All weekend I’ve been thinking that there’s an absent third missing between Collecteds & “Books as They Happen” – it’s the case of the Selected. Sometimes even that literary act of category miscegenation, the “New & Selected” (a.k.a “Didn’t write enough new poems for a full book, but wanted/needed to publish one anyway”).

Selecteds are notoriously problematic & there are the horror stories about different ones, such Bob Grenier’s editing of a Creeley Selected that proved too radical for its publisher & was scrapped for something that the publisher thought more of as a Greatest Hits volume. You can find Grenier’s original table of contents in the 1978 Boundary2 issue devoted to Creeley – it would have been a great book.

So I was trying to think about how you might do that. How would one approach the question of thinking it through? I’ve always thought, for example, that my own work wouldn’t lend itself to that form, that you couldn’t intelligibly “excerpt” from these booklength poems that are themselves parts of larger projects. But I wanted to think it through without that double-sided investment of editor/author, so thought about who hasn’t ever had a Selected, and how would I approach their work. Louis Zukofsky. How would I think to edit a Selected works of his poetry?

Even as I’m resistant to the idea that one could/should excerpt from my own poems, I don’t sense that same taboo with his. Is that because it’s not my own work, or because there’s something fundamentally different between his poetry & my own (well, there is, obviously, but besides all of those reasons)?

So what would I pick from “A,” for example? I tend to read “A” not as a continuous whole, but as a series movements:

• 1 through 6, the opening sequence written very much under the influence of The Cantos
• 7 through 11, the poems in which LZ first reaches his mature works
• 12 all by itself, the great WW2 poem, heavily influenced by Paterson
• 13 also by itself, “partita,” one of LZ’s finest works, as finely tuned a modernist work as exists
• 14-20, not “formally” the whole of An (that poem-within-the-poem that is a major sequence unto itself), but its gut”
• 21, “Rudens,” a text I never understood until I saw it performed last year at the Centennial Conference at Columbia, LZ’s lust for Shakespeare’s late fantasies, the weakest section in the entire work¹
• 22-23, which I think of as “the twins,” the finest writing LZ would ever do
• 24, Celia’s gift to LZ proved to be closure, or perhaps cloture

Of these, I would include the following:

• 1 through 3, a brilliant opening, it shows his roots, his indebtedness to Pound & the role of music as a template
• 6, because it is where LZ really is thinking through the problem of the form of the long poem
• 7, because it’s a great poem & where LZ really takes leave of his predecessors
• I love “A” – 8, but realistically, it's too long for a Selected & its involvement with issues of labor, Marx, the question of social movements are all handled more compactly – and more profoundly from a poetic perspective – by the great double-canzone of “A” – 9. “A” – 9 is a must
• “A” – 10 is the first WW2 poem & not nearly so long as “A” – 14, but in the compact environs of a Selected, I’m caught by the easy, careless (and never redacted) racism of lines like “No slant-eyed devil on stilts,” so I wouldn’t include it, even tho the evocation of a lost Paris is one of the most powerful images of the war from an American poet
• “A” – 11, a love poem to his wife & son, one of the clearest statements of his theme of family love, one of his finest poems
• “A” – 12 is both long & problematic from my perspective – this is the only number I would pull excerpts from: the first nine-plus pages up through the stanza on “How does the Czar sleep Nights?” – the section beginning with (big cap) “Blest” and continuing through the passage that starts (also big cap) “Ardent” – the final 11 pages or so, beginning with “These are some things I wanted / to get into a poem” –

Thus after the first 261 pages of the volume, I’ve selected just 70, and if I had to cut back, “A” – 12 would be the first to get cut. The second “half,” by which I mean “A” - 13-23, is not a whole lot longer, 302 pages, but I would include considerably more from this second half of the volume, which LZ did not begin until nine years after completing 12. The second half where Zukofsky’s greatest work lies.

