Unquestionably the most ironic inclusion in the new issue of Radical Society is Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian exile turned Louisiana academic & part of NPR’s decorative collection of “quaint dialect” commentators alongside the likes of Bailey White. For reasons that are understandable enough, Codrescu has always been an anti-Communist & resistant to the idea that would be shades of difference between the likes of, say, Stalin & western Marxists in general. To find Codrescu in a journal that was issued initially under the banner Socialist Revolution is itself an index of exactly how much the world has transformed in the past thirty years.

Not that Codrescu can stop himself from revisiting the past in introducing the work of Eugen Jebeleanu (1911-1991), whom he characterizes as the “epic poet” of Romania’s Communist period (1947-89). In Codrescu’s narrative, Jebeleanu started as a true believer in Soviet bloc modernism. Codrescu compares him with Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda & Yannis Ritsos, all of whom played important roles in their own national literatures. However, as the Stalinist project decayed into “folk kitsch,” Jebeleanu rebelled. In Codrescu’s words, “Jebeleanu woke up.”

The poetry we are offered in Radical Society comes from Jebeleanu’s later works, when he has become a lyric surrealist of a modern, maybe even post-modern type. Vasco Popa & Tomaž Šalamun are closer in temperament & style to the works that Mathew Zapruder has translated here (and elsewhere across the web – Zapruder has been the key to Jebeleanu’s arrival in the West) than Yevtushenko or Vosnesenski.

The poems themselves are okay but the question they raise for me is one of value with regards to the context of language & state. What does it mean to be a national figure as a poet when the nation itself consists of just 22 million people? It’s a question that bedevils any thoughtful writer, regardless of our proximity to the imperial center. Twenty-two million people is notably fewer than the number who live in Canada, which itself has only two-thirds of the population of California. The situation for any Canadian poet is in some ways more complex, given their participation in at least two larger linguistic literary traditions as well as their nearness to the heavy-handed hegemon along their Southern rim. But these broader traditions mean that a writer like Steve McCaffery, George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje or Nicole Brossard can reach & have an impact far beyond their borders without necessarily having to submit to the curiously alienating process of translation, whereas the Romanian-writing Jebeleanu was constrained by a literary community that did not exist significantly outside of his country’s own borders.

Twenty-two million certainly makes a nation if it so chooses. Romania’s population today ranks 47^th among the 235 nations of the world, well ahead of Australia & Greece, though smaller than Uzbekistan or Tanzania. It’s twice the size of Pennsylvania, maybe 1½ times the size of metropolitan New York. This is precisely where questions of state & language on the one hand and the value of the local on the other flood one another. One poet becomes, in Codrescu’s formulation (for which he credits Allen Ginsberg), the “epic poet” of his nation, another is merely a New York School writer in a town that is itself wider & more diverse than that.

One Sunday last November, I posted an email from Juliana Spahr in which she argues for a diversity of literatures:

I think it is crucial that we all not be scared of the diversity of contemporary poetries. I think it is a great sign of health. I love it. I like to think, and I think it might be true even, that right now, when I am alive, right now there are more poetries or I have the possibility of reading more poetries than humans at any other time. What a huge weird world of poetries! I can't read it all. I admit it. But what a great thing.

Yet, now the note of sadness, what has happened is a peculiar myopia. I say this over and over, but one of the strangest, saddest?, things that is the result of this wealth is not that it is hard for readers, but that so few of these poetries talk to each other. So language poets and Nation language/Caribbean poets and pidgin/Bamboo Ridge poets and Scots poets and etc. all have these arguments against standard English. They are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet the poets so rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost opportunity.

Spahr’s complaint, which is completely legit, seems to me the obverse face of this same coin. For these poets to meet, to truly commingle & communicate, there has been a commons & little magazines are never that. Either they are local, if not to a region, then to an aesthetic, or else they are entirely shapeless. Neither strategy can claim to solve the problem of the minority language writer exiled within a city or state of another tongue. Neither can bring Jebeleanu’s poetry to us without the intermediation of a Mathew Zapruder (aided in Radical Society by Radu Ioanid). Writers who inhabit more than one such world – I’m thinking of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa as one example, but Edwin Torres could just as easily serve as another – never do so abstractly. They are as specific to their respective contexts, each one, as a human could be.

It’s not clear what the role of poetry will prove to be in Radical Society over time. The history of Socialist Review doesn’t necessarily auger well. The journal has had what can only be characterized as a tortured relationship to culture over the decades.* The presence of so much creative work in the first issue of the new regime is noteworthy, but so is the somewhat scatter-gun nature of its aesthetics. Hirschman’s Depestre and Codrescu’s Jebeleanu fall into the category of a late modernism of the margins. Charles Bernstein & Katha Pollitt may have attended Harvard at the same time, but they represent radically divergent poetics. & only Sikelianos offers a sample of what writing might be like by anybody under the age of 50. Samples of diverse poetics presented precisely as that comes closer to a mode of literary tourism** than it does to the commons for which Spahr & I yearn alike.

