The Third Letter

Dear Walrus Whoever You Are You Are

A few thoughts this Sunday afternoon.

i)

Taking T.S. Eliot first. Again, for me, it’s hard to separate the poetry from the context in which I first encountered it – i.e. the classroom and lecture hall. The reverential tones with which the texts were discussed precluded any real discussion or personal engagement. Little was made of the manuscript workings and Pound’s surgical interventions – things which, now, fascinate me and maybe even eclipse the poem! Subsequently, I’ve tended to steer clear of Eliot other than on the occasions when I’m called upon to teach him – usually ‘The Waste Land’ in a few hurried periods – and I’m aware that there’s plenty there that I’ve missed.

I remember reading a lecture by Berrigan where he speaks respectfully of ‘The Waste Land’ – I think arguing that so much of what came later was already figured there. There it is – not so much the text as the mind with which you approach it. And perhaps that is part of the US/UK issue. The US poets approaching Eliot pragmatically, trying to locate what was worth taking away, or what energy it possessed, as against the British establishment mummifying it, turning into literary heritage, trying to numb it. Surely one of the reasons Eliot – and Joyce for that matter – is so popular in the Academy is the way he encourages doctoral-style research: allusion hunting, text sourcing, etc. Wasn’t that W.C. Williams’ complaint against Eliot – that he’d sent poetry back into the library?

This then leads on to explaining why Duncan can exert such a fascination where Eliot does not (or hasn’t for me). Duncan, too, is digging into the Tradition – Grail legends, troubadour poetry, Dante, Blake ... – yet somehow it doesn’t feel like a museum collection. I’ll bring in Zappa who, for me, is always a good touchstone and his Project/Object and Conceptual Continuity. Zappa never presents it as a polished system but opens it up to the bittiness of things and life.* I suppose you could connect this to a ‘Junk’ aesthetic which (given my sketchy knowledge) was shared by people such as George Herms and Jess on the West Coast. A poem by Duncan is as likely to juxtapose the death of his cat or a new crop of fruit in the garden with some cosmic theory or citation from a Great Author. The work remains ‘open’ – on the page, to the energies working within its confines and out to the movements of the volume itself, life, the universe, whatever.

Eliot, by contrast, seems intent on the polished oeuvre, the masterpiece, the Grecian Urn. And, for my money, the poetry suffers accordingly. **

I would have said the same about Pound but now sense the Cantos are much more a work in process, much less omni-competent (but did Pound know this?) than first appeared – and thus of greater interest for what I’m after. And Ron Silliman’s recent entries on Rachael Blau Duplessis’ ‘Drafts’ have alerted me to her work.

ii)

Faber & Faber. Yes, there’s a whole conspiracy theory you could develop here. I think it’s again connected to teaching. The kinds of poets Faber published – say, Hughes and Heaney – wrote the kinds of anthology piece you could market to schools (‘Dragon’s Teeth’ was one I recall) and shape a generation’s taste. However, Alvarez’s ‘The New Poetry’ with Penguin was also a key volume – as much for who it included as who it left out.

It’s the type of writing that was decisive – I won’t repeat the sketch of my previous letter. To take it further, I think it’s a way of seeing the poem as anecdotal, of a time ‘now’ in which a memory or scene is being recollected. It had to have ‘feelings’ – but nicely tempered by linguistic devices. Irony would also be helpful – to counteract any accusations of sentiment, vulgarity and poor taste. And, very clearly, a large debt was owed to a Wordsworthian model. The language of the poem – for all the talk of poetic artifice – was still in the service of paraphrasable meaning. A short story to all intents and purposes. The locations of poet and reader were clearly maintained. And there are all sorts of socio-political extensions from this.

What a reader brought up on this kind of diet could not fathom would be the sort of writing where words were ‘simply’ words on the page and the complex energies they contain.

To give three very quick examples that occur to me:

Canto I where Pound writes “I mean, that is Andreas Divus, /In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.”

W.C. Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’

Oppen’s embedding of (and changes to) the Henry James quotation in the first poem of Discrete Series.

In the Pound example, it is not so much the wild goose chase to track down the volume and compare translations. Rather, to see “Andreas Divus, /In officina Wecheli, 1538,” – the printed words (and date) for what they are, what they embody, their actual printed existence. (Perhaps a comparison can be made with David Jones’ idea of ‘anathemata’). To have noticed, to have selected, to have repeated and placed these words. That is ‘the meaning’ (a term which itself has to be re-thought).

In the Williams example, a way of looking at the poem as an attempt to confront the reader with actual words on the page (and not, as it is often read, as a way to summon up a visual scene in the mind). The refusal of the poem to relinquish its printed and composed state. That is the ‘meaning’.

In the Oppen case, a tension felt between the source text and the citation’s current position. We cannot (or do knowing it’s a bad old habit) read ‘through’ to the James text. Our eyes are glued on the words here on the page, of meanings being suggested to do with transitions of prose to poetry, of meanings internal to the mechanism of the poem.

I’ll throw in another example – Zukofsky’s Poem beginning “The” especially the prefatory remarks and ‘references’.

iii)

Another angle of approach – the possibility of creating ‘communities’. Maybe the US – the Land of Plenty – was more conducive to opting out, getting by on part-time work which allowed time for writing, low rents and tolerant tenancy laws. I’m thinking of the groups that emerged in the late 50s in New York and carried through into the 80s. (I saw a recent interview with Ted Greenwald in which he argued high rents have killed the New York ‘scene’). There’s the group around Duncan and Spicer. In the UK there seems to have been a happy time in the 60s allowing poets like Raworth and Harwood to juggle the life:writing equation. I’m wondering where in the UK it would be possible to do the same in 2008? Rents, taxes, unemployment benefits, health charges, food prices – it would be near suicidal! Maybe Sean Bonney has managed it.

iv)

Experimental US & British poetry and Comedy. I’ll just leave this as a tantalizing sentence for now (the kids will return any minute). However, I reckon this is a fruitful avenue of research ...

Yours as rain hammers on the Velux

The Carpenter


* a lot of my ideas on Zappa derive from discussions and correspondence in the 1990s with Ben Watson (aka ‘Out to Lunch’, Professor of ‘Poodle Play’ and J.H. Prynne disciple).

** Manny Farber’s ‘White Elelphant Art vs Termite Art’ essay is useful here.