Donald Allen

There’s no such thing as a perfect anthology. For one thing, the form is too complex, carrying as it must a world of social dynamics & implications on top of all the “usual” literary ones. For another, editors – all editors – are simply human & prone to all which that implies.

Case in point: Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry , unquestionably the most influential single anthology of the last century. It’s a great book, an epoch-making one in many ways. If you didn’t live anywhere near a location that might carry the small press books of the 1950s & early ‘60s, the Allen anthology was the place where you got to hear what all the fuss was about with the Beatniks, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets & so forth. I still keep my copy of the Grove Press edition right next to the more recent UC Press re-issue. My wife still keeps her copy of the Grove Press edition in one of her bookcases upstairs.

But it’s by no means a perfect book. Only four of its 44 contributors are women & 43 of the poets are white. It would have been a stronger book, and done a better job connecting back to the traditions from which this poetry arose if it had included the work of Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Lorine Niedecker or George Oppen, all of whom were active when the first edition appeared in 1960. One could even argue that it might have been a stronger book had it included William Carlos Williams, H.D. or even Ezra Pound, all of whom were still alive in 1960. In the afterword that has been added to the UC Press edition, Allen himself suggests that this is very much the kind of anthology he himself first envisioned:

I visualized leading off with recent work by William Carlos Williams, H.D., e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, to be followed by a few poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, and Louis Zukofsky, and then a larger selection of poems by twenty-four of the “new” poets.

According to Allen, it was Charles Olson who balked at this lineup, emphasizing as it did continuity rather than change. A little selective amnesia, omitting rather than incorporating these literary elders, gave the final product a much more radical air than it might otherwise have had. And I suppose that it didn’t hurt that the book leads off with a new version of the Grand Old Man than, say, Pound or Williams, Olson himself taking up the first 38 of the edition’s 386 pages given over to verse (another 70 are allocated to statements of poetics and bio notes, with Olson taking up 20 percent of that).

Where there are exceptions to this prohibition against an “older” aesthetics, every one is in the San Francisco Renaissance section of the book, the second of the volume’s five groupings. Helen Adam, James Broughton, Brother Antoninus & Madeline Gleason all extend out of a tradition that extends more directly from Pound’s old employer, William Butler Yeats. With the plausible exception of Antoninus (William Everson), a Dominican monk whose poetry owes a great debt to Robinson Jeffers, the others were all also confidants of Allen’s closest advisor on this anthology, Robert Duncan. If, as has sometimes been argued, the Allen anthology’s neglect of women can be traced at least partly back to Duncan, it’s worth noting that two of the book’s four female poets fall under this category & that a third, Denise Levertov, was Duncan’s closest female correspondent of all. Without Duncan’s influence, it’s conceivable that the Allen anthology would have been 39 guys and Barbara Guest.¹ But one wouldn’t have had to change the aesthetics or reach of the anthology in the slightest to have included, say, Diane DiPrima, Hettie Jones, Bunny Lang, Mary Fabilli or Lita Hornick. You could have tripled the presence of poets of color by adding Bob Kaufman & Steve Jonas. And you could have had a parallel to the West Coast “exceptions” out of New York if you wanted to be completely fair: Edwin Denby, F.T. Prince, David Schubert.

But this was not the only perceptible omission the Allen anthology made. Notably missing are non- or anti-academic poets who don’t come directly out of the Pound-Williams tradition, including Bern Porter, Bob Brown, Jackson Mac Low & Jerome Rothenberg.² If anything, these poets would have given Allen’s collection a more revolutionary feel than it eventually had. But there were also poets whose writing owed a heavy debt to William Carlos Williams, in particular, but who didn’t share in the vaguely Beat counter-culture that was the unspoken common ground for all the poets in the Allen, such as David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro, whose absence I suspect drove a wedge between camps. Ignatow, Shapiro & Rexroth are all poets who could easily have been in the Allen who were later taken up as influences by more conservative writers who treat them as integral to a less Anglophiliac, less formalist variant of the School of Quietude. One can only imagine what poets like Phil Levine or journals like the American Poetry Review might have become had they seen the likes of Rexroth et al as part & parcel of the New American Poetry & thus understood their own history differently.

The New American Poetry also didn’t do a great job with its inclusion of younger poets. The two “babies” in the gathering, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer, both turn 70 this year, having had very different careers. Meltzer stayed true to his neo-Beat roots & his recent selected poems, David’s Copy, demonstrates that the Meltzer of the Allen anthology was a solid & worthy selection. However at 23, Loewinsohn was still very much the perfect imitator of William Carlos Williams & not yet much more, a fact that let to considerable derision among his peers that was quite evident on the scene when I first came into it five years later. As Loewinsohn grew up as a poet, his own aesthetic evolved in a more narrative direction, eventually yielding one legit small masterpiece, Against the Silences to Come, a couple of decently sized collections, the most recent of which, Goat Dances, came out in 1976. Having gotten into Harvard after a fairly rough time as a Beat (he & Richard Brautigan were roommates for a time in an automobile), Loewinsohn published two novels, got tenure at Berkeley, and to my knowledge hasn’t published a book now in 20 years. Allen could have done much better by focusing more attention instead on the Spicer Circle (Joanne Kyger, George Stanley, even Harold Dull), some of the younger New York poets (Kathleen Fraser, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett) or looking away altogether from the “scenes” to writers like Besmilr Brigham, James L. Weil or Judson Crews.

