casual, anti-performative manner). Another way of looking at this same issue is to note that the success of the second generation of the New York School was in good measure due to the distinctly different sensibility of Ted Berrigan, who guaranteed that what was to come could not possibly be read merely as “the acolytes of Frank, John & Kenneth.” A little distance does a world of good.

The name Michael Palmer also percolates up repeatedly from the work of Ben Lerner in Angle of Yaw, published by Copper Canyon. From the organization of the book itself, the multiple sections that have the same title as the volume, to individual stanzas, such as the opening passage of “Didactic Elegy”:

Intention draws a bold, black line across and otherwise white field.

Speculation establishes gradation of darkness

where there are none, allowing the critic to posit narrative time.

I posit the critic to distance myself from intention, a despicable affect.

Yet intention is necessary if the field is to be understood as an economy.

The only major difference between a passage like this, which seems committed to a referential terrain that, like Palmer’s, one wants to call philosophical geometry, or perhaps geometric philosophy, that plane that in painting underscores so much of the landscape of the surrealists, is that Palmer’s commitment to beauty as decadence invariably leads him toward a lushness of sound this passage seems to avoid. But that is a telling distinction, which looms up large in other works, such as many prose passages in the twin “Angle of Yaw” sections. Consider:

THE AUTHOR EXPOSES HIMSELF IN PUBLIC like film. Every surface secretly desires to be ruled. A faint hazy cone in the plane of the ecliptic precedes the tabulation of a body by a train. Read only to resist the temptation to write. Skew lines and slickensides in an era of polarized light. The zip disk of snuff films your son defends as research has divided the community into infinite subdistances. Born losers born ready to be born again, we await the mayor’s address in metal chairs. Then it hits me: I’m the mayor.

Humor in Palmer’s work ranges between dry and droll, and appears sparingly, like a silver thread of scandal. It’s frankly goofier & closer to the surface in Lerner’s work, a heritage possibly of that same second generation of the New York School. Further, Lerner is willing to expose the issue of polished surfaces as a formal dimension of the work of art, as such. Literally on the facing page preceding the work above is this, also quoted in its entirety:

THE PHENOMENA OF EXPERIENCE have been translated into understanding. Plug the exposed voids in the veneer cores to eliminate nesting. We live in the best of all possible worlds. Stain the compound to match the plywood finish.

This poem offers a marvelously daft recasting of the history of literary devices. The third sentence – a generalization that sweeps the particulars of the foregoing away – is a deep echo of Rilke’s last line to the torso of young Apollo, undercut here precisely by its anticlimactic position. The last sentence underscores what is merely implicit in the second: that the found material here comes from some do-it-yourself woodworking manual. Now it becomes evident that the first and third sentences might themselves be derived from external materials, including just perhaps an Rilke-for-Dummies close reading guide.

There is a confidence here that one almost never finds in Palmer’s work &, interestingly enough, it’s the one thing that gets Lerner in trouble, as in:

NO MATTER HOW BIG YOU MAKE A TOY, a child will find a way to put it in his mouth. There is scarcely a piece of playground equipment that has not been inside a child’s mouth. However, the object responsible for the greatest number of choking deaths, for adults as well as children, is the red balloon. Last year alone, every American choked to death on a red balloon.

Here, the joke overcomes the use of the joke and the poem collapses into a one dimensional plane we may associate, say, with Russell Edson. But it’s done so well is the obvious rejoinder, and there’s no question that it is. All the more reason it should have been left out. What in Lerner’s best pieces functions as a disruption of the poetic here simply lies flat. Lerner’s best work comes at the other extreme, when the frame of reference appears to change on an almost sentence-by-sentence basis:

THE SMUGNESS MASKS A HIGHER SADNESS. We are unaware of the patterns we generate. In the carpet grass, the snow crust. When we don’t know a word, we say, Look it up. Up? And the Lord withdrew his thumb, trailing delicate, rootlike filaments, leaving a hole in my chest the size of a polis. From which I address you, Hamsun. If you dig deep enough, you hit water, then hell, then China. So why not fly? Getting there is half the fun; the other half: not getting there.

