The differences between Robert Duncan’s A Selected Prose, edited after his death by Robert Bertholf, published in 1995, & Duncan’s earlier Fictive Certainties, which Duncan edited just ten years earlier, are instructive.

 

The twenty essays included in A Selected Prose are focused not just on the literary, but on a particular aspect of the literary. It is primarily a record of Duncan as a member of the San Francisco Renaissance. With only two exceptions, the selections either rise out of that experience as statements of poetics and/or theory, or involve a closer look at writers of interest to a New American (Whitman, Pound, Moore, H.D., Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, Levertov, Spicer, Bev Dahlen) or visual artists associated with the West Coast funk art trends of that same period (Jess, George Herms, Wallace Berman). The two exceptions are “The Homosexual in Society,” Duncan’s famous statement of 1944 that appeared in the first issue of the journal Politics (tho the expanded version here first was published in the rather more august Jimmy & Lucy’s House of K) – historically an important text in the history of gay freedom in this society – and a late look at the work of Edmond Jabès. One might say that this is the Robert Duncan a reader might expect from the pages of the Allen anthology. Save for the piece on Jabès, all of the issues addressed in this volume were available for discussion in the U.S. in the 1950s.

 

The thirteen pieces Duncan gathered for Fictive Certainties are longer and, for the most part, more theoretical. Only three pieces appear in both books: “Towards an Open Universe,” “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” & “Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman.” One might fairly say that the first two of these essays are the only theory-focused works in A Selected Prose. In Fictive Certainties, they appear instead as relatively minor statements when placed up against this volumes opening work, “The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography,” which outside of The H.D. Book, is the longest sustained prose work Duncan was ever to write. The Duncan of Fictive Certainties is actually a very different writer than that of A Selected Prose. Certainties has only two reviews of poets either in Duncan’s age cohort or younger: Olson & the philosophically minded John Taggart. Further, there are several pieces in Certainties that reflect an interest in the changing trends in theory itself: “Poetry Before Language,” a work that might be read both as an anticipation of Derrida and as a statement of language as a mystical experience; “The Self in Postmodern Poetry;” and “Kopóltuš: Notes on Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology.” This is a Duncan for the Age of Theory, intellectually far broader & more aggressive than the one we find in A Selected Prose.

 

Since I have argued that the “structure” of Duncan’s great prose poem sequence, The Structure of Rime, is in fact the same term we find first in structuralism – the intellectual tendency that can be traced back through Roland Barthes, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jacobson & others ultimately to the Russian Formalists, the piece on Barthes is worth examining a little more closely. Like any Duncan prose work whose title includes the term “notes,” this isn’t going to be an orderly, academic march through the traditional expository stations.

 

The difficulties start right away, with the title, Kopóltuš. It’s not a word you have ever heard before. You can’t find it in the OED, indeed, according to Google, there is no mention of it anywhere on the internet, with or without diacritical marks.¹ It would appear to be a neologism.

 

This is followed with an epigram from Barthes’ essay:

 

“images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment . . . [as] systems of signification”

 

At which moment Duncan begins by raising the question of naming.

 

Individualizing (naming) a group of three objects in a certain light, involving red, yellow and cerulean, the equilibration of the members of the group having a certain feel (this arrangement feels "in key") reveals that other elements we do not admit to seeing are present in what we see. We call the complex association of all these (an it) – we call it a kopóltuš (“it is a kopóltuš”), or we may say of the group “it is significant.” (Jess asks if kopóltuš made me think of “poultice” or “cold poultice.”)

 

Indeed, naming – the rightness or inherent nature of names – is precisely “Kopóltuš’” subject. It’s an intriguing question have been invoked by somebody who was born as Edward Howard Duncan & then raised by adoptive parents as Edward Howard Symmes, taking the name Robert & joining it to Duncan only after he was discharged from the army in 1941.²

 

How do names mean? Especially complex or abstract ones:

 

This is a work of art, we say. This is not a work of art. This is a kopóltuš. “Does your key feeling agree with my feeling” does not mean “Is your feeling like mine” but “Does your feel that this is a kopóltuš agree with mine?” No, it is not a Picasso. We agree that we like Picasso, but he is referring to a Picasso I don’t much like; I am referring with praise to a Picasso which he thinks is poor. I am sure this is a Picasso (we can check it out as to whether Picasso actually painted it); he is sure it is not a Picasso (but does it look like a Picasso to him, where he has some knowledge that it was forged; or does he recognize that it is a Braque?). Was this forged Picasso forged by X or Y? This is a Y pseudo-Picasso. This pseudo-Picasso is a genuine Y, who is so skillful at imitating that you cannot tell it from a Picasso. I can’t tell it from a Picasso but it might be Braque. It isn’t a kopóltuš tho, tho it looks like one, it doesn’t feel right. A kopóltuš is not a look but the feel of a look.