One could make similar arguments concerning the problematic inclusion of at least six & conceivably as many as ten of the 44 contributors to the Allen anthology. Realistically, tho, one could make a case for the inclusion of every poet there, even Bruce Boyd. A more important question, tho, has to do with the book’s structure. Allen’s decision to divide his collection into “groups” was controversial enough at the time, but I think it had a lot to do with the book’s power & influence. By separating out different modes of the new poetry, Allen made the reading experience of unfamiliar work much easier for readers far from either literary center in the U.S. In essence, this strategy tells you not only who to read, but how to read them. Not devoting a section to Boston, for example, was every bit as important as devoting one to San Francisco, even if the so-called S.F. “Renaissance” is largely a fiction of this volume, one rendered even less intelligible by Allen’s decision to put Duncan – the archetypal San Francisco poet – into the Black Mountain section, as well placing Philip Whalen, Michael McClure & Loewinsohn into the final “independents” grouping.

In addition, there’s an implicit hierarchy of sections that goes well beyond the disproportionate number of pages given to Charles Olson. The hierarchy is: (1) Black Mountain, (2) San Francisco, (3) Beats, (4) New York School & (5) independents. This certainly downgrades the New York poets unfairly, and it misses the already emerging New Western poetry (now sometimes called ecopoetics) that Allen could have acknowledged by placing “SF Renaissance” poet Lew Welch (whose poems in the issue are entirely from his “Chicago period”) alongside Welch's Reed College roomies, Whalen & Snyder, perhaps adding “Black Mountain” poet Ed Dorn. That may have required more forward thinking analysis than anyone could have done at the time, but by the start of Coyote’s Journal by the middle of the next decade & the rise of other New Western poets like James Koller, Bill Deemer, Drum Hadley, John Oliver Simon & Keith Wilson, it was a joining together just waiting to be put on paper. The absence of the New Westerns from the Allen anthology has a lot to do with the ongoing neglect of this writing here nearly a half century later.

But for all of these warts, the Allen anthology is still unquestionably a great book, and it makes sense that it should be the most influential collection of the latter half of – indeed of any point in – the 20^th century. Again, Allen himself notes how, in the 1950s,

Oscar Williams’ frequent collections of verse had given contemporary anthologies a bad name.

Which is surely true to my memory of the time (tho I first read Frank O’Hara in one of Williams’ gatherings when I was in high school before I ever saw the Allen). Anthologies like that were pitched, as are those today by Garrison Keillor, Caroline Kennedy & Billy Collins, at people who don’t read poetry & who may well find the simplest piece by Robert Creeley too taxing, too threatening for their noggins. Such readers desire a poetry without questions or ambiguity, which is like weightlifting without weights.

So Allen not only changed poetry, in making all this newfangled stuff widely available, he rehabilitated the genre of the anthology itself. That’s a tremendous achievement. Which is why I want to keep its limitations in mind later this week as I look at a series of new anthologies that have arrived on my desk (or, more accurately, on the floor next to it) over the past few weeks.

 

¹ Gertrude Stein’s absence from Allen’s original roster is attributable to her death 14 years before, but it definitely narrows the poetic range of what he was proposing.

² Thus one might read the debacle of Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2, which embarrassingly under-represents the New American Poetry and its participants, as simply a matter of “payback” several decades later.

Over the past month, I’ve received three focused anthologies, focused in the sense that none pretends to be “best poets of X” or whatever, but rather use the anthology form to examine something more targeted & specific. Tyler Doherty & Tom Morgan’s For the Time-Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals explores a major poetic genre and tradition. Jonathan Wells’ Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll uses one genre, poetry, to examine another. So does Poets on Painters, edited by Katie Geha and Travis Nichols, the catalog of a show that opens next week at the Ulrich Museum of Art on the Wichita State Campus.

For the Time-Being is one of those “Aha” experiences – the idea behind it is so good and so right that the one real surprise is that this anthology didn’t exist 30 years ago when the likes of Phil Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn & Joanne Kyger were putting an American stamp on this genre that has deep roots in the literature of Japan and in the work of such as Thoreau closer to home. Doherty & Morgan understand what they have here also: in addition to poetry & poetic journals – they also include poems as such that are, to employ William Corbett’s term, “observational,” a register of time – the volume includes a quartet of essays as well as interviews with Kyger, Michael Rothenberg, Andrew Schelling and Shin Yu Pai, “poets we had always identified as working in this mode.” In all, they include work from a total of 29 poets including Jack Collom & Joel Sloman – both of whom also contribute essays – Hoa Nguyen, Stephen Ratcliffe, Pam Brown, Joseph Massey, Aaron Tieger, Laurie Duggan, Thomas A. Clark, Stacey Szymaszek, Marcella Durand, Daniel Bouchard, Jonathan Greene, Bob Arnold, Dale Smith, Joseph Torra & more in addition to all the interviewees. There is even an appendix of sort with a list of related books – I was surprised to my own Xing included, but also surprised to see my own Paradise not – and an essay on Morgan on teaching the poetic journal. One good index of the care that Doherty & Morgan have taken is that they replicate the persnickety typeface of Stephen Ratcliffe’s excerpt from Human / Nature, a feature of his work that he picks up, I suspect, from his neighbor & pal Robert Grenier.

