My favorite blog-specific email of the past week came from Kevin Davies, who takes exception to one of my comments concerning my 1974 Burning Deck volume, nox.  Here it is, with the offending paragraph quoted first:

Ron, re:

“Because nox is set in a series of fifteen quadrants, four poems to a page, I've heard some readers report that they could not tell if each page was one poem or even if the book was a single work. It's not an unfair question, even if an answer in the negative seems transparently obvious to me.”

Not only is this not obvious to me, I would argue that you're wrong. Whatever your intentions and whatever the publication history of sections of the book, nox functions unambiguously as a long poem in 15 sections, each with four subsections. It is coherent as such. I have carried it around in my head as such for twenty years (actual book long since lent out and not returned) and find your argument to the contrary unconvincing.

Yeah but whado I know . . .

Regards, Kevin D

The idea that the poet might not know is an interesting enough concept, sort of in line with ideas about writing & ideology that Pierre Macherey once was hawking, a post-Freudian notion that the writer is the person least likely to know what is going on in the poem. At one level, that makes a kind of sense, one that I’m certainly willing to entertain – the reader’s experience in the case of my own book might well be different enough to warrant such a divergent reading – but at another, it’s a reading that cedes all power to the critic. & you can imagine just how hostile I would be to that possibility. You would be right.

I don’t have the original manuscript for nox & note that the contents listing in the archive at UC San Diego, which includes all of my work for those years, makes no mention of the book. Maybe Rosmarie Waldrop has a copy somewhere. In any event, I could not tell you whether it was me or Rosmarie who made the decision to put those poems into quadrants. If it was me, it was only because in 1974, I was working in the prison movement & making so little money (roughly $200 a month*) that paper was a precious resource. I do know that the order, to the degree that there is one, is all but random. At best, my organization was at the impressionistic-intuitive level when I sent the manuscript off to Providence. Is this a “secret collaboration” between Rosmarie and myself, a la Pound’s hand in The Waste Land? I couldn’t tell you.

The second thing that Davies’ email reminds me of is the rather unique category of the Lost Book, which is to say the unreferenceable remembered book. It is that category, I would suggest to Kevin, that makes nox more cohesive than any actual inspection of the physical text would reveal.** I suspect that virtually every body – or at least every poet – has his or her own little catalog of such books. Once, I recall, an ex-lover of mine in the very early 1970s loaned my copy of Paul Blackburn’s typescript of his Provencal translations – photocopied as I recall from George Quasha’s copy – to a friend who never returned it. That made me so very furious at the time that to this day I have not been able to bring myself to pay for the paperback that later emerged, but which is now probably out of print anyway. Blackburn’s translations may always been one of my Lost Books.

Another even more central text in this curious canon of absence of mine is Francis Ponge’s Notebook of the Pine Woods, which as I recall was published as a special issue of Cid Corman’s Origin, probably in the second series. I have no idea where that one went. As I recall, Ponge, a member of the French Resistance during World War II, was being hunted by the Nazis and so had to spend an extended period of time, a winter or a year or some such, in a cabin in some pine woods. To make good use of his “residency” in this literal retreat, Ponge wrote . . . and rewrote . . . and rewrote the same sonnet over & over, taking careful notes of what he was thinking about with every version. It was/is a wonderful work – and the parallels to the process by which Rae Armantrout writes were not lost on me even 30 years ago – but it has become something mythic and idealized in my imagination.

A few works enter into that purgatory of the remembered book only to re-emerge again sometime later. One volume that does not quite qualify for the Lost Book category for me is Jack Spicer’s Heads of the Town up to the Aether, principally because I never owned a copy in the first place. In the years immediately after Spicer’s death in 1965, it was just impossible to get hold of – I recall stories that Gino Clays Sky was supposed to have a boxful somewhere, but nobody knew where he’d gone off to, there being rumors of Montana or Idaho or Colorado. I saw somebody else’s copy of Aether once and read it straight through – did it belong to Clifford Burke? Jack Gilbert? David Bromige? I don’t remember. But I do remember how, when The Collected Books first appeared in 1975, it was having my own copy at long last of the included Aether that made me happiest of all.

So here is a shout out to Ben Friedlander, who awhile back sent me a copy of the Frontier Press publication of Spring & All, the 1970 edition of Williams’ great work that proved so crucially revolutionary to all the poets right at the starting moment of langpo. I must have sold my copy when the New Directions Imaginations came out, including that work plus others. But it was the 1970 edition that had had the huge impact and I don’t think a poet today can get even a glimpse of the shock there was to discover such radical critical thinking lurking way back in 1923, way ahead even of Projective Verse, without seeing the Frontier Press copy and realizing what a wasteland of critical thinking poets were just emerging from at that moment in history. So even though I already had a copy of the text itself, Spring & All had functionally become a Lost Book.*** I bemoaned my lack of a copy to Ben, who apparently knows family of the late Harvey Brown, and – voila! – my memory & library were restored. Thank you, Ben!

* Tho that was a huge increase from the $125 per month I lived on in 1973. Before I go all sentimental about the starving artist, etc., I should remind myself that in 1973, I had half of a four bedroom flat in the Pacific Heights area of Sacramento Street in San Francisco, for which I paid $67.50. I hitch-hiked to work in San Rafael & used food stamps. Phil Whalen’s On B ear’s Head, which I recall reading in that flat, was a 400-page trade paperback from Harcourt Brace. It cost $3.95, nearly twice the price of an elegant but otherwise normal-sized book like Ashbery’s Three Poems.+

** In essence, it is the parsimony principle freed of having justify itself against any evidence.

*** For very similar reasons, I bought a hardback of The Desert Music a couple of years ago, it being the very volume that, back in 1962 or ’63, had caused me to realize that poetry would be my vocation.

+ Since I’m writing about something as quirky as the price of 30-year-old paperbacks, maybe I should note that Jonathan Mayhew’s blog project of writing about the slips of paper he finds in his older books of poetry is a fascinating literary variation on the archeological dig. You inspire me, Jonathan.