 

We no longer dealing with Barthes here, at least not directly. Instead Duncan has wandered deep into the weeds of that briar patch called Philosophical Investigations. I don’t know – and it’s certainly not apparent from reading Fictive Certainties, Selected Prose or The H.D. Book just how much 20^th century philosophy Duncan read, or how widely. Dewey & Whitehead are the only ones mentioned by name in The H.D. Book, unless one adds Walter Benjamin’s friend, Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish Mysticism. To my knowledge, Duncan never mentions Wittgenstein anywhere in print, let alone the tension between Wittgenstein Early & Wittgenstein Late. Yet the piece on Barthes here & the one on Jabès in Selected Prose give at least some sense that Duncan was aware of the changes in critical thinking that were occurring in the 1960s & ‘70s, in which philosophy as a discipline, especially continental philosophy, was hardly a dispassionate bystander.

 

The problem for Duncan is exactly that. The implicit premise of the H.D. Book, its promise, at least at the outset, is that Duncan will somehow be able to show how theosophy – or at least his theosophy, focusing on the lost & the hidden now as a spiritual or mystic dimension – will somehow solve critical thought, everything that might be captured under that telling rubric Structure. Kopóltuš, in this sense, is precisely what would give voice to that which Wittgenstein says must be passed over in silence in the seventh & final master sentence of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

 

Yet Duncan returns again to Barthes directly, quoting:

 

It is true that objects, images and patterns of behavior can signify, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture.³

 

But if things – including names – are not autonomous, if they mean only differentially, if meaning itself is inherently differential, the way the phoneme p differs from the phoneme b, then the whole of the magical world – the world at the heart of all religions, including that secret religion of all religions, theosophy – disappears. Duncan understands the problem at once:

 

The artist of the kopóltuš said, “It spoke to me.” A theory and practice of magical art may enter into this event, or, not having existed before, may follow in its wake. The artist assembling and arranging objects towards some aesthetic satisfaction happens upon a set that “speaks to him,” a telling arrangement. What does it say? In the Book we read a Burning Bush spoke to him and said, “I AM,” and we read also that Yahweh, also called “God,” spoke out of the Burning Bush. The Bush did not then, autonomously, announce its own being. The “I” was some One else.

 

Only those who have never read Rimbaud will not hear the allusion in that last sentence. This is the moment that Duncan cannot solve, at least not directly, so he turns instead to a dream in which the painter R.B. Kitaj appears. They touch, temple and cheek “exactly fitted in.” This leads Duncan to the following sentence (which I’m going to delineate, to air out, for the sake of readability):

 

The figure of the jig-saw

that is of picture,

the representation of a world as ours
in a complex patterning of color in light and shadows,

masses with hints of densities and distances,

cut across by a second, discrete pattern

in which we perceive on qualities of fitting and not fitting

and suggestions of rime

in ways of fitting and not fitting –

this jig-saw conformation of patterns

of different orders,

of a pattern of apparent reality

in which the picture we are working to bring out appears

and of a pattern of loss and of finding

that so compels us that we are entirely engrosst in working it out,

this picture that must be put together

takes over mere seeing.

 

The master verb phrase – takes over – does not occur until the 117^th & 118^th words of this serpentine sentence. Here the image Duncan offers as an allegory for structure lies less in the radical distinction between deep structure & surface appearance, but rather twin orders inhabiting the same space & time. The leap Duncan here offers is difference itself: fitting & not fitting, of loss & of finding, a gap we perceive not directly but through suggestions of rime. Yet once the picture itself – the referential world, the realm of signifieds, we bask – or so Duncan presents him and his dream Kitaj in the process of doing – in the pure presence of immanence itself.

 

The moment itself seems to click into place, the lines of it so perfectly joining present contributing to but overwhelmed by the unalterable establishment of a locality in the context of the whole puzzle yet to be workt out into its picture.

 

This moment of taking over, of clicking into place might, in some other narrative, be presented precisely by the act of faith itself, the term leap understood quite literally. Duncan does not do this, but rather leaves us right at the end of that sentence, the problem narratively resolved perhaps, but certainly not solved.

 

Even if Barthes is not the best writer on which to focus these issues – one can imagine Duncan tackling Derrida as well as Wittgenstein had he but the chance & Jacobson & Saussure might have been better choices through which to have attacked the concept of difference in language – Barthes is a particularly apt choice, being the one major structuralist thinker – Elements of Semiology is a text from late in that period of his work – to have become a significant post-structural thinker as well.

 

And therein lies the rub. Robert Duncan’s critical project not only turns on the thinnest of premises – that H.D.’s brief analysis with Freud makes her an initiate of his – but that the union Duncan seeks between the mystical and critical theory is made ever so much harder by the fact that the latter proves to be a moving target. By the time that Duncan finally finds himself able, or at least imagines himself so, to bring theosophy into the house of theory, theory itself has moved on. Duncan had called his great prose poem sequence The Structure of Rime, not The Post-Structure of Rime.

