Writing about ezines Jacket & How2 last Thursday, I ended with this question:

Where is the journal that steps up to looking at the world with such rigor, but from the framework of poets age 35 & under?

One possible answer to that question, certainly, lies in The Poker, Dan Bouchard’s journal out of Cambridge, MA, settling now into its own adolescence of sorts with issue number 6 just out. Like the five issues that have preceded it, numero six is impeccably edited, combining work by newer poets (Nancy Kuhl & Deborah Meadows, both of whom are new to me), lots of well-known mid-career writers (Joe Elliot, Rodrigo Toscano, Lee Ann Brown, Bouchard himself, Bill Luoma, John Latta, Jennifer Moxley, Mitch Highfill), some American masters (Jackson Mac Low, Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Waldrop), plus a serious swath of critical writing (34 pages of essays, roughly a third of the journal, none of which could be called a book review, tho Steve Evans’ “Field Notes” does include a little omnibus blog review of sorts & touches on recent books as well).

Bouchard clearly understands that an editor’s first function is to offer context – Evans’ notes are deservedly legendary for the work they do in this regard, critically, for example. Here, in addition to Evans, Bouchard includes Ben Friedlander’s selection a poem by Fitz-Greene Halleck, a neglected 19^th century American poet associated with the Knickerbockers, the major School of Quietude (SoQ) group prior to the Civil War, who has not had a volume published since 1869. Friedlander’s introductory essay makes a decent case for this conservative poet – something the current SoQ is notoriously poor at doing.¹ Similarly, Jackson Mac Low’s poem, “Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed Upon From Every Direction,” a late piece from last year, is followed by a brief appreciation of Jackson by Mitch Highfill, an appropriate commemoration of Mac Low’s importance to American poetry over the past half century. Waldrop’s contribution to the issue consists of translations from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, one of the first great texts of what would turn out to be the avant-garde tradition.

Print journals have a materiality that an ezine can never match, of course. You can put it in your backpack & read it at convenient moments all day long as you travel about the city. On the other hand, there are limits to any print journal’s distribution, and print lacks the potential for readily accessible archives that ezines have (tho not all e-journals take advantage of this, to my constant & utter dismay). Bouchard’s commitment to print extends to his refusal to look at manuscripts sent electronically, a little Luddite touch that The Poker might just be the last journal to employ.

With the Mac Low, a new Drafts by DuPlessis & what may be the title poem of Armantrout’s next book all included here, it’s really worth noting just how much important verse Bouchard is able to get for a publication that includes just 65 or so pages of poetry, including both Baudelaire & Halleck. It is apparent that many poets now act as tho The Poker might just be the closest thing we have to a poetry journal of record in these United States. Given the comically bathetic narrowness of, say, Poetry, which has not performed this function since Henry Rago died while on sabbatical in 1969, it would be an interesting project for a sociologically minded critic – Alan Golding? – to trace just where poets have turned in the years since in the absence of such a journal. In 2005, however, it would seem clearly to be The Poker that takes on this responsibility.

 

¹ Since to do so would require confronting a literary history about which they are mostly in denial. So much better to pen another appreciation of Rilke than to investigate their own tradition’s roots & by-ways.

The new No is now. Which is to say that the second issue of this exceptionally intelligent – but bafflingly designed* – journal has arrived. As with its first issue, there are several features that entirely warrant the $12 cover price. Three that immediately come to mind are:

 

·         In Denmark: Poems 1973-1974, by Kenneth Irby – a 66-page book (bound on gray matte pages to distinguish it from the glossy white of the main No), by the writer whom I’ve argued in these pages before may have the best ear of any American poet of my time.

 

·         An American Primitive in Paris, a sizeable portfolio of the paintings of Enrique Chagoya, whose artwork used to grace the page of Socialist Review back when I had the fortune to be its editor.

 

·         The American Rhythm, by Mary Austin, with an intro by C.D. Wright, returning to print this 1930 document** arguing for an American poetic measure predicated upon what Austin calls Amerindian languages.

 

On top of which there is a piece by Marjorie Perloff attempting to prove William Butler Yeats to be Steve McCaffery before Steve was. And very healthy selections of poets well-known (Palmer, Will Alexander, Barbara Guest, Cole Swenson, Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Robinson) and new at least to me (Molly Dorozenski, H.L. Hix, Kristin P. Bradshaw among them).

 

What is most interesting to me about Austin’s piece is not necessarily her argument per se, which depends on a racial fantasy of Native Americans, but rather its underlying premise, that the measure – I mean this in the metrical sense – of American writing, simply by virtue of not being European, would be different. It’s the same argument that has bedeviled American letters from the break between the Young Americans & the School of Quietude in the 1840s right up to today. One can, of course, mount a pseudo-linguistic argument – it’s been done more than once – claiming that iambic in particular is implicit in the English language, though to do so is simply to ignore the vast range of regional variations that occur even now after some 50 years of the influence of television and job mobility has tended to flatten out local differences.

