Photo by Amy King

To ask what makes John Ashbery a New American Poet is to ask the implicit question of what made the New American Poetry (NAP) distinct, not just from various tendencies of the School of Quietude but also from the traditions out of which it emerged in the decade after the Second World War. For one thing, the NAP wasn’t one thing – it was several. In addition to the Beats, the Projectivists, the Spicer Circle & the New York School, there was (and still is) the question of the San Francisco Renaissance, which was never more than whoever Robert Duncan wasn’t feuding with that week, and that quirky still unacknowledged tendency that rose up out of the Reed Three (Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch) and then Jim Koller’s Coyote’s Journal to embrace a poetics that was at least loosely aligned with Zen Buddhism, an interest in the American west, both as landscape & tradition, and a poetics that was not innately urban – I call these poets New Western or Zen Cowboy & would include Koller, Bobby Byrd, Jack Collom, John Oliver Simon, Simon Ortiz, Keith Wilson, Drum Hadley, Bill Deemer, Clifford Burke & of course Joanne Kyger. Actually, I’m sure that list is omitting way too many people in places like Idaho & Arkansas (where Besmilr Brigham would surely qualify). What is it that Denise Levertov, Drum Hadley, John Ashbery &, say, Amiri Baraka had in common that would permit anyone to identify them as part of a larger literary movement?

The traditional, historic answer has generally been that as the NAP

has emerged in Berkeley and San Francisco, Boston, Black Mountain and New York City, it has shown one common characteristic: a total rejection of all those qualities of academic verse. Following the practice and precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, it has built on their achievements and gone on to evolve new conceptions of the poem.

Thus sayeth Donald M. Allen, right there in the second paragraph to the “Preface” to The New American Poetry. But what then about poets like John Ashbery & Jack Spicer, neither of whom followed “the practice and precepts” of Pound or Williams? One could make the social argument for Spicer of course – his circle, including everyone from George Stanley, Joanne Kyger, John Wieners & Steve Jonas (albeit briefly), Harold Dull, Larry Fagin, Stan Persky & even Robin Blaser & Jack Gilbert, was crucially at the heart of Bay Area poetics for a decade, at least once you got more than ten feet outside of City Lights Books. But during that same crucial decade from the mid-1950s through the mid-‘60s, John Ashbery was not in New York. The most you can say about him during this decade was that Ashbery was in touch with other New York poets and took part in some publication projects that tended to incorporate them from afar. Some of them had jobs that kept them around the burgeoning visual arts industry, as did he, only elsewhere.

Ashbery’s first book had been released without much distribution by Tibor de Nagy, the same gallery that brought out work by Frank O’Hara. But Ashbery’s second book, Some Trees, had been the 1956 Yale Younger Poets volume selected by Wystan Auden, hardly a camp follower of the Pound-Williams tradition, indeed the most significant figure in the School of Quietude (SoQ) not aligned with either the Boston Brahmin crowd around Lowell or the somewhat older Fugitive poets about Warren, Ransom & Jarrell.¹ The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery’s next volume, came out from Wesleyan at a time when that university house still published only SoQ poets, while Rivers and Mountains came out from Holt, Rinehart Winston, one of the lesser New York trade presses. The Double Dream of Spring came out from E.P. Dutton in its American Poets series. It was only after Wesleyan reprinted the British Selected Poems, first published by Jonathan Cape, letting Some Trees go out of print, that Ted & Eli Wilentz, owners of the Eighth Street Bookshop, republished the Yale edition under their own Corinth imprint in 1970. Which means, in fact, that it is not until 1975, when Black Sparrow releases The Vermont Notebook, the most under-appreciated of Ashbery’s One-Off volumes, that a major NAP-related press actually first publishes one of his books – 19 years after Some Trees.

Is Ashbery a New American Poet then strictly by friendship & accident? I think he comes by it legitimately, which is to say formally, as does Spicer. I do think that there are some poets in the Allen anthology in particular about whom you might make an argument that they don’t necessarily belong to the NAP tradition even if they were also outside of the School of Quietude as well: Brother Antoninus, Madeline Gleason, James Broughton, even Helen Adam. These were not poets who looked much to the Pound-Williams tradition, but whereas Spicer & Ashbery are doing things in their work that is in consort the New American Poetics, the most one might say about this other quartet is that you could trace their anti-academicism in general back to the same source where Pound found it, in the work of Yeats.

Until recently – maybe last week – I would have said that Spicer & Ashbery are much closer to the New American Poetry because their work also focuses the readers attention on the materiality of the signifier, precisely what the School o’ Quietude attempts to efface. Spicer was the one person among the 44 Allen gathered to have actually studied language, working as a professional linguist. As such, he didn’t buy the mythological line = breath unit Piltdown personism Charles Olson was promoting & said so frankly. His own counter position, radio dictation from Mars, was no less metaphoric but in its functional process the idea severed the simplistic psychologism that actually underlies much NAP neo-romanticism, whether that of Olson or Ginsberg or O’Hara. If you’re taking dictation, then this text isn’t about you.

What all New American Poetry tendencies have in common, or so I might have said just one week ago, is this general emphasis on the materiality of language. Whether it’s in the compositional strategies of the Black Mountain poets, ever seeking a more accurate method of scoring the page for sound, in the oracular excesses of a Beat poet going “overboard” verbally, via spontaneous bop prosody, as Kerouac put it, or in the densely crafted imagery of Ginsberg’s hydrogen jukebox or Michael McClure’s ecstatic lion roars or in the softer & more ironic variant offered up by O’Hara et al, every one of these poetries comes alive precisely because it resists the conception of a transparent referential language, something only a few of the SoQ poets seemed to be capable of doing (most notably in the 1950s Theodore Roethke & John Berryman).