 

But by the time that Duncan is coming into the realization of this, the unfinished – indeed, now unfinishable – H.D. Book has already served its other primary purpose, the one that is figured in its early title, The Day Book, a means through which for Robert to test, to formulate, to articulate a critical vision that might then serve as underpinning to his own mature writing, indeed, even the imagined (if never precisely written) elder epic. Which is why, ultimately, The H.D. Book works more – and better – not thought of as the lost or mystery critical masterpiece of the New American Poetry so much as it does as the Ur-blog of its time.

 

 

¹ Something I have just changed.

 

² Something not discussed in “Kopóltuš”

 

³ I am reminded of George Lakoff’s definition of semiotics as failed linguistics. This passage & indeed Duncan’s focus overall is very much pre-cognitive linguistics. Nowhere is the problem of historical time on Duncan’s thinking more apparent than here.

Of all the major projects undertaken by the New American generation of poets – which for the sake of definition lets presume consists of the 44 poets included in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology that gave its name to such different tendencies of poetry as the New York School, the Black Mountain or projectivist poets, the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats – only one appears never to have been published in book form, Robert Duncan’s booklength critical volume, The H.D. Book. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but the major blame – if we are to use that word – lies with Duncan himself.

 

Begun in 1960, at a time when Robert Duncan was embarking – and understood that he was embarking – on his major literary project as a poet, commencing with The Opening of the Field and continuing on through two additional volumes before he took a 15-year hiatus from publishing volumes of poetry, The H.D. Book was projected to consist of three parts:

 

·        An nine-chapter first part, entitled Beginnings

·        An eleven-chapter second part, entitled Nights and Days

·        A third part, of unknown length and chapters, to consist entirely of a reading of H.D.’s Helen of Egypt

Duncan worked hard on the first two sections in 1960 and ’61, a time when he was in frequent correspondence with Hilda Doolittle, the one member of the so-called high modernist generation with whom Duncan seems to have had a serious dialog, begun after an abortive attempt to sustain an earlier one with Ezra Pound in the late 1940s.  Doolittle herself passed away in September of 1961 at the age of 75, having had both a long & unusual career as a poet and a surprisingly difficult life for someone who, for the last forty years of her life, never had to worry about either work or money. 

 

Duncan continued to think about, and occasionally to work on, this project so far as I can tell for the remainder of his life. Dates given in the sections published in journals suggest that there was a flurry of writing in 1963 and 1964. The second section of Chapter Five of the second part gives three different years of composition – 1961, 1963 and 1975. Duncan published a selection of excerpts from the second part of this project first in Origin, Second Series, Number 10, in 1963, but didn’t begin to publish chapters systematically until 1966, when the first chapter appeared in Coyote’s Journal, a magazine edited by James Koller & a rotating band of co-editors that included at times Edward van Aelstyn, Peter Blue Cloud, Carroll Arnett, Steven Nemirow, William Wroth and William Brown.

 

[I don’t think it’s possible in today’s world of webzines and phenomena such as Spencer Selby’s list – which includes roughly 370 “experimental poetry/art magazines” – to fully appreciate the scarcity of publishing resources that existed in the middle 1960s, and thus to appreciate the greatness of the best little magazines of that time. In the period immediately prior to the creation of Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar, Coyote’s Journal – on which Caterpillar was loosely modeled – was easily the best little magazine in the United States, including everyone from Richard Brautigan to Tom Clark, Larry Eigner, Anselm Hollo, Ted Enslin, Edward Dorn, David Bromige, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, Douglas Woolf, David Meltzer, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Basil Bunting, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Ronald Johnson, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen. The exclusivity with which the journal focused only on white men was not, as they say, a differentiator in 1963. After eight issues or thereabouts in five years, Coyote’s Journal turned into an occasional project of Koller’s as he bounced around from Portland to the Bay Area and eventually east to Maine.]

 

Duncan published that first chapter of part one in 1966, the second one the following year (again in Coyote’s Journal) plus the first half of the sixth chapter in the initial issue of Clayton Eshleman’s  Caterpillar. In 1968, the second issue of Caterpillar completed the publication of the sixth chapter, plus chapters three, four, and five. Duncan also published the first chapter of the second part that year, again in the first issue of a new magazine, this one Sumac, a publication edited by baby-food heir Dan Gerber and budding novelist Jim Harrison.

Duncan published chapters two, three and four of the second part of the volume in 1969, plus the first section of chapter five. Then Duncan didn’t publish anything from The H.D. Book until 1975, when he published three additional pages from chapter five of the second part, plus chapters seven and eight in the second issue of Credences. Chapter nine appeared in 1979, chapter 11 in 1981, and chapter ten in 1983. In 1986, Duncan published a reworked version of part two, chapter five in a Sagetrieb issue devoted to his work and chapter six of the second part in the Southern Review.

