Nuova Poesia Americana – San Francisco is the second volume (Los Angeles was the first) in a series of nice fat anthologies translating American poetry for the Italian reader, published by Oscar Mondadori under its Poesia del ‘900 imprint. Edited by Luigi Ballerini & Paul Vangelisti, it’s an interesting take on San Francisco poetry since, say, 1950, and makes some attempt at being broadly inclusive, containing everyone from the North Beach street poet scene (Bob Kaufman, Neeli Cherkovski) to language poets (David Bromige, yours truly, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer) to the SF Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Lew Welch, Phil Whalen, David Meltzer, Philip Lamantia) to the School of Quietude (Stan Rice, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Gillian Conoley), stretching in time from George Oppen to Jeff Clark.

There are some gems of inclusion here – Kaufman is one example, too often by-passed for any other member of the Beats, or James Schevill, the Berkeley-born poet who, having refused to sign the loyalty oath at the University of California, went on to become perhaps the defining director of the San Francisco Poetry Center before moving to Providence in the mid-60s, or Ronald Johnson, long a San Francisco poet before he returned to his native Kansas in the last decade of his life, whose prickly personality kept him from being fully active in any of San Francisco’s various literary communities. And I was ecstatic to see George Stanley included, given his importance to the scene in the 1960s. Like Joanne Kyger, also present & accounted for, Stanley is one of those writers without whom that decade of American verse – let alone Bay Area poetry – ceases to make sense, but who all-too-often is not included because he’s lived in Canada for 40 years.

There are choices here as well – this is a 500 page book, but because everyone is represented by work in both English and Italian, it has the range one might expect from a collection half its size. Contrast this with Stephanie Young’s Bay Area Poetics, which has roughly the same number of pages, but 109 contributors. It’s great to see work by Norma Cole, Leslie Scalapino & Laura Moriarty in Nuova Poesia Americana, but Jean Day, Kit Robinson & Bev Dahlen are absent. The School of Quietude selections underscore the fact that, at least after Louis Simpson fled Berkeley in the wake of the 1965 Poetry Conference, the “traditional” or “conservative” poets in the Bay Area have never really been very traditional or conservative. Adding Thom Gunn, John Logan or Kay Ryan wouldn’t really have changed that perspective (tho possibly including Chana Block or William Dickey might have). And given all the warriors from the 1950s, it’s odd that Lawrence Ferlinghetti – to whom the volume is dedicated, along with Kenneth Rexroth (also not present), Ambrose Bierce, Dashiel Hammett & Joe DiMaggio – is not found in these pages. Ditto Carl Rakosi, who spent nearly 30 years in the City after he retired. Or Tom Clark or Bill Berkson, poets whose aesthetics may shout New York, but who have lived in the Bay Area for decades. Or – and this might have been harder to articulate within the space of an anthology – writing associated with the New Narrativity: Bob Glück, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Mary Burger, Camille Roy, Michael Amnasan. How to identify a kind of writing that most often opts for fiction as its genre-coat, but also is integral to the poetry scene, as such? Realistically, tho, there are only one or two spots in this collection where one wants not just more, but different poets – I don’t see how you choose Cherkovski, for instance, when you don’t include either of the two Jacks, Hirschman or Micheline.

Given the space constraints, I wonder actually about my own inclusion here, as well as that of Jeff Clark, since both of us have moved on to other parts of the country. I did live in the Bay Area – in San Francisco as well as three different cities in the East Bay (Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, to be precise) – for over 45 years and I’d be lying to say that I wasn’t pleased to be thought of in this context, just as I am to have a plaque on Berkeley’s poets’ walk on Addison. But when resources are finite, it feels odd to be on board when others are not. And it raises the question of all the other poets who made their mark first in the Bay Area before moving elsewhere: Rae Armantrout, Erica Hunt, Stan Persky, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Jack Gilbert, Carla Harryman, Kathy Acker, Tom Mandel, Shirley Kaufman, John Wieners, James Liddy, Ted Pearson, Linda Gregg, Andrei Codrescu, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Myung Mi Kim, Larry Fagin, Mary-Margaret Sloan, Arthur Sze, Lytle Shaw. Even Louis Simpson.