• I would include all of “A” - 13 through 16, an uninterrupted swath of 114 pages.
• I love “A” - 17, the coronal for Floss & elegy for her husband William Carlos Williams, but it’s not Zukofsky’s best work, in spite of its embodiment of poetry as community (&, as such, one of the first truly post-avant works) – likewise, I wouldn’t think to include “A” – 18
• I would include “A” – 19, formally the strongest of the later portions of the 1960s work, a period when, from my reading, LZ’s work was again starting to level off – Zukofsky had a pattern of making enormous strides in his work, followed by longer fallow periods.
• For those reasons, I wouldn’t include either “A” – 20 or 21, but I would include all of “A” – 22 & 23, written in the early ‘70s after the gift of Celia’s musical montage of 24. These two pieces are Zukofsky’s very best work.

That’s a total of 265 pages taken out of a work that contains over 800 once you fold Celia’s piece in. It would of course be the core of any Selected. But would these excerpts “represent” or at the least not entirely gut “A” ? My sense is that it wouldn’t, tho I think you could argue for including others, especially 8, 10 & 17 (another 85 pages). That’s where I’d have to start thinking about just how large my Selected would be, and just how adequately I thought to represent the shorter poems.

 

¹ This is where it becomes clear that Olson’s uses of Shakespeare completely trumps Zukofsky’s.

Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi turns 99 this week. At 7:00 PM Eastern tonight, Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus will sponsor a webcast of a live reading and conversation with the poet.*

 

Rakosi is our last living connection with the Objectivists. In far too similar a fashion, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has emerged as the last of our Beat poets, John Ashbery the lone remaining core member of the New York School’s first generation, Robert Creeley the last of the great teachers at Black Mountain College, Robin Blaser the last participant in the Berkeley Renaissance (later the San Francisco Renaissance), etc. We are, it would seem, in a curious interregnum, an epoch of lasts.

 

There are of course an infinite number of problems with all such easy definitions. Perhaps it is impossible to find any other living participant from the Objectivist issue of Poetry – the age of 99 will put some distance between you & others – but what about Barbara Guest & the New York School, what about Snyder, McClure or Meltzer among the Beats? Or, conversely, what about the ways in which Ginsberg & Kerouac seem to have kept Ferlinghetti at arm’s length, at least in the 1950s? He was a publisher before he was their comrade.

 

Literary formations are intellectual constructs that live in time. If Objectivism lives today, it does so first in the memory of Carl Rakosi, a poet who apparently did not meet most of his fellow Objectivists in person until the 1960s, and then in our own sense of what that collective term represents. Before February, 1931, when the Zukofsky-edited special issue of Poetry first appeared, it is safe to say that hardly anyone beyond Zukofsky had any idea of what that term might entail.

 

Among the appendices to The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, editor Robin Blaser includes Robert Duncan’s questionnaire for his 1958 “Workshop in Basic Techniques,” as well as Spicer’s whimsical subversions in response.** Under the third section – “Tradition” – Duncan asks the respondent to choose one of two figures, alternative he refers to as “the tree or constellation,” the former being a straight-forward genealogical abstraction. Duncan instructs the applicant to “conceive of yourself as poet (that is, the spirit of your work) in the position marked with an x; then list as many poets . . . of your genius as you can numbering them according to their position in the design.”

 

The tree identifies “x” as the off-spring of 1 & 2. Positions 3 through 6 represent the “parents” of 1 & 2, with 7 & 8 standing for a sibling of each. Figures 9 through 12 are siblings or equals of ‘x.” The constellation offers no lines connecting figures. Rather some are closer, some further, some larger, some smaller. In this figure, “x” is near an unfilled center. Spicer in fact chose the constellation as his form, placing himself (“x”) into the lower-right hand sector of a rectangular quadrant that has now been moved directly into the center. The other three sectors are labeled variously, “Robin,” “Duncan,” & “To be found.” Spicer adds two items to his constellation, enabling him to array six figures relatively near to this bound quadrant: Pound, Cocteau, Dada, Yeats, Lorca, & “Vachael” (sic) Lindsay. Above and below are two more distant figures – Miles, meaning Josephine Miles, the dominant poet at UC Berkeley in the 1940s and ‘50s, and “Untermeyer’s Anthology.” Notably more distant, because “beyond” the array of six nearer influences, Spicer places two final figures, “The English Dept” and “The Place,” the latter being a North Beach bar associated with the Beats (and not, pointedly, with Jack’s crowd at Gino & Carlo’s).

