Yesterday, I noted the degree to which the reception of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems constitutes an act of literary CPR, an attempt to return the School of Quietude (SoQ) back to the imaginary hegemony it once fantasized as its birthright.

 

Lowell’s advocates are not unaware of the odds they face, or the difficulties involved in resurrecting something quite this moribund. They themselves have problems with a lot of Lowell’s writing: “if the equivalent of Uncle Artie had written ‘Day by Day,' published shortly before Lowell died, it would have seemed slack and listless,” writes Pritchard in the New York Times. These partisans are also skeptical as to whether the historical moment will allow their genie to be squeezed back into the lamp. Times Book Review editor McGrath writes

 

If someone of Lowell-like talent and Lowell-like ambition were to come along now, it's not a given that poetry would be his or her No. 1 career choice. If you had a literary bent and really wanted to become famous and leave a stamp on your generation, you would write novels or screenplays. Or, better yet, you would set your verses to a bass line and become a rap artist.

 

Leave to the Times not to notice, since its advertisers still have budgets, that the normative adult novel as an art form is far deader than even the poetry of the School of Quietude & that Hollywood’s idea of a screenplay is, literally, Dumb and Dumberer.

 

Part of the great frustration one senses from Lowell’s acolytes has to do with the fact that his generation in general & Lowell in particular failed to quash the rabble – the Olsons & Ginsbergs & O’Haras – in his day, thus enabling all manner of post-avant nonsense to come tumbling after. By the time Lowell died, the School of Quietude was completely outnumbered. While they may be able to keep the representation of post-avant poets in the Norton to a few, the existence of a Norton Postmodern just demonstrates how complete the revolution has been. McGrath bemoans a world in which “poetry has become an art form with more practitioners than actual readers.” Not dealing with the contradiction that such an actual renaissance of practicing poets suggests – & apparently ignorant of the role trobar clus has had in writing for at least 600 years – McGrath opines that this may be because “Lowell may have belonged to the last generation to believe seriously in the poetic vocation.”

 

The implication just beneath the surface of all these texts is that Lowell et al didn’t deal these threats from outside because Lowell & more than a few of his comrades – Berryman, Sexton, Plath, Schwartz, Jarrell – were bonkers. “They were all a little nuts,” as McGrath puts it, &, “except for the teetotaling Jarrell, they were all alcoholic.” (These are the “horrific odds” that Caroline Fraser finds Lowell pitted against in her fawning LA Times review.)

 

But I think the reality of the situation is different. For one thing, Lowell himself was never so hostile to the New American poetry &, after a reading series on the West Coast in 1957 introduced him to readers who placed greater demands on poetry than he was used to in Boston (or at least the Boston he knew), Lowell’s own poetry changed. Indeed, reading the reviews as they come out now, it’s always important to see where the reviewer stands with regards to the Early vs. Late Lowell question. Lowell himself never rejected the idea of “confessional poetry,” M. L. Rosenthal’s hokey attempt to link Lowell up with the writing of Ginsberg & the Beats in an attempt to render Lowell interesting by association.

 

Where younger writers – Bly, Merwin, Rich – brought up essentially in the same tradition as Lowell were able to form a new aesthetics once they dropped the crabbed, metered works of their youth, Lowell’s rather endless late sonnets show a poet unable to break fully free. It’s no wonder he idolized Hart Crane, the SoQ practitioner from his parents’ generation who also glimpsed the implications of modernism (& its descendants), & who similarly struggled to identify a “third way” between the School of Quietude & the broad tradition of avant writing.

 

The poems in Hank Lazer’s Doublespace – and especially Lazer’s later writing – demonstrate that there really is no third way. The closest thing we have to it in contemporary American poetry is ellipticism, the tendency that one might cobble together from, say, the work of Jorie Graham, C. D. Wright, Ann Lauterbach, Forrest Gander & their peers, seems more of a decision deferred than a uniting of opposites. That most of the poets who come to ellipticism do so as refugees from the broader SoQ tradition suggests further that the problem both Crane & Lowell confronted – what should an intelligent poet do when they realize that they’ve been writing within a tradition that no longer has any compelling reason to exist? – has not gone away.

Whenever I feel too completely dismissive of Robert Lowell, I think of Bob Grenier. Grenier studied with Lowell at Harvard &, I believe, it was Lowell who helped Grenier get into the Writers Workshop at Iowa City even as the triumvirate of Creeley, Zukofsky & Stein were beginning to render Grenier opaque to the Brahmin crowd back in the Bay State. You can still find vestiges of Lowell’s influence, though, in Grenier’s first book, Dusk Road Games: Poems 1960-66, published by Pym-Randall Press of Cambridge, Mass.:

 

On the lawns before the brown House

on the hill above the city

the wheeled sick sit still in the sunshine –

 

Lowell turns up again as an influence in the “conservative” portion of Hank Lazer’s remarkable Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989, his attempt to bridge the gulf between Le School d’ Quietude & post avant poetics. One of Marjorie Perloff’s first books was her 1973 The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell.