Where is Radical Society heading? We shall see.

* Thus the journal may have published Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” but it twice – several years apart – failed to accept Samuel R. Delany’s classic response to Haraway.

** Thus it strikes me -- & the Sikelianos piece I looked at yesterday is what really drove this home – as being poetry for people who don’t read poetry, that curious genre. But does that expand the audience for poetry or merely absolve these non-readers from ever having to confront all of poetry’s gloriously incommensurate difficulties?

Reading Eleni Sikelianos’ poem, an excerpt from a longer text entitled “California,” in the new issue of Radical Society, I had a strange experience. I felt the presence of Michael McClure. Not the McClure of the Ghost Tantras, the plays or the ecstatic howls of the should-have-been ineffable, but rather the cosmological McClure, the PBS pop science McClure, casting into centered texts meditations based on things he’s seen or read about the natural world in the popular media. For example, this piece, entitled “For the Death of 100 Whales”:

Hung midsea
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers

Brains the size of a teacup
Mouths the size of a door

The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.

Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.

Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.

This poem, which McClure read at the Six Gallery reading in 1955 that helped to spark the so-called Beat Revolution – & not co-incidentally first pointed out to the world at large that San Francisco was as vital a center for American letters as New York – is predicated on an April 1954 story in Time magazine about, in McClure’s own words,

seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.

Although this is not the kind of poem that McClure is typically represented by in the anthologies, it is a type of poem that he has written his entire life. Its value lies not in McClure’s research – none is involved – but rather in the way he imbues the topic with emotion & narrative figuration. In a sense, this is the opposite of the “research poem,” whether of the Pound-Olson variation with their unintentional parodies of the scholar fumbling around in the archives or of the more journalistic “investigative poetry” approach advocated in recent decades by Ed Sanders. Another poet who literally made use of PBS and other mainstream media not only for ideas, but for layers of content thus displayed, was Larry Eigner.

When I was growing up as a poet in the 1970s, I used to hear other writers comment negatively – sometimes emphatically so – about this side of McClure’s poetry, as though it were a kind of debased product & that, in working from sources in everyday media, McClure was essentially revealing a kind of laziness that was at the heart of his project, not unlike the equally scandalous process of allowing other people type up his holographic manuscripts & perform what in the age of the typewriter was not an inconsequential function: the centering of his lines.

Somewhere along the line I decided that this was a bad rap. In an age where Andy Warhol & others – this was still pre-Jeff Koons – were utilizing assistants to help construct the work of art*, any insistence on doing your own research struck me as a kind defensive measure on the part of writers who felt that, if such aid & delegation were possible, then perhaps readers might not appropriately appreciate their own devotion to all the ancillary tasks that might envelop the act of writing. The work that struck me as the decisive argument for the permissibility of appropriated materials as a source for literature was Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony.

The primary differences between Reznikoff’s approach & McClure’s are (1) Reznikoff’s focus was the social while McClure has been more drawn to the natural world & (2) Reznikoff’s approach to these materials has been one of minimal overt commentary, almost a deadpan transparency, while McClure’s has been one of a drum-beating & hollering display of empathy. Empathy, of course, has ever been “uncool” & “unhip” & I suspect McClure had to deal with that prejudice back in the 1950s every bit as much as in the 1970s & ‘80s.**

Sikelianos’ poem skips the drum-beating & ALL CAPS HOLLERING, but in fact is an act of empathic inhabitation of a milieu inhabitable today only in the imagination:

There was still the problem

of the mystery of regenerative forces here on Earth.

My early Californians

might have been prowlers & plunderers, lover of the lower orders of intelligence

They might have had a fortunate notes or eyes or horns

of surprising size.      They were

4-handed animals or omnivorous quadrupeds or

My early Californians might have been 8-feet tall stomping around in the glacial ice

Ages-extinct fires nearly tiny dragon-headed lakes

Chasing the American camel, chewing the fat fireside & touching up a wooly mammoth,

mini-horses, imitation

bison four times the weight

of buffaloes, ground sloths the size of tanks,

giant shining armadillo roll over, silver

wheels crushing tender grasses,

Edentata belonging to the (inhabited) Earth,

edacious at the tooth

of Time, nibbling some sweet thing, fiery

Hymenoptera edulcorated by their history with men

Shades of Forrest Gander! This text itself has been edulcorated – that c can be pronounced either hard or soft according to the OED – by polysyllables a-babble. What we have here –the quotation above constitutes maybe one-fifth of the Radical Society excerpt – is poem as nature museum diorama.

Writing of Earliest Worlds last September, I noted how Sikelianos’ work there included lines that were “among the most thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly heard (&, not coincidentally, felt) since Charles Olson was a young man.” Almost by its nature & certainly by its genre, “California” is a more relaxed piece of writing. It’s probably accessible to a broader range of readers, albeit at the cost being less exhilarating to that core who’ve seen what Sikelianos at her most intense can do.