The group that really brought this home for me is the Zen Cowboy poets, the tendency that borrowed from every one of their peers & discounted any pretense of a theorized style. But what you see in the best work of this group – Whalen, Collom, Welch, Brautigan’s poetry (and at least the early novels), the later Kyger & occasionally even Snyder – is a focus on focus, on presence, immanence. Be here now is very much a poetic program. Its motivation may be different, but its practice varies hardly at all from the in-the-moment / of-the-moment poetics that could generate a classic called Lunch Poems or a series like Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. Among the Projectivists, this emphasis is the essence of Creeley’s Pieces, or of the phenomenological mobiles of Larry Eigner.

Really with the exception of Stein & Zukofsky, I don’t think the materiality of the signifier was the intention of the modernists – it’s an area where, for example, George Oppen is far stronger in Discrete Series, his supposed juvenilia of the 1930s, than in the award-winning Of Being Numerous thirty years hence. It’s part – but not all – of the program of Spring & All. And you might say that it’s what remains of Pound’s layered densities of reference in The Cantos once you throw the bogus scholarship overboard & just read what’s on the page. Ditto the 19^th century philology at the heart of Finnegans Wake.

Indeed, one might make the case of the New Americans generally that they read what the modernists wrote, rather than what the modernists thought they wrote. Which is how a Robert Creeley could profess to be stunned that William Carlos Williams did not voice his line breaks as such, once he’d heard Williams read. It was so obvious if you just looked at the page. Just not to Williams.

But how then square this underlying first principle of the material signifier, the immanent word, with something like this?

There is no staying here
Except a pause for breath on the peak
That night fences in
As though the spark might be extinguished.

 

He thought he had never seen anything quite so beautiful as that crystallization into a mountain of statistics: out of the rapid movement to and from that abraded individual personalities into a channel of possibilities, remote from each other and even remoter from the eye that tried to contain them: out of that river of humanity comprised of individuals each no better than he should be and doubtless more solicitous of his own personal welfare than of the general good, a tonal quality detached itself that partook of the motley intense hues of the whole gathering but yet remained itself, firm and all-inclusive, scrupulously fixed equidistant between earth and heaven, as far above the tallest point on the earth’s surface as it was beneath the lowest outcropping of cumulus in the cornflower-blue empyrean. Thus everything and everybody were included after all, and any thought that might ever be entertained about them; the irritating drawbacks each possessed along with certain good qualities were dissolved in the enthusiasm of the whole, yet individuality was not lost for all that, but persisted in the definition of the urge to proceed higher and further as well as in the counter-urge to amalgamate into the broadest and widest kind of uniform continuum. The effect was as magnificent as it was unexpected, not even beyond his wildest dreams since he had never had any, content as he had been to let the process reason itself out. “You born today,” he could not resist murmuring although there was no one within earshot, “a life of incredulity and magnanimity opens out around you, incredulity at the greatness of your designs and magnanimity that turns back to support these projects as they flag and fail, as inevitably happens. …”

At first, this seems to be the antithesis of a poetics of immanence – be anywhere but here would seem to be the message, both at the level of content & in practice. “The New Spirit” is the only poem I know of that includes a sentence that contains the word magnanimity not once but twice with but a dozen words between occurrences. Trying to pin down Ashbery’s argument, as such, is the proverbial scooping up mercury with a pitchfork. You simply can’t do it.

If, however, you read Ashbery the same way you do Larry Eigner, as a model of consciousness itself, the place of presence refocuses in a new way. Ashbery in Three Poems reminds me, more than anything, of the Buddhist adage that You are not your thoughts, and with the underlying idea that thinking itself represents a form of anxiety. The whole purpose in meditation of focusing on breathing is precisely to make the individual conscious of the degree to which thinking goes on, even when one pays it no mind. Meditators never fully banish thoughts – it’s not even clear if that would be doable – but rather get distance from them, so that when thoughts rise up & intrude on the meditation one can simply turn them aside. Three Poems replicates this process better than any work of literature I’ve ever read, before or since. As experience, the poem’s mode is one of continually refocusing, then drifting, then refocusing again, then drifting further. If it never settles, this is because there is, as Stein once characterized her hometown of Oakland, “no there there,” no topic sentence, no secret center, no monad “I” or “eye” at the work’s heart.

Ashbery telegraphs this in any number of ways. One of the most effective, for me at least, is his occasional breaking up of a paragraph literally midline as tho one might have a stanza break with no other vestige of traditional verse devices. Thus, for example,

For I care nothing about apparitions, neither do you, scrutinizing the air only to ask, “Is it giving?” but not so dependent on the answer as not to have our hopes and dreams, our very personal idea of how to live and go on living. It does not matter, then,

 

but there always comes a time when the spectator needs reassurance, to be touched on the arm so he can be sure he is not dreaming.

This is not an epic challenge between solipsism & phenomenology, but rather a poetics that wants to include both the real and all of our difficulties getting in touch with that plane. It’s not that Eigner or O’Hara propose to be here now & Ashbery does not, only that Ashbery wants us to be conscious that both here & now are concepts that need to be unpacked, that neither is quite what it seems.

Years ago, somebody in an interview tried to provoke Allen Ginsberg into dismissing language poetry, which was only then coming into prominence. For a generation, Ginsberg replied, poets point at the moon, then poets notice they’re pointing. In a period during which Robert Creeley could – and did – write

Here here
here. Here.

John Ashbery is responding literally in kind – one can palpably feel the nod to Creeley in the generosity of Ashbery’s phrasing – when he begins the most important of his poems

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

Three Poems is not merely John Ashbery’s best and most important book, one that American literature is still working to fully incorporate, it is a demonstration that the principles underlying the New American Poetry can be arrived at from a completely different direction than that employed by 99 percent of his peers in the late sixties, early seventies. As such, it represents one of the most intellectually ambitious literary projects ever written.

