David Bromige

 

Early in 1968, a friend at SF State, David Perry (a graduate of the writing program at Bard & master’s level writing student at State not to be confused with the current, much younger poet of the same name) convinced me to attend a reading at the Albany Public Library in order to hear one of his old Bard classmates, Harvey Bialy. The great irony, from my perspective, being that this was the very same room, even, where I’d spent nearly every Saturday morning for the past 20 years as part of my mother’s ongoing attempts to get my brother & I out of the house – it was the very room where I’d first discovered poetry, seriously discovered it, just six years before.

Bialy was quieter than I expected, more low key. But it was the fellow with whom he read, a Canadian grad student at Berkeley born in the U.K., with a deep voice that could have earned him a living introducing Masterpiece Theater episodes, David Bromige, who totally thrilled me. This was somebody whose every word I wanted to read.

On my way home, tho, David Perry caught the F Bus back to his home in the City while I proceeded to hitchhike back to my apartment in the Adams Point section of Oakland when I got a ride from another attendee at the reading. This happened to be David Melnick, a UC grad student &, by great co-incidence, a one-time roommate of the Chicago Review’s Iven Lourie. We talked as fast as we could about all the different things we suddenly discovered we shared, beginning with a similar taste in poetics – at that moment, I think both of us would have suggested that Louis Zukofsky was our second favorite poet (I would have put Duncan first & Melnick Ashbery). I’d never met another Zukofsky fan, as such, so this seemed amazing to me. Almost immediately, Melnick started to recruit me for a project that he had in mind. He wanted to create a revolution of sorts with the campus magazine at UC, Occident, in those days as sad an example of School of Quietude college journal as one might find. Specifically, David was interested in getting the work of the New York School, in particular, David Shapiro, into the pages of this publication that had once been edited by the likes of Diane Wakoski, Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer when they were students. My own interest was in promoting the next generation of the New American poets generally – this fellow Bromige seemed like a perfect example – and so I agreed to help out – I wouldn’t actually transfer to UC for another 18 months, but I started coming to editorial meetings & nobody thought to throw me out. So Occident became the focal point, magazine-wise, for the next period of my life.

The immediate problem – challenge might be a better word – was that the executive editor of the journal, Lewis Dolinsky, was certain that bringing beatniks into the magazine was a career stopper for his editorial ambitions and so he appointed a new grad student, David McAleavey, poetry editor largely to serve as gatekeeper, hoping to ensure that the barbarians would stay on the right side of the wall. The problem with Dolinsky’s plan was that McAleavey wasn’t really a literary conservative – he was interested in the work of John Berryman, but mostly he was unread in the New Americans. So Melnick & I simply shared our various enthusiasms with the man – in response, McAleavey actually taught me, finally, how to play at least a passable game of chess.

This project had all kinds of repercussions beyond simply getting the work of Bromige & Shapiro into Occident. Melnick & I used our mutual Chicago Review connections to propose a feature on new poets of the Bay Area, which eventually was published in 1970, David McAleavey would go on to publish both my first book, Crow, and Melnick’s, Eclogs, when he was with Ithaca House (McAleavey having transferred to Cornell to finish his PhD, which turned out to be on George Oppen), and Melnick went on to work for decades alongside Lewis Dolinsky on the editorial staff of the San Francisco Chronicle (both retired when it was taken over by the Hearst syndicate). The Chicago Review feature, which got the work of d alexander, Harvey Bialy, David Bromige, Ken Irby, Joanne Kyger, McAleavey, David Perry, George Stanley, Julia Vinograd & Al Young into that publication, in turn is what set me up for the feature I would later edit for Alcheringa, which in turn led directly to In the American Tree.

That’s a lot to get out of a single act of hitch-hiking.

But throughout this entire period, it was always evident that the committee structure of Occident was not going to lead to great literature, as such. The best journals have always reflected the aesthetic commitment of a single individual, or a cabal of like minded co-conspirators. I was, by now, both disinterested in academic rags & had not yet fully found any alternatives that fit my own sense of what was needed.

While I was at SF State in 1968, my linguistics professor, Ed van Aelstyn, one of the founding editors of Coyote’s Journal, persuaded me that I should solve this problem by doing my own publication. That sounded like a great idea, so I began to solicit work, drawing principally from my favorite contributors to Caterpillar – this was made easier one afternoon when d alexander showed up at my apartment just below the Rad Lab woods in the Berkeley Hills with his rolodex in hand.

There was only one catch. I had no clue about how to publish a magazine and no cash whatsoever. My strategy for getting through college had been to get a student loan that would cover my tuition, books and rent for a semester – always taking care to pay the whole semester’s rent in advance – at which point I had so little cash that I always qualified for food stamps. Even if I’d understood what I was getting into, there was no cash around – I could go for a month on just $20 once I’d handled the rent, etc., so long as I had my “agricultural coupons.”

When, one day, I got a terrific unsolicited submission of work from David Gitin, somebody whom I really didn’t know – I had met him once or twice & that was all – I knew I had to do something. So I typed up a few pages of work, hand drew a title logo & took the first issue of Tottel’s to Krishna Copy on Telegraph Avenue. The first issue had work from David Bromige, Jerry Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Daphne Marlatt, Robert David Cohen, David Perry & somebody I’d just gotten to know, Robert Grenier.

If you look at my bibliography on the EPC website, you can trace this transition in interests & focus. In 1969, I published work in Poetry and Caterpillar, and in Arts in Society, all essentially the outcome of attempts I’d made to do so over the two previous years. I also had work in the South Florida Poetry Journal, to which I’d been steered by Duane Locke. Herbert Kubly, a writer of travel memoirs, also used my poem from TriQuarterly as the frontispiece to a book on Greece. And I’d managed to get work into Occident.

The following year, I had work only in Occident and the first issue of Tottels (tho this is also the year when the Chicago Review feature came out). At this point, I was focused in on my own projects in writing, not concerned with publishing somewhere that might cause me to “get ahead.”

Cid Corman

I noted Tuesday that

Whereas I felt intimidated by the poetry gods who turned up in Coyote’s Journal … I actively campaigned over the next few years to get my work into Caterpillar, Origin and Poetry

This I think is not atypical for young poets. I would be surprised to discover that a young poet did not have a gap, indeed a gulf, between the magazines they read & the ones in which they publish or seek to publish.

My very first experience of print (outside of one occasion in the highschool literary mag) came in Richard Krech’s Community Libertarian, a one-shot mimeo publication that focused primarily on the street poets of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in 1965, tho I think Rich coaxed an article out of David Dellinger to help give the publication the mix of poetry-meets-politics he was seeking (and I can’t help thinking that his sense of this helped set me in the direction I’ve gone ever since then). He followed this again the next year with a more purely literary magazine, Avalanche – saddle stapled into the familiar 8.5-by-5.75-inch format – that had more of a hippy feel to itself. Those were my earliest publications, although I was already starting to send work out in the kind of scattershot way that only a 19-year-old poet can do, failing to distinguish between The New Yorker & a mimeograph magazine. My work in Community Libertarian is an inept hybrid between Howl and The Waste Land, literally my first serious attempt at writing anything. By the time Avalanche came around the following year, I was still an incoherent mix – Gary Snyder mixed with Alan Dugan, one might say – but at least the tone of angst had calmed down some.

