I pulled out Michael Lally’s None of the Above: New Poets of the USA (Crossing Press, 1976), searching for that quote I used from Jim Gustafson in my note about Joseph Massey’s Minima St. But instead of putting the anthology back after getting what I needed, I’ve left it sitting on my desk and have been rereading it for the first time in years.

The book is a juicy time capsule, an excellent cross section of literary tendencies that were active among younger poets during the middle of that decade. Most visible are a somewhat blurry, already diverging version of the New York School (Phillip Lopate, Paul Violi & Hilton Obenziner from the uptown scene*, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen & Bernadette Mayer from St. Marks, a pre-Texas Lorenzo Thomas, Joe Brainard), langpo (Mayer of course, Bruce Andrews, Ray Di Palma, P. Inman, Lynne Dreyer, yours truly) & a post-Iowa but “anti-workshop” phenomenon of the period that for want of a better term was called Actualism in those days: Darrell Gray, George Mattingly, Dave Morice and Gustafson. In addition to Inman & Dreyer are three other Washington, D.C. poets of the period: Ed Cox, Tim Dlugos and Terence Winch. The collection also contains some poets who are exceptionally difficult to categorize: Barbara Baracks, who departed from the poetry scene & the Bay Area just as language writing was gathering steam; Merrill Gilfillan, who has gone on to become one of the finest nature writers we have; Joanne Kyger, a literary renaissance all to herself**; Patti Smith, just at the cusp of rock stardom; Nathan Whiting, a fascinating loner who used to compose long, skinny texts in his head while running great distances***; and of course the editor, Michael Lally, whose own activity in Baltimore & Washington had proven a catalyst for a lot of the younger poets there but who by the mid 1970s had moved to New York before re-emerging in Los Angeles, working as an actor under the name Michael David Lally in TV and films.

Twenty-six years shifts perceptions around a bit, so that one reads these texts to some degree knowing which writers one still reads with interest and enthusiasm a quarter century hence. Lally’s own interests and blinders are evident enough – that is a remarkably East Coast version of langpo, for example. And with the exceptions of Kyger and myself, writers whose linkage to the New American poetry is to anything other than the New York school are notably absent.

What intrigues me today is the fate of Actualism, which as a phenomenon has largely disappeared over the past two decades. The term itself was taken from the Actualist Conventions put on in Berkeley at the theater of the Blake Street Hawkeyes. Coordinated by poet G.P. Skratz and the Hawkeyes, these annual weekend-long marathons included all manner of performance – Whoopi Goldberg was a Hawkeye in the early 1980s – while the poetics were heavily influenced by the teaching and writing of Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo, as well as by Andrei Codrescu, then a recent arrival to SF from Detroit. In addition to the poets included in the Lally anthology, Pat Nolan, Keith Abbott, Jim Nisbet and Victoria Rathbun were among the most visible in the Bay Area.

Perhaps the most important thing to note is that Actualism was an -ism that never sought to be any sort of movement – the anarcho / anti-organizational impulse was very strong. If anything, the Actualist Conventions were themselves a spoof of the least attractive aspect of their surrealist predecessors+. The one other serious manifestation of the phenomenon was an even smaller Actualist Anthology (1977, The Spirit That Moves Us), edited by Gray & Morty Sklar.

On some level, Actualism might be thought of as how the impact of Ted Berrigan resonated through Iowa City to San Francisco. While it was extremely powerful in the 1970s, it’s harder to see a quarter century later. One might make a similar case for the influence Berrigan had on Chicago and look to the Yellow Press anthology, also from 1976, called 15 Chicago Poets.

Nisbet has gone on to become a novelist of neo-noir thrillers, Abbott & Mattingly teach at Naropa & New College, respectively, Morice continues his Dr. Alphabet routines, and Skratz & Nolan still pop up in print from time to time. But Gray drank himself to death with an intensity that was terrifying, Gustafson returned to Detroit where he died too young of an aneurysm without ever having the breakthrough book for which his poetry appeared to be destined, and others who were once loosely affiliated with this phenomenon, such as Allan Kornblum, evolved their own careers in different directions.

I do still sense the impact of the Actualist frame of mind in everything from the Coffee House Books catalog to the Exquisite Corpse website. But if you want some feel for how Actualism fit in back in its heyday, None of the Above contextualizes it best. The rare book website, abebooks, lists 10 copies reasonably priced in stores around the U.S. But pay attention: there are at least three other volumes with that same title, one subtitled “Why Presidents Fail and What Can Be Done About It,” another “Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude,” and the third by children’s book author, Rosemary Wells.

