STL #87: Flesh and Stone

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder writes that his poetic rhythms derive from the rhythym of the physical work he was doing at the time of writing. As a young poet, this work was "riprap," "the daily trail-crew work of picking up and placing granite stones in tight cobble patterns on hard slab." This prosody is seen described in the poem "Riprap":

"Lay down these words/Before your mind like rocks./ placed solid, by hands/In choice of place, set/Before the body of the mind /in space and time." These lines show Snyder's desire to build lines up with short, substantive words. The words are fit together by the recurring sound patterns; the last two lines of the quoted section contain the sonic key to the poem: the long i, the long a and the ahh sound of body (and rock). Snyder's craft is patient and deliberate, the kind of effort needed to build a road up a mountain.

In the longer "Myths and Texts," his rhthyms reflect the tranquility of working on a mountain look out, the occasional heave of attaching logs to tractors, and the chants of Great Basin Indians. Not that riprap in discarded: he still considers "[p]oetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics." We still see the careful constructed lines of "tough, simple, short words, with the complexity far beneath the surface texture. However, he also delves into more a traditionally meditative mode: "One moves continually with the consciousness/of that other, totally alien, non-human.../Attentive to the real-world flesh and stone." This phrase subtly echoes the common expression 'flesh and bone.' In Snyder, "Bones & flesh knit into the rock." John Muir is a figure in "Myths and Texts" who becomes both flesh and stone, melding with the mountain he's climbing. He describe Muir's paralyzing fear, clinging to the rock face and imagining falling into the chasm. After the fear passes, he perceives the rock in detail and his "limbs moved with a positiveness and precision" that he "seemed to have nothing at all to do" with. It is as if his flesh self did fall, and his stone self brought him up the cliff. Near the end of the sequence, there's a sort of reverse riprap. Human improvements, like the flesh's desire to know for knowledge, is not permanent. While the poet sits on his mountain lookout, he observes "It's all falling or burning--/rattle of boulders/steady dribbling of rocks down cliffs." Snyder has a comprehensive poetic that accounts for the "two sources of human knowledge--symbols and sense-impressions." Often they are the same: in the poems discussed here, he creates symbolic discourse out of the sense-impressions of labor and observations. A man can create roads that up, but the mountain will push the rocks back down-- "It's all falling or burning."

Further reading: the complete Myths and Texts

STL #86: the sun will be invisible soon (3 unlyrics)

Philip Whalen, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stuart Z. Perkoff

I hope to wrap up the present Test of Poetry on The New American Poetry in short order, by storming through the fifth and final section in groups of three or two poets. The rules of this test have been that my readings be based on the texts as presented and on the apparatus of the book itself--the authors' notes, the statements on poetics, and the organization of the book. The first four sections represent geographically-centered mid-century poetic movements: the Black Mountain group, the San Francisco poets, the wandering Beats, and the New York school. But as Allen writes in his preface, the fifth group "has no geographical definition"; they are poets "who have evolved their own original styles and new conceptions of poetry." This claim of iconoclasm doesn't exactly fit the first three poets: While Philip Whalen is a well-known San Francisco poet with Buddhist leanings, Gilbert Sorrentino is a life-long Brooklynite who wouldn't fit in so well with the cosmopolitan O'Hara cabal, but the obscure Stuart Z. Perkoff fits right into the Beat sensibility. But the logic operating in the previous four sections implies that the poet's are in conversation with one another. I'm going to try to discover such a conversation among the iconoclasts, using the poetics of one as a starting point for the discussion of the group.

Whalen's "Sourdough Mountain Lookout," dedicated to San Francisco grandmaster Kenneth Rexroth, is a constructivist lyric that packs citations of sources around a recognizable lyric moment (laying on the granite mountainside in the September sun). Whalen calls his poetry "a picture or graph of a mind moving..." and also "bald-faced didacticism moving... from the particular to the general." In his own terms, he's using the lyric form for non-lyric (didactic) ends. The particular, or the originating lyric moment, is the day before his summer job as lookout ends, sunbathing nude while thinking of the words of Heraclitus, Samuel Johnson, Empedocles, his father ("Remember smart-guy there's something / Bigger something smarter than you.") and Buddha. It ends with the Buddhist mantra that is literally translated 'Go, go, go beyond, go thoroughly beyond, and establish yourself in enlightenment!' but is (sort-of) phonetically translated by Whalen as "Gate / Gate / Really gone / Into the cool. /Oh Mama!" The last two lines are a wonderful Zennish non-resolution resolution: "Like they say, 'Four times up, / Three times down.' I'm still on the mountain."