 

A note that Duncan published in 1983 suggests that at one time there were to have been three additional chapters in the first part, plus a twelfth chapter of the second part:

 

Chapter 5, which addresses the matter of the State and War, remains in large part unpublisht. Chapter 6, which has to do with the transmutations of genital and poetic experience, has not been publisht at all (contrary to the impression given by the checklist in Scales of the Marvelous [New Directions, 1979].

Both this note, and a second one that is appended to the PDF version, suggest that some or all of the unwritten chapters were to have been composed after the completion of the third section, the reading of Helen of Egypt. Presumably because of The Southern Review publication,  Chapter Six is included in the PDF.

The PDF file is worth noting because it is the only version of this project that is readily available in 2004, and thus is the edition most contemporary readers are likely to have come across. It’s not clear just who produced this version – the credit to Frontier Press is an allusion to Harvey Brown’s Buffalo press that, in 1970, brought out the lost classic original version of William Carlos Williams Spring & All, seemingly in a pirated edition. The success of that project – easily the most influential critical text of the early 1970s, if not at the moment of its original publication in 1923, when it more or less sank like a rock from view – was thought by many readers to have forced New Directions to return the great early prose works of Williams the high modernist to print. So this “Frontier Press” edition is rather something of a similar prod, in this instance to the University of California, which must eventually publish The H.D. Book in some version in its collected works of Robert Duncan, and to that series’ general editor, Robert Bertholf. The PDF file has circulated through a number of different sites on the net over the past four or five years, and can currently be found at OneZeroZero, a virtual library of English Canadian Small Presses.

 

The PDF file is little more than a reprinting of the chapters that had appeared in little magazines prior to 1983 and even on that score it has flubbed the job, publishing the fourth chapter of the second part both in its correct position within the manuscript AND as the fourth chapter in the first part as well. (One can still find an occasional issue of TriQuarterly number 12, in which the real fourth chapter of the first part appeared in 1968 – I have a poem in that same edition.)  It’s worth noting that TriQuarterly calls the book as a whole just H.D., not The H.D. Book. Duncan also called it The Day Book in its initial appearance in Origin. In short, this was a project that never fully came together.

Duncan’s second note in the PDF file largely concedes this point:

 

Note: The last three chapters of Part I and the remaining chapter of Part II I think to be dependent upon what happens in Part III, of which no sentence has yet been ventured. The first draft of the Book was done in 1961, considerable over-lays were written in 1964, with dream material entering into the Book as late as 1964. It had been commissioned by Norman Holmes Pearson as a Book for H.D.’s Birthday, but at the time of the commission I had warnd him that I saw H.D. as the matrix of my finding my work in Poetry itself. “I askt him for an H.D. book,” Norman Holmes Pearson said sometime in the 1960s, “and he’s writing an LSD book.”

– RD

By the time Duncan died, some 70 handwritten pages of the third section existed and the first part was now complete at six chapters. But the final chapter of the second part appears never to have been written. What we have, then, if we turn to the PDF as the best widely available resource is a document that is missing two published chapters, plus all that exists of the third section. At best, The H.D. Book we have is shards of a working that Duncan himself was not able to complete even though he worked on it, off and on, for over a quarter of a century. When the UC Press edition comes out, perhaps as early as the end of this year, it will be interesting to see if we can now answer the question as to why a project to which Duncan appears to have given such importance was ultimately left undone.

 

The first time I saw “Biotherm,” my impulse was to squint. As published in A Controversy of Poets, the 1965 anthology edited by Paris Leary & Robert Kelly that attempted to put School of Quietude poets (selected by Leary) alongside New Americans (chosen by Kelly) side by side, Frank O’Hara’s “long” poem for Bill Berkson appears in 6 point type. Six points is really what graphic designers call “mouse type,” a font size used for material in an ad you are compelled to print (usually for regulatory reasons) but which you really don’t want anyone to read. The width of O’Hara’s page when slotted into the volume’s mass market paperback format is no doubt what forced the issue – Olson’s ”Letter to Melville 1951,” which immediatly follows O’Hara, manages to function perfectly well at 8½ points, the standard “body text” font for the volume, requiring only a few hanging indents.

 

The result is that on the first page of O’Hara’s poem, the title itself – “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)” – looks huge in its standard 9 point font, O’Hara’s name, at 9½ points, looks like a billboard. Contrasted with these, the body of O’Hara’s text produces a sort of vertigo, as though one were looking down from a great height. As I’ve noted before, I didn’t really connect with Frank O’Hara’s work until I saw him in Richard Moore’s brilliant USA Poetry PBS documentary in 1966, in which O’Hara is something akin to the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character, writing, drinking, smoking, talking to the camera, to friends in the room & to someone on the phone simultaneously with an ease & grace that was jaw-dropping, the typewriter keys clattering on at an almost alarming rate. I bought the Kelly/Leary anthology at Cody’s as a result of seeing Louis Zukofsky in the same series – it was the only volume in Cody’s that had any work by Zukofsky at all. But I don’t remember if that was before or after the O’Hara show. I already had seen O’Hara’s work in the Allen anthology, but it didn’t click with me there – I suspect that it must have looked too “easy” or casual & I was a very serious teenager indeed. So “Biotherm,” even in that itty-bitty type (or just possibly because it required that itty-bitty type), was really the work through which I began to first take O’Hara as a poet seriously.