* Although Hilton had already moved west and was immersed in political organizing by then.

** An email I sent to Linda Russo on April 28, 1998 fills in what I mean by this. It’s part of the Joanne Kyger web page at the Electronic Poetry Center.

*** Unfortunately, the anthology form, especially in this rather short collection of 31 poets in 224 pages, didn’t permit any samples of Whiting’s longer works.

+ In addition to every form of performance art imaginable, the Actualist Conventions also included every kind of poetry.

The World in Time and Space arrived in the mailbox yesterday and it’s a big fat wonderful collection of essays & interviews about contemporary poetry, or more exactly, poetry from the New Americans of the 1950s to the present. My first thumb-through (which took a couple of hours) tells me that there is a lot in here to make me think, learn, laugh, cringe & want to argue. Ed Foster & Joe Donahue have done a first-rate job in putting together a volume on poetry that matters. The list of contributors and their pieces will tell you why:

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Bruce Andrews, Making Social Sense: Poetics & the Political Imaginary

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Edward Foster, An Interview with Gustaf Sobin

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Michael Baughn, Olson's Buffalo

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Landrey, Robert Creeley's and Joel Oppenheimer's Changing Visions

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Leonard Schwartz, Robert Duncan and His Inheritors

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Norman Finkelstein, cc: Jack Spicer

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>John Olson, The Haunted Stanzas of John Ashbery

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Clippinger, Poetry and Philosophy at Once: Encounters between William Bronk and Postmodern Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>W. Scott Howard, 'The Brevities': Formal Mourning, Transgression, & Postmodern American Elegies

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Mark Scroggins, Z-Sited Path: Late Zukofsky and His Tradition

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Burt Kimmelman, Objectivist Poetics since 1970

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Jeanne Heuving, The Violence of Negation or 'Love's Infolding'

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Peter Bushyeager, Staying Up All Night: The New York School of Poetry, 1970-1983

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Stephen Paul Miller, Ted Berrigan's Legacy: Sparrow, Eileen Myles, and Bob Holman

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Thomas Fink, Between / After Language Poetry and the New York School

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>David Clippinger, Between Silence and the Margins: Poetry and its Presses

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Linda Russo, 'F' Word in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Account of Women-Edited Small Presses and Journals

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Standard Schaefer, Impossible City: A History of Literary Publishing in L.A. Susan Vanderborg, "If This Were the Place to Begin": Little Magazines and the Early Language Poetry Scene

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Susan M. Schultz, Language Writing

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Marjorie Perloff, After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Daniel Barbiero, Reflections on Lyric Before, During, and After Language

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Christopher Beach, "Events Were Not Lacking": David Antin's Talk Poems, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and the Poetics of Cultural Memory

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Andrew Joron, Neo-Surrealism; or, The Sun at Night

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Dan Featherston, On Visionary Poetics, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Peter O'Leary, American Poetry & Gnosticism

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Michel Delville, The Marginal Arts: Experimental Poetry and the Possibilities of Prose

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Stephen-Paul Martin, Media / Countermedia: Visual Writing & Networks of Resistance

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Mary Margaret Sloan, Of Experience To Experiment: Women's Innovative Writing, 1965 - 1995

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Edward Foster, An Interview with Alice Notley

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Aldon Lynn Nielsen, "This Ain't No Disco"

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Kathryne V Lindberg Cleaver, Newton and Davis, re: Reading of Panther Lyrics

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Brian Kim Stefans, "Remote Parsee": An Alternative Grammar of Asian North-American Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Brent Hayes Edwards, The Race for Space: Sun Ra's Poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Julie Schmid, Spreading the Word: A History of the Poetry Slam

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Steve Evans, The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Loss Pequeño Glazier, Poets | Digital | Poetics

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>Alan Golding, New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries

Talisman House has done a tremendous job of promoting American poetry in recent years: Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, in 1996; An Anthology of New (American) Poets in 1998; and Mary Margaret Sloan’s monumental Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, also in 1998. In 2000, Talisman House published Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. All are “must-have” volumes for any halfway decent collection of contemporary poetry. These are available through Small Press Distribution.