If I have any hesitations about Time-Being, they have mostly to do with not including more “historic” materials – Ginsberg’s Indian journals, Larry Eigner’s poetry (which just might be the origin of the “observational” mode, or at least he’s its Shakespeare), some of Blackburn’s work or Whalen’s, perhaps an excerpt from Williams’ Paterson, which certainly is close kin to this mode – and, dare I say, a failure to incorporate any examples from School of Quietude poets, such as A.R. Ammons. While it is true that this is a form that has been developed largely by post-avants poets, it hasn’t been as exclusively their domain as this book seems to suggest.

On of the reasons Time-Being works so well is that it’s ultimately a form- or genre-based project, even as it demonstrates as much as anything else just how wide the genre can be (try to imagine Joseph Massey’s miniatures as a mode of journal & it works, but you wouldn’t typically think of them that way, or at least I wouldn’t). Content-based anthologies are, I think, inherently dicier projects. Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll demonstrates the problem & creates some all its very own. Ultimately, they ask the poem to do that which is perhaps poetry’s least fruitful function, to be both referential & deferential to something entirely outside the frame of the poem. It could rock & roll, as it is here, but it could just as easily have been the war in Iraq, cats, sex, the problems of diabetes, whatever. In this case, you have one aesthetic mode commenting upon another – you couldn’t get further from the experience of rock itself, which is all about immanence, the directness of direct experience, if you tried. This largely is why I almost always decline invitations to become a part of such ventures.

Jonathan Wells has taken the problem to a new level, tho. He’s gathered together an anthology that is the literary equivalent of Lawrence Welk and is passing it off as Green Day. Worse, Wells has somehow dragged poor Bono into adding a foreword, demonstrating only that he doesn’t read poetry. Wells’ collection of rock poets includes Kevin Young, Campbell McGrath, William Matthews, Billy Collins, David St. John, Philip Levine, Edward Hirsch, Tess Gallagher, Charles Wright, Stephen Dunn, Carol Ann Duffy, Thom Gunn, James Tate, Dorianne Laux, Philip Larkin, David Wojahn, Charles Simic, B.H. Fairchild, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Bill Knott, Franz Wright, a bizarrely out of place Allen Ginsberg (strictly a token), Heather McHugh & more. Ginsberg is one of the few poets in this collection who isn’t writing in a tradition that was obsolete two (or ten) decades before Elvis discovered Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Gunn, Muldoon Tate & Matthew Zapruder shine here simply by contrast. And the collection gives every sign of being ignorant of history: there is no evidence of Jack Spicer’s famous anti-Beatles poem, or the work of Victor Bockris, Patty Smith, Jim Carroll, Laurie Anderson, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, John Sinclair, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Franklin Bruno, Clark Coolidge, Chris Stroffolino, Tom Clark’s Neil Young appropriations or even the high school poetry of Jim Morrison (from whence Muldoon garnered his most recent book title). There is, after all, an actually existing tradition of rock poetry – and it’s entirely absent here. This book is embarrassing.

Third Rail makes one almost hesitant to approach Poets on Painters, visually a much more appealing volume in that it’s a catalog to an art show, the volume designed by Jeff Clark no less. As a derivative literary genre, ekphrasis at least has a history. Further, the writers here are among the more exciting of our younger poets today: Laura Solomon, Hoa Nguyen, Sawako Nakayasu, Noah Eli Gordon, Nick Moudry, Kristin Prevallet, Corina Copp, & more. The foreword is by somebody who actually knows the genre, Anselm Berrigan. And there is an engaging correspondence up front between co-curators Katie Geha, a curator at the Ulrich Museum in Wichita, and poet Travis Nichols, part of the Subtext scene in Seattle, that puts the volume into a larger context. But its methodology is also invariably its limit. After she has suggested as a model for the kind of juxtapositions they’re seeking something along the line of Robert Smithson’s “non-sites” (work Nichols had not previously known) & Nichols in reply notes that “There is no collaboration,” Geha responds, in part:

You are right that there is a rich history of poets and painters working together but that this is not the mode of our exhibition. The emphasis is not on the relationship between the poet and the artists, but rather on the relationship between two texts. The artists in Poets on Painters did not work together; rather, an invitation was extended, a poet was matched with a specific painting and asked to write a poem to correspond. The painting predates the poem, making the poet’s correspondence the wall-text for the exhibition and the text for the catalog, creating an entirely new site and new image. The painting is the first site, the poet’s response, the second. When placed side-by-side, the two works create a new image – the poem and the painting constantly in correspondence.

This note, however, literally ends with a postscript:

P.S. Sawako Nakayasu met with Echo Eggebrecht in New York.

This process puts an asymmetry into the process not unlike Wells’ book: poetry in both cases is asked to be responsive, if not reactive. The pressure is entirely on the poet.

The advantage to Poets on Painters, tho, is that Nichols has gotten some exciting poets who are equal to this challenge. Thus Hoa Nguyen responds to Nina Bovasso with

Eve’s necklace after the legume
seed-pod     black and segmented
Chunky black beads
          And “in the madness of spring”: pink
Flowers drooping in clusters

Burn up thy thought

Star
The mother
Aquarius     (window)

Tho much in Nguyen’s poem might be thought of as depiction – Bovasso’s piece is a remote cousin to this – where it most completely replicates it is in the rapid shifts between lines and the hyperactive punctuation of And “in the madness of spring”: pink. The tempo of the poem is very accurate to the busyness of the painting.