Two larger absences are writing from people of color – Ishmael Reed & Kaufman are the only representatives among the 29 contributors – and writing explicitly related to the feminist movement, such as the work of poets like Pat Parker & Paula Gunn Allen, Judy Grahn or Susan Griffin. Parker & Allen would have helped on both counts. The feminist literary movement that first emerged in the 1970s is inconceivable without the presence of the Bay Area, and those writers were hardly cordoned off from the rest of the scene. Susan Griffin & I both took the same classes at San Francisco State, Parker & I read together quite regularly in the open reading series at Shakespeare & Co Books in Berkeley in the mid-1960s, Grahn & Allen both read at the Grand Piano. (Some others, like Kathleen Fraser, Frances Jaffer & Edith Jenkins, clearly drew from both that world as well as the heritage of the post avant – none of them here either.) I can make virtually the same argument for more than a few poets of color, from Al Young to Al Robles to Ntozake Shange to Janice Mirikitani to David Henderson to Jessica Hagedorn to William Anderson to Victor Hernandez Cruz to Nate Mackey to Harryette Mullen – all are completely a part of the history of Bay Area poetries. Big Oops not find at least two or three more of them here.

Some of this may just be a combination of space limitations and the difficulty of editing an anthology of this kind at some distance – Vangelisti is a long-time Los Angeles resident & chairs the MFA program at the Otis College of Art and Design. Ballerini divides his time between L.A. and New York. I certainly couldn’t do half the job they have if I were trying to put together an anthology of the Los Angeles region. But at the same time, having lived not that far outside Philadelphia now for 11 years, I’m not at all sure that I could begin to do the same job for Philly either. It really takes a full immersion in a major regional scene like that of the Bay Area – or Philadelphia or Detroit, or any major metro – to completely appreciate its richness, breadth & depth. Indeed, that’s why finding Schevill, Johnson & Stanley is so great here. Vangelisti & Ballerini have come within shooting distance of having accomplished the impossible, making this a good book to own even if you don’t read one word of Italian.

While I was in California back on July 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Afghan poetry in the U.S. on its front page. The article by Masood Farivar, which has been reprinted by a few other newspapers in places such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Alabama, is worth reading in its entirety – when was the last time you saw a cogent piece on the sociology of poetry on the front page of a newspaper? Me neither. The headline in the Journal was “For Afghan Cabbies, A Poetry Tradition Spurs War of Words.” Most of the other papers, however, realized that this wasn’t about taxi drivers, giving it the plainer, but more accurate heading of something like the Post-Gazette’s “D.C. Afghan poetry groups fight war of words.”

The gist of the article concerns two reading series that take place in the same Masonic Lodge in Springfield, VA, on different Friday nights each month. One, “An Evening with the Dervishes,” in the words of Farivar, “

prefers what it calls the serious, scholarly pursuit of poetry. The group views itself as a literary clique focusing on masters such as Abdul Qadir Bedil, a 17^th century poet and Islamic mystic, or Sufi. Its gatherings feature top scholars and poets.

The other, older series, “An Evening of Sufism,”

brings all forms of Afghan poetry to large audiences. It also treats attendees to free refreshments and pop-music performances.

The article makes a point of noting that a reader in the latter series recently “informed the audience that she’d just finished her poem in the parking lot.”

The differences between the two groups echo the division within American poetries between the School of Quietude, that ensemble of aesthetic tendencies that tends to stress the conventionality of poetry and its continuity with English literary traditions (and tensions) & the broad range of post-avant alternatives that emerged with the New American Poets of the 1950s, but which can be traced back to Whitman & Poe a century earlier. Farivar characterizes the dispute:

Mostly they adhere to Afghan social norms, treating each other with civility and even deference. Occasionally, they drop by each other's gatherings. But at times, their rivalries have burst into the open.

