For a reader of my generation, a collection like Way More West: New and Selected Poems by the late Ed Dorn comes as a potentially useful corrective, not the least because it’s instructive to see that the relatively brief excerpt from ‘Slinger comes early, with more than half the book’s weight falling after the completion of this comic epic. Easily the most contentious and controversial of any of the New Americans – Amiri Baraka would be a pretty distant second on that scale – one version of the received wisdom about Dorn was that he was one of those rare individuals blessed with a natural lyric gift – the brilliance of a poem like “Vaquero,” one of Dorn’s earliest, and best known, poems would attest to that – who chafed at the intellectual demands of the projectivist poetics with which he was so closely aligned. In this reading, Dorn wrote What I See in The Maximus Poems as an attempt to come to terms with this challenge, and then produced one, perhaps two great books (depending on the version you heard – The North Atlantic Turbine was always cited, but some folks would argue for Geography as its equal), before flaming out spectacularly by writing Gunslinger, the metaphysical comic western that is, in many ways, a refutation of the projectivist program – a break not unlike the ones that Amiri Baraka & Denise Levertov would make as well. In all three cases, the received wisdom went, none of the apostates was to fulfill their early promise as poets. The villain in Baraka’s case supposedly was Maoism, in Levertov’s a fundamentalist feminism & in Dorn’s cocaine. In this telling, Dorn went off to noodle on some brief poems that basically showed him trying to relearn how to write, producing nothing of consequence unless you consider the bile that spilled forth during the Naropa Poetry Wars where the position of Dorn & Tom Clark opposing the excesses of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which were considerable, was often taken, with evidence in print (and Dorn himself the publisher), to be racist, xenophobic & homophobic. But by then many, perhaps most, of the poets of my generation had long since stopped reading Dorn. Tho he lived the last several decades of his life in Boulder, Colorado, my understanding is that he seldom set foot on the Naropa campus after that dust-up.

There is no question that Dorn had difficult relations with his peers. When, in 1973 – pre-Naropa but post-‘Slinger – I got him to agree to read with Robert Creeley & Joanne Kyger in a benefit for the prison movement in California, Dorn’s one condition was that he be allowed to go last, so that he could arrive late & not have to speak to either Creeley or Kyger, with whom he was not then talking. It was the only time in my life I ever saw Creeley read first at such an event, but if Dorn took any pleasure in that, I couldn’t tell since Dorn didn’t arrive until right before he was to go on. His reading that night was terrific, that part is unquestionable, the first time I’d ever heard Recollections of Gran Apachería. But his behavior prepared me for all the claims later that he’d become the Mel Gibson of the New American Poetry. His remark years later that he didn’t need to read language poetry because Clark told him he didn’t need to only reinforced that impression.

So it’s fascinating to see that the editor of Dorn’s new selected – it’s not the first & there was even a collected that went through three editions in the 1970s & ‘80s – is Michael Rothenberg, editor of Big Bridge & most recently the editor of Phil Whalen’s selected, also out from Penguin. Think about that. The editor of the poems of the writer most closely associated with Zen Buddhism in America has just edited the poems of the poet perhaps most militantly anti-Buddhist as well. A poet of substance himself, Rothenberg’s presence here alone is enough to suggest that Dorn deserves a second look. If the received wisdom selected poems would look a great deal like the Four Seasons Foundation Collected Poems 1956-1974, plus the first two books of ‘Slinger, plus Apachería, and maybe 20 pages to represent the last quarter century of Dorn’s life, this is a completely different book, indeed a significantly different poet.

It’s not that Way More West slights the early work – six of the nine sections of North Atlantic Turbine are present, plus more than half of Geography. If I have any qualms about the selection, it’s only the absence of any of the second volume of ‘Slinger, since that was the section in which it became clear that Dorn was not interested in going back to a world in which Charles Olson was the poetry equivalent of god-on-earth & Dorn the favored one among his potential successors. Since Gunslinger continues to be available – tho Duke rather stupidly hasn’t gotten that much of its backlist up on the website – this isn’t a major failing.

The real question is whether this Ed Dorn is as good or significant a poet as the Black Mountain acolyte gone bad of received wisdom. The answer I think is “it depends.” What it depends on is how you respond to the far flatter poems of political agitprop Dorn filled so much of his work with the last 20 years of his life. What makes his position different from that of Baraka or Levertov, about whom much the same charge might be made, is that their politics was relatively clear- (if, especially for Baraka, wrong-) headed, they had a consistency as political thinkers. Dorn, on the other hand, is rather all over the map, with a constant & macho attitude toward violence that comes across at this distance as quite shallow:

a bullet
is worth
a thousand bulletins

The first poem (in its entirety) from Abhorrences is a position that captures the Bush foreign policy in Iraq all too presciently, tho I’m sure that’s not what Dorn intended. But we’ve had, at this point, a damn thorough test of that thesis and I think we can say it’s wanting. It’s precisely because the bullet is the irrevocable act – we can’t put Iraq back together again no matter how we try nor how many dead Americans we throw at the problem – that a thousand bulletins will always be worth far, far more.