 

All of which is just to note that there is a terrific essay on the poem in Sal Mimeo #3 by none other than Bill Berkson himself. Part memoir, part close reading, part meditation on the aspects of genre, with an exceptional seven-page glossary of references to the topical & situational references in O’Hara’s poem (itself only twelve pages in original manuscript), Berkson’s piece originally was composed  “for a booklet accompanying the deluxe Arion Press edition of ‘Biotherm’,” published in 1990. With 42 lithographs by Jim Dine, that volume is still available new at a mere $2,750. (A second suite of eight Dine lithographs selected from the illustrations to Biotherm goes for ten grand.)

 

Larry Fagin’s Sal Mimeo – which looks photocopied to me, in spite of its title – presents Berkson’s material in a more workmanlike setting. It’s one of several “historic” pieces in the current issue. Others include a 1988 interview with the late John Wieners, poems by Richard Kolmar from the 1960s & others by Alan Fuchs from his 1971 chapbook, Before Starting. Part of what makes Sal Mimeo so much fun is that it balances not only the historical with the new, but also the widely known with the still emerging. Some of the poets certainly are the New York School folks with whom Fagin traditionally has been associated: Berkson, Ron Padgett, Tony Towle, Bernadette Mayer. But, as with Carla Harryman’s work discussed here on Tuesday, Fagin goes further afield than one might expect. There are collaborations by Lyn Hejinian & Jack Collom, a marvelous suite of poems by Michael McClure, work from Bolinas poet Larry Kearney. There are also poets whose work I frankly don’t know, such as Richard Roundy, Daniel Nohejl, Chris Edgar, Eileen Hennessey and more. It’s definitely worth a read or, better yet, a subscription. Fagin can be reached at 437 E. 12^th St., # 18, NYC 10009.

Rob Stanton has some follow-up questions.

Dear Ron,

Huge thanks for your thorough and thoughtful blog-response to my query about Engines. I think I was hoping that you might say something more about collaboration in general, just as you did - the proliferation of poet/poet and poet/artist collaborations in the current poetic climate is something I find particularly fascinating (just thinking about examples you mention, I recently read - and loved - Leningrad, and the idea behind The Grand Piano seems both interesting in itself and strangely inevitable). I was intrigued that you picked "A"-24 as a possible precedent - I too feel distinctly ambivalent about whether it really does 'cap' "A" (and whether that sort of 'terminal' idea was tenable in the first place). In a sort of sentimental way, I think it does - making semi-actual the scene envisioned in "A"-11: music, words and performance. Apart from that, the nature of the collaboration in "A"-24 seems particularly complicated: firstly, there is Celia Zukofsky's work in setting Zukofsky's words to music, then there is the actual presence of Handel's music (suggesting a Handel/Zukofsky interaction, mediated by Celia), and then there's the question of whether the four 'voices' of Zukofsky presented actual represent a unified 'whole' (one of the joys of that Factory School site is the recording of the 'live' version organised by Barrett Watten*).

Given your point about how collaboration provides an opportunity to sidestep and/or interrogate the 'raging control freak' aspect inherent in an individual 'style', I was also interested in your mention of 'the metabolism of one's own processes'. I'm not sure to what degree you intended the biological inference, but this immediately put me in mind of Olson's repeated emphasis on the physicality of the poet/m. I've always felt that his talk about the individual 'breath' of the poet was strangely close to mainstream whitterings about the necessity of 'individual voice' etc., despite the very different poetic 'ends' advocated. Is 'self' inevitable in poetry? Does the inevitable communality of collaboration offer a real alternative, or does it simply place the problem at one remove (I hate to admit it, but despite the efforts toward some kind of group expression in Leningrad , I found it hard not to 'see' differing styles in the separate passages)? Or, to put it another way, if the problem with most mainstream poetry is the foregrounding of 'unified self' as end rather than mean, is all poetry simply somewhere along a sliding style of degrees-of-leaning-on-personal-experience? (I've been reading The Prelude recently and have been intrigued by the incredibly arbitrary and piecemeal nature of the Wordsworthian 'epiphany' on a larger canvas.) You've written of 'the abstract lyric' before in your blog in relation to the work of Barbara Guest, but is such a thing 100% possible?

Anyway, this has been a horribly rambling email. Apologies in advance, and thanks again.

All the best,

Rob Stanton

The question of the person, in Olson or in collaboration, is invariably a difficult topic, precisely because works are written by individuals, either singly or in groups, & yet we know that “the individual” itself is a complex & internally contradictory construction. If we follow the cognitive scientists and neurobiologists, one of the first things we will discover is that, even within the human being, there is no “monad,” no single site of thought or language. Rather, different portions of the brain work in conjunction to apprehend our world & build responses to it – many of these occur below the level of consciousness & outside of our waking life.