Sorrentino's "The Zoo" also frustrates typical lyric meditation within lyric form, using a much different range of reference. He draws from entomology and comic strips. The situation is "the death of the one banana / peeling beetle in the U S A" but it doesn't even flirt with the potential for bathos of the situation. Rather than operating as an elegy for the insect, half the poem describes the beetle in objective terms, while half of it compares it to the baby from Gasoline Alley, Skeezix. The unspoken context is the medium of the newspaper: no doubt Sorrentino's knowledge of the insect was provided by the same source that supplies his tongue-in-cheek frame of reference. The poem doesn't allow the moment to be an epiphanic reflection on the speaker's inner being--in the end the speaker doesn't care or even believe in any of it.

Whalen was a well-known poet. Sorrentino became well-known as a novelist. I have never heard of Stuart Z. Perkoff outside of this book. Two of his three poems here are non-starters, interesting only for being dated to sixties cliches but written in the fifties. The third transcends this hippie-ish vocabulary even as it utilizes it. "Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love" begins as a 'going up the country' pastoral, as "beautiful girls & boys" frolic in the sun. The setting turns out to be a Jewish summer camp ("off in the wisconsin woods, where there were neither jews nor cities"). The sun doesn't only warm the young bodies, but it shines a revealing light on the horrors of the Holocaust. It's yet another critique of the lyric, along Adorno's lines: how to write of the sun and youth with knowledge of genocide. The fairly long poem alternates the camps scenes with grave descriptions of the condemned "howling in the crowded boxcars / howling in the dark barracks... silent / in the furnaces." It concludes with the sun, but not the sun that dapples the boys and girls playing, but the sun that will eventually burn out.

Oddly enough, Whalen uses the same concept when talking about "the sun / Which, as I said, will disappear / Anyway it'll be invisible soon." It probably shouldn't be surprising that late poetry-- verse written long after the dominance of the form, should upend one of its traditional images. These poems all challenge the lyric form in some way. Whalen and Perkoff use it to show a mind moving to a didactic conclusion, while the mind moving in Sorrentino drains a seemingly relevant poetic trope of its potential gravity.

STL #85: Very Funny Fellows

Triple Play: Kenneth Koch to Frank O'Hara to John Ashbery.

Before widening the scope of this piece, I had planned on calling it "Kenneth Koch Is a Very Funny Fellow...Right!" (in tribute to Bill Cosby's comedy album). But when I sat down to draw by thoughts together, I was struck by the idea that the flip side to my tempered enthusiasm for Koch is my unbounded admiration for O'Hara. He has a wider range than Koch, yet even his funny poems are richer. To round out that generation of New York poets, I then decided to bring in John Ashbery, another wise guy who has made a lot out of a wry, ironic tone.

I like Koch, but have found him limited--his reworking of W.C. Williams or Frost's "Mending Wall" as "Mending Sump" are worth a smile, but don't go anywhere. He's a cut-up, but the apparent lack substance in his work makes you question it (right?). But a poem like "Fresh Air," though not a direct reworking of a source and longer than the two I mentioned, has many small pleasures, mostly in the charming, droll tone, but isn't as fully engaging as any of the O'Hara or Ashbery poems here. The poem mocks the codification of poetry into lineages, techniques, and workshop lessons ("My second lesson: 'Rewrite your first lesson line six hundred times. Try to make it into a magnetic field.'")

I think of a similarly light tone when I think of O'Hara, even though, as this lengthy selection shows, he can turn on a dime into something as moving as the last lines "The Day Lady Died": "and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of/leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT/while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing"(the lack of the period at the end really makes this). O'Hara was "mainly preoccupied with the world as [he] experience[d] it" and, as much as anyone ever did, writes in what seems to be his natural voice, which happens to be witty and ubane. Some of his poems do seem to be jokes, at least structurally speaking. "Why I Am Not a Painter" is a sort of a shaggy dog story--sometimes you've got oranges and sometimes you have sardines.

All the New York poets have the wit and diction I referred to above as 'urbane.' But the title "How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher" might not appear funny at all--perhaps it recalls 17th century devotional verse. I haven't seen much of the voluminous criticism on Ashbery's works, but I'm sure that relationship has been worked out. My theory is that the poem is narrated by Jesus in the tomb, and he's hanging around trying to figure out what happens next. The idea of Christ saying "Huh" is funny enough by itself. The rest of the threads through place and time, perhaps weakening the identification of JC as the speaking voice (who says "I'm/Named Tom"--at once the master and doubting disciple) but engages an uncertain relationship with the divine throughout.