The next two publications to pick up on my work had profound, but divergent impacts on me. One was Poetry Northwest, a School of Quietude venue that has recently re-emerged from the crypt. David Waggoner accepted a couple of poems on the condition that he could revise the final lines of each. He told me what he wanted to do, which basically was to provide a more sharply defined sense of closure, and I agreed. Afterwards, tho, I felt completely abused by the process. I have never knowingly let somebody else rework my verse again, and I’ve been known to have a hair-trigger temper over sloppy translations as well.

The other publication was Kauri, a mimeo mag stapled together with pages that were faint enough when the journal first arrived. Where I found the work in Poetry Northwest completely boring – my own included – Kauri was lively & full of controversy. Somebody in an earlier issue had dismissed the work of some unknown visual artist by the name of Andy Warhol & some acquaintances of his by the names of David & Eleanor Antin were writing back to peel the cobwebs out of the earlier writer’s eyes. They were blunt & uncharitable & it was fascinating. There was another poet, if my memory serves me correctly, by the name of Clayton Eshleman who also had work that I noted & liked. I had never heard of any of these people before, not even Warhol, so I made a mental note to pay attention to any work of theirs I might see in the future.

Poetry Northwest’s format was simple, but relatively professional. Kauri, frankly, looked like crap, but it was by far the more exciting publication. I was beginning to get just the hint of a critical sensibility.

As it turned out, being accepted at Poetry Northwest opened lots of curious doors for me. I soon had work accepted by the Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, Southern Review and Arts in Society. Both the Chicago Review and Arts in Society seemed to me to be ambivalent about which side of the aesthetic divide they owed their allegiance, but the other two were anti-New American poetics, the Southern Review militantly so. The Chicago Review’s editor at the time, Eugene Wildman, though, was an experimental novelist who had already put out an anthology of sorts of concrete poetry. One of several poetry editors, as I recall, was Iven Lourie, whose older brother Richard was already part of the Hanging Loose collective. Lourie had this idea – or maybe it was Wildman’s idea & Lourie’s role was execution, so to speak – that Chicago Review should “discover” a half dozen young poets and then push them aggressively until they all were famous, which would in turn allow it to thrive from the backwash of their notoriety. The people they selected for this effort included Robin Magowan, Dennis Schmitz, William Hunt and me. This enabled us to get our work into the journal on a slightly more regular basis so that we could begin to actually get some kind of continuous following. Nobody seemed to notice that none of us had all that much in common – tho as it turns out I’ve enjoyed & followed both Magowan & Schmitz’ writing ever since.

By now, however, what I was writing & where I was publishing had diverged dramatically from what I was reading. Most people whose work was compelling to me by 1967 – Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Phil Whalen, Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky – were not showing up at all in publications like TriQuarterly (tho Duncan would published a chapter of the H.D. Book in the very same issue where I had work). In Arts in Society in 1969 – again the work had been accepted years in advance – I had poetry on a page opposite one C.H. Hejinian. I didn’t know that people called her Lyn, or even that she was a she. It would take us nearly another seven years to meet. But I was at a stage where I felt that there were three very disjunct world of poetry: the one of the work I was most interested in reading, the one in which I was publishing, and a third one composed of the younger poets I knew around San Francisco & Berkeley.

By now I was studying at SF State & making great use of its library. The poetry buyer right before I arrived had been Robin Blaser, tho he’d already moved north to Canada, but the collection that he left behind was superb. While I mostly focused on the books in the collection – I read every volume in the American poetry section, A to Z – I did read every copy of Origin, which was in the rare books collection, & began writing to Corman. Origin’s magical period, when it had been a direct extension of the Black Mountain poets, had long since passed, but the aura of its imprint lingered on & Corman’s own vision has itself had a significant impact on American poetry.

I was also writing to Clayton Eshleman fairly regularly as well, sending him work that might be for Caterpillar & getting back detailed if brusque critiques. His tone could be daunting but it was apparent that he had always seriously read the poems & thought about what he was going to say before writing – I was amazed at how rare that seemed to be (still am, in fact) – and tho I seldom fully agreed with him, at least not in simple terms, defining myself against his criticism was extraordinarily useful. I had a parallel, if less intimidating, correspondence going on at the same time with Robert Kelly, one of Caterpillar’s associate editors.

In retrospect, it’s interesting that none of the most ambitious work of mine from that period ever did get published, tho you can find it in the archives at UC San Diego. Both Poetry and Caterpillar ended up taking work that I thought of as being finger exercises. What that probably means in practice is that I was able to focus adequately in those short spaces to adequately get through the poem, brief as it was. But by the time Henry Rago had accepted my piece for Poetry, my interest in publishing further in academic (or what I would now call School of Quietude) journals had dissipated almost entirely. It was not just the bland & ultimately lazy work I felt I saw all around me in such publications so much as it was a growing recognition that I would never find the readers I was seeking in those pages. So far as I can tell, Ray DiPalma is the sole individual who ever read my piece in the Southern Review. Though the poem was written in 1966 or ’67 & had been accepted almost immediately, it didn’t reach print for another five years. When it came out, Ray sent me a note that asked simply “Do you have a secret life?”

  

Jed Birmingham sent me an email last week, asking me about poetry journals. Which were the ones that had had the greatest impact on me? Then, in his introduction of me at Autostart on Thursday, Charles Bernstein talked of the impact my own little poetry newsletter, Tottel’s, had had for him back in the early 1970s. And was kind enough to mention “The Dwelling Place,” a feature of nine poets that I did for Alcheringa in 1975¹ – my afterword to that selection, “Surprised by Sign: Notes on Nine,” was my first attempt to write about language poetry.

So I’ve been mulling over the question Jed asked. It’s two questions, really, for one’s relationship to the magazines one reads is not identical to one’s relationship to the magazines where one publishes. And I think for younger poets this is especially true.

So I would draw a fairly sharp line between my experience of magazines in the 1960s with that in the 1970s & after. Let’s think about the 1960s first.

There seemed to be a lot of magazines around, but in retrospect relatively few had deep meaning for me. Three in particular stand out: Coyote’s Journal, Caterpillar & Poetry. There were other magazines, of course, ranging from the New Directions Annuals – a once-a-year anthology that always made you wonder why, if this was the same press that had pioneered the work of Pound & Williams, it always seemed so bland & muddled – to Beatitude, the irregularly published journal of the SF post-beat street scene in North Beach – to journals like R.C. Lion, Hollow Orange, Odda Tala, Kauri & Work that all represented different aspects of the New American (and, tho I don’t know that anyone yet saw it as such, the post-New American) scene, to more academic fair, such as Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Chicago Review & Arts in Society. The library at San Francisco State had Origin and I read it, even studied it, & started corresponding with Cid Corman, in what was really my first concerted effort to campaign my way into a journal I liked. But you couldn’t find it in a bookstore. Nor could you reliably find any publications of the New York School, save – very intermittently – for The World.