 

 

¹ Indeed, one could write a history of the School of Quietude that focused on Auden’s impact in America as the most explosive force other than the sudden emergence of the NAP in causing the SoQ to begin its own steady devolution into a variety of sometimes quite mutually hostile tendencies, so that the crowd around FSG, the trade presses, and the Eastern foundations became quite a target both for bad-boy Brahmins like Robert Bly & the more western & less urban (and less urbane) poets out in Iowa City.

Frank O’Hara (left) & John Ashbery, 1953         (photo by Kenneth Koch)

Back when Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg were just about the only poets actively advocating for the work of Gertrude Stein – Richard Kostelanetz, somewhat younger, came later, bringing with him the energy to get a lot of her work back into print – the one poet who seems to have actually grasped the implications of her literary interventions & to have brought them over into his own poetry is John Ashbery. What I’m thinking of, specifically, is the coloration of words & the impact this has on the affect of any given textual surface.

One sees it, of course, early on in Stein – it’s almost the point of Tender Buttons. As she writes at the start of “Breakfast,”

A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow.

A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.

A sudden slide changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.

An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations.

Stein’s work recognizes what Robert Creeley would only much later be able to articulate theoretically as

A poem denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. (1953)

In other words, poems are not referential, or at least not importantly so. (1963)

Yet if nouns don’t name objects that exist outside the poem, what is it they do? As Tender Buttons suggests & Ashbery will spend a lifetime demonstrating, they color the text. After all, as Stein says in “Poetry and Grammar,”

Poetry has to do with vocabulary just as prose has not.

Today, there are many clear instances of this – the way Clark Coolidge drains referential terms from The Maintains (This Press, 1974) only to bring them back again in that book’s companion work, Polaroid (Big Sky, 1975), or how Larry Eigner would use the most generic of nouns – tree, sky, cloud, bird – almost architecturally in his poems. But certainly the poem where I first noticed this is in Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” one of the great poems in Rivers and Mountains. Although it is not the title work of that book – a brilliant gesture, given its focus precisely on the names of rivers throughout the world – nor the “long poem” masterwork (“The Skaters”) that in some ways makes this volume a rehearsal for Ashbery’s Double Dream books, the function of names in “Dusk-Charged Air” is unmistakable:

Far from the Rappahannock, the silent
Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara’s welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among the black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson’s
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
is contained within steep banks. The Isar
Flows too fast to swim in in, the Jordan’s water
Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats
Were dark blue. The Moskowa is
Gray boats. The Amstel flows slowly.

And so forth for another 3.5 pages. I’ve always thought of “Dusk-Charged Air” as being the next step for Ashbery after “Europe,” the brilliantly disjoint poem at the center of The Tennis Court Oath. In “Europe,” with all its little snatches of found language, decontextualized as they are, all nouns – indeed, one could almost say “all words” – function purely as the names of rivers do here. I read the opening of Three Poems as though Ashbery were, in fact, addressing precisely the question of what “Europe” is & how it functions, both as poem and as a stage in the process of his own evolution:

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

 

clean-washed sea

The flowers were.

 

These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something some comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but – yourself. If is you who made this, therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on

 

to divide all.

Against the radical disruption of leaving all out, as in “Europe,” poems like “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” or, say, “Farm Instruments and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” the famous sestina that lies at the heart of Double Dream of Spring with its own landscape populated by the characters of Popeye, seem to offer the same lesson from a very different angle. The use of names in each was, at the time these poems were first written, so atypical as to burst out at one not unlike the image of a Brillo box or a Cambell soup can or Jasper Johns’ use of the American flag.

Thus if poetry is about vocabulary & poems themselves are not referential, we have – no one is more clear about this than Ashbery – a hierarchy of vocabulary. At the pinnacle are the three great orienting pronouns, I, you and we, followed very closely by proper names – Rappahannock or Wimpy or whatever – followed by nouns, as such, then adverbs & verbs and then all other words. It is worth noting that what puts the three pronouns at the pinnacle is their implication of presence, these invariably are the pronouns of immanence, as he, she and they are not.

Because he is so attuned to the implications of this hierarchy, one might in turn order all of Ashbery’s poems by how they utilize it. A poem like “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” focuses in at the level of the name, but Three Poems is a book almost entirely lacking in them. The absence of is so pronounced that when one does turn up – “dull Acheron” on page 21 for example – it comes as a jolt even when, as here, the point is precisely its non-jolting nature. This, in turn, elevates the role of the three pronouns, all of which appear on the first page, and in a sequences that seems not accidental or even casual – at least not here where Ashbery is setting up the project as a whole. The privileged pronoun, at least in “The New Spirit," and the earlier stages of this book, exactly as Ashbery suggests on, is you, a term that is decidedly slipperier than either I or we, because, as here, it can – but doesn’t have to – imply writer as well as reader:

You are my calm world.

*

You were always a living
But a secret person

*

Such particulars you mouthed, all leading back into the underlying question: was it you?

*

And yet you see yourself growing up around the other, posited life, afraid for its inertness and afraid for yourself, intimidated and defensive. And you lacerate yourself so as to say, These wounds are me. I cannot let you live your life this way, and at the same time I am slurped into it, falling on top of you and falling with you.

*

You know that emptiness that was the only way you could express a thing?

*

To you:

 

I could still put everything in and have it come out even, that is have it come out so you and I would be equal at the end of our lives, which would have been lived fully and without strain.

*

Is it correct for me to use you to demonstrate all this?

*

You private person.

*

And so a new you takes shape.