 

In some ways, Austin’s sense of the prairie in the measure anticipates Olson’s own sense of space (or, as Olson puts it, SPACE). Implicit in both is a sense that elements other than language impinge up on it, speak through it, are in some sense themselves articulate. Olson of course returns measure to the body, literally, of the poet – meter becomes a kind of pulse, as if one’s blood pumped differently according to who & where we might be. Within 20 years of Olson’s essay on Projective Verse we find a poetics that in practice emphasizes enjambment centered in New England (Olson, Creeley), one that favors the long flat lines of the prairie (Paul Carroll most clearly, tho Lew Welch played with this possibility as well) & a verse mode that tends to be more relaxed and open, generally associated with the American West (Whalen, Snyder, Kyger, etc.). It’s this poetic atlas that Spicer appears to scoff at & what, one wonders, were we to make of the likes of Kenneth Irby & Ronald Johnson, both of whom spent substantial parts of their lives in Kansas, both of whom pay extraordinary attention to the ear, neither of whom remotely approach the aural aesthetics of the other?

 

Langpo to some degree sidestepped the issue in good part by turning to prose, but the issue lingers on even more acutely I think for younger poets. The failure to create an adequate response is partly to blame for the resurrection of patterned poetics in the guise of a New Formalism (that was – & for the most part still is – terrified of form), always already guilty premodernists that they are. And it’s what enables Thomas Fink to call me on my analysis of Brenda Iijima’s “Georgic”: I have, in his view, identified all the ways she is not like X, Y, or Z, without really being able to describe what, in fact, her line break is about. What motivates it? What is the positive principle that determines that broken word stam- / pede? But as I confessed then,

 

this is what most mystifies me – because given those words, I just couldn’t do it on my own.

 

And I’m not aware of anyone who has stepped up to attempt such a project, either with regards to this text of Iijima’s, or for that matter any other contemporary younger poet. And I sense, as I think Tom Fink must also, my own frustration here, that we find ourselves at the end of 2003 with so few choices available as to the line – either the metrically closed verse of premodernism, ranging from the hokey to the merely embarrassing, or the untheorized (& too often too slack, tho not certainly in Iijima’s work) “free verse” marriage of convenience, with maybe theories along the line of Austin’s or Olson’s to haunt us with their inadequate alternatives.*** Indeed, the absence of a good answer here sometimes has been used by critics to argue that poetry is, if not, certainly on the wane as a medium.

 

I do intuit at some level that the assumption that underwrites both Austin & Olson – that the measures of verse are contextually dependent – makes sense. But I don’t, even after writing & thinking about poetry for 40 years, feel anywhere near ready to say why or how. I would love to hear what readers of this blog think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* The only excuse for starting the first piece, an elegy by Michael Palmer for the novelist W.G. Sebald, on the left-hand page is lack of space in the issue . . . yet there are blank pages at the end. And there is no excuse for the muddle that is the table of contents qua contributors’ notes pages. If these are attempts to innovate or protest conventional design elements, they succeed only in confirming the superiority of the convention.

 

** A second edition was published posthumously in 1970.

 

*** So I read Irby’s work in this issue, written nearly 30 years ago, right at the height of the “my linebreak / my zipcode” fever, yet written in a wholly different context, having moved at that point to Denmark. And these are curiously the flattest lines of his that I know, as if that Scandinavian sound were bleeding into the English.

There is a new Poker out, numero 3, & the darned thing just keeps getting better. There is some terrific new poetry, including major contributions from Fanny Howe, Dale Smith & Alan Davies, any one of which is worth the price of admission, & an interview of Kevin Davies by Marcella Durand that is more of a conversation, sweet & funny & insightful, but the real jaw dropper this time is the publication of an essay by William Carlos Williams, more accurately the text of a talk (or notes for one) the doctor gave at Harvard in the spring of 1941, possibly as an extended introduction to a reading. As I understand Richard Deming's preface to the piece (which I read after reading Williams' text, a procedure I recommend), there were/are multiple draft typescripts for this talk among Williams' papers in Buffalo (where else?), so that the text we are given here consists principally of what appears to be the final typescript plus typed comments from three appended cards. Reading the resultant document, one notices it flows but there clearly is a rhetorical shift right at the point when the cards come in. I wish that somebody at Harvard had thought to tape the darn thing.

 

The main body of the talk, "The Basis of Poetic Form," consists of seven numbered principles or assertions about poetry, four of which have extended notes that follow. At the end of the seventh note begins the section derived from the cards, which opens the entire discussion up for an extended consideration of poetry as ethics or at least ethos. Deming in his preface alludes to Wittgenstein in arguing that ethics & aesthetics are one, a point he sees Williams having in common with the philosopher (whom he admits having no evidence Williams ever read). Reading the piece itself, the connection occurred to me as well, not for that tie-in (which is largely the product of Deming's decision to include the cards), but rather because Williams' seven assertions is not dissimilar from Wittgenstein's initial attempt to encapsulate all logic into the seven master sentences of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

 

The first of Williams' assertions reads as follows:

 

There are many ways of looking at a poem -- all of them misleading unless founded upon structure.