Equating a seven-word poem to the Iraq invasion may seem like a cheap shot, tho it’s not, merely a language game that has now been tested in the all too real world. But Dorn’s fascination with violence undercuts his green / libertarian tendencies repeatedly. Here is a 1992 elegy for Petra Kelly, founder of the German Green party. Dorn makes much of Kelly’s having spent her high-school and undergraduate years in the U.S., tho it’s not clear if he realizes that more than half of this time was spent in Columbus, Georgia:

When Petra Kelly shot herself
I was right beside her in my heart
and my admiration for her steadfastness
was complete and totally unlike
what I feel for the black-boy whips of McDonna
or the earlier pretenders like Jane and Joan
in the brief history of corrective sensibility.
         The careful mediation of her
American accent, the pure Georgetown
german weltwaves in the background.
         Certainment, why hang around
for the land to fill up with genetically resentful and
overproduced Southerners just so the pretenders
can get their carpets vacd?
         The history of the world has been written
with the disappearing ink of those accounts
and the pilfered wages of their solution –
the sine qua non of population dumping.

 

¡Salute! and so long Petra.
For the price of a single round, you ducked
the destiny you described, and gave the colour to,
and framed – the born prophet
of a finale full of Fall Out, - Bye Bye.

Dorn of course gets it wrong. Petra Kelly didn’t shoot herself – she was shot and killed by her partner & whether it was a murder-suicide or a joint suicide is one of those unknowables of history – tho frankly the idea that it would have been the latter without the presence of any suicide note is extraordinarily improbable given Kelly’s life as a political activist. Misreading a sad act of depression & domestic violence as a political statement is sort of the archetypal stance of Ed Dorn. But what is he actually trying to say? That by dying Kelly is less of a “pretender” than Jane Fonda or Joan Baez? Given their starkly different political trajectories, it’s hard to know what point Dorn is making by conjoining them thus – that anyone who demonstrates is a pretender? Or perhaps just anyone with money, which I take to be the content behind the “Georgetown” allusion, Kelly having gone to the American University. Is he suggesting that anyone in a privileged position who tries to reduce their carbon footprint (Dorn would have loved that phrase) is forcing the Chinese to go without their cars? Or is it simply the idea that first world women who take any political position are thrusting a top-down politics on the rest of the world, a politics of pure (if unanalyzed) sexual resentment? My guess is that it’s the latter.

So what we get, finally, is a rather sad case – of all the New Americans, Dorn’s later poems rank up there with Diane DiPrima’s Revolutionary Letters as the silliest when it comes to their actual political thinking. And like Pound’s politics, it undercuts the poetry, even more so because Dorn has sacrificed so much of his poetics for this muddle of pissed-off agitprop. Consider Dorn’s poem “about” the case of Ezra Pound, entitled “Dismissal,” part of the last suite of poems, save for the cancer odes of Chemo Sábe, Dorn was to write. Its first stanza notes that Pound “made anti-Semitism a heresy, / although he wasn’t the greatest anti-Semite of his time. / Or even close.” Which is true enough, tho it’s worth noting as Ben Friedlander has, that Pound was considerably more anti-Semitic than, say, Mussolini. What gets me most, tho, is the next stanza:

A Modern gang of cutthroats
in cartoon berets, with sumo champions
like Gertrude Stein –
The giant abbreviator from Oak Park
who wrote, stuttering
pseudo-wise hymns to war, and
its effects on the adventurous sector
of the lower / upper middle class.

There is an implicit, well not so implicit as cheaply explicit, homophobia in making fun of Gertrude Stein’s weight, but the connection to Hemingway, made with no more than a dash & linebreak & no verb phrase for either side of this equation. What is being said here? Are Stein & Hemingway the anti-Pound gang of cutthroats? Or merely a front for same, these otherwise unnamed figures “in cartoon berets.” Dorn takes up three stanzas & a section title to simply note that there was no trial. “Besides / insanity is the ultimate dismissal!” Then come two further stanzas that carry the implications further:

It was too familiar, a fitting end
to the old, uniformed fascism of the two wars
gliding into the transpace of the new
hierarchical oriental fascism of beehive
conformity, industry devoted only to survival
and ruinous increase. Singularity,
the swamping of the gene swamp.

All of it fondly called
the Modern Movement by those
who fervently hope it is over
and that their banal attempt
to get rid of a whole period
by driving a stake through it
will finally give them an end
to their belaboring the scapegoat.

One might reasonably read this as arguing that state fascism is being replaced by its corporate counterpart, and that modernism is about to be canned by the School of Quietude (parts of which did, in fact, attempt to ban Pound’s works, led by sonneteer & 1934 Pulitzer winner Robert Silliman Hillyer), using Pound to drive “a stake through it.” Why, however, the gratuitous racism of oriental midway through the first stanza above – there’s been no discussion anywhere here of Japanese or Asian capitalism, let alone the outsourcing of manufacturing to China (which hadn’t really gotten going when this was written)? And what, precisely, is intended by “Singularity, / the swamping of the gene swamp.” This isn’t polysemy and these aren’t new sentences – this is someone trying to make an argument who just can’t do it.