 

But what always gets in the way of any possible admiration I might have for Lowell is his poetry. When it was first published in 1946, Lord Weary’s Castle – that title alone tells you everything about literary allegiances – was read, rightly, as a turn away from any poetics of direct speech, not only anti-Williams & the polyglot circus of Pound’s Cantos, but even anti-Frost & anti-Auden. For the New Critics, the conservative agrarian poets who were at that same moment consolidating their hold on English departments across the United States & beginning to wonder about their legacy, Lowell was an affirmation of their larger program. It didn’t hurt that he was a Lowell, either. By the time he was 30, Lowell had already won the Pulitzer Prize and had a photo spread in Life Magazine.

 

Yet Lowell, especially the early Lowell, is seldom a good poet for more than two or three lines at a time, which invariably are buried in larger lugubrious monologs that do little more than show a man unable to actually get to his own writing through his presumptions about “what poetry should be.” It is precisely that should be, the sense of obligation to a dead aesthetic inherited from a mostly imaginary British Literary Heritage, that I take to be behind David Antin’s famous line “if robert lowell is a poet i don’t want to be a poet,” a sentiment that was virtually universal among the poets I knew in the 1960s & ‘70s. Still, in 1964, on a week when Time magazine could have focused on the aftermath & implications of the first Harlem riots of the decade, it chose instead to feature Lowell on its cover.

 

In a sense, it was on Lowell’s watch as the Guardian of High Literary Value that the barbarians, led by Olson, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Levertov, Ashbery, Duncan, Creeley, O’Hara & LeRoi Jones, overthrew at last any residual pretense of a cohesive literary tradition extending outward from a “center” built around the School of Quietude (SoQ). Much of the reaction this past week to the release of an 1,186 page Collected Poems, published by the SoQ house press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has I think to do with reactions to this phenomenon.

 

On the one hand, you would expect the SoQ to be beating the drums, proclaiming this to be the literary event of the year. & there has been some of that. The subhead to Peter Davison’s review in The Atlantic Monthly, a journal founded by James Russell Lowell, reads “The new collection of Robert Lowell's poems will doubtless stand from now on as The Work.” Similarly, the subhead to a review A. O. Scott, the New York Times film critic, in Slate, calls Lowell ”America’s most important career poet.” The Los Angeles Times, which chose a woman who wrote a book on “living and dying” in the Christian Science church to review Lowell’s Collected, says that “the magnitude of Lowell's achievement — an achievement won against horrific odds — can now come fully and magnificently into view.” That at least deserves some sort of award for overwriting.

 

At the same time there has been a lot of ambivalence expressed in the reviews as well, not so much at the poetry as at the career & faded reputation, suggesting a deeper (and not overtly expressed) anxiety about what his life & work say about the SoQ in general. The New York Times ran a Sunday Magazine piece on “The Vicissitudes of Literary Reputation,” by Charles McGrath, editor of that journal’s Book Review. W. H. Pritchard’s review in the Times notes that “Lowell had no place to go but down.” Newsday ran a review under the subhead “Robert Lowell was revered in his lifetime but is largely forgotten today.” Caroline Fraser in the LA Times quotes Donald Hall from a Boston Globe article, “You don’t hear his name much.”

 

But you shall. The Collected represents in many ways one final chance for the School of Quietude to resuscitate any residual life left in the Lowell heritage. A parallel project ten or fifteen years from now on behalf of Richard Wilbur certainly won’t do it. So it’s now or never. If this act of literary CPR doesn’t work, the Brahmin sub-sect of the SoQ will be stuck forever continuing to make do with its imported poets from the U.K. & Ireland.

So what do poets from the school of quietude mean when they say that they’re “more traditional,” if in fact their tradition is no longer, & may even be shorter, than that of post-avant poetries? I think that traditional in this sense means this: always already familiar.

 

What these poetries have in common, with a very few exceptions (virtually all from the vicinity of ellipticism), is consistency of viewpoint, narrative or expository lines that are treated as unproblematic, language that integrates upwards to meta-levels such as character, plot or theme. Most of these poetries are set up to avoid at all costs that which the Russian Formalists called ostranenie & Brecht later characterized as the alienation- or A-effect, the admonition to make it new, make it strange. As Shklovsky put it in Art as Technique back in 1917,

 

The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

 

Post-avant poetries, whether happy-go-lucky Actualism, furrowed brow langpo, or the post-Oulipo linguistic pyrotechnics of a Christian Bök, all have this in common. It was true of Emily Dickinson & William Blake & it’s true today of Jim Behrle & Mary Burger. To the school of quietude, however, this approach is virtually the Sign of the Beast.