According to Nabokov, "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game." A game is by nature more rewarding--it's open and agile where a lesson is closed and rigid. In the anthology, O'Hara and Ashbery's work is more expansive--you get a greater complexity of tone than in Koch's accomplished wise-guyism. O'Hara and Ashbery swing from serious to humorous, while Ashbery at his best is both at once.

Further reading:

Ashbery: so much to read--I'd like to revist The Mooring of Starting Out, and then stroll through the rest

Koch: On the Great Atlantic Railway

O'Hara: Standing Still and Walking in New York

STL #84: Lines of Influence

(On Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Edward Field)

I have been sitting on this one for a while now so to crank it out I'll resort to both my writing tricks: 1)I'll declare an arbitrary time limit for myself (let's say one hour) and 2) begin by stating what it is I want to do with this piece.

In this piece, I want to consider the question of influence in the work of Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Edward Field. This focus seems especially apt given the obvious stamp of Wallace Stevens on Guest's early work, Schuyler's articulation of abstract painting's influence on his cohort of writers, and Fields's apparent separation from that primary influence of other, more well-known of the "New York poets."

I've read and enjoyed Guest's work from the 70s and 80s, and while I like these poems they are obvious apprentice work. As I said above, you can clearly see the influence of Stevens in the tourism of poems like "Santa Fe Trail" and "Piazzas," the gentile conversationalism in "Sunday Evening" (the very title of which beckons for a Stevensian comparison) and the focus on the imaginative intelligence in all the poems. These elements all come to a head in  "Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher." It begins with an address to an interlocutor which is straightforward in tone but deceptively obscure in meaning:

I just said I didn't know

And now you are holding me

In your arms, 

How kind

The very next line is the refrain that provides the title.  It's not an easy line to interpret. The following imagery suggests the parachute is billowing in water as the speaker floats up past "[p]ink and plae blue fish." Following the repeated phrase, though, the speaker is trembling in "mid-air,"  having just finished swimming, and by the end of the poem she is "treading water/Near it, bubbles are rising and salt drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer/Air than water." She is "closer to you/Than land and I am in a stranger ocean/Than I wished." This is a wonderful, mysterious poem.

In "Poet and Painter Overture,"Schuyler argues that the poets of New York are more influenced by their painter friend and colleagues than anyone else. In the New York of the 1950s, "writers and musicians are in teh poet but they don't steer.".. If you pursue too literally the analogue between painting and writing, you are bound to be disappointed. While there is something to mapping non-representational use of words in something like John Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath to abstract art, it might be better to compare the arts more loosely. I wrote a paper in graduate school (that I think was quite good, actually) that compares the New York painters' flatness with the poets' "flatness." See how clever I am with the quotation marks there--the picture field actually is flat and the the painters can manipulate that fact with techniques ranging from distorted perspective to collage. For writers following the painters' lead, "flatness" is more in attitude than anything else--as Schuyler says, "'Writing like painting' has nothing to do with it." It's hard, impossible, pointless, stupid therefore to make a direct comparison between a flat field painting by Robert Rauschenberg and the interior monologue in "Freely Espousing": 

or Quebec! what a horrible city

so Stubenville is better?

the sinking sensation 

when someone drowns thinking "This can't be happening to me!"

the profit of excavating the battlefield where Hannibal whomped the Romans

the sinuous beauty of words like allergy

the tonic resonance of 

pill when used as in

"she is a pill"

on the other hand I am not going to espouse any short stories in which lawn mowers clack.

That last quoted line I read as a dig at the suburban fiction of John Updike and his ilk. As we wander toward that wonderful destination, we pass through a number of 'items' arranged on a field--places, thoughts, words as words, none inflected nor poignant as the inevitable central image/symbol of a lawn-mower-clacking story.

While Schuyler establishes connections with New York painters, Edward Field looks to different fellow artists. In his bio he discloses "I am trying to make the New York theatre scene." I can't find online that he ever made it, but I re-examined his poems to look for any performative influence. Read with that in mind, I guess they both sound a bit like monologues: they don't advance 'plots' but can be read as psychological portraits. El Interneto says he used his theatre training to develop a compelling reading style. I can see that, though the poems don't particularly grab me.

Further reading in Guest and Schuyler, but not Field. 