There is more than a little Pound in Dorn. Imagine ‘Slinger as Dorn’s Mauberly, but that the only “Cantos” that follow turn out to be those devoted to Martin Van Buren & that he dies before he can be rehabilitated poetically in Pisa. You would get a selected that feels not so terribly different from Way More West. It’s a career arc that is functionally going over the cliff even with Gran Apachería, and it makes you reread all the earlier work, and especially the ellipses in the earlier work, not as moments of Olsonian leaps, but as real gaps in thinking.

There is a story worth telling – it would make a great doctoral dissertation, frankly – about what happened in the 1960s to the New American poets: who got political, like Ginsberg, Baraka, Levertov & Margaret Randall, who merely played at being political like Diane DiPrima, who incorporated the political into their work (Duncan, Zukofsky, Oppen), who freaked at the idea of poets as political such as Jack Spicer, who stayed silent throughout (Ashbery, for one, but pretty much every NY School poet not named David Shapiro), who actively rooted for the far right (Kerouac), etc. If the aesthetic reign of the New Americans proved short lived (even as their impact continues to resound and expand to this day) a lot of this has to do with their movement being a quintessentially post-World War 2 phenomenon. It was never prepared to survive drugs, the Beatles or Vietnam. Among the wreckage of all that, there is no more tragic tale than that of Edward Dorn, who got political only to be revealed as incoherent. Way More West is an important book, precisely because it is such a sad & ultimately disappointing one.

Nothing is harder or more tricky than a selected poems. As Robert Grenier demonstrated when he delivered a selected Creeley that showed the poet’s work centering around the poems that confront language most directly – focusing on Words and Pieces more than on the earlier “popular” For Love – not everybody views the same poet the same way. Several Quietist poets have suggested that Mauberly represents the pinnacle of Pound’s achievement, but then I would edit a selected Eliot completely absent of the molasses that is the Quartets. It would be fun, just as an exercise, to see just how many different John Ashberys we could create via a selected poems. And we know how some poets, including both Auden & Moore, actively revised their own pasts through cautious, if injudicious, editing.

So it pleases me no end to see that the David Shapiro who emerges from New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) captures what is unique about this most difficult (& just possibly most rewarding) of all New York School poets. One way of looking at Shapiro might be to import Zukofsky’s musical notion of the integral & to suggest that for Shapiro, the upper limit is Joe Ceravolo, the lower one Kenneth Koch. That’s a range with a discernible path, but an enormous reach from one to the other: Here is a poem that has elements of both:

A Problem

 

There are two ways of living on the earth

Satisfied or dissatisfied. If satisfied,

Then leaving it for the stars will only make matters mathematically worse

If dissatisfied, then one will be dissatisfied with the stars.

 

One arrives in England, and the train station is a dirty toad.

Father takes a plane on credit card with medical telephone.

One calls up America at three-thirty, one’s fiancée is morally alone.

But the patient is forever strapped to the seat in mild turbulence.

 

Thinking of America along psychoanalytic lines, and then

delicately engraving nipples

On each of two round skulls

You have learned nothing from music but Debussy’s ions

And the cover of the book is a forest with two lovers with empty cerebella.

 

Beyond the couple is a second girl, her head smeared out.

This represents early love, which is now “total space.”

These are the ways of living on the earth,

Satisfied or unsatisfied. Snow keeps falling into the brook of wild rice.

It took me quite a few years to learn how to read a poem like this, in good part because, while I “got” Joe Ceravolo instinctively as a young poet, it took me a long time to warm toward the work of Kenneth Koch whose surrealism originally struck me as far too derivative of what I’d read elsewhere translated from the French. Here, I once would have found myself loving certain lines & images (“the train station is a dirty toad” and that great final sentence, which has both image & tonal echoes of Grenier’s early work – I’m not sure that Shapiro even knew of Grenier at the time this must have been written in the very early 1970s), wishing they hadn’t been “stuck” in the midst everything else. Now, however, I can see all the ways in which “everything else” really is necessary, just how very closely calculated every decision is, like when to use punctuation & when not. There’s a whole narrative here just in how periods are used & where: it’s no accident that they turn up midline just twice, both times following the very same phrase, each at the end of similar, tho not entirely parallel, sentences. Aesthetically, read aloud, the two sentences could not have a more profoundly different sense of sensuality – and the second makes the final sentence so much more powerful.

The poem is also both sad & serious in ways quite unlike Koch, unlike Ceravolo also for that matter, an emotional register that one finds in Shapiro that is rare anywhere else in the New York School – there are instances of wistful regret in Ashbery perhaps, but that’s about it. As if one of the registers of how difficult it is to live day-to-day in New York City is that, even as a poet, you never can let your guard down. In this way, Shapiro is completely different from Berrigan, O’Hara, Padgett & many later poets, precisely because he lets us see the jagged vulnerability that is such an important part of his psyche:

The snow is alive

But my son cries

The snow is not alive
The snow cannot speak!
The snow cannot come inside!
You cannot break the snow!

But the snow is alive

And the tree is angry

This is the first section, of two, of a poem that takes its title from that first line, a part of the title series from After a Lost Original, written some 20 years after “A Problem.” Formally, you can see how close this poem gets to Ceravolo’s sense of a magical world, but nowhere in Ceravolo will you ever find this tone, which is both layered & complicated, with more than a little hurt.