 

A sentence like the one above reminds me of just how much of a modernist (or neomodernist) I really am. If there is anything inaccurate about this statement, I can't see it. Yet I note how Williams couches this assertion of structure's primacy -- it's very indirect. It also (inescapably, to my mind) invokes Wallace Stevens. I'm wondering here about questions of occasion & audience -- did Williams see Harvard '41 as Stevens' turf in some fashion?

 

Williams' second assertion invokes associations as well, but in a very different direction, one WCW could not have anticipated -- Roland Barthes & his Writing Degree Zero (composed just 13 years later & with Rene Char as its literary horizon):

 

A poem is a use of words (as emphasized by Gertrude Stein) to raise the mind to a level of the imagination beyond that attainable by prose. It is prose plus.

 

And in a note that follows, Williams poses Jabberwocky's relation to Alice in Wonderland as an example. It is worth underscoring Williams' invocation of Stein here -- by 1941 Stein is famous (something she was not 15 years prior), but already being treated by the American media as an instance of avant-gardiste as jokester & joke (a role it will later assign to Andy Warhol, say). But that is not how Williams is using her here, & obviously not how he expects this audience to understand the reference.

 

It is, 62 years later, easy enough to recite all the ways in which the idea of "prose plus" can be problematized, even to cite Williams' own earlier works (Kora in Hell, certainly, but possibly also the critical prose in Spring & All) as instances (alongside Stein's Tender  Buttons) of the vibrant possibilities for poetry in prose in English -- no need to turn here to Perse or Ponge or Jacob. Yet what strikes me more deeply in this statement is the absence of the word machine: Williams does not call the poem a machine made of words. Is it the audience? Is it the changing nature of the machine itself as a social phenomenon, with Europe already sunken deep into the Second World War?

 

The third assertion brings together the elements of the first two -- structure & words -- in a way that I don't think I've seen done elsewhere:

 

And thus poetic form comprises the words and its structural uses -- that character which the structure superadds to the words their literal meanings. But the form thus achieved becomes by that itself a "word," the most significant of all, that dominates every other word in the poem.

 

Williams is drawing a distinction here between structure & form. Form is the structure of the poem and what the words themselves bring to the occasion. But note that, back in that first assertion, the term structure itself has never been defined. Now, however, the third term in this equation (structure + words = form) is given a very curious definition: it is not structural per se* but rather a kind of word, a word in quotes, a word as hegemon to the poem.

 

One could write a dissertation I suspect unpacking those two sentences -- they are clearly the most important in this talk -- and after a (for this talk) lengthy note in which Williams dismisses first Imagism ("as a form it completely lacked structural necessity") and then Objectivism ("there were few successes -- or have been few, so far"), both of which miss the mark due to an allegiance, Williams thinks, to the image, WCW himself starts to enumerate the implications of this three-part equation:

 

The structural approach has two phases, the first the selection of forms from poems already achieved, to restuff them with metaphysical and other matter, and the second, to parallel the inventive impetus of other times with structural concepts derived from our own day. The first is weak, the other strong.  

 

Here is my School of Quietude/Post-Avant distinction in a nutshell. Do you think that School of Quietude poets would object if I just followed Williams from now on & called them weak poets? Even more than the invocation of Stevens earlier, Williams here seems rather to be picking a fight. The ascendancy of New Criticism (with its explicitly metaphysical agenda & distinct fondness for "restuffing" poems from other eras) is by 1941 more or less complete. Even more telling, though, is the fact that Williams in the first of these two sentences reverses the power relations implicit in his own formula -- it is the structural that now dominates, which is characterized as strategic, while form is devalued as instrumental, tactical. A poem will have form, but it is the structure that will govern its fate. This sleight of hand can be interpreted in several different ways, at least one of which would collapse the two terms form & structure into a synonymic whole (as did the Projectivists).

 

The degree to which Williams is provoking his audience is inescapable in Williams' fifth assertion:

 

The weak approach to the understanding of poetic form is typified by the teaching attitude. Teaching -- that is, the academy -- is predominantly weak. It can't be otherwise and this, in fact, is its strength. It rests on precedent. But because of this it tends to arrogate to itself honors and prerogatives which, sometimes, it does not deserve.

 

Harsh words coming from a man who doesn't know the difference between that & which. Williams' argument, that weakness is teaching's strength, sounds like something out of Sun Tzu's Art of War. It is worth noting here the tacit distinction Williams is making between "the academy" and invention, particularly given the relationship of science to both institutions (a relationship that, in 1941, is soon to change with the advent of the nuclear era). Scientists draw conclusions from nature, the evidence, facts. Inventors use such data as inputs into their creative process, one that recasts the world as they produce new technologies, tools, processes. "The academy," specifically literary studies, only has what Williams has called "poems already achieved" for its raw data, but given that humans are social & must live within historical time, this forces the academy into an ever backwards looking role. Implicit in Williams' model -- and keep in mind that as a physician, he has by now decades of experience as a consumer of science & user of inventions, not a scientist himself but rather a practitioner of its effects -- is that poets are to the academy as inventors are to science. Williams doesn't outright say this -- this assertion is one of the three unaugmented by any note -- but I think it is unavoidable in looking at the system being proposed here.