I’ve written before of Coyote’s Journal and its expression of an aesthetic I’ve called New Western writing, a swath of New American poetics that would begin with Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen, independent poets nominally associated with the Beats, and also include those, like Edward Dorn, who rose out of the Projectivist tendencies of Black Mountain, but actively engaged issues of the west. The journal got underway in 1964 when the University of Oregon campus magazine, Northwest Review, ran afoul of school officials & local reactionaries by publishing work by Phil Whalen, Antonin Artaud & an interview with Fidel Castro. The Journal published eight issues between then and the fall of 1967, before going into a more intermittent schedule – the most recent issue, numero 13, came out mostly online (& in print in Europe) in 1999. The eighth issue, from 1967 gives a sense of its range. Contributors included Charles Olson (“rages / strain / Dog of Tartarus”), Joanne Kyger, Richard Duerden, Tom Clark (still publishing as Thomas in those days), Ed van Aelstyn (one of the journal’s founding editors & later my linguistics professor at SF State), Robert Duncan (a chapter from The H.D. Book), Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Jim Koller (by then the co-editor with van Aelstyn & over the long haul the journal’s driving presence), Peter Armstrong, Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, Edward Dorn, John Hall, Gary Snyder, & Sergei Bielyi. Armstrong, Hall & Bielyi are the only names I don’t recognize here. More than half of the contributors had appeared in Donald Allen’s breakthrough The New American Poetry a few years before.

I never felt confident enough in my own work to submit work to Coyote’s Journal during that incredible run, but right as its eighth issue in four years was coming into print (it would be another four years before the next one showed up), Clayton Eshleman, fresh from travels to Japan & South America, began Caterpillar in New York City. Physically, Caterpillar looked enough like Coyote’s Journal to give one the sense that a baton had been handed off – tho Eshleman has told me that his actual model was Corman’s Origin. Here was a journal from New York that (a) was visibly not the New York School and (b) was reliably distributed on the West Coast, something you couldn’t say about any NY School publication. In a sense, it was also a direct descendant of smaller, earlier journals, like Yugen & Floating Bear & Trobar, and not entirely unrelated to Lita Hornick’s larger but more occasional Kulchur. For the most part, those were journals I had heard of, tho never seen. Caterpillar printed many – tho not all – of the same poets you could find in Coyote’s Journal, such as Blackburn, Duncan, Snyder & Olson, but did so alongside other poets like Armand Schwerner, Hugh Seidman, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Antin, Jackson Mac Low, Diane Wakoski, Michael Heller, Robert Kelly & Jerry Rothenberg that gave the journal a far more Eastern & urban sensibility. Tho it also had a fairly short lifespan, maybe five full years before Clayton moved west & revamped his publishing energies into a new publication, Sulfur, Caterpillar (even more than Coyote’s Journal) had a remarkably centering impact. Everybody I knew had a strong opinion about it – not always favorable, although often so – and virtually every other post-avant publication could be characterized by the ways in which it was not Caterpillar.

Whereas I felt intimidated by the poetry gods who turned up in Coyote’s Journal – I was all of 21 when that eighth issue was on the stands –  I actively campaigned over the next few years to get my work into Caterpillar, Origin and Poetry.

Poetry may seem like the odd journal in this trio, but it’s not really. During Henry Rago’s 14-year run as editor of that journal, starting in 1955 & ending only with his sudden death while on sabbatical in 1969, Poetry went through an evolution quite unlike any other School of Quietude (or, for that matter, post-avant) publication before or since. The journal Rago inherited in 1955 was largely living on its laurels for having published Ezra Pound & his friends early on – one could politely characterize the aesthetics of virtually all of its previous editors not only as undistinguished, but indistinguishable. In part, this was because through the Second World War, the actual number of publishing poets in the United States was a fraction of what it is today, something that could be counted in the hundreds – the current figure is at least 10,000 – and for the most part Pound’s engagement with modernism & the one special issue Poetry had devoted to the Objectivists in 1931 had enabled it to say that it had “represented” the various forms of non-conventional poetries around. But if you weren’t somebody Pound was promoting, the chances of an avant writer getting into the publication were relatively slim. Gertrude Stein never once appeared there. Nor did Mina Loy. Nor did Bern Porter. Nor Philip Lamantia. Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford & Kenneth Rexroth were about as radical as it got once you strayed from the Pound-Williams tradition.

Well, there was one other exception, but it wasn’t particularly visible until the New American poetries started popping up everywhere in the early 1950s. The ongoing tension between modernist & anti-modernist poetries had percolated along quietly until the arrest & trial of Ezra Pound for treason after the fall of the fascist regime in Italy, when a number of poets, led by Robert Silliman Hillyer (1934 Pulitzer Prize Winner, first published in Poetry in 1924), sought to ban the writings of Pound, or at to least drive them from print. With the publication & subsequent obscenity prosecution of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, not to mention the combative tone of the poem itself, the gloves were off between the School of Quietude & the New Americans. And Poetry generally knew which side it was on.

Except when it came to Robert Duncan & several poets of the New York School, specifically Kenneth Koch (first published in Poetry in 1945), Frank O’Hara (December 1951) & John Ashbery (1955).² Duncan had first published in Poetry in 1942, well before the New American phenomenon congealed, & tho he was the person perhaps most responsible for the combative stance of the Allen anthology – he refused to appear in the Robert Kelly-Paris Leary Controversy of Poets collection because of the presence of poets like Robert Lowell – he had been able to publish in Poetry all along.³

With these exceptions, Poetry had only admitted token publication of a few New Americans – Robert Creeley in 1957, Denise Levertov in 1958 – until 1962, when the journal almost on a dime made a major reassessment of its role and began publishing everybody, the only publication in American history actually to do so in any kind of balance. Thus, to pick a random example, September 1966 starts off by giving pride of place on its cover to the publication of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-15, one of his most dense texts, starting as it does with a homophonic translation from the Hebrew. But also included in that issue are W.S. Graham, Robert Bly, Aram Saroyan, Gibbons Ruark, Shirley Kaufman, Richard Howand, Tom Clark (tho he goes by Thomas here also), and Guy Davenport. The October-November 1963 double issue leads off with John Berryman and includes such conservative stalwarts as J.V. Cunningham, Hayden Carruth, Randall Jarrell, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke & Karl Shapiro (like Carruth a former editor of Poetry), but it also includes Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder & Louis Zukofsky. Two years later, the summer double issue leads off with Wendell Berry & includes SoQ heavies Carruth, Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton & Theodore Weiss. But it also includes Creeley, Duncan, Ron Johnson, Koch, Levertov, Olson, Snyder, Gael Turnbull & Phil Whalen. The January 1969 issue leads off with Kenneth Koch’s “Sleeping with Women,” and includes SoQ poets Philip Booth, Lewis Turco & Stephen Dobyns. But it also includes Anselm Hollo, Larry Eigner, Mitch Goodman (Denise Levertov’s husband, better known as a novelist), Hugh Seidman & me.