If Shapiro is emotionally the bravest poet among the New Yorkers, it’s not accidental that he’s also the most political – indeed, one might say he’s almost the only political presence, at least for his generation. Once you get to Joel Lewis, Eileen Myles & after, this isn’t so rare, but before Shapiro – who was very visibly a presence during the Columbia student strike circa 1968 – it appears not to have been even an imagined possibility. Try to imagine Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery at an anti-war rally a la Ginsberg, Bly, Levertov or Rothenberg. Or Ted Berrigan organizing a rally to support his best friend Anselm Hollo back when the immigration service was trying to deport this partaker of cannabis. Political action is not only a fact of Shapiro’s biography, it’s in the work, in poems as diverse as “House (Blown Apart)” from the 1980s or the very recent “A Burning Interior,” one of whose sections is this “Song for Hannah Arendt”:

Out of being torn apart
comes art.

Out of being split in two
comes me and you. HA HA!

Out of being torn in three
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)

Out of the essential mistranslation
emerges an illegitimate nation.

Better she said the enraged
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.

Out of being split into thirteen parts
comes the eccentric knowledge of “hearts.”

(Out of being torn at all
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)

And out of this war, of having fought
comes thinking, comes thought.

The very flatness of these lines almost echoes Levertov’s most political pieces, even if Shapiro’s source undoubtedly is (again) Koch, (again) put to purposes Koch himself could never have imagined. But it’s simplicity is undercut with the two post-rhyme interjections – and consider how that laughter sounds at the end of the fourth line: it is very much laughter without joy, an extraordinarily complicated emotion to present in a poem, even in this one, which in so many ways is heart-breaking.

When Joe Ceravolo’s selected poems, The Green Lake is Awake, appeared, it had a huge impact on people’s sense of the New York School, gen. 3 and beyond, because Ceravolo had been something of a secret save to the people for whom he was really really important (a situation not unlike Jack Spicer’s during the decade between his death and the appearance of the Collected Books). Shapiro’s selected won’t have the same impact – tho it should – in part because he’s never truly disappeared, steadily bringing forth books now for more than 40 years, doing important work as an art critic, visibly a presence around New York. Yet I’ve never been certain just how many poets actually know David Shapiro & his work. Because Shapiro wrote superbly when he was very young – January was not only a book of poems published Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1965, a time when even Frank O’Hara couldn’t find a real publisher among the trades (Grove Press was a bottom feeder there), but was written for the most part by Shapiro when he was still in high school – it would have been easy (but wrong) to impose on him the narrative of the brilliant savant, and not to recognize the decades of discipline he’s subsequently added to what he brought to the blank page in the 1960s. He’s not Frank Stanford goes to New York. Nor is he a jack of all arts, master of none, tho his skills as violinist (the career ultimately not taken) and art critic are daunting. And because he’s one of the more anxious souls around the poetry scene, I’m not sure just how many people really know him as the generous, loyal, brilliant friend to so many poets he’s been all these years. The person he reminds me of most in that regard is Bob Creeley.

So this volume is one of the great “must have” books of the year. If you have any interest in the New York School, or in the New American Poetries, or even just broadly in the history of the post-avant, David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems is required reading. It’s also a great, if complicated, joy.

El Greco, The View of Toledo

To look at The Sienese Shredder “#1,” you would not immediately think of this luscious amalgam of art, criticism, poetry, interviews & even recordings as a “little magazine” – it appears at first glance to be the sort of museum catalog that accompanies only the larger and more expensive exhibitions about the country. But there you have it. With cover collages by Don Joint against a bright mustard frame, a CD containing what amounts to a reading of a selected poems by Harry Mathews, bright four-color portfolios of paintings by Jane Hammond and Shirley Jaffe, some smart essays by co-editor Trevor Winkfield on Sassetta, “painter of fragments,” & by Jack Barth¹, a wonderful short piece that can only be called a close reading of El Greco’s The View of Toledo (“we are in the middle of a hallucination, in the anxious peripheries of revelation”), this is very much a high-end art catalog, interspersed with some superb poetry and by some things that you simply can’t be expecting.

For example, a portfolio of 12 postcard collages by John Ashbery, the sort of miniature frames of "disjunctive but found" wit you might expect, say, from the late painter Jess. Turnabout is fair play, however, as Jess – or his estate – contributes two of “Osap’s Fables” in the form of prose poems. Here is the first:

A worm was so fond of his Young Man that at length, seeing with insolent contempt base traps to ensnare the harmless, one day he would marry his constant companion. A SpiderCat, weaving her web with the greatest SILK, became a woman working at her shroud much quicker than a young bride. “Yes,” said the Silk, “but your labours, which are at first Venus, spring from the room, the nature of a Cat. AND the Cat determined that there were no longer the half finished arms of her husband and, only this morning, caught the Mouse, and it was very fine and transparent; and it is still down here HIS YOUNG MAN, hearing you acknowledge that I work behaviour with the greatest care, and seeing that I began it, changed the Cat into a blooming woman. They swept the princes away as dirt, and under the form of a woman she married and killed it; but at night my web is changed and worse than useless, whilst his wishes, as soon as they are seen, are preserved on and in her affection. THE worm and her form and accordingly, mine are made slow and swiftness is hidden.” SPIDERCAT used to declare that if she were back again, the Silk should see how large and how sincere was nature become. “what do you think of her and his gratified ornaments?” disagrees THE SILK; “AND Venus angry at her neighbour designed only as a Mouse of my lady, destroyed the young although beautiful, WORM.” See this in time: and he looked to THE WORM for labour cries.