 

Thus Daisy Fried characterized post-avant poetics as “anti-coherency” when in fact this tendency has a consistently more rigorous approach to the question of coherence than does its opposite, which simply presumes it. Chris Lott characterizes the Other as

 

indicative of a sense that only what is new and experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the idea is clear enough) can be any good.

 

Lott’s ability to insert clarity & precision as though they were the opposites of new and experimental is an especially adept touch.

 

Of Noah Eli Gordon’s exclusion from an anti-war reading in Amherst,  Matthew Zapruder wrote,

 

I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is willing to grant that the notion of “difficulty” has any place at all in poetry. That’s an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely thought that Noah’s poem was too difficult to work effectively in that situation.

 

Zapruder’s characterization of the situation is most compelling, precisely because what he finds troubling is exactly that which Shklovsky – whose influence on linguistics through Roman Jacobson &, through Jacobson, the Prague School of Linguistics & later the New School for Social Research, on everything from New Criticism through Structuralism, was profound – identifies as the fundamental dynamic of art. In short, the problem that the organizers’ of that particular reading had with Gordon’s poetry was that it was poetry. They wanted to ensure an experience of something else altogether.

 

Lott’s conception of poetry as a pure spectrum, with “experimentation” at one end & maybe the old new formalism at the other, is a world without history. His music analogy presumes that one could switch seamlessly between poets the way one might between the jazz of John Zorn, the country music of Dolly Parton, Eminmem’s white boy rap & some arias from Tosca by Placido Domingo. In point of fact, if you really appreciate David Pavelich’s poetry, the verse of Philip Levine is going to appear bloated & full of posturing, brimming with bad faith & false consciousness. Ray Carver won’t fare a whole lot better, though Bob Hass & Marie Ponsot will. I’ve argued before & will happily do so again that the general aesthetics of the school of quietude are so ass backwards that whenever somebody from that context does write well, they virtually have to be a genius. They really are making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear & all the more power to them for that.

 

But it has been the school of quietude’s near stranglehold on certain economic institutions, particularly of the small press scene that poses as trade publishing in America, secondarily of a number of the awards programs, finally of all too many university curricula, that transforms these antimodernists from merely being the verse equivalent of the Harlequin novel into something more heavy handed & sinister. The requirement of kitsch that is at the heart of the poetry programs of The Atlantic, the New Yorker, The Nation & like-minded organizations is one thing. But the school of quietude’s insistence that this “part of the spectrum” then be taken seriously reminds me of something far more like the garden party scene in The Manchurian Candidate than anything else. Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is not a good model for a critical reader, but he has the school of quietude routine down pat. The behavior that Ange Mlinko complained of on Thursday, which has been documented so many times that it goes beyond the ridiculous – begin with Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum & proceed to Hank Lazer’s Opposing Poetries, especially vol. one – has all the characteristics of cultural genocide. What is curious is that Lott seems surprised that people have emotions about this sort of behavior.

 

Finally, the school of quietude claiming any heritage from the likes of Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman is not merely disingenuous & silly, it raises to the level of consciousness just what these antimodernists would most like to forget – that only period specialists in the academy still read the likes of Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, Sidney Lanier & James Russell Lowell, their real tradition. How exactly do these poets imagine that their fate will be any different?

For the past couple of days, ever since I got Chris Lott’s email, I’ve been drafting & redrafting a response. I haven’t been happy with any of them.

 

I’m not unsympathetic with Lott’s quandary. Certainly not by comparison with Ange Mlinko yesterday. It’s apparent to anybody who reads Lott’s blog that he’s serious, well intentioned & open to a wider than usual range of writing. I believe him completely when he writes that

 

it is downright disheartening to feel as if that which one loves is not just being supplemented by another kind of beauty, but being downright beset as a relic of tradition that is holding the art back.

 

Lott’s desire for a completely ecumenical approach to poetry in which one might read David Pavelich, then Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, then Annie Finch, echoes at one level what Juliana Spahr wrote here last November: 

 

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.

 

Yet there are two aspects of Lott’s complaint that strike me as troubling. One is its assumption that one poetry is “more traditional” than another – Lott’s problem being that this is taken by some post-avant poets as a pejorative. Rereading the same exchange with Daisy Fried from December 3 that Lott cites, I realize that she makes this same equation. I don’t buy it.