 

Predictably the sixth & penultimate numbered assertion here focuses instead on what Williams would call strong poetry. But what is less predictable is the claim (or concession) that he makes at the end of this paragraph:

 

The strong approach -- made through the vernacular by attention to its modulated character, inventing from that ground to parallel the successes of the other eras -- is relegated too often to the service of outlaws. Over long periods the weak approach tends to culminate in the strong, establishing the peaks of literature.

 

Relegated to the service of outlaws -- who precisely does Williams mean by this? Whitman? Rimbaud? Pound? Blake? Futurism & dada? And what precisely does he mean by outlaw? Is it simply a designation of outsider status, so that Melville & Dickinson might be included? Or is he suggesting something more completely antisocial, narrowing the term down to the African arms trader & the Nazi propagandist? Again the paragraph carries no supplemental note that might unpack these not inconsequential distinctions for us. Further, what does Williams mean when he claims that the weak approach tends to culminate in the strong? Does Williams mean, as I think maybe he does, that a period dominated socially or institutionally by weak poetry leads inevitably to a reaction in which strong poetry overturns the apple cart? If so, then he is speaking in 1941 right at the outset of what will be the most compelling period of evidence for his theory, as the Second World War broke the connection with European modernism and allowed the American academy to become heavily dominated by the "weak" poetry of New Criticism, overthrown in the mid-'50s by the resurgence of a New American poetry. If so, it is the moments of disruption that Williams is identifying her as the "peaks of literature." Yet the language he chooses doesn't sound like the rhythmic alteration we associate with volcanoes -- long periods of settling & sediment punctuated by eruptions, entailing heat & light. Rather it sounds additive. That when the strong arrives (or is let in) to supplement the weak is when such peaks occur. Although I think Williams is clear enough elsewhere that what he thinks generally is the former, this particular wording is ambiguous enough that it might be heard either way. & given this audience, this might represent Williams' sense of a "concession," an inclusionary gesture, however faint.

 

At this point in William's talk, his structure of presentation has been very clear. The number paragraphs (as distinct from the supplementary notes) follow an identifiable structure.

 

1.       General premise

2.       Assertion: implication

3.       Assertion: implication

4.       Assertion: implication, etc.

 

Each numbered paragraph after the first has two sentences exactly. The seventh & final numbered paragraph must, however, complete the arc of Williams' argument, drawing the circle if not shut, at least to conclusion:

 

New concepts will always call for new forms and new forms demand new structures. The basis of new poetic forms and structures will always be that age which demands of them its fullest expression, that will be impatient of traditional limitations which conceal in their rigidities our destruction.

 

On one level, this is the longstanding political case against the School of Quietude.** On another, we note that Williams has again drawn a line between form & structure. On a third, Williams here introduces a new term to the equation, concepts, without saying much of anything about what a concept is in the narrow sense he is giving it here. In a way, I think that all of the notes that follow in this talk (which, including the three cards that accompany the typescript, is very nearly half the text) might be read as an extension or supplement to this assertion, drawing out specifically Williams' sense that measure is the term or dimension through which he personally attempted to address the demand for new structures, new forms.

 

New concepts. Not, it is worth underlining here, new conditions in the social world. Rather, it is the ideas in men & women that are generated as they confront this new raw data that Williams identifies here as the generative force, the source of continual, unceasing change that lies at the heart of literature. Always call. Change not for the sake of change but rather inescapably because the world itself changes constantly. Because the world itself is change. Thus the "basis of new poetic forms" -- the phrase differs from Williams' title only insofar as forms has become plural & new is new -- is precisely time. Social, historical time: "that age which demands of them its fullest expression."

 

But in pluralizing form & adding new, Williams is making a second argument here as well. The basis of "restuffed" forms, the traditional, lies exactly in a wish against the age. It's too simple to merely call this nostalgia. Rather, it is a denial, for example, of all the horrors of the modern, from the genocide of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks*** to the immiseration of the Depression, the rise of the Gulag, the advent of Hitler. On a more general or symbolic level, the traditional may even be read as a denial of death, not in the sense of protest or "overcoming" through good works, but through avoidance & pretense. Like my mother-in-law who would not allow her husband to go through the front doors of the oncology clinic because of the word Cancer emblazoned there. The traditional in this sense is the "hear no evil, speak no evil" school of poetry, even when & as it writes of rape, murder, genocide, abuse. The pathology of this world view cannot be understated+, but Williams chooses to do exactly that now that he is speaking at the very heart of its institutional expression, Harvard. His conclusion is politic, even as it is unavoidable.

 

"The Basis of Poetic Form" is not without its problems, although in my reading these have mostly to do with Williams' failure to fully articulate a definition of structure & its relationship to form as he uses that word. I'm not convinced that the ethics of Williams' address rises or falls on his inability to completely untangle those two terms, but disentangling the two threads, one of form, one of structure, could not help but throw new light not just on all the poetries of Williams' own time, from Imagism to the cusp of the New American poetry, but on the poetry of our time as well.