When Olson first began to produce the poems for which we remember him today in the late 1940s, he actually appears to have been almost the only poet in the United States to demonstrate any awareness – more anticipation than knowledge, really – of these issues. In his “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn,” first written in 1955, one year ahead of Ginsberg’s Howl, Olson notes that “millennia . . .  & . . . person”

are not the same as either

time as history or as the

individual as single

The first three pages of “Proprioception,” written six years later & easily Olson’s most ambitious & successful critical project, show O working through this problem, this question, at great length. He is so concerned with place that he is driven to find such, somewhere. Proprioception itself, kinesthesia, one’s awareness of the actual physical rubbing together of one’s inner organs, the growl of the stomach & peristaltic pulse of the bowels, is for Olson a key, an awareness that precedes any other mode of knowing – “I am I because my little gut knows me.” The body for Olson is the place of the unconscious. The “soul,” an entity with which Olson was much obsessed, proved to be profoundly physical. Projection – the meat of his practice as a writer, a (literally) Projectivist poet –

is discrimination (of the object from the subject) and the unconscious is the universe flowing-in, inside.

Maximus, this great comic persona that both is & is not Olson – and most certainly is not Russell Crowe – represents O’s attempt to have it all ways. And while Olson is most certainly not the only poet among the New Americans to push the person beyond its traditional boundaries & unveil the constructedness of such “natural” categories – think of Kerouac’s “Imitation of the Tape” in Visions of Cody, Burroughs’ use of cut-ups in Naked Lunch & The Ticket that Exploded, Spicer’s theory of Martian radio – Olson appears to have been the only one to have had a critical understanding of the question, as such.

So, sure, there is a fair amount of persona floating about Maximus that is not so terribly different in its own way from the imaginary blue-collar worker Phil Levine posits in his “I.” The self in such poetry is largely a type, & I always think of the stereotypical signals thereof worn by the ‘70s rock group The Village People: you can tell which one Levine would have been, though I fear that may be Olson under the feathered headdress. Bly’s serape, Blackburn’s cowboy hat & Duncan’s purple cape were hardly more subtle. Yet it’s Olson, among all of these, who understands not only that it’s funny, but that there are issues here, & as such worth exploring.

That “worth exploring” is, I think, the answer to the question of whether or not “self” is finally inescapable. It will always be, like “the social,” one possible horizon among several, regardless of how nuanced our understanding of its composition might become. After all, how far have we advanced in this regard from Shakespeare’s Lear, responding with a quartet of words that operate like a series of concentric circles, moving from the outer inward: Edgar I nothing am? The same response – worth exploring – is, I suspect, also the underlying principle beneath the continued attraction of the abstract lyric, even if I personally find the issue less compelling. The answer to Stanton’s question’s isn’t ultimately so much why as it is why not?

 * For some reason, the Factory School site fails to credit Bob Perelman, though my understanding is that it was Bob who initiated this collective process in the first place as well as substituting his piano for Handel’s harpsichord. In my video copy of the November 15, 1978 San Francisco State performance, it is Perelman whom Poetry Center director Tom Mandel has introduce the event in addition to his performance therein.

Turning to George Stanley’s “Vancouver, Book One” in The Poker this morning, I realize several things:

 

§         The Poker’s table of contents is alphabetical by first name – good fortune for Chris Stroffolino, not so good for Tom Devaney & it takes me awhile to find the page number again for George.

 

§         The section published here is not all of Vancouver, Book One, but rather just section 8.

 

§         The work partakes of not one, but two distinct (though related) genres: the poem as journal & the poem written on transit.

 

An epic in the form of a journal? It’s an interesting concept, problematic from the outset (which I suspect is deliberate). Kevin Davies – one of the editors of Stanley’s forthcoming selected, A Tall, Serious Girl – recently sent me a note that mutual friend Ben Friedlander had posted to another list on the subject of journals. It read in part:

 

[Paul] Blackburn is incredible; he and [Joanne] Kyger are to my mind the most underrated poets of their generation. Both of them take the journal as their basic form, and both are geniuses at naturalizing peculiar verbal gestures by fixing them in narrative structures. I suspect that similarity has something to do with the lack of respect they get: the journal form looks dated, I guess, and the naturalizing leads people to take them as simple. Otherwise, they’re very different. Kyger uses the journal as a way of investigating the nature of space and time. Blackburn is a social historian.

 

This recalled what I’d written about Blackburn’s Journals in the blog: “even a fine poet does not necessarily make for great reading when writing becomes all but dissociated from intention.”