Also writing from the dead is Edwin Denby, a tale of terror in a wry tone:

My father was a cheese grater
My mother was a stair
I’m a no-nonsense escalator
Less I couldn’t care
I’m a slick machine but I turn mean
When from inside my parts that glide
I smell the fetor of a musky sneaker
Taking an upward ride
I grab the toes as my slabs close
I grate my steel
On feet that feel
Tom flet that grab
In his sneaker’s toe
Click-clack
He can’t pull it back
Ilzich-zack
The monster won’t let go
The danger peaks
He nearly freaks
Untie the shoe lace, Tom!
He did.
Free the foot slid.
The escalator foiled,
Tore the sneaker, and ate it oiled.

Early on in the issue, Judith Stein interviews painter Richard Tuttle not about his work, but about the role of art dealer Richard Bellamy in “birthing the new American art that followed Abstract Expressionism.” In what feels almost like a parallel piece, William Corbett offers a short memoir on “Three Great Talkers” – Charles Olson, Philip Guston and Robert Creeley. I was surprised, given his role commenting on Guston’s career, to discover that Corbett doesn’t think of himself as being nearly so intimate with the painter as he does with Creeley.

One might argue that these indirect works - writings by a painter, even Jess – was that a cut-up by the artist of Tricky Cad? – or this marginalia by Denby might not be major, maybe not even serious work (it might be the only bit of Denby I can think of that would be at home with the least formal aspects of the NY School generations 2 or 3), or that Tuttle discussing a dealer likewise isn’t addressing the question of art directly. But Sienese Shredder has major contributions mixed in as well – several scores by Alan Shockley², 17 pages of new poetry by Ron Padgett and the first new Larry Fagin poems I’ve seen in print in over a decade, fifteen of them, each in prose one paragraph long. Here is “Joanne Hates the Curtains in the Kitchen”:

What’s the name of this in this language? Virgil would write in the morning and spend the evening struggling to put it into hexameters. But Ovid lay it out straight into verse. Brodey’s flashing bolt. Yellow-pink-red-blue-green-black rhomboids with little sprays of paisley. I understand well enough resistance to words. The birds is coming, that’s what they used to say. Now they say … the truth is … transubstantiation. Time briefly lengthens, bleeding a little, so we have history to live out, the naturalness of melting. Everyone is hungry for this collation. Why are we in this world? Why does it have to be us? I don’t know, kids, I’m just a little Dutch girl holding my pitcher of milk. Change here for all points, many times in future.

The allusion to the late Jim Brodey is perhaps the one instance of the oblique here, that intimate level of address so typical of the New York School. The only other moment in the poem that might be said to touch on that same sort of genre-defining (or coterie defining) characteristic is the joke about the Dutch girl in the next to last sentence. Otherwise, this poem could be anything, even direct address (indeed, one interpretation might be that the NY School touches are there precisely to let the reader know that it isn’t just direct address).

As a group – the same is true for Padgett’s work – these poems are terrific, both men are at the top of their game amp; one’s only reasonable complaint might be that this seems like an awful lot of work to tuck into a magazine that has no prior readership & costs $25 per copy. If, in fact, this is the only work that Fagin has published in over a decade, it should be in The New Yorker, damnit.

On the other hand, it is one way to guarantee that people will want to pony up for the new journal.

Another piece in the journal that, for me, raises a somewhat similar question is Francis Naumann’s piece examining – in stunning detail – one element of Marcel Duchamp’s announcement for a 1943 exhibition to be called “Through the Big End of the Opera Glass.” (Not to be confused with “The Big Glass.”) This element is a chess problem printed on the underside of one of the invitation’s four folded “public” faces (imagine a greeting card). Naumann, who is both an art scholar & a gallery owner – one of whose shows not that long ago was a presentation of married life on the part of two artists, Sienese Shredder cover artist Don Joint, and co-editor Brice Brown – argues, and pretty well demonstrates, with the aid of chess grandmaster Larry Evans, that the Duchamp problem has no solution. This is a wonderful demonstration of Duchamp’s method, not to mention his mind in general, and one of the few instances I’ve ever seen in a general publication of any kind of the way in which chess can be as much philosophy, or art, as it is proto-military strategy, math or spatial relationships.

It is also, along with the Stein-Tuttle interview, the second piece in this 252-page publication to feature an art dealer as a major thinker – indeed, as a major category of legitimate art critic. The two sections together – not unlike the two major collections of poetry (there are many other poets here too, including Denise Duhamel, Gérard de Nerval, Chris Edgar, Carter Ratcliff, Charles North, Nick Carbó & Miles Champion) – are where this journal clicked into place for me. The Sienese Shredder seems very much to want to define – maybe even redefine – the New York School as such, for the 21^st century.