These are just a smattering of the you statements that appear over the first twenty pages of “The New Spirit,” so that when the speaker of the poem proclaims

we remain separate forever

we just don’t believe it, particularly when this self-same sentence continues after a comma,

and this confers an admittedly somewhat wistful beauty on the polarity that is our firm contact and uneven stage of development at this moment which threatens to be the last, unless the bottle with the genie squealing inside be again miraculously stumbled on, or a roc, its abrasive eye scouring the endless expanses of the plateau, appear at first like a black dot in the distance that little by little gets larger, beating its wings in purposeful and level flight.

Reading this text for who knows how many times over the 35 years I’ve owned this book, I find it hard not to laugh at the passage that follows, given the directness of its statement about the referentiality of the poem:

I urge you one last time to reconsider. You can feel the wind in the room, the curtains are moving in the draft and a door slowly closes. Think of what it must be outside.

If you can hear in that passage the allusion to Creeley, to Hamlet, even to Faulkner’s own use of the arras veil, all the better. For a text that literally, deliberately, goes nowhere – and does so again & again – “The New Spirit” and all of Three Poems is filled with such magical moments that are, as I read it, the point.

This is not a point that can be made through exposition as a hierarchic argument, a flow chart of consequences, syllogisms locking into place. It demands instead a process-centric approach to meaning. There is a reason that Ashbery’s poems, even the contained lyrics of the Double Dream books, resist, as I wrote the other day, “going anywhere.” Nowhere is this resistance more fully enacted than in Three Poems.

The only part of writing that is literally organic is the way in which the rhythms of production fit into the life of an author. This is something that can vary dramatically from poet to poet – was there ever a year in which Robert Kelly did not write more than the entire collected works of Basil Bunting? – and it doesn’t seem to be anything that can be very readily dictated from the outside. Surely there is no right or wrong way with this, any more than there is to the color of our skin or our height or even sexual orientation. Any teacher in an MFA program will have the experience of watching one student struggle with creating a manuscript of acceptable length to qualify for the degree while for another student the real question is how best to whittle down from a stack of writing hundreds of pages thick into something that makes sense as a short book.

This does not mean that a poet can’t change, nor that poets don’t go through periods in their writing during which this process might be quite different. When I first began corresponding with Tom Meyer, he was still a student at Bard writing a massive, decidedly Poundian epic that he was tentatively calling A Technographic Typography (I published two excerpts of the 42^nd “graph” in Tottel’s in 1971). This isn’t who he turned out to be as a poet at all.

This question runs quite a bit deeper than the just the size and number of the poems someone writes. I’ve commented recently on my blog on the dramatic differences in the poetry of Edward Dorn, pre- and post-‘Slinger, but Dorn was hardly the only member of the New American Poets to have had this experience. Amiri Baraka’s output and style changed drastically once he abandoned his persona as LeRoi Jones. Denise Levertov did likewise, tho not with such flair. Frank O’Hara hardly wrote anything during the last two years of his life. Ted Berrigan likewise. Robert Duncan’s production drops rapidly once he announces his 15-year “hiatus” from publishing – and some would argue that the work does as well. George Oppen, Carl Rakosi & even Louis Zukofsky went through long silent periods. Pound has his pre-modernist period, when he wrote Persona, often cited by our Quietist (and quietest) friends as evidence that they also like this 20^th century innovator – it’s just the innovations they hate. With Stein, it’s just the other way around. From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas onward, she becomes a memoirist of the avant-garde more than an instance of it.

If you read Robert Creeley, you have to be struck with the degree to which his early work, through Pieces, Mabel and A Day Book, constantly pushes change. No two books are alike. As with Pound, there are poets who love the author of Pieces and those who love the author of For Love, but it’s rare to meet someone who feels equally passionate about both volumes. Then around 1975, Creeley settles in & moves gradually into what is now recognizable as his late style, which he continues pretty much without interruption for the next 30 years. I certainly know poets who insist that this is Creeley’s dotage, that basically he’d given up. That’s not my perception, but the narrative of decline they impose on what turns out to be more than half of Creeley’s life’s work follows the same general path I’d suggest for Dorn (or, for that matter, Levertov). And there is no question that the two volumes of Creeley’s Collected Poetry are profoundly different reading experiences.

John Ashbery, by comparison, presents a much more complicated situation. When Three Poems appears in 1972, he has already been publishing for 19 years, going back to Tibor de Nagy’s publication of Turandot and Other Poems. Yet, including Turandot, Three Poems is only Ashbery’s sixth book. In the 35 years since, Ashbery has dramatically picked up his pace, issuing 19 additional volumes of new poetry. Let me put this in even more stark turns. In 1966, when Frank O’Hara died, John Ashbery had just published Rivers and Mountains, his fourth book. Eighty-four percent of Ashbery’s career – to 2007 – had yet to be written. The writer whom FOH so affectionately dubs as Ashes basically had just begun to emerge.

Yet Ashbery was already quite famous, at least in the ways a poet might be. The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains had assured that he would be one of the defining figures for an American avant-garde for the next 50 years. Yet The Double Dream of Spring had been a confusing work, extending what Ashbery had been doing in the juvenilia of Turandot and Some Trees, but really more consolidating this style of the pop-art surreal lyric that resists going anywhere. Double Dream of Spring is a fine book, maybe even a great one, but it was also the first book that Ashbery produced that did not in some fashion change poetry.