Rereading “Bean Spasms” in The Angel Hair Anthology does so many different things for me:

• Reminds me of what a great poet Berrigan was, something that for me can slip when not recalling the range, depth & delicacy his work was able to reach all at the same time
• Makes me realize yet again that it was this poem & not “The Sonnets” that truly made Ted into a New York poet, rather than, say, merely a brilliant Providence Army vet who got to Manhattan by way of Tulsa
• Causes me to note how Part 3, with 13 lines, is in its own way a variation of a sonnet – “you string a sonnet around yr fat gut” he says only two lines in the section that is labeled “4,” Berrigan actually playing in the poem with the role of subsection headings. Later he will say, midline (and with no stanza break on either side), “Right Here. That’s Part 5”
• Makes me remember how, reading Louis Cabri’s The Mood Embosser (Coach House, 2001) last summer, which is really a fine first book, at times made me think “this is what Ted Berrigan would be like with politics,” but that, now confronting Berrigan directly, seeing how the great range of reference inherent in Ted’s best work could not/would not restrict itself to a domain such as the political & that it is precisely how the social, the intimate & the purely fanciful interact that made Ted Ted
• Reminds me yet again of what an important an influence Berrigan has been for so many of my favorite poets – Kit Robinson, Bob Perelman & Alan Bernheimer in my own generation, Cabris more recently – and why this is a good thing
• Which in turn reminds me that, betwixt the poets of the Allen anthology & my own cohort, there were really two significant strains of innovation in poetry: the “second generation NY school,” around Ted, Padgett, Berkson, Schjeldahl, Gallup et al and the poets around Caterpillar, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Diane Wakoski, David Antin

One of the most memorable moments co-curating the Grand Piano poetry series in San Francisco with Tom Mandel in the mid-1970s was the evening we hosted Ted Berrigan and SF-expatriate George Stanley. I recall counting the audience at significantly over 100, well beyond what that little room could hold comfortably, and how both poets were masterful that evening. But what may have been strangest about the event was the degree to which each poet brought half of the audience to the reading and how very few of the audience members had any idea just who the other poet happened to be. It was a meeting of very different, though essentially simpatico, tribes.

Afterwards, the scene divided literally into two parties that could have been characterized as straight/gay or NY/SF, although there were exceptions to all such axes of division. At the Berrigan’s affair south of Market, some epigone made a point of telling Ted just how much better he had been than “that other poet.” Ted stopped that person – I’m not naming names because the miscreant has been edited from the memory card – instantly and went into a terrific impromptu lecture on what an excellent poet George Stanley was and how important it was to fully understand the San Francisco renaissance, including its own second generation and the Vancouver diaspora that followed the death of Jack Spicer.

The abstract lyric certainly existed before Barbara Guest – Stein, for example, and some of Williams’ work, especially prior to World War II; the French can go back to Mallarmé – but it was/is Guest who in English seems to have perfected the form in the 1950s, a period in which she was largely (and unfairly) unnoticed with the significant exception of the Allen anthology – it is Guest who lead off the New York School section in that epochal collection, even as she had the fewest pages of work represented. Reading her poetry of that period sends me back along a different coordinate – to the texts of David Schubert and through him to the short poems of Hart Crane. I don’t know if Guest read Schubert, who seems to have largely slipped through the cracks of literary history (albeit acknowledged as an influence by John Ashbery and visibly evident in the poetry of Frank O’Hara). 

 

There is a tendency in American poetry that one might characterize as academic in the old-fashioned pejorative sense & certainly the letters and essays in the 1983 QRL issue on Schubert reflects that tradition: Alan Tate, Ben Belitt, Horace Gregory, Louise Bogan, Ted Weiss. In a sense, the New American poetry and its descendents (which include virtually every progressive mode of U.S. poetry some 50 years hence) has exorcised itself of even the memory of that tendency. Pound and Stein were geographically inoculated from it, the Objectivists simply avoided all interaction (the feeling appears to have been mutual). Yet Williams dealt with it and Marianne Moore positively thrived in that environment, and it is evident that at least through Auden (curious interloper that he is after the Second World War) the New York School was willing to let some elements in.

 

In some sense, trying to sort out the role of such influences is not unlike those followers of Creeley who do not understand his enthusiasm for Crane or Stevens. Reading is itself always a narrative, the unfolding of meaning in time – I read this book before that one. In my own life, it was Philip Whalen’s poetry that gave me the inroads I needed in order to appreciate Clark Coolidge’s work in the 1960s, yet I know of poets who came upon those two writers in the opposite sequence and I simply cannot imagine what one would make of it: I cannot fold my mental map into that configuration.

 

An analogy from music might be the relationship between Bing Crosby and Jimi Hendrix. Before Crosby, singers belted out tunes as if they were still performing from the stage of an auditorium, even as they were finally being recorded. It was Crosby who understood that the implication of the microphone was that you could sing softly and bring out a whole new range of possible music. Similarly, Hendrix was the first performer to understand the full implications of the electrification of the guitar. Crosby and Hendrix equally revolutionized music.