Indeed, the opening piece is a college commencement address for the San Francisco Art Institute by Bill Berkson. The presence of poets who are major art critics – Ratcliff, Corbett – art by poets (not just Ashbery, Carbó’s contribution is a gorgeous, tho somewhat conceptual, visual poem), poetry by an artist. And the best demonstration of gallery owners as thinkers – one often hears far more deprecating terms for them – that I’ve seen – Sienese Shredder is making the case for a poetry that is thoroughly immersed in the world of the arts, and especially in a world in which the visual arts are understood as very close to central.

Given the fact that this journal is edited by Trevor Winkfield & Brice Brown, two painters, this take certainly makes sense. It also follows on Winkfield’s rather aggressive & controversial British anthology, New York Poets II: From Edwin Denby to Bernadette Mayer, published by Carcanet in the U.K. as a follow-on to Mark Ford’s original volume (Winkfield’s co-editor here), which gathered the work of just Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara & Schuyler. NYP II is notable mostly for the number of key figures who have been airbrushed out of the group portrait: Alice Notley, David Shapiro, Maureen Owen, Lewis Warsh, Anne Waldman, Tom Clark, Tony Towle, Tom Vietch, Frank Lima, John Giorno, Ann Lauterbach, F.T. Prince, John Perrault, Jim Brodey, Ed Sanders, Aram Saroyan, John Godfrey, Paul Violi, Ted Greenwald, Michael Brownstein, Peter Schjeldahl & Dick Gallup. For starters..

If you include Bill Berkson, as NYP II does, you can hardly argue the absence of others on the constraints of space. Berkson’s a wonderful poet, but he’s lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 freaking years. Clark Coolidge, another of NYP II's eleven contributors, hasn’t lived in New York City for a day in the 36 years I’ve known him. So it’s an aesthetic argument that’s being made there. But because it’s an argument by exclusion, I don’t think it’s terribly effective. I have some of the same problems with NYPII that I did with Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2, which makes a similar claim (in its case, that Fluxus was the central post-WW2 literary movement) without openly owning it.

So I find The Sienese Shredder – a name worth exploring some other day – a really valuable contribution, since this would seem to be something of the same argument as NYP II made positively, on the best possible terms. I don’t think there can be any question that it’s a serious argument, tho one could argue its key tenets, at least as manifested here, rather endlessly:

that the visual arts are central in the ensemble of aesthetic practices

that art dealers need to be acknowledged as serious art thinkers

that a New York School (even if it’s not called that anymore) continues to exist & be vital, and that it’s defined by its relation to painting

that the role of St. Marks (&, implicitly, the whole “post-Ted thing”) has been overstated

It’s very interesting to look at The Sienese-Shredder in contrast, say, to Vanitas, which likewise intersects the painting-poetry axis that has existed in New York since at least the end of World War 2. Unlike The Sienese-Shredder, Vanitas is more open (and various) in its aesthetic arguments, providing not one but three manifestos at the start of its first issue.

As for the Shredder, the absence of a manifesto is an interesting move here, consistent with Gen 1 NY School practices, in which manifestos are abjured because one talks seriously about poetry by talking about painting – a sort of code. It also, I suppose, makes it harder for those outside the definition to argue back, for fear that they might sound too shrill or earnest. And it’s not that Winkfield & Brown outright exclude other perspectives – there’s Corbett, Jess, even Fagin in that light – but there is a demotic voice one can find at St. Marks that is largely missing in Sienese Shredder. And, given its stated policy of “submissions by invitation only,” that almost seems to be the point.

To purchase The Sienese-Shredder, send an email to info@sienese-shredder.com.

 

¹ Not to be confused with the novelist John, whose friends all call him Jack also.

² Alan Frederick Shockley, not to be confused with the didgeridoo maestro Allen Shockley.

I’ve been reading The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan for what must be the sixth or seventh time. Not only does reading this series every few years never get old, my experience is that, for me at least, it has never been the same book twice. Reading it now in the sumptuous UC Press edition of Berrigan’s Collected Poems, I am struck with the air & light & infinite good humor that is at the heart of these poems. I’m particularly taken with the first two qualities, reinforced as they are by the large fields of white space the 6-by-8 UC format extends to the text. I agree with Alice Notley’s assertion in her introduction to the Collected that “The Sonnets, in fact, could reflect no other setting than” Manhattan, although “air & light” are not qualities I associate with that densely populated island. They’re functions here more of Berrigan’s own personality, which can grin very wide & be fairly barbed all at once:

L

I like to beat people up
absence of passion, principles, love. She murmurs
What just popped into my eye was a fiend’s umbrella
and if you should come and pinch me now
as I go out for coffee
… as I was saying winter of 18 lumps
Days produce life locations to banish 7 up
Nomads, my babies, where are you? Life’s
My dream which is gunfire in my poem
Orange cavities of dreams stir inside “The Poems”
Whatever is going to happen is already happening
Some people prefer “the interior monologue”
I like to beat people up

Ellipsis in the original, as they say. If there was a better sonnet in the 20^th century, more complex & subtle, more full of human emotion or life, more well crafted, it’s somewhere else in this same sequence, but it’s of course always open to debate.