Members of "An Evening of Sufism" accuse the Dervishes of tearing down their flyers from Afghan stores, and have dubbed them "hash-heads," which in Afghanistan is a term associated with the uneducated.

In fact, the Dervishes seem closer to the group’s origins in a series of evenings when the poets would seriously debate the nuances of classic Afghan texts, pooling their money to call M.I. Negargar, a former Kabul University professor now living in exile in England, to tease out the full potential of the works they were discussing.

If one steps back from the specifics of the current tempest – who tore down whose flyers or who is trying to get whom kicked out of the Masonic Lodge – one sees two distinct approaches to literature emerging, one focused on the historic canon of Afghan poetry and emphasizing continuity with traditional Afghan culture – there is a move among the Dervishes, for example, to ban all forms of musical accompaniment at their readings – the other focused more on the present, which includes contemporary writing and concerns that may affect Afghan exiles in the U.S., but which would be of little import from the perspective of traditional culture in Afghanistan. Finishing a poem in the parking lot just before the start of a reading may not be the best way to present polished writing, but it certainly is one way of foregrounding the value on the present that the other group has.

The article made me wonder just how much these same divisions may underscore roughly parallel, and far older, chasms within American poetry. For example, just how much of the School of Quietude/post-avant debate can still be traced back to this nation’s origins as a gathering of exiles, one group concerned with accentuating its continuity with European cultures, especially British culture, the other hoping to foreground that which is somehow uniquely American about American poetry?¹ How does this compare with the same sort of division, say, back in the U.K., where the distinction seems instead to reflect class divisions as much as anything else (a cleavage that goes back to Shakespeare’s day, at the least, when the Bard initiated the post-avant impulse by composing his own sonnet series to demonstrate that an uneducated writer of popular entertainments from the boonies could perform at least as well as a “University wit” like Ben Jonson).

The U.S. Afghan exile literary scene dates, according to this article, back to the 1980s when the first wave of exiles began to write. The article implies, without seeming to realize that this is what it is suggesting, that the scene in Springfield, VA, represents literary processes that may be larger than just Afghan or U.S. verse, and represents an opportunity to observe an evolution in the social history of poetry not unlike the way a cyclotron enables a scientist to recreate conditions near, if not at, the Big Bang from which all current tendencies necessarily follow. Regardless of where you might fit into these broader literary traditions, the rise of Afghan poetry in the U.S. should be worth watching.

 

¹One could argue that between a colonial imperialism lurking within one tradition & an unexamined nationalism lurking in the other, that both tendencies offer ample territory for critique. This division isn’t so much about who might be “right” as it is about the values being propagated by each tendency’s agenda.

Sometime back around the days of the Kennedy administration, an American poet was penning lines such as these:

 

Cetus-white flakes of boar still are sticking to my back

like dying leeches, and the aged

strata of flesh

rippled to numb

friction by dregs of Hudsonian

wind.   Shoulder-blade armor, slabs

of the ass, lock around

shaking armadillo

candy.

 

Not the psychological jargon or landscapes of surrealism, this poetry was trying on the possibility of linguistic meaning treated very much in the manner that abstract expressionists had been treating painting. This was a poetry that did not feign speech, even as it invoked elements thereof.