 

How would Carl Rakosi respond to this questionnaire? Or Allen Ginsberg? Jack Kerouac? Frank O’Hara? Harryette Mullen? Anselm Berrigan? Gil Ott? Jena Osman? Dale Smith? Linh Dinh? Dodie Bellamy? Regardless of the formation you select, or the modifications you might make (a la Spicer) to one of Duncan’s figures, the process requires you to position yourself within the terrain of a poetics. All any literary formation is, in one sense, is just such a process carried out consciously, collectively & in public.

 

But this hardly means that such formations are fixed or frozen in time. To see that, one need only look at the three broad phases of Objectivism –

 

§         The 1930s, interactivity, optimism, joint publishing projects, critical statements, recruiting (Niedecker)

§         The 1940s & ‘50s, almost totally receding, with several Objectivists either not publishing and even not writing for long periods of time

§         1960s onward, the emergence & success of these writers precisely as a literary formation

In 2002, one might argue that Objectivism must be whatever Carl Rakosi says it is, even if he did not meet most of his collaborators until the third phase itself was under way. While John Taggart, Michael Heller, Rachel Blau Du Plessis or I might include Objectivism somewhere in whatever configurations we ended up drawing in response to Duncan’s question, only Rakosi might be apt to place it at or near “x.”

 

Even within formations, individual elements vary dramatically. Spicer, Duncan & Blaser had three very different relationships with Charles Olson, for example. Among langpos, one can find several people who have found Russian futurism & its critical front, Russian formalism, to be of great value. But one can find more who seem to have paid it only cursory attention, if any. Further, no two poets came to what we might call Russian modernism from exactly the same direction nor with the same set of concerns. Thus one can’t say that the relation of Russian futurism to language poetry is X or Y or whatever unless one specifies it down to the individual. Rather, it is “part of the mix,” as are (or were) any number of other disparate elements, from the New York School to surrealism to Stein to Projectivism to Zukofsky to the Bolinas Mesa phenomenon of the early 1970s.***

 

If ever there were an instance of the map not being the territory, such subjective positionings as these models suggest would be it. Spicer’s filled-out questionnaire is a perfect case in point, even if we concede that Spicer is playing with the document. Beyond Duncan & Blaser, the New American Poetry is entirely absent from this 1958 document. Those two & Josephine Miles are the only poets even born in the 20^th Century. While Spicer’s constellation is notable for its internationalism, the choice of Vachel Lindsay (whose first name Spicer misspells), that old premodernist post le lettre, as his instance of Yankee nativism seems premeditatedly daft, given the absence, say, of Williams, Whitman, Dickinson, Crane or Stein. In a parallel mode, “Untermeyer’s anthology” (either The Pocket Book of American Poems or Modern American Poetry, both of which were “best sellers”) seems calculated to invoke the low-brow & decadent side of verse.

 

But what is most remarkable about Spicer’s 1958 map is what a resolutely static view of poetry it offers – two friends, one professor, one poet locked up in an insane asylum, as such hospitals were styled in those days, and everybody else basically is dead, anthologized, relegated to the English Department. The only inscrutable possibility – and it’s positioned on the outermost ring of Spicer’s constellation, as distant as the English Department – is the Beat scene at The Place.