 

But Blackburn clearly distinguished between journals & poems – you have to go 474 pages into The Collected Poems before you find the first piece identified as a journal entry, dating from 1967, when Blackburn was already 40 and a significant figure in American poetry. Kyger likewise makes the distinction. Many of her poems may seem occasional &, as with Blackburn, they’re often dated, either at the foot of the poem or in its title. But these works are radically different from The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964. In this way, Blackburn & Kyger are both like Larry Eigner or Ted Berrigan, two other great poets who used the form of the occasional poem, literally the poem as the register of an occasion. It’s not, I would argue with Ben, quite the same. The occasional poem – a genre far too neglected critically – utilizes its originating or motivating event as both instigator & determinant of boundary for the poem, but that boundedness, that sense of a defined edge, is precisely what journals lack. Journals have a tendency to be formless in their outer exoskeletal concerns & often proceed merely chronologically. So while I agree with Friedlander’s assessment of Blackburn & especially of Kyger, for my money the most significant woman writing from the late 1950s until the 1970s & always a wonderful poet, I don’t see either as taking “the journal as their basic form.”

 

So the idea of a longpoem in the mode of a journal – it was Kevin Davies who first used the term “epic” to characterize Vancouver – strikes me as a consciously challenging project. Its secret underbelly, of course, is the reality that every epic is at some level a journal. It is not an accident, I think, that the most studied & revered portion of Pound’s Cantos are The Pisan Cantos, very much Pound’s journal of imprisonment in the cages at Pisa. All the fog & pretense of writing about Van Buren’s administration, for example, is revealed by contrast to have been just that: fog & pretense. Rather, the great epic quest of bringing together these disparate historic particulars simply gave Pound something to write “about” while writing, just as a translation is itself a way for a person to write without having anything of their own to say. In both senses, the process of writing is almost entirely apart from any question of content. We write because we write is the secret motto of every poet. Having “something to say” is nice, but hardly necessary. Are you really interested in the history of a fishing village northeast of Boston? Can anyone tell even remotely what the “subject” of “A” might be? Far from damning, the answers to these questions tell us something very important about poetry, its relation to the self-valuable signifier & the importance of process. Thus I think that the great challenge of any & every longpoem has always been how not to be “just a journal.” Stanley, it would appear, has decided to turn that question on its head & tackle it straight on.

 

The poem of public transit, as you might imagine, is another genre very close to my heart, having written books both explicitly (BART) and implicitly (Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps or, say, What) entirely while riding around on buses & trains. There is even a section of The Alphabet, in Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect, in which I take the process of BART, riding around the entire course of an urban transit system, & apply it to the comparable system in a city that I barely know at all, Atlanta.

 

For me the great poets of transit have always been Robert Duncan & Phil Whalen & while Whalen’s poetry also edges up against that concept of the journal that Friedlander is trying to get at, Duncan is certainly the furthest poet imaginable from that mode. Yet Duncan once told me that he could not have written “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom” – the very poem that Stanley takes direct aim at in his own early great work “Pompeii” – without having been on the San Francisco Muni & that that poem carried within it the rhythms of Muni’s tracks.*

 

Stanley himself has used transit in his poems, even if not as a process for the poems, before. In fact, when going through the manuscript for A Tall, Serious Girl, I’d misremembered one of his early San Francisco works, “Flesh Eating Poem,” as being about the N Judah because there is a reference to that streetcar, as well as to the 22 Fillmore line. Since in reality that’s a serious misreading (or rather misremembering, the mind revising as it does, constantly), I was surprised not to find what I recalled as the “N Judah” poem in the manuscript. In fact, “Flesh Eating Poem” – that title gives you just a taste – is included.

 

Now, in Vancouver, we are very much getting on the bus or off the bus – the SeaBus included – “Writing in the dark – outside the college – in the sodium glare through the bus window.” Perhaps the poem of transit is a genre within a genre here – & I know that I’m more deeply attracted to it as a model for writing than almost anyone I’ve ever met – but it makes me especially pleased, gleeful even, to see it rise up again at the start of a new longpoem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Some of my very best discussions with Duncan came on the “F” bus between the original location of Serendipity Books on Shattuck & San Francisco. Duncan went to Serendipity almost every Wednesday afternoon & then would walk over to the Shattuck Co-op to shop for groceries before catching the bus & an attentive person who also lived in the City could sometimes make this same journey – I still think of those trips as my Symposium of the Bus. I rue the day, moving back to the East Bay in 1987, when I realized that politicians had devastated the AC Transit system since I’d headed to San Francisco in 1972 (I’d also lived in SF in 1966-67). It meant that I had no choice at that point but to learn to drive.

            I want to note also that Duncan shopped at the Co-op not because he liked carting groceries 10 miles in his lap & then via the Muni to his home in the Mission, but because the Co-op’s attendant credit union, Twin Pines Federal Savings, had “not blinked an eye” (Duncan’s phrase) at the idea of issuing a mortgage loan to two men in the early & deeply homophobic 1950s. One more vote for a socialist bank.

Parceled, not parceled, ever the light.