 

At that moment in history – say 1963 – one could count such poetic investigators of the linguistic in the United States on the fingers of one hand. While John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1962, Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On was written initially in 1953. When the Sun, however, didn’t become widely available until published by Black Sparrow in 1969. Jackson Mac Low was also about, active as were Ashbery & Koch, in New York City, but his poetry took even longer to get into print. Mac Low’s work didn’t become widely available in book form until Black Sparrow published 22 Light Poems – the first 16 of which were written in 1962 – in 1968. That work, in spite of the elaborate methods by which Mac Low determined which light went where in the text, generally followed a traditionally discursive model. As a result the true radicalism of Mac Low’s project, although evident to those who knew him or saw him perform in & around New York, wasn’t really visible to many until Dick Higgins published Stanzas for Iris Lezak in 1971. Mac Low had been writing using chance methodologies to generate texts since the final days of 1954. Mac Low & Koch in particular appear to have been models that Ted Berrigan had in mind when he first put together The Sonnets in the spring of 1963. And that was it.

 

The result is that you have parallel but different narratives for this new writing that was no longer the mimicking the spoken. In order of composition, you get the following:

 

Koch → Mac Low → Ashbery → Berrigan

 

But in terms of publication in book form, you get a very different sequence:

 

Ashbery → Berrigan → Koch → Mac Low

 

It’s even far more complicated than I’m making it, given that, to pick just one complicating factor, Clark Coolidge published Ing with Angel Hair in 1968 (that is, prior to Koch’s Sun) & Space with Harper & Row, complete with a hardback printing, in 1970. By the time Stanzas for Iris Lezak came out, This magazine & the whole langpo scene were already gathering considerable momentum. Plus, both Ashbery & Koch had largely stepped back from the formal radicalism of their works of the 1950s. Indeed, after Three Poems, Ashbery spent the 1970s issuing his savage School of Quietude parodies – for which he was awarded every prize that school could muster. Untangling a narrative of the actual evolution of innovation was virtually impossible by 1972, especially since at that time it all was too new, too close & still very fluid.

 

Yet for me the biggest problem with any of these theoretical chronologies is that each leaves out the poet I’ve quoted at the head of this blog: Jack Collom. The poem whose opening stanza I’ve just reprinted, “Spring’s First Day Ode,” didn’t appear in book form, as best I can tell, until it showed up in the “Early Poems” section of his selected works, Red Car Goes By (Selected Poems 1955-2000), published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press & edited by an all-star collective that included Hejinian, Reed Bye, Clark Coolidge, Larry Fagin & Merrill Gilfillan. The book was published in 2001. I’ve had the book since it came out, but I’ve just begun to really dive in.

 

I think I must have seen Collom’s work for the first time when David Gitin included the both of us in an issue of his journal Amphora in 1971.* I presumed that he was, like me, a poet in his early 20s, just getting going. Collom was in fact already 40. And while he published at least 16 books of his own poetry prior to this 500-page selected, most were with small presses located in Colorado or Nebraska. Outside of three textbooks published by the Teachers & Writers Collective, Red Car Goes By is the first collection of Collom’s work ever to be widely available, its nearest competitors for that honor being a 300-copy edition published by Grosseteste in the U.K. & a stapled book from Lewis Warsh’s United Artists.

 

While Collom did spend some time in New York, his Poetry-in-the-Schools assignments – Colorado, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming – tell you the real reason why he has been so terribly neglected. Up until very recently – & I mean in the last half-dozen years, as the web has begun to erase the hard borders of geographical isolation – any poet living outside of the major metro areas on the two coasts confronted an especially daunting task in getting their work known. In fact, Collom in this regard was exceptionally lucky since, in 1974, New York more or less came to him in the form of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a subway stop on that old Tibet-Manhattan line right there on Arapahoe Ave. What if, I wonder, Collom were living in Mitchell, South Dakota? Or Rock Springs, Wyoming? Colorado had only a little over one million in population in 1952, the year Collom got a degree from Colorado A&M. It’s population since then has more than tripled. The population of Boulder has more than quadrupled.

 

Hollywood’s romance of the west over several decades of cowboy movies have tended to blind us to the fact that these landlocked states are in some very real ways America’s own Siberia. (Indeed, Siberia is reputed to have just as many natural wonders as the Rockies or the Grand Canyon, including the largest inland lake in the world.) Even now you can find poets – Gene Frumkin, Lisa Cooper & Keith Wilson are three examples – whose work would be much more widely read if they only lived within 300 miles of St. Marks or City Lights.