Twenty books later, it becomes apparent that Ashbery was settling into what I take to be his mature rhythm as a poet: the steady production of books that are all, in one form or another, patterned upon Double Dream, a collection of short lyrics – relatively few that are longer than a page or two, save for one longer piece – seldom adding to more than 110 pages in print, even with fairly sizeable type. These lyric collections are punctuated with a series of other books that are very different from one another, and basically different from the Double Dream series of volumes as well. These include

The Tennis Court Oath
Rivers and Mountains
Three Poems
Vermont Notebook
possibly As We Know
Flow Chart
Girls on the Run

I use the word possibly with regards to As We Know because I think this is the one volume that genuinely deserves to be on both lists – it’s overall composition matches the Double Dream schema, but the long two-column poem ”Litany” warrants being placed in this second group. Unlike the Double Dream series, whose volumes blend rather seamlessly one into the other, the books in this second list are deliberately motley – you cannot generalize from any individual volume to the group as a whole. If I term the first group the Double Dream series, I think of this second set as the One Offs, unrepeated, potentially even unrepeatable projects.

I’m prepared to argue than in a century, most of the poems we (or our grandchildren) will still be reading and learning of John Ashbery’s belong to this second list, that of the One Offs. Partly, this is the fate of any great innovator – the poems that change poetry, that become the most canonic, are (one could reasonably argue) “the most important,” are seldom the best, or the most polished of a given writer. People read, say, Stein’s Tender Buttons more than Stanzas in Meditation not because they are “easier” (if by easier we mean shorter), tho that never hurts, but because they were the poems that first taught her audience how to read in a different fashion. Similarly, it is the very first Maximus poems one remembers of Olson’s most clearly, again because they changed poetry. Sonnets really is Ted Berrigan’s first work – it is still his most famous. So too The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains and Three Poems changed poetry, whereas Flow Chart is a poem that exists in a world these earlier books made possible. One could similarly argue that William Carlos Williams never wrote better than in Spring & All, tho it is his first mature work. Or that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is certain to be read in 200 years, while his finest writing – “Wichita Vortex Sutra” or “Wales Visitation,” say – are much more up for grabs. One might say the same with Stanzas for Iris Lezak and Jackson Mac Low, a work that seems almost brutal in its machinations compared with the subtle deft works he composed toward the end of his life.

The history of poetry is always the history of change in poetry, almost never the record of “all that is best.” One might, for example, argue that a study of the dramatic monolog ought to lead ineluctably to modern masters such as Richard Howard or Frank Bidart, capable of seeding the form with everything culled from a history of 20^th century psychology, but the genre’s actual importance is that it was one of the three great innovations of the 19^th century – along with the prose poem & free verse. The fact that dramatic monolog has grown mostly more nuanced where the two other genres have transformed themselves several times over in the past 120 years or so – the one great exception to this would be Maximus – suggests that the monolog’s history is as the stunted genre of the 19^th century, precisely because it was the one least dependent on form as such.

But what interests me most today is that, when Three Poems first appeared in 1972, the rhythm of Ashbery’s work was not – at least as seen from the perspective of 2007 – yet apparent. Indeed, today we might see a steady drone – in the sense of a tanpura in Indian music, perhaps – of collections modeled on Double Dream. The foreground of the tabla, the great South Asian drum, which in this analogy would be the One Offs, has never been steady. This is consistent with the basic fact that each has been invented entirely anew. But in 1972, Ashbery had not yet established the regular rhythm of lyrics on the model of Double Dream or (more likely) wasn’t releasing them to the world, leading readers to imagine a potentially infinite string of One Offs extending limitlessly into the future. That was, after all, the same general model Creeley was using, more or less (Creeley’s model of “the book” was never so hard-edged as Ashbery’s in those early years), right through to, say, In London. In Creeley, it is as tho he reaches a point & can go no further, but settles in to develop a poetry befitting a much more settled life than the one proposed by the young man with a rep as a drunken brawler & seducer that was Creeley in the fifties & sixties. For Ashbery, the One Offs, the poetics of deep change, has never turned off entirely, even if individual works come more slowly now. Even if they don’t change poetry now when they occur. What appears in Creeley’s career as his “late style” is something that Ashbery has demonstrated as possible as early as Turandot and Some Trees, tho it doesn’t become a steady mode of production – or at least of publication – until Double Dream. And even though it is the One Offs, especially “Europe” and Three Poems, that changed American poetry forever, there are now so many books on the Double Dream model, some of them so fully feted with ribbons & trophies, that what we now think of as “the Ashbery way” is precisely these Double Dream lyrics, effortless & brilliant, subtle & still campy, remarkably attentive to the nuances of daily life, that to understand the context & importance of Three Poems, one has to imagine an Ashbery completely different from the one we have now.

Think about John Ashbery’s Three Poems from the perspective of readers in 1972 when it first appeared as a Viking Compass volume, a photo of a trim mustachioed Ashbery standing somewhere on a farm with movie-star good looks peering back at the reader. The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery’s 1970 collection, had been the first book about which any Ashbery fan of the period could justifiably complain, as some did, that it offered little that was formally new or different from his earlier work. Previously, the one thing that had appeared certain about Ashbery, who followed Some Trees with The Tennis Court Oath and that in turn with Rivers and Mountains, was that you couldn’t predict what the next volume might look like based on whatever you thought about the most recent. One argument that I did hear made about Double Dream was that, well, you certainly couldn’t have predicted that.¹ In narrowly extending, consolidating really, aspects of Ashbery’s poetry that went all the way back to the early 1950s, Double Dream seemed to want to demonstrate the effortless excellence of Ashbery’s craft as he moved into his forties. The implication, at least according to optimists, was that readers should be patient – the next book would be a doozy.