 

 

 

 

* Whereas in the famous Projectivist formula -- form is nothing more than an extension of content -- form is treated as a synonym for structure, at least as Williams is using the latter word here, a condition (it is worth noting) that affords form less force than Williams assigns it in his equation.

 

** And why, for example, I don't hesitate to characterize Post-Avant poetics as progressive, as when I deploy that word to characterize the Philly poetry calendar I run on Sundays. No matter politically to the left a poet such as Marilyn Hacker or Carolyn Forché might be, if she chooses in her writing the "traditional limitations which conceal in their rigidities our destruction," then she cannot be characterized as in any manner progressive, merely conflicted or self-destructive.

 

*** Why is it, after all, that both the Kurds & Iraqis oppose the presence of Turkish forces in Iraq?

 

+ Indeed, it is the very same dynamic that enables many Democratic politicians to call themselves liberal as they compromise the well-being of their constituents & health of the planet, in the pursuit of a self-deluded realpolitik. It is the process that has given us Clintons & Blairs alike.

Van Gogh’s Ear (VGE) is one of those strange journals that focuses almost exclusively on the writing of poets and authors who possess major name recognition. Indeed, a poet has a better chance to getting into print here dead – Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Whalen, even Marilyn Monroe – than young. It’s not that there are no younger writers here, but for the most part those who do show up amongst the 86 contributors to VGE’s second issue are poets who have already established themselves with audiences – Anselm Berrigan, Lee Ann Brown, Jena Osman, Edwin Torres – or who are now taking off like rockets, such as kari edwards & Linh Dinh.

 

Although the journal’s tagline is “Poetry for the New Millennium,” VGE 2 includes eight contributors whose work appeared in the Allen anthology 43 years ago: Ashbery, Blaser, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, McClure, Orlovsky, Snyder & Whalen. Second generation New Americans turn up (Berkson, Malanga, DiPrima, Notley) as do a few langpos (Bernstein, Hejinian, Perelman, moi) as well as others who fall generally into this same post-avant territory, such as Tom Raworth, Bob Holman, Sparrow, Eileen Myles & Paul Auster. Editor Ian Ayres’ view of American poetry is basically European, which in practice means that the school of quietude is accorded only token representation. I wonder what W.D. Snodgrass must think about finding his “Gringolandia” – it’s even worse than the title sounds – sandwiched between the writing of yours truly & Gary Snyder. John Updike’s “Trees” follows similarly on the heels of Edwin Torres’ “The Theorist has no Samba!”

 

One poem in particular first caught my eye because I recognized the handwriting, literally, as it’s presented on the right-hand page in holographic reproduction, the identical text printed on the left. The poem is by Allen Ginsberg, but it doesn’t look anything like your typical Ginsberg work & indeed acknowledges its source by its title, “Lines for Creeley’s Ear”:

 

The whole

weight of

everything

too much

 

my heart in

the subway

pounding

subtly

 

headache

from smoking

dizzy

a moment

 

riding

uptown to see

Karmapa

Buddha tonite.

 

One can hear what Ginsberg is finding in Creeley’s line – that almost gamelan precision as the mind steps through the syllables, something Creeley gets not from the Projectivists but from Zukofsky. The parameters of the project are simple enough: quatrains with no more than four syllables – the first three stanzas each have ten syllables, the last one 13. If you track the quatrains even closer by syllable count*, you see that Ginsberg has done an admirable job in creating not only a sense of variety but of aural development, starting with two of the shortest lines, ending with three of the longest.

 

Ginsberg plays with some of Creeley’s famed enjambments in the first two stanzas, but it’s interesting that the third – when the impact of smoking is being described – seems almost the most flat-footed. It’s an inspired, counterintuitive way to mimic tobacco’s impact on blood pressure.

 

The one line for me that doesn’t work is the second one of the last stanza. No other line in the entire poem contains what is so clearly two distinct aural units & I suspect that Creeley, faced with the same set of choices, might well instead have run them as two lines & to have ended with Buddha tonite as its own separate one-line stanza. It’s conceivable that Ginsberg heard it as taking a longer breath before the final sweep of the last two lines, but to end of the first word on n  & start the next with t breaks that movement for my ear.

 

Ginsberg seems to have been similarly bothered by that final stanza. The poem appears in what I take to be a revised form in Ginsberg’s Collected Poems. In the Collected,  it is titled simply “For Creeley’s Ear.” Buddha has been moved up to the third line alongside Karmapa, with tonight – now spelled the traditional manner – alone on the fourth line. The problem of the second line now tends to dissolve – it becomes a step toward the only five syllable line in the work, with the two-syllable last line functioning almost as a coda or bell to signal the poem’s end.

 

That’s an interesting revision, in that it does solve the problem that nagged at me from my first reading, yet overall I think the Collected Poems version is weaker for it. The revised version puts the climax of the poem on the penultimate line, almost to the point where the final line seems added on in order to avoid violating the form. In the Van Gogh’s Ear variant, the weight falls on the final line & the equation of Karmapa** with Buddha is offset by the acknowledgement of the marketing of a public event, tonite being sort of the apotheosis of the spelling associated with billboard-speak. The VGE version thus has layers of meaning & humor that are lost when one moves one word up a line and alters the spelling of another. It’s a great argument for the care of the poem, for recognizing that every character has a role.