Nick Moudry responds to a work entitled Untitled (Black Butterfly Pink MGoz) – again, a piece related to this – with a text called “The proper perspective”:

Our chief occupation – from a
position not quite central – is

to send them off wildly
in any direction without explaining why

that particular path was
chosen. Lines

converging and crossing. A
course in mathematics would

not be so much wasted as
beside the point. After

all, an entire city
can’t believe in chemistry, can

they? Therefore I felt
justified – by

virtue of the law – in reducing the
world to a skeleton. the

first mistake is
to assume every

dialogue is argument.
I need money. Reduce,

reduce, reduce sounds more
alluring than any

purely stated idea. I suppose
we are just fighting off boredom.

The effect is the penetration
that is used exactly as

if the force moves through it rather
than turning back inward I hear.

Both picture and poem foreground the line, albeit obliquely, one barely visible against the black surface, the other barely audible through one enjambed soft linebreak after another. There’s a dry wit – the closest Moudry gets to slapstick is to twist the grammar and give us they instead of it in his question of cities, chemistry & belief. It’s not a poem “about” the painting so much as it is an homage to its impulses, gestures, sense of weight. More akin to an equivalent structure than, say, the correspondence Geha writes of in the introduction.

None of the painters or poets here are (as yet) iconic. One senses that their future is still more important than, say, their past – unlike Time-Being, which mixes the two, or Third Rail, which is strictly backward looking – and for this reason Poets on Painters is the book from this trio I’ll be rereading the most often.

“It must be hard getting out of graduate school without a book contract.” That sentence, which was spoken publicly at a party a few years back by a poet who has received both a Pulitzer & a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, is still the single dumbest thing I’ve ever heard said about contemporary poetry by somebody actually involved in the practice. Most poets, even School-o-Quietude prima donnas, don’t get out of grad school with book contracts – the speaker here meant by a trade publisher like FSG, since indie presses seldom bother with contracts at all & university presses for the most part work on a book-by-book relationship. A poet with an ongoing relationship with a university press, the way Alan Dugan was situated with Yale, is rare and noteworthy.

That sentence came roaring back into my head for the first time in awhile over the weekend as I pondered what, in fact, it might mean for two more or less simultaneous anthologies to appear with 193 poets between them, 180 of whom must all be instances of the School of Quietude, while sharing just four poets who appear in both volumes. Now obviously there are differences between the two volumes that go well beyond the fact that one is well edited, the other rather poorly so, or that the Poetry Daily website has a fondness for the patterned poetics of so-called new formalism that Pittsburgh editor Ed Ochester doesn’t share. The simple reality is that of the 149 poets included in the PD anthology, just four were from poets included by Ochester in his misleadingly titled American Poetry Now.

So it’s worth taking a closer look at how each book was edited. PD picked 149 poets who had appeared on its online Poem-a-Day web feature since an earlier anthology in 2003. That suggests that its editors had maybe 1,000 different poets to choose from – and this no doubt is partly why the book has a shapeless Noah’s arc feel to it – it was just trying to represent too much. The Pitt Poetry Series that Ochester has been editing now for forty years prints four books a year, meaning that he had something akin to 160 possible books to choose from. If I go on the PD website, I can look at the archive for just the past year – another bad editorial decision from Boller & Selby – so that I can see at most about one-third of what the editors had to work with. If I go on the Pittsburgh Press website, I can find a catalog for the Pitt Poetry Series that lists 128 titles, a few of which are listed twice (presumably because these volumes came out both in hardback & paper bound editions), so maybe 120 or so books overall, with a list of exactly 80 authors. One of those, tho, is Ed Ochester for editing APN¹ itself. Whether or not this represents the entire series is impossible to tell, tho I suspect that there may be at least some older volumes that are out of print and thus not listed.

In any event, in picking 47² poets for this anthology, Ochester also omitted at least the other 31 listed in his catalog, including Allison Joseph, Carol Muske, Odysseus Elitis³, Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon, Gabe Gudding, Gary Gildner, Aaron Smith and Rick Hilles. Going through the catalog, I don’t think there was a general principle determining who did or did not get included, beyond say the fact that those poets with multiple Pitt volumes – Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Robin Becker, or Alicia Suskin Ostriker – are all represented. The real reason is, I suspect, Ochester’s sense of how many pages he wanted to allocate to each poet and the size volume the press could afford.

There are, as it happens, some Pitt poets in the PD archives who did not make it through the much tighter funnel in that anthology. One case in point is Penn State professor Robin Becker, whose poem “Sound View” appeared on the Poem-of-the-Day website on August 7 of last year, excerpted no less from her most recent Pitt book, Domain of Perfect Affection. The poem begins with the sort of labored simile & hyperactive verb phrase that seems to parody the notion of “creative writing” itself:

Like driftwood,
antlered,
        a deer
foams toward shore.

It’s impossible not to guffaw at an opening sentence like that. Unfortunately, the rest of the poem makes plain that this isn’t a satire on bad writing, but rather is the real deal itself. Reading Becker’s selection in APN, however, suggests that “Sound View” represents some sort of lower limit of bathos toward which her work might descend. It’s not that Becker’s not given to ludicrously figurative language –

I like to watch
your breasts float like two birds
drifting downstream

– but rather that, at her best, she’s not a poet of figurative language at all, but rather of relationships. Indeed, in “Adult Child,” likewise in APN, the only false notes occur precisely where Becker uses metaphor as filler:

Now that my parents are old, they love me fiercely,
and I am grateful that the long detente of my childhood
has ended; we stroll through the retirement community.
My father would like to call the woman who left me
and tell her that I will be a wealthy woman someday.
We laugh, knowing she never cared about money
but patiently taught him to use his computer and program
the car phone. In the condo, my mother navigates
a maze of jewelry, tells me the history of watches,
bracelets, rings, pearls. She says I may sell
most of it, she just wants me to know what’s what.
I drive her to the bank where we sign a little card
and walk, unaccompanied, into the vault, gray boxes
stacked like bodies. Here, she says, are the titles and deeds.