STL #83: Four Beats

I'm going to cut a huge swath here and do about 45 pages and four poets at once. The Beat canon has shifted a little since the publication of the anthology. From Allen's quartert of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Orvlosky you might drop K (whose gift was prose) and Orlovsky (presently more a character in Ginsberg's biography than anything else) and draw Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in from other sections. Despite criticisms and shortcomings, these Beats all have something to offer.

Of course, those offerings aren't necessarily on display here. The best writing by Jack Kerouac in this collection is the first few autobiographical sentences of his contributor's note: "After my brother died, when I was four, they tell me I began to sit motionlessly in the parlor, pale and thin, and after a few months of sorrow began to play the old Victrola and act out movies to the music." I am not a Kerouac-basher. People who shake off an adolescent admiration for On The Road tend to over-react and find his work adolescent. His style has its limits to be sure, but I've reread some of his novels with interest. Unfortunately, his cult to big enough to keep everything he ever wrote in print, including his bad poetry (and it's all bad). The thought that he wrote over 250 "choruses" of Mexico City Blues is distressing. The dozen included here don't have much to offer, and are as fatuous and mis-informed as his detractors would have it. One of the things about Kerouac that I find fascinating is that he was a Roman Catholic in continual confession, not the hip Buddhist gunning for Enlightenment as he claimed. But as he wrote in his note on poetics here, "I have trouble covering up my bullshit lies."

Ginsberg's towering achievement is unquestionably Howl and his ode to Walt Whitman "A Supermarket in California" is an American-lit anthology stand-by for its allusions, imagery, and 'discussabilty.' In his "Notes for Howl and Other Poems," he describes how his line is "one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of breath." This of course sounds a lot like the Projectivist rap promoted by Olson, except for Olson the breath represents WORK rather than thought. This difference makes sense, since Olson works his learning and sources pronouncedly than Ginsberg, who even when squirreling into Eastern or visionary traditions is much more open to inspiration and the first-thought best-thought ethos. In "A Supermarket in California," his first line/thought-breath contains Whitman, the night, and his headache--it is a reproduction of a moment in time when Walt Whitman came into his mind. When he goes "shopping for images" inside the store, enumerations sweep into his head. What is so delightful in the poem is the 'fact' that he follows Whitman through the store, follow only in his "imagination by the store detective" (when the opposite is "real".)

Less hallowed than "Supermarket" or Howl is Corso's "Marriage." As I write through these pieces, some of the hallmarks of the Beats become apparent: loose, spontaneous conglomerations of nouns jammed together in long baggy lines, gestures toward Eastern philosophy, and an a-political protest of institutions like marriage. It's a do-nothing kind of protest because it never proposes doing anything about current conditions. In "Marriage," Corso even imagines capitulating to the square institution. To not be ridiculous, the do-nothing critic must temper his critique with humor:

I see love as odd as wearing shoes

I ncver wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother

And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible

And there's maybe a girl but she's already married

And I don't like men and --

but there's got to be somebody!

Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,

all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear

and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

The most puzzling (and least well-known) of these four Beats is Peter Orlovsky. I feel genuinely uncomfortable reading his "Second Poem." It starts off as a pleasant description of a desultory morning, seeming like a poised naivete hiding a savvy hipster. The line "like my farther/I've done flick the ashes & buts" strike one as a bit odd, but probably intentional. This momentary doubt flares up as a flurry of misspelled words ("frist of all"; a "nock on the door"; "pancaks") turns up over the next few lines. Flipping to the back biography, we read "I.Q. 90 in school, now specialized IQ in thousands." It's harder for a savant to succeed in literate art than a visual one, but the imagination can transcend traditional intelligence. But intuiting a little about his relationship with Ginsberg, the situation and execution of this poem about making a "paradise" of his "room-land" gets a little ooky. Putting that context aside, it can be read as a self-portrait of a marginal man with a powerful imagination: "My life and my room are like two huge bugs following me around the globe."

Further reading? Maybe Orlovsky, maybe Ginsberg's Wichita Vortex Sutra

STL #82: SF Omnibus

For the first time in a month, I've returned to the green pastures of STL. I was ready to dispense with the remaining SF poets, with the strong memory in mind of having completed a three part critique of Lew Welch, Richard Duerden, and Philip Lamantia and ready to write up notes on Bruce Boyd, Kirby Doyle, and Ebbe Borregaard. Much to my surprise, I find my memory has been playing tricks on me again, since all I had on the former three was as follows:

Lew Welch is the apocryphal author of the perfect American poem "Raid kills bugs dead." His "Chicago Poem" is a hate song to the city of broad shoulders.