 

In the U.S., at least, post-avant poets can trace their heritage back to Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman & often to the likes of Blake, the young Wordsworth, or Aloysius Bertrand. To go back as far, most school of quietude poets would have to turn Tennyson, the core Romantics and the later work of Wordsworth. Both broad traditions in American verse reflect significant influences from foreign poetries, albeit different poets & aspects. The most visible difference in terms of literary heritage between the two tendencies is that the schools of quietude (SoQ) are more apt to reflect an interest in certain traditions from the British Isles – and, indeed, there is a wave of conservative British & Irish poets who have done quite well for themselves in the U.S., job & publication-wise, of late, taking spots that would otherwise have gone to home-grown SoQ poets.

 

I’m more intrigued at the idea that one often gets from school of quietude poets that their work also extends back in American letters to Dickinson or Whitman, when their own poetry so often appears to have been written at least one century earlier than either of these masters. One way to fully appreciate just how radical Dickinson is as a poet, even within the post-avant framework, is to read Michael Magee’s brilliant ongoing work, My Angie Dickinson, which appropriates Emily’s forms for a contemporary content. The way I read this work is that Magee is doing the same sort of “parallelogram” with Dickinson’s poems that Meredith Quartermain does with Robin Blaser’s in Wanders. It’s an amazing & still evolving project – I know I’m not the first to have noticed – & confirms my impression that E.D. would never get into print in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Atlantic, The New York or even The Nation, were she alive today. Indeed, she wouldn’t be allowed to participate in anti-war readings put on at the campuses around her own hometown of Amherst.

 

So I think there are two things occurring when poets claim that one tendency is “more traditional” than another. The first is a certain amount of obfuscation. School of Quietude poetry is not traditional in the sense of fitting into that heritage, but rather extending from a different literary narrative altogether, one that was for so many decades opposed to precisely such writing: Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, Sidney Lanier & James Russell Lowell, for starters.

 

“Traditional” in the way it’s used by SoQ poets doesn’t in fact mean working within a tradition. Rather, it’s a stance toward the role of change within art that is most often being staked out by such a term. Change is not easy for anyone but in the SoQ world, it’s positively excruciating. Remember how dramatic the writing of the young Brahmins in the 1950s & ‘60s who revolted – Bly, Merwin, Plath, Rich, in particular – was perceived to have been. Adrienne Rich, for example, chose to publish the title poem of her breakthrough Diving into the Wreck in Clayton Eshleman’s journal Caterpillar, not because Eshleman has ever been considered a paragon of feminist politics, but because the alternatives available to her at the time were so very few.

 

Case in point: David Ossman, better known these days for his work as part of the Firesign Theatre, published a collection of interviews in 1963 entitled The Sullen Art, taken from a series of WBAI radio interviews he had done in 1960-61. In his introduction, Ossman quotes from Gilbert Sorrentino that “the new poets are not a bunch of illiterate, barbaric, slightly criminal types,”  & addresses the issue of the two tendencies in American writing:

 

It would be unfortunate, however, to consider these writers members of a single “avant-garde” clique. They are two individual and independent to be taken for an organized junta in opposition to what has been variously called “The Academy” and “The Establishment.” Not only have many of them been teachers, but their books, published and in preparation, total some 60 volumes. It is too bad that American poetry today appears to fall into two distinct camps.

 

Ossman’s gathering of 14 anti-establishmentarians – 13 men & Denise Levertov – include not only Rexroth, Creeley, Ginsberg, Dorn, LeRoi Jones, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, Gilbert Sorrentino & Paul Carroll, but also John Logan, W.S. Merwin & Robert Bly!! The back cover’s copy isn’t kidding when it suggests that it’s erroneous to characterize these new poets as “beat.”*

 

The idea of Logan, Merwin & Bly as aesthetic rebels is laughable today. Yet in the context of the world in which they first arose as poets over 40 years ago, a universe in which Aiken, MacLeish, Lowell, Jarrell & the New Critics dominated the SoQ landscape, it was at least plausible to imagine them as closer to the New Americans than really was the case. Indeed, Bly, James Wright, Robert Kelly & Jerome Rothenberg even collaborated for awhile around the concept of a “deep image” poetics, a new tendency that dissolved as quickly as it became apparent just how radically dissimilar their own poetries & programs really were.

 

In reality, Bly, Merwin & the other rebel Brahmins were little more than a reaction formation created by the excitement of the New American Poetry – their recognition was that, in order to save the school of quietude, they had to change it. This they did mostly by importing the verse of the SoQ’s spiritual & literary cousins from Europe, either through translation or imitation. Thus was airport gate surrealism born. That the new formalists would show up a scant generation later to attempt to take back the broader direction of the School of Quietude demonstrates just how much inertia there was & is in the SoQ. The recent importing of the airport gate poets themselves suggests that this has not been a successful strategy & that folks are now hoping that such transplants will move this tendency beyond its current “on life-support” status.