 

So Red Car Goes By is more than just a selected poems by a major poet, although it is that also. It’s an intervention into the collective amnesia that causes muddled thinking about the history of American letters. I can tell already that this is one book that is going to transform how I think about poetry & the world.

 

 

 

 

* Gitin also included Carl Rakosi, Larry Eigner, Peter Riley, Diane di Prima, Lewis Mac Adams Jr., Denise Levertov, Andrew Crozier, Clark Coolidge & Charles Amirkhanian in that same 40-page issue. With over 30 years of hindsight, Gitin’s editorial instincts seem remarkably on target.

Before I got up this morning, I spent some time in bed reading through Joe LeSueur’s delicious new memoir, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, a wonderfully intimate & informal portrait of a world that is utterly gone now. There are some amazing moments in this book, such as the tale of how an incident with Chester Kallman convinced FOH to give up anonymous sex or how, far more reticently, LeSueur visiting O’Hara on his deathbed proved unable to say anything or even reach out to touch his dying friend. 

 

I’d paid no attention to the work of Frank O’Hara until I saw the mesmerizing television show* on him in Richard Moore’s Poetry USA series on PBS, a blur of constant motion – O’Hara on the phone & typewriter simultaneously while managing to keep up a conversation with the camera, drink & smoke, he was the ultimate multitasker decades before that term came into use – until, in the show’s closing credits as I recall (I haven’t actually seen the whole thing in 37 years), the voiceover mentions that O’Hara has recently died. I remember at the time sitting in front of the little black-&-white TV completely stunned, as if I’d seen a wonderful door open, only to have it slammed shut in the last 10 seconds of the show.

 

O’Hara’s death, not unlike that of Jack Spicer a year earlier, marked a critical moment in the history of the New American poetry. Both poets had been the central social organizers of distinctly geographic literary communities, and their passing transformed each town. Almost overnight, or so it seemed at a distance, the New York scene shifted its focus away from this group of largely gay men born in the 1920s – Ashbery was in Europe, Schuyler too much the recluse – and onto younger (& straighter) acolytes. The role Ted Berrigan would soon take in the environs around Gem Spa hardly seems conceivable in a world in which Frank O’Hara attends a party whose primary memorable feature is a lascivious tale told by W.H. Auden’s partner.

 

Auden’s role with regards to the New York School both was & was not like that taken by Kenneth Rexroth toward the poetries that crowded into San Francisco during the 1950s. The two poets were parallel in that Auden, like Rexroth, functioned at least partially as a sponsor, going out of his way to put Ashbery’s second book into the Yale Younger Poets series for first books. And, also like Rexroth, apparently felt some ambivalence about what these youngsters were up to. But, whereas Rexroth aligned with the bulk of the New Americans in his distrust for an American poetics that was cravenly derivative of the conservative mainstream poetry of the British isles – a distrust you can find amid the Beats, the Projectivists & the so-called San Francisco renaissance** – Auden virtually was British poetry, easily the most established & celebrated British poet since Yeats, even if he was now living variously in Brooklyn & on St. Marks Place.

 

I’ve sometimes wondered if the ease with which the first generation New York School connected with New York trade publishers wasn’t simply an accident of proximity, but also occurred at least in part because the NY School, at least until Mr. Berrigan showed up – and this really is Ted’s great contribution to this tendency – did not challenge the paradigm that American poetics was a tributary of British letters, a paradigm that has been central to all variants of the school of quietude.

 

 

 

 

* Listen to O’Hara’s reading of “Having a Coke with You” from that TV show here.