Duerden's "Musica No. 3" is a topologically engaging poem about a sea cave. I had to draw a sketch, but I think I understand it.

Lamantia seems to have thought he moved beyond a juvenile surrealism, but I'm not so sure. There's a poem called "Terror Conduction" with lots of words in ALL CAPS. I can't bear to go on.


But come to think of it, I don't have too much more to say (though I do like that Welch poem, especially the resolution where he decides "I'm just/going to walk away from it. Maybe/ A small part of it will die if I'm not around/feeding it anymore."). And since I'm so far behind, I've decided to deal with the last three in similarly brief fashion.

Bruce Boyd's "Venice Recalled" reads like a Projectivist (Black Mountain) poetics. He speaks of a company of poets whose speech is "only open & discursive." This company, "we who would live openly," exists at and as "the natural peripheries" of language. That credo expresses the outsider tendency (but not the self-importance) that unifies the scenes around which this book is organized (though transcends).

If Boyd is a Projectivist ex officio (am I using that correctly?), Kirby Doyle is a Beat undercover. He has the Corso reform school pedigree and his poem "Strange" has a "Howl"-esque construction of long thought-breath lines knit together with a repeated "or" beginning each line. It's a neat little period piece based on how the world is "groping about" through a dozen different similes.

Borregaard seems famous for being obscure. He has a cool name to be sure, which might in some way way bear a connection to his penchant for obscure words. The poem "Some Stories of the Beauty Wapiti" contains a fistful unusual words, from "wapiti" (a large deer) to "oleo" (margarine), "wastrel" (a dissolute), "vatrix" (unknown), "hyades" (a star cluster), and "nedda" (an Italian woman's name). His tendencies in the poems here seem to point toward a Rothenbergian ethno-poetics, which might be my next anthology test.

So if there's a lesson here, it's that categories enforced by the anthology were loose to start with and, as Allen admits, became "obviously irrelevant." But next week I'll move into a category that is still used, if not relevant: the Beats. I hope to write more regularly over the summer months, dealing with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Orvlosky quickly before diving right into the New York poets.

further reading: Of these six, I'm most likely to seek out more Welch: Ring of Bone (collected) and How I Work as a Poet (essays).

STL #81: Jack Spicer

While going through the Allen anthology has introduced me to many enjoyable voices, reading Jack Spicer for the first time makes me feel I'm in the presence of something truly great. I had heard of Spicer, but this isn't what I expected. (The great stuff never is.) "Imaginary Elegies I-IV" seems to both embrace and push away the Poundian Imagist standard that undergirds so many of these poetics. Spicer said in his "Letter to Lorca" that he "would like to make poems out of real objects" like a collage artist does. But he comes out against images as such; he wanted "to make things visible rather than to make pictures out of them." Over time, things "become garbage" but poetry, by making visible, can correspond, co-respond, to the world.

"Imaginary Elegies" begins with a consideration of this correspondence. It begins "Poetry, almost blind like a camera/Is alive in sight only for a second." If poetry captures images of say a specific bird in flight, it is only "the continuous Platonic pattern of birds flying" that lets us hold it in our mind. We use "disciplined adjuncts/To the moment of sight" to make sense of our impressions. As a poet then, Spicer might write of the sun, but really would rather "praise the very tall blond boy/Who ate all my potato chips at the Red Lizard." It's the Platonic ideal that provides the center of discourse. That's all well and good--the real turn comes in the next section when he describes the moon as "God's big yellow eye remembering /What we have lost or never thought." This isn't a normal eye, not a " yellow camera. It perceives/What wasn't, what undoes, what will not happen." But, in the third stanza, "God's other eye is good and gold." This Apollo's eye is accurate and absolute as opposed to the questioning tentative Dionysiac moon-eye. The poet is to "be like God" and use these two eyes.

But the final section of the poem (and presumably the last of four elegies, though it's not clear how that works) what that injunction means, or more precisely "what I thought/When I wrote that." That thought is gone, "No realer than old/poetry." Though "Time does not finish a poem," Spicer seems to be waiting it out in this fourth stanza. The originating image that inspired this poem is far gone, all that is left is moderated by memory and language. The poem ends with a more modest directive than "Be like God." Instead, "The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds." Yet we are left with the same conundrum of the image. Is this "the Platonic pattern of birds flying" that we believe or the real birds at a real moment in time?