 

My sense is that neither version quite works as well as it might, that the stumbling block of the second line of the final stanza can’t really be addressed anywhere but in the second line itself. It’s intriguing to watch Ginsberg make the attempt, but it’s a mistake to have tried to resolve the issue elsewhere in the stanza.

 

That Ginsberg in 1976 is still writing what is clearly a “Creeley study” is, I think, a sign of how little affected by his celebrity Ginsberg at least sought to be. These lines may be for Creeley’s ear, but the work itself is clearly for Ginsberg’s benefit. That we benefit also is just part of its charm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Thus the syllable count of the lines for each quatrain:
2 – 2 – 4 – 2
3 – 3 – 2 – 2
2 – 3 – 2 – 3
2 – 4 – 3 – 4

 

** This would have been Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the 16^th Gyalwang Karmapa, who traveled to the U.S. in 1976.

Hotel Amerika is the strangest new magazine I’ve come across in some time. Published out of the English Department at Ohio University, Athens, the first issue – dated Fall 2002 but only recently turning up in my mailbox – has a cover image by David Wojnarowicz, part of the late artist’s Rimbaud-in-NY series. It is not, however, the famous image of a junky shooting up while wearing a mask of Rimbaud, but a far safer scene, man in a Rimbaud mask standing at the edge of a body of water, a fishing trawler foggily silhouetted against the horizon. As it turns out, this dynamic between edgy, innovative artist and famous name-safe scene is a drama that is enacted throughout the entire issue.

 

Hotel Amerika appears expensively produced, but the visual decisions have a quantitative feel to them, as though more were always better. The logo has a professional design look to it, but is a little busy for a work employing just 12 letters – Hotel is san serif, the larger, lower Amerika is not – the k always is shown in a second color, for example as gray when reproduced in black-&-white. The same impulse to excess applies to interior page design as well. Outside of work titles, the logo is always the largest type on the 8½ by 11 page. Even more disconcerting, however, is the presence of the author’s name vertically down the outside margin in lower case italics:

 

n

a

t

h

a

n

i

e

l

 

m

a

c

k

e

y

 

This distracting & difficult to decipher device is skipped on the title page for each work, where the author’s name appears above a gray bar in which the title is set in drop-out type. If nothing else, the design should be an incentive for future contributors to submit their most concise pieces.

 

The contributors to the first issue are no less overdone. Poetry from John Hollander & Charles Wright, but also from Nate Mackey & Rachel Blau DuPlessis. As well as Diane Wakoski, John Ashbery, Susan Griffin, Hugh Seidman, Jean Valentine & Colette Inez. Fiction from Guy Davenport & Alyce Miller. Essays by Charles Bernstein & Andrea Dworkin – that’s a combination worth thinking about – as well as by Carol Bly & Phillip Lopate.

 

Finally, there is a category in the table of contents called Prose Poetry / Short Prose, which includes Lawrence Fixel, Eduardo Galeano, Rosmarie Waldrop, Tom Andrews & Killarney Clary. As a grouping, this is the one category in this issue that makes sense. Not because Clary or Galeano are doing anything remotely similar to Waldrop or Fixel or Andrews, but because the parameters of the genre (at least as defined here) are such that it raises issues that one can see being worked out in consistently interesting, if different, ways.

 

Given where she usually publishes, Clary might be seen as part of the new quietude, but in having to work through her impressionistic & deeply personal pieces in prose rather than verse, she forces herself to a formal rigor that’s uncharacteristic of that scene:

 

As she woke from her screaming dream she heard her voice – a weak, worthless gasp, little more than air. On that seam she heard herself before her shame – an odd shame in the dark alone as she was – before leaving into sleep, before leaving on the liner from the quay with her parcels. We test goodbye new every time, to tear out a few stitches, to measure what enters.

 

Andrews is the sort of comic poet who would have done fabulously living in New York City, hanging out with 3^rd & 4^th gen St. Marks poets, but who instead did the small city MFA & tenure route until he died way too young from a rare blood disorder. The curious result is that Andrews is a well-known poet, but not by the readers who would probably have appreciated him best. It would be interesting to see his work set alongside the likes of, say, Joe Brainard or Tom Veitch or an Actualist such as Darrell Gray.

 

Lawrence Fixel in some respects is the really great presence in Hotel Amerika. At 85, Fixel has been a quiet – indeed almost silent – presence on the San Francisco scene for at least five decades, coming to readings, sitting in back, saying little or nothing, leaving as soon as the events were over. His own prose works, which have appeared in little magazines & small volumes also for decades, may have started out of an interest in surrealism but have evolved into a meditative terrain all their own. In some respects, Fixel, who is characterized as a “guardian spirit” by David Lazar in a prefatory editorial note, may be the one poet included in this issue not because he (or she) was a “name.”

 

Andrews has five works in Hotel Amerika while Fixel has four – and, if anything, the magazine would have been stronger had it included more of their writing & had fewer cameo appearances by more famous names.