And Lerner shows that he can do this also in a way where disparate threads weave almost seamlessly:

AN IMAGE OF ULTIMACY in an age of polarized light. Will you marry me, skywrites the uncle. A pill to induce awe with a side effect of labor. A lateral inward tilting and the aircraft pushes its envelope. A minor innovation in steering outdates a branch of literature. Envelopes push back. The way a wake turns to ice, then vapor, then paper, uniting our analogues in error, intimacy’s highest form. Jet engines are designed to sublimate stray birds. No appears in the corn.

That probably is my favorite piece in the entire book because so much is going on here, and at such finely tuned points of precision. The word awe thus rhymes with a word that doesn’t appear in the piece at all (yaw), tho it is immediately (and obliquely) described. The word uncle rends the whole sense of romance implicit in the first half of its own sentence – and is that final sentence a reply? Or the second, more overt rhyme: vapor, paper. And what is the relationship being staked out here between error and incest? As the diagram at the top of this note (from Wikipedia’s definition of the yaw angle) suggests, this is in some ways the title poem of this book. Tho Yaw also is the Levantine god of chaos. And rivers. So I hear the word labor at the end of that second sentence principally around the denotation of childbirth – maybe that’s the echo from all the references to pushing. But one senses, reading & rereading this poem, that it may not have been written in exactly this form. Rather it feels that it began deep inside – maybe with the sentence Envelopes push back – and then moved outward in both directions, as tho there were concentric circles of connotation rippling outward.

So ultimately Michael Palmer is just one of many influences visibly threaded here throughout the text, as this book attempts many things Palmer would never think to do and fails to take up battles that are central to Michael & his work. The difference between Lerner’s relationship to Palmer & that of Cole seems mostly to be one of time. Much like the New Western poets in their relation to the New Americans, Cole is only a couple of years younger than Palmer, who was born in 1943. Lerner, however, was born in 1979. Lerner’s mother, the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner, actually is younger than Palmer.

Harold Bloom has rather poisoned the well of influence in recent poetic discourse, partly because his theory of strong & weak misreadings equating to strong & weaker poets is wrong – both Cole & Lerner are by any test strong poets – but even more because, like the very New Critics against whom Bloom’s work was a reaction, he has misused his critical position too often to promote and defend minor or marginal characters – Geoffrey Hill, A.R. Ammons – largely missing out (the exception’s would be Ashbery & Duncan) on the major poets of his own time.

It’s true that there will always be acolytes and poets who are but pale photocopies of their heroes, who take their attendant master as limit rather than as suggestion of possibility. But the difference between Norma Cole & Ben Lerner is not that one is a strong poet, the other not, but rather a factor of time. Cole had to win her critical distance and, because she’s good artist, she did. But Lerner I suspect just finds it easier at the outset to have such distance with a poet who is roughly the age of his parents.

Indeed, someone like Jack Spicer might have had his career aided somewhat by being mostly out of print for a decade after his death in 1965, many of closest compatriots scattered about British Columbia, rather than concentrated around the scene in North Beach. Particularly given his reputation as a difficult personality, a little distance here may well have been the difference between utter disregard (cf. Ferlinghetti’s relatively recent “Do people still read him?”) and the recognition of Spicer as a major figure of the mid-century period that is in fact now becoming common.

All of which is to say, perhaps, that, yes, I do see/hear Michael Palmer’s hand floating not so far from some of the work of Ben Lerner. But it’s not something Ben Lerner has to worry about, “get over,” or “go beyond.” In some ways, he was born already having done so.

John Ashbery isn’t the only influence to pop up in the “Early Poems” section of Jack Collom’s giant Red Car Goes By volume. And the influences aren’t always whom one might expect, either. One poem, “Bauch,” suggests that Collom must have been such German poets of the period as Helmut Heissenbüttel or Eugen Gomringer. One senses also both the Beats & the Projectivists as people whom the young Coloradoan must have then been absorbing.

 

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of that early section in Red Car is that Collom – perhaps because of his great geographical distance from any manifestation of The Scene (the bio at Teachers & Writers notes that he did not meet another poet until he had been writing for eight years) – seems never to have felt any need to pick & choose between various New American tendencies – he could & did absorb a little from everybody & in such a fashion that it was never anybody’s poetry but his very own.