 

Contrast this with the extraordinarily active sense of poetry, place & position to be found in Spicer’s final work, Book of Magazine Verse, published posthumously in 1966. There we find poems consciously written “for” – Spicer’s sense of preposition is especially barbed; not one of the named journals would ever print anything from this volume – The Nation, whose poetry was then being edited by Denise Levertov; for Poetry Chicago, then in the hands of Henry Rago+; for the Canadian little magazine Tish; for Ramparts, a Catholic journal that was at that point transforming itself into a muckraking antiwar publication, a leftwing publication that might have attracted Spicer precisely because it was published in San Francisco, a rare thing for a national publication in those days; for The St. Louis Sporting News, the bible of baseball in 1965; for the Vancouver Festival, not a magazine at all; and finally for the jazz journal, Downbeat. Spicer’s choices here are as clear a map as the 1958 questionnaire, but the world they address is radically changed. One might see Poetry Chicago as an equivalent, say, for either the English Department (especially given Spicer’s paranoia about his exclusion) or even “Untermeyer’s anthology” – advertised no less in that grand 50^th anniversary issue. Inside, the poems are full of pop culture references: the Beatles, Ginsberg’s bust in Prague, the Vietnam war, Peter, Paul & Mary. In 1966, when Book of Magazine Verse came out, it never occurred to me that as a 19 year old, I was a regular reader of four of the publications Spicer references. But in retrospect, that’s a remarkable statement about Spicer.

 

One could argue that Spicer had changed dramatically, both as person and as a poet between 1958, when he had just finished writing After Lorca, and 1965, when he died. But whether one fixes one’s lens on the individual or on the social matters relatively little. Either way, the map itself is not static, but must be negotiated, in both the navigational and contractual senses of that word, continually. Periplum, as Pound called it, the ability to steer through waters in which no reference point is fixed.

 

All of which is to suggest that when one refers to Carl Rakosi as an Objectivist, or of Spicer as writer from the San Francisco (nee Berkeley) Renaissance, one needs to ask further: which Objectivism, which renaissance? The Objectivism of 1931 was a far cry from that of 1945, let alone 1965 or even as recently as 1985. If Objectivism (or modernism, or language poetry, the New York School or what have you) is perceived as a continuous & relatively fixed set of values, then it has become a map unanchored from the territory to which it ostensibly refers.

 

Which is why it is not possible to write language poetry in 2002.

 

 

 

* For more information, call 215-573-WRIT or see the special website: www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/rakosi.html.

 

** (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975), pp. 357-60. Black Sparrow books are now an imprint of David R. Godine.

 

*** In the early 1970s, Bolinas’ population, never more than a few hundred, included Robert Creeley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Joanne Kyger, Larry Kearney, Jim Gustafson, Jim Carroll, Tom Clark, Bill Berkson, Louis MacAdams Jr., and several other poets all loosely affiliated with different strands of the New American Poetry.

 

+Rago’s tenure at Poetry is worth examining further. From his arrival in 1955 through 1961 or so, he was more or less indistinguishable from the bland academics who were to follow in his wake, but from 1962 until Rago’s death in 1969, Poetry had a brief reawakening and was for that seven year period the only magazine in America to publish the New Americans & the school of quietude side by side, devoting issues to Zukofsky, publishing a 50^th anniversary issue that included Creeley, Olson, Levertov, Koch, Pound, Mac Diarmid, Rexroth, Williams & Zukofsky as well as Aiken, Berryman, Merrill, Bogan, Ciardi, Cummings, Eberhart, Frost, Graves, Hecht, Jarrell, Kunitz, Lowell, Merrill, Merwin, Moss, Nemerov, Sexton, Spender, Wilbur, William Jay Smith & James Wright.

The fourth issue of The Electronic Poetry Review is now live and includes a talk that I gave a couple of years ago at the annual confab of the Modernist Studies Association, “The Desert Modernism,” focusing in part on the question of why William Carlos Williams would have chosen to write a poem in 1951 that would lead to the famous, if somewhat abashed, affirmation of

                                             I am a poet! I
am.  I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed.

