One point that I’ve made three times* since I began the Blog a little over a month ago is that themes, for me at least, don’t work. That is to say, I literally can’t read them. Them, in this instance, being poems with a point. When I try, the poem invariably loses my interest before I complete the text. My experience as a reader is that it feels like coercive sentiment & I find myself physically repelled by the poem. The affect is nausea. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with the sentiment or not. Nor for that matter does it need to be about war or politics – I’ve had the same problem with any number of other noble topics, from AIDS to the environment to love.

Great political poetry – & by extension thematic poetry – is not impossible. I would point to Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra, Part II” and Robert Duncan’s “The Fire, Passages 13” as two of the finest works of the past fifty years, let alone two of the best political poems. In each instance, the devastation & viciousness that is the essence of war** functions as no more than one axis around which a much wider range of reference is organized. The experience of each poem is to move outward, incorporating a broader & much richer cross-section of the world than, say, just the political. In the process, each contextualizes (thus making a case for the importance of) the underlying theme itself.

With its massive deployment of parallelisms invoking a tone right out of the Old Testament and the call-&-response oral traditions of the black Baptist church, Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America” is neither great poetry nor simply another commemorative bauble by Pinsky, Collins or Angelou. At one level, the poem is about the palpable but nonetheless abstract presence of evil in the world itself. At another, the dizzying juxtapositions that are yoked together via the constant question – “Who? Who? Who?” – play with the concept of paranoia itself. Anti-Semitism runs throughout the poem, not simply in the few lines that have been scattered widely about the media. So do anti-capitalism, anti-authoritarianism and a limited version of anti-racism. But ultimately it is the referential range of Baraka’s juxtapositions –

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

– that restricts the poet’s impulse. The poem exists entirely at the level of public discourse. There may be moments of referential opacity if you don’t get a reference, but none of intimacy. It may help some readers to know that “Little Bobby” is Bobby Hutton, the first person to sign on with Huey Newton & Bobby Seale in Oakland’s Black Panther Party, gunned down at the age of 18 by the police there on April 6, 1968, but the poem does nothing to suggest that Hutton, or anyone for that matter, has any reality or meaning beyond the headlines from which the poem is constructed. Private life is reduced to the mention of a tax cut.

The public reactions to this poem have generally missed its playful elements as well as the way in which that reiterated baseline who who echoes a genuine howl of grief that is also present & perfectly audible in the text. It is in the nature of public discourse to miss just such elements of life, poetic justice of sorts for a text that is so indebted to this same discourse. But the ineluctable problem of any thematic text almost invariably has to do with its reduction of discourse. Duncan & Ginsberg could not be more radically opposed to Baraka.

* With respect to Chain, Louis Cabris & Ted Berrigan, and Kit Robinson.

** It matters little whether or not the war can be “justified.”

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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