 

I said that there were two aspects to Lott’s plahn that bothered me. I’ll get to the other tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

* Almost as puzzling today as the presence of Bly, Merwin & Logan in Ossman’s anthology is the absence of any New York School poets in a series taped & broadcast in New York City.

Ange Mlinko has a response to Chris Lott’s email yesterday.

 

Dear Ron,

 

I have often wanted to drop you a note saying how much I liked this or that in the blog, but the exigencies of new parenthood limit my time on web and email. I am, however, so outraged by the letter you posted in your blog today that I have to, well, spew. You know how it is when Republicans maintain a pseudo-embattled stance in the face of the liberal "elite"? It's not enough that the school of quietude, the school of broken-up-plainspoken-prose-is-so-poetry, the school of "John Donne would totally be writing broken-up-plainspoken-prose today!" poetry, the "official verse culture," what have you, is a behemoth that systematically vanishes great poets like Robert Duncan or even John Ashbery (an acquaintance with an MFA from Southwest Texas had never heard of him) and leaves writers branded "experimental" with no place to publish except for a handful of journals they don't put out themselves. And if that sounds like sour grapes, I'll gladly be sour enough for all the excellent poets in their fifties & sixties who appear in Shiny but never in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, etc. But I'd like to save the majority of my sourness for the idea that we should all be some happy poetry family on a "spectrum." Because that's a patent lie, and the poetry establishment is afraid of great poetry (where is Michael Palmer's MacArthur? Susan Howe's? Alice Notley's? just to name a few names who are more widely influential), and anyone outside the "experimental" "club" who whines about the "club" can take a flying leap – in his Republican-borrowed suit.

 

Thanks for letting me rage.

Best,

Ange

 

I don’t entirely agree with Ange (maybe it’s because I have appeared in The Paris Review), so I will add my own two cents tomorrow & the next day.

Chris Lott, who blogs Ruminate, and I traded emails. Here is Chris’ take on things.

 

On Friday, June 06, 2003, Ron Silliman <rsillima@yahoo.com> spake thusly:

 

Thanks for reminding me. It's been awhile since I looked at your site. I'll post your note on my blog tomorrow. And I may answer that "more traditional" comment later in the week. I actually don't think it's possible for poets to more or less traditional, only to respond to different traditions.

 

I'd be interested to hear more about being more or less "traditional." I just posted a note to some friends about your response to a letter from Daisy Fried that I found reading through your weblog (I was seeking to understand what the "School of Quietude" that so many blogs kept referring to was all about, other than the Poe reference).

 

I took a pretty typical path for someone my age (early 30's) to learn about reading and writing poetry: introduced to the old masters in high school, immediately took to writing my own poems and stories, went to college and changed majors 100 times on the way to degrees in English Lit and Philosophy, emphasizing "contemporary" poetry in the former and pomo lit theory in the latter. As such, I have had what I guess to be the "school of quietude" inculcated as part of the curriculum.

 

In this respect, poetry blogs are all that they are supposed to be – were it not for following hints of threads through your site and a number of others in the same constellation, I would remain relatively unaware of a vast swath of poetry and poetics from the last 30 years.

 

Daisy Fried's letter, and your response, interested me because it seemed to be the clearest articulation yet of where I find myself in relation to a lot of this new work. It also strikes me, reading through a lot of these logs, that there seems to be a lot of vitriol towards that which isn't new and avant-garde. Is this just a natural consequence of feeling slighted by the academy and the teachers who influence so many when it comes to learning what poetry is? Or is it indicative of a sense that only what is new and experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the idea is clear enough) can be any good? One blogger mentioned Ray Carver and felt compelled to write a parenthetical (get out of my weblog, Raymond Carver) as if he had committed some avant-garde sin by acknowledging someone who simply wrote some good work out of a different tradition.

 

Whatever club there is that I am catching glimpses of through these weblogs and journals may never want me as a member. I'm not sure I could pass the "anti-tradition" check at the door, as attached as I am to some artists that seem to receive nothing but sneering contempt at the hands of the new elite within. I'm sure there are artists of every stripe who want nothing to do with any work that is outside of their comfort zone – I know I have heard the supposition that some of the poets you write about are willfully obscure, and I have theorized myself about some artists that their finished work is "the beginning of a poem that just needs some time put in to be crafted into something worthwhile" – but then again, I have said the same thing about poems that are as traditional as they come.