From 1962 through 1969, every poet in America knew to send their very best poems to Poetry, the ones around which they would organize their next book. And it shows – it’s an extraordinary run, unmatched certainly in my lifetime for breadth & quality of work. Henry Rago took a sabbatical for the 1968-69 school year & Daryl Hine, a little-known Canadian formalist who was teaching in the Chicago area, but who apparently either had the time or was able to take it, substituted for Rago on an interim basis. (He’s listed as Visiting Editor for the issue in which my work appears.) When Rago died of a heart attack, tho, Hine was able to stay on permanently & the current neocon regime was set in place. Now that there is serious money in the house, thanks to Ruth Lilly, it is unlikely that the pseudoformalists will ever let go. And once Hine flushed the last of Rago’s acceptances through the publishing process, that it was for ecumenicalism in American verse. But for seven years, Poetry was the best poetry magazine ever published. And it’s interesting to wonder if such a publication could ever happen again.

 

¹ It was published in 1975. I did the editing in 1973. The nine poets included Bruce Andrews, Barbara Baracks, Clark Coolidge, visual poet Lee DeJasu, Ray Di Palma, Robert Grenier, David Melnick, Barrett Watten & your humble correspondent.

² For this purpose, I would not include Edwin Denby’s lone appearance in 1926.

³ But see his letter to Denise Levertov of October 22, 1958 in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, pp. 143-145, where he complains about the editing practices of Rago, Don Allen & Cid Corman, one after another.

In addition to a wonderful tribute to Barbara Guest by Peter Gizzi, and a rather puffier one for Stanley Kunitz by Michael Ryan & Gregory Orr, the fall issue of American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, departs from its usual presentation of poetry as a genteel affair (an essay by Albert Goldbarth, Paul Muldoon close reading Elizabeth Bishop, a “manuscript study” presentation of a handwritten text by John Berryman, a selection of “poems from recent releases” that includes Mark Levine, Sandra M. Gilbert, Seamus Heaney, Carl Phillips & Floyd Skloot), to offer up three “emerging poets,” younger writers who have not yet had a big book out, introduced by a sponsoring poet. Sherman Alexie presents S.G. Frazier, Rodney Jones presents Phebus Etienne & Rae Armantrout presents Joseph Massey.

Some family responsibilities kept me from getting to Massey’s reading in Philadelphia a week or two ago, so I was pleased to see him featured here, partly because I’m pleased to see that Armantrout shares my own enthusiasm for his work. The feature includes three poems of Massey’s & one of Armantrout’s. Massey’s poems all come from Property Line, a chapbook from Jess Mynes’ Fewer and Further Press of Wendell, Massachusetts. Property Line is, in every sense of the word, not yet a big book, what with a press run of 250 copies and pages that are just six inches high, 3.75 inches wide. In addition to a gorgeous cover (art by Wendy Heldmann), the books pages use a dark red ink that is surprisingly effective. Perhaps it’s the deep maroon sheets between the covers and the slightly buff pages of the text itself that pulls it altogether, but as book design it really is elegant. The first poem in the book is the same as in the magazine feature:

Hill’s red
tethered
edge –

berries
that numbed
your tongue

It was the sound of the poem that carried me through it the first time I read it (in the journal before the book, in fact), all those parallel ĕ sounds & that almost subterranean d. Yet a few days later, what lingers more is that one word that semantically stands ajar, slightly out of line with the rest of this otherwise impeccably realist depiction: tethered. In what way (or ways) might a hill be tethered? When I first read the poem, I know that my mind substituted at least the meaning of the word deckled – as in irregular, notched, almost fractal – for tethered. But that’s my mind, and I’m savvy enough about the inner workings of the parsimony principle to know that the reader will supplement whatever details create, for him or her, the simplest, neatest explication. Beyond which, of course, there is an echo of weathered. But that’s not it either. Literally tethered means tied down, a meaning I can’t fit quite with the presence of a bush or a sense of a hill’s horizon. And it’s that not fitting, that imprecision in a work that seems to be exactly a monument to the precise, that gives this poem its depth over time.

John Tranter responded to my comments regarding Aaron Kunin’s text that deploys both verse and prose within the same text without having to resort to haibun-like before-&-after effects by reminding me of this link on Jacket’s website. It’s a discussion of line lengths online, just a part of Jacket’s editorial style guide. One of the reasons that Jacket is the best online poetry publication – tho hardly the most important reason – is that it does think to have, and publish, its style guide.

All magazines, online & otherwise, do have style guides, although relatively few seem actually to know this. It’s something that any professional publication will have in some formal manner, just as every major corporation does, covering everything from use of the name in print to the colors of the logo (there is only one “IBM blue” & woe is he or she who gets it wrong). At The Socialist Review, we knew what it was, and discussed it at length, tho it was never written down anywhere. Later, when I worked for ComputerLand, there were enough people involved in writing & editing in the marketing organization that one could have heated, passionate debates over, to pick an actual example, the relationship of an em-dash to a comma. Often such organizations adopt a published style guide, such as The Associated Press Style Guide, The Chicago Manual of Style or Words into Type. The Chicago Manual has had something of a twitchy history of deciding whether or not to include a comma before the “and” in a series of terms, such as blue, green, mauve, and tope. One edition will have that comma, while the next will drop it. Then the one after that seems to bring it back. This happened at least three times while I was at ComputerLand (which, during the same period, morphed into Vanstar) and it brought out rousing debates each time. And I have known organizations that swore that they were committed to a long out-of-print edition over some convention that may have been no larger than that.

Most zines, hard copy or soft, tend to represent the effort of one individual, sometimes aided by some friends, more often not. In those cases, the style guide tends to reside in the editor’s head & he or she may or may not be able to give you some pointers as to what they are. But a good reading of a couple of issues will let you know, for instance, which ones are prepared to let a critic use an ampersand or spell though as tho & which are not.

The advantage of having a guide in print is that you can outsource some of the finer details of copy editing, whether to another member of the magazine staff, a third-party editor, or perhaps the submitting author, which is more or less how I read Tranter’s guide – it’s a how-to for the submission of articles and poems, so that he doesn’t have to spend forever making minute html adjustments to try and get your text into his format. For example, if I were submit this text to Jacket, I would have to address the fact that my blog’s use of dashes differs from his. I prefer the brevity of an en dash ( – ) with one space on either side to an em dash (—) butted right up against the words it disrupts. This is simply a matter of what pleases my eye. I use ampersands for much the same reason: I like the physicality of the symbol & the ways in which it reminds me of the constructedness of writing, which, after all, words as such preceded: our ancestors spoke for centuries, presumably millennia, before somebody started taking notes. I like the semi-colon as well, tho I tend to use it sparingly. If I have a list that requires semi-colons, I’m much more apt to run it as a list thus:

A

B

C

That breaks up the text for the eye & improves readability. I should note, however, that I have never found a satisfying convention for bullets, such as one might use with a list like the above, that works well with enough browsers to warrant deploying. My few attempts at this have all been regrettable.