It’s worth keeping in mind the role of the modern prose poem within American poetry in 1972. Hayden Carruth’s omnibus 1970 anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, containing 136 poets representing “American Poetry of the Twentieth Century,” 722 pages long, has exactly zero prose poems. It’s not that prose poems were not being written. Robert Bly and his fellow contributors in The Sixties had been actively pursuing the genre, as had George Hitchcock’s ancillary deep-image journal, Kayak. At Berkeley, Kayak had already triggered a student-run imitation, Cloud Marauder. None of this was visible in the Carruth anthology, even though Bly, James Wright and George Hitchcock are all included. One poet who does not appear is Gertrude Stein.² Another who is not present is Russell Edson, whose first collection had been published in 1964.

If Edson’s model of the prose poem was the short fable of Kafka, Bly’s paradigm was borrowed from the work of French poet Max Jacob, author of The Dice Cup: a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem. Readers of modern French literature knew, of course, that there was much more to the prose poem than this, but until the very late 1960s, the only readily available alternative translated into English were the works of St.-John Perse. Perse had won the Nobel Prize in 1960, but had begun publishing over a half century earlier and with a style that has always reminded me of the art of Maxfield Parish. Here is the opening of the fifth section of “Strophe,” a part of Seamarks, translated here by Wallace Fowlie:

Language which was the Poetess:

“Bitterness, O favour! Where now burns the aromatic herb? . . . The poppy seed buried, we turn at least towards you, sleepless Sea of the living. And you to us are something sleepless and grave, as is incest under the veil. And we say, we have seen it, the Sea for women more beautiful than adversity. And now we know only you that are great and worthy of praise,

O Sea which swells in our dreams as in endless disparagement and in sacred malignancy, O you who weigh on our great childhood walls and our terraces like an obscene tumour and like a divine malady!

Perse’s overly humid prose seemed so far removed from the proliferating Jacob-Bly & Kafka-Edson editions of the prose poem, predicated as those strains were upon brevity, that it’s not clear that anyone, at least in America, knew quite what to do with his work. Plus Perse’s translators, such as Fowlie & T.S. Eliot, were hardly paragons of avant-garde practice. Robert Duncan may have been equally capable of elevated language, but there’s an inner decadence here – the sheer predictability of such impossibles as sacred malignancy or divine malady – that would have made Duncan shudder.

In 1969, however, Jonathan Cape published Lane Dunlop’s translation Francis Ponge’s Soap while Unicorn Press in Santa Barbara, California, brought out Nathaniel Tarn’s edition of Victor Segalen’s Stelae.³ From Japan, Cid Corman had already been publishing his own versions of Ponge in Origin, leading up to his selections, Things, which appeared in 1971. American readers were beginning to get hints of the broader landscape for poetic prose that Europeans had known already for several decades. John Ashbery, having spent roughly a decade in Paris from the middle 1950s onward, was perfectly positioned to know this. One might even say “to exploit this,” introducing into American poetry something that had not previously existed here: the prose poem as a serious – and extended – work of art.

 

¹ I am not including Ashbery’s first Selected Poems, which appeared between Rivers and Mountains and Double Dream.

² This was not atypical in 1970, a moment when perhaps only Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg were seriously arguing for her inclusion in any consideration of American poetry. Patricia Meyerowitz’ Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, the volume through which many poets of my generation first became aware of Tender Buttons, was originally published by Peter Owen in 1967, but not reissued in the Penguin edition that finally gave it broad U.S. distribution until 1971.

³ Tarn had worked at Cape, which was then undergoing a defensive merger with Chatto, and may well have produced the Segalen for the famous Cape Goliard / Grossman series. Tarn was the editor of Soap.

Ed Barrett, left, with Bill Corbett

I had the strangest experience with Ed Barrett’s “prose poem novel” (as it says on the rear jacket) Kevin White. I read the first half of it over two days, then got interrupted by what daily life was throwing at me, then couldn’t remember which backpack I’d put the book in so took a few more days before I picked it back up and finished it. But the experience was of two almost completely different books. During my first stint, I was definitely reading, feeling, seeing the prose poem on every page, even if it was a remarkably cohesive set of same. Here is the very first poem, from the book’s first (of nine) sets, “Kevin and John”:

I saw Kevin White’s mind disappearing into heaven as he bent down to pick up a tea bag John Wieners left on I-93 Southbound to remind oncoming traffic and the Big Dig that we have been set to – Boston, a mound of curly tight shiny law in the mind of Kevin our charge – and holding it like a ribbon to give a pretty girl, he placed it on his tongue and spoke to the Virgin Mary his language of tannin.

A single sentence prose poem that incorporates the former mayor of Boston, its most iconic poet, its most infamous “improvement” project, the Boston tea party, the Catholic church – dichtung don’t get much more condensare than that as Pound might have put it.

But when I returned to it, Kevin White had indeed turned into a novel, as elegant as anything plotted out by David Markson, each page as realized, both symbolically & visually, as Don DeLillo at his best. I went back & started over attempting to see it as I had at first, as a “collection” of separate poems around a series of recurring motifs, but I just couldn’t. Somehow the book had actually transformed itself. It was (is) a very spooky bit of magic.

For a guy born in Brooklyn, Ed Barrett “does” Boston pretty thoroughly. In addition to Wieners and White, other folks who show up in this book’s not-quite-80 pages include Whitey & Billy Bulger, Nomar Garciaparra & Pedro Martinez, Bill Corbett & Fanny Howe, the Virgin Mary & Deborah Hussey, whom a search of Google reveals to be the “last known” murder victim of Whitey Bulger.¹ If the book doesn’t have a plot in the usual sense of that term, it still fits together quite a bit more tightly than, say, Thomas Pynchon’s most recent effort.