Ignore détente and stacked like bodies and this is a decent piece of writing, concise & perceptive. The two metaphors don’t add anything – they really are filler – but they’re not so wildly inappropriate as to cause more than an instantaneous wince. And this poem is much more characteristic of what Ochester has chosen to represent of Becker in his anthology – and indeed even from Domain of Perfect Affection on the Pitt web site. So the mystery is not why did Boller & Selby not choose to include Becker in their anthology, but how did that particularly garish & silly piece get chosen for Poem-of-the-Day in the first place.

Again, I think this may come down to Ed Ochester being a better editor than Diane Boller & Don Selby (tho, I suppose he could have done Becker an even bigger favor by just getting her to drop “Sound View” from her book). In trying to represent a much broader view of American poetry than Ochester, Boller & Selby lack a perspective that enables them to select out what’s best about a poet whose work might differ from their own aesthetic. There are poems in their anthology – Ron Slate’s “The Demise of Camembert” for one, Meghan O’Rourke’s “Anatomy of Failure” for another – every bit as embarrassing as “Sound View.” Ochester at least makes a case as to why Robin Becker is a serious poet & why I might want to read more of her writing. That really is his job as editor and he executes it consistently. With its one-poem-per-poet for all but two of its contributors, PD leaves everyone pretty much exposed to whatever the individual poem might happen to be. In some cases, that’s a fatal mistake.

Although Ochester himself argues in the introduction against “poetry gangs,” it’s the certainty of his vision that makes his book work. In general, Ochester likes poetry that is straightforward, narrative & not too given to literary flourishes – he himself notes the presence of humorous poems here, and it does sound as if the one participant of the New American Poetry he actually enjoyed was Frank O’Hara. There’s also a lot of writing by people of color here, to such a degree that I went through Ochester’s omissions to see if he was upping the quota to give the end product more of a multicultural feel – he’s not, Pitt really does have good track record in this regard. It may well be the single best publisher of conservative poets of color in the country.

The end result is a Pitt poetics that is as internally consistent from one poet to the next as anything you could want from any movement, including language poetry. Indeed, I think the range here is quite a bit more narrow than one finds in In the American Tree, let alone something more recent & post-avant like Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics. So in what way is this not a cabal? Is it because it theorizes itself as not one? Or because the poets just aren’t in touch with one another? Because they don’t support each other in the development of their work? Because they don’t find ways to build on one another’s insights & perceptions? In what way here is not having a community an advantage? It’s hard for me to figure this one out, other than to say that “not being a group” is one very important feature of this very cohesive gang of poets.

 

¹ Ochester doesn’t publish himself in the series, although nobody would think less of him if he did. He may feel that there is a value in having an outside editor for his work. Autumn House, a Pittsburgh-based press that mostly focuses on School of Quietude poets from Pennsylvania, has been his publisher in recent years. Although I live in Pennsylvania, I’ve never seen an Autumn House book in a bookstore. Four of their books are available through SPD. At least if Ochester published his own work, we’d be more apt to see it.

² On Friday, I characterized American Poetry Now as including “four dozen poets,” and the back cover lists 48 contributors. However, Muriel Rukeyser, tho listed on the cover, does not show up elsewhere in the volume.

³ Arguably the author of the single best volume ever published by the series. Given that Axion Esti is an outlier for this series, which generally doesn’t publish poetry in translation, the omission makes sense.

While I was away in Boston, I received two anthologies one could characterize as thoroughly immersed in something akin to a School-of-Quietude vision of American poetics: Ed Ochester’s American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology (APN) from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Poetry Daily:Essentials 2007 (PD), edited by Diane Boller and Don Selby, available from Sourcebooks, Inc., in Napierville, Illinois. Because the two projects appear to share a general worldview, it’s their differences that strike me as most revealing.

The most obvious point in common you might think would be their table of contents. Ochester’s volume contains four dozen of the poets published by the U. of Pittsburgh Press during his 40-year reign as its poetry editor. PD, as I’m going to call the Boller & Selby edition, contains 152 works from the Poetry Daily website that have appeared there since the last such anthology was done in 2003. Among those included in APN are Lorna Dee Cervantes, Wanda Coleman, Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson, Edward Field, Daisy Fried, Bob Hicok, Etheridge Knight, Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Peter Meinke, Kathleen Norris, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Muriel Rukeyser, Reginald Shepherd, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn & Dean Young.

Among those included in PD are Edward Hirsch, Louise Glück, Eamon Grennan, Brendan Calvin, Tony Dent, Dorianne Laux, Karl Kirchwey, Jane Kenyon, Claudia Emerson, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan, Randing Blasing, Antler, Chase Twichell, William Logan, Jennifer Chang, David Woo, W.D. Snodgrass, David Wojahn, C.K. Williams, Michael Scharf, Liam Rector, Thomas Lux, Louis Simpson, Timothy Liu, Carl Dennis, Simon Armitage, Dan Chiasson, Heather McHugh, Linda Gregg, Charles Simic, Ted Kooser, Bob Hicok, Debora Greger, Colette Inez, Marilyn Hacker, Floyd Skloot, David Antin, Michael Ryan, June Jordan, Gail Mazur, Daisy Fried, Gerald Stern, Albert Goldbarth, John Koethe, Christian Wiman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, Richard Tillinghast, W.S. Merwin, Stephen Dunn, Gustaf Sobin, David Wagoner, Daniel Hoffman, Natasha Trethewey, Martín Espada, Paul Violi, Robert Hershon & Thomas Lynch.