Tranter, who once wrote a poem entitled “The Chicago Manual of Style,” isn’t inherently opposed to the idea of a Ginsberg-esque or Whitmanesque long line, but he is generally befoozled as to how best to represent these curling long lines in HTML & is willing to admit to it. Confronted with the same problem, I generally treat long lines as individual paragraphs with hanging indents and make a point of seeing to it that there is no margin, or what a typesetter once would have called leading, at the bottom – whereas the typical paragraph here tends to have 12 points of leading. Thus Ginsberg’s famous lines:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

are rendered via the following html code at the top of the first “paragraph”:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:
.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'>

Whereas the bottom paragraph or line is coded:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:
.75in;text-indent:-.25in'>

I’ve boldfaced the key section of code that differs between the two. The so-called margin-bottom is how we get the space between quoted text and the regular body of this discussion. But note that you have to specify margins in all four directions.

That works in some cases, tho obviously not Kunin’s. I’ve seen some publications attempt to represent complex spacing in poetic lines – not just length, say, but also the kind of uses of blank space that I always associate in my mind with the work of the late Paul Blackburn, sometimes s t r e t c h i n g words out with blank spaces between every letter, for example – by rendering the text in a JPG file, treating it as an image. I have resorted to this myself here. Use it in the middle of a longer poem, tho, and you can be sure that some reader somewhere will set their screen to the “wrong” resolution & get text that differs wildly in point size from its immediate surroundings.

Possibly some future version of HTML, or whatever comes after HTML, will resolve these issues. I’m skeptical, simply because the people who are responsible for such things don’t read poetry & don’t worry about such things. An alternative that some online zines opt for is Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format. PDF certainly has its uses – it’s an acceptable format for ebooks, for example – but it slows down some browsers to a crawl. I use it at my job, and I use it to format texts I want to read later on my Palm Pilot, and once in awhile to help an editor understand exactly where my own lines should break in the poem, but a zine that alternates an HTML framework with PDF poems & articles has always struck me as something new for the abominations of Leviticus. Also, just try looking at a text like David Daniels’ Gates of Paradise in a PDF format on a small screen, like that of any PDA. It does not, as they say, compute.

I always worry that any new technology is going to have an impact on the verse that is produced & read there, and at some level I’m sure some of this goes on. Yet the omnipresence of the “green screen” of the pre-Windows days of computing did not yield a generation of poets who worked in 22-line forms, tho that was all you could see on the screen at one time. And it’s worth keeping in mind that the web is itself just 15 years old – Tim Berners-Lee first uploaded it to a server on August 6, 1991 – and that HTML is unlikely to be the standard we will be using a century from now. I don’t even want to think of the upheaval that a new format will bring if a new web standard is not backwards compatible.

I was on the plane coming back from California & trying to get a little sleep, so I of course turned to Poets & Writers, the trade journal dedicated to the concept that poetry can be as pedestrian as any other job, &, whilst thumbing thru its pages noted the little list of names that appears as a sidebar in each issue: writers who have recently died. On the list was Carol Bergé.

When I got back to Chester County, I looked on the web to see who had noted this, finding only one memorial poem on Bob Arnold’s Woodburners site. A search of the Wom-PO archives turns up nothing. According to Amazon, you can download a four-page write-up from the Gale Group Contemporary Authors biographies, but nothing else is in print. The Gale Group piece is perfunctory at best, tho it does give a list of her books, both prose and poetry & only mentions in passing her role as the editor of Center from 1970 thru 1981. It gives her home address as the Chelsea Hotel.

I met Bergé just once on a street corner in San Francisco’s Chinatown, for less than a minute. She was one of four writers – Diane Wakoski, Rochelle Owens & Barbara Moraff were the others – immortalized in LeRoi Jones’ infamous attempt at pre-feminist editing, Four Young Lady Poets, published by Totem/Corinth in 1962, quick enough after the appearance of the Allen anthology for you to realize that any one of them might have been included, might have increased The New American Poetry’s representation of women from just four (Madeline Gleason, Barbara Guest, Helen Adam, Denise Levertov) of its 44 contributors. Four Young Lady Poets was successful enough to go through at least three editions in the 1960s, literally the first announcement that the New American poetry wasn’t going to be just the Male American poetry. When it first appeared, Bergé was 34 years old.

Bergé had three books in the 1970s from Bobbs-Merrill, a trade publisher unique in that it was headquartered in Indianapolis, one from Black Sparrow, one (in 1984) from Ishmael Reed’s I.Reed. Two of the Bobbs-Merrill volumes were fiction – Bergé was one of the first true metafiction writers in the U.S. – but most of her publishers were presses with names like Weed/Flower, Membrane, Fault, Theo Press and Amalgamated Sensitivity. In the 1970s, when she was editing Center, Bergé was also doing the academic nomad routine, teaching at Goddard College, the University of Southern Mississippi, where she briefly edited the Mississippi Review, the University of New Mexico, Grand Valley State College and Wright State University. She belonged to all the usual writers organizations and served on P.E.N.’s executive committee in 1977-79. Her one NEA grant came in 1979, in the large batch that attempted to make up for all the years of excluding post-avants from earlier awards (& which caused howls of outrage from a certain school of you-know-what that likes to pretend it doesn’t exist).

Considering that the Gale Group bio lists a total of 23 books, her near total disappearance is startling. A review like this one in the New York Times from 1984 suggests that Bergé was able to garner serious attention for challenging work, but for reasons I don’t quite get she never seems to have won the sort of lasting following her writing deserves. To use CAConrad & Larry Fagin’s term, Bergé has become one of our true neglectorinos. At the very least, there would seem to be good cause for a selected poems & a selected prose.

You can find some of her writing on the net, most of it poetry. The best selection is an excerpt from The Unexpected on Karl Young’s Light & Dust website, the book having been published originally by his own Membrane Press. Three other pieces can be found in the first issue of Grist On-Line, where her work is sandwiched between Tuli Kupferberg, one of the original Fugs, and yours truly. Bob Arnold reprints one piece from The Unexpected, in a slightly different form than you’ll find on Light & Dust.

Carol Bergé would have been 78 this year.

One new journal that has started up this summer that promises to make a significant contribution to American poetics is Celery Flute: The Kenneth Patchen Newsletter, edited by Douglas Manson out of Buffalo. It’s a great idea, given that Patchen is one of the most important of the neglectorinos of the last century, patron saint to American visual poetry & an important influence on poets from the mid-‘30s onward, especially on such Beats as Kerouac & Ferlinghetti. Indeed, City Lights’ Pocket Poets series took its famous (if now sadly abandoned) design from Patchen’s An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air, designed by Kemper Noland & published by his Untides Press at the Conscientious Objectors’ prison camp in Waldport Oregon in 1945.

Mason, in his introduction, calls the journal

the beginning of a critical reassessment of a poetic career that stands out in twentieth-century American literature for its ability to astonish, arrest, and reveal, for its unique historical and cultural importance, and as an example of the ongoing suppression of a popular, radical avant-garde practice of innovation in poetic form.