Barrett has, in fact, been in Boston for some time, twenty years at least, during most of which he has been associated with various MIT programs that focus on the intersection between computing & writing. Where another poet so positioned might be inclined to use that intersection to drive endless amounts of techno-centric media exploration (imagine, say, Alan Sondheim in the same job), Barrett seems to have gone rather in the opposite direction. Choosing a poetry that is taut, highly constructed, with layers of allusion & irony used rather the way the painter Jess liked to heap up oil in some of his portraits. He gave a reading & talk at Writers House not quite 18 months ago & the MP3s of the two events, well worth listening to, return again & again to the same two names – Bill Corbett & John Ashbery – as touchstones for Barrett’s practice.

In fact, he’s not really like either, or at least this book isn’t. At first I thought of Kevin White as being closer in its sensibility to the sort of booklength poem that takes advantage, say, of genre vocabulary & devices, rather the way James Sherry’s 1981 In Case deployed the language of the hardboiled detective novel. But really it’s the city, not a genre, that’s the organizing principle here:

Flight Into Egypt

I saw former Red Sox pitcher Bill "The Spaceman" Lee take something from a dumpster in front of the Corbett house. "Watch it!" said Lee, "dreams are not hard science like colonoscopy and laser hair removal-dreams don't even know your name, Mr. Wally Cox, and therefore they come to you but could just as easily visit someone else when all you wanted was to have your head patted like a child. And I am Bill Lee, making a voodoo doll of Carl Yazstremski whose dream came to me by mistake and said Yaz was living in the Corbett house, upstairs under the eaves." "Is Bill moving?" I asked, "What's he need a dumpster for, anyway?" "Ask him yourself, here he comes," shouted Bill Lee as he ran down Columbus Avenue, sideways like a crab. "Bill, I don't understand, what is this all about?" "Dreams," snarled Corbett, "Who the hell is Bill Lee to talk about dreams!" And we walked into his study which was filled with life-size voodoo dolls of Bill Lee, each wearing a different set of legs: deer legs, grasshopper legs, rat's feet, and still twitching in the corner, a doll with legs of a blue-claw crab taken from the Gowanus Canal when Bill was visiting Brooklyn where the crab population, long crushed under the weight of pollution, now floats and copulates in the currents around Brooklyn like a blue halo. "Dreams know your name, Ed Cullen Bryant, like a real estate agent knows a price. Through my black art I torment Bill Lee with more sets of legs climbing up on him than some of the poor souls who once worked as prostitutes on Columbus Avenue. But now Boston has these dumpsters where our true past, which is unclaimed dreams, gets shoveled out each morning!" And Bill kicked the side of the dumpster so hard some trash spilled out revealing a child's Burger King paper crown from a lost day in the lost life of the nameless real, its gold paper glistening in the sun. Just then the soul of John Wieners stood beside us and when he picked up the Burger King crown and set it on his courtly brow, you could see it wasn't paper at all, but the live body of a blue-claw crab, its shell delicately balancing on top of John's bald spot, its legs in the air like a Boston prostitute, and in each of its needley pincers a birthday candle glowing in the blue smoke of the Virgin Mary's cigarette.

This is the lone poem in the final section of the book (&, in fact, is the final work Barrett read at Writers House as well, a good piece on which to close). The return here of John Wieners makes me realize that the deeper model in Kevin White, deeper than the novel, just might be the serial poetry of Jack Spicer, especially the run of great books that began with Heads of the Town Up to the Aether & ran through Book of Magazine Verse. That’s the kind of cohesion I sense page-to-page, section-to-section, tho with none of the acrid sarcasm that characterizes so much of Spicer’s use of public figures.

Oddly, as I write, Small Press Distribution has no copies of Kevin White on hand & the Pressed Wafer website hasn’t been updated even longer than that of the National Poetry Foundation, so it may well be that you can’t buy this book at the moment. Which is a shame. Hopefully this will be corrected shortly.

 

¹ Tho I note her body was buried where Bulger had already stocked two other bodies, one of them a drug trafficker & jewel thief by the name of Arthur “Bucky” Barrett.

A great idea badly executed can be much worse than a bad idea.

My evidence for this assertion is Michael Benedikt’s anthology, The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, published as a mass market paperback, a Laurel Original, in 1976. When I first saw the little blue book, I bought it instantly, thinking At last! But when I got to the French section and saw that there was no Victor Segalen, no St.-John Perse, no Marcelin Pleynet, no Jacques Roubaud, my heart sank. Then I got, not quite at the very end, to the American section, which includes only the following:

Kenneth Patchen
Karl Shapiro
David Ignatow
Robert Bly
James Wright
W.S. Merwin
Anne Sexton
Russell Edson
Michael Benedikt
Jack Anderson
James Tate

No Gertrude Stein, no William Carlos Williams, no Robert Duncan, no Robert Creeley, no John Ashbery, no Ron Padgett, not one of the language poets. It was a debacle, a book that appeared to have been edited in the worst of faith, a deliberate falsification of the record. The British selection, containing only Peter Redgrove & Cecil Helman, was, if anything, worse. I felt nauseated & furious all at once. I realized two things almost instantly. One was that this volume, issued in a mass market trade format, was going to crowd out the marketplace for a truly comprehensive volume. The second was that a book this self-consciously false wasn’t going to do all that well. It would seem I was right on both counts. The Prose Poem appears never to have been reprinted – you can’t even find used copies on AddAll or BooksPrice, perhaps because the trade format used such cheap materials that even my own copy has to be held together now with a rubber band, its pages so acidic they’re almost smoldering their way to the illegible.

And to this date, there has never been a comprehensive anthology of the form. This one little terrible book both crowded out & poisoned the market.