But here is the kicker: these two volumes have between them 193 poets, only four of whom show up in both volumes: Daisy Fried, Barbara Hamby, Bob Hicock & Ted Kooser. Why this is so and what this might mean intrigues me.

Neither edition is entirely rigid about its boundaries & I feel pretty safe in suggesting that both Ochester and Boller-Selby would probably reject the School of Quietude label outright. Edward Field, who is in the Ochester volume, appeared in Donald Allen’s epoch-making The New American Poetry some 40-plus years ago. And to call Wanda Coleman or Lorna Dee Cervantes, two of Ochester’s other contributors, examples of Quietude would just be misleading. The real story here has been, for several decades now, that writers of color have had dispensation to be lively and thoughtful & to treat American literature as tho it were more than just a sidebar to pre-Romantic British letters. Similarly, “talking at blerancourt” by David Antin may well be PD’s longest single contribution – ten pages of Antin’s patented verbal noodling to respond to the question “what is an artist” – as well as one of its liveliest.

What is really different between the two volumes is Ed Ochester’s editorial vision. Like all good poetry editors, he has a clear sense of what he likes & why. There are almost no formalists, new or old, in APN. PD includes not only old (W.D. Snodgrass) & new (William Logan, Christian Wiman, Karl Kirchwey), but actually existing British pre-Romantics like Simon Armitage, even as it does so in a broader landscape that can include not just a poet like Antin, but other post-avants such as Michael Scharf & the late Gustaf Sobin. And with 152 poems spread over 225 pages – Albert Goldbarth appears twice & Mary Molinary has three short poems from the same appearance in Beloit Poetry Journal, so the number of poets is 149 – PD feels much more like a literary version of Noah’s ark. Or would, if only it were more representative of the poetry even of its own website.

Poetry Daily is, more than anything else, an advertising website that focuses on poetry. Payment as such is not a requirement to having one’s poem picked for the daily feature, but everything on the website suggests an attempt to drive revenue through the site’s affiliate program with Amazon – something that a more self-critical website would think twice about given the impact Amazon is having on independent bookstores – and the site does run ads for conferences & the like. Perhaps because Boller & Selby aren’t strong readers, Poetry Daily is largely captive to those presses that make an active effort to promote their books. And historically, those have been the university & New York trade presses. So while this is nowhere nearly the monolithic publishing universe that was the case, say, 20 years ago, it is still very much not representative of the poetry scene in North America overall.

Unfortunately, this is where Boller & Selby’s weakness as editors makes a significant difference. While their goal actually does seem to be to represent English-language poetry in its richness & breadth, their instincts as editors are much narrower. There is, for example, a broader representation of post-avants among the 365 poets retained in the site’s archive – each poem-of-the-day retained for one year – than shows up here in this collection of 149 writers taken from a roster that must have numbered close to 1,000 possible contributors. For example, post-avants who presently have work in the PD archive who are not represented in this volume include Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Dan Beachy-Quick, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Burt, Robert Creeley, Gary Gach, Forrest Gander, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Gizzi, Cynthia Hogue, Robert Kelly, John Kinsella, Kenneth Koch, Ben Lerner, Rachel Loden, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Spencer Selby, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Treadwell & Bill Zavatsky.

Two things need to be noted here. First, post-avant poets make up a substantial portion of all poets now writing – my guess would be half – so to see what amounts to ten percent of the PD archive itself allocated to half the world tells me just how much work there is left to do to open the world of poetry up just so that every tendency has something approximating equal access to such resources. While I’m pleased to see the likes of Antin, Antler, Scharf, Sobin & Violi in the actual print volume, the reality is that the meager ten percent representation of the website has been reduced to roughly one half of that for this keepsake. This doesn’t especially surprise me since Poetry Today’s website also has a news page that contains links (not unlike the ones that ran here Wednesday), a resource that takes not too much energy to produce – but in which PD consistently misses about 75 percent of all articles relating to post-avants that appear even in major American newspapers. While Boller & Selby do strike me as trying to represent the whole of poetry, much of what’s out there is simply not on their radar in Charlottesville.

Ochester, on the other hand, has a vision & a commitment & it shows in his volume. It doesn’t hurt either that his format gives each writer roughly six pages for work, with a seventh for a photograph & some bio-bibliographic data. American Poetry Now is superbly produced just as a book, whereas PD suffers from cheesy font & paper choices, what you might expect from a printing house that features, as its best-selling book, 50,001 Best Baby Names.

Whether Ochester’s vision is a serious one for poetry is no doubt a different discussion than the one I’m interested in today. At the end of his book, he offers two lists of suggested further reading. The first is identified as “Essential Books of Poetry,” the other merely as “Recommended.” While Pound & Williams & even Frank O’Hara show up on the essential list alongside such immortals as Robert Bly & Phil Levine, and the lengthier recommended list includes many of the New Americans & even the likes of Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian & Harryette Mullen, the total absence of such poets as Louis Zukofsky & Gertrude Stein tells you that Ochester’s vision of the divisions between the raw & the cooked largely ossified at a point in the 1960s before such poets had arrived at their more recent canonic status. As a reading list, it’s really rather sad.