As I so often do when thinking about the history of poetry, I try to articulate a social context for Williams’ sense of isolation, which I do partly in terms of Objectivism:

The early 1950s was the nadir of Objectivism. Zukofsky, completing “A” 12 in 1951, would not touch the poem again until 1960. Some Time, Zukofsky's gathering of his shorter works between 1940 and 1956, contains just 33 poems for its seventeen years. In her bibliography of the composition of these works, Zukofsky's wife Celia notes that, in 1954, the only poetry he wrote were two sections of “Songs of Degrees,” one a nine-line valentine, the other “William / Carlos / Williams // alive!” George Oppen hadn't written anything since 1934. Charles Reznikoff was self-publishing and the collection Inscriptions: 1944-1956 takes up only 30 pages in his Complete Poems. Lorine Niedecker had published just one book and that with a publisher in Prairie City, Illinois; she would not publish another until Ian Hamilton Finlay brought out My Friend Tree in Scotland in 1961. “The Spoils,” which Basil Bunting wrote in 1951 was his first major piece of poetry since 1935 and last until 1965. He wrote just three odes, as he called his shorter poems, in the 1940s and none in the 1950s.

The talk in general and this passage in particular provoked a most interesting and thoughtful email from Eliot Weinberger, which he has kindly given permission for me to reprint here. I don’t agree with everything he says but he’s got me pondering the need to re-vision the 1950s in particular beyond the canonic box that is Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. Here is Weinberger’s perspective:

Along with the silence/invisibility of the “objectivists,” you should add Rukeyser, who published no new books between 1948 and 1962. WCW told a depressed Reznikoff to keep writing, no matter what, so Rezi wrote the novel “Manner Music.”

I think you underestimate the presence of Pound who, though locked up, was writing a zillion letters a day and entertaining endless visitors. It's also a period of the first standard editions of Ez: 1948, Cantos; 1949, Selected Poems; 1950, Letters; 1953, Translations; 1954, Literary Essays. Then in 1954 you have the Confucian Odes and in 1955 Rock-Drill. He couldn't be more visible, however immobile.

I also wonder about WCW's isolation. If you look at his letters and essays from the time, he's praising (and is in contact with) a lot of poets: Lowell, Eberhart, Roethke, Rexroth, Harvey Shapiro, MacLeod, etc-- besides the New Americans you mention (Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg) and the honorary New American, Corman.

Also in the period you have Rexroth’s “Signature of All Things,” “Dragon and the Unicorn” and “Beyond the Mt” (reviewed by WCW). And Patchen had books from ND, Jargon, and the first City Lights pocket pamphlets.

I'm as guilty as everyone else, maybe more guilty, but I increasingly wonder whether we're all not prisoners of the Don Allen taxonomy. The problem is that Allen overlooks a (small) sort-of generation between the objectivists and the New Amers: Rexroth, Rukeyser, Patchen, etc. And the anthology wars c. 1960 obscured genuine affinities, at least in the early 50's. Lowell considered himself a Poundian; he loved WCW; everyone remembers his famous “raw and the cooked” as referring to him and Ginsberg, but in fact, RL thought he was one of the “raw,” compared to Wilbur etc. WCW and Roethke are not in opposition, etc. It is forgotten that Origin was pitched on two poets: Olson and Bronk, whom no one would put together any more. And the Allen obscured genuine hostilities: Joel Oppenheimer used to tell about Beats and Black Mountaineers getting into fistfights at the Cedar Tavern.

Is WCW in 1950-55 more isolated aesthetically/personally than anyone else, or himself at any other time? Snyder says somewhere that in the spiritual wasteland of the 50's one would hitchhike a thousand miles just to have someone to talk to. Outside of a few small groups-- like the SF Ren and the Black Mteers who were actually at Black Mt (unlike the Blk Mt group in Allen) and the inner-circle Beats-- how much physical community was there anyway?

Could the proverbial Martian be able to sort the poems c. 1950 of Levertov, Eberhart, Roethke, Duncan, Rexroth, etc into “avant-garde” and “establishment”? Maybe there's a new history to be written.