 

** Virtually everyone who at that point took William Carlos Williams seriously. While one can similar attitudes in American poetry over a century earlier, Williams rather steady campaign of negativity towards Eliot resonated with the rise of New Criticism, which had gain control over many of the English departments after WW2 even if the New Critics themselves had long been spent as poets. In this regard, the stance taken by the Objectivists, the first wave of Williams followers, deserves more scrutiny. It is also worth noting, of course, that this debate between anglophiles and those arguing for a “new” or “indigenous” poets was ongoing as early as the 1840s. The fact that American universities looked to England for legitimacy in their model of post-secondary education led most early U.S. colleges to align with the anglophiles, a phenomenon that is still visible in many universities.

“Job share archivists” Susan M. Schultz & Pam Brown have augmented the Department of Dislocated Memory with a new installment of their collaboration ”Amnesiac recoveries.” It’s a project that raises all kinds of interesting questions.

I have never seen a history of poetic collaboration. A search in Google for all sites that use both “poetry” & “collaboration” yields 199,000 sites. A search for the exact phrase “history of poetic collaboration” yields none – or will until the Google crawler finds today’s blog. My sense – and it may be quite incomplete – is that poetic collaboration arises truly with the surrealists.* It enters the U.S. largely through the writing of the one group most heavily influenced by surrealism: the New York School. You will not find any collaborations in the Allen anthology. Indeed, the only ones you can actually spot** even in In the American Tree are in the section of critical statements, first a collaborative manifesto for the French journal Change & later the famous list of experiments that Bernadette Mayer & several groups of students at her Poetry Project workshops created. But if you look to Tom Clark’s anthology All Stars (Grossman Publishers/ Goliard – Santa Fe, 1972), a combination of NY School & beat writers that reflected Clark’s view from the Bolinas mesa, Ron Padgett’s selection consists of 17 collaborations – with Dick Gallup, Ted Berrigan, Tessie Mitchell, Michael Brownstein, Anne Waldman, Pat Padgett, Bill Berkson, Larry Fagin, Jimmy Schuyler & of course Tom Clark.

The absence of collaboration among Beats & Projectivists***, and for the most part from the San Francisco Renaissance+, is worth noting. It suggests, I think, a stance toward the author & literal authority that is substantially different from that of other communities of writing. Allen Ginsberg may well have been the Kral Majales or King of the May in 1965 Prague, but he also appears to have been a meticulous & careful warden of his own literary production. At the same time, Ginsberg took no credit for the editing job that literally transformed the pages on William Burroughs’ floor into Naked Lunch – a stance that parallels Ezra Pound’s similar editing of The Waste Land.

But the New York School had no such hang-ups with sharing credit. As with Surrealism, boundaries existed only to be transgressed, albeit with more of a smile & wink than the Europeans generally brought to the process. Boundaries are precisely what are at stake in “Amnesiac recoveries.” Here, for example, is “Shut-Lip”:

The investment banker sewed his lips shut. He'd arrived in a leaky ship, having paid dues to the dark haired man who answered to no name he could pronounce. Pronunciation is over-rated, he muttered to himself as he eased into the hold, arms bound in fetal position. His middle passage was punctuated (never leave metaphors of language behind, he added, pensively) by hunger pangs. No-name man told him nothing of the end, though his origin had been clear (he remembered, at least, his hard-earned MBA). He wanted to escape big words, like globalization, like fraud. Crusoe's accountant had nothing on his, member of the magic club in high school, artist of the extraordinary bottomless line.