 

This in many ways is radically different from what I found as a young poet in the mid-1960s, coming along really just after the period represented by Collom’s “Early Poems.” The world I ran into was in fact deeply partisan – a young Projectivist – which is more less what I must have been between 1966, say, & coming under the heady influence of Bob Grenier in 1970 – a young Projectivist might be interested in, say, the New York School or the Beats, but really only as a friendly backdrop to the so-called real debate of that period, which was What to make of Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger, seen by more than a few people at the time as a form of revolt against Projectivist principles. Where you a ‘Slinger person or a North Atlantic Turbine person, that was the question, Turbine being the apotheosis of ‘50s style Projectivist writing? Did you include Duncan in your sense of Projectivism &, if so, which one? How did you account for his relationship with the likes of Jack Spicer, who seemed so at odds with Olson’s sense of language? & if you were a hardcore Projectivist, did you think of yourself as expansive & inclusive of history & sources, a la Olson & Pound, or did you find “book learning” to be inauthentic compared with the personal & thus prefer the far narrower intimate focus of a Creeley? & what did you do with Zukofsky, who – like Olson – seemed very much to come out of the most radical aspects of Williams & Pound, but in whom Olson obviously had no interest (&, so far as I could tell, vice versa)? Oppen was just starting to show up in print, Bunting likewise, & folks like Rakosi & Reznikoff were still principally rumors. Niedecker was unknown, even by the poets I knew in Milwaukee. Thus when Kay Boyle handed me a manuscript by somebody I’d never even heard of – Joe Ceravolo’s Ho Ho Caribou – & announced that it was going to win the first “Frank O’Hara” award & be published by a New York trade press, one had a sense that powerful political forces were ganging up to push one tendency forward at the expense of one’s own. & it was a world in which Creeley’s Pieces came as a resounding jolt – it was as radically different from Projectivist assumptions as Slinger had been, just in a different fashion.*

 

If all this seems more than a little icky, well, it was. But this hyper-partisanship also explains, at least in part, why the poetry wars of the 1970s proved to be so terribly intense.** Part of what is so very interesting reading these earliest poems by Jack Collom is that he seems to have already figured out what it seems to have taken so many other poets another twenty years to get straight – it’s not a zero sum competition. Liking the New York School need not preclude an interest in the Beats, the Projectivists nor anything else for that matter. In that sense, Collom is writing – these poems date from 1955 to 1964 – very much like a poet of the 1980s. The man literally was a quarter century ahead of his time.

 

One wonders – especially if one c’est moi – how other poets of his time must have interpreted Collom’s eclecticism. As a wishy-washy failure to declare allegiances? Or as having already gone beyond the stumbling blocks that other poets were only then starting to pick their way through? That Collom had books from Tim Longville’s Grosseteste Review Press – whose interest in U.S. poetry combined Projectivism & Objectivism – in 1972 & United Artists Books, virtually an official outpost of 2^nd Gen. NY School poetry, in 1981, suggests that Collom’s poetry was connecting with some diverse audiences. It may also suggest that Collom’s writing, by its very independence, can be read by an aesthetically committed reader as being part of whichever literary tradition one happens to like best.

 

I find this interesting in part because it is so consistent with much later attitudes & approaches to writing. & Collom has himself been a very consistent & productive poet – even in the 1950s, he has the sharpest eye for (& greatest knowledge about) birds of any American poet. In a world in which many poets think “hawk” is terribly descriptive, this is a man who knows a harrier from a kestrel & that you don’t look for burrowing owls in a tree.

 

 

 

 

* One that made it possible to imagine how Zukofsky fit into the evolving tradition.

 

** The wars were, in part, an extension of a situation that had existed for over a decade, hardened in part by the fact that younger poets often took the divisions in the Allen anthology far more seriously than did that anthology’s contributors. The most vigorous & vicious attacks against langpo, it is worth noting, came from wannabe New Americans who felt they had “signed up” for the world projected in The New American Poetry & that anything that suggested ongoing evolution directly threatened the petrified tableaux of their worldview.

 

 

 

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Jordan Davis tries to keep me honest. When I wrote on Tuesday that “Red Car Goes By is the first collection of Collom’s work ever to be widely available, its nearest competitors for that honor being a 300-copy edition published by Grosseteste in the U.K. & a stapled book from Lewis Warsh’s United Artists,” he sent me a series of notes, one of which indicated that The Fox was (a) perfect bound, not stapled, (b) published in an edition of 750 copies & that (c) United Artists was Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer. Davis even adds that it was typeset by Skeezo & printed by McNaughton & Gunn.

 

I stand corrected on all accounts. I was operating from a description I’d seen from a rare book dealer – I’ve never seen the book itself.