 

From the perspective of a reader, the disparate hodge-podge of writers comes across as a lack of editorial vision. The absence of an articulated aesthetic stance most clearly impacts the poetry. On the plus side, Hotel Amerika includes Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ “Draft 53: Eclogue.” It’s absolutely worth reading – this is true for every section of that work – and is reprinted in full on the website. And it’s good to see Hugh Seidman & Diane Wakoski given ample space for their poems as well. But John Hollander’s offering of what can only be called an Armand Schwerner imitation, “Antique Fragments,” is a howler even by Hollander’s standards. Here is the VII^th  and final section:

 

This boat that holds us near the edge of the lake

Has quickly run over the evening water

Now [ . . . ] at rest [ . . . ] rocking [ . . . ]

I am in your arms [. . . ]

Our lives in the arms of the waves.

 

If the sentimentality of those final lines are intended to be satiric, they fall so far short of Schwerner’s far more comic, erudite & pointed Tablets as to be embarrassing. What is even more startling, I suspect, is the idea of Hollander imitating Schwerner in the first place. It has even occurred to me that Hollander might not be imitating Schwerner, however badly, & that maybe Hollander doesn’t know Schwerner’s work. That would be a far more damning conclusion.

 

As is often enough the case when new journals start with a burst of name writers & no clear direction like this, it may be that Hotel Amerika’s actual aesthetics won’t become evident for a few issues. Looking at the table of contents for the second issue posed on the website, only one of the ten or so names I recognize, John Latta, isn’t associated with the school of quietude unless one includes the right-wing author, Mario Vargas Llosa. All in all, it’s a curious mix, even more so perhaps because George Hartley is on the masthead as a contributing editor.

Ruth Lilly, heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, has made a donation to Poetry magazine estimated to be worth at least $100 million. It’s an interesting proposition, not nearly as random in nature as some of those who have publicly bewailed her foolishness have suggested, and is likely to set off any number of consequences, intended and otherwise. Let’s cast a cold eye at the facts:

 

§         Poetry is a monthly magazine that has been around for some 90 years, currently with a subscription base of about 10,000, down some 20 percent from its high point of a few years back.

§         Its current annual budget of around $65,000 enables it to actually print over 100,000 individual copies of the magazine per year and employ a staff of four, a record of frugality that is worth noting (though subsidized by such things as free rent and, I believe, academic salaries).

§         For the past 33 years, since the sudden death of then-editor Henry Rago, Poetry has been merely one of several larger publications associated with what I’ve been calling the school of quietude, no better, no worse.

§         Poetry’s fabled beginning as the official publication of American modernism, of which much has been made, is to some degree a myth – a look at any early issues that do not reflect the somewhat overbearing assistance of Ezra Pound shows the publication to have almost always been at heart muddled in the middle of the road, with a bias toward the conservative.

§         There was a period of greater diversity and experimentation between the late 1940s, when Hayden Carruth & Karl Shapiro were briefly in the editor’s role, & Rago’s death in 1969 – particularly during the latter half of Rago’s 1955-69 tenure – but was something of an aberration in its history.

§         During that brief period – 1962 through ’69 – Poetry actually achieved for a brief moment what its editors seem always to have envisioned as the magazine’s true role, as the closest thing possible to “the publication of record” for American verse culture. During this period, it was where poets of all stripe would invariably send the poems they envisioned as the title pieces for their next works. It not only published the best of everybody, but did so with a balance that reflected a much larger vision of American poetry. Let’s look at three representative issues from that period:

1.      October , 1965. The issue is devoted to a single poem, Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-14, Beginning An. In addition, there are three reviews: one of All by Robert Creeley; a second review of the same book by “Thomas” Clark (not yet Tom, although already poetry editor of The Paris Review); a review of Bottom and After I’s by Gerard Malanga. Finally, there is an article on Blake by Zukofsky, “Pronounced Golgonoozà.” Is the publication you associate with Poetry today?

2.      March, 1967. A general issue. The lead poet on the cover is Denise Levertov, listed next to the title of her poem, “A Vision.” Also on the top portion of the cover with their works more or less listed are, in this order, John Logan, Tom (now it’s Tom) Clark, John Woods, Thomas McGrath & Edward Dorn (“The Sundering U.P. Tracks,” one of his finest poems). On the center of the cover, six other poets are listed without mention of titles: Barry Spacks, Etta Blum, James L. Weil (a fine poet in the Corman tradition, better remembered today as the publisher of Elizabeth Press books), John Ingwersen (“his first appearance anywhere” according to the contributor’s note), Louise Gluck and Frank Samperi. There are also five critical articles by Laurence Lieberman, Hayden Carruth, Donald W. Baker, Robert Sward, and Philip Legler. These reviews cover some 19 books of poetry, ranging from Richard Lattimore to Harriet Zinnes. Sward’s review includes, in addition to a volume by Keith Wilson, three books published by Aram Saroyan’s Lines Editions, by Richard Kolmar, John Perrault and Clark Coolidge. Levertov & Logan, Woods & Dorn, Spacks & Weil – this is an almost panoptic view of American poetry. The Sward review, which infamously slam’s Coolidge’s Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric (“slippery sort of instant poetry,” “a psychedelic outpouring,” verbal hop-scotch,” “an inspired centipede,” “no actual imagination” “a dead-end,” “chic, trivial piling up of images,”  “finally a bore,” “irrelevant preening,” “self devouring cuteness,” “virtually without voice,” “nothing of any human urgency,” “pointless curios”) is entitled “Landscape and Language,” the first use of that latter noun in association with Coolidge or any of the langpos yet to be. While Sward’s piece is hysterically (& historically) wrong in its view of Coolidge as a dead-end, the willingness of the publication to offer such partisan fare differs sharply from Poetry’s current approach to the post-avant world, one of benign neglect, acting as though it simply does not exist.