In addition to an this editor’s note, the first issue contains a piece by Michael Basinski, who discusses Patchen’s correspondence with Jonathan Williams & contemplates ways in which to historically place this unique working class radical poet/painter, given that the categories still widely available (New American, etc.) still fail to address what was happening in poetry prior to 1950 – it was not simply New Critical/Fugitive, Objectivist, Pound-Williams, etc. – there was more (and different) that has yet to be understood.

Manson attempts to accomplish much the same thing in a long piece – it’s really the great find of the first issue – that uses the concept of prepoetics to compare & contrast the careers of Patchen & the likeminded (tho historically later) Canadian poet bp Nichol.

This is followed with two pieces relating to another early radical poet associated with Patchen & the evolution of the literary scene in the Village, Holly Beye (a deep neglectorino). First is a review of Beye’s journals, 120 Charles Street, The Village: Journals & Writings 1949-1950, which is then followed by an excerpt. Even then, it is clear from Beye’s notes that Patchen was suffering from the crippling back condition that essentially made him a recluse in Palo Alto by the 1960s, making his relationship to the SF scene that I was just then starting to enter into all the more mysterious. Just who was this guy whom Robert Duncan, Tom Parkinson & Kenneth Rexroth all obviously looked up to, but who appeared to be all but invisible?

At 34 pages, the first issue has been heavily seeded by Manson doing triple (maybe quadruple) duty, editing, writing three pieces & publishing the journal. Hopefully, Celery Flute will resonate with a readership & generate more work from a broader range of participants. There’s a lot here, for example, that I could stand to learn, all of it worth the effort.

My only complaint is that the journal needs to have a web site, especially so that it can post out-of-print past issues to the web and ease the process of acquisition. The first issue costs $7 and a four issue subscription is $20 for individuals, $35 for institutions, check or money order payable to Douglas Manson & sent to Celery Flute, 425 Bird Ave, Apt. 2, Buffalo, NY 14213-1235.

Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides have finally come to a conclusion, with the publication of Jonathan Green’s Songs of Farewell, a gathering of 15 poems published on a single sheet of paper, the 100^th such “broadside” in Pollet’s series. In its 12 years, Backwoods Broadsides has been a Who’s Who of mostly post-New American poetics, including such authors as

Antler
Bob Arnold
Amiri Baraka
Tom Beckett
George Bowering
Nicole Brossard
Lee Ann Brown
Cid Corman
Robert Creeley
Mary de Rachelwitz
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Diane Di Prima
Sharon Doubiago
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
George Economou
Clayton Eshleman
Ted Enslin
Kathleen Fraser
Ben Friedlander
Michael Heller
Dick Higgins
Jack Hirschman
Anselm Hollo
Ronald Johnson
Devin Johnston
Pierre Joris
Robert Kelly
Joanne Kyger
James Laughlin
Jackson Mac Low
Osip Mandelstam
David Meltzer
Stephen Paul Miller
Jennifer Moxley
Sheila E. Murphy
A.L. Nielsen
Hoa Nguyen
Alice Notley
Peter O’Leary
Rochelle Owens
Bern Porter
Kristin Prevallet
Meredith Quartermain
Peter Quartermain
Carl Rakosi
Joan Retallack
Jerome Rothenberg
Aram Saroyan
Andrew Schelling
Armand Schwerner
Dale Smith
John Taggart
Anne Tardos
Nathaniel Tarn
Sotère Torregian
Robert Vas Dias
Anne Waldman
Keith Waldrop
Rosmarie Waldrop

Plus maybe 40 more. I do believe that he only “repeated” two contributors in the entire series, Sheila Murphy (once solo, once in a collaboration with Doug Barbour) and Clayton Eshleman (once in his own right, once as translator for César Vallejo).

One amazing aspect of this series is that you can still get it all or in parts. Back issues – and they’re all back issues now – go for $1 postpaid in the US (“Canada/international add postage” reads the flyer, suggesting perhaps that Canada is not fully international vis-à-vis the U.S.). Complete sets are available for $100 postpaid in the US (international airmail add $10). I’m only willing to tell you this because my check for $100 is already in the mail. Send your check (which I would make out to Sylvester directly) to Sylvester Pollet, 963 Winkumpaugh Rd., Ellsworth Maine 04605-9529.

Here is Jonathan Greene’s title poem from the last “chaplet,” “Songs for Farewell”:

They say his robe is flowing.
He, too, flowing downstream . . .
wave, goodbye.

§

To leave like a winning dive,
clean into the water like a knife,
no splash.

Easily the best expression of what I called yesterday the New Western aesthetic within the New American Poetry was the magazine Coyote’s Journal during the mid-1960s – edited originally by James Koller, Carol Arnett & a rotating host of others, it has continued onward, sporadically, in Koller’s hands and may still exist to this day. An abebooks.com listing for the second issue identifies its contributors as Larry Eigner, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman, Ed Dorn (featured in 28 pages), Douglas Woolf, Anselm Hollo, Robert Kelly, James Koller & Gary Snyder. Another, for double issue 5-6 mentions Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, Richard Brautigan, Anselmo Hollo among the contributors. A 1971 issue – the first after a four year hiatus – lists Gary Snyder, Harold Littlebird, Jack Collom, Franco Beltrametti, Lew Welch, Giulia Niccolai, Adriano Spatola, Al Glover, Paul Blackburn, Don Eulert, Coyote Man, Zoe Brown, Jerome Rothenberg, Bobby Byrd, Harry Hoogstraten, Drummond Hadley, Keith Wilson, James Koller, Allen Ginsberg. I had originally thought that Caterpillar, Clayton Eshleman’s first magazine, had modeled itself after Coyote’s Journal, as they had similar physical formats, an interest in the heritage of the Black Mountain poets & large-scale ambition, but Clayton corrects me, noting that his template above all others had been Origin (which makes sense, in part because Eshleman was still very much the New Yorker when he started Caterpillar.)

But as Coyote’s Journal stopped being a predictable presence in the poetry journals section at City Lights, Serendipity & Cody’s in the Bay Area – eight issues occurred between 1964 & 67, then nothing for four years – something curious happened. Nothing. While other publications shared some or all of Coyote’s aesthetic – Clifford Burke’s Hollow Orange, for example, or John Oliver Simon’s Aldebaran Review or even Will Inman’s Kauri – they were smaller publications even within the social frame of small presses. With Olson’s death – he was an important influence for many New Western poets, in part because his insistence on space seemed to point in their direction – the rise of other literary tendencies, including Actualism & Language Poetry, the New Western’s adamant resistance to leaders resulted in a shift away from any cohesive aesthetics. The New Western moment had passed.

This did not mean, however, that New Western poets themselves had stopped writing, but the sense of anything larger or more cohesive soon dissolved. Snyder had already ceased to be a presence in the Bay Area, Phil Whalen was immersed in his study of Zen, Richard Brautigan turned to the novel, Lew Welch took a pistol & disappeared into the woods, his body never to be found. Others continued to be active, but without the same focused outlet for their work, moved to more private or local solutions.