 

In a decade in which so many academic poets continue to sound as if they were the contemporaries of Bing Crosby, I find it intriguing that Barbara Guest should become the most influential of the New American poets. In part, it no doubt is because her work has not yet been fully incorporated, much as the Objectivists of the 1930s needed to wait until the 1970s to be brought completely into view. So perhaps it is because the current generation of academic poets seems as relevant to poetry as astrology does to astronomy, the abstract lyric carries forward within itself aspects of a tradition all but unheard elsewhere.

During his life Robert Duncan alternately called his booklength critical project both The H.D. Book and The Day Book. Individual chapters appeared in journals such as Caterpillar, but the volume as a whole has never appeared. The copy I’m reading comes from a pirate typesetting that I don’t believe was ever released in hard copy. In this sense, the version I have is not unlike the Frontier Press edition of Spring & All that Harvey Brown produced in order to provoke New Directions into republishing that great lost work of Williams.  

 

People have speculated over the reasons why The H.D. Book is not in print, and conspiracy theories on the topic are not unpopular. But in some sense, the book’s problem lies precisely in its genius – a work of criticism with no argument, no theme, no development, no expository equivalent to a plot. It certainly has nodes around which it turns again and again – Duncan’s autobiography, the poetry of Hilda Doolittle, the poetics of the high modernists in general, the “wars” between various occult practitioners extending outward from Blavatsky, seers that Duncan both cheerfully acknowledges as frauds and insists must be taken at full value. Any given chapter, any given paragraph may turn to one of these topics, or sweep between any two of them (Duncan’s sense of pace seems slow precisely because it is governed by rhythm).

 

So what we as readers must then confront is a text that straddles genres neatly between critical theory and autobiography and proceeds, as Shklovsky would have noticed, as plotless prose, a work whose point is never to get anywhere, but always to bring the reader into the presentness of reading itself. The H.D. Book is hardly the first such critical work in English – there is all of Stein’s lectures and critical prose, and again Spring & All. But in fact none of these have ever had an easy or simple publishing history, as Duncan himself certainly understood. In the 1950s, he had been the only writer of any note to acknowledge Stein’s influence whatsoever.

http://www.factoryschool.org/content/pubs/rhood/duncan/HD_Book.pdf

 

I am the slowest of readers, so much that when I was a student, my high school enrolled me in an Evelyn Woods’ speed reading course to see if it couldn’t increase my pace – but I always imagined words to have sounds & sentences and paragraphs to set off thoughts, requiring me to reread passages over & over whenever I returned from my flights of “fancy.”

 

Today, I am reading perhaps 50 books at once – I have a stack beside this desk that includes The Angel Hair Anthology, Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works, Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service, Allen Curnow’s Early Days Yet, Tan Lin’s Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, Conjunction’s special issue on American Poetry: The State of the Art, Serge Gavronsky’s 66 for Starters, Charles Tomlinson’s Selected Poems, James Sherry’s Our Nuclear Heritage, Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Barbara Guest’s Selected Poems, and H.D.’s Collected Poems 1912-1944. Some of these are “rereads” (Sherry, Stanford), but others (Lin, Curnow, Tomlinson) are books that I have been reading literally for years.

 

In addition to this stack, I have another that sits by the front door, waiting for those moments when I can relax and sit on the porch and read – these are the books I took with me to Nova Scotia this summer (though the Angel Hair anthology and Niedecker collected were also in that group and have since migrated down to my study). In my bedroom is another clutch of books of poetry that will be integrated with the stack by the door. Plus the novel I’m currently reading, David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten.

The stack by the front door includes Christian Bok’s Eunoia, Pattie McCarthy’s bk of (h)rs, Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, Heaney’s version of Beowulf, Besmilr Brigham’s Run Through Rock, Jennifer Moxley’s The Sense Record, Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (a curiously flaccid text given its reputation), and Edwin Torres’ The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker.

 

In a restroom upstairs is a smaller stack of critical &/or non-fiction texts that I’m working through more slowly. And in the dining room is Stephen Wolfram’s self-published tome, A New Kind of Science, which I’m going through with the idea that there must be some ideas for poems in there that I might use once I begin Universe in earnest (still a year away, I’d guess).

 

But in my pocket, as an e-book, is Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book, which I’ve downloaded to my Palm Pilot using the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Palm tool.