 

I guess it's disconcerting to be jarred out of one's comfort zone when it comes to the art they love. But it is downright disheartening to feel as if that which one loves is not just being supplemented by another kind of beauty, but being downright beset as a relic of tradition that is holding the art back. I have this same kind of relationship with music. I'm a lover of a certain era of jazz. But I find myself enamored of many kinds of music. There are some listeners who are able to cope with that, and others that feel the same way. But there are some for whom it is not enough to know what they love, they feel a need to degrade all that which is outside of that set and in the process denigrate the people who believe otherwise. I think it should be just fine to love David Pavelich and Philip Levine, or be moved by the frustration and tension in a Carver poem one minute and admire the subtle craftsmanship of Annie Finch the next. This doesn't seem to be a majority opinion.

 

If kinds of poetry form a spectrum, I'd like to think that ideally we don't have to fall in any one place. Instead we should be visible as an absorption spectrum is in the physical world – with affinities that can and should fall in many different areas, some singly and delicate, others clustered and strong, but not limited to any one place, time, or type.

 

c

Several bloggers (Jordan Davies, Jonathan Mayhew, Henry Gould) take exception to my association of the New York School v.1.0 with Auden & with that association having conditioned their reception by certain institutions, particularly the trade publishing houses. Hey, guys, that’s not an attack on the NYS, and far more of a comment on reception than on writing. Where I sometimes think that Cal Lowell at his very best had the potential to write like Frank O’Hara on Quaaludes*, Auden, as they say, had serious chops. & thank you, Kasey, for coming to the defense of my “salvageable insight.”

 

Also, to be accurate, I can’t & don’t take credit for “school of quietude” – that phrase was coined by Edgar Allen Poe. In the 1840s, Poe was caught up in the very same debate over whether American literature was British writing writ small or something altogether different when Henry Theodore Tuckerman rejected “The Tell-Tale Heart” with the admonition that Poe should “condescend to furnish more quiet articles.” That adjective did not sit so well with Poe.**

 

Because it was originally received as a break with the previous New American traditions, langpo’s own interest in & indebtedness to various aspects of the New American Poetry of the 1950s and ‘60s has not always been acknowledged. That thought runs through my head as I’m sitting here reading a wonderful book that reminds me of nothing so much as Pomo Lunch Poems, Kit Robinson’s 9:45, his seventeenth volume just now out from Post Apollo Press of Sausalito.

 

Not to suggest that these poems were written during, say, lunch hours, nor even – although I suppose it is a possibility – at 9:45, but rather that these works carry within themselves an attitude & psychic quickness that I associate with Frank O’Hara at his best.

 

These are all short poems & all have a double dynamic. First there is a relationship – at minimum in their titles – to number, numbers & numbering.*** Second, these texts operate off of a three-line stanza. What I mean by “operate off” is that the tercet  is the standard logical unit throughout, but that 13 of these 31 poems – is that numeric palindrome an accident? – have a final stanza that is either one or two lines long, because that is what the logic of the poem demanded. The form is so cleanly & powerfully defined that I have no hesitation whatsoever at describing the poem “1.5” as a three line poem in two lines:

 

Take a risk

with one and a half sticks

 

Here, in its entirety, is “$1250”:

 

Whether you gave her

first and last

and a deposit

 

Or whether the last
was the deposit
that is the question

 

This is a poem that looks simple enough, but which is doing a couple of things at once. In addition to bringing together two radically different realms – Hamlet & the rent – the poem functions by never using the key noun (rent) anywhere in the text. Each by itself is humorous, although the social situation they depict borders on tragic. Part of what makes this poem work is the degree of discipline in Robinson’s line: the breaks & italics are each exactly where they need to be.

 

Not all of the poems are as tightly woven as that. This doesn’t make them loose, but rather frees them to range over broad mindscapes in remarkably compact spaces. One favorite is “27,” the significance of whose title is entirely opaque to me:

 

The heart itself

contains genetic instructions

to like certain things

 

Pros like Jay don’t need tips

you don’t refuse to breathe, do you?

I leaned against the door and breathed

 

A word of it

and waited for my heart

which was now full of new information

 

The echoes of the last three lines of Frank O’Hara’s most famous poem, “The Day Lady Died” –

 

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

 

– are unmistakable. And, if one thinks about, O’Hara is a patron saint of the vocabulary of number in poetry. Consider that same poem’s first five lines:

 

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille Day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get of the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

 

None of this “explains” Robinson+, though it may illuminate both his project & its influences. In fact, I think of Robinson as someone whose sensibility is closer to v. 2.0 of the New York School than it might be to O’Hara. None of the first generation really had the light touch for the small stanza written entirely without waste, but it’s something you see repeatedly in Padgett, Berkson, Schjeldahl, Shapiro, Ceravolo & Fagin.++ This same touch shows up from time to time in some interesting spots among the langpos – Ray DiPalma, for example, as well as Alan Davies, Fanny Howe, Alan Bernheimer & John Mason. And you can see it elsewhere, also, among this same age cohort – Merrill Gilfillan, Curtis Faville, some of the Actualists – but nobody is more adept at it than Kit Robinson.