But it is at least a vision & as such makes American Poetry Now a more useful volume than Poetry Daily Essentials 2007. It’s worth noting, finally, that not only is the work in PD a far cry from essential – I suppose “Misrepresentative Smatterings” wouldn’t have sold as well – but two of the things you cannot get from the Ochester volume either are a sense of American poetry and a sense of poetry now. This sort of grandiose misnaming may well be the archetypal gesture of the School of Quietude, which has historically treated anything not in its official field of vision as non-existent for over 150 years. In this sense, Ochester & the team of Selby & Boller are both members of the same militant faction even if the cracks between their efforts is what’s most interesting in these two limited, limiting collections.

A terrific anthology
of contemporary poetry
from Taiwan
edited by Shin Yu Pai

7 poets
each with an interview,
& the poems
include a couple of sound files
and a video
realization
of Chen Li’s
War Symphony

§

The rest of
Fascicle 3
is no slouch either

with an Eritrean portfolio
including translations from
Tigrinya, Tigre & Arabic

poetry from over 50 poets,
new work by Alexei Parshchikov
(gotta wonder about that
translation strategy
tho),
whole chapbooks
by Allyssa Wolf
&
Vicente Huidobro,
work by Harry Crosby
plus an essay on Crosby
by D.H. Lawrence,
plus
Roberto Tejada on Clayton Eshleman,
Kevin Killian on George Oppen
Graham Foust on Looking
Mark Wallace on P. Inman

& oodles more

§

Also up online
with a ton of reviews
is the latest
Galatea Resurrects,
a magazine
done entirely in Blogger

§

Noisiest home page
for a new mag
goes to
Mad Hatters’ Review

Where Joe Amato
has some new poetry
&
Lynda Schor
offers an interview
& a “whatnot”
with tips on diapering

§

Artie Gold
one of Montreal’s
Vehicule poets

& a fine, fine fellow
died Wednesday

§

A praise day
in memory of
Diane Burns

§

The politics of slams

§

What I like best
about this review
of the history of poets
at Harvard
is that the author
can’t spell
Charles Olson

§

Looking at the Booker
from the vantage
of India

§

Vaclav Havel
in
America

§

Rodney Jones
wins
$100K poetry prize

§

“The Stephen King of his day”

§

Trying to forget
the dreariness of Auden
"in his cups"
in order to celebrate
the centennial

§

O Anna
Akhmatova!

§

The blindness
of Borges

§

Greg Tate
on
Bob Dylan
as the future of rap

§

The Ashbery Bridge

§

Viggo, reading

§

If you thought Dan Brown
was dreadful,
wait till you read
the Dan Brown Wannabes

§

Banksy gone bad

§

Fluffing your aura
to make it
even more real

§

The problems of conserving
contemporary painting

§

Howard Hodgkin at the Yale

§

Saving classical music

§

And if,
on March 2^nd,
you should find yourself
in Atlanta
at the AWP,
check this out:

Nick Carbó has edited an Asian/American issue of MIPOesias and it is AWESOME.

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.

It helps, reading this Jack Spicer poem for the first time, to know that Paul Morphy was the greatest of the 19^th century chess players, a New Orleans lawyer who opposed the Civil War & spent the war years in Paris, and that he was every bit as moody & cantankerous as modern-day chess champions, refusing toward the end to play anyone who would not give him the advantage of one pawn & one move. The poem is entitled “The Clouds”:

The pawns are pushed like clouds
Paul Morphy played.
The poem pushes a car
or even love
What a poem could grasp   That is,
a car
that runs over
a king or a queen or a bug
that happened to get on the board.
If that aint big enough
I push New Orleans toward anything
he’s afraid of
Imagine, in a hundred years
Biography, sitting before the fire on a winter’s night.
Imagine,
anything
he’s afraid of.

The typescript, which is dated anywhere between 1959 & ’61, also contains this alternate ending:

Imagine, in a hundred years
Biography, sitting before the fire on a winter’s night
Trying to figure it out
Imagine,
anything
he’s afraid of.

This typescript appears on p. 102 of an extraordinary new book entitled Exploring the Bancroft Library, a sumptuous art-book anthology to celebrate the centennial of the acquisition of what is now the largest public library west of Chicago by the then-fledgling University of California at Berkeley, co-edited by Charles B. Faulhaber, the director of the library, and Stephen Vincent, poet, editor, blogger. Curiously (to my mind at least), this edition is published not by UC Press, but rather by Signature Books, a publisher of Western & Mormon Americana.

The Bancroft is a major institution in its own right – it was my constant hangout when I was a student at Berkeley, having pulled every string I knew in order to get a carrel in the stacks there, which in those days was almost unheard of for an undergraduate. In fact, one year before I actually transferred over to Berkeley, I found myself one May afternoon locked in a classroom in Wheeler Hall, the English Department mausoleum & the building immediately south of the Bancroft, watching out the window along with maybe a dozen similarly huddled student protestors (I was technically an outside agitator, I suppose, and certainly would never have been admitted had I gotten busted) while Alameda County Deputy Sheriffs – “blue meanies” in the popular jargon of the day – riddled a library van with shotgun pellets & fired live rounds right through the rare book room window. Fortunately, no one was hit, though four blocks away the same deputies did kill one bystander, James Rector, & blinded another. This to explain perhaps my own deep attachment to the Bancroft, which goes much further than one might expect for your typical college library.