Later, I did meet Michael Benedikt once and he wasn’t the cynical sharpie I’d envisioned from this project at all. If anything, he seemed a well-intentioned if somewhat bumbling sort of guy. I wondered later just how much of the disaster that was The Prose Poem was literally his lack of knowledge of the materials. Could he really not have known about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, John Ashbery’s Three Poems, William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell, or Robert Creeley’s Presences? Or did he just lack the intellectual courage to step outside the confines of Robert Bly’s infinitesimal notion of what constituted a prose poem? Was he an active agent of the School of Quietude’s compulsive distortion of the record – his anthology certainly was – or merely its victim? He’s gone now, so I’ll never know.

I’d forgotten that whole deep sick-to-my-stomach feeling of a book that should be a great event but turns out just to be a mess until I acquired Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, co-edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad, just released by Soft Skull Press. It’s a disaster, not on the scale of The Prose Poem, but a disaster nonetheless. If The Prose Poem warrants an F, Saints of Hysteria is more of a D+ affair. It’s not a malevolent book, but more in the tradition of Doug Messerli’s Language Poetries or Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, or, for that matter, Donald Allen’s attempt to “update” The New American Poetry, The Postmoderns, all of them examples of how you can make a bad book using only good poetry. That, for the most part, is the story here too.

Called by its publisher “first definitive collection of American collaborative poetry,” it’s anything but definitive. This volume is functionally incompetent as a historical record of the genre, and tho that may be the greatest of its sins, it’s not its biggest problem as a book. The three editors missed large swaths of collaborative work, yes, particularly among the language poets, the Actualists and among contemporary writers, but the volume’s largest hurdle – the one that makes it essentially unreadable as a book and unusable as a classroom text – is that it’s presented incoherently. With over 200 poets spread out over less than 400 pages, there is no index of authors anywhere save for an alphabetical list that mercifully takes up the rear cover. Presenting the material in what the editors claim is a “loose chronological order,” they’ve dated absolutely nothing. Allen Ginsberg turns up on page 3 alongside Neal Cassady & Jack Kerouac, then not again until page 59 when he collaborates with Kenneth Koch, then on page 75 with Ron Padgett, then on page 102 when he and Bob Rosenthal are working with an entire MFA class from Brooklyn College, then literally on the next page where he turns up with Lita Hornick & Peter Orlovsky. Hornick turns up again on the next page collaborating with Ron Padgett – it’s his first appearance since the Ginsberg collab & fourth in the book overall. An author’s index and end notes after each text listing any other pages each author appears on would have gone a long way toward making this book usable, but its present format renders it unintelligible. There are some interesting combinations here, but you’re on your own trying to find them. The occasional “process notes” serve to clutter, rather than clarify, what is already a mess. They should have been given their own separate section.

That overstatement from the book’s publisher that I quoted above continues, as follows: “ranging through the New York School, the Beats, Language poetry, to the present.” But when I search out the area I know best, langpo, I can find only three of the forty contributors to In the American Tree: Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer & Bernadette Mayer. And Bernadette appears here for her work with other NY School poets. Considering that language poetry uses collaborative methods so extensively that the process was used to call language poets “Stalinists” in venues from the Partisan Review to the San Francisco Chronicle, I’m startled not to find any excerpt from Legend, the first booklength collaborative poem in America outside of the New York School. Not only is it not present, not one of its five authors turn up anywhere. No Bruce Andrews, no Charles Bernstein? None of Ray DiPalma’s work with Paul Vangelisti? Rae Armantrout is another poet whom this anthology disappears – her poem “Engines” is a collaboration with yours truly (making her technically a co-author of The Alphabet). Also missing is any evidence of Hejinian’s booklength collaboration with Carla Harryman. The same is true for the extensive collaborations done by Alan Bernheimer & Kit Robinson. And there’s no evidence here of any collaborative work by Steve Benson. This book includes just enough to say that it’s not overtly excluding langpo, but the reality is that if it had thought even halfway seriously (and one percent politically) about this volume’s content, it would have recognized that language poetry’s use of collaborative tools is often quite different from the NY School standard that is dominant here, and that it would have been interesting, even important to explore those tensions. But there’s no way to even glimpse that from this volume.

Contemporary flarfists will I think have an almost identical complaint, tho with some different names (the token inclusion is Rod Smith). All forms of conceptual poetics are missing, such as the work Hannah Weiner did with John Perrault. Save for Keith Abbott & Pat Nolan, the Actualists – another Berrigan-inflected literary community of the 1970s – is completely absent. No Darrell Gray, no G. P. Skratz, no Dave Morice. It’s bizarre. No sign of Michael Lally anywhere. Is it really true that neither Jena Osman or Juliana Spahr have ever written collaborations? Sheila E. Murphy or Miekal And? Susan Schultz or Maria Damon? If they have, you can’t find out about it here. The editors have been careful enough to include smatterings of Robert Bly, Marilyn Hacker, Jim Harrison, Jane Miller, Reginald Shepherd, but it’s tokenism and easily identifiable as such. The result is that an unfamiliar or uneducated reader will come away from this book confirmed in the belief that the history of collaboration can be read as radiating outward from the writing of the three primary poets who dominate this volume and presumably the last half century of American poetry: Ted Berrigan, Joanna Fuhrman and David Lehman. That certainly is an interesting & curious history. I’m only buying one third of it.

So far as I can tell the title of this book must refer to its editors, given that what they have offered us is maybe half of an unedited manuscript. Actually, the cutesiness of the title is a way of deflecting attention from the actual proposition of the book – it’s a confession on the part of the editors that they know this book isn’t what it claims to be. The editors all have, or had until now, good reputations as poets & people. I can’t imagine why they didn’t do their homework, but it’s so manifestly absent throughout this misbegotten venture that this book easily is the disappointment of the year. Plus, as the example of the Michael Benedikt anthology demonstrates, what Saints of Hysteria means above all else is that we’re not likely to have a comprehensive or competent collection of American collaborative poetry for another thirty years at least. That’s tragic.