                                                                                 

I’m not quite sure how to characterize this capability – this sort of stanza is one of those things that I’ve learned I’m not terribly good at – but I suspect that almost any of the above would tell you that this aptitude for concision & balance is a thing that can only be achieved through a subjective sense very close to “feel.” Whenever I’ve tried it – you can find a few examples hiding in The Alphabet – I’ve felt clumsy and ham-handed. So I appreciate it all the more when I find it, in Robinson as in the poem I quoted last Tuesday by Fanny Howe. It’s a gift.

 

 

 

 

 

* The two poets in the Boston Brahmin group who could really write were Berryman & Plath. Sexton is interesting for the same reasons that Jerry Springer or reality TV are “interesting.” The poet in that tendency who deserves to be rediscovered, though, is George Starbuck.

 

** The “positive” correlate for School of Quietude, Henry, is “decorous” or perhaps “understated” or “plain-spoken.”

 

*** Whereas  the school of quietude approach to this same project would, no doubt, have been numb and numberer.

 

+ Who, for example, is Jay & what is “27?” The theme of the heart could lend itself to an almost infinite variety of interpretations.

 

++ The closest approximation you will find among those poets born in the 1920s turns out to be Creeley, but Creeley’s sense of the stanza is seldom as finished or polished in affect as this.

I came across the short list for the 1953 National Book Award for poetry &, a little like the 1957 Evergreen Review that I was looking at on Thursday, I find that it’s intriguing for what it tells me about poetry as a social phenomenon. It’s a lesson in the shifting nature of literary attention.

 

Awards, almost by definition, aren’t a good representation of the literary scene. What they register is not necessarily who’s doing good work, but rather the relative social power of different forces within the terrain, as filtered – always & only as filtered – through the specific & local politics of a given award body. The Pulitzer gathers its reputation not from the quality of its choices – which for poetry over the years have been more laughable than not – but from the simple fact that, by giving prizes to newspapers in other categories, Pulitzers get regularly reported by newspapers. The more recent National Book Critics Circle Awards demonstrates principally that book critics look to those publishers who advertise, which invariably means the trade publishers, even if somewhere above 90 percent of all poetry is published exclusively by small presses. So looking to the short list of 50 years ago is not the same as looking to the poetry of that time as it is the forces at play within what Charles Bernstein so loving calls Official Verse Culture (OVC)

 

In 1953, Archibald MacLeish won the National Book Award for poetry – he also won the Pulitzer & Bollingen that year, all for his Collected Poems 1917-1952. Five decades hence, it’s arguable as to whether MacLeish is read seriously by poets any more or merely by the professional class of scholars of modernism. MacLeish, of all the U.S. poets of the 20^th century, was the furthest from being an outsider. But he also strikes me as having been an okay poet & relatively a nice guy – if your child was to bring home a beaux who was a poet, you’d probably be happier if it was a MacLeish than an Olson, Pound, or Spicer. MacLeish, variously an editor at Fortune, Librarian of Congress and State Department official, is remembered at least as well for his friendships with the major modernists – helping Pound to get released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, for example – as he is for his poetry.

 

MacLeish’s circumstance isn’t necessarily so unusual. Of the 12 finalists for the award that year, only two strike me as being read by a substantial number of poets today:* Kenneth Rexroth & W.S. Merwin. Not necessarily by the same poets, but by poets nonetheless. For writers however marginally integrated into OVC, the news is not good – the chances are overwhelming that in 50 years very few poets will be reading your work. And, remember, this is the case for those fortunate enough to make the NBA short list. OVCers who fall outside of that inner circle of benediction can anticipate an even harder time finding audiences in the future.

 

But the nature of this integration is what strikes me as most visible from the short list. MacLeish & Merwin can both be said to fall fully inside that framework, defined for the moment as connections to New York trade publishers, major university presses, academic appointments & this reinforcing mechanism of the “award circuit” itself. Of the twelve poets on the short list, only five can be truly said to fit within that framework. In addition to MacLeish & Merwin, there were Stanley Burnshaw, something of a maverick among the New Critics in that he was active on the left; Peter Viereck, poet, historian, longtime UMass Amherst professor & already in the 950s something of a professional conservative intellectual; and Robert Silliman Hillyer**, the sonneteer who actively campaigned to have Pound’s works quashed after World War 2. Merwin, it’s worth noting, started out as a scion of the New England Brahmin formalists & would, a decade later, become one of several – Robert Bly, James Wright, Adrienne Rich were others – who dramatically transformed their poetry away from the cramped verse they had inherited.*** Merwin’s 1952 debut volume, A Mask for Janus, a Yale Younger Poets volume selected by Auden, is decidedly pre-transformation.