One of the poets who seemed to vanish was Drummond Hadley, who had published one book, The Webbing, with Don Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation in 1967. Hadley, as it happened, had moved to the Mexico/Arizona/New Mexico border sometime around 1965, where he has worked as a cowboy & rancher for the past four decades, founding the Animas Foundation, a group devoted to sustainable agriculture, & helping to start the Malpai Borderlands Group, an ecosystem management project. Somewhere along the line Drummond got shortened to Drum. And now, finally, Hadley has a big collection of his poetry available from Rio Nuevo, entitled Voice of the Borderlands, introduction by Gary Snyder. Given that Rio Nuevo is a regional publisher – typical titles include The Prickly Pear Cookbook, Navajo Rug Designs & The Legend of the O.K. Corral – it’s not evident that Voice is going to get the national distribution it deserves.

One could legitimately characterize Hadley as a cowboy poet, save that he’s a cowboy who quotes Charles Olson & has obviously read Ed Dorn’s Slinger, & who mentions Snyder, Creeley, Coyote’s Journal founder Jim Koller & Keith Wilson among others in his acknowledgements page. And tho he is given to fairly simple, straightforward poems, the book not unwisely includes a five-page glossary, so that us city types won’t think that RCA (Rodeo Cowboy Association) isn’t the technology firm once headquartered in Camden, NJ.

Of all the poets who reflect to one degree or another the influence of Olson, Hadley may be the only one to fully get it that the fundamental genre of The Maximus Poems is dramatic monolog, and that it is Olson more than anyone who demonstrated what might be done with that form going forward. Dramatic monolog, along with free verse & the prose poem, one might characterize as one of the three great formal innovations of early modernism, yet it is perhaps the one least well understood today, in part because of the likes of Richard Howard & Frank Bidart attempting to preserve Robert Browning in amber.

Hadley, tho, is closer in spirit to the documentary impulse one finds in Olson, tho less with documents, more with the voices of the people around him. It’s something one finds, albeit with a different attitude, in the work of Jonathan Williams with its broad characterization of accents. Many of the poems in Voices are identified after the poem as “Voice of,” tho the names – Bronc Buster Billy Brown, Walter Ramsey, Coot-Si-Wii-Kii-Ooo-Ma (Delbridge Honani), Trog Smith, Stan Hall, Porfirio, Bill Bryan – are obviously not selected for their currency with the audience, say, at St. Marks. Thus, through the eyes of others, we can sometimes glimpse Hadley off to the side in the poem, in the third person, as with “A Calf with Three Legs”:

One day, Porfirio and Drum were riding together
They came upon a young calf
Who had been born with only three legs.
The calf’s right front leg was missing.
Porfirio looked at the calf for a long time.
Finally, he said, “La luna le comió la pierna, digo yo,
the moon ate the leg, says I.”

– Voice of PORFIRIO

The real energy of these pieces lies less in any individual poem than in the overall tapestry they present of a way of living that has all but disappeared in this country – at 350 pages, it’s rich & detailed. The collection is gathered thematically rather than chronologically – thus one runs into sequences of poems devoted to a single subject, such as keeping warm out of doors. Specificity is important here, tho often for Hadley it’s the specificity of the voices he captures – many poems are simply comments, not necessarily from the blue state perspective we’re used to in contemporary verse. Here is a piece with both title & subtitle (or, as Hadley suggests in the index, section heading & title, tho the section here consists just of this one poem), “THE TRADERS: Horse Trading”:

My old Daddy used to say,
“You walk around a horse once.
You look in his mouth
You’re ready to trade.
It’s about the same with a man or a woman.
You walk around one of them once.
You see what’s in their eyes.
You’re ready to trade.”

– Voice of ROY THORN

Simple as that poem is, the voice there hinges on the one extraneous word in the entire piece: “old.” It heightens the spareness of what follows as well as positioning both speaker & the original saying in narrative time.

All told, this is a sad book precisely because of the changes that have occurred, are occurring & are certain to occur in the future to this part of the American landscape. One glimpses the modern world only occasionally, and in surprising ways – a co-inventor of the H-bomb worries about zipping up his pants – yet it’s unseen, literally unvoiced presence hangs over this volume like a cloud.

This is an important book, tho clearly not for every reader. Poetry has a lot of social functions & one of the implications of the Olsonian program is that it can document lives in ways no other record could capture. Drum Hadley has tuned in to that possibility in a way that’s virtually unique, even as the poems themselves are no more difficult for non-readers of poetry than, say, Spoon River Anthology. Hadley himself appeared on NPR the other day, reading from Voices. You can listen to it here.

Alice Notley

 

If the new edition of Chicago Review devotes 137 pages to Christopher Middleton, that’s just for openers – the issue contains another 170 pages of poetry, fiction & critical fair, virtually all of it of interest, and very much in the vein of what Jacket does online, suggesting broad contexts for reading. It contains a generous selection of post-avant poetry in English, with work by poets with roots in Australia (John Kinsella), France (Gustav Sobin with one of his last poems), England (Keston Sutherland &, in another way altogether, Alice Notley), Canada (Christopher Dewdney, Kevin Connolly), a look at Allen Ginsberg’s photography, new work by Landis Everson, one of the original members of the Berkeley Renaissance who is returning to print with quite a flourish at the end of his eighth decade, a long piece of fiction by Lisa Jarnot, an interview with Camille Guthrie plus memorials to Philip Lamantia & Guy Davenport.

ChiRev – an abbreviation I’ve been using now for some 38 years, back to when I first appeared in that journal, and which shows up in my own poetry, but which may be exclusive to me, I don’t know – has been doing this with each of its recent special issues & it makes extraordinary sense. Come for the Middleton, the Dorn or Zukofsky, stay & get turned on to something new altogether, simply because on the page they make sense. The cohesion of this issue is as impressive as any accomplished by a single hand, be it Clayton Eshleman, Cid Corman, Bob Creeley or Barrett Watten. That it is actually being done by a college magazine is more or less impossible. With their typically cautious faculty sponsorships & rotating student editors, college mags are a ground for young poets to get some sense of what editing may be about, but the simple fact is that most are pretty dreadful productions, maybe a “famous” name or two & a lot of student work – sometimes the student work is quite a bit better than the generous mid-career poet’s contribution, having given the mag something he or she wouldn’t send to a journal that might be more widely read.

Chicago Review has had its own mixed history of course. An attempt in 1959 to publish “Old Angel Midnight” by Jack Kerouac & an excerpt from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in the journal was thwarted by a half-wit journalist at the Chicago Daily News who knew that a good ruckus over obscenity would increase his readership, leading instead Paul Carroll to create Big Table as an alternative site, in many ways the inaugural event of Chicago postmodernism, especially after the Post Office in turn went after Carroll & Big Table. In the late 1960s, Eugene Wildman & Iven Lourie (who would abandon his own literary career for a deepening spiritual engagement in the 1970s & is probably remember now more as the brother of Hanging Loose co-founder Dick Lourie) pushed the magazine out of that sort of inevitable collegiate shell college mags can fall into, but then the staffs rotated again & not much was heard until the mid-90s. Thus, for example, it seemed mostly to miss the burst of creativity that poured forth in the wake of a brief post-Iowa teaching stint in the Second City by Ted Berrigan in the 70s. Now Eric Elshtain concludes an extravagantly successful five-year run as poetry editor with this issue, so I suppose we’re going to have to hold our breaths all over again for what the journal will mean in the future. But this run has been something else – these last issues in particular will be on poets’ bookshelves for decades to come.