There are a million good reasons for any citizen in the Bay Area, any bibliophile, or any former UC student to own this anthology, but I just want to focus on this one. The first part of the book consists of panoramic essays on each of the Bancroft’s major collections, accompanied by a shorter essay on a key collection within that area – the choices are whimsical to the point of being brilliant. The key collection for the section on the history of science and technology, for example, is that of Rube Goldberg! And for rare books and literary manuscripts, it is Jack Spicer, with an essay by none other than Kevin Killian, Spicer’s biographer & himself a wonderful poet. The three illustrations for this two-page suite include this typescript of a poem, a sampling of Spicer’s translation of Beowulf in his own hand – numbered lines with the Old English in red pen, the translation above it in a slightly faded blue ink – and a poster for Spicer’s book Billy the Kid, a collage including chess pieces (knights), a man in a deep sea or outer space outfit and an add for women’s blue jeans (I’m making that gender call based on the femme boots that jut from the cuffed leg) with a monarch butterfly just slightly off-center at the crotch where some superimposed text reads “COME JOIN US ON THE ALASKAN FRONTIER.” The book is advertised at a cost of 50¢, to be found at two locations on the same block in North Beach, one called The Cloven Hoof, the other the Paint Pet.

Killian’s essay contextualizes Spicer for readers who’ve never heard of him before – twenty years earlier this same collection would inevitably have focused on the library’s Mark Twain holdings instead – and makes the point, underscored here by the typescript, that although Spicer’s theory of Martian radio & poetry by dictation is widely known, an actual examination of his manuscripts reveals instead “Spicer the craftsman, never satisfied with what he had written, always seeking the next turn round the bend.” Killian also gives the first complete accounting I’ve seen of all the major Spicer publication projects that are now in progress.

Vincent and I are of the generation that came of age shortly after Spicer’s death &, for a decade or so until the publication of the Collected Books by Black Sparrow in 1975, we & Spicer’s immediate compadres had him sort of as our own secret in the world of poetry. Vincent, in fact, is in the middle of a series of prose pieces dedicated to Spicer that is emerging these days on his blog. A decade from now, Spicer is almost certainly going to be seen as one of the half-dozen great poets of the mid-century period in America (the post-avant scene already knows this, but the Collected Books have been out of print for awhile now), so just maybe we’ll finally be getting over the circumstance of discovering – continually, as tho Spicer’d been writing furiously the entire four decades since his death from alcoholism a few weeks after the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 – new poems as well hewn & hard-edged as the one above. When Killian, Peter Gizzi, Kelly Holt & Aaron Kunin have finished their respective editing jobs, we will have a new, far more substantial and complete Jack Spicer, even if it is still the same cranky drunk from the deep end of the bar at Gino & Carlos.

Killian is, as I would expect readers of this blog to know, as qualified to write on the work of Jack Spicer as is anyone not named Robin Blaser in this world. Lew Ellingham’s sprawling raw manuscript of Poet, Be Like God had defeated more than one first-rate Spicer scholar before Killian stepped in & helped make it the best literary biography to date of any New American poet. In a just world, Killian would have had an endowed chair at an ivy league school for ten or fifteen years now. That Vincent & his co-editor Bliss recognize & acknowledge this is integral to the genius of this anthology.(And check out the Kyoto notebook page of Phil Whalen’s, reproduced two pages before the Spicer essay, as well as the photo nearby of Gwendolyn Brooks apparently as a teenager.)

I should note, while I’m at it, that Killian has some terrific work as well in the new No, which I wrote about in more depth last Wednesday. Better known as a novelist & playwright, Killian’s chops are just as solid when it comes to verse. Of the five poems by Killian in the issue, my fave is “Proverbs”:

After dinner is over, who cares about spoon? Deer
Should not toy with tiger. Every maybe has a wife
Called maybe-not. I went hunting for your proverbs,
Silently, dicta buzzing through my head,
In the long flat jungle where they stalk the plain.
If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.

I missed the metaphor, my gun, like a loaded base,
stood up in my face. Impossible to miss someone
who will always be in heart. Mind, like parachute,
only function when open. “Hey, sahib,” said my
Sumerian sidekick, “maybe in this one jungle case
you might be out of your league.”

Mock insanity not always safe alibi. I didn’t love you
because you were curious. I just let myself go, like
the mud turtle in pond, more safe than man on horseback.
I didn’t give you five dollars just to suck my dick,
must gather at leisure what may use in haste.
I’m trying to go all Charlie Chan on your ass,

Must turn up many stones to find hiding place
of snake. Okay, my little clown, I fucked up this safari,
so bring me back to Minna Street, help me ward off crack.
I made a magic promise to pluck bullets from mid-air,
happiness from that hole in your rucksack.
Pretty girl, like lapdog, sometimes go mad.
People who ask riddle should know answer.

Not only do you see Killian appropriating proverbs at all angles here, particularly with the fortune cookie syntax, an ear that has honed itself on Spicer over the years, but the detail that I like best is how he uses the more formal capital at the left margin in the first stanza, but drops it thereafter, a perfect formal analog for the increasing intimacy between poet & reader as this poem progresses. It’s attention to particulars like this that tells me this poet indeed knows the answer.