There are 79 poems gathered into this particular edition of The Sonnets, a few from as early as 1961, the bulk from 1963. That’s 13 more than appeared in the first two editions, but still nine less than Berrigan actually wrote. Given that he used cut-up or splicing techniques, some of them in such a way that you can’t miss the device – the same lines pop up over and over – and that some of the source material was his own very first “not-so-good” (to use Notley’s own judgment here) poems, I’ve wondered – during maybe three of my read-throughs – if a devoted scholar could reconstruct the “uncut” poems, the translations from Rimbaud, the miscellaneous additions that, in fact, make these so much more than verbal collages.

The very first work in The Collected Poems, The Sonnets is in some ways the most radical poetry Berrigan would ever write. Notley calls it, rightly, “Ted’s most famous book.” It is probably the work through which more poets have learned the core strategies of abstraction in language – it doesn’t have to be “non-referential;” a line, a phrase can go in one direction, the next one along an altogether different path; the whole itself will pull together disparate elements to construct “a voice,” etc. – than any other single text.

There was, in the late 1960s & throughout much of the 1970s, some dispute among younger poets as to who might have been the actual source for such procedures in poetry. The core of The Sonnets was constructed in 1963, one year after John Ashbery published “Europe,” the work of his that most clearly “predicts” the poetry of Berrigan (and not just The Sonnets), one year earlier in The Tennis Court Oath. William Burroughs, in his 1965 Paris Review interview with Conrad Knickerbocker (which I’ve also been rereading this week), assigns credit to Brion Gysin, but does so in a way that is carefully hedged:

A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, “Minutes to Go,” was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in “The Camera Eye” sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.

The argument thus goes: Gysin did it first, tho maybe there were others, and in any event there are antecedents dating back to the high modernists, so does it really matter? What counts is that Gysin blew my mind. Burroughs makes a similar claim at the start of his essay, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin:”

At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. André Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.

In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit  (all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this point) had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

The Wikipedia article on cut-up techniques largely replicates the Burroughsian view. The “as far as I know” qualification of the interview, however, suggests that, even by 1965, Burroughs had begun to hear of the cut-ups and chance techniques of others, such as the work being done in Britain by Bob Cobbing. Robert Sheppard, in “Bob Cobbing and Concrete Poetry,” invokes Burroughs in a somewhat deprecating manner:

Cut up, an analogous technique used, more occasionally than supposed, by William Burroughs, himself British-based for a while in the 1960s, was practised by Cobbing as far back as the 1950s. The procedural and permutational works of the Oulipo movement, founded in 1960, and still active, suggests another relationship, one seen in Cobbing’s sideswipe at the inane figurative play of much contemporary British poetry when he generates lines such as ‘rock ’n roll makes me feel like roly-poly / a little lechery makes me feel like spotted dick’ from Liz Lochhead’s ‘a good fuck makes me feel like custard’.

Jackson Mac Low, forever attentive to documenting his forays into new territory, notes in Representative Works: 1938-1985, that his initial two “biblical poems” were “the first works I composed by means of chance operations (30 Dec. 1954 – 1 Jan. 1955).” Mac Low’s texts differ from, say, The Sonnets or even Burroughs’ cut-up fiction in that they might not have been recognized even as literature when they were first composed. The opening lines of “7.1.11.1.11.9.3!11.6.7!4.,a biblical poem,” are:

In /_____/ /_____/ wherein the /_____//_____/
made
/_____//_____/ eat lest they /_____/ and taken /_____//_____/ the
eight

A text that appears to predict Armand Schwerner’s later The Tablets.

Earlier even than Mac Low, however, is Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On, written originally in 1953. Like Berrigan’s The Sonnets a decade later, one could argue that The Sun is Koch’s most radical, even his best work. However, because The Sun didn’t come out in book form until Black Sparrow brought it out with a Larry Rivers cover in 1969¹, long after Koch’s role as the straight clown amid the gay New York School males had been cemented in the imagination of readers, it had relatively little impact. But how else might Koch have composed:

Bong! went the faery blotters; Ding Dong! the

Country of Easter! shore! each toes

The marriage-bin, shouts of “Conch!” “Ruthie” “Lurks

Behind the ‘pea’ is basement’s Illinois

Obtuse radio-lithograms!” “Coptic!” and “Weak Beddoes

Less-us-the- shirt!” Ran behind me-Vishnu, all

Summer. Closet of how it seems! O bare necks

In October, closest apparent “film star” of the

Buffalo. Peter of Carolina’s neatest snow-

Pier condescension. O haughty chapter how

Clear was as apparent cruelty, bonnet,

List, tackles the lace. Hump chariots the summer

Either desires. Ether, so tall

As ice, sees her cuckoo hooves at desire

Margin. Amour dodo cranberries. There

”Art,” “blamelessly,” cashes, D’s, weds hat’s

HEADS! Joyous midnights, different clams!

Oh the word “flotation”’s cosined beaver rotation beneath

The “seelvery” dog-freight cars, mammoth

Stomach-quiz-raspberries we parent

Cuckoo Mary coast-disinterest verst of “cheese” diversed

Flags of the “comma stare” rewhipped

Georgia of teaching cash registers to “hat” side

Of pale “plates,” the bitter “nurse” soothing “ha”-green “stangs” forward!