 

Rexroth very pointedly was never part of that world. In the light of this short list, I see him as one of four examples of “regional” verse that were being called out in 1953 to acknowledge just this phenomenon. In addition to the western Rexroth, Book Award nominees included two Appalachian regionalists, Byron Herbert Reece of Georgia & Jesse Stuart of Kentucky, and Colorado’s Thomas Hornsby Ferril, the somewhat unacknowledged founder of cowboy poetry. Reece, who committed suicide later in the 1950s, has become something of a folk figure in his native state where one of the access trails to the Appalachian Trail has been named for him.

 

This leaves three other writers, two of whom seem so distinct that it would be foolhardy to put them into a list such as regionalists, the third being more mysterious. The first of these is Ridgeley Torrence, a one-time New York City librarian who became known as a writer of plays portraying African-American life. Torrence’s work fits into a tradition of whites focusing on black culture that would include Stein’s Three Lives, Carl Van Vechten, and Dubose & Dorothy Heyward, the creators of Porgy and Bess. The husband of ghost story writer Olivia Howard Dunbar, Torrence died in 1950 and was being considered posthumously for the award.

 

Like Merwin, Naomi Replansky was nominated for her first book. She was also the only woman among the twelve nominees. Replansky continues her work as a poet to this day, although she apparently went over thirty years between her first volume, Ring Song, and her next volume. A correspondent in the 1950s with poets such as George Oppen and an out-of-the-closet lesbian during the starkly homophobic postwar years, she’s an important (if somewhat secret) figure in the history of women’s writing. Interestingly – and perhaps ironically – Replansky’s poem “Housing Shortage,” taken from Ring Song, turns up on all manner of “inspirational poetry” websites, many of which seem blithely unaware of its dimension as a poem about the personal politics of the closet:

 

I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one

Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place
With all the apparatus of living
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.

Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Given yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.

You too dreaming the same.

 

I don’t know enough about Replansky’s poetry to understand why it’s not been more widely published or read. Or perhaps it is, but by a community about which I know far too little.

 

Replansky, however, is hardly as mysterious as Ernest Kroll, nominated in 1953 for Cape Horn and Other Poems. Kroll had published at least one chapbook before this volume from Dutton, followed in 1955 by Pauses of the Eye, from the same press. Although Kroll continues to show up in tables of contents into the 1980s, mostly with a form he called the “fraxiom,” or fractured axiom, “the aim being to cause the reader to believe that two things, contradictory or complementary, have been said in almost the same time it takes to say one.” While there were some chapbooks of fraxioms (fraxia?) and one volume in an edition of 300 copies from the University of Nebraska Press in 1973, Kroll’s works appear to be entirely out of print & prove almost as hard to find on the web as Ridgeley Torrence’s. I’m unable to find out anything about the author, although I suspect he may have been part of 1953’s “regionalist” phenomena as far as the Book Award nominating committee might have been concerned.

 

I recall Andrew Schelling telling me once that he thought it was okay that poets “disappeared” over time, that it was all part of the composting of literary influences that results in a constant regeneration. I, as readers of this blog & my other work must know, feel much more ambivalent about that. I wonder, for example, how the regionalism of 1953 leads to – if it does – the regionalisms of today, such as Afrilachian poetry. I also wonder if the school of quietude doesn’t need to get off its collective butt and think about creating real institutions & traditions that would enable its writers to develop the kinds of lasting influences & reciprocity that characterize the post-avant scene’s heritage. For while the poets of quietude may get a disproportionate share of all the institutional awards for poetry, their work nonetheless seems largely destined to dissolve rapidly over time.

 

Some links to the poets on the short list for the 1953 National Book Award:

 

§         Stanley Burnshaw

§         Thomas Ferril

§         Robert Hillyer

§         Ernest Kroll

§         Archibald MacLeish

§         W. S. Merwin

§         Byron Reece

§         Naomi Replansky

§         Kenneth Rexroth

§         Jesse Stuart

§         Ridgeley Torrence

§         Peter Viereck

 

* Your chances were just as good if you were nominated in the fiction category, as were both May Sarton and William Carlos Williams.

 

** If Hillyer is a relative – most Sillimans in the U.S. can be traced back to the arrival of two brothers in Connecticut around 1680 – it’s a legal, rather than genetic connection. My paternal grandfather, born a McMahon, was renamed Silliman after being adopted.

 

***This 1960s revolt within the school of quietude has generally been lost amid the many other more flamboyant rebellions & transformations of that decade, but it is certainly worth studying in its own right. One question that might be answered by such an investigation is whether or not John Berryman’s Dream Songs & Sylvia Plath’s Ariel should be viewed as part of that rebellion, or as the liveliest elements of the tradition that remained.