3.      January, 1969. Another general issue. Just two poets listed alongside the titles of their contributions in this issue, Kenneth Koch (“Sleeping with Women”) and Helen Singer. Then comes the first of two clusters of other poets: Philip Booth, Anselm Hollo, Larry Eigner, David Galler & Lewis Turco. That’s quite a quintet. The second group includes four poets making first appearances: Mitchell Goodman (the novelist & then still married to Levertov), Stephen Dobyns, Hugh Seidman and “Ronald” (yes!) Silliman, identified in the contributor’s notes as a sophomore at “San Francisco College” (sic) and a postal clerk. Ralph J. Mills has the entire critical section in which he actually reviews 30 books – just try to imagine that as a project – a strategy to reviewing that was not uncommon at Poetry during the 1960s. Contributing Editor Hugh Kenner has a letter, correcting a detail from an earlier article on Pound.

This last issue appeared just before Rago’s death, which occurred while he was taking time off to write, leaving “Visiting Editor” Daryl Hine (a Canadian old formalist) to accidentally inherit the journal and take it rightward with a vengeance.*

 

I go on at some length here to make a point. Putting Kenneth Koch along side Helen Singer, or Louise Gluck on the same line as Frank Samperi is an act of radically representing the breadth of American poetry on a scale that has not even been attempted in the 33 years since Henry Rago died. While there certainly are a lot of little magazines, especially around colleges, that will publish poetry of any stripe, none do so with any sense of shape as to the broader whole, even if that vision is understood as the editor’s first responsibility. And without that sense of shape, they also lack the potential for impact.

 

It is worth noting that this broad view was still the image of Poetry that lingered for some time after Rago’s passing – indeed, it was still the image of the magazine back when Ruth Lilly was submitting her poems to then associate editor Joseph Parisi. If the publication today is viewed as sleepy & harmless, a narrow journal that drifts between the sclerotic & the bathetic, it was not (and need not be) always thus.

 

If Hine’s takeover was accidental, so in a way is the Lilly endowment – while it was not an accident that Lilly chose Poetry, the publication appears not to have planned for such a gift. $100 million might do a lot. But let’s take a look at what it will not do – change the balance of power between the two primary traditions in American literature. The mainstream will continue to have all the resources. The Whitman-Dickinson / Pound-Williams-Stein-Zukofsky / New American tradition will continue to have all the poetry & fun.

 

What it is much more likely to do is to radically transform the power relations within the school of quietude. APR and all the other pretenders to Poetry’s role as the hegemonic “mainstream” journal of verse are now cast as establishment subalterns, a curious phenomenon indeed.

 

Parisi, to his credit, seems – if his public statements are any indication – to understand that this changes his role dramatically. He is now the CEO of the largest poetry non-profit organization in the world, a role that may well soon preclude his editing a journal that is sure to be only one of many Modern Poetry Association projects. Parisi himself is already talking about teaching institutes, high school programs, and a line of books.

 

I have seen the word “horror” used to describe the potential of a generation of high school students introduced to American poetry through the vision of Poetry magazine as it is currently edited. But I don’t agree. It hardly matters what poetry a teenager is introduced to if they have, at some point, that “aha” experience that will set them off to be serious readers & possible writers of poetry for the rest of their lives. The absolute number of post-avant writers who themselves began as students of the most reactionary professors imaginable makes it quite clear that, if these students are going to find their way, they will do so as people always do, on their own.

 

So even in the worse case scenario, one in which Poetry & the Modern Poetry Association acquire pseudo-state status over many institutions of poetry, rather like the role of the Red Cross in medicine, it is likely to have very little impact on the post-avant world that I inhabit, and the poetry about which I care most deeply. In this sense, it is a non-event.

 

If anything, simply the need to expand its horizons in order to make use of such sudden abundance, Poetry might even take a step or two back in the direction of Henry Rago’s heyday. One obvious first task would be to hire a new full-time editor for the magazine so that Parisi can turn his attention full-time to the institution building tasks that are now on his plate whether he wants them there or not. It would be great – even utopian – if he were to hire somebody with the breadth and vision for American verse that Rago had and who would stretch the magazine beyond its current narrow confines. C.D. Wright would be an stellar example of such a person, but even in Parisi’s own back yard he can find Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff, whose New American Writing for over 20 years has done a far better job at representing its subject than Poetry.

 

 

 

* It was Rago, not Hine, who accepted my work for publication.