The writer whose work pulled me in first is Kevin Connolly, who I’m presuming is the Canadian poet & journalist, tho any details are curiously absent from the contributors’ notes. He has a piece entitled “So Familiar,” which acknowledges that it is “after Darrell Gray.”

You are the toy delivered at daybreak,
conundrum to a storm of checkmarks,

and still, so familiar to me
this bale of regret
I have strawdogged. . .

Cordwood, filibuster,
young love caught under the porch
with the chamois and the millionaire

A class of oafs
can set the terms more finely
than any timeshare Nero

But when I put up my fiddle, the
moon dawdles on my cheekbones –
all those plump hours tractoring back

A perfectly fine little poem & one that does indeed remind me of Darrell, the Actualist poet who drank himself to death far too young, especially Darrell’s work under the French pseudonym Phillipe Mignon, sort of a kinder, but not gentler, Kent Johnson.(Johnson is himself represented in the issue via a sympathetic review by David Hadbawnik.) Gray, who studied with Berrigan in Iowa City in the late 1960s, before moving to the Bay Area after a brief stint writing – no joke – verse for Hallmark in Kansas City, was the lynchpin for a network of poets whom one might think of as third generation New York School, save for the notable detail that they were not New Yorkers & not in New York.

Another member of that same generation at Iowa, of course, was Alice Notley, whose own roots were in the sparest part of the harshest desert in the U.S. She married Berrigan & lived with him until his death some fifteen years hence, after which she lived in England & France, taking up serious root everywhere she went. She has two pieces here in very long lines indeed, two others in prose – they don’t look at all like anything Ted Berrigan ever did or anyone in Iowa ever did, or pretty much anyone writing before has ever done, unless maybe the more oracular side of Anne Waldman. But you get those little verbal flourishes in Notley, like her use of adverbs & adjectives in the first two lines of “Oath”:

by the little daggers of my dear, the very legitimate tendernesses of his spirit/body i swear.

to go on before the courts and flowing lectures, to animate the light with furious weight.

The whole heritage of the New American Poetry is captured in something like furious – it’s a term you can hear Kerouac & Whalen, for example, using before a noun such as weight. It is impossible to get such life into a poem without having it be there at all points – it’s not something you can fake or learn in school. Even in these new & sometimes strange forms, Notley’s poetry is absolutely bristling with such instances of specificity, in every line, every phrase.

A very different vision of the history of the New American Poetry shows up in Peter Leary’s review – it’s both deeper & more personal than that term suggests – of the humongous volume of collected correspondence between Robert Duncan & Denise Levertov. Both poets have seen their reputations wane somewhat since their deaths – Duncan’s because key projects such as The H.D. Book and any sort of collected poems have never seen print, Levertov because she cast her lot in her later years with one side of the School of Quietude, which has a perpetual tendency to neglect its own (part of a larger hostility to literary history that one suspects is because a cold, clear look at same would force them to, as Rilke would have put it, change their lives). Both are considerably more important figures than they might seem today, and are like to return as forces if & when fuller collections of their of work are made available.

Leary focuses on the degree to which this correspondence traces the breakup of their deep friendship over the Vietnam War, the moment of great drama in the letters, to be sure. Levertov who became a fulltime political activist in these years argued with Duncan, who was a good enough friend to actually tell her the truth about what this was doing to her writing. Yet it is worth remembering here that it was Duncan, with “The Fire Passages 13” & “The Multiversity Passages 21,” along with Allen Ginsberg’s ”Wichita Vortex Sutra,” & George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” who turned out to be the great antiwar poet of the Vietnam conflict. Levertov’s own political poetry is not anywhere near her best work, and the Vietnam era poems don’t stand up well against antiwar work by far more conservative poets like James Dickey or Donald Justice.

At the same time, Duncan was somebody who needed enemies & opposition & he burned down more than a few of his friendships over his life. The relationship with Levertov may have been the most profound of these self-invoked disasters, although certainly poets who were in San Francisco during the early sixties have been known to speak of periods where Duncan & Spicer behaved more like Godzilla & Mothra. So there is this dynamic as well. But where Duncan’s confrontation with what a homophobic jerk Pound was simply led him to stop communicating with the older poet in the 1940s (unlike, say, Allen Ginsberg), Levertov was someone he wasn’t going to let dissolve into a scold without a fight. He goes after her like a brother doing an intervention on a sibling who’s got a crack habit, only to discover that she has no intention of stepping off the high horse that was, for awhile at least, gaining her a broader readership for the first time in her career.

Ginsberg, on the other hand, is represented via a fascinating consideration of his photography & specifically how his photography fits into his literary aesthetic, specifically the problem of how to photograph the subjective. Erik Mortenson is new to me as a critic, but this strikes me as a rich vein of possibility. Ginsberg was obsessed with his photography – in some ways, I think it was a form in which he never had to fit into the expectations of being “Allen Ginsberg, Papa Hippie, King of the May.” Once before a panel we were both on under the big tent at Naropa began, he leaned over to me to say “When I’m in places like this, I’m always imagining all the photographs I could be taking of the audience.”

A very different view of post-avant tradition comes in Bill Mohr’s piece on Paul Vangelisti, the Los Angeles poet, editor & translator. I’ve written even in the past week about the degree of isolation Southern California has as a literary scene, and Vangelisti like Leland Hickman is an example of somebody who is not nearly as widely known today as he should be – and would be if he lived, say, in San Francisco, New York or even Philly or Boston – so it is great to see Mohr taking on the broad view of his work here. If only the issue had a few new poems of his as well.

But it’s hard to fault a publication this rich & this committed to the completeness of the post-avant. The memorial pieces for Philip Lamantia & Guy Davenport, for example, bring together radically different views of poetry & the world. Both have important relationships, however, to the same broader scene. Similarly, there are pieces here that I haven’t mentioned by Elizabeth Willis, Sarah Mangold, and a delightful review of Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed by Daniel Kane. Plus lots of poets new (or at least relatively new) to me, starting with Philip Jenks, John Wilkinson, Daniel Borzutzky, Danielle Pafunda, Camille Martin, J.S.A. Lowe, Jen Lamb, Tim Early & Gregory Fraser. It’s not that there are no false moments – Elshtain tries to compare D.A. Powell with Charles Olson & another piece overpraises the work of Jeff Clark, who has been designing the covers of ChiRev of late. In all, however, this is a feast. It’s not up on the Chicago Review website quite yet, but this issue – like all of the recent ones – is worth ponying up for. While you’re at it, get whatever back issues you don’t already own.