Which brings my back to Michael McClure & the question of choices in writing. The very qualities – empathy & narrative figuration – that I suspect enabled the Radical Society editorial board to include this work in the first issue of the journal’s new life are those which are most apt to divide poetry’s primary group of readers, who may well find it all too “inauthentic.” Since this is an excerpt, it will be interesting to see how “California” develops & also how it’s received.

* If Sol Lewitt actually drew all those lines on art museum walls himself, he’d end up in the American Visionary Art Museum.

** Thus, for example, I don’t recall ever having seen an article that fully explored what I take to be McClure’s greatest contribution to poetry – his exquisite sense of the pacing of detail. It’s a side of his writing that shows up most sharply delineated in the cosmology poems.

Radical Society is here. Its very first issue is labeled Vol. 29, No. 1, because the journal is in fact a reinvention, a resurrection of the old Socialist Review, whose executive editor I was from 1986 until 1989*, originally founded under the name Socialist Revolution in 1970. You could, if you wished, trace the journal back further to a split in the editorial board of Studies on the Left in the 1960s, when one faction wanted to make that journal the official publication of what was then presumed to be a potentially successful revolutionary party that was seen to be forming in the United States.

Socialist Review found a good deal of its liveliness & an even larger portion of its own internal strains & turmoil in having not one, but two editorial collectives, geographically distant, each with its own demographic, politics & culture. That the journal survived as long as it did under the stewardship of dueling collectives was itself a miracle, a marriage born to some degree out of mutual convenience. Originally founded by a group centered (and largely funded) by Studies on the Left veteran James Weinstein (who would later create & publish In These Times), SR, as everyone seemed to call the journal, originally was the project of a group of folks in the San Francisco Bay Area who had gone through the 1960s together. Some were out of school & working as political activists; others had gone on to grad school. All shared the perception that the left in the United States suffered from a lack of theoretical understanding. When three of the first-editorial-generation grad students all got jobs in the Boston area, a second editorial collective was started**. Very soon, one collective had evolved entirely into tenured academics, while the other consisted of (generally younger & poorer) grad students & activists. While the tension between the two collectives was sometimes unbelievable, the Boston’s group economic focus proved a useful balance to the West Coast collective, which periodically introduced some extraordinary work, perhaps most notably Donna Haraway’s “Manifest for Cyborgs.”***

SR very much reflected the history & fate of the ‘60s generation up until the early 1990s, when an attempt to “pass the baton” to a younger cohort ran into difficulties, the collectives seemed to fall apart, as did a distribution deal with Duke University Press. Now Radical Society has emerged with a mostly new collective – SR veterans Barbara Epstein & Howard Winant on the new editorial board – the term “collective” seems to have been retired – as are, among others, Kira Brunner, a former editor of Dissent & co-editor of The New Killing Fields; Peter Marcuse, an urban planning professor from Columbia; Vanessa Mobley of New Republic Books; fiction writer Rachel Neumann; Greg Smithsimon, a grad student at Columbia; Daraka Larimer-Hall, organizer for the Young Democratic Socialists (the youth organization of Democratic Socialists of America); Ellen Willis, author of No More Nice Girls who teaches communications at NYU; and Laura Secor of the Boston Globe.

Radical Society continues SR’s tradition of left contrarianism by making its big article in its first issue Ellen Willis’ “Why I am not for Peace.” While hardly an endorsement of George W’s cowboy imperialism, Willis does outline the case from a position not far removed from the one being made these days by Salman Rushdie, that Hussein must be removed to end the torment of the Iraqi people.

This is followed a column in which four commentators respond to a blurb from U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. As interesting as the responses are the respondents: journalist Abid Aslam, psychoanalyst George Saki, Nation columnist Katha Pollitt & poet Charles Bernstein, who offers up a theory of spf – surreptitious policy factor.

Nor is Bernstein the only poet to show up in this issue. “Café Europa” is a talking piece given by David Antin, presented here as an essay with curious formatting. There is a sizeable selection of works by Romania’s epic poet Eugen Jebeleanu, with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu. There is a full-page poem, “A Rainbow for the Christian West,” by René Depestre, translated by Jack Hirschman. And finally, there is a two-page excerpt from a poem entitled “California,” written by Eleni Silelianos.

* I stayed on the West Coast editorial collective until the pressures of a difficult twin pregnancy swallowed up what little time & energy I had available in late 1991.

** There was briefly an attempt to create a third collective in New York, but it failed to take root.

*** Unfinished Business: 20 Years of the Socialist Review, published by Verso, is an excellent collection of pieces reflecting the perspective of both collectives (I write this as a co-editor of the volume). Even the blurbs on the back of the paperback reflect the tension between the two: Noam Chomsky weighing in for the Boston Collective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for the West Coast.