Clearly Koch is using more than just cut-up materials – his ear forwards the play along in several places – there is even the alphabet (”Art,” “blamelessly,” cashes, D’s). But if Koch is being less systematic than, say, Mac Low, I think it’s impossible to imagine just writing this, say, as it came to him. That really doesn’t become possible, so far as I can tell, until sometime in the early 1970s, most probably in the work of Clark Coolidge, specifically after he dropped the idea of the long poem he’d embarked on after Polaroid and The Maintains, works that equally problematize normative syntactic integration into units of meaning, but do so using systems throughout. Look, say, at Quartz Hearts instead.

So either Koch is 20 years ahead of everyone, but then does nothing with this discovery, a scenario that makes no sense to me, or more likely he is just ahead of Mac Low, Cobbing, Gysin & Burroughs, this same disrupting methodology getting invented repeatedly over the course of one decade.

Another way one might look at all this is in terms of proprietary anxiety, the cut-up as intellectual turf. Here it seems that you have Burroughs at one extreme – it’s not really his move, but Gysin’s, but you Burroughs promoting it from that point forward – and Mac Low clearly is interested as well, tho taking a much wider view if you look at the whole of his career (he’s a veritable engine of different ways of disrupting the ego in the process of writing), while at the other extreme you have Koch, Berrigan & Ashbery, commenting very little if at all on their work in this vein, doing one major piece, then moving on to other work. Cobbing & Gysin work on a third level, people who didn’t go around making major formal claims, but whom others chose to single out as inventors of this exact device.

Ultimately, it’s always the same move – get away from the continuity of syntax & tale & suddenly the reader is plunged into the presentness of what is in front of them. It’s always present, always demanding to be negotiated, interpreted & never getting easier even if you can. Individually, the works that rise out of this breakdown in the narrative chain are all quite different – Berrigan’s “I like to beat people up” isn’t a line we would associate with Ashbery & it’s a lot cheerier than a number of similar statements that occur in Burroughs. But a lot more important than figuring out just who should get credit for cutting up & folding in is fathoming just why this move at this exact moment in history.

 

¹ Having appeared in a format that telescoped all 104 stanzas down to just 19 pages in Alfred Leslie’s 1960 one-shot, Hasty Papers.

Photo by John Tranter

It strikes me as bizarre that John Ashbery, of all people, never has received a National Medal for the Arts. The medal has been given out now for 21 years to 8 to 10 recipients per year, including both individuals and organizations. Of the more than 200 medal recipients, the entire list of poets ever to have received this honor is:

Anthony Hecht, 2004
Maya Angelou, 2000
Gwendolyn Brooks, 1995
Richard Wilbur, 1994
Stanley Kunitz, 1993
Robert Penn Warren, 1987

Need I say just how pathetic that list is? Gwendolyn Brooks and the Five Dwarves represents the whole of poetry over, say, the last half century? It’s high time we rectify this nonsense.

The National Medal doesn’t need only to go to graybeards – Robert Duvall, Dolly Parton, Twyla Tharp, Ron (The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, The Da Vinci Code) Howard & Yo-Yo Ma have all received this acknowledgment of their lifetime achievement in recent years. Nor does it have to be only the most sclerotic practitioners – Wynton Marsalis has received one, tho Miles Davis never did. Nor did Anthony Braxton or Steve Lacy or Cecil Taylor. John Cage never received a medal, nor did Stan Brakhage, nor even Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. Nor, to come back to poetry, did Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Carl Rakosi or Robert Creeley. But Austin City Limits, Ralph Stanley, Buddy Guy, Rudolfo Anaya & Trisha Brown have all been named. Gregory Rabassa, the translator of Julio Cortázar, the great Oulipo fictioneer, was on the list in 2006. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott received one in 1998 in what was perhaps the medal’s single most interesting year, going also to Fats Domino, Agnes Martin, Frank Gehry, Philip Roth, Gregory Peck, Gwen Verdon, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and … Sara Lee Corporation (for its role as patron).

I believe that Ashbery would be among the first to acknowledge the hollowness of honors, as such, and there was a time – say, ten years ago when both Ginsberg & Creeley were still alive – when one could have had a rousing argument as to whom might be the most deserving of the New Americans to be the first to receive such an award. But time has settled that argument, and the social value of having any member of the New Americans – the single most significant generation of poets we have had over the past half century – acknowledged should not be under-estimated.

It may be worth noting that two-thirds of the poets named to date were chosen by Bill – “I had poets at both my inaugurals” – Clinton. Hecht’s appointment by George W. may seem pretty lame, but George H.W. managed to name exactly none.

All of the Objectivists are gone. There are at most a dozen of the 44 poets included in The New American Poetry still alive, half of whom one could argue are at least as deserving as any of the poets who have thus far received the medal. (Personally, I would love to see George Bush and Amiri Baraka together, but maybe that one’s not going to happen.) Poets from the generation after the New Americans – Joanne Kyger, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg – are now hitting their seventies. Recognition of America’s major literary tradition, the one that can trace its roots legitimately back not just to Pound but to Whitman, is overdue. Awarding John Ashbery this medal is an obvious first step. It’s long past time. Mr. Gioia, tear down this wall.