In the end, it was hard to collect his story, through teeth clenched like broken-jawed Ali's. One had to assume consonants, or were they vowels, emerging as from some Afghan cave into the abortive syntax of a bombing run. What we heard had something to do with sea, and ground, and sickness. The south sea island that welcomed him (sic) has only years left before the flood (lawsuits are pending). On its coral, the banker sits, quiet as monk, though not so tranquil. He knows his days are numbered, so he counts them in his throat. If he were a poet, one might say he'd found his voice.

memoricide -
           bombing the library.
collective memory,
          the treasures of manuscript,
    the texts                 history, natural sciences,
      philosophy, poetry, mathematics
anthologies, dictionaries, treatises on everything,
            his story,
                                collected,
the bombing filmed

in the peace zone,
   Coca- Cola
       phones the film collector
seeking footage
                   of "real UFOs"

There is a political tone here that one hardly ever sees even with Gen XXXVII of the NY School, and it’s stronger even in several of the other pieces, which generally circle around the topics of oil, corporate corruption & U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, always impacted by questions of memory – & of why memory fails to beget a seemingly appropriate political response. Of course, neither Brown nor Schultz can by any remote stretch of the imagination be characterized as part of the old St. Marks scene – Schultz is as far removed from there as one can be physically & still reside within the United States, Hawai’i, while Brown is a well-known Australian poet. 
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of this as a collaboration is how it challenges “the political.” Typically & traditionally, one key to the political has been what might be thought of as “angle of positionality,” which usually gets reduced to an idea of stance. This is visible at the surface in identarian texts of all manner: the poet writes from his or her historical/ethnic/social/gendered position & articulation of that position is often what the resulting text is about.  But Schultz & Brown come from different nations with different roles in the oil = global domination scenario. Schultz may be marginalized in her role as poet within the hegemon, but within it she most certainly & visibly is. Brown is at least doubly marginalized, living in a country that the U.S. has been known to treat as a branch office. There are of course further complications: Schultz is a haole, an Anglo outsider functioning in a role as authority by virtue of the teaching profession. The relationship of Hawai’i to the mainland is exceptionally problematic & a separatist movement continues to percolate there. Australia’s history vis-à-vis an imperial center & its aboriginal population is no less convoluted. Both of these writers are perpetually aware of these conditions.
Part of what makes “Amnesiac recoveries” so interesting is that it’s not possible to tell who in the collaboration is writing at any given moment, something that is so discernible, say, in a work like Sight that its authors, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino, two fabulous poets who grew up in the same town in the same country within a couple of years of one another & whose fathers both taught at the same school, actually initial their individual passages.
But if we cannot tell who is speaking, or at least writing, in ”Amnesiac recoveries,” how does the reader then position these texts with regards to the issues of globalization that are raised? This is what strikes me as so remarkable:  Schultz & Brown have arrived at what I can only call a transnational voice, a position that steps quite clearly outside of the role of states precisely as it address the problem of the rogue hegemon. If there is a position of world citizen from which one might be able to write, this is it.
Brown & Schultz do this with wit, sharpness & élan. The entire project – I have no idea if the two sections that are up are all of the collaboration or only just the first portion of it – is gutsy & fun while being serious in the face of some extraordinary challenges.++ In connecting the dots north-south across the equator between their two homes, these poets are erasing lines that we often forget are “always already” there. & it’s fascinating to see what now shows through.

* Some writers characterize the relationship between William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially during the Lyrical Ballads period, as a collaboration. An argument can certainly be made for that, even though they didn’t publish poems as composed by both.

** I believe that the phrase that is used as the epigraph to the West section of the book, “Instead of ant wort I saw brat guts,” was itself composed during a collaboration.

*** Thus when Daphne Marlatt works collaboratively, as in the book Double Negative with Betsy Warland, it’s because she’s moved away from the Projectivism of her youth toward a political feminism.

+ The notable exception was The Carola Letters co-authored by Joanne Kyger & George Stanley. See Kevin Killian’s article on the row it caused in the SF scene. Killian raises the possibility that camp, the arch subgenre of gay culture, was a major thorn in the side of Robert Duncan. Camp as a discourse erases boundaries not unlike the ones that Schultz & Brown are tackling.

++ The web site captures this beautifully with a photograph of the two poets in Hawai’i staring at the apotheosis of the problem, a stretch limo in a setting in which no limousine should ever appear.

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.