                                      Trismegistus to Tat: our bones

will want velvet,

                            line decays, root your gods

in flesh & stock your flesh in

                                                flame

(Giordano given over

                                    –ubi peccavit– he sinned in fire

tongue    word-thorn

                                    into fire,

                                                   17 February 1600

& the beam of light

                                 that is defining measure

–metre, the palladium

                                      yardstick only a curio

or orifice of

                     measure a controlled radiance,

ångstrom

                an infinity ‘longer than point–

Punctum in Nihilo

                               from which

It pours.

               Sentences by nature false,

‘opinions’ momentaneous murmurings

corpse-fat soft,

                         saponification of the great poets

when it is

                  Delight forgot–

                                                Addio alla madre

I take

            this serious knife

                                          where Death is

& makes

                 all sharp again

wretch of dull edge

                                 his knife I fight

bites mine.  Crystals

                                    of damascene sever in air

:   this silken

                        kerchief divides the steel.

 

This passage, the first two out of eight pages, opens Robert Kelly’s Songs I-XXX (Pym-Randall Press, 1968). Typing these lines again after all these years – one of the real benefits of doing this blog* – I feel as riveted by them as when I first confronted this work over thirty years ago. There is in these lines of verse something I feel is almost entirely missing from most of today’s poetry – the measure of the line heard & understood as a mode of music. Melopoiea as Pound once called it. This use of sound is something that poets once took for granted as an option – there are moments in The Cantos when it is all that exists beyond the crackpot economics & dubious readings of American presidential history. Yet, somehow, after Robert Duncan, a master at this mode, you find Robert Kelly, with his exquisite conception of measure, and Kenneth Irby, with an ultimate ear for vowels, then silence. Or not silence, exactly, but rather a shift in the manner music.

 

It was Olson of course, along with Creeley, who heard that other possibility in Pound’s line & even more clearly in that of Williams, the intricate prosody of the spoken, the huffing of the line as breath – very nearly a poetics of asthma in Olson’s case, the way so many of his poems start out with a long line only to find themselves narrowing as the words rush, repeatedly interrupted by the need to mark line’s limit, to a literally breathless conclusion.

 

Thus, in the 1950s and ‘60s, American poetry found itself with not one, but three different tendencies with regards to the proactive use of sound in poetry:

§         the complicated rhythms of the spoken (Olson, Creeley, Blackburn**), which also included a number of relatively casual practitioners, such as Ginsberg, Whalen, Snyder & O’Hara

§         a poetics predicated on measure (Duncan, Kelly, some of Irby)

§         a regularized metrics derived from the old formalism (Berryman, Lowell)

Of course, the great majority of poets fell into a category that could be triangulated between “a little of this & a little of that,” those who didn’t really care & those who were genuinely tone-deaf to their own writing.

 

Songs I-XXX was the third book published by Kelly in a two year period of 1967-68 that to this day remains not just a great burst of poetic productivity – Kelly has been the Energizer Bunny of poetic production his entire life – but also a defining moment for a particular mode of poetics, one that was grounded in sound & turned toward alternative sacred texts as a primary concern.

 

It’s worth noting Kelly’s trajectory in that decade – it gives some sense of how greatly the scene was changing, as well as how greatly it has changed in the 30-odd years since. Beginning to publish around 1960, Kelly within five years had brought out five books with small press publishers, been the focus of an issue of Cid Corman’s Origin, and co-edited with Paris Leary, A Controversy of Poets, published as a Doubleday Anchor paperback original. While Leary’s contributions have largely been forgotten outside of a few obvious “Big Names” such as Robert Lowell or the fans of Gray Burr & Melvin Walker La Follette, Kelly’s contributors expanded the roster of the Allen anthology, bringing Louis Zukofsky, Jackson Mac Low, Jerry Rothenberg, Gerrit Lansing & Ted Enslin to a considerably broader audience than they’d previously experienced.*** & by virtue of coming five years later than the Allen, several of Kelly’s selections, such as of “Billy the Kid” for Jack Spicer and the complete “Biotherm” by Frank O’Hara – literally in 5½ point type – were notably stronger than those included in the Allen.

 

So the three books that appeared more or less immediately on the heels of Controversy, Axon Dendron Tree (Salitter Press, 1967), Finding the Measure (Black Sparrow, 1968) & Songs I-XXX (Pym-Randall, 1968) effectively served to solidify Kelly’s position as a major American poet, one of the first, along with Ted Berrigan to achieve this level of recognition within the post-avant tradition who had not been a part of the Allen anthology.

 

 

* There is nothing that compares to having the words of a poem you are thinking about emerge from your own fingertips atop a keyboard, no matter than Robert Kelly may have originally drafted these in pen or that, in the late 1960s, he was almost certainly working with a manual typewriter, not a PC.

 

** Whose sense of the uses of transcription to spatially approximate aspects of speech is perhaps the most detailed of all.

 

*** I’ve noted before that when Richard Moore’s USA Poetry PBS television series first introduced me to the work of Zukofsky in 1966, the only volume that held any of his poetry at Cody’s in Berkeley, then as now the largest bookstore in